Page 11 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

‘It’s down this road.’ Flynn had the maps app open on his phone.

‘It can’t be. There’s nothing here.’ I swung the wheel to turn the car out of the narrow lane.

‘They’re putting in a new Aldi,’ Fraser said from the back seat. ‘Mum loves a good Aldi.’

‘Drive a little way down,’ Flynn suggested as we sat under the breaking dawn. ‘Look, there are other cars heading that way, there must be something.’

‘What does Eddie drive?’ I asked idly, turning the car again to follow a little Fiat down the barely made-up roadway.

‘Skoda,’ said Fraser, promptly. ‘Scala. New one. What? I knows about cars and it was in one of them pictures that Wren had.’

We bumped a bit further on, until we could see a brightly lit building up ahead. It bore an astonishing resemblance to a tin-roofed barn, but had huge full-length windows down one wall, emitting the kind of glow that made it look as though a gigantic UFO had set down in a car park.

‘That’ll be it,’ Flynn said, as we stared, our retinas frying. ‘Fraser, you’re on.’

Fraser hesitated. ‘I don’t really know what to do,’ he said, holding his rolled-up towel, which contained his ‘gym kit’. ‘I’ve never been in one of them places before.’

‘Margot’s got you an induction session,’ I said, checking my messages. ‘You just have to go in and ask for Minnie, and she…’

‘Or he,’ put in Flynn, and Fraser winced.

‘Or he, will get you going from there. You’ll be fine. And the place will be full of women, so you might get your chance to chat some of them up.’

Fraser muttered, ‘Huh’, but he got out of the car and began crossing the car park to the behemoth of a building, with his towel under his arm, like a child off to their first swimming lesson.

‘Do we have to do this every day?’ Flynn asked, breaking the awkward silence that resulted.

‘Until we can find out something, yes.’ I yawned. ‘So I really hope Fraser is going to be able to give us something to go on this morning. I can’t take this early start for too long.’

We jointly gazed at the nuclear-standard illuminated building in front of us.

Through one of the windows, I could see a row of fixed bikes, two of which were being ridden by men with very serious faces, and a very slender girl was running on a treadmill to one side while doing something on her phone at the same time.

‘I’m going to park around the side, out of the way,’ I said, starting the engine.

‘We don’t want to be spotted, especially if we’re going to be here the whole month.

People might get suspicious.’ Besides, I didn’t think I could stand to watch everyone dedicatedly getting fit, not when I was craving a Mars bar.

‘There are other cars.’ Flynn indicated the car park, which was studded with cars and bikes.

‘But not with people in. We look like parents waiting at school pick-up, and I don’t think Fraser would get away with looking like a five-year-old on his first day.’

‘Fraser,’ Flynn said carefully, after a moment. ‘He’s a bit… He doesn’t seem to know much about women, does he? Has he asked you out yet?’

‘No!’ I fumbled behind me, found the flask of coffee that I’d made in the pre-dawn darkness and pulled it out. ‘Why would he?’

‘Because Wren is gay, Margot’s old enough to be his mother and Annie’s married.’ Flynn took the cup I handed him.

‘Wow. I’m clearly not even the best of a very weak bunch.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ Flynn looked at me. ‘You’re very eligible, even though you don’t seem to think so.’

In the resulting quiet, a distant bass beat throbbed. The girl on the treadmill was texting, one handed. Another car drew into the car park and I put my coffee down. It was a Skoda being driven by an older man. ‘I think that’s Eddie.’

Flynn and I watched as the car was reversed several times in order to place it neatly in the middle of the parking space, and a middle-aged man got out.

He had a holdall with him which he swung jauntily as he crossed the car park and entered the gym, where, I noted, he was greeted by the guy on reception as though they knew one another.

‘Well, at least he was telling the truth about the gym.’ Flynn drained his plastic cup.

‘We’d better keep an eye on the door in case it’s a ruse. He might turn straight around and come out again.’

But Eddie didn’t. Flynn and I drank coffee and discovered a mutual love of obscure nineties bands, scented surface cleaners and the local supermarket, and a joint hatred of build-it-yourself furniture.

All of this turned our early morning excursion into a moderately pleasant experience.

Flynn wasn’t quite as cuttingly sarcastic as I’d imagined; he was at times genuinely funny.

But even so, we ran out of conversation after an hour and I’d slumped down into the driver’s seat in a got-up-too-early daze, when Flynn nudged me.

‘Fraser’s coming. Quick, look as though we’ve had a miserable time, otherwise he’s going to be jealous. Blimey, he’s pink!’

Fraser was indeed trudging down the entryway of the gym, in the company of a woman who looked as though she could have lifted him with one hand. Her tan glowed, her leggings were sprayed on and her eyelashes were so long that I could almost feel the updraught from here.

Fraser looked as though he’d eaten a radioactive vindaloo. He was scarlet all the way down and blowing like a cart horse after a heavy day’s ploughing. He got into the back of the car and instantly lay down across the seat. ‘Get me out of here before she kills me,’ he said.

