Page 28 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

The next Saturday, therefore, we went to York to ‘pop in’ on my family.

Flynn drove us for the first time. To my surprise, he had a car, new but not flash, and he drove like someone more used to the wide roads of Australia, with occasional muted swearing at potholes.

When we arrived my parents were, to even more of my surprise, polite – they even made my brother get up from his usual position, lounging along the sofa, so that Flynn could sit down.

They made us both a cup of tea and smiled their way through introductions.

Maybe they had changed, I thought, as I drank my tea.

Or maybe I had been mistaken in how I had remembered family life?

I began to feel better, relaxing a little as I listened to Flynn telling them about the wine bar, about using it as a place for clubs to meet.

Perhaps this little house, which smelled of my brother’s trainers mouldering in the corner and my mother’s vicious attempts to hoover the pattern off the carpet twice a day, actually could be a refuge for me.

My old bedroom was still as I’d left it, as though my parents were waiting for me to give up trying to live independently and come back, and it was beginning to look as though, should Flynn and I not work out, I could.

My brother would still be a work-shy misogynistic bully, of course, but one day he would move out.

Surely. He was thirty-five; sooner or later his girlfriends would get tired of being taken back to be greeted by our mum in a dressing gown, asking if they wanted a coffee.

Surely. Tired of being woken by a knock on his bedroom door and told that breakfast was on a tray on the landing. Surely.

I left Flynn telling my father about the different kinds of wine he stocked and how he favoured Australian origin.

I had no idea why Dad was even listening to this, he hadn’t drunk anything but Tennent’s during my entire lifetime, but perhaps this was another symbol of change.

I’d done the right thing, I told myself as I nipped upstairs to the all-too familiar bathroom.

Leaving home, getting away, had shown them that I was an actual person rather than the general secretary for my brother, as they had treated me before.

Pride made me look fondly at the pink bathroom suite and green washbasin – my brother had broken the original matching one in a fit of temper one day and Dad had sourced a cheap replacement.

I was making a go of my life. I wasn’t falling into the role that had been prepared for me, and they were accepting my moving on.

I dried my hands on the thin hand towel.

Yes, I should come back more often. Mum was looking put-upon and worn, my brother and Dad had always been a bit keen to sit down and put their feet up and never consider that maybe she would like to rest sometimes too.

Maybe I could pop back for the odd weekend and give her a hand.

If I could deal with Dexter, I could certainly face up to my brother who, apparently, still didn’t have a job and was ‘thinking of going travelling’, which meant going on the train to Bristol to sponge off his old mates down there, if Mum would give him the train fare.

He, at least, would never change. Why would he when he was cosseted and treated like a little prince and congratulated just for taking off his shoes before he put his feet on the sofa?

My mother thought ‘double standards’ were a size of bedsheet.

The stairs were thickly carpeted, so nobody in the kitchen heard me coming back down. But I could hear them. Mum and Dad and brother, all gathered in there, having a hushed conversation.

‘I reckons she’s rented him,’ my brother announced confidently. ‘Pay-by-the-hour type thing.’

‘He’s certainly too nice for her,’ Mum said. There was a clinking of cups. ‘Well, he’ll see through her soon enough. He seems an intelligent lad, she won’t be able to keep up looking clever for long.’

‘She’s got make-up on, did you see?’ my brother said smugly. ‘Trying to pretty herself up.’

‘I have no idea what she’s done to her hair,’ continued Mum, whose hair was still in the coy ‘Princess Di’ that she’d had since 1981, according to the photographs. ‘Why is she trying to change how she looks? I mean, it’s obvious to anyone with any sense that she…’

I hit the bottom step at the same time as my heart hit my stomach.

How could I have been so stupid? The impulse to gouge a strip from the tidy wallpaper almost overcame me and I had to curl my fingers into my palms to stop myself.

Of course they hadn’t changed. I was still the useless one, who should stay at home and pay bills that my parents couldn’t manage because they gave all their money to my golden, do-nothing-wrong brother.

I should exist to serve, to do as I was told.

That training had led me to Dexter, who had been the best I thought I could get.

‘Come on, Flynn.’ I opened the living room door and surprised him looking at the collection of family photographs on the vigorously polished shelving above the TV. ‘We need to go.’

He nodded and we left without saying goodbye.

It wouldn’t matter, my family would spend another hour dissecting my visit; telling one another how I’d never had any manners or decency and how I probably had to get my paid-for ‘boyfriend’ back before his time was up.

They’d get enough mileage from their happy annihilation of my character to keep them busy for weeks.

Neither Flynn nor I said much on the drive back.

He was still swearing quietly about the state of the rural roads and I was thinking, hard: trying to beat down the memories of my childhood and adolescence in a household where I had been ‘the girl’ and, as such, liable for helping my mother in her attempts to martyr herself to the cause of masculinity.

Staying in at weekends to do the laundry, while my brother went out with his leering friends.

Watching whatever he chose on the TV, because his opinion counted, while mine didn’t.

Getting a holiday job in a café, starting at six, while my brother lay in every morning.

Lying awake while he and his current girlfriend made enough noise in their room to make the neighbours bang on the walls, and my parents’ tolerant ‘boys will be boys’ comments if anyone dared say anything.

It had been like the Dursleys and Harry Potter, only without the magic.

‘Well.’ Flynn drove the car around to the garages at the back of the wine bar.

I’d never noticed these before. They were the old stables from when the building had been a pub, somewhere to put the horses on market day or to stall the beasts that had pulled the delivery dray.

Now they were full of boxes of glasses. And Flynn’s car, obviously. ‘A lot of things make sense to me now.’

