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