‘We have to wait for Eddie.’ I handed him my coffee cup, which he couldn’t take because his hand was shaking so badly. ‘We need to know where he goes from here.’

‘Eddie,’ said Fraser, with heavy emphasis from his prone position, ‘is in there going like a McLaren round the Nürburgring. Minnie says she’s never seen such good progress.’

‘And what’s Minnie like?’ I asked.

‘The Spanish Inquisition, with added torture.’ Fraser sat up slowly. ‘Bugger me sideways, my head’s spinning.’ He breathed carefully for a moment. ‘She says she’s looking forward to seeing me tomorrow,’ he said, glumly.

‘On the bright side, Eddie might be heading for his girlfriend’s house right now.’ Flynn pointed at the doors to the gym, where Eddie was bidding the young man on reception a cheery farewell. ‘So you might not have to come back.’

‘Margot made me promise to use the full month,’ Fraser said, even more dolefully. ‘She said she wants her money’s worth.’

‘Great, does that mean I’m committed to this for the whole month too?’ I yawned, a jaw-creaker of a yawn.

‘We do need to find out what Eddie’s up to,’ Flynn pointed out. ‘And it would be extraordinarily convenient if we established it on our first day.’

‘Oh God,’ Fraser and I groaned, in a Greek chorus of misery.

We followed Eddie’s car at a careful distance as he drove out of the car park and straight to Drayton’s. We didn’t follow him all the way in but turned for home at the entrance. ‘Bit of a bust, then,’ Fraser observed. ‘Unless he’s bonking someone at work,’ he added, hopefully.

‘Well, I’m not putting on a funny walk and pretending to be a factory inspector.’ Flynn gazed out of the window. ‘How would we find out?’

‘Wren says he can’t be, because Annie knows everyone who works there.

’ I checked again on my page of handwritten notes that Wren had given me.

‘He’s worked there for nearly forty years and they haven’t even had any new female staff for the last ten.

Plus, someone would have told her; she’s very friendly with the managing director’s secretary, and she wouldn’t have hesitated to spill the beans. ’

‘You’ve got a crib sheet?’ Flynn took the notes from the centre console. ‘Wow. You’re all really going into this full throttle, aren’t you?’

‘Something to do, in’t it?’ Fraser piped up. ‘Otherwise, I’m just home gaming in my bedroom.’

‘I think Margot and Wren are using it as a distraction from their own circumstances too.’ I steered towards home. I was going to drop Flynn and Fraser and go straight to work. ‘And you offered.’ I snatched my papers back from Flynn.

‘So, what’s your excuse?’ He was giving me that look again, an almost heavy look, as though he and I were in on some secret that mustn’t be spoken aloud.

‘I’m bored,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘Work is rubbish, my best friend is moving away, and Dex – well, I’ve not seen him since Valentine’s Day and I don’t want to see him anyway,’ I added honestly. ‘So I’m at a lot of loose ends.’

Fraser and Flynn shared the last of the coffee as I drove back to town, with the sun climbing its reluctant way into the sky, using the grey clouds as a ladder.

Dex still hadn’t tried to text me – obviously I had him blocked, but he usually messaged me through any app he had and I hadn’t blocked him on all of them; I needed to know when he wanted to come back.

This time, it seemed, he didn’t. Or he was punishing me by maintaining radio silence; that thought had also occurred to me.

Perhaps he thought I’d miss him more and be so apologetic that I’d let him trample all over me if he didn’t speak to me for a while.

Who was I kidding? I always let him back.

It was just that this time I didn’t seem to be missing him as much as usual.

By now I’d normally weakened and messaged him in the middle of the night, halfway through my second bottle of wine, begging him to come home, but I realised with a gut-punch that I hadn’t even thought of him for a couple of days, except in a negative way.

I let the men out at the wine bar. Fraser was going to wait to get his breath and the bus back, and I immediately turned around and headed for work, where I was five minutes late.

My manager looked at me with raised eyebrows.

I mouthed ‘sorry,’ and sat down, putting on my headset, logging in on the computer and wondering how long I could keep this up.

Getting up at five thirty in order to be showered, dressed and ready for work, and then sitting in a car park for an hour while Fraser worked himself into cardiac arrest was not sustainable.

Maybe we could force Eddie’s hand somehow?

‘Phoebe, your light is on.’

I shook my head and took the call, yawning as I did so.

Eddie went to the gym, then straight to work. At least, he’d done that today. Perhaps he had to maintain a presence at the gym in case anyone checked up on him; everyone there clearly knew him and would vouch for the fact he went. But maybe there were days when he didn’t go…

‘Phoebe!’ The voice came from behind me and made me jump. ‘I think we’d better have a word, don’t you?’

Damn. My caller had hung up without my even noticing. I sighed, stood up and followed my supervisor into the dreaded Back Office.