Page 12 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

‘So they’ve fired me.’ I slumped over my arms on the wine bar counter. ‘Which, in a way, is a good thing, because now the worst has happened. But in another way, obviously, it’s a very, very bad thing indeed.’

Flynn was mixing cocktails. It was cocktail night at the wine bar, although this little market town tucked into the dip before the land rose to the bleak heights of the moors wasn’t exactly inundated with mixology connoisseurs.

‘Have to keep my hand in,’ he said, as I watched him doing something fancy with strawberry syrup. ‘The tourists love this stuff.’

‘I’ve got the flat for another month, because I pay a month in advance,’ I said, still with my head down on the bar. ‘After that, I’m out.’

‘What will you do?’ A deft flick and he added ice cubes.

I sighed. ‘Tent on the roundabout?’ I thought briefly about my parents, the too-small house in York where photographs of my brother concealed the wallpaper in every room. Walking into their house, you wouldn’t even know I existed from the evidence. ‘You said you could offer me a job?’

‘Did I? I think I also remember saying that you wouldn’t like the conditions.’ Flynn shook the concoction until his hair bounced and his glasses slid sideways.

‘You’re not that bad. I can put up with you.’

‘What sort of job would you really like to do? If you could choose?’ A stream of slightly pink liquid foamed out into a wide-rimmed glass as Flynn poured and then pushed the results across the counter to a couple of young women, who giggled.

‘I dunno.’ I talked to my forearms.

‘What do you like doing?’ He smiled at the girls and they giggled even more, nudging one another and making ‘he fancies you’ faces.

‘I like cooking,’ I said. ‘I make great soup.’

‘Right. Anything else?’

‘Not really. I used to be good at poetry,’ I said, before I realised that he was talking to the cocktail-buying girls and sighed deeply again. ‘Right. I’d better go to bed to be ready for tomorrow’s early start. Six thirty at mine?’

But Flynn had already gone, chopping mint and chatting with what looked like a hen party, although why a hen party would bother our tiny corner of North Yorkshire, I wasn’t sure.

Maybe the hen was a pheasant? No, that was tiredness clouding my brain, I thought, sliding off my stool and heading for the door.

I looked back over my shoulder before I stepped out into the chilly evening.

It was strange, but the wine bar, with its careful, subtle lighting and laughter, felt more like home now than the chilly flat.

But then, if I didn’t do something about getting another job soon, the flat wouldn’t be home either for much longer.

I was seized with a sudden fondness for the smell of fish on the staircase as I walked up to my front door, and for the way the key didn’t properly turn in the lopsided lock.

It wasn’t the fondness born of appreciation for the conditions, more a kind of ‘I’m going to lose all this soon’ anticipatory nostalgia for having a roof over my head.

But I couldn’t worry about that now. I had to get some sleep.

Worry about my future and the threat of losing the flat ought to have meant that I sat awake half the night, fretting and chewing at my nails.

But the imminent disaster that was my life imploding was counteracted sufficiently by that morning’s early start to mean that I plummeted into a deep sleep as soon as I climbed into bed.

So the banging on the door made me jerk upright, uncertain as to where I was or what was happening.

‘Girl! You’d better be in there!’

It was Dex. He’d clearly bypassed the text to tell me he was coming back and gone for direct action.

‘Open this door, now!’

I could hear the couple in the flat below waking up. The ‘plink’ sound their overhead light made as it switched on and the buzz from the bedroom floor was the giveaway, but I could also hear their voices, muted by midnight.

I sat up in bed and pulled the covers to my chest. I could not do this right now.

I had to be up in – a quick glance at my phone told me – three and a half hours, to pick up Flynn and Fraser.

If I let Dex in now, he’d want to keep me awake for the rest of the night, alternately telling me what I’d done wrong and engaging me in noisy sex.

Plus, he’d probably want me to stay here, in bed with him, tomorrow too, and I had promises to keep.

Plus, it was dawning on me slowly, I really didn’t want Dexter back in my life.

Following Eddie had become more important than having a boyfriend.

‘Phoebe! Open this door!’ A stream of epithets that made me wonder whether Dex actually had a vocabulary or whether he just strung together loads of swear words, brought my downstairs neighbours to their door.

‘Shut the fuck up, you nutjob! People are trying to sleep!’