‘Mmm?’ As we got out of the car, I was still lost in remembering one particularly savage summer, when my brother had encouraged his friends to follow me around town, heckling and trying to corner me in out-of-the-way places.

I’d been reduced to tears, hiding in the toilets in Browns until they gave up, when I’d run home to be told that I was late back and wouldn’t be allowed out again for the rest of the week.

The memory of that cold fear of not knowing what might happen next, of having to get away fast, had made Dexter’s brand of unthinking cruelty feel predictable and a known quantity.

‘You know they don’t have a single photograph of you up on the wall?’ Flynn went on, almost casually. ‘Loads of your brother, some of your parents, some of them together. None of you.’

‘I’m not photogenic,’ I said absently, repeating what I’d always been told. ‘They don’t have any good pictures of me.’

‘Fee.’ Flynn sounded so solemn then that I had to look at him. He put both hands on my shoulders. ‘You are lovely. Your family, on the other hand… are not.’

There it was again, that cold shutter coming down when I thought of my childhood.

The knowing in my rational mind that it had been unfair, warped.

And yet the pull to the familiar, wanting so badly to be needed and loved that I would do anything asked of me to feel that I belonged.

‘My parents prefer my brother, that’s all.

’ I tried to sound breezy. ‘He was born very premature and they weren’t sure he would live, so it’s only natural that they… ’

‘No, it isn’t.’ Flynn sounded almost angry, and Flynn didn’t seem to have any real anger in him on a day-to-day basis.

‘There is nothing natural about any of it. Blimey, I thought my dad was quite hands-off with me, when really his only life advice was to do a business degree and steer clear of women who know I’m, well, okay for money, but your family is next level.

They make Dad look as though he wanted a spreadsheet of my movements. ’

He shifted and brought his face closer to mine.

There was a suspicious gleam in his eyes.

‘Your life has been so shit, it’s a miracle that you are even slightly normal,’ he said.

‘I wondered how someone as intelligent and aware as you could have entertained someone like Dexter for more than five minutes, but now I can see. You were taught that was all you deserved.’

‘I know it really,’ I said, watching his gaze travel over my face. ‘I do know. That’s why I came away. I wanted to escape but I didn’t really know how. Hence…’ I waved a hand, meant to indicate my flat but really taking in this little cobbled yard and the padlocked doors, ‘Dexter.’

‘Oh, Fee.’ Flynn kissed me now, a kiss that was softer than his usual kisses, something that felt like the promise of summer after a winter’s chill. ‘Fee.’

‘The club was so good for me,’ I went on.

‘Not being alone. Being able to do something to help Annie. I even…’ I stopped, unsure of whether this was the right time or the right place, but Flynn’s expression encouraged me.

‘I’ve even thought of training to be a private investigator,’ I said in a speedy burst. ‘I’ve looked it up, there are courses and all sorts of qualifications you can take.

It would be good to have a proper job, something that’s me, if you see what I mean.

And,’ I went on with a renewed enthusiasm because he hadn’t laughed, ‘I think I might be good at it. I’ve never had something to be good at before, but all that following Eddie and the planning and deciding what to do next…

I know it sounds horrible because it was Annie’s life we were poking about in, but I enjoyed it.

I’ve never really had anything I enjoyed before. ’

Flynn took a couple of steps back. Now he was looking at me differently, head slightly to one side, as though there was something new about me that he’d never noticed before. ‘That would be amazing,’ he said slowly.

‘I need to… to not be someone who just gets sucked into things,’ I went on.

A little flame of enthusiasm had lit from the spark of the idea and Flynn’s not shooting it down.

‘I love working in the wine bar, of course, and it was so good of you to offer me the job. But I’m doing it because it’s there, if you see what I mean.

Like the call-centre job – I only went for that because I was desperate and I saw the advert online.

It wasn’t as though it was something I’ve always wanted to do.

But being an investigator – I think I could be good at that, and being good at something hasn’t happened to me that often. ’

Flynn smiled. He had a slow smile that seemed to inch across his face a little at a time, starting in his eyes and then spreading down to his mouth. It was very attractive. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly again. ‘I can see that.’

‘And I think I’m born to blend into the background. There’s nothing about me that stands out; I’m so ordinary that I’m almost invisible,’ I went on.

‘I think we might still need to do some work on your self-esteem. You are very far from ordinary and invisible, Fee.’

‘Maybe,’ I said slowly, the idea crystallising in my head as I said the words, as though they were ice, helping my thoughts to set.

‘Maybe I need to be ordinary. It will mean that everything I’ve learned throughout my life – all the blending in and trying to be what everyone wants of me – will be useful.

After all, I could hardly follow Eddie, or anyone else really, if I had purple hair and was so beautiful that I stopped traffic, could I? ’

Flynn laughed. It really did make him step out of his ordinary bracket; it made his dark eyes glow behind his glasses and his mouth pleated upwards in a way that highlighted the generally pleasing shape of his entire face.

I had another of those moments where I felt a sudden knowledge of inclusion in the human race.

Flynn liked me. Margot, Wren, Annie and Fraser liked me.

I wasn’t the apparent monster that I’d been brought up to think I was: the stupid, unsexy, ugly and unlovable person that Dexter had always yelled at me that I was, that my parents had tried to convince me I was.

People liked me. People listened to me.

‘I think you could do anything you set your mind to,’ Flynn said, turning to open the back door to the bar. ‘I’ve never met anyone as determined as you.’

He often complimented me in bed, and sometimes when I learned a particularly tricky cocktail recipe, but this was the first time the compliment had felt personal. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever had a moment’s pride in myself.

‘Thank you,’ I said quietly, and meant it for more than the words he’d said.