Same Time Next Week

Chapter 33

Mel pulled up in the car park of the pub and wondered if Postman Pat was here yet. Would he be driving that very nice black Merc or the red Jag? Or was that his mountain bike chained up? She checked her watch; she was bang on time. She decided to go in and wait. She pushed open the door and thought, why the hell had she agreed to this? She’d done her best to appear presentable, even if this cold sore was big enough to grow crops on and still repelled all attempts to cover it up. Her jeans felt slack on her waist thanks to the cheating bastard husband diet and she’d resisted wearing black because she thought a pop of colour might lend her some confidence. She’d plumped for a pine green shirt, the one that made her hair look extra bright.

She approached the bar, waiting her turn behind a tall man with thick, greying hair that fell across his forehead on one side like the original Superman’s, and a slim woman with shoulder-length dark hair and pretty eyes who was probably years older than she looked; an attractive couple. He was carrying a briefcase and was all togged up in a suit, whereas she had sand-coloured cropped chinos on and trendy loafers.

‘Bottle of Peroni Red, please,’ Mel ordered when it was her turn.

‘Not here for the quiz, are you? Because there isn’t one this week,’ said the barmaid, popping the top off it and pouring it into a glass.

‘No, I’m not,’ she replied. Good job really, seeing as her brain was so scrambled at the moment she couldn’t even remember her maiden name, never mind who was the President of the United States in 1954.

She heard the outer door squeak open and shut and turned to see Pat had just come in, but not in a postman uniform. Blimey, he even dressed like Liam Gallagher. In fact he looked more like Liam Gallagher than Liam Gallagher’s reflection did. He raised his hand in a gesture of acknowledgement. She mirrored it automatically, though unsure what the correct protocol was for greeting the husband of the woman your own husband was banging.

‘I’ll get these,’ he said, taking a wallet out of his back jeans pocket.

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Bottle of Peroni Red, please,’ he ordered. Bloody hell, they were lager twins, Mel thought. They had so much in common.

He handed a twenty note over to the barmaid before Mel had the chance to get her money out. ‘For both,’ he said. She didn’t protest because she couldn’t be bothered fighting about anything else. She’d get the next ones, if they were here for that long.

As they made their way to a table, a younger man turned and did a double-take at Pat, and Mel thought it must happen all the time to him.

She caught his scent as she followed him, he’d put aftershave on but she couldn’t place it. It was an odd one: earthy, smoky, vanilla, not usually a combo her nose would agree with but she liked it; it was off the wall like he was.

They sat down in a corner by the window. A waitress came out carrying two plates of food and headed past them.

‘Do you want anything to eat?’ asked Pat.

‘It’s not a date,’ snapped Mel.

‘No, I know but… I… didn’t… know if you were… expecting to.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Scampi and chips would not go well with the conversation they were about to have. You don’t have to answer him in that tone though , said an inner reprimanding voice.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.’ He’d be thinking that’s why her husband left, horrible old cow barking at people.

‘’S’fine.’

They sat in silence for a long minute, sipping at their drinks. Where was the entry point to this tangled mess, she thought.

‘I don’t know how to start,’ he said, echoing her unspoken words. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘I wasn’t going to. Friends said I should.’ Friends was pushing it; women she’d met once. Women she’d like to see more of.

He sipped again, she sipped again. It was going to be a very long night if they only said a couple of sentences every five minutes. She dived in.

‘Let’s begin at the beginning then, shall we? What happened at your end?’

Pat put his glass down slowly before speaking.

‘I came in from work on the Monday, found a note on the kitchen table saying she needed some space and not to look for her, she’d be in touch when she were ready. I went upstairs and saw how much stuff she’d taken out of her wardrobe. I knew it had something to do with that school reunion, she went proper odd after she’d been there. I tried messaging, ringing but she wouldn’t answer her phone. More or less what happened last time, really.’

Mel gave a small gasp. ‘She’s done it before?’

‘Yep, couple of years ago. We hadn’t been getting on so well, she upped and left, someone she worked with. It all blew out pretty quickly and she came back and we tried to get over it.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a manager of a Tosca coffee shop. I rang them when I couldn’t get hold of her but apparently she’d not been in for a whole week. God knows what they thought of her own husband ringing up and not knowing that, they were very blunt with me on the phone. Yet till then she’d been coming home normally as if she’d been working. So I can only presume she was with… your husband all the time instead.’

‘How did you find out who she’d run off with?’

‘My brother knows someone who knows someone who was at the reunion and he did a bit of digging for me. I knew she was with a fella; I knew all that stuff about wanting space was bollocks. When I found out who she copped off with at the party, I looked up his business and got the registered address. I figured she was deffo with him. Apparently they were at it in the school toilets.’

