Page 14 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

We all looked at one another. ‘Should we take photographs?’ I asked hesitantly.

What had previously seemed a fun little conceit, something to keep us busy, had suddenly all become very real.

Eddie was clearly lying about going to the gym every day and I wondered what Annie would say, whether this would blow her marriage up completely when she realised her worst fears were true.

Forty years they’d been together, and he was throwing it all away like this.

Maybe I wasn’t missing anything by staying single; falling in love looked as though it might be a shortcut to a nervous breakdown, and I certainly wasn’t going there over Dexter.

‘Once a month in’t much of a shag,’ said Fraser, the Hugh Hefner of the bench press.

‘They might meet elsewhere the rest of the time. There was that day he didn’t go to work, after all.’ I carried on driving, heading back home. It suddenly dawned on me that there was no rush – that I had no job to go to. The day stretched as a painful space of time to fill.

Suddenly Fraser piped up. ‘Can you take me back to the gym? I’ll tell Minnie I’m full of Imodium.’

Flynn and I turned surprised eyes on him. ‘You sure? You didn’t seem over-keen on the place.’ Flynn asked.

‘Yeah, well, Margot’s paid for a month, might as well use it. And there’s some well fit lasses in there I gets to stand behind, and Minnie does this thing where she touches my leg…’ He trailed off into his own private musings.

‘Just go steady in those shorts.’ Flynn began rewrapping the sandwiches. ‘You’ll do yourself a mischief.’

I drove back down to the gym, where the car park was now much fuller, as those who started the day at a sensible hour put in their exercise. The two men on the bikes were still there, I noted.

‘Don’t enjoy yourself too much!’ Flynn called as Fraser got out. ‘And you’ll have to get the bus back!’

Fraser’s farewell was a lot cheerier in the daylight. He didn’t exactly bounce his way into the gym but he limped in a more convincing way.

‘I hope he’s not going to turn into a gym bunny,’ I said as we watched him go. ‘Well, maybe not a bunny,’ I added, as Fraser’s stocky form scuttled up the entrance steps. ‘A gym wombat, possibly.’

‘It’s good for him. Social contact,’ Flynn said. ‘You and Fraser have a surprising amount in common.’

‘Shut up. No, we don’t.’ I turned the car again. I wondered if I could ask Margot for petrol money; all this running up and down was sending my fuel gauge lower than I liked it.

‘You both need to get out more.’

I rounded on him. ‘Who made you God?’

Flynn looked taken aback for a second, scrunching foil. ‘What?’

‘All this telling me what I am and what I’m not and what I ought to be doing with my life! Maybe I’m happy with it the way it is, all right?’

I oversteered and the car wobbled into the middle of the road, incurring a beeped horn of warning from an oncoming driver.

‘I’m sorry,’ Flynn said quietly. ‘It’s weird, working in a bar. People come in and tell you their problems and it’s awful when you can clearly see what’s wrong but you’re not allowed to say anything other than “have you ever tried a Cancun Mobcap?”’

‘That’s not a real…’

‘No, no it isn’t. It was for illustrative purposes only.

’ He sighed. ‘But you seem like a nice person and I hate to see the way you’re…

You’re right. None of my business if you want to work some grotty job and date awful men.

Up to you. Obviously.’ Another sigh. ‘I like you, that’s all.

’ Flynn took his glasses off and polished them on the cuff of his shirt.

Without them he looked a lot less sarcastic – almost naked to the world.

‘Oh.’

‘And I really would like to offer you a job. I need someone else behind the bar.’

I stared at him and the car wobbled again. Things like this didn’t happen to people like me, getting offered a job out of nowhere. I’d practically had to beg for the call-centre role. ‘Are you allowed to hire people like that? Don’t you have to check with the owner or something?’

The polishing upped in tempo. If his glasses had been that dirty, it was a wonder he’d been able to see Eddie at all. ‘I… well, I am the owner. Technically. Sort of.’

‘How can you be sort of an owner?’ I felt a bit weird now.

