Same Time Next Week

Chapter 29

‘Here you go,’ said Ray, bringing a plate of gooey cookies through to the back room, still warm from the oven.

‘Oh, Ray, you really didn’t have to. I don’t think there will be that many people coming anyway,’ replied Amanda, hoping that her second friendship meeting didn’t just consist of her and gobby Janine. If that happened, she’d close the fledgling club down and go back to square one. Or abandon it totally.

‘Because of you, I have customers,’ said Ray, then he tilted his head. ‘What’s going on with your neck there?’

‘God knows,’ she said. At least she knew it wasn’t another present the menopause fairy had decided to chuck at her. It was simply tension she was carrying in her head and shoulders, tension caused by her shit of a brother who was doing everything to sabotage the plans she was trying to set in place to move their mum to safer accommodation. She’d rung him to ask how he’d got on with the conversation he’d promised to have with her. He’d told her that he’d had a think about it, and it would be too much: ‘the stress would kill Mother’ , he’d decided. Amanda had told him that the stairs would kill her first and slammed down the phone on him. As she expected, her mum had gone over to Bradley’s side and no longer wanted to talk about moving. No wonder her neck felt tight. She could hardly turn it. She’d had two lots of painkillers and it hadn’t even taken the edge off it. And it wasn’t doing much for her insomnia, either.

‘Sit,’ said Ray. He was insistent when she looked puzzled. ‘Just do it.’

He pushed her down onto one of the chairs at the table and moved behind her. She turned to see what he was up to and he clicked his fingers and pointed forwards. She heard him rubbing his hands together. Then she felt those hands on her shoulders and totally stiffened.

‘Oh, come on now,’ he said, chiding her. ‘You’re kicking against me. I know what I’m doing. I learned how to do sports massage when I coached some football. I won’t be as brutal as I should be but trust me, it will help.’

She gulped, had a sudden vision of herself lying on the table in front of her naked and covered in olive oil, being massaged by Ray wearing an American football kit. Those HRT patches certainly didn’t stifle any wayward imagination.

‘Turn to your right,’ he commanded, gently manoeuvring her neck to where he wanted it positioned so he could smooth up and down it with his strong fingers.

‘Ideally I’d have given you a good half hour on it. You need to go and book yourself in somewhere. You desk-dwellers are prone to this, it’s your weak spot,’ said Ray.

At the moment she was made up entirely of weak spots, all of them wanting a massage.

‘I need oil,’ said Ray. ‘You mind if I splash some on you?’

Was he joking? If he wasn’t – yes. If he was – still yes.

He was joking, of course.

He kneaded, his thumbs circled, his fingers pressed; she wanted him never to stop. He was right though, she did need to book herself in somewhere. She failed to give herself the care she needed.

‘OOoh.’ She hadn’t meant to make the noise but he got her in a sweet spot. It was directly connected to somewhere she shouldn’t tell him about.

‘That’s it, good girl, you’re softening,’ he said.

He had no idea.

She heard Janine’s voice outside talking to someone and she jumped up just before she walked in with Sky, the lovely silver-blonde young woman who made teddy bears.

‘Thank you, Ray… for the… cookie… things,’ said Amanda, a bit at odds.

‘Ooh, more of those gooey biccys,’ Janine shrieked with delight, more or less leaping over the table to get to them. Had she been a racehorse, she’d have cleared Bechers Brook for them without even breaking into a sweat.

‘Anytime,’ said Ray, who had a habit of making things go gooey in the middle, it seemed.

Amanda checked her watch. It looked as if there would only be three people tonight, then. The knitter was a no-show and so were the other two silent women – no shock there. Then the door opened and in walked a woman with a glory of ginger hair, but very tired eyes.

‘Hi, is this the women’s friendship group?’ Mel said. She couldn’t quite believe she’d dragged herself to the shower, washed her hair, put on some clothes, tried to cover up the giant cold sore with artful dabs of make-up and made it out of the door. She just couldn’t stand one more lonely night in the house. It would probably be a wasted effort but when you were desperate for some company and were actually thinking about contacting your horror of a sister – yes, things were that bad – then something had to be done about it.

Janine had brought with her a list of facts about the menopause. Not so much a list, as a ream. She had rattled off two pages of ‘did you know’ information about it – and she was by far from finished – when there was a knock at the door and it opened just a little for them to see a slice of person, statuesque with long blonde hair.

‘Is this the friendship group?’ asked the new arrival, shyly. She was well over six foot tall. ‘Oh, hello.’ Her lips curved into a smile when she spotted Sky.

‘It is indeed, come on in,’ said Amanda, eager to welcome a friendly face, though really she should do the woman a favour and tell her to run, run as fast as she could in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry, it’s for women only,’ said Janine, just as Astrid was about to take a step inside.

