Page 36 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
He looked at me critically. There it was again, that tight focus that hinted at the fact that he was so much more than a bartender; while it didn’t exactly shout about the sheer amount of backing he had, it certainly suggested that this was a man who’d had a good deal of expensive education and was much more intelligent than he appeared. It was a look that understood.
‘If you’re sure…’ he started.
‘I am. Most of the healing is done. As long as I don’t dance the samba in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll be fine.’
‘Great. Because I didn’t finish those toilets. I was distracted.’ An enormous grin. ‘Off you go, now.’
My return of his look was a lot less focused and a lot more vitriolic. ‘Bastard.’
‘Yep.’
So, I went to scrub the loos.
13
At twenty past five on Thursday morning, we were parked at the bottom of Annie’s cul-de-sac of bungalows on the outskirts of Pickering. It was dark, and the streetlights were making all three of us look blue-toned and sickly.
‘Why are we here so early?’ Fraser whined, for about the tenth time.
‘Because we don’t know that he’ll go to the gym this morning,’ Flynn explained again, for about the eleventh time. ‘He might pretend to go early and head off somewhere else. He’s got all day, after all.’
Lights had gone on inside their house. They illuminated the carefully mown lawn, which had clearly had its first cut of the season, and a flower bed for whichtendedwas the only word that applied. Some unwisely early bedding plants had been put out in rows which looked as though geometrical instruments had been used in the scheme, and outlined by white-painted stones.
‘Minnie says he’s anal,’ Fraser observed, and both Flynn and I turned to the back seat in choreographed unison. ‘You know, like obsessed with order?’
‘I think she might be right,’ I said, faintly relieved. ‘Which makes this whole “having an affair” thing even weirder.’
‘You and Minnie?’ Flynn turned even further around, so that he could properly see Fraser. ‘You an item?’
‘God, no!’ Fraser shuddered. ‘She’s got a bloke. He’d cream me. He’s ten foot tall or something, played prop for the Leeds Rhinos. It’s a rugby team,’ he added when I frowned. ‘She’s great though, Minnie.’ He seemed to go off into a little daydream for a while. ‘She says we should start up in business together.’
Flynn almost corkscrewed himself into the seat and I swivelled back around again. ‘What sort of business?’
‘Well, it’s like, I’ve made such good progress and everything, and she wants to set up by herself as a private instructor and her bloke says he’d put up some cash, and she asked me if I’d take some qualifications and be a trainer. For people who start out as real fat bastards and don’t know how to exercise. To, like, encourage them and everything.’
‘But you’ve only been going for a month,’ I said weakly.
‘Yeah, but I go every day. Nearly every day. Five days a week. And that’s dedication, Minnie says, and she reckons I could inspire other people to turn their lives around.’
Flynn and I locked eyes. Our mutual doubt was almost solid. ‘But you only went every day because we’ve been checking up on Eddie.’ Flynn sounded almost as weak as I had.
‘But I’m going to keep on! Minnie got me a year’s membership, cut price cos I’m on benefits. She’s going to train me up and I’m going to be an inspiration. She says.’ Fraser almost glowed with achievement. ‘So I’m going to go later. On the bus.’
‘Good on you.’ Flynn sounded as though he meant it. Although, to be honest, Fraser’s new sense of purpose seemed to have been the best thing that could have happened. Well, he’d stopped wearingStar WarsT-shirts, anyway.
‘Look, this might be Eddie.’ I nudged Flynn as I saw a strip of light beam out across the manicured lawn, indicating an opened door, then the light went out and a figure stepped into the dark. ‘Annie must still be asleep.’
Eddie was wearing his work clothes, but apparently over the top of ordinary things, because he looked bulkily overdressed. He turned once to look back at the house, then walked over to the garage and, under cover of the dark and a quite frankly hugely overwrought pergola, began taking off the top layer. Under his work suit he was wearing a polo shirt and chinos. He opened the garage door, flipped open his boot and carefully placed his work things in there, closed it again, and then got in to reverse the car out.
Flynn, Fraser and I crouched down. We were almost opposite the house and, as Eddie had met us all now, didn’t want to be spotted by him, although we needn’t have worried. He pulled out tidily, checked all his mirrors and, tweaking the driver’s mirror into a more central position, he drove off down the road.
‘Quick!’ said Fraser, unnecessarily. ‘We don’t want to lose him!’
Losing Eddie at six in the morning on the almost deserted roads around Pickering would have been a near impossibility. Being spotted by him was far more likely, so we had to hang back quite a way as he drove five miles under each speed limit out towards the dual carriageway that led to York.
‘Bugger me, he’s a slow bastard, isn’t he?’ Formula 1 Fraser commented.
‘Probably doesn’t want to get pulled over,’ I suggested. ‘Hard to explain to Annie how he came to get a speeding ticket miles from where he’s supposed to be.’
