The Wish List. Sophia Money-Coutts

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      ‘No, no, no,’ he replied, shaking his head as he made for the stairs. ‘Can’t think about all this now. I’ve got enough on as it is.’

      I stuck my tongue out at his back. ‘Didn’t want to think about it now’ was always his excuse. It was maddening. And irresponsible.

      Then came the noise of Eugene clattering downstairs. He dropped an armful of empty boxes on the floor in front of the till.

      ‘They can’t stay there,’ I said.

      ‘Calm down, bossy boots,’ he replied, leaning on the counter and panting. ‘I’m famished. Do you mind if I have first lunch? Not sure I’m going to make it to second.’ Lunches in the shop were divided into first (an hour at twelve thirty) and second (an hour at one thirty), decided between us every day.

      ‘Nope, you go.’

      ‘Thanks,’ replied Eugene, yawning and stretching his arms over his head. ‘See you in a bit,’ he said, already halfway through the door before I could shout at him about the boxes.

      ‘Men,’ I muttered to myself. At home, I lived with two sisters who never put a mug in the dishwasher; in the shop, I worked alongside men who only thought of their stomachs. I wondered which was more trying. Not that long ago, Mrs Delaney had told me that gladioli plants were asexual. Sounded a much easier life, being a gladioli.

      As I bent to slide my fingers under the boxes, the doorbell tinkled behind me so I stood up quickly, aware that another customer was being subjected to my bottom. ‘Sorry,’ I said spinning around, ‘I’m just tidy— Oh, hello.’

      It was the man in the braces.

      ‘Hello again,’ he said, grinning. His hair was damp and there were dark spots on his shirt front from the rain. ‘I only… Well, I hope you don’t mind… The thing is I don’t go around London asking women I meet in shops this, but I wondered if you might be free, or might be interested, in perhaps having a coffee with me?’

      ‘A coffee?’ I repeated, as if I didn’t know what coffee was.

      ‘Or a drink,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like. I’d just like to talk to you more about books, if you wanted?’ He ran a hand through the wet strands of his hair and looked expectantly at me.

      ‘Er…’ I was so surprised by his reappearance that, as if witness to a baffling magic trick, I went mute.

      ‘If you can’t, or don’t want to, or if you’re taken and don’t for some reason wear a wedding ring – it’s often very hard to tell these days – then forget I ever asked and I’ll never come in here again. Although that would be a shame since it’s a splendid bookshop. But if none of those things apply then I would like very much to buy you some sort of beverage – hot or cold, it’s entirely up to you.’

      ‘Er…’ I started again, willing my brain into action. ‘Yes, lovely,’ I said, over the top of the boxes. It was only two feeble words but it was better than no words.

      ‘Good. I was hoping you’d say that. What’s your number?’ He reached into his trousers and pulled out his phone.

      Number, I told myself, you can do this. I duly read it out to him.

      ‘Marvellous,’ he said, pocketing his phone. ‘I’ll text you. Maybe this weekend?’

      ‘Lovely,’ I said again, feeling dazed.

      ‘It’s a date,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’

      ‘See you soon,’ I repeated, although he was already gone. I dropped the boxes on top of the fiction table and exhaled slowly, then squinted at my reflection in the window pane. Did I look different today? Was my hair less like a spaniel’s?

      ‘Florence, duck, you know those shouldn’t be there,’ said Norris, appearing on the stairs again and pointing at the boxes. ‘Put them out the back, please.’

      I didn’t even protest that, actually, it was Eugene’s fault for abandoning the boxes and I was moving them for him. I just did it.

      And it was only while flattening them with my feet in the stockroom that I realized two things: firstly, I didn’t even know the man’s name. And secondly, Gwendolyn’s list! I froze and my hands flew to my cheeks as I remembered what I’d written. He was a tall, absurdly attractive and seemingly funny man who read books, liked cats and clearly didn’t think a drop of rain was going to kill him. But that had to be a coincidence?

      Course it was. I laughed and shook my head as I started stamping down the boxes again. As if the universe had anything to do with it. Obviously it was a coincidence. There was no way that lunatic in her daisy dungarees had sent that beautiful man in here.

      I had a NOMAD meeting that evening so I left Eugene to lock up and walked to the primary school where they were held, a few streets from the shop. Peering through the classroom porthole, I saw my friend Jaz already sitting in one of the child-sized plastic seats. A man I didn’t recognize had folded himself into a front-row seat and was scowling at the finger paintings. We were a small group, normally about eight or nine, and we sat in rows surrounded by colourful finger paintings and art made from pasta. At the front, under a large whiteboard, our leader Stephen would try and encourage a sensible group discussion while we ate custard creams. It was always custard creams. Stephen brought them himself, along with a travel kettle, several mugs and tea supplies.

      I pushed open the door. ‘Hi, Stephen,’ I said, waving at him.

      He spun around from his plate of biscuits and beamed at me. ‘Good evening, Florence. All well?’

      ‘All pretty brilliant, actually,’ I said, dropping my bag on the small red seat next to Jaz. Her 4-year-old, Duncan, was sitting cross-legged on the floor in his sweatshirt and school trousers, earplugs in, watching a video on her phone. ‘How come Dunc’s here?’

      Jaz sighed. ‘Because his dad’s a premier league asshole who didn’t make pick-up.’

      She said this loudly enough to make Stephen’s shoulders twitch. Dunc, fortunately, was too engrossed with his phone to overhear. I ruffled his hair and he looked up and grinned happily before dropping his gaze back to the screen.

      Jaz’s ex, Dunc’s father, was a plumber called Leon. He and Jaz had been together for a few months when she got pregnant. She’d presented him with the happy news only for Leon to admit that, actually, Jaz wasn’t the only woman whose pipes he was seeing to. They’d split and Leon had been a sporadic father ever since. Occasionally he’d take him to the Battersea zoo to see the rabbits and the frogs (Dunc, very into animals, wanted to be a vet when he grew up), but he and Jaz were generally on bad terms.

      Dunc was the reason she’d started coming to these meetings. Jaz was a hairdresser who worked in a Chelsea salon but, when he was a baby, she’d started obsessing about his food: his food and her food. She panicked that he’d eat or swallow something – a crisp or a grape – that had been contaminated by her own hands with chemicals from the salon. She began to only eat food with a knife and fork, and nothing could touch her fingers at any stage of the cooking process, which had drastically shrunk her diet.

      By the time she started coming to the meetings on the advice of her GP, she was only eating ready meals since she could just peel off the cellophane. Ready meals for breakfast, ready meals for lunch, ready meals for supper. It was the same for Dunc – a 2-year-old reared almost exclusively on Bird’s Eye. When I joined the group a few months on, Jaz (and Dunc) had graduated from just ready meals to ready meals along with pasta and vegetables so long as they came in a frozen bag and she didn’t have to touch them before cooking. Now, she let them eat most things, apart from fruit by hand, but she still came along every other week so we could whisper in the back row. We made an unlikely pair – me, the bookish 32-year-old in ugly shoes and Jaz, the forty-something hairdresser