Astrid’s foot stalled.

‘You come in right now,’ said Amanda, furious that gobby Janine had the gall to police the door.

‘Er… excuse me, but no.’ Janine started making a series of jerky, affronted movements, her eyes raking up and down the newcomer. ‘I thought this was a a friendship group for women . What are you?’

‘She’s an Astrid ,’ said Sky, leaping to her feet as if she was about to confess to being Spartacus.

‘Well, I’m afraid, if that ’s staying, I’m not.’ Janine grabbed her copious notes, her bag and her coat. No one did anything to stop her. She marched out and shut the door rudely behind her, a statement of her outrage.

Astrid stood there not knowing what to do.

‘Should I go?’ she asked, eventually.

‘You absolutely shouldn’t,’ said Amanda, cracking a smile. ‘If only I had a guest-of-honour chair, it would be yours right now.’

It was strange how dynamics worked, thought Amanda a little later as she handed round more of Ray’s delicious cookies. It was as if Janine’s presence had dammed up a river that could now run freely. The atmosphere felt lighter by degrees. The coffee flowed. She’d never get to sleep with all this caffeine in her system, but sod it, this was more how she’d imagined her group would be. Preferably with a few more people, but this was a good start, easy company, though the redhead wasn’t saying much.

Amanda had given her spiel again about where she worked and what she had tasked herself with doing, and that she hoped in the course of the weeks ahead she’d harvest some useful info about the menopause’s impact on the workplace; but more than that, she hoped she could bring together some nice women to let off steam, share, support, chat, or moan in a safe, protected space. Without some gobshite grabbing all the limelight , she added to herself.

‘I work for a bank,’ said Mel, forcing herself to contribute because she was aware she’d been sitting there like an ornament. ‘And a couple of years ago, head office asked anyone going through the menopause to do a survey. So a couple of us did; it came to nothing. We got a gift bag to say thank you which had a pen and three Tena Ladys in it. Oh, and some samples of Yorkshire Tea. Apparently the idea was that everything tastes better with a cup of tea. One of the women I worked with said she’d like to shove that effing tea bag down the CEO’s throat. She was suffering with a bit of rage at the time. We kept her off the counter when we saw her turning red.’ Mel smiled, for the first time in god knows how long.

Astrid threw back her head and laughed at that, along with the others.

‘My mother-in-law didn’t have a single symptom,’ Mel went on. ‘Some women don’t know they’re born.’ Mind you, Mother Nature probably thought she’d suffered enough having that personality , Mel didn’t add.

‘I had an early menopause, thanks to a hysterectomy,’ said Sky. ‘I hope that’s me done for a while on the change front.’

‘I know why they used to call it the change ,’ said Astrid. ‘I’m not going through the menopause but I have felt change inside me, unrest und anxiety. It’s my age, I’m sure. And maybe my circumstances.’ She gave a smile then that was right at the sad end of the spectrum. It was a smile that every one of the women in the room recognised.

‘Well, you’re among new friends if you want to talk about those circumstances,’ said Amanda.

Astrid’s expression morphed to that of someone mortified that she might have made herself the centre of attention.

‘It’s just life stuff of course,’ she made light of it. ‘Very small problems considering what some people have to put up with.’

Sky replied to that, ‘Astrid, my dad used to say that we shouldn’t try to bury problems because we think someone else might be going through worse. What you’re feeling is valid and real and shouldn’t be minimised.’ She felt herself starting to blush in case she was coming across as a wannabe Confucius. ‘For some context, my dad had a lot going on in his life and I didn’t want to tell him that I’d battered a girl at school with my satchel and was worried about the repurcussions.’ Then Sky wished she hadn’t given them that example because it didn’t exactly cast her in a good light. But she spotted Amanda’s eyes twinkling with some amusement.

‘Sky,’ said Astrid with a look askance at her, ‘I can’t imagine you hitting anyone with a school bag.’

‘It was a big bag too. Full of loads of books and I didn’t hit her hard enough, even though I knocked her flying off her feet,’ Sky fessed up. ‘She said something vile about my dad. I never did tell him what it was but…’ Her voice trailed off because she didn’t want to start unloading all that. She waved her words away. ‘Anyway, sorry, I hijacked the conversation there. Would anyone like a fill-up of coffee?’

Everyone put up their hand.

‘Okay, so what was it that brought us all here?’ asked Amanda. ‘What was it that made you think, I need to go and mix with total strangers up at the new diner on the hill? Because I’ll confess, I might be mining for menopause info but I wanted the company of women and I wondered if there would be others like me. I used to have pals at school and somehow, when we grew up, we went our separate ways; they got kids, drifted into other friendships where there were other kids. I miss having a good mate. Someone to take me off the boil.’ She was on the boil these days rather more than Stromboli.

