Page 23 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

We shuffled awkwardly out of the toilets and through to the cleaner air of the bar, where we pulled our chairs around the club’s usual table, and Flynn took out his phone. ‘This is what I showed Dexter.’

It was a photo. Flynn, with shorter hair and looking smart in a business suit, next to a man I vaguely recognised. The man had his arm around Flynn’s shoulders and a broad smile on his face.

‘That’s…’

‘That’s me. Yes. Last year, in Oz, right after we’d won an award for the rooftop bar I was managing.’

‘That man, that’s Andrew Mays-Harrison, isn’t it?

’ An entrepreneur, a TV pundit on The Apprentice, sometime Dragon on Dragon’s Den.

Businessman, football club owner, sponsor of an F2 team, general public moneybags.

Made Alan Sugar look as though he was scrabbling about down the back of the sofa for 50p’s.

‘Mmm.’ Flynn put his phone away. ‘He’s my dad.’

I jumped to my feet unwisely fast and felt the stabbing of those thousands of splinter cuts anew. ‘What? Bugger, ow!’

‘And I told Dexter that if he came near you in future, I’d bring the whole of my dad’s security detail to bear on him and he’d be lucky if he ever saw daylight again.

He’d actually be lucky if he ever saw anything other than the bottom of a deep river, and nobody would know where he’d gone.

’ Flynn cleared his throat. ‘A little bit hyperbolic, I have to admit, and Dad’s not quite as much of a gangster as I made him out to be, but the end result would be the same. ’

I stared at him. ‘But that’s…’ The ends of my sentences had clearly wandered off again.

‘I apologise for not telling you this before,’ Flynn went on, leaning his elbows on the table. ‘But I had to be certain that you didn’t already know this. About who I am, I mean.’

‘What the hell difference would it make?’

‘Ah, you sweet innocent.’ He gave me a grin that was almost pure mischief.

A small proportion, though, seemed wary.

‘Margot recognised me. Her husband and my dad were on some kind of committee together, apparently, so she’d met me before, a long time ago.

I didn’t remember. We meet a lot of people. ’

‘She didn’t say anything to me.’ I still felt winded by his revelation. Why had I never asked his surname? Why had I gone on assuming that he was just a barman?

‘No.’ Now Flynn looked serious. ‘I had to know that you thought we might have a shot together before I said anything to you. I needed to be sure…’ He stopped and became very interested in the floor underneath our table.

‘I needed to be sure that you wanted me,’ he said, slightly muffled by his own collar.

‘As opposed to? Henry Cavill? He wasn’t here snogging me in a toilet though.’

‘As opposed to wanting an “in” on Dad’s corporation. I’ve got a bit of precedent for women who – well, let’s say that I wasn’t the main reason they wanted to be with me.’ He was still talking to the floor.

‘And that’s why you left Australia?’ The winded feeling had turned to a vague prickliness, almost like the onset of a faint. As though the world had suddenly become unreal.

‘Mmm. Two in a row. Second one wanted to move in with me, and I was just starting to clear the ground for that to happen, finding us a bigger place to live in one of the suburbs…’ Flynn looked up at me now.

‘In Australia, there’s a common law agreement.

If you live together for two years then split up, it’s the same thing as a marriage split: you divide property and finances and all that.

Luckily I found out in time – she already had a boyfriend.

She was using me, going to wait out the two years and then take me for financial support and a share of the property. ’

‘Oh, Flynn,’ I said softly. Although his words were matter of fact, there was a creasing around his eyes and a tightening of his mouth that said he’d cared, and finding out that he was being used had hit him hard.

‘Yeah, they were in it together, her and her boyfriend. She was going to set him up in his own business with the money she took off me. Marry him and leave me in the dust.’

Despite our recent close encounter, I felt strange touching him, but I put my hand on his arm. ‘That must have been hard.’

‘My mum died when I was fifteen,’ he said.

‘Right. I have no idea why that should have any relevance to this, but I’ll go with it.’ I kept my hand on his sleeve and he put his over the top.

‘After she… died, me and Dad… we only had each other. He taught me all about business but he kind of left out the mum stuff. The bits about how you deal with women. So, I’m an idiot sometimes.’

We sat, while the spring sunshine sloped its way up the road towards the pub, pausing only to glance in at our windows. ‘I don’t think you’re an idiot,’ I said quietly.

‘Back then, it genuinely never occurred to me that someone might try to use me for money,’ he went on, but at least he was talking to me now, rather than the floorboards. ‘Dad’s always been a wealthy man, so it’s my normal. It just doesn’t feature in my thinking.’

I wondered what he thought about me, with the fishy staircase to my flat and the three crowded rooms. My hand fell away from his.

‘So, I needed to know that you weren’t looking for an easy road to money,’ Flynn went on. Then, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insinuate that you ever would. But Tamar did a bit of a number on me, I’m afraid. It’s made me – nervous.’

‘That’s why you didn’t have a Valentine’s date?’ My words came out a bit tight. ‘Because you think everyone’s in it for your money?’

‘Or access to Dad. You’d be amazed how many people want an introduction as soon as they find out who I am.’ Flynn’s eyes dropped away from mine and he slumped forward, cupping his face in his hands. ‘I just want to be me,’ he said, a little indistinctly.

‘But you’re not above using your dad to threaten bully boys?’ I tried to lighten him up a bit. The implications of all this were beginning to dawn on me but I couldn’t look at them now. Flynn was anxious, that much was obvious, and I didn’t want long silences to fill with his doubts.

‘He deserved it. And, by the way, I meant every word of it. If Dexter shows his face around here again, I shall be on the phone to some very unpleasant people, who could teach him a thing or two about throwing weight around.’ He gave me a slightly watery grin.

