Page 6 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

‘We all’ chorused that we were fine, thanks, against all available evidence.

‘Fraser,’ Margot barked his name, making him flinch and try to slide even further under the table, ‘why don’t you tell us about yourself? What brought you to our club? Were you dumped?’

Fraser took another big mouthful of wine and shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Did you dump her?’ Annie leaned forward, unknowingly putting one elbow in a spill of the tonic water she’d ordered.

Fraser shook his head again. All the swagger and blokey mateyness he’d shown when it had only been Margot and me was gone, as though, faced by a wall of women, he had lost all confidence.

‘I didn’t have a date for Valentine’s,’ he said.

‘Nobody wanted to go out with me.’ Then he pushed himself a little more upright in his chair and straightened his shoulders.

The pigs undulated. ‘But that’s all right though, isn’t it, cos I’m a disappointed valentine too. ’

Flynn came in over my shoulder, wiping up Annie’s spill. He smelled good again, and there was something rather pleasant about the gentle press of him against me as he moved his cloth over the tabletop.

‘How many women did you ask?’ Margot arranged her face in lines of concern in front of Fraser.

He slumped even further. ‘I don’t know any women,’ he muttered. ‘There weren’t anyone to ask.’

The remaining four of us did a kind of round-the-table stare.

‘But I’m still disappointed,’ Fraser went on, his tone becoming a little more wheedling, a little more self-justifying. ‘I mean, not having anyone to shag don’t make me exactly happy with my life, know what I mean?’

The stare went round the table again, like an unclaimed bill.

‘I’m not sure,’ Margot began carefully, ‘that you are quite grasping the nature of this group, Fraser. We’re meeting as a support group for those who suffered romantic disappointment, not a generalised dissatisfaction with life as a whole.’

‘Well, that’s not right then.’ Fraser stuck out his round chin. ‘That’s trades discriminations, that is. Just because I’m disappointed all year round, it don’t make me ineligible for the club. Makes me more eligible, if you asks me. We should change the name.’

‘Of the club?’ Margot looked taken aback.

‘Yeah. It’s not just, like, for people who’ve had a bad Valentine’s, is it? Not really. It’s for…’ He frowned, seeming to mentally grope for a definition. ‘It’s for us,’ he finished, with a lack of clarity that made his nickname of Fraze-the-Haze suddenly become obvious.

Wren cautiously raised a hand. ‘We’re all heartbroken though, aren’t we?’ she offered. ‘Maybe The Heartbreak Club?’

Fraser snorted. ‘Sounds like a country and western band.’

I thought of Dexter and felt everything inside me clamp down. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t mind dealing out a bit of heartbreak.’ Then, in a spirit of honesty, I added, ‘If I had anyone to deal it to, of course.’

Margot doodled for a moment, then looked up.

‘How about – this?’ She’d drawn the same heart that I’d seen on that very first poster, with the knife through the middle, but now it was surrounded by blocky letters spelling out The Monday Night Heartbreak Club.

‘We can leave it to onlookers to decide whether the heartbreak is being suffered or occasioned by us. Makes us look a little less hopeless, don’t you think? ’

‘What’s that supposed to say, then?’ Fraser asked. Margot read it out and he curled his lip. ‘Bugger me, that’s even worse! Now we sounds like a Taylor Swift song.’

Annie raised a cautious hand. ‘Something happened to me,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know what everyone thinks.’

Our attention switched to her so fast that we all got whiplash. ‘Of course,’ Margot said. ‘Go ahead, Annie. We can discuss the naming of the club another time.’

‘Well, Eddie went off to work on Wednesday but he forgot his bag – he works over at the meat-packing factory and he always takes his own lunch. He’s in the offices, mind, not on the factory floor, so it’s sometimes hard for him to get to the canteen.

So I rang the main switchboard, just to tell them to let him know that I was putting it in the fridge for tomorrow.

And they said…’ Her words half-choked off, as though she didn’t want them said.

Margot and Wren were leaning forward in identical postures of suspense. Fraser was picking his nails.

‘They said he wasn’t in.’ Annie finally got the words out but with her head pulled back towards her chest, defensively.

