Page 29 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

Monday, club night, rolled around again.

Fraser was late. He messaged to say that he was coming straight from the gym on the bus rather than grabbing a lift with Margot.

‘He’s really taking this whole “getting fit” thing seriously, isn’t he?

’ Wren said, sipping her orange juice. She’d taken Annie’s usual seat, I noticed.

Clearly we supposed Annie had now moved on to other things; maybe she’d really take up Portuguese evening classes.

She still messaged us, though, the group chat was filled with breathless and rather strangely punctuated tales of redecoration and holiday bookings.

Her emojis were prolific and not always up with current usage – she used the purple aubergine whenever she mentioned Eddie’s love of her lamb moussaka, for example, which was off-putting for those of us who’d enjoyed moussaka up to this point.

But it was Annie, and she was so clearly enjoying her renewed security in her marriage that none of us liked to tell her what it meant to anyone under the age of thirty when she sent doughnut and cucumber emojis side by side.

‘Fraser was looking for a purpose,’ Margot said confidently, laying her phone on the table and squaring her handbag on the floor under her chair.

‘He was never going to find a girlfriend living the way he did, and now he at least stands a chance. He and Minnie seem really keen on starting classes for people who are total beginners, and I think he will be extremely good at it.’

Margot seemed to have softened a lot since the club started too, I thought, helping Flynn bring a couple of bowls of crisps and peanuts to the table. It seemed safe enough, with Fraser not here yet.

‘Do you think he can keep it up?’ I asked casually, clearly having caught the spirit of Annie’s unintended double entendres.

‘Fraser is showing a single-minded dedication to an idea that has, I must admit, surprised me,’ she replied.

‘I have to say that I have learned a lot from Fraser about not judging a book by its rather tatty and somewhat juvenile cover.’ She gave an unexpected smile and I noticed that she was wearing a lot less make-up than she had at our earlier meetings.

Margot seemed to have loosened her stays a little.

I wondered if one of the dating app men was responsible.

‘Fraser’s cute,’ Wren said, and we turned to her with such speed that whiplash was a possibility. ‘Oh, not like that,’ she added. ‘Sorry to disappoint anyone but I’m still not attracted to men.’

Margot coughed as though this had broken a train of thought.

I wondered if she had been quietly trying to set Wren up with Fraser behind the scenes.

If Wren had been straight then it would have been an obvious tidy ending for our club, and Wren and Fraser could, I had to admit, have made a nice couple.

Her desire to be looked after and, as she said herself, ‘treated like a princess’, would fit right in with Fraser’s still slightly outdated beliefs about women and traditional roles.

Bugger. I wondered if a purely platonic household might be possible, Fraser looking after Wren, and her washing his gym kit and cooking for him. The spectre of the big purple aubergine swam before my eyes and I shook my head.

‘I meant that he’s very simple and straightforward,’ Wren went on. ‘There’s no beating about the bush with Fraser.’

Oh God, those emojis and entendres were going to haunt me forever. Margot coughed again and I wondered whether she was thinking the same as I was.

‘He’s kind and he’s got no “side” to him,’ Wren went on. ‘What you see is what you get with Fraser and I think he will make someone a wonderful boyfriend. But not me,’ she added, dashing my slowly rising hopes for a friendly household.

Thankfully for those of us who were straining credulity at this point, Fraser himself clattered through the door carrying his rolled-up towel, as ever, which he flung on the bar as he collapsed into a chair.

‘Bugger me,’ he said succinctly. ‘Minnie’s had me lifting. Anyone got a horse they want turned over, I’m your man. Oh good, peanuts are out.’ He took a double handful scoop of the recently arrived nuts and threw them into his mouth with the eagerness of a man in a desert arriving at a waterhole.

Margot was averting her eyes.

‘Slow down, mate,’ Flynn said cheerily. ‘There’s only another five hundred bags in the storeroom and I don’t want to run out this early in the week.’

‘Sorry.’ Fraser sprayed the table with partly masticated nuts.

‘Bloody starving. Been in the gym all day with Min, filling in forms for personal trainer courses. I’m not great at the writing, what with my dyslexia, so Min has to do them for me.

’ He looked around at us. ‘What we talking about, then?’

In the face of the peanut-spray, the hint of body odour and Fraser’s general Fraser-ness, nobody seemed to feel able to say, How nice you are and how you’ll easily find a girlfriend.

Fraser was definitely one of those people that you can think fondly of when they’re not present, but whose reality gives you second and third thoughts.

‘Annie,’ I said. ‘Now she’s got her happy valentine after all.’

‘Oh yeah. And you’re shagging Flynn, and I’ve got the gym – just got to set these two up and we can all die happy.

’ Fraser waved a salty finger at Margot and Wren, who stared blankly at him.

I absolutely did not say what I’d been thinking about Wren and him setting up home together.

Nobody should have that kind of idea put in their heads.

Flynn dropped his head and was trying not to smile. Margot kicked over her handbag and had to bend down under the table to pick it back up again and I felt my entire face go so hot that the peanuts were in for another roasting.

‘What?’ Fraser stared around us again. ‘Am I not supposed to know that these two are banging? Bloody hellfire, it’s like a f—it’s like a romantic novel in here some days, with them gazing in each other’s eyes and trailing hands and all.

My Mum reads Mills Jordan and I got serious very quickly and I think that was my mistake.’

Over at the bar, Flynn was in conversation with the two men, who had bought a glass of wine each and were drinking quickly, a sports bag on the bar between them.

He saw me look over and winked, then mouthed two minutes at me.

I didn’t know why. He was working, it wasn’t as though he’d excused himself to wander the high street, accosting women. I smiled back.

Outside, the night was leaning in through the windows as though pulled in by the light.

I watched Flynn bid the two men good evening as they drained their wine glasses and hurried off to whatever business summoned them.

Flynn headed off towards the back room, possibly to fetch more glasses, and I had one of those moments where I felt as though I were existing in the closing titles of a film.

Everyone was happy. I had a gorgeous boyfriend and the hope of a new life.

Summer was coming, slowly this far north, but definitely advancing on us, as evidenced by the recent crop of hanging baskets and new planting around roundabouts and road verges.

My family had been shown that I could have a wonderful future and was far from the loser status that had been attributed to me almost as soon as I was born.

They might think I had to rent it by the hour, but it was still more future than they had, stuck in that little house, re-enacting the rituals they’d been set in forever. I had Flynn and I was free.

Any minute now, the titles would roll, the screen would be bathed in a golden glow and we’d all hasten off to our new futures, I thought, leaning back with a satisfied sigh and watching Wren mopping Margot down with a handful of tissues while Fraser carried on eating peanuts as though we were about to whip the bowl out from under his hand.

I half-noticed that the men who’d left in such a hurry had put their sports bag on the floor and forgotten it, and the thought of them having to turn around and come back made me smile.

More haste, less speed, I thought, lifting my glass of juice to finish it.

And then the bomb went off.