Page 21 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
I wanted to say,No, of course not!But then I thought of sitting in the wine bar without a glass of wine, of myfridge with its contents of single-glass bottles of cheap Chardonnay. ‘I don’t always drink,’ I said quietly.
‘Never said you did.’ I saw him purse his lips as though there were words straining to come out that he thought were better kept contained.
‘And I never drink at work.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It’s just that…’
‘I could hear you, you know.’ Flynn had evidently decided to let the words out now. ‘Sometimes. You and Dexter. When I was outside, doing the windows or sorting out a delivery.’
‘Ah.’
‘I mean, it wasn’t deliberate or anything. I wasn’t listening in.’
‘Not at all like you have a track record for nosily hanging over people having a conversation or anything,’ I said, snippily. ‘Which has led us to the unfortunate circumstance we now find ourselves in. You can get out, by the way. I’ve stopped moving.’
Flynn did not get out. He did start staring at the smoking binmen though. ‘He encouraged you to drink, didn’t he? I could hear the yelling.’
Suddenly all I could think of was my father, sniffing at my breath when I came in and shouting to my mother that I’d been drinking alcohol, and what kind of a daughter did she think she was raising? And my brother, lying on the sofa sleeping off yet another hangover, laughing uproariously, as though his sister being berated was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. How I’d thought I might as well be hung for a sheep and started drinking more and more, because it made the nights shorter and the shouting ignorable.
How I’d stormed out one night, battered by their demands and accusations, and the words. How they’d told me I’d be back in a week, I couldn’t manage without them and anyway theyneeded me back because my brother had lost his licence and needed me to drive him to work.
Then I’d met Dex, and his brand of control had felt like love. He’d told me that I was no fun without a drink inside me, probably because when I was sober, I pulled him up on his behaviour. I’d been driven to drink on both sides, but I shouldn’t console myself with that fact. I’d chosen it. Chosen the tipsy tolerance of Dex’s behaviour, his casual violence, his chauvinistic assumptions that I would cook and clean and never ask questions, and his neglect of me as a person.
I told Flynn all of it, sitting there in my car as the little town woke up and began its day around us. When I started to cry, he raked around but couldn’t find anything handkerchief-like, so he handed me a bit of the kitchen roll that had been wrapped around the sandwiches, and I ended up with a face covered in cheese slivers. But I couldn’t stop talking. Even when a piece of soggy tomato dropped onto my chin, I just ate it and carried on.
Finally, when I’d hiccupped myself to a standstill, Flynn spoke.
‘So, you drank because your life was shit, then your life became shit because you drank?’
I liked the way he’d put it into the past tense, as though that wasn’t me any more.
‘Sort of. I didn’t really drink that much until Dex – well, it wasn’t a great relationship, put it that way, and alcohol made it… fuzzier. I didn’t mind so much when I was a bottle of wine in.’
‘Oh, Fee,’ he said, rather hopelessly.
‘And then sometimes Dexdidn’twant me to drink, because I had to be able to drive him around and he didn’t have a car. But Ihadto drink, because otherwise being with him was – difficult. So, he’d shout and I’d shout back and it all got messy. As youheard,’ I added.
Now Flynn shook his head. The hopelessness seemed to have robbed him of words. Over in the doorway, the binmen had started showing one another stuff on their phones. ‘But he’s gone now? You’re definitely over?’ he asked, at last.
‘Yes.’ Well, that sounded firm, at least. I thought of Dex, his muscle vests and his tattoos, and the only image I could call to mind was last night, his thuggish insistence that I be in the room. That wasn’t love. It wasn’t even friendship. He’d never even asked me about my family, knew nothing about my golden-boy brother. Flynn had got more of my background in twenty minutes sitting in this car than Dexter had in two years. I was far closer to the Heartbreak Club than I’d ever been to Dexter.
‘Then maybe you could put in a couple of shifts for me? Only temporarily, until I can… well, until I can be certain. Like I said, I won’t have people drinking on my watch. What you do in your own time is up to you, but I need someone sober and with-it behind the bar. And definitely no “have one yourself”.’
‘Right. Yes. Thank you.’ I didn’t sound very grateful. I wasn’t even sure that Iwasgrateful. I was glad to have the whisper of a job that might keep me from having to return to my parents. I was happy that Dex was out of my life. But I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea of being beholden to Flynn, or any man, for life’s necessities. I would have felt better if I could have found myself a job – and I still wasn’t entirely sure that Flynn wasn’t stringing me a line with his ‘my dad gave me this place to manage’. I’d been told one too many ‘make myself look important’ lies by Dexter and his associates, and I couldn’tquitebelieve that anything could come this easily, just from a friend. I strongly suspected that a morning would come when Flynn would have to admit to having massaged the truth somewhat, and I would be back on the street with nothing. But, for now, anything was better than nothing and I didn’t exactly have stellar references.
Flynn grinned again. ‘Okay. I’ll see you at six this evening when we open and I’ll run through everything with you then.’ He got out of the car, bending back in to gather the detritus of sandwiches and sobbing. ‘And we can also talk about what Eddie might be up to.’
‘Eddie,’ I said blankly. My mind was full of other stuff, it hadn’t the capacity to dwell on Annie’s faithless husband right now.
‘Yes. We might need to work out how we find out who he’s seeing, now we know he’s sneaking off from the gym.’
‘I’ll have a think.’
‘Right, see you later then.’ Flynn was gone, hustling himself off down the pavement to the side door of the wine bar, and leaving me to haul myself back up to my flat to lie on my bed, exhausted and feeling oddly deflated.
9
