Page 10 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

There was a resounding lack of people volunteering to get to the gym before seven in the morning.

‘Well, I can’t do it,’ Margot said. ‘I have to be preparing for work at that time.’

‘I don’t do mornings,’ Wren said sharply. ‘Seriously. I don’t. If you want someone to follow him home from work or find out where he goes in the evenings, I’m your woman, but mornings – nope.’

‘We could really do with someone in the gym and someone watching outside too,’ I said carefully, slightly upset at the turn things were taking. ‘In case he gets away from whoever’s inside.’

Fraser sighed. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m the token fat bastard. I’ll pretend to join the gym; everyone will believe that. Besides, I could stand to do some proper exercise.’ Then he glared at us, his ears shining like beacons. ‘But someone has to sub me the joining fee, I’m broke.’

‘I don’t mind sitting outside, doing the following to and from the gym,’ I said.

There was no way I could afford to cover his fees, but I didn’t mind being incognito in a car.

‘As long as Eddie doesn’t hang around; I have to be at work for nine.

But I’ll need someone with me, in case we have to follow him, because he might head off somewhere on foot and then I’d have to park the car. ’

‘I can come with you.’ Flynn grinned. ‘It’s not that busy round here in the early morning; I think I can spare the time.’

‘And I’m going to need a lift,’ Fraser said. ‘I haven’t got a car,’ he added, unsurprisingly.

‘Right. So, tomorrow morning, Flynn and I will pick you up at six thirty, Fraser,’ I said, far more decisively than I felt. ‘We’ll drop you off at the gym. We can sit outside and pretend to be…’

‘We could snog,’ Flynn said cheerily. ‘Pretend to be a couple, you know.’

I glared at him. ‘For an hour? No thank you. I’ll bring a flask of coffee.’

‘Oh, yes, or that.’

‘Do I get a snog?’ Fraser asked hopefully.

‘No. What you get is an hour on an elliptical trainer, keeping an eye on Eddie.’ Margot was glaring now too.

‘I’ll pay for a month’s trial for you.’ She had her phone in her hand and the gym website open.

‘That’s the shortest period you can join for, unfortunately.

And if Eddie makes a break for it, you’ll have to make your own way home because these two’ – she waved a hand at Flynn and me – ‘will be following him.’

‘I’m going to need my bus fare too then.’

Margot rolled her eyes. ‘Fraser, do you have any independence at all? I mean, what do you do with yourself? Why haven’t you got transport? Why haven’t you got a job?’

Fraser hunched himself down as though he wanted to become invisible. ‘I has to help Mum,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t. I know your mother; she’s the last woman on earth to need any of the kind of help that you could provide,’ Margot snapped.

‘Yeah, but she’s got my sister’s kids to look after now, with my sister being, well, you know. Mum don’t hold it against you, by the way, she says you did everything you could, but they’d got her holding the stuff on camera, so…’

Wren and I tried very hard not to let our eyes meet. I could see her bending her head and I was also considering the wooden tabletop as though I were performing some kind of tree ring analysis. Beside me, Flynn’s eyebrows were so high that his glasses had dislodged.

‘And the kids can be proper little tw—buggers,’ Fraser went on. ‘Sometimes Mum needs an extra pair of hands and someone who can really shout. So I helps her out. I gets benefits, cos of the dyslexia,’ he finished.

Nobody knew what to say. Finally Margot came out with, ‘I’m very glad that your mother is managing, and I’m only sorry that your sister got such a protracted sentence.’

‘You did your best,’ Fraser said, equably, clearly not having the faintest idea what a ‘protracted sentence’ might be, while the rest of us kept our faces very, very neutral and tried not to breathe.

‘So, you live at home with your mum?’ Wren said at last, as though this were a dinner party conversation.

‘Yeah. Like I said, I wanted a girlfriend but I don’t know any girls. I tried a few online, but they all told me to fu—to go away.’

The solid silence descended again.

‘You must know some females, surely?’ Wren persisted. I tried to kick her under the table but missed and hit Margot’s bag. It felt as though she had bricks in there. ‘Didn’t you stay in touch with any of your schoolfriends?’