I’d been assuming that Flynn was like me, working the kind of job that most people do at the weekend, making just enough to get by.

But he was the owner of the bar? Or was he spinning me a line – like Dex had when he’d told me he was an ‘entrepreneur’?

But then, admitting that your main job is dealing drugs would be a hard sell, even on Tinder.

I straightened myself up a bit, as though I had my boss in the car.

‘My dad.’ Flynn began to examine his spectacles now, holding them up to the light and twisting them this way and that, almost as though the distraction was helping him through the conversation.

‘He owns quite a few bars, bistros, that sort of thing. I’d come back from Melbourne – I was out there managing some of his wine bars – and he’d bought this place to renovate but didn’t really know what to do with it.

I had some ideas, so he made the place over to me. To prove myself, I guess.’

Without his glasses on, I could see that Flynn wasn’t quite as young as I’d assumed. There were faint lines and creases around his eyes and the morning stubble that outlined his cheeks made him look older, too, and more serious.

‘That must be nice,’ I said, meaninglessly but aware that my voice was tight and the words sounded bitter.

He shrugged and slipped his glasses back on. ‘It’s life,’ he said. ‘I’ve not really known any different. Anyway.’ He shook his head. ‘I could offer you a job, but there is one absolute deal-breaker…’

I pulled the car into the same space as I’d pulled it out of.

Life hadn’t really got going in the little town yet this morning, none of the shops were open and the street was almost devoid of any action, apart from a little knot of binmen who had clustered into a doorway and were smoking furtively.

Did I really want a job that came with conditions?

From a man I’d assumed was on my level? I had to admit to myself that I’d have treated Flynn differently if I’d known that he wasn’t only a bartender in a tiny Yorkshire town.

I would have been wary of him, for a start.

I looked up at my flat. It was grim, the stairway smelled of week-old cod and I had to watch TV in bed.

I could move. I could head for the city and find myself another minimum-wage job that would only pay me enough for a room in a house share.

But at least I wouldn’t have Dexter turning up on the doorstep whenever he felt like punishing me.

‘What’s the deal-breaker?’ I asked, cautiously.

Flynn, still sitting in the passenger seat as though oblivious to the fact that we’d stopped and I’d turned off the engine, grinned, and it made him look young again, almost like the student I’d assumed him to be.

‘You can’t drink,’ he said. ‘I won’t have anyone working with me drinking.

It’s too easy to slip up, to short-change, to get into arguments.

Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. Would that…

’ He stopped, frowned, then started again, with weighted words. ‘Would that be a problem?’

I wanted to say, No, of course not! But then I thought of sitting in the wine bar without a glass of wine, of my fridge with its contents of single-glass bottles of cheap Chardonnay. ‘I don’t always drink,’ I said quietly.

‘Never said you did.’ I saw him purse his lips as though there were words straining to come out that he thought were better kept contained.

‘And I never drink at work.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s just that…’

‘I could hear you, you know.’ Flynn had evidently decided to let the words out now. ‘Sometimes. You and Dexter. When I was outside, doing the windows or sorting out a delivery.’

‘Ah.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t deliberate or anything. I wasn’t listening in.’

‘Not at all like you have a track record for nosily hanging over people having a conversation or anything,’ I said, snippily. ‘Which has led us to the unfortunate circumstance we now find ourselves in. You can get out, by the way. I’ve stopped moving.’

Flynn did not get out. He did start staring at the smoking binmen though. ‘He encouraged you to drink, didn’t he? I could hear the yelling.’

Suddenly all I could think of was my father, sniffing at my breath when I came in and shouting to my mother that I’d been drinking alcohol, and what kind of a daughter did she think she was raising?

And my brother, lying on the sofa sleeping off yet another hangover, laughing uproariously, as though his sister being berated was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

How I’d thought I might as well be hung for a sheep and started drinking more and more, because it made the nights shorter and the shouting ignorable.

How I’d stormed out one night, battered by their demands and accusations, and the words. How they’d told me I’d be back in a week, I couldn’t manage without them and anyway they needed me back because my brother had lost his licence and needed me to drive him to work.

