Page 18 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
We were both whispering. I was worried about the people downstairs waking up again, twice in one night might well have them calling the police for real, rather than as a threat.
Flynn put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You seem a bit twitchy.’
‘My ex turned up in the middle of the night,’ I said, biting down on my lip to stop it wobbling. ‘It was a bit of a shock.’
I led the way down the stairs and out to where my car was parked on the street. I looked at it, sitting there in its slightly bent-bumpered philosophical way, and wondered if I ought to sell it now I didn’t need it for work. It might raise enough for another month’s rent.
‘Sounds it. Does he often do that? Turn up out of the blue?’
The morning was chilly and the door had frozen shut. I had to tug really hard to get the seals to allow me in. ‘He used to.’ I opened the passenger door. ‘I’d always take him back, you see. But now I’ve decided… well, it really is over. I don’t even know why I kept it going so long.’ We pulled away from the kerb, my car reluctantly biting its way onto the frosty surface of the road.
Flynn gave me a long look. ‘He was dreadful,’ he said quietly. ‘Absolutely awful. What were youthinking, Fee?’
‘You don’t know him!’ The presumed insult to my intelligence stung. ‘He could be quite… He sometimes…’ The indignation drained away and left me with the backwash comprising acceptance and a surprising feeling of culpability. ‘No, you’re right. He was rubbish. I’d been single a long time and I didn’t really feel up to a long selection procedure.’
‘You were acquiring a boyfriend, not a street dog,’ Flynn observed mildly.
‘My friend, Demi, was a bit obsessed with baby things. She was pregnant with her second and Alfie was only nine monthsold, and everything was a bit heavy going for her, so we sort of drifted apart and I just wanted… someone.’
Flynn wasn’t looking at me. He seemed, from the direction his face was pointing, to be watching the dark lines of roadway, creased by tyre marks in the heavy frost. ‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked, as though making conversation was painful.
‘In a bar.’
‘Ah.’
‘What?’
Flynn sighed. ‘Alcohol does not make the wisest choices, Fee. I think you know that.’
‘Bit rich coming from a guy who’s earning his daily crust selling the stuff to anyone who’ll buy,’ I said snippily. Then, as the annoyance at his presumption drained away, I sighed. ‘I know. I really do. There isn’t anything else, that’s all. My life looks – empty.’ I tried not to over rev the engine; my car could be surprisingly noisy in the dark of the night. ‘I’m not good at friends,’ I said finally to the black windscreen.
‘And yet, here you are, driving out at this ridiculous hour to try to help Annie? That sounds like friendship to me.’
I didn’t say anything. I steered us to Fraser’s, where he was waiting at the end of the road, his rolled-up towel under his arm. ‘Thought you weren’t coming,’ he said, falling into the back seat. ‘Ihopedyou weren’t coming. Fuck me, I can hardly walk today.’
‘It’s all in a good cause, Fraze,’ said Flynn, surprisingly matey.
Fraser sniffed and lolled his head against the seat back on the journey.
The gym was, once more, lit up like a landed spaceship. Fraser reluctantly peeled himself out of my car and limped to the reception desk, where Minnie was already waiting for him, wearing flesh-coloured leggings which made her look distressingly as though she were naked from the waistdown. Fraser looked back over his shoulder, like a child being sent on an outward bound course, and Flynn gave him a cheery wave as Minnie led him off into the bowels of the building.
The two men were back on the static bikes, pedalling away in silent unison.
‘Why don’t you have friends?’ Flynn had brought sandwiches. Sandwiches! At seven in the morning! I hadn’t even had time to make the flask of coffee. He pushed a foil-wrapped parcel at me and the prospect of food took away any annoyance I was working up for his resumption of our previous conversation.
‘I do have friends!’ There was Annie and Margot and Wren and if the total needed adding to, I was even prepared to feel warmly towards Fraser. ‘I just don’t have a lot of time, with work and… work.’
The glasses wriggled. I presumed his eyebrows were creeping up his forehead again.
‘What about family?’
‘I have a family too.’ I unwrapped the foil. Cheese and ham with a token bit of salad, carefully wrapped in kitchen roll, not too offensive for this time in the morning. I hadn’t had anything to eat last night either, had I? I tried to remember the contents of my fridge, which mostly seemed to be small bottles. ‘Do you?’
‘Neat reversal.’ For a moment we both chewed, staring out through the show-off windows at the motivated individuals inside the gym. ‘I didn’t spring fully formed from the loins of a wine bar,’ he said, and then, as though seizing gratefully on a chance not to talk about his family and letting his sandwich drop onto his lap, ‘Is that Eddie?’
‘Is what Eddie?’ A piece of lettuce had slithered from my sandwich onto my leg and I was trying to retrieve it when Flynn’s hand came onto my wrist.
‘Over there!’