‘They said he’d booked the day off and he must have forgotten to tell me.

Well, I pretended that I’d been daft, and of course he’d told me, I was just having a bit of a senior moment and everything.

’ Now she looked up at each of us in turn, and her slightly faded hazel eyes were clouded with worry.

‘But I really hadn’t. He never mentioned it to me.

And, if he did have the day off, why did he make himself a lunch?

It could only be so that I didn’t suspect anything. ’

‘Does he have any hobbies?’ Wren asked. ‘Might he have taken the day off to do one of those? Golf, or something?’

Annie shook her head sadly. ‘His only hobby is watching Escape to the Country.’ She took a deep breath.

‘It’s an affair. Of course it is. I don’t know why I’m being so silly, trying to find reasons for everything.

It’s practically textbook, the daft old bugger can’t even be original about it!

Going to the gym every day…’ She looked wistful for a moment.

‘He’s got some lovely biceps now, mind.’

‘Any idea who the other woman is?’ Margot was colouring in the corner on her notepad. ‘Any suspicions?’

Annie seemed to feel better now that she had put words around her fears. ‘Nope. Not a one. I mean, he’s an overweight sixty-year-old administration manager who deals with pork by-products; he’s hardly Richard Armitage.’ Then her face drooped. ‘But I love him,’ she said, more quietly.

It must be nice, I thought, watching her press her hanky to the corners of her eyes in a genteel dabbing motion, to feel that way about someone.

To actually love them so deeply that the thought of losing them caused you pain.

Or to have someone feel like that about you, whispered the tiny, treacherous voice at the back of my head which sometimes liked to remind me that nobody loved me or ever had.

The best I could say about Dex was the fact that he closed the bathroom door when he was in there and he liked the same music as me.

But I’d had someone, a job, a best friend and a life. Now, gradually, everything was falling away from me like when you peel an orange and let those slivers of peel slip to the floor.

‘He’s talking about taking up cycling,’ Annie went on. ‘Cycling! Maybe he just wants to show off his legs – he’s got very good legs has my Eddie. But I can’t be married to a cyclist, not at my age.’

‘Are you all right, Fee?’ Wren closed the gap between us at the table. ‘You’re looking a bit aghast.’

‘Just thinking,’ I muttered. ‘I mean, I feel a bit of a fraud really. Poor Annie…’ I lowered my voice a little more, but Annie was still busy talking to Margot and showing her pictures of her garden, as far as I could tell.

Eddie was, apparently, a demon with the lawnmower.

Fraser was listening in, clearly at a loss for anything to say, twisting his wine glass between his fingers, as though he wished it were a pint.

‘But you’re heartbroken too,’ Wren said urgently. ‘There’s nothing that makes one experience more valid than another. I mean, I ended my own relationship. Jordan would quite happily have carried on seeing me. Does that mean I shouldn’t be here?’

I looked at her. There was nothing remarkable about Wren: she was a generic pretty, small, young woman, almost the blueprint for what you’d produce if someone asked you to sketch ‘woman in their mid-twenties’.

And yet here I was feeling that weird ‘included’ feeling that I’d had on the first night – as though, somehow, someone saw me. ‘Of course not,’ I said, surprised.

‘None of us are happy. Well, except Margot, who doesn’t seem as cut up about her divorce as I would have thought…

’ Wren trailed off as we both looked thoughtfully over at Margot, who was showing Annie photos now.

From the exclamations, I think it might have been the Highland cabin.

Or the boat, it was hard to tell. ‘And you can’t quantify unhappiness, can you? ’

‘I suppose not.’

‘How shit does life have to be before you’re allowed to say it’s shit?’ Fraser put in suddenly, surprising us. ‘That’s what you means, isn’t it?’

‘Succinct, but true.’ Wren smiled at him and, to my astonishment, Fraser blushed.

His whole face gained the colour of severe sunburn, he thrust his empty glass onto the middle of the table, stood up and said, ‘Got to go, bus to catch, same time next week?’ and fled the bar as though we’d threatened to tie him to the table.

