Page 10 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
It would give the club a kind of purpose.
And I realised that, for probably the first time in my life, I actually wanted to achieve something. Not just go through the motions or follow the crowd. I wanted to beuseful. To have, as I’d said, a purpose. Helping Annie could be our purpose.
I was sitting rereading the message, trying to work out whether what I’d said was really what I meant, when I managed to press the send button instead of scrolling down, and threw the phone onto the bed in disgust. Honestly. It was three in the morning. Now Margot would think I sat up all night obsessing over being single, as though I didn’t have an actual life to be getting on with. It rather blew the illusion that I wanted to create, of Strong, Purposeful Fee, and replaced her with Insomniac Fee. Overthinking Fee.
Bugger.
I got back into bed and lay down, trying to will the headache to disappear and, to my surprise, my phonepinged a message.
That is a very good idea. Let me have a think. See you soon!
So Margot was awake at this godforsaken hour too, was she? Well. Okay then. Maybe I hadn’t cocked up as much as I thought.
I snuggled down into the duvet, feeling curiously better for knowing that someone else was up and answering messages. It took me back to nights lying awake next to Dex, while he snored and I tried to work out how I was feeling about my life. If I’d nudged him to try to get him to talk, he would mutter something incomprehensible, grab any part of my anatomy he could reach and instantly start up the wood-chipper snore again, as though I were a human comfort pillow. I’d sometimes felt as though I was the only person alive in the world on those nights.
But now I knew Margot was awake too.
I wriggled my way around in the bed. It wasn’t the world’s most comfortable sleeping arrangement – the hinge that closed it up into a sofa was in the wrong place and I had to arch my lower back over it – but I’d got used to it now. As I wriggled, I saw a reflected glow in the window and realised that a light had gone on across the road, above the wine bar. Just a faint light, as though someone had turned on a small lamp down a corridor, but noticeable. After a few seconds, that went out and darkness resumed, but I was still staring at those blank, bland windows opposite.
Did Flynn live over the business? I didn’t know much about the wine bar, only that it had changed hands recently and been closed for a while for the revamp. There must be a warren of rooms above, left over from when it had been the pub, so presumably someone lived there. Well, given the light, that or they had a very tidy-minded poltergeist.
I closed my eyes again. Me, Margot and – someone. I didn’twant to think that it might be Flynn, but it pleased me to imagine that dark-eyed man roaming the network of rooms above his workplace like a clockwork automaton, awake and alert and waiting for dawn. Suddenly the night didn’t feel like quite such a lonely place.
I was drifting off to sleep when I jerked awake again. Had Ireallysuggested that we use the club to help Annie? What the hell could we do? Shit happened, we’d all been treated badly, that was something there wasn’t any real solution for. Although, I thought, as I punched the pillow and tried to get comfortable again, Annie could probably benefit from chatting to someone about the ending of a forty-year romance – to help her reframe a new future. Had I really suggested that we find out who Eddie was being unfaithful with? What thehell…
I slumped into sleep again, to new dreams of Inspector Gadget-type shenanigans, lots of secret following and flying cars, plots and planning and creeping around corners.
5
Work was hell. Demi was working from home again and since her bombshell about moving to Peterborough we’d not had a lot of contact. Maybe that was why I was embracing the cautiously titled Monday Night Heartbreak Club quite so ferociously. It was a fixed point now; Monday nights I knew I’d have people to talk to, and I was slightly scared of how easily it had happened and how much I was looking forward to it.
Of course, there wasn’t much else in my life to look forward to. Dexter had maintained radio silence, but that was nothing new. He’d be waiting for me to text, to beg him to come back, to promise all kinds of exotic sexual practices and nightly home-cooking if he’d only – what? What had Dexter really ever brought to my life? Apart from a presence, a smell, loads of dirty laundry and constantly disturbed nights, I couldn’t think of anything, and all of those things could easily be replaced if I got a Labrador. Although a Labrador probably wouldn’t have all those dodgy friends or come home at three in the morning rambling incoherently and full of braggadocio, testosterone and cocaine.
My manager Had Words with me about productivity,turnaround time, length of calls and whether I was offering value for money. Since there wasn’t much I could say to any of this – what did she expect me to do? – I nodded and smiled and pretended I’d try harder. All the time in the back of my mind, like a savage earworm, ran the thought that if I lost my job I wouldn’t be able to afford the rent. I could go home, yes, back to my parents in York, who would receive me gratefully because, after all, hadn’t I proved their point? Icouldn’tmanage by myself out in the big wide world as they always said. I should stay with them, find myself a nice little job and contribute to the household, which comprised them and my feckless brother. My ‘nice little job’ would mean my contribution could provide him with pocket money to enable him to vanish on a weekly basis and turn up back at the house with a tottering new girlfriend who would spend several days holed up with him in his room, giggling and sending out for food, then disappear, never to be seen again, and be replaced with a new giggler in a crop top the following week.
My parents indulged my brother. It wasn’t their fault. But I’d have a roof over my head.
I sat back down in my cubicle and vowed that I’d live in a tent rather than go through that again. Maybe Peterborough wasn’t so bad and I could camp out on Demi’s sofa for a while?
Then they switched the calls back through to me again and I was overtaken by the need to sell household insurance to people who didn’t want or need it for the rest of the day.
Five o’clock meant home time. Back to the dingy flat, where the couple downstairs had progressed to throwing things and having noisy make-up sex. Back to staring out of the window.
‘Hello. Are you having an extraordinary meeting?’
‘No, I’m having a large white wine.’
I didn’t know why I was here. Other than I didn’t want to sit in on yet another evening, and I’d run out of alcoholin the flat. Flynn poured me a small glass and then leaned on the bar as though he had all the time in the world.
‘So, how’s life?’
I thought about the question as I drank my wine. ‘I’m not entirely sure. But I think I proposed that we find out who Annie’s husband is having an affair with, so there’s that.’
Flynn widened his eyes at me. ‘Wow. Really? That’s very proactive of you.’
‘Don’t, you sound like my boss. She’s all about the proactive and the dynamic, and it’s rubbish.’ I gulped some more wine. ‘I do think we should help Annie, though. If she knows more about the affair she might find it’s easier to come to terms with. She’ll be in a position of power.’ Then, because something about Flynn’s apparent disbelief that I could have any influence made me want to fly over the top of his scepticism in a vehicle made of whimsy, ‘We can always offer to set fire to his trousers, if she wants.’
‘Will you tell her that’s what you’re doing?’
