Page 32 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

The film was from a camera above the bar, with a wide-angled lens. I watched our group arrive, saw Margot and Flynn put the peanuts out, everyone moving jerkily like in a ridiculous 1920s silent film.

‘I’m playing it back at twice normal speed,’ Flynn explained. ‘To get to the good bits.’

‘I look good,’ Fraser said wonderingly. ‘Wow.’

He’d arrived pantingly through the door and thrown himself upon the peanuts.

‘You look like an industrial digger,’ Margot observed.

‘Margot!’

‘Sorry, Wren.’ Margot gave Wren a small, secret smile. They were still hand in hand and nobody was commenting, so I decided to keep quiet too. ‘Sorry, Fraser.’

‘Nah. I were hungry. And Minnie says nuts are good.’

We all crowded in close around Flynn’s phone screen to watch.

At least, everyone else crowded and he was holding the phone almost under my nose, so we were all bundled together.

Nobody, apart from Fraser, had remarked on how bad I looked, or my injuries, and I guessed that the group chat had been kept fully up to date with my progress.

Maybe they’d already visited when I’d been out of things?

The thought of Fraser looming by my bed when I wasn’t conscious made me pull a small face.

‘Here.’ Flynn tapped the screen. ‘This is where they come in.’

We watched the door open, and Flynn changed the timer to show everything happening at normal speed. Two men came in and stood by the bar, putting the bag between them.

‘I should have noticed the bag,’ Flynn said sadly. ‘But it’s so ordinary.’

The pair moved, talking to Flynn on the screen, and I jerked.

‘Fee?’ Wren looked sideways at me around Margot. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I know them.’ My voice sounded as cracked as it had when I had first woken up.

‘You know them?’ Margot peered more closely at the screen now.

‘Yes. Well, I sort of do. I recognise them, anyway. I didn’t really look at them that night, they had their backs to me and I was too busy…

’ No. I couldn’t tell everyone that I was too busy being smug about my new future.

‘That one, the tall one, he’s called Axe, although I very much doubt it’s his real name, and the other one is always in the background.

He deals drugs, he lives in Leeds…’ I moved my head on the pillow.

‘His name is… No, I can’t remember. But I’ve met them both. With Dexter.’

Flynn let the phone drop. ‘Dexter? You mean, your ex did this?’ He gestured at the screen.

‘Looks like it.’ My voice was small. ‘Sorry.’

‘Not your fault,’ Flynn said sternly. ‘At all. But I need to call the police and tell them.’

He went out and left the remaining four of us looking sheepishly at each other. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t realise he’d go that far.’

‘Look.’ Wren sat down beside Fraser, poking him until he moved towards the end of the bed and she could sit next to me. ‘You can’t take responsibility for your ex’s actions. You didn’t force him to be a jealous, possessive, thuggish bastard, did you?’

I moved my head on the pillow again. It wouldn’t quite shake, I couldn’t get it far enough over to the left, so it was more of a one-sided flop. ‘I honestly thought he’d just forget about me. I should have remembered that Dexter is…’

‘A sad, pathetic excuse for a psycho?’

‘Yes, thank you, Fraser. I should have remembered that Dexter doesn’t like being shown up and Flynn showed him up good and proper. He wouldn’t have come round, he’d been well warned off, so he sent his mates. I wonder if they knew what was in the bag?’

‘If they didn’t, they got out of there pretty sharpish,’ Fraser said, finding the bowl of fruit that someone – Flynn, most likely – had placed beside my bed, and peeling a banana.

‘True.’ Wren smiled. She and Margot locked eyes for a moment and then both turned away in a movement so similar that it looked synchronised. ‘And one good thing did come of the explosion, Fee.’

Margot took over. ‘I would never have – well, I wouldn’t have come out if I hadn’t been so terrified for Wren,’ she said.

‘I knew I had… feelings, but I wasn’t sure and I was too scared to say anything.

