nervous; Jules had done Lighter Life last year and then relapsed badly.
Jules turned round, tried to lean back. Everyone tensed. She squealed: ‘I can’t let myself!’
‘Harder than you think, isn’t it!’ trilled Linda, delightedly. ‘It can be surprisingly difficult to let go.’
‘It’s not advisable to mimic fainting from furniture, is why,’ Delia said. She knew she was getting herself into more trouble but she felt too mutinous to care.
Linda turned the swivel eyes of a fanatic upon her.
‘Exactly! Unlearning our inhibitions is real work. De-inhibitisers bring us closer together: emotionally, socially, even spiritually.’
‘I’m the only Christian,’ Ann said.
‘Spirituality can take many forms,’ Linda said, sweetly.
‘That stuff with the aliens that the actors do isn’t religion,’ Ann retorted. ‘Jesus was the son of God, not the son of Zod.’
Linda looked confused and Delia found herself unexpectedly giggling at a bona fide Ann zinger.
After two false starts, Jules let herself drop backwards onto their arms, the slippery sweatiness among the interlinked hands palpable.
As Jules fell towards them, Delia had an awful premonition they’d fail her and she’d perish in the world’s most ludicrously unnecessary death. Spin that, council.
As it was, they staggered slightly but they supported her with ease. Or, they thought they had, until a bloodcurdling scream was emitted.
At first, Delia thought it was Jules, but Jules was still horizontal, blinking up at them. She looked as frightened as everyone else.
As they set her on her feet, Delia turned to see Ann sat on a chair, holding her arm out in front of her, face contorted in a rictus of pain.
‘My arm! My arm!’
‘Heavens above, what’s the matter?’ Roger said.
‘It’s a fracture. I’ve not got the support bandage on today.’
Someone stepped forward to try to examine Ann and she let out another howl.
‘Don’t TOUCH IT!’
‘What did you do to it?’ Delia said.
‘It got shut in a fire door in Chapel St Leonards,’ Ann said. ‘It’s never been right since.’
Delia remembered that tale. The gruesome incident happened in 1989. Ann was only obsessed with expiry dates for food, obviously.
‘Was I that heavy?’ Jules said, quietly, and Delia said quickly, ‘Not at all! Not even slightly! Ann has an old injury.’
Yeah, a sprain of the manners.
‘Do you need First Aid?’ Roger said to Ann.
‘No, I am used to pain,’ Ann said, with a whiff of burning martyr.
‘Who’s our next volunteer?’ he said, trying to restore focus.
‘Shouldn’t you do exercises where I can take part?’ Ann said, beady eyes on a wary Roger. His eyes were suddenly full of: oh my God, I am going to be sued up the pipe on a discrimination and disability ticket.
Delia nearly laughed out loud. Ann truly was a rattlesnake in a Per Una waterfall cardigan.
Roger went into hushed conference with Linda and when they concluded, Linda said: ‘OK, we’re going to move on to a great fun exercise, my favourite. We all tell everyone one fact about ourselves that the group doesn’t know, for discussion! Here’s mine, to kick you off. I’ve seen Del Amitri nearly fifty times in concert and am a founder member of a fan club, The Del Boys and Girls.’
‘Never heard of them,’ Ann said.
After the excitement of Ann squawking, Delia’s hot resentment of the team-building games returned with full force.
Then irritation turned to boredom. Feigning interest in a colleague’s car-booting hobby or childhood sporting achievement wasn’t easy.
As they discussed her diffident gay colleague Tim’s trip to Reykjavik, Delia’s mind roamed the room and wandered out of the window. And then – KABOOM – something suddenly burst into her front brain at the most inappropriate moment.
Like a music hall act leaping through the curtains with splayed jazz hands – ta dah! – while an audience sat in sepulchral silence.
It had happened in the first days of February, earlier this year. Paul had slung his fisherman’s coat over the banister and Delia had seen a card in an inside pocket slide out. She wouldn’t usually have been nosy, but she could spy a teddy bear face. It couldn’t have been for Paul’s nephews – Delia ran the birthday admin for him.
‘What’s that?’ She’d tweaked it out, and found a Valentine’s card, a tooth-rottingly sweet, teenage sort of one with teddies stood in a pyramid formation, their rounded bellies each carrying a letter B-E-M-Y-V-A-L-E-N-T-I-N-E.
Paul had blushed damson. Paul never blushed.
‘For me? Aww! Getting slushy in your old age,’ she teased him.
She’d thought it was odd – Paul thinking of Valentine’s Day for once, the choice of that card. He sometimes came home with a bottle of Amaretto on the 14th of February, the choice of beverage in honour of their first meeting, but cards and flowers weren’t Paul’s way.
‘I’ll get you a different one. Not much of a surprise,’ he’d demurred. Sure enough, Delia received Monet’s lilies instead, although she insisted she liked the cheesy teddies.
Delia added the clues together. It had been for Celine. She had been getting romantic gestures long denied to Delia. And February to May: they’d been seeing each other longer than three months.
She felt as if she’d been disembowelled with a melon baller.
‘Delia. Now you,’ Roger said, turning to face her.
‘What?’ she said, blankly. It wasn’t meant to be insolent; she just felt so howlingly empty. She thought it didn’t matter that work didn’t mean anything because home was everything. Now, she had nothing.
‘Please tell everyone here a fact about you we don’t know.’
Delia blinked. That they didn’t know? Her life?
Her mouth was dry.
‘Last Friday, I proposed to my boyfriend. Then he sent a text meant for another woman to me. It turned out he’s been having an affair. We’ve split up.’
The circle of faces registered a mixture of fascination