‘I am a widow,’ said Astrid, taking advantage of a rare moment of bravery that happened to land with her. ‘I met someone who loved me for who I am… now, and it was quite the shock for us both to find each other. I thought that people only found a love of their lives like that in books or in films, then I go and fall for a man and then he tells me he’s fallen hook, line and zinker for me. And we married, we had a big wedding because he knew I always wanted to be a bridesmaid but I never was, so he made me a bride instead. And last year he died. He felt a bit poorly, he went to bed to sleep it off and suddenly he was getting worse. His body started attacking itself, trying to fight off the infection. He was six foot eight inches tall, he was bigger than a church door and he was felled by little, tiny germs.’

Her voice faltered; she coughed, sniffed. ‘Sorry.’

Mel reached down into her handbag and pulled out a packet of tissues then whizzed it across the table to Astrid.

‘Take the whole packet, I’ve got plenty,’ she said. She was keeping the Kleenex company afloat single-handedly at present.

‘I’m lonely,’ Astrid admitted. ‘That is why I am here. The place where I am most happy at work, they are selling. I have lost my man. My world is upside down. I don’t need the money but I am hoping to rent a room out in my house just so that there is someone around to share the space with.’

‘Be very careful then,’ Sky warned her. ‘If you get the wrong person, your home might not feel like your home any more. I live in a house and it used to be great, my housemates were ace but now the creepy landlord has moved in and trust me, I would rather live alone any day than share with someone I couldn’t stand.’ She went on to tell them how bad things really were and how getting out wasn’t as easy as it might appear.

Astrid blew her nose. ‘You should come and rent my room, Sky,’ she said.

‘If it’s still available in five months, I will.’ Said aloud, ‘five months’ sounded even longer than the time it was.

‘Just leave now, never mind about the money. I am sure we can sort out something.’

‘Thank you, Astrid. I’ll think about it.’

It was so kind of Astrid, but she wouldn’t move in if she didn’t have money to pay her rent. And she wasn’t going to let Wilton get away with not giving her the bond back. She’d think of something and wouldn’t say any more about it for now. Astrid was too generous and Sky wouldn’t take advantage.

‘What about you, Mel?’ asked Amanda, because she looked like a woman who had been kicked to buggery, dropped and then picked up again for part two.

‘Me?’ began Mel, with a clip of brittle laughter. ‘Up until three weeks ago if you’d asked me how things were going, I’d have said “I’m blessed”. Lovely husband, no mortgage on the house, good job, secure. Then my husband went to a school reunion. He didn’t want to go, I told him not to be so daft, he’d enjoy it. And it appears that he met someone that night and he’s walked out on me to be with them. Just like that. He took the sandwiches I’d made for him, he went to work and he didn’t come home. The man who I would have given a gold Olympic medal to for being constant couldn’t even let me know he wasn’t dead in hospital. I was going out of my head. He wouldn’t answer my calls or my texts.’

Mel looked up and found a captive audience. She didn’t think she would have been able to speak about it so objectively, as if this had all happened to another Mel in a parallel universe.

‘The first I knew about what was going on was when her husband turned up on my doorstep to tell me his wife was shagging my husband. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I got the wrong woman and went storming into her beauty salon to confront her and made a total arse of myself because her bloke was on an oil rig north of Aberdeen. Then the right woman’s husband turned up again at my door on Saturday morning looking like a pound-shop Liam Gallagher, with the fucking personalised anniversary present I’d ordered for my husband – because he’s only a postman… and he’s called Pat. And if that wasn’t enough, I opened up the bloody present and they’d printed “ SIEVE ” on it instead of “ STEVE ”.’

She breathed the full stop. There was silence and then the room erupted with laughter. All four of them, Mel most of all and she had no idea why she was laughing. And Astrid was trying not to and Amanda’s eyes were squirting out tears, and Sky was apologising and trying to press the corners of her mouth inwards to stop. They were in fits and then it died to sighs of apology and smiles of sympathy.

‘It’s not funny, I’m so sorry,’ said Amanda.

‘Trust me, I needed to laugh,’ said Mel. No, it wasn’t funny – and it also was. Postman Pat who looked, sounded and even walked like Liam Gallagher. Lovely, kind Saran Sykes whom Mel had fantasised about punching; that sodding money clip with SIEVE engraved on it. You couldn’t make it up. It was like being in a play written by someone who’d shuffled up a bag of tropes and pulled them out one by one to make a storyline from.

She told them then how Steve had come back to fetch his clothes and wouldn’t engage with her, even though he must have seen how much she was hurting.

‘It was just cruel,’ she said. ‘I was looking at someone I’d known for over thirty years and I didn’t know him at all. I never thought he’d treat me like this.’