Mel covered her ears. She didn’t want to think about Steve doing that, but a picture was now staining her brain of them both passionate and panting and having a long, earth-shattering simultaneous orgasm next to a urinal.

‘Sorry, TMI. I thought it might help you.’

She would never get that AI image scrubbed. ‘How on earth did you think that would help?’

‘In case you were imagining a Hallmark film. Which it definitely ain’t.’

Clumsily put, but she understood what he meant, even if she wouldn’t have thanked him for it.

‘The girls’ toilets, in case you were wondering. Not the boys’.’

‘I really wasn’t wondering.’ At least it took the urinal out of the frame.

They sipped at their drinks and then Mel said, ‘I didn’t even know he’d left me on the Wednesday. I thought he was working away overnight.’

‘She’d been gone two days then.’

‘He didn’t take any stuff with him. Why?’ One of the many questions frying her brain.

‘Dunno. Maybe he just decided on the spur of the moment that… today was the day. Maybe he was dragging his heels and she gave him the now or never ultimatum.’

That sounded plausible.

‘Have you heard from… her since?’

Pat rubbed his chin and Mel noticed his long fingers, proper guitar-playing hands. Young Jason Jepson had big hands for a kid his size and had been as pleased as punch when she’d told him that he had a great advantage, being gifted those.

‘I got a text from her saying that she couldn’t wait to see me, lover. Then a follow-up saying to ignore the last text, which had been sent in error. She hadn’t sent it in error at all, she was just poking the bear. You see, she’s all about the drama is Chlo, that much I’ve learned over the years. She’d like nothing better than to see me and your fella fighting over her, which is basically what happened last time. I didn’t feel good about lamping the area manager of Tosca coffee in the car park and denting his Maserati.’

It sounded like a euphemism and Mel made an involuntary snort and tried to cover it up as a cough. It wasn’t funny, none of this was funny. But sometimes it was, as Frank Carson used to say, the way you tell ’em.

‘I could have lost my job if he’d pressed charges. He didn’t, he just wanted it to go away. So I was really angry at myself this time, reacting… and I let you have it and you di’n’t deserve it. It’s not me, despite what you might think. I won’t be dancing when she pulls the strings this time. I felt really bad about just turning up at yours like that and I wouldn’t have hit him if I’d seen him.’

‘What would you have done then?’ asked Mel.

‘Honestly? I’d have looked him in the eye and told him he was welcome to her,’ said Pat.

‘For a moment there I thought that was Liam Gallagher,’ said Alex, quietly, in case he was overheard.

‘Wrong side of the Pennines,’ replied Erin. The man sitting in the corner of the pub, alongside the woman with the lovely red hair, looked more Liam than Liam did these days.

‘How did you find out about Molly’s club?’ asked Alex. He’d been back to the bar and bought two packets of crisps, torn open the bags for them to share.

‘My ex-husband has a repair shop across from the tearoom and so I’d heard about it in passing. As Carona had died very suddenly, he suggested that maybe I would find some group therapy there advantageous; but me being me, I thought I could handle it by myself.’

If she’d told Bon the whole truth six months ago, he’d have frogmarched her to Molly’s, she was sure of it. ‘What about you?’

‘From a solicitor friend. She lost her partner very young in tragic circumstances and she couldn’t move on. Molly really helped her. She’s married now. To someone, ironically that she met in the group, a fireman. Tell me about your ex-husband.’

‘I left him for Carona; he forgave me even though I couldn’t forgive myself.’

‘Would you go back to him, given the chance?’

‘No. We were a mistake. One of my better mistakes, I have to say.’

Alex nudged the cheese and onion crisps closer to her.

‘Have some, they’re very good for the soul. They leave chicken soup behind in the starting blocks.’

She smiled and reached for one.

‘He told me last week that, before I left him, he had been on the cusp of ending our marriage, because he wasn’t in love with me any more. I can’t tell you how good that made me feel.’

Alex stared at her, trying to work out if she was being sarcastic.

‘I mean it,’ she clarified. ‘He’s the last person on earth I would want to hurt and I thought I’d mashed him, but I really hadn’t.’

‘Has he found someone else?’

‘Not yet, but I hope he does.’

‘What about you, do you think you’d like to meet someone else, Erin?’

‘I can’t even think about it, Alex,’ she said. ‘It frightened me with Carona how much someone could change in such a short time.’

‘Do people change? Or do they just present their best face at the beginning and that’s what you try to keep seeing as the veneer wears off? Not everyone is different from their initial shine, of course. Did your ex-husband change in the same way?’