Fraser shrugged so deeply that it looked as though today’s T-shirt – the Star Wars one again – was trying to eat him. ‘Didn’t go to school much,’ he muttered. ‘Dyslexia an’ all. And I never meets anyone.’

‘You met us,’ Margot joined in now, breezily.

‘Yeah, well, my mate Scousie…’

‘Scousie the Lousie?’ Margot asked, in a rather pointed way, I thought.

‘Nah, Scousie’s already his nickname – he’s really called Gerald – well, he’s my mate, and he said that joining a disappointed valentines’ thing would be like shooting fish in a barrel. He said it would be full of women desperate for a bloke and I’d be in with a shout.’

More silence. This one was painful.

‘You can report back to your friend, Scousie’ – Margot spoke so slowly and clearly that she sounded like an elocution lesson – ‘that no woman is desperate for a man.’

I thought about Dexter. I thought about meeting him at a friend’s party, how he and his mates had gate-crashed and I’d thought it was funny and brave and when he’d homed in on me and started drinking out of my glass, I’d admired his effrontery.

I’d thought it was a sign that he was a man who knew what he wanted and went after it.

I didn’t realise that it was a sign that he was a man who knew desperation when he saw it.

I didn’t say any of this to Margot or Fraser, of course.

It had been a lesson hard learned and I still wasn’t entirely certain that I’d taken it quite to heart.

‘On the other hand’ – Wren broke the awkwardness – ‘it must have taken quite a lot of courage to turn up here.’

We all stared at her.

‘I know I was nervous, coming to the first meeting, not knowing who I might meet or what it might all be about. And I’m used to – well, having to meet lots of different people, being a journalist and everything.

So it must have been worse for you, Fraser.

’ She took a mouthful of her drink. ‘I think you were very brave to turn up, whatever your reasons for coming.’

Now we were all gaping, but I could see the activity behind the eyes.

My own mind was racing. I’d exceeded nineteen to the dozen and was rapidly approaching ninety to the dozen.

Brave. Walking into a meeting of new people, not knowing what might happen.

Not knowing whether they might laugh or sneer or dismiss me as not disappointed enough.

I found myself sitting up straighter. I’d been brave.

For the first time in my life, I’d been brave. I’d been the Fee that I wanted to be.

I ignored the fact that alcohol had had quite a lot to do with that bravery.

Fraser was displaying a paint-chart worth of colours: his ears were red, his cheeks were practically purple and his neck had gone an odd shade of yellowish-green.

The silence was now broken by the sound of everyone gulping their drinks much too fast.

‘Well, anyway,’ Flynn glanced over at the door, where two men in suits had come in and were pointing around at tables, clearly trying to decide where to sit, ‘I’d better go back to the bar. I’ll come over tomorrow at six thirty, Fee?’

I looked down at my half-finished wine and let the newly acknowledged feeling of courage trickle through me. ‘I’ll be ready. Scribble me down your address, Fraser, so I can pick you up.’ I looked around until Wren tore off a page of her notepad.

‘Er, I can’t.’ Fraser entered more deeply into his relationship with his T-shirt. ‘But I can tell you where I live.’

As Flynn pushed his chair back over to the table where it belonged, Margot gathered her bag from under the table and Wren squeaked about how exciting this all was and not at all what she’d expected when she’d joined the club, I wrote down Fraser’s address and listened to his slightly garbled instructions as to how to find his house.

None of us seemed to want to talk about Wren’s insight, but, to me, it felt as though our smiles were a little broader, our actions a little bit more assured.

Especially Fraser’s, once his colour returned to normal.

‘We’ve got gnomes,’ he said. ‘Mum’s really big on gnomes, so you can’t miss us. End of the cul-de-sac, down the alleyway, and I’ll meet you out there. Don’t want to wake the arseh—I mean, everyone else in the road.’

It was only when I went up the fishy-smelling stairs to my flat that I realised I was smiling. A proper relaxed grin sat on my face, broadening as I opened the door and collapsed onto the sofa bed. It felt odd, but very, very good.