‘I’ve got cameras, you know. Dad won’t set up any kind of enterprise without the full security gear in place.

I told him it was ridiculous in a place this size, where you have to worry more about a wandering bullock than terrorism, but it looks as though he may have had a point. ’

I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. The whole thing was utterly absurd.

Flynn, lovely dark Flynn with his desire to clean everything he saw and his way with a hundred and one cocktails, was actually the son of a business mogul.

It was ridiculous. Although, thinking about it, I had been very incurious about the whole ‘dad made this place over to me’ and ‘managing a bar in Melbourne’.

They were hardly the sort of thing that the local farming fraternity could throw into conversation.

Maybe it was me who was the idiot here.

‘Dad gave me the third degree,’ Flynn went on, getting up to arrange glasses behind the bar.

‘After Tamar. I thought it was a bit late, and I could have done with all that before Oz, but never mind, he gave me all the warnings eventually. Make sure a girl wants me for who I am, not what I’m going to inherit.

Make sure she’s not got some firm plans in place for how to spend anything she gets from me.

Make sure she’s – well, make sure she’s nice. ’

I stayed sitting on my chair, behind the table. It felt good and solid, because the world had gone unreal again.

‘And you are, I think,’ Flynn went on, reshelving some flutes up on the high shelf – we didn’t have a lot of champagne drinking going on in here. ‘You’ve had a rough time. A rough life.’

‘I don’t need rescuing, Flynn,’ I said carefully.

I didn’t want to put him off totally, but I didn’t want to feel like a soggy kitten in a snowstorm.

‘I’ll be fine when I get my feet back under me.

I’ve got somewhere to live and a job – thanks again for that, by the way – and I will get by.

Oh, and the feet thing wasn’t a pun, I only meant, once I get a new front door and some full-time work.

’ I waggled a foot under the table. Thick socks padded the worst of the injuries and they were healing.

‘I don’t want to save you.’ He was keeping his back to me, as though he knew that my pride had been wounded and wanted to look as though this was a casual chat.

‘I really don’t. I like you a lot, Fee.’ Now he turned around and his expression was urgent and somehow very focused.

‘You’re lovely. You bumbled into the club, mostly I think because you were too drunk to go anywhere else, and you’re helping people through things.

You haven’t asked for any help yourself.

Oh, and I’ve already had a new door fitted on your place, so you don’t need to worry about that. ’

‘I’m not helping anyone, am I?’ This was puzzling. Was he sure he’d got the right person?

‘You don’t take any shit from Margot; she actually listens to you. You’re kind to Fraser, who’s a plonker, and you’re driving us around keeping an eye on Eddie. You’re kind to me. You included me in the club, and you didn’t have to.’

I thought back to that first meeting. The dark man behind the bar who’d caught my eye, listening in. ‘I couldn’t not. You practically had us bugged.’

‘But you could have just treated me like the bloke who served the drinks. And you didn’t.’ A glass slipped from his hand and broke with a punctuating tinkle on the floor. ‘Bugger. You’re a nice person, Fee. And that’s what I need: someone real, someone nice. Someone good.’

‘Someone who isn’t haunted by a six-foot skinhead who wants to beat up anyone who talks to them?’

‘He won’t be back. The cameras would give me a head’s up – we’ve got facial recognition programmed in, he’d be spotted before he got within ten metres and the bells would go off. One phone call and he’s toast. Dad plays golf with the chief constable,’ Flynn added, smoothly.

‘I thought that was just something people said in detective dramas. Do chief constables really play golf?’

Flynn shrugged, throwing his hands wide. ‘This one does. And I’m pretty certain that your Dexter’s feet wouldn’t touch the ground if he tried anything round here.’

‘Wow.’ The sense of unreality was back. ‘Facial recognition?’

‘Oh, we’ve got all the tech. Dad insists.

’ Flynn vanished behind the bar and sounds of dedicated sweeping reached me.

‘He’s a bit of a fan of all the new stuff.

You should see his house, the whole place runs itself from his phone.

I think his housekeeper gets a bit annoyed, mind you.

It must be surreal, going into rooms to turn things on and off only to find they’re doing it themselves in front of you.

’ He popped back up again and grinned broadly.

‘You’ll love it. I’ll take you up there soon, he’ll want to meet you. ’

‘To vet me,’ I said. ‘I’d better be able to walk properly by then.’

‘Ah, you’re his type. Down to earth, sensible. He’s always telling me to find a sensible girl, someone who isn’t afraid she’ll break a nail if she makes a sandwich.’

There was nothing I could say. Nothing. Although I did entertain a brief moment of imagining how my brother would react on finding that his sister was with the son of a multimillionaire and being glad I’d blocked his phone number years ago.

Mum and Dad would try to guilt me into keeping him in the style to which he would very much like to become accustomed, and that was not going to happen.

‘You go back up, get yourself fit for tomorrow morning,’ Flynn said cheerily, as though he was unaware that he’d just rewritten my future.

‘No, it’s all right. I need to occupy my mind,’ I said. ‘This has been a bit of a shock, and I ought to get myself a bit more mobile anyway.’

He looked at me critically. There it was again, that tight focus that hinted at the fact that he was so much more than a bartender; while it didn’t exactly shout about the sheer amount of backing he had, it certainly suggested that this was a man who’d had a good deal of expensive education and was much more intelligent than he appeared. It was a look that understood.

‘If you’re sure…’ he started.

‘I am. Most of the healing is done. As long as I don’t dance the samba in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll be fine.’

‘Great. Because I didn’t finish those toilets. I was distracted.’ An enormous grin. ‘Off you go, now.’

My return of his look was a lot less focused and a lot more vitriolic. ‘Bastard.’

‘Yep.’

So, I went to scrub the loos.