Cakes: 10; chocolate Hobnobs: 14; orange Clubs: 8). I knew the number of steps downstairs to the shop basement (13), the number upstairs to the travel section (12) and the number of caffeine-stained mugs that hung from the wooden tree in the office kitchen (7).
Time had been the only real help. That, and the fact that I’d become better at hiding my habit. I wore an old-school watch with little hands so I never had to see an unsettling digital time like 11:11. If I was watching television at home, the volume had to be set at an even number by the remote control. Every other week, I went to an anxiety support group called NOMAD (No More Anxiety Disorders. Blame the founder, Stephen, for its unfortunate name, although luckily most members saw the funny side). But these days, the meetings were more to catch up with my friend Jaz than to actively participate.
This morning, I played Consequences by counting the number of cars I passed. Often, while doing this, a little voice whispered that if a blue car followed a bus then it would be a bad day, but if it was a white car, something good would happen. Logically, I knew this was rubbish and that I was making up rules for myself. But I couldn’t help it. If a blue car, or a green car, or a yellow car, or whatever colour car my brain decided was bad that day did follow the bus, I’d feel panicked, alarmed at what might happen. It was relentless, my brain’s constant paranoia, but counting gave me a sense of order. I felt guilty if I didn’t count things in the same way that others did if they didn’t go to the gym.
At first glance, Frisbee Books wouldn’t strike anyone as a suitable office for a maniac obsessed with neatness and numbers. Tucked away off a busy Chelsea shopping street, it looked like it belonged on the set of a Dickens film. Its wooden front was painted dark green, with ‘Frisbee Books Ltd’ in white lettering. Underneath that was a big window with two rows of books on display, lined up for passing shoppers.
Stepping inside was like falling into the library of an extremely untidy recluse. The walls were covered in shelves that supported thousands of books pressing up against one another. Just over 43,000 books. The shop floor was strewn with tables of different sizes loaded with books in bar-graph piles. Military hardbacks on one table (we sold a lot of those in Chelsea); memoirs stacked high on another; cookery books on a table beside that. Fiction and non-fiction was separated in two halves of the shop – non-fiction as you walked in through the door, fiction off to the right.
Norris, my boss, had inherited the shop from his uncle. It had opened in 1967 when London was swinging, but Uncle Dale thought his bookshop should stand as a cultural sandbag against the likes of Jimi Hendrix and the miniskirt. Norris took over the shop in the early Nineties when Uncle Dale had a hip replacement and could no longer stand all day. Two years on, he died in his sleep leaving Norris the bookshop in his will.
Frisbee Books hadn’t changed much since. There was a 12-year-old computer in the basement that Norris used for accounting and ordering. Otherwise the shop ran as it always had done. Loyal customers dropped in to order a new biography of Churchill that they’d read about in The Spectator. Middle-aged women browsed for birthday presents. American tourists stood outside in shorts and wraparound sunglasses, taking pictures of the ‘cute bookstore’ they’d found for friends back in Arkansas.
I’d asked nine independent bookshops across London for a job when I graduated from uni. In my letter, I explained that I fell in love with A Little Princess when I was eight, had barely looked up from a book since, and all I wanted to do now was help other people find stories they could lose themselves in. In my last week at Edinburgh, fellow English Literature graduates boasted of internships at publishing houses or acceptance into law school, but I suspected that working in a corporate office would mean making presentations in boardrooms and bitching about your colleagues. Not for me.
I got four replies to my letter; five were ignored. Two replies asked me to get in touch via the official application form on their website, and one said they only accepted employees with retail experience. Norris was my life raft, sending me a postcard suggesting I come along to the shop for a cup of tea.
He was a human bear with tufts of grey hair protruding from both his head and his ears, as if he’d recently stuck his fingers into a plug socket. He didn’t ask anything about my retail experience. While giving me a tour of the shop, he simply wanted to know what I was reading (I’d pulled an old Agatha Christie from my bag) and demanded to know whether I owned a Kindle. Norris growled the word ‘Kindle’ with suspicion and I’d admitted that I used to have one until I dropped it in the bath.
I instantly regretted the bath comment because Norris paused by the ‘F’ shelf and his eyebrows leapt several inches in surprise. But then he moved on to the authors beginning with ‘G’ and asked whether I was a morning person because he wasn’t much good before he’d finished his thermos of coffee and would I be all right to open the shop. Our chat took fifteen minutes, after which Norris said he’d see me the following Monday.
I’d arrived nervously that first morning, stammering when customers asked where they might find the latest Ian McEwan or if we had an obscure political book by a Scandinavian writer in stock. The first time I ran a transaction through the till I was so afraid of fluffing it that I spoke robotically, like a Dalek: ‘That. Will. Be. £12.99. Please,’ and had to be prompted for one of our paper bags. But I soon settled into the routine.
Today, it was my turn to unlock, so I arrived just after nine, turned on the computer behind the till and ran a Stanley knife across the boxes from the distributors. New stock to be put out. Although it might not have looked like it, there was an order to the shop that I understood. If a customer came in and asked for a Virginia Woolf or a travel guide to the Galapagos, I could point them to exactly the right spot. I knew the shop as well as I knew my home. Or better, perhaps, since I rarely went into Ruby and Mia’s bedrooms (too messy, used cotton pads everywhere).
I knew the customers who came in every day to browse but actually lived on their own and just wanted some company. I recognized the punters who were time-wasters, loitering between appointments, who would finger multiple books before sliding them back into the wrong shelf. And in quiet moments, it also allowed me time to work on my own book, a children’s book about a counting-obsessed caterpillar called Curtis who had fifty feet and was late for school every day because it took so long to put on all his shoes. I’d also come to see Norris as a sort of mad uncle and could tolerate his daily habits – sitting on the downstairs loo for twenty minutes after his coffee, ignoring the phone so I always had to pick it up, leaving indecipherable Post-it notes on the counter about customer orders that were often lost.
Then there was my colleague Eugene. He was a middle-aged actor who’d worked at the shop for the past decade to pay his rent since he was rarely cast in anything. He had a bald head that shone like a bed knob, wore a bow tie every day and made me rehearse lines with him behind the counter, which often startled customers. Recently, there’d been a dramatic death scene when Eugene, rehearsing for a minor role in King Lear, had ended up lying across the shop floor.
Either he or I opened up before Norris arrived late every morning, his shirt fastened by the wrong buttons, thermos in hand; this was special coffee he ground at home and made in a cafetière before decanting it and solemnly carrying it into work in his satchel. I’d made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with Nescafé not long after I started work there and the cloud that passed his face was so dark I’d wondered if I’d be fired.
Anyway, he’d arrive and there was always grumbling about the traffic or the weather before he went downstairs into his office to drink this coffee from his favourite mug – ‘To drink or not to drink?’ it said on the outside. Half an hour later, he would reappear on the shop floor in cheerier humour and ask whether any customers had been in yet.
But that morning, I was still standing behind boxes of new stock when Norris arrived early and rapped on the glass.
‘You
