Page 25 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
I’d straighten up, embarrassed, but Flynn just grinned at me and offered me a night off to catch up on my sleep, but I wouldn’t take it. Nights off meant sitting alone in the flat, and I had enough of that during the day. Sitting up there on my own meant the pull of the alcohol was strongest. I could avoid it during the day, knowing I had to work later, but when the evenings stretched long and boring, sometimes the temptation was too much. After work I could get through without breaking open one of the small bottles in the fridge – by the time we’d washed up, cashed up the till and swept the floor, I was too shattered to do anything apartfrom fall into bed, hence the falling asleep in the car. But a night off might mean I slipped, and anything that kept the urge at bay was to be seized and held.
On my days off, I started a grand tidy-up of the flat, which helped to fill the time – I’d found several of Dexter’s cast-off socks, two forgotten lighters under the table, and I’d chiselled months of grime off the cooker. I had even nailed down those loose floorboards in the bathroom. The place still smelled of fish, though. I managed to ration myself to only one small bottle on those nights, using the physical exhaustion of scrubbing andDIYto prevent me from opening more. It worked. Mostly.
Eddie continued in his routine, apart from the Friday morning, when a gym newcomer had parked in the spot he usually occupied, causing him to drive twice around the car park and Flynn and me to sit alert as whippets. Two circuits seemed to reassure Eddie that no other parking spaces were explosive, and he parked, precisely as usual, two spaces to the left of his usual haunt.
Other than that, nothing unusual happened.
Flynn didn’t mention my sobbing all over him in the car that morning, and the situation wasn’t repeated. I carefully kept the chat light: last night’s TV, the customers we’d had in, how much less pink Fraser was looking now when he came out of the gym, and how much we both hated hearing every single detail about his performance improvements and Minnie’s words of wisdom.
We had the weekends off. According to Annie, she and Eddie went to Asda on Saturday, then he mowed the lawn, and on Sunday they sat and read the papers together and cooked a big roast. I got ‘green draylon and toilet roll covers’ vibes about the whole thing, but she seemed happy with it. At least it meant she had eyes on him all day, so we were excused from following him and, to Fraser’s relief, the gym.
‘Do you think she’d forgive Eddie, if he is having an affair?’ I asked. It was Sunday afternoon, the March sun was managing to muster a little heat, and we’d taken chairs out into the garden at the back of the wine bar. It wasn’t much of a garden, more of a yard, but Flynn had done his best with a couple of barrels filled with soil, in which sad leaves occasionally emerged and were instantly stripped to sticks by the slugs.
Flynn stretched out his legs and picked up his tea mug. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘She’s more of a tough cookie than she lets on, I think, our Annie.’
There it was again. That tiny hint of warm inclusion in the phrase ‘our Annie’. I felt the warm blanket of belonging over my shoulders; I was part of something here. ‘But he might want to leave her. Set up with his affair partner, start a new life.’
We both stared into our tea, pondering the duality which could make fussy, routine-obsessed Eddie, whose gym obsession seemed to have shaped him, according to Annie, into someone who could have qualified for the next Olympics, manage to keep another woman.
‘Maybe it’s a man?’ I turned my face up to the sun. Mostly what I turned my face up to was the mossy overhang of the guttering, where the flat above the wine bar jutted out into the yard, but it was better than nothing. Better than my place, where the sun only highlighted the mould in the grouting. ‘Maybe Eddie is secretly gay and leading a double life?’
Flynn made a ‘could be’ face over his mug rim. ‘Fraser’s definite it was a woman he saw standing outside that house in York, and I’d bet my business on Fraser’s ability to tell a woman from a man. It would be sad though, don’t you think, if Eddie were gay and he’d never felt able to come out and be his real self?’
‘I’m sure Annie’s roast dinners make up for a certain amount of closetedness.’ Then a thought which had circledaround the back of my head, making only the odd middle-of-the-night appearance in my conscious thoughts, came to the forefront again. ‘Are you gay, Flynn?’
He spilled his tea. ‘No!’ Some mopping went on and he had to go in and fetch one of the bar tea towels. ‘What on earth made you think that?’
Lots of things. You’ve never made one suggestive remark to me, after all that sitting in a parked car, chatting. You’ve never mentioned a girlfriend, past or present. You don’t seem to want to talk about why you joined our club either.
