Page 53 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
‘True.’ Wren smiled. She and Margot locked eyes for a moment and then both turned away in a movement so similar that it looked synchronised. ‘And one good thing did come of the explosion, Fee.’
Margot took over. ‘I would never have – well, I wouldn’t have come out if I hadn’t been so terrified for Wren,’ she said. ‘I knew I had…feelings, but I wasn’t sure and I was too scared to say anything.’ She gave a soft smile towards Wren. ‘Especially with all that talk about dating sites. I really didn’t think you’d noticed me at all.’
‘We had a long conversation in that ambulance, didn’t we?’ Wren almost giggled now. ‘There were quite a lot of admissions going on. I’d fancied Margot right from the first time we met, but I didn’t think that she felt the same way, until that dreadful night.’
‘I would have thought it was fairly obvious,’ Margot went on. ‘Inviting you to stay? Making your favourite meals?’
‘I thought you were just being nice. Helping me get over Jordan.’
‘I didn’t altogether realise what I was doing, I suppose. Not at first.’
‘Yeah, yeah, lovely. So far, so Thelma and Louise,’ Fraser burst in. ‘Can we get back to what those two pricks were doing in the bar? You can drive the car off the cliff later.’
We all stared at him. ‘Thelma and Louise weren’t gay,’ I said eventually.
‘Bloody were. I’ve seen that film about four hundred times.’ Fraser ate another banana. ‘It’s our Chloe’s favourite. I can do all the lines too, if you want.’
‘Probably not necessary.’
Fraser, the unintentional film subtext critic, started on the grapes. ‘So, you reckon your ex wanted to smash up Flynn’s place?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘We were collateral damage. He had no way of knowing we’d be in there that night; he must have just wanted to get at Flynn for daring to take me away from him. That’s how he sees it,’ I finished quickly, in case anyone thought I’d been two-timing Dex with Flynn. ‘I was his property, because that’s how he thinks of women. He was probably delighted to find out that I was badly injured.’
‘Prick,’ said Fraser, dribbling grape juice and ignoring the fact that he wasn’t exactly squeaky-clean in the female disenfranchisement stakes.
At that point, Annie came in, flustered and ruffled. ‘Eddie’s just parking the car,’ she said. ‘Dreadful parking facilities here, aren’t they? Anyway.’ She plopped a paper bag of grapes onto my bedside table and Fraser started on those too. ‘How are you feeling? I saw Flynn in the corridor on the phone. Is everything all right?’
There was a moment of busy conversation as we all tried to tell the story, but the mixing of perspectives meant that it was jumbled and probably didn’t enlighten Annie as much as she’d hoped.
‘Someone deliberately tried to kill you?’ She looked aghast, her eyes travelling over my drip stands. ‘How dreadful.’
‘I’ll be fine.’ I tried to smile bravely but the stitches wouldn’t allow it.
All of a sudden Annie’s face seemed to melt.Tears flowed down her cheeks and her mouth writhed. ‘Oh dear. It’sallso dreadful!’ she said again, pulling a large handkerchief from the sleeve of today’s cardigan. ‘When I heard… well… Eddie had to take me to the doctor, I was that distressed.’
Margot patted Annie’s hand, the one that wasn’t mopping her face with the enormous hankie. ‘Everyone is all right, Annie,’ she said soothingly. ‘We’re all still here.’
‘I didn’t realise…’ Annie sobbed on. ‘…just how fond I’ve got of all of you. I thought it was just meetings, somewhere to offload how worried I was about Eddie, but listening to you all being so…brave.’ She sniffed and blew her noise. ‘It made me realise that we’re less a club and more like a little family.’ A wavering smile broke through beneath the mopping and she straightened herself a little, the cardigan flapping around her shoulders. ‘Aren’t we?’
There was a thin chorus of agreement from the others and I felt a momentary jolt in my chest.Found family. Wasn’t that the phrase? Although my actual family might be less than satisfactory, why shouldn’t I make myself a new one with people I actually cared about?
I joined in with the general concurrence. Even Fraser had slowed down his grape ingestion to nod thoughtfully.
‘I got a great family,’ he said slowly. ‘But not what you might callsupportive. Our Chloe laughed at me doing my stretches the other day.’ He chewed, ruminatively. ‘The cow,’ he added. ‘I got to get out of there.’
‘I never had children,’ Annie continued. Her voice was a little lower now, as though the words weren’t really meant to be heard. ‘We did try, but… well, never mind. That was all a long time ago. And for all the societies and hobbies I’m part of, there’s nobody who’s ever really taken an interest in my life. You all listened to me. You made me feel like I mattered.’
Now there was a silence, only slightly mitigated by the somewhat industrial sound of Fraser eating my grapes.
‘It can be hard.’ Margot spoke now and her voice was similarly low. Confidential. ‘When you try to conceive and nothing seems to happen. Everyone else is popping out little ones as if they don’t even think about it, even people who don’t seem to want them.’ She patted Annie again, but this time it looked as though there was a weight of understanding in her touch. ‘I’ve seen too many of the end results of unwanted and unloved children turning to crime as a cry for help.’
More silence. More mastication noises. Then Fraser said, through a mouthful, ‘Bugger me, we’re here to cheer Feebs up, not depress the whole lot of us. Anyone want a grape?’
Flynn came back into the room, looked sideways at Fraser eating all the fruit and handed me the phone. ‘It’s the police,’ he said. ‘They’ll come and talk to you when you’re out of here and feeling better, but right now they need everything you’ve got on those two that came into the bar, and what happened with you and Dexter.’
I took his phone. ‘And I shall be delighted to tell them.’
Everyone else started to talk about holidays and the atmosphere lightened a good deal, for which I was grateful, but they ate all my grapes, for which I wasn’t.