‘That was unexpected,’ Margot said, after a pause in which the surprise at his sudden departure died down. ‘Young Fraser doesn’t seem to quite know why he’s here, does he?’

‘I think he thought it would be like shooting fish in a barrel,’ I said, rather bitterly.

‘Lots of women disappointed in love, gagging for a…’ My brain strained for nouns that Fraser might use, but all the ones I could come up with made me sound like a twisted anti-male woman who’s convinced anyone with a penis is bad news.

‘…bloke.’ I came up short. ‘Maybe he thought joining the club would be a shortcut to getting a girlfriend.’

‘He’s lonely,’ Wren said, again showing more depth of character than I’d had her down for.

‘We’re all lonely. Aren’t we? Isn’t that why we’re here?

It’s not so much the disappointment about Valentine’s Day, or that we’re all heartbroken, it’s the fact that we’re all on our own now. Apart from you, Annie, of course.’

‘And my marriage is looking to be more and more a temporary state of affairs,’ said Annie darkly from inside her glass of tonic water.

Gradually the meeting broke up. Annie wanted to get home to check that Eddie had eaten the meal she’d left for him, Wren had work to do and Margot – well, Margot probably wanted to shake Bruce to see if another cottage fell out or something.

But they all departed, leaving me sitting at the table and reluctant to head over the road.

I hadn’t even had chance to discuss my idea of us actually doing something useful with the club, whatever we were going to call it.

I bought another glass of wine, and Flynn leaned on the bar towards me. ‘You live up there, don’t you?’ He nodded towards my flat.

‘Yes.’ I grasped my glass as though it were a lifeline. ‘Although “live” is a bit stretched as a term.’ I was talking too much; wine did that to me.

Flynn pursed his mouth. ‘You were watching me putting the tables out the other day.’

I had a horrible moment where I wondered what else he’d seen at those windows. ‘I wasn’t watching you. I was looking out. At the street.’

He nodded. ‘And you lived with that big guy sometimes. Is that the one you split up from right before Valentine’s?’

‘No, he was just one of my harem. I keep a cupboard full of men up there and swap around,’ I said, snappishly. I was disconcerted by this man seeming to know so much about my life and my comings and goings. Had he been watching me?

‘Yes, I used to see him going in and out, during the day, when you were at work,’ Flynn went on, fumbling with the card machine. ‘He’d have someone different with him every time. Women, sometimes. Does he have a lot of sisters or something?’

My phone slipped from my hand and slithered down behind the bar. Flynn bent to retrieve it, giving me time to compose my expression. I had it smooth and unbothered by the time he came back up again. ‘No,’ I said evenly. ‘No. No sisters.’ I drank the wine down in two gulps. ‘I have to go now.’

‘Would you like me to walk you back?’ Dark eyes.

He had dark eyes I’d not noticed before behind those gold, round-rimmed glasses.

Dark eyes, dark hair and that black uniform, like a shadow of a man moving through the world.

Only the white tag on his shirt that proclaimed his name – also in black – gave me something to focus on.

‘No, thank you,’ I said to his badge. ‘I’m fine.’

But neither of us moved. ‘So, then. What’s the point of your club?’ Flynn asked eventually. ‘I heard you trying to steer them towards something, last week.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, tiredly. ‘At the moment it’s a bunch of us who’ve had a rubbish time lately, getting together to chat, and they seem happy with that.’

‘Hmm.’ Flynn picked up the bar towel again and began wiping the surface free from wet rings and scattered peanuts.

‘And what does “hmm” mean? What point do you think we should have?’

He looked meaningfully at my empty glass. ‘I dunno. Some self-help? Something to get you over your romantic disappointments? Otherwise aren’t you just reinforcing your own misery?’

‘Have you ever thought about being on TV? Because with the level of trite aphorisms you come out with, you’d be an absolute winner on the daytime circuit.’ I propped my empty glass carefully in the middle of his newly wiped surface. ‘And I’m going home now.’

Flynn nodded. ‘Goodnight, Fee,’ he said quietly. ‘Take care.’

I’d closed the door very, very carefully behind me before it occurred to me to wonder what I was supposed to be taking care of.