Page 8 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club

Work was hell. Demi was working from home again and since her bombshell about moving to Peterborough we’d not had a lot of contact.

Maybe that was why I was embracing the cautiously titled Monday Night Heartbreak Club quite so ferociously.

It was a fixed point now; Monday nights I knew I’d have people to talk to, and I was slightly scared of how easily it had happened and how much I was looking forward to it.

Of course, there wasn’t much else in my life to look forward to.

Dexter had maintained radio silence, but that was nothing new.

He’d be waiting for me to text, to beg him to come back, to promise all kinds of exotic sexual practices and nightly home-cooking if he’d only – what?

What had Dexter really ever brought to my life?

Apart from a presence, a smell, loads of dirty laundry and constantly disturbed nights, I couldn’t think of anything, and all of those things could easily be replaced if I got a Labrador.

Although a Labrador probably wouldn’t have all those dodgy friends or come home at three in the morning rambling incoherently and full of braggadocio, testosterone and cocaine.

My manager Had Words with me about productivity, turnaround time, length of calls and whether I was offering value for money.

Since there wasn’t much I could say to any of this – what did she expect me to do?

– I nodded and smiled and pretended I’d try harder.

All the time in the back of my mind, like a savage earworm, ran the thought that if I lost my job I wouldn’t be able to afford the rent.

I could go home, yes, back to my parents in York, who would receive me gratefully because, after all, hadn’t I proved their point?

I couldn’t manage by myself out in the big wide world as they always said.

I should stay with them, find myself a nice little job and contribute to the household, which comprised them and my feckless brother.

My ‘nice little job’ would mean my contribution could provide him with pocket money to enable him to vanish on a weekly basis and turn up back at the house with a tottering new girlfriend who would spend several days holed up with him in his room, giggling and sending out for food, then disappear, never to be seen again, and be replaced with a new giggler in a crop top the following week.

My parents indulged my brother. It wasn’t their fault. But I’d have a roof over my head.

I sat back down in my cubicle and vowed that I’d live in a tent rather than go through that again. Maybe Peterborough wasn’t so bad and I could camp out on Demi’s sofa for a while?

Then they switched the calls back through to me again and I was overtaken by the need to sell household insurance to people who didn’t want or need it for the rest of the day.

Five o’clock meant home time. Back to the dingy flat, where the couple downstairs had progressed to throwing things and having noisy make-up sex. Back to staring out of the window.

‘Hello. Are you having an extraordinary meeting?’

‘No, I’m having a large white wine.’

I didn’t know why I was here. Other than I didn’t want to sit in on yet another evening, and I’d run out of alcohol in the flat. Flynn poured me a small glass and then leaned on the bar as though he had all the time in the world.

‘So, how’s life?’

I thought about the question as I drank my wine. ‘I’m not entirely sure. But I think I proposed that we find out who Annie’s husband is having an affair with, so there’s that.’

Flynn widened his eyes at me. ‘Wow. Really? That’s very proactive of you.’

‘Don’t, you sound like my boss. She’s all about the proactive and the dynamic, and it’s rubbish.

’ I gulped some more wine. ‘I do think we should help Annie, though. If she knows more about the affair she might find it’s easier to come to terms with.

She’ll be in a position of power.’ Then, because something about Flynn’s apparent disbelief that I could have any influence made me want to fly over the top of his scepticism in a vehicle made of whimsy, ‘We can always offer to set fire to his trousers, if she wants.’

‘Will you tell her that’s what you’re doing?’

‘I think she’ll know. The flames and the smell of scorching M&S underpants will be the giveaway.’

He stared at me silently for a moment. ‘I meant, are you going to tell her you’re tracking her husband, not about the setting fire to his trousers, which, as you so eloquently put it, will become obvious in time.’

‘Oh.’ My confidence left me in the face of his matter-of-factness and I felt myself go red. ‘I don’t know. I have to talk to Margot and Wren first. I just had the idea, I can’t go off and do it by myself.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I have a job that I absolutely will lose if I take any more time off. They’ve run out of sympathy. Especially because,’ I admitted to the bottom of my now-empty glass, ‘I’m really shit at it. I hate it. Call-centre work was the only thing I could find, though, and it covers the bills.’

‘Oh dear, you are having a bad time,’ Flynn said cheerily. ‘I’d offer you a job here, but I don’t think you’d like the conditions.’

‘Working with you? Nope, you’re right there. I couldn’t work with a smarmy arse like you.’

‘Ha.’ He wandered off to go and serve a trendy young couple who were dressed to the nines.

I wondered where they were off to. Then I wondered what their relationship looked like, whether he was cheating on her or she on him, or whether they were totally loved up, as they appeared to be, and a pang of jealousy hit me like sniper fire, strafing my nerve endings until I had to turn away.

Flynn didn’t come back. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted him to, but he got busy, serving and sorting bottles and loading the dishwasher, and I’d finished my wine, so I went home.

The silence buzzed. Even the couple downstairs had entered their refractory period. The shops were closed, there was no traffic apart from the odd car bumping up or down the hill on its way somewhere. Everyone seemed to be where they wanted to be right now. I picked up my phone.

‘Margot, I’ve been thinking.’ It was her voicemail, but better than sitting in silence.

‘If we can find out Eddie’s usual routine from Annie – carefully, so we don’t let on what we’re doing – then maybe the three of us could take it in turns to keep an eye on him?

Maybe we could take photos? Then maybe we can tell Annie what we know, but we can do it in a supportive way, so that we’re there when she finds out who it is, and she’s got us there to talk to about what she does next? Maybe. Anyway. See you on Monday.’

I hesitated. My finger hovered over the 0 button, and I fought with myself not to delete the message which had, after all, mostly been maybes stuck together with supposition and not quite given the impression of Purposeful Fee that I’d intended.

Sod it. I carried on. ‘Oh, and of course Fraser might want to be involved too, but then again he might think it’s too revengey for him, being a man. Okay then, bye.’

There. I took a deep breath and the unaccustomed feeling of accomplishment settled on my head like a crown. See, world? I could do it. I could have ideas…

The phone rang five minutes later. ‘Hello, Fee, it’s Margot. Are you free tomorrow evening? Only, I’ve had a bit of a think about what you said.’

All the poise and certainty plummeted. What had I said? Had I just been stupid? But it was only the club, I hadn’t proposed holding strip nights in the wine bar. Was I free? A kind of bitterness scratched at the back of my eyes. ‘Yes, I’m free.’

‘Then let’s meet in the usual place. Oh, and let’s not mention this to Annie yet, shall we? I’ll phone the others and ask them to come. We’ll all have a little conflab and maybe come up with something? Would that suit?’

There was an eagerness in Margot’s voice, as though she was looking forward to it, and it struck me suddenly that perhaps she was as lonely as I was.

Newly single, having to adjust to a whole new way of life – not that it was new for me, more a recurring reality, but it was still an adjustment.

I felt that glimmer of warmth again, not happiness that someone else was as miserable as I was, but a snatch of fellow-feeling.

It wasn’t just me. Other people were alone too.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I said, knowing that I sounded jaunty and in control again and rather liking it.

‘Wonderful.’ And Margot hung up. I sat for a moment, staring around the flat, and then went to tidy the kitchen.