‘Sounds to me like he’s deflecting,’ said Astrid, reaching for another cookie, ‘shutting you out because your tears could make him feel guilty and a lesser man if he lets them in.’

‘I have to agree there,’ Amanda nodded slowly, sympathetically. ‘He’s creating some emotional distance, so he doesn’t have to live with the shame of what he’s doing to you.’

‘I don’t understand why, though,’ said Mel, shaking her head. ‘Maybe I might if he was highly sexed and I wasn’t giving him what he wanted, but if anything it’s the other way round. And thinking about it, because I’ve been analysing our relationship like a forensic scientist since it happened, it’s always been me who suggested we go here and do this, putting the effort into us. If it was up to Steve, we’d sit in front of the TV every night apart from going out for a curry occasionally with his brother and whoever he happens to be with at the time. I can’t get my head around any of it. What did I do or not do to make him into this man?’

She reached in her bag for a tissue. Trying to get into Steve’s head from every angle had exhausted her. He’d turned into one of those puzzles with a treat in the middle that you couldn’t get to because there was absolutely no way in. She blew her nose. If she could have sold snot, she’d have been able to buy herself a Porsche.

‘Please don’t start blaming yourself for his behaviour,’ said Amanda gently. ‘Just because you can’t explain it, don’t automatically presume it must be you who’s at fault.’

Mel didn’t say that she was already doing that. That she’d wondered if all this would have happened if she’d been a couple of stones lighter. Or had longer legs, or brown eyes instead of green and wore a more intoxicating perfume, or wasn’t Mrs Boring works-in-a-bank.

‘Postman Pat gave me his number in case I wanted to talk,’ she sniffed.

‘And do you?’ asked Amanda.

‘I could think of nothing worse at the time,’ she replied. ‘But I must admit, I am coming round to the idea. Should I?’

‘I vould,’ said Astrid. ‘Information is power.’

‘It’s up to you, but yes, if it were me, I think I would too,’ Amanda nodded.

‘And me,’ Sky added to them.

‘Thank you,’ said Mel. This was why she had braved coming here, to just be with other women who might have been around the block and had an inner compass that wasn’t whirling in the dark. She was lost in her own life without a map and groping for a guide rope.

It was the time to bring the meeting to an end; the session had flown tonight without gobby Janine dragging them down, and Amanda knew that while she might not have collected any data about menopause in the workplace, the evening had been beyond valuable for them all.

‘Same time next week, everyone?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Deffo,’ said Mel, seemingly speaking for them all.

Sitting in her car, Mel pulled the piece of paper with the postman’s number on it out of her purse and started off a text.

This is Mel English. I will chat to you if you like.

She hadn’t even had chance to start up the car when a reply came back.

In person would be best. What about the Spouting Tap in Little Kipping? It’s out of the way. Tomorrow at 7.30 pm suit?

She sent a thumbs up.

The diner was empty when Amanda came out of the back room carrying the empties. Ray was wrapping up talking to one of the chefs who was on his way home. This place should be buzzing until at least ten. Ray didn’t seem that unhappy though, but then he was a glass-half-full kind of guy, that was clear. She should ask him for some lessons.

‘I heard you all laughing from in here,’ Ray said to her, smiling, taking one of the coffee pots from her. His hand brushed against hers in the act of doing it. She thought about his fingers smoothing down her neck earlier and her brain fizzed like a shaken bottle of champers.

‘They were a smashing bunch of women. I hope they come back,’ she answered him. ‘Were you busy tonight?’

He rocked an open hand back and forth. ‘Been better, been worse. Not bad for midweek, I suppose. We have a party of fourteen on Friday night and Saturday’s more or less full, so I’m good with that. How’s the neck?’

Amanda tilted it quickly to the side. ‘Terrible. Know anything that could help?’ An internal voice of disapproval reprimanded her for flirting. She might as well have thrown her knickers at him. She went for damage limitation. ‘I’m joking, obviously; it’s eased up, whatever you did worked. Thank you, I’m good now.’

‘Go and book a long massage. Anyway, I’ve been thinking, one night, I’m going to cook you dinner here,’ said Ray.

‘Honestly, no thanks necessary. I—’

Ray shushed her. ‘It’s happening. Don’t argue.’

She opened her mouth and that inner voice told her to shut up and stop wrecking things for herself. She heeded it, for once. So now she had something else to look forward to, as well as the next Tuesday club, she thought as she said a goodnight and headed out to the car.

She’d just zapped it open when the phone rang in her bag. It was Bradley and Bradley rarely rang.

She answered it warily. ‘Hi. Everything okay?’ because she suspected it wasn’t.

‘Mother’s in hospital,’ he said. ‘Dolly next door called me.’

‘What happened?’ asked Amanda, feeling her heart speeding in her chest.

A beat. ‘Apparently… she fell down the stairs,’ he said.