‘Oh, nothing. Just wondered.’
Those dark eyes, half-hidden behind the gold-rimmed glasses, looked at me very seriously for a moment. ‘Because I haven’t tried it on with you?’
I felt myself going pink and started slurping at my tea to give me something to do with my face. ‘Nnnn,’ I garbled, swilling liquid.
He smiled, and shook his head. ‘You’re either really cocky or…’ Now the look became focused and he leaned forward across the makeshift table, which was really a bit of board resting on two chairs. Leaned in really close until he was almost nose to nose with me. ‘Was that the sort of man you’re used to?’ he asked softly.
But I’d learned my lesson from the snotting session. Letting anything out meant lettingeverythingout, and I wasn’t going through that again. He knew about my mistakes with Dex and he knew about my family, that was enough. ‘Nnnn,’ I said again, still to my tea. Those ‘men I thought were just being friendly until they got me alone in a car or their flat or down an alleyway’ were not his business. My constantly mistaking casual sex for love, availability for affection, was not his business.
The fact that I was still learning to like myself sober, was not his business.
Flynn shook his head. ‘I don’t know who I should feel sorriest for,’ he said, dabbing at the front of his shirt where spilled tea was forming a stain the exact shape of the York ring road. ‘You or me.’
‘Why would you feel sorry for either of us?’ I put my mug down on the ‘table’. ‘We’re both doing all right. You’ve got this,’ I waved to indicate the building, ‘and I’m hanging in there. Paying my bills, just about. Thanks for employing me, by the way. Any chance of a few more shifts? I could do with a few quid; I want to redecorate the bathroom.’
‘Oy, I’m notmadeof money.’ He smiled and then the smile faded and left him with that older look, lines around his eyes and mouth. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said again, but almost as though I wasn’t meant to hear. Then a headshake and another smile. ‘Right. If you want another shift, you can do tonight if you like. I don’t think we’ll be busy but I’ve got some paperwork to catch up on, so you can man the bar while I go behind the scenes, and it means I won’t need to do it tomorrow.’
I stood up and picked up the tea mugs. ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, but I was wondering. Why was Flynn so avoidant about talking about himself? He knew more about me and my situation than almost anyone apart from Demi, and she hadn’t been in contact since I’d messaged her to say I’d lost my job. Probably too busy living in Peterborough, I thought, and tried to keep the sourness out of my head. The more time I spent with Flynn and the rest of the club, the more I realised that Demi and I hadn’t really been friends. Not proper friends. We’d worked at the same place and we’d socialised occasionally, that was all, but I hadn’t trusted her with my background. She didn’t know about my parents and the weird, twisted way they’d brought up my brother and me. Sheknew about Dex, and some of his more extreme behaviour, but not about the way he’d made me feel. We’d talked about men in general, and I’d sometimes hinted at the fact that I wasn’t completely happy with him, but she’d seemed to think of my life as something likeEastEnders. Something to make her own life seem normal and happy in comparison.
But the Heartbreak Club all had problems. Life had been pretty shit for all of us, in one way or another, and that bound us together in a way that other people, with their shiny relationships and gorgeous partners, wouldn’t understand.
Except for Flynn. I left the bar and went back to my flat, leaving him to sort out something with the computer. Flynn was the outlier. He didn’t seem to have been particularly cut up about not having a great Valentine’s Day. He was part of the club more by default and by always being there. So whywashe there? I did, for one brief and skin-tightening moment of horror, wonder whether he’d been recruited by Dex to keep an eye on me, to make sure I wasn’t seeing anyone else, but I quickly dismissed that idea. Flynn simply wasn’t a Dexter sort of person. He didn’t have enough tattoos, for a start, and he only swore occasionally, like when he dropped a full bottle on the tiled floor. He didn’t leer, he didn’t letch. He wasn’t like Dexter.
And then, as I put the key in the lock and let myself into the tiny flat and smelled the damp and the washing drying on the radiators, I thought,I must have been desperate…
So, when Monday rolled around and I saw the group making their way in ones and twos into the bar, I felt I had to say something.
‘Look.’ I waited until we’d all sat down. ‘I’ve had a revelation.’