Erin shook her head. ‘No, he was a constant.’

‘There you go, then.’

‘Cupid really is a twat, isn’t he?’

Alex smiled. ‘Sometimes. Not always.’

‘I’ve had an offer on the flat, and so I’m going house-hunting, which will be exciting.’

‘I’ll come with you if you like.’ He held up his hands to indicate that he hadn’t meant to imply she might need a man onboard. ‘I’m sure you are more than capable of choosing somewhere, but if you need some company I’m more than willing to be dragged around by you.’ He added cheekily, ‘Unless you’d rather take your perfect ex-husband, of course.’

Erin hooted. ‘If you feel you are so bored that you’d want to come, then give me your number.’

Yes, Bon would have gone with her, she knew that, but she needed to stop relying on him so much for support – emotional or otherwise. She didn’t want to take up the space in his life some other woman could have. Some very lucky woman.

‘How long have you been married to… her ,’ asked Mel. She couldn’t say the name without conjuring up the scent on Steve’s shirt. The innocent scent she had laughed at before she’d shoved it in the washing machine. The scent that had probably been transferred to him when they were up close and personal against a girls’ toilet cubicle wall. Eat your heart out, Mills and Boon.

‘Fifteen years,’ said Pat.

‘Any kids?’

‘I’ve got a daughter from an earlier relationship. They never took to each other. My daughter put up with her for my sake, but Chloe’s always been jealous of any other female on the scene, including my mam. You?’

‘I couldn’t have kids. I’d have loved one. I’ve been with Steve for thirty-one years. It’s our thirtieth wedding anniversary in June.’

‘Wow. And has he ever… done it before?’

‘Nope. Not even a glance in another female’s direction, this is why I can’t get my head around it all. I think he’s ashamed. He came home the day after you first turned up and just threw things in a suitcase but he wouldn’t talk, just totally shut me out. That says to me that he can’t face what he’s done, so that shame will be what brings him home, I’m sure of it.’

Pat wrinkled up his nose. ‘And would you want him back?’

Mel opened up her mouth to say that of course she would, because she’d never considered anything other, but the words wouldn’t come out for some reason.

‘Look, it’s your life. We don’t know each other but all I’m saying is that it’s going to be hard either way. I know that because I’ve done it. I never threw it back in her face after she’d had her… fling, because you can’t do that, the wound doesn’t have a chance to heal if you keep opening it up. It might not heal anyway; mine didn’t. I thought I was at fault and that’s why she’d gone and I was so intent on trying to fix us that I ignored how I was feeling. She just carried on as if nothing had happened; it was easy for her, and I tried, I did, but I never quite bossed it. You can’t rewind the clock, you can’t go back to how it was before because they’ll never be the same person again and so you have to learn to live with the change, the new them.’

Mel hadn’t considered that it would not be the same Steve in her life if he did come back. She only knew that she couldn’t survive it if they ended. She couldn’t throw thirty years away and start again by herself. She kept having flash visions of herself in a tiny, dull maisonette, lonely, no one to go on holiday with, watching Britain’s Got Talent on her own on Saturday nights with a sad fart microwave meal for one on a lap-tray. It couldn’t happen that way; she wouldn’t let it. And so her whole concentration was screwed onto the sticking place of him walking through the door and saying, ‘I’m home’, and what lay beyond that, she hadn’t considered.

‘What’s he like?’ asked Pat, breaking into her sad reverie. ‘In a nutshell.’

‘He works hard, he likes his job and he’s good at it, he’s handy around the house. He likes footy, cars, he’s a home bird. He’s got a good sense of humour.’ She paused, feeling emotion rise inside her. They used to laugh a lot together, less so maybe as they’d got older, but everyone got grumpier with age, didn’t they? Although she didn’t think she had. She took a breath and scraped around for something else to say because he didn’t sound very dynamic. ‘We like a holiday abroad. We rub along. We like to eat out… well, it’s more me that likes to do that because it gives me a break from cooking.’

‘I do most of the cooking at ours,’ said Pat. ‘I have the dinner ready for when she gets in. She hates cooking.’

Mel dropped a note of sardonic laughter. ‘Steve can’t cook for toffee. Sounds like they’ll be living on Super Noodles if he can find a recipe for them.’

The thought of it brought her a smug smidgeon of short-lived glee. She wondered how quickly he’d tire of that setup and if the lure of her Sunday roasts would entice him back. He liked his home-cooked meals best of all, did Steve.

‘Were you happy? Were there signs that he wasn’t?’

