From The Heart by Sheila O'Flanagan

‘Honestly, Janine, you’re getting it a bit out of proportion. And a few minutes ago you were asking me about getting engaged to him!’
    True, I thought. Maybe Janine wasn’t such a good friend. Maybe she was just trying to stir it up and maybe she was seriously jealous like Leanne with me. ‘He’s using you, Natalie,’ she said. ‘He wants someone around when he’s stuck and he’s out with other women whenever you’re not there.’ I was able to knock that one on the head fairly quickly. I was always there for him.
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Cheryl suddenly. ‘I’ve another call coming in. I’ll talk to you soon.’
    There wasn’t another call coming in to Cheryl’s phone but she’d clearly got fed up with talking to Janine. I didn’t blame her. After all, everyone bangs on about how great your friends are and how important their opinions might be and how, in the end, women support each other all the time, but the bottom line was that me and Cheryl both had jealous friends who didn’t realise that the relationship we had with our boyfriends was just as important. Leanne wasn’t going out with anyone at the moment and that, in my view, was why she was so het up about Ian. I’d bet any money that Janine didn’t have a boyfriend either.
    Then Cheryl’s phone did ring again. This time she smiled as she answered it.
    ‘Hello, darling.’
    It was the wonderful Tom, I guessed. She was besotted with him. I could hear it in her voice.
    ‘Oh, no, Tom – why?’ She looked aghast. ‘. . . Yes, but, well I’ve just told Janine that I couldn’t go out with them because I was going out with you and she said that they were going to ask Martina instead . . . A few minutes earlier . . .’ She was looking at her left hand again. ‘. . . No, but you told me you booked it so I didn’t want to let you down . . . of course I realise that you have to work but . . .’
    I watched her face. This had happened before. I knew it had. She had that kind of resigned expression that means the excuse has already been used. And she’s accepting it even if she isn’t very happy about it.
    ‘It’s not that,’ she told Tom. ‘It’s just – well, this is always happening.’ She bit her lip and listened again. ‘No, I’m not going to ring Janine back . . . Because I already told her I was going out with you . . . No. Oh, come on Tom! Give me a break.’
    That’s something else that men don’t understand. Presumably if Cheryl had told Tom that she couldn’t go out with him he’d simply ring up his mates and happily announce, ‘Guess what, I’m free after all,’ and head off to the match or the pub or whatever with them even if he’d told them five minutes earlier that he couldn’t go. But with women . . . I don’t know. Maybe we think we’re losing face or something if we’re supposed to be going out with a guy and it gets called off. I mean, it’s totally stupid but that’s the way it works.
    Tom ended the conversation, Cheryl closed her little snap-shut phone and gazed out of the train window at the backs of the houses we hurtled past. And then I noticed a tear tipping over the brim of her eye and rolling slowly down her cheek.
    I bit my lip. There was something sadly wrong with her relationship if she was crying over this. I felt uncomfortable at having listened, at having sneaked a look into her life. She wiped the tear away and turned back into the carriage, opening up her phone again. She hit speed-dial.
    ‘Tom, hi.’
    Maybe she was going to break up with him, I thought. Maybe she’d decided that being with the girls was more important after all.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I hung up on you.’
    I hadn’t noticed that. I’d assumed that after she’d said ‘Give me a break’ he’d said something else before they’d stopped talking because she hadn’t closed the phone straight away. But apparently not, they’d ended on a sour note and now she was retrieving the situation.
    ‘Yes,