’ She gave a soft smile towards Wren. ‘Especially with all that talk about dating sites. I really didn’t think you’d noticed me at all. ’

‘We had a long conversation in that ambulance, didn’t we?’ Wren almost giggled now. ‘There were quite a lot of admissions going on. I’d fancied Margot right from the first time we met, but I didn’t think that she felt the same way, until that dreadful night.’

‘I would have thought it was fairly obvious,’ Margot went on. ‘Inviting you to stay? Making your favourite meals?’

‘I thought you were just being nice. Helping me get over Jordan.’

‘I didn’t altogether realise what I was doing, I suppose. Not at first.’

‘Yeah, yeah, lovely. So far, so Thelma and Louise,’ Fraser burst in. ‘Can we get back to what those two pricks were doing in the bar? You can drive the car off the cliff later.’

We all stared at him. ‘Thelma and Louise weren’t gay,’ I said eventually.

‘Bloody were. I’ve seen that film about four hundred times.’ Fraser ate another banana. ‘It’s our Chloe’s favourite. I can do all the lines too, if you want.’

‘Probably not necessary.’

Fraser, the unintentional film subtext critic, started on the grapes. ‘So, you reckon your ex wanted to smash up Flynn’s place?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘We were collateral damage. He had no way of knowing we’d be in there that night; he must have just wanted to get at Flynn for daring to take me away from him.

That’s how he sees it,’ I finished quickly, in case anyone thought I’d been two-timing Dex with Flynn.

‘I was his property, because that’s how he thinks of women.

He was probably delighted to find out that I was badly injured. ’

‘Prick,’ said Fraser, dribbling grape juice and ignoring the fact that he wasn’t exactly squeaky-clean in the female disenfranchisement stakes.

At that point, Annie came in, flustered and ruffled.

‘Eddie’s just parking the car,’ she said.

‘Dreadful parking facilities here, aren’t they?

Anyway.’ She plopped a paper bag of grapes onto my bedside table and Fraser started on those too.

‘How are you feeling? I saw Flynn in the corridor on the phone. Is everything all right?’

There was a moment of busy conversation as we all tried to tell the story, but the mixing of perspectives meant that it was jumbled and probably didn’t enlighten Annie as much as she’d hoped.

‘Someone deliberately tried to kill you?’ She looked aghast, her eyes travelling over my drip stands. ‘How dreadful.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ I tried to smile bravely but the stitches wouldn’t allow it.

All of a sudden Annie’s face seemed to melt. Tears flowed down her cheeks and her mouth writhed. ‘Oh dear. It’s all so dreadful!’ she said again, pulling a large handkerchief from the sleeve of today’s cardigan. ‘When I heard… well… Eddie had to take me to the doctor, I was that distressed.’

Margot patted Annie’s hand, the one that wasn’t mopping her face with the enormous hankie. ‘Everyone is all right, Annie,’ she said soothingly. ‘We’re all still here.’

‘I didn’t realise…’ Annie sobbed on. ‘…just how fond I’ve got of all of you.

I thought it was just meetings, somewhere to offload how worried I was about Eddie, but listening to you all being so…

brave.’ She sniffed and blew her noise. ‘It made me realise that we’re less a club and more like a little family.

’ A wavering smile broke through beneath the mopping and she straightened herself a little, the cardigan flapping around her shoulders. ‘Aren’t we?’

There was a thin chorus of agreement from the others and I felt a momentary jolt in my chest. Found family. Wasn’t that the phrase? Although my actual family might be less than satisfactory, why shouldn’t I make myself a new one with people I actually cared about?

I joined in with the general concurrence. Even Fraser had slowed down his grape ingestion to nod thoughtfully.

‘I got a great family,’ he said slowly. ‘But not what you might call supportive. Our Chloe laughed at me doing my stretches the other day.’ He chewed, ruminatively. ‘The cow,’ he added. ‘I got to get out of there.’

‘I never had children,’ Annie continued.

Her voice was a little lower now, as though the words weren’t really meant to be heard.

‘We did try, but… well, never mind. That was all a long time ago. And for all the societies and hobbies I’m part of, there’s nobody who’s ever really taken an interest in my life.

