Page 7 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

I woke in the night thirsty and thick-headed, and groped my way into the bathroom for some paracetamol and water.

Fortunately it wasn’t far to go: the flat was tiny, converted from an old chemist’s shop into three flats over three floors, in which nobody had enough storage space or a bathroom with an opening window.

My flat comprised a kitchenette, which looked out over the backyard where bins bred and feral felines yowled the night away, and a miniscule bathroom too small for a bath, and where the shower cubicle rocked if a door slammed.

Then the one main room, where our… where my bed was supposed to be folded back to make a sofa during the day, but in reality I never bothered and watched TV from the pillows.

I blundered into the bathroom, ran the tap for a few moments and fumbled a couple of tablets out of the pack.

The floor wobbled under my feet, giving me a moment of wondering whether the hangover was worse than I thought before I remembered that I’d pulled the bathmat over the loose floorboards so I could ignore them.

The landlord wouldn’t do anything about it – see rocking shower, electricity that tripped out when it rained, etc.

– so there was no point in mentioning it.

I’d bought the flamingo-patterned mat to try to cheer up the flat last time Dexter slammed out of my life but it really only made the bathroom floor look as though someone had had a spectacular nosebleed all over it that hadn’t washed out.

My metaphorical bathmat was equally bloodstained and Gothic, but a lot less easy to replace.

I finished my analysis of the flooring, took my glass of water and went back through to sit on my bed and swallow the tablets.

I hadn’t drawn the far curtain, which meant I could see out of the window across the street to the wine bar, which was shrouded in darkness now, with only one small blue bulb indicating that a machine was still switched on somewhere inside.

I supposed Flynn was happily tucked up in bed somewhere now, sleeping the sleep of the blameless.

Probably wearing jet black pyjamas, I thought, making myself smile.

I wondered if he took his name tag off at night, or whether he kept it on to help his sleeping partner remember his name.

That made me think about our ‘club’. It gave me a kind of itchy feeling in the back of my head, almost as though I could see us all projected five, ten years into the future, all still sitting around that table, sticky drinks and sympathy.

Why were we meeting? To tell one another horror stories about our dreadful relationships? Misery loving company?

Perhaps it was an overspill from the pep talks at work, all the constant cries for achievement, forward motion, targets – I think someone had used the word synergy at one point, and I still didn’t know what that meant – that made me want to do something.

Those little chats did seem to have instilled in me a desire for some kind of results.

Funny that, I’d not even really taken much notice when I’d been sitting in that room with fifteen other ‘team members’ and a whiteboard, but now, in the middle of the night, a desire for targets and an end goal seemed to have crashed over my head and was stopping me sleeping.

Or it may have been the hangover, of course. Alcohol-anxiety, a killer headache and the twisting little knife of guilt at having once again drunk more than I should, all ganging up in the back of my mind to needle me with how insipid I was, how inefficient. How uselessly, pointlessly dull.

I leaned back against my pillows, gulping down the water and remembering that warm, included feeling that I’d had earlier that night.

Here were people who were offering me friendship and understanding.

They weren’t seeing a wishy-washy drunk, they were seeing the Fee that I could be.

They hadn’t had the chance yet to see the numerous ways in which I was a total fuck-up, of course.

A renewed sense of purpose trickled through my veins.

I could be that Fee they thought I was, at least for the purposes of being in the club.

Once a week I could pretend, couldn’t I?

Reinvent myself to be the purposeful, ambitious person that I might once have been, before Dexter, before…

well, before conception probably. The others would believe that I was whoever I said I was – all I had to do was act like it.

I couldn’t give Margot a run in the leadership stakes but I could be the ideas man.

My knuckles tightened around the water glass. We could make this club something. We shouldn’t be meeting to complain, to moan about our circumstances and become bitter while watching elderly men play increasingly competitive table games. We could DO something. We could help one another.

I dragged my phone out. I still kept it under my pillow, because Dexter had liked me to return all his messages promptly, although I didn’t know why. Nobody was going to be messaging me during the night any more, were they? After a few moments thinking, I messaged Margot.

I think we ought to try to help Annie. There must be a way we can find out who Eddie is having his affair with, at least. If she knows, she can take it from there.

My finger hesitated over the send button, as I had a horrible flashback to Flynn telling me about Dex and the way he’d casually dropped in the fact that he’d brought women back to the flat. I typed:

And maybe we could get some kind of revenge on the people that made us join the club?

Then I erased that. Revenge wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t in the image of the Fee I wanted to be.

It would give the club a kind of purpose.

And I realised that, for probably the first time in my life, I actually wanted to achieve something. Not just go through the motions or follow the crowd. I wanted to be useful. To have, as I’d said, a purpose. Helping Annie could be our purpose.

I was sitting rereading the message, trying to work out whether what I’d said was really what I meant, when I managed to press the send button instead of scrolling down, and threw the phone onto the bed in disgust. Honestly.

It was three in the morning. Now Margot would think I sat up all night obsessing over being single, as though I didn’t have an actual life to be getting on with.

It rather blew the illusion that I wanted to create, of Strong, Purposeful Fee, and replaced her with Insomniac Fee. Overthinking Fee.

Bugger.

I got back into bed and lay down, trying to will the headache to disappear and, to my surprise, my phone pinged a message.

That is a very good idea. Let me have a think. See you soon!

So Margot was awake at this godforsaken hour too, was she? Well. Okay then. Maybe I hadn’t cocked up as much as I thought.

I snuggled down into the duvet, feeling curiously better for knowing that someone else was up and answering messages.

It took me back to nights lying awake next to Dex, while he snored and I tried to work out how I was feeling about my life.

If I’d nudged him to try to get him to talk, he would mutter something incomprehensible, grab any part of my anatomy he could reach and instantly start up the wood-chipper snore again, as though I were a human comfort pillow.

I’d sometimes felt as though I was the only person alive in the world on those nights.

But now I knew Margot was awake too.

I wriggled my way around in the bed. It wasn’t the world’s most comfortable sleeping arrangement – the hinge that closed it up into a sofa was in the wrong place and I had to arch my lower back over it – but I’d got used to it now.

As I wriggled, I saw a reflected glow in the window and realised that a light had gone on across the road, above the wine bar.

Just a faint light, as though someone had turned on a small lamp down a corridor, but noticeable.

After a few seconds, that went out and darkness resumed, but I was still staring at those blank, bland windows opposite.

Did Flynn live over the business? I didn’t know much about the wine bar, only that it had changed hands recently and been closed for a while for the revamp.

There must be a warren of rooms above, left over from when it had been the pub, so presumably someone lived there.

Well, given the light, that or they had a very tidy-minded poltergeist.

I closed my eyes again. Me, Margot and – someone.

I didn’t want to think that it might be Flynn, but it pleased me to imagine that dark-eyed man roaming the network of rooms above his workplace like a clockwork automaton, awake and alert and waiting for dawn.

Suddenly the night didn’t feel like quite such a lonely place.

I was drifting off to sleep when I jerked awake again.

Had I really suggested that we use the club to help Annie?

What the hell could we do? Shit happened, we’d all been treated badly, that was something there wasn’t any real solution for.

Although, I thought, as I punched the pillow and tried to get comfortable again, Annie could probably benefit from chatting to someone about the ending of a forty-year romance – to help her reframe a new future.

Had I really suggested that we find out who Eddie was being unfaithful with? What the hell…

I slumped into sleep again, to new dreams of Inspector Gadget-type shenanigans, lots of secret following and flying cars, plots and planning and creeping around corners.