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 always wearing animal print – but we’d become close. Although outwardly very different, we both knew what it was like to feel as if we’d lost control of our own brains, as if we were being operated by an internal puppeteer constantly giving us pointless and exhausting tasks.
‘You all right?’ I checked, looking from Dunc on the floor to Jaz. Today she was wearing a white T-shirt over a pair of snakeskin leggings.
She sighed again. ‘Yeah, just dead as a dingo.’ Jaz often confused her expressions. A couple of weeks ago she’d complained to Stephen of feeling as if she was between ‘a sock and a hard place’.
‘Dodo,’ I corrected.
‘One full colour and three perms today. Three! Honestly, these women. What were they thinking? And then I had to rush to school to get this one.’ She nodded at Dunc and I glanced at the phone screen to see he was watching some sort of nature documentary, a lioness tearing into the hind leg of an unlucky zebra.
‘What’s going on with you though?’ she added. ‘Why the good mood?’
I didn’t immediately answer. I just smiled at her.
Jaz leant forward in her small seat. ‘Why you looking like that?’
‘Got asked out today.’ I’d been bursting to tell Eugene all afternoon but every time I nearly did, the door would ring and someone else came in to escape the rain.
‘What d’you mean? By a guy?’
‘Yes! Thank you very much for looking so astonished.’
Jaz whooped and jumped up, clapping with delight. ‘Serious? You going?’
‘Everything all right, Jasmine?’ Stephen looked up from his custard creams. He was a man almost as round as he was tall who could have been mistaken for an IT teacher – short grey hair, black glasses, always wore short-sleeved shirts with a tie. Nerdy but kind. He saw himself as a south London shepherd, trying to help his flock every other week with a ninety-minute discussion and biscuits.
‘All fine, Stephen, don’t you worry,’ said Jaz. ‘Just found out that your woman here’s got a date.’
I hissed as I sat. ‘Shhhhhh, not everyone needs to know.’
‘My congratulations to Florence,’ said Stephen. ‘And, Jasmine, as you’re clearly so full of beans, you can be today’s tea monitor.’
Jaz winked at me and headed for Stephen’s kettle, plugged in in the corner behind the classroom sandpit. I fished my phone from my bag. No message yet but it was probably too soon.
I put my phone face down in my lap and looked around as the others started arriving. Notable members of our group included Mary, a middle-aged accountant who had a phobia of buttons; Elijah, who ran a nearby dry cleaners and was obsessed with conspiracy theories; Lenka, a nurse who suffered hypochondria, and Seamus, a Dubliner who’d been diagnosed as a compulsive hoarder and lived in a Pimlico flat full of newspapers that dated back to the Sixties. The council was trying to kick him out but Seamus kept coming up with legal reasons to stop them.
The meeting started as soon as Jaz had poured the right number of teas into the right number of mugs and handed them out. To the background noise of slurping, Stephen introduced the newcomer, a man called Paul, before asking how everyone was.
Lenka immediately jumped in. She was often suffering from something new she’d read about on the Internet.
‘Not so good today, Stephen,’ she said. ‘I am not sleeping so well at the moment.’
Stephen tutted. ‘Oh, Lenka, I am sorry. Would you like one of these while you tell us about it?’ He held out the plate of custard creams.
‘I am not sure why all of a sudden I am having these troubles,’ she went on, taking a biscuit. ‘I think perhaps it is my bad neck, and then I wondered if it was maybe too much coffee when I am at work, so I have stopped drinking the coffee. But then I read on my mobile that if you cannot sleep it might be a sign that you maybe have that disease where you forget things, what is it called, it is named after that man who used to be on the telly?’ She bit into her custard cream and looked around at the rest of us.
‘Alzheimer’s?’ volunteered Mary.
Lenka shook her head. ‘No, no, the other one. You see? I am forgetting these things already.’ She had another mouthful of biscuit.
‘Parkinson’s?’ said Stephen.
Lenka’s eyes widened and her head went up and down like a nodding dog.
‘All right, Lenka,’ said Stephen, who was careful never to rubbish any suggestion in this classroom. ‘I think what we should perhaps do is look at other factors which might be preventing you from sleep. For instance, are yo—’
‘You mustn’t use your phone so much, Lenka,’ interrupted Elijah. ‘The government can see everything you can, they know what you’re searching for, they know what you’re rea—’
‘Yes, thank you, Elijah,’ said Stephen, wrestling back control. He had to do this quite often. In a session last month, Elijah insisted that Prince Philip had ordered Princess Diana’s death, which made Seamus, a staunch monarchist, threaten to leave the room. The situation was only resolved when Stephen changed the subject by asking me how I was getting on with my Curtis the counting caterpillar story, a project which had been his idea in the first place. Knowing I loved books, he’d suggested that I give story-writing a go. He’d been right. With the encouragement of the other NOMAD members, I’d come up with the idea and slowly – very slowly – started writing it. I found the process soothing. On bad days my brain would play Consequences with everything I saw (if the next car is red, today will be bad. If there are an uneven number of biscuits in the tin, today will be bad. Three pigeons in the square not four? Bad). Finding a spare hour to write helped calm my mind down, but I guess Stephen had known that.
‘How did this date come about then?’ Jaz asked from the corner of her mouth.
‘Came into the