Then I’d met Dex, and his brand of control had felt like love.

He’d told me that I was no fun without a drink inside me, probably because when I was sober, I pulled him up on his behaviour.

I’d been driven to drink on both sides, but I shouldn’t console myself with that fact.

I’d chosen it. Chosen the tipsy tolerance of Dex’s behaviour, his casual violence, his chauvinistic assumptions that I would cook and clean and never ask questions, and his neglect of me as a person.

I told Flynn all of it, sitting there in my car as the little town woke up and began its day around us.

When I started to cry, he raked around but couldn’t find anything handkerchief-like, so he handed me a bit of the kitchen roll that had been wrapped around the sandwiches, and I ended up with a face covered in cheese slivers.

But I couldn’t stop talking. Even when a piece of soggy tomato dropped onto my chin, I just ate it and carried on.

Finally, when I’d hiccupped myself to a standstill, Flynn spoke.

‘So, you drank because your life was shit, then your life became shit because you drank?’

I liked the way he’d put it into the past tense, as though that wasn’t me any more.

‘Sort of. I didn’t really drink that much until Dex – well, it wasn’t a great relationship, put it that way, and alcohol made it… fuzzier. I didn’t mind so much when I was a bottle of wine in.’

‘Oh, Fee,’ he said, rather hopelessly.

‘And then sometimes Dex didn’t want me to drink, because I had to be able to drive him around and he didn’t have a car. But I had to drink, because otherwise being with him was – difficult. So, he’d shout and I’d shout back and it all got messy. As you heard,’ I added.

Now Flynn shook his head. The hopelessness seemed to have robbed him of words. Over in the doorway, the binmen had started showing one another stuff on their phones. ‘But he’s gone now? You’re definitely over?’ he asked, at last.

‘Yes.’ Well, that sounded firm, at least. I thought of Dex, his muscle vests and his tattoos, and the only image I could call to mind was last night, his thuggish insistence that I be in the room.

That wasn’t love. It wasn’t even friendship.

He’d never even asked me about my family, knew nothing about my golden-boy brother.

Flynn had got more of my background in twenty minutes sitting in this car than Dexter had in two years.

I was far closer to the Heartbreak Club than I’d ever been to Dexter.

‘Then maybe you could put in a couple of shifts for me? Only temporarily, until I can… well, until I can be certain. Like I said, I won’t have people drinking on my watch.

What you do in your own time is up to you, but I need someone sober and with-it behind the bar. And definitely no “have one yourself”.’

‘Right. Yes. Thank you.’ I didn’t sound very grateful.

I wasn’t even sure that I was grateful. I was glad to have the whisper of a job that might keep me from having to return to my parents.

I was happy that Dex was out of my life.

But I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea of being beholden to Flynn, or any man, for life’s necessities.

I would have felt better if I could have found myself a job – and I still wasn’t entirely sure that Flynn wasn’t stringing me a line with his ‘my dad gave me this place to manage’.

I’d been told one too many ‘make myself look important’ lies by Dexter and his associates, and I couldn’t quite believe that anything could come this easily, just from a friend.

I strongly suspected that a morning would come when Flynn would have to admit to having massaged the truth somewhat, and I would be back on the street with nothing.

But, for now, anything was better than nothing and I didn’t exactly have stellar references.

Flynn grinned again. ‘Okay. I’ll see you at six this evening when we open and I’ll run through everything with you then.’ He got out of the car, bending back in to gather the detritus of sandwiches and sobbing. ‘And we can also talk about what Eddie might be up to.’

‘Eddie,’ I said blankly. My mind was full of other stuff, it hadn’t the capacity to dwell on Annie’s faithless husband right now.

‘Yes. We might need to work out how we find out who he’s seeing, now we know he’s sneaking off from the gym.’

‘I’ll have a think.’

‘Right, see you later then.’ Flynn was gone, hustling himself off down the pavement to the side door of the wine bar, and leaving me to haul myself back up to my flat to lie on my bed, exhausted and feeling oddly deflated.