my toast while listening to the radio – a Cabinet minister had been forced to apologize for making a joke about vegans – and ushered Marmalade into the garden.
Mia left for work first. She worked for a fashion PR company, quite senior now, and was responsible for telling women that they should wear crochet and tartan this season and that animal print was out. She’d given up on me because I refused to wear anything other than my self-imposed navy uniform to the shop. Ruby would generally lie in bed until midday, depending on whether she had a casting, then leave a trail of mugs and milky cereal bowls around the house which I put in the dishwasher every evening since, by then, she was always out.
I slid lunch into my rucksack, a waterproof navy job bought several years ago from Millets for its many compartments. It fitted my purse, my lip balm, my house keys, a spare hair tie, a packet of paracetamol, my phone, my sandwich, my flapjack and whatever book I was reading. I didn’t understand women who left the house with a handbag the size of a matchbox. How could they go about their day looking so self-assured when all they had on them was a debit card and a lipstick? What if they got a headache?
I reached under the hall table for my hideous work shoes, fastened them and set off on foot for the shop. A distance of exactly 2.6 miles, much of it along the Thames.
I walked to most places playing Consequences, another form of control. It had started when I was four, the year after Mum died. That was when I started totting up the number of classmates every morning to make sure they were all there. Only when I reached fourteen could I relax. Everyone present. Some days, it was only thirteen, which would make me anxious until Mrs Garber said it was all right, the absentee’s mother had called to say they had a stomach bug and they’d be back in tomorrow.
After my classmates, I counted the chairs in our classroom to make sure there were enough. Then the pencils in my pencil case to check I hadn’t lost any; the paintings on the walls; the carrot batons on my plate at lunchtime; the books in my rucksack on the way home again. I counted the stairs when I got back and tried not to let the flight between the bathroom and Mia’s room bother me – Mia was just a baby then – because it was an odd number. Only nine stairs on that flight and I preferred even numbers. They felt more secure, more stable. No number was left out because they all had partners. To my 4-year-old brain, not being left out was important.
My obsessive counting slackened its grip as I grew older but it still remained a habit. Dad and Patricia had despatched me to various specialists over the years, but a succession of armchair experts, asking how angry I felt on a scale of 1 to 10, had done little to cure me. I knew the number of keys on the grubby work keyboard (104) and the number of biscuits in the various packets we ate at work for tea (Jaffa 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