‘Yes, we were – and no, there weren’t,’ she answered, slightly affronted. ‘We’d got into a routine like any other couple. I suppose you could say it was a bit boring but he never said he wasn’t happy: if anything, it was me who made the effort to change things round and keep it fresh, you know. He just wanted to put his feet up when he came home; I would drag him to the cinema or out for dinner and he enjoyed it in the end… I think.’ If an ‘it was all right that’ was anything to go by .

‘Sex?’

Her mouth formed an O of shock. How dare he ask that?

‘We were fine,’ her tone defensive.

‘Chlo likes sex. It didn’t put her off having it with me while she must have been seeing your other half. I bet he wouldn’t be happy to hear that.’

‘Me and Steve…’ Mel blurted out, without meaning to and then didn’t know if she should finish the sentence. Oh, what the hell . They both needed to be aware of all the facts if they were going to try and help each other get through this mess. ‘We haven’t… you know… since the school reunion. He was tired the first weekend and the weekend after, he… couldn’t.’ Guilt , it had to be. And that was good. He was a decent man with a conscience. He had far more of one than Chloe – whatever her married name was – seemed to possess from the sounds of it.

‘What’s your surname?’ she asked.

‘Gallagher,’ Pat replied.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Yeah, I am, it’s Bannerman. But if you’re asking that so you can go and look her up, she’s taken everything down or turned it to private.’

That was exactly why she was asking.

‘There’s some photos of her on Google if you search,’ Pat went on.

‘And what’s she like?’ asked Mel.

‘Confident, good-looking, great figure, ambitious, self-obsessed, selfish. She likes the best things, always designer, stuff to show off with; she’s like a plate on a stick that has to keep spinning, constantly looking for the next thrill and then she gets bored with it really quickly. We’ve got a nice house, just around the corner which is why I’m going to have another Peroni in a minute and you don’t have to think that I’m drinking and driving.’

‘I’ll get them,’ insisted Mel, jumping up.

There was a queue at the bar so she went to the loo first and looked up Chloe Bannerman on Google images. She had to scroll through a few pages. Then up popped a waist-length shot of a woman in a suit, slender and attractive, shoulder-length dark-brown hair, juicy mouth, big smile, sexy as Nigella, Steve’s favourite. It was definitely her because underneath was the wording, ‘Manager Chloe Bannerman, Tosca Coffee, Wakefield.’ As Mel dried her hands, she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the sink with her pale, drawn face and that cold sore sitting on her lip as if it had taken up permanent residence, and thought, would Steve really leave that to come back to this?

‘So you’ll ring me then if you go and view any houses?’ Alex looked to Erin for confirmation. ‘I’ve bought a few properties in my time, and do know the right questions to ask.’

‘I promise,’ Erin drew a cross on her heart.

‘I might even be able to fix you up with a mates’ rates property solicitor.’

‘Now you’re talking.’

‘I’ll see you next week then at Molly’s… or maybe before.’ Alex smiled at her and she smiled back. He made the slightest movement forward that intimated he might have been about to kiss her on the cheek, but it didn’t happen and she felt a flick of disappointment that it hadn’t. She admonished herself for that as she got into her car because she’d met the guy twice, and yet she could feel that familiar stirring that just didn’t happen when you were merely friends with someone.

‘So are we just expected to sit and wait until they decide to call the shots?’ asked Mel, standing beside her car. She didn’t want to talk any more, she just wanted to get home, in case Steve turned up which was not highly likely but still a possibility. ‘Is my marriage over? I don’t know what to do.’ She made a growl of frustration. ‘He didn’t even want to go to that sodding reunion. I pushed him, I said he’d enjoy it. Ha. Never a truer word.’

She wasn’t sure if this meeting had done her good or not. Before she’d sat down with Postman Pat, she just presumed that Steve would recover from this temporary madness of his eventually and normal service would be resumed. Pat had given her too much to think about. She could see what he meant, though, that her life was going to be impacted by Steve coming back as much as it would by him leaving her permanently.

‘He’ll be in touch,’ Pat promised her. ‘They’re having a honeymoon period, it’s exciting and naughty at the moment, but then real life comes knocking. He’ll have money things to sort out, he’ll need more of his stuff before you decide to shove it on a bonfire.’

‘He won’t have considered that,’ said Mel with a gasp. ‘I’m not that sort of person.’

‘As you’ve discovered, we never really know anyone inside out. If you do want him back, sit tight, don’t phone, don’t text because you’ll get into his head more that way, which sounds nuts, but it’s true. Or you can take the control into your hands and pack up his stuff and throw him out.’

‘I just want him home,’ said Mel.

‘I’m done this time,’ said Pat. ‘At least I think I am.’