Page 9 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
I had a horrible moment where I wondered what else he’d seen at those windows. ‘I wasn’t watchingyou. I was looking out. At the street.’
He nodded. ‘And you lived with that big guy sometimes. Is that the one you split up from right before Valentine’s?’
‘No, he was just one of my harem. I keep a cupboard full of men up there and swap around,’ I said, snappishly. I was disconcerted by this man seeming to know so much about my life and my comings and goings. Hadhebeen watchingme?
‘Yes, I used to see him going in and out, during the day, when you were at work,’ Flynn went on, fumbling with the card machine. ‘He’d have someone different with him every time. Women, sometimes. Does he have a lot of sisters or something?’
My phone slipped from my hand and slithered down behind the bar. Flynn bent to retrieve it, giving me time to compose my expression. I had it smooth and unbothered by the time he came back up again. ‘No,’ I said evenly. ‘No. No sisters.’ I drank the wine down in two gulps. ‘I have to go now.’
‘Would you like me to walk you back?’ Dark eyes. He had dark eyes I’d not noticed before behind those gold, round-rimmed glasses. Dark eyes, dark hair and that black uniform, like a shadow of a man moving through the world. Only the white tagon his shirt that proclaimed his name – also in black – gave me something to focus on.
‘No, thank you,’ I said to his badge. ‘I’m fine.’
But neither of us moved. ‘So, then. What’s the point of your club?’ Flynn asked eventually. ‘I heard you trying to steer them towards something, last week.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, tiredly. ‘At the moment it’s a bunch of us who’ve had a rubbish time lately, getting together to chat, and they seem happy with that.’
‘Hmm.’ Flynn picked up the bar towel again and began wiping the surface free from wet rings and scattered peanuts.
‘And what does “hmm” mean? What point do youthinkwe should have?’
He looked meaningfully at my empty glass. ‘I dunno. Some self-help? Something to get you over your romantic disappointments? Otherwise aren’t you just reinforcing your own misery?’
‘Have you ever thought about being on TV? Because with the level of trite aphorisms you come out with, you’d be an absolute winner on the daytime circuit.’ I propped my empty glass carefully in the middle of his newly wiped surface. ‘And I’m going home now.’
Flynn nodded. ‘Goodnight, Fee,’ he said quietly. ‘Take care.’
I’d closed the door very,verycarefully behind me before it occurred to me to wonder what I was supposed to be taking careof.
4
I woke in the night thirsty and thick-headed, and groped my way into the bathroom for some paracetamol and water. Fortunately it wasn’t far to go: the flat was tiny, converted from an old chemist’s shop into three flats over three floors, in which nobody had enough storage space or a bathroom with an opening window. My flat comprised a kitchenette, which looked out over the backyard where bins bred and feral felines yowled the night away, and a miniscule bathroom too small for a bath, and where the shower cubicle rocked if a door slammed. Then the one main room, where our… wheremybed was supposed to be folded back to make a sofa during the day, but in reality I never bothered and watched TV from the pillows.
I blundered into the bathroom, ran the tap for a few moments and fumbled a couple of tablets out of the pack. The floor wobbled under my feet, giving me a moment of wondering whether the hangover was worse than I thought before I remembered that I’d pulled the bathmat over the loose floorboards so I could ignore them. The landlord wouldn’t do anything about it – see rocking shower, electricity that tripped out when it rained,etc. – so there was no point in mentioning it. I’d bought the flamingo-patterned mat to try to cheer up the flat last time Dexter slammed out of my life but it really only made the bathroom floor look as though someone had had a spectacular nosebleed all over it that hadn’t washed out. My metaphorical bathmat was equally bloodstained and Gothic, but a lot less easy to replace.
I finished my analysis of the flooring, took my glass of water and went back through to sit on my bed and swallow the tablets. I hadn’t drawn the far curtain, which meant I could see out of the window across the street to the wine bar, which was shrouded in darkness now, with only one small blue bulb indicating that a machine was still switched on somewhere inside. I supposed Flynn was happily tucked up in bed somewhere now, sleeping the sleep of the blameless. Probably wearing jet black pyjamas, I thought, making myself smile. I wondered if he took his name tag off at night, or whether he kept it on to help his sleeping partner remember his name.
That made me think about our ‘club’. It gave me a kind of itchy feeling in the back of my head, almost as though I could see us all projected five, ten years into the future, all still sitting around that table, sticky drinks and sympathy. Whywerewe meeting? To tell one another horror stories about our dreadful relationships? Misery loving company?
Perhaps it was an overspill from the pep talks at work, all the constant cries for achievement, forward motion, targets – I think someone had used the wordsynergyat one point, and I still didn’t know what that meant – that made me want todosomething. Those little chats did seem to have instilled in me a desire for some kind of results. Funny that, I’d not even really taken much notice when I’d been sitting in that room with fifteen other ‘team members’ and a whiteboard, but now, in the middleof the night, a desire for targets and an end goal seemed to have crashed over my head and was stopping me sleeping.
Or it may have been the hangover, of course. Alcohol-anxiety, a killer headache and the twisting little knife of guilt at having once again drunk more than I should, all ganging up in the back of my mind to needle me with how insipid I was, how inefficient. How uselessly, pointlesslydull.
I leaned back against my pillows, gulping down the water and remembering that warm, included feeling that I’d had earlier that night. Here were people who were offering me friendship and understanding. They weren’t seeing a wishy-washy drunk, they were seeing the Fee that Icould be. They hadn’t had the chance yet to see the numerous ways in which I was a total fuck-up, of course.
A renewed sense of purpose trickled through my veins. I couldbethat Fee they thought I was, at least for the purposes of being in the club. Once a week I could pretend, couldn’t I? Reinvent myself to be the purposeful, ambitious person that I might once have been, before Dexter, before… well, before conception probably. The others would believe that I was whoever I said I was – all I had to do was act like it. I couldn’t give Margot a run in the leadership stakes but I could be the ideas man.
My knuckles tightened around the water glass. We could make this club something. We shouldn’t be meeting to complain, to moan about our circumstances and become bitter while watching elderly men play increasingly competitive table games. We could DO something. We could help one another.
I dragged my phone out. I still kept it under my pillow, because Dexter had liked me to return all his messages promptly, although I didn’t know why. Nobody was going to be messaging me during the night any more, were they? After a few moments thinking, I messaged Margot.
I think we ought to try to help Annie. There must be a way we can find out who Eddie is having his affair with, at least. If she knows, she can take it from there.
My finger hesitated over the send button, as I had a horrible flashback to Flynn telling me about Dex and the way he’d casually dropped in the fact that he’d brought women back to the flat. I typed:
And maybe we could get some kind of revenge on the people that made us join the club?
Then I erased that. Revenge wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t in the image of the Fee I wanted to be.