‘She’s locked me out of my own home!’ Dex yelled back, lying on both counts.

He had a home, somewhere in the arse end of Leeds, and he wasn’t locked out, he’d never had a key to the flat.

He hadn’t needed one; he knew I’d always let him in.

Then, in a slightly quieter voice, he added, ‘My stuff is in there.’

This was a huge lie. Dex never left anything here, apart from the odd paracetamol packet and some Tiger Balm.

He didn’t live with me, he’d made that very clear; he stayed with me as long as I made it worth his while.

Or, more likely, when he was too broke and off his face to get back to where he did live.

I didn’t reply. Before, I would almost inevitably have opened the door to him, grateful and wary in equal measure, missing perhaps two days of work as a result while we got drunk and ate our way through the output of the pasty shop on the corner.

This time it was different. I had things to do. People were counting on me to do something other than sell them insurance. Annie needed answers, and that was down to us.

And now I had an ‘us’, whereas before it had just been Dex and me, with Demi as an occasional presence and a voice on the phone.

I tried to imagine Margot’s reaction to Dex turning up in the night, or Wren’s, or even Annie’s.

Any of them would be sending him away, not only with a flea in his ear but an entire circus of bloodsuckers loose about his person.

I couldn’t see any of them standing for this kind of treatment.

Only Fraser, who would, presumably, never be in this position, and would have invited Dex in for a drink and a round of Call of Duty should he have shown up at two in the morning.

‘Well keep it down!’ My downstairs neighbour clearly was not in the mood for sympathy. ‘Any more noise and I’ll call the police.’

I tried not to breathe.

‘You’d better be in there.’ Dex was muttering now. I knew he was sick of being arrested. ‘Because if you’re shacked up with someone else, I’m coming after the pair of you.’

I almost laughed and wanted to shout, If I’m not here, then I can’t hear your threats and they’re pretty pointless, don’t you think? but I didn’t. I stayed, rigid, with the bedclothes clamped to my chest like armour, trying to keep my eyelids from making a noise when I blinked.

I stayed that way for ages, even after I was fairly sure Dex had left.

I didn’t dare make any sound in case he was sitting there outside the door, either waiting to hear me or waiting for me to come home from wherever he thought I’d been.

My mouth was dry and gritty with a lack of saliva, but I didn’t even dare to lick my lips in case it made a sound.

I breathed in little shallow gasps so that the bed didn’t creak and give me away.

Eventually, though, I must have fallen asleep, because I was woken by a tapping on the door.

‘Fee? Are you ready?’

It was softly called through the door and I leaped out of bed, where I’d slept sitting up, disorientated and slightly panicked. ‘Flynn?’

‘Yes. Who were you expecting? Only it’s six thirty and you weren’t outside…’

‘Two seconds.’ I flung on yesterday’s clothes, grabbed my keys and phone and ran to the door. Then I hesitated and asked, ‘There’s nobody else out there, is there?’

‘Like who? It’s a bit late for Father Christmas.’

I opened the door. Flynn, looking irritatingly composed for this time in the morning, stood on the threshold. ‘You look dreadful.’

‘Disturbed night. Sorry I kept you waiting.’

‘It’s fine.’

We were both whispering. I was worried about the people downstairs waking up again, twice in one night might well have them calling the police for real, rather than as a threat.

Flynn put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You seem a bit twitchy.’

‘My ex turned up in the middle of the night,’ I said, biting down on my lip to stop it wobbling. ‘It was a bit of a shock.’

I led the way down the stairs and out to where my car was parked on the street. I looked at it, sitting there in its slightly bent-bumpered philosophical way, and wondered if I ought to sell it now I didn’t need it for work. It might raise enough for another month’s rent.

‘Sounds it. Does he often do that? Turn up out of the blue?’

The morning was chilly and the door had frozen shut.

I had to tug really hard to get the seals to allow me in.

‘He used to.’ I opened the passenger door.

‘I’d always take him back, you see. But now I’ve decided…

well, it really is over. I don’t even know why I kept it going so long.

’ We pulled away from the kerb, my car reluctantly biting its way onto the frosty surface of the road.

Flynn gave me a long look. ‘He was dreadful,’ he said quietly. ‘Absolutely awful. What were you thinking, Fee?’