You all listened to me. You made me feel like I mattered. ’

Now there was a silence, only slightly mitigated by the somewhat industrial sound of Fraser eating my grapes.

‘It can be hard.’ Margot spoke now and her voice was similarly low.

Confidential. ‘When you try to conceive and nothing seems to happen. Everyone else is popping out little ones as if they don’t even think about it, even people who don’t seem to want them.

’ She patted Annie again, but this time it looked as though there was a weight of understanding in her touch.

‘I’ve seen too many of the end results of unwanted and unloved children turning to crime as a cry for help. ’

More silence. More mastication noises. Then Fraser said, through a mouthful, ‘Bugger me, we’re here to cheer Feebs up, not depress the whole lot of us. Anyone want a grape?’

Flynn came back into the room, looked sideways at Fraser eating all the fruit and handed me the phone.

‘It’s the police,’ he said. ‘They’ll come and talk to you when you’re out of here and feeling better, but right now they need everything you’ve got on those two that came into the bar, and what happened with you and Dexter. ’

I took his phone. ‘And I shall be delighted to tell them.’

Everyone else started to talk about holidays and the atmosphere lightened a good deal, for which I was grateful, but they ate all my grapes, for which I wasn’t.

What I could tell the police wasn’t enough, of course.

We had the security footage, we had everything I knew about Dexter and his ‘friends’.

The police were grateful and tried to sound encouraging and positive, but it wasn’t enough.

All I had was one fake name and the knowledge that they were connected to Dexter, who lied as easily and regularly as he drew breath.

Despite the police’s assurances that everything was being done, I knew that everyone concerned would have gone to ground and would be busy laying alibis as fast as they could.

Some film, however good quality, of two people who probably wouldn’t look anything like the participants by the time they’d cut their hair, grown beards and moved to Carlisle, wasn’t going to do any good.

Plus, it didn’t include Dexter, and unless his mates were prepared to drop him in it, he would get away with this.

Surprised at my jaw-clenching desire to see punishment for Dexter, I wondered why I had suddenly become so keen for retribution.

I’d let him get away with everything he’d done to me so far: the criminal damage, assault, coercive control…

He’d used me and mistreated me and I’d been afraid of him, but fear didn’t explain why I’d kept letting him back in.

Had he really been all I thought I was worth?

I lay back on the hospital pillows, still unable to sit up unaided, and wondered about my life choices that had led me here.

If I hadn’t looked Dexter’s way, if I’d never gone home with him that evening, if I’d never let him into my life – I wouldn’t be here now, looking at an existence so completely altered.

The smell of disinfectant, that awful boiled-air smell that hospitals have, made my nose itch, and with all the drips and clips, it took some effort to get my working hand up to my face to scratch it.

Then I stared at my arm for a bit, because it was that or watching the clock with its oddly erratic tick, painfully marking the interminable passing of seconds while I lay here.

How long would Flynn put up with me now? I couldn’t even help in the bar if I was going to have to limp slowly everywhere and couldn’t lift a box with one hand. He seemed solid so far, but that was probably shock. What the hell was I going to do?

A few sparse tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes made me feel a little better.

If this was rock-bottom, then it could have been a lot worse; I was still alive, all my friends were still alive.

Maybe it was going to prove impossible to get Dexter to face up to what he’d done and be punished; his associates were still being hunted by the police – a scenario which gave me a frisson of pleasure – but he couldn’t stay underground for long.

Dexter had so far barged his way through life feeling untouchable, actually being untouchable, apart from brief arrests and detainments, because everyone was too scared of him to give any evidence against him.

Now, I realised, that it didn’t matter any more what he thought of me.

I wasn’t afraid any longer. The second he put his head above the parapet, I was going to bring him down.

If he never did, of course, if he kept his distance and stayed away from me, that would be a victory of sorts too.

Not as satisfying as seeing him imprisoned for what he’d tried to do, but I’d be free.

Or would I? Was I going to spend the rest of my life attempting to look over my shoulder in case Dexter decided that now was the time to show me what happened to those who tried to get away?