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 shop,’ I whispered. ‘Although he suggested a coffee. Is a coffee definitely a date?’
‘A coffee with a man you don’t know is a date.’
‘What if it’s a job interview?’
‘Give me strength. Then it would be a job interview. Is he interviewing you for a job?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I explained the episode in more detail: his mother’s book. His intriguing clothes. His return twenty minutes later to ask me for the coffee.
‘There we go,’ said Jaz, folding her arms. ‘It’s a date. A coffee can be a date. They do it in America all the time. What’s he called?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ she replied, so loudly that it attracted Stephen’s attention.
‘Jasmine and Florence, are we OK?’
‘Yeah, all good,’ said Jaz. ‘And top story, Mary. Really compelling. Carry on.’ Jaz stuck her thumbs up at the front.
Mary, who’d turned her head to look towards us, glanced back at Stephen. ‘Er…’ she faltered.
‘Go on, Mary,’ said Stephen, staring at Jaz with a pointed expression. ‘You were telling us how you feel on the sad anniversary of Humphrey’s death.’
‘Oh no,’ whispered Jaz, slumping forward on her desk. Humphrey was Mary’s parrot. Late parrot. He’d died last year and been the main topic of discussion at these sessions for months afterwards.
We sat in respectful silence for a few minutes while Mary continued, but I knew Jaz wouldn’t be able to zip it for long.
‘So when you going to see him?’
‘Not sure,’ I said, between my teeth.
‘So you don’t know his name, you don’t know anything about him and he dresses like a Victorian undertaker.’ She paused. ‘I dunno about this.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. I felt as if she’d pricked the bubble in my stomach with a pin.
‘Just be careful. Could be a weirdo.’
‘OK, but there’s one more thing I need to tell you about.’
‘What?’ she hissed.
As quietly and succinctly as I could, I explained about Gwendolyn and the list. ‘Is that weird?’ I whispered when I’d finished. ‘I don’t believe in that stuff but it seems a weird coincidence, no?’
‘You got this list?’ she said. I nodded and reached under my chair to pull the piece of paper from my rucksack.
Jaz smoothed it across her thigh with the side of her hand and read it.
I counted them off on my fingers. ‘One, he dressed well. Two, he