The Home for Broken Hearts (16 page)

Ellen smiled at him, glad to see him like this, young, brash, half drunk, half naked, and awkward. The real Matt, as disarming and handsome as he might be, was nothing like the captain in her dreams. Perhaps avoiding him was the wrong thing to do after all; the better she got to know him, the less he would embody that perfect hero in her head.

“Good night, Matt,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

“Night, Ellen, and…” Matt paused, suddenly bashful. “I’m glad you were up. It’s not often you meet a woman you can talk to.”

“Unlike the ones you can have sex with,” Ellen replied. “They’re a dime a dozen.”

Don’t you reckon, heh?” Pete chuckled into his third lunchtime pint, which seemed to be reflected quite graphically by the rising tide of red that crept over his jowls and toward the tips of his ears with each swig of beer. “Heh? Matt?”

Matt looked up from his own untouched beer and realized that he hadn’t been listening to a word that Pete had said since they’d sat down at the table. This was his third week at
Bang It!
and he was halfway through his probation. His first two columns had gone down well with Dan and, best of all, with the readers; he’d had quite a lot of actual letters, which was rare in the
Bang It!
office, which usually got Suze to make them up in her lunch hour. Dan was pleased with him, but the more he worked for Pete, the more he realized that half his job, at least, was comprised of babysitting his boss and keeping him at least vaguely on track. Nobody had said it out loud, of course, but the fact was that Pete was an alcoholic with a fondness for the odd line of midmorning coke. Matt had no idea how Pete kept his job, but he did, and he got the distinct feeling that as the rookie in the pack it was his duty to help him keep it. Still, the more he saw of Pete, who was permanently messed up—and even Dan, whose good looks and vigor were already being blurred by a lifestyle that would eventually kill off the best of them—the more Matt secretly wondered if this was his dream
job after all. Was this really what he’d been hoping for all those years back, when he’d first tried his hand at journalism? A job that meant he woke up every morning with a hangover, that was giving him a worrying laissez-faire attitude toward naked breasts, and where the pinnacle of creative brilliance that was required of him was to think up ten different ways to write “blow job.” He was sure he’d had other aspirations as a kid, when a report on the news at ten from a massacre in India had brought him to tears and inspired him to want to do what that reporter had done, bring the really important news home to people in a way that made it seem personal, that made it matter. Somehow, life had brought him here, an expert babe-hound, living the bachelor life surrounded by women. It had to be his dream job, how could it not be? Even if his drunken boss did somewhat take the edge off.

At just after twelve thirty, Pete had arrived at Matt’s desk, looking hot and uncomfortable in a too tight shirt and food-stained tie, beads of sweat decorating his brow despite the air-conditioning in the office, and once again demanded that Matt join him for a liquid lunch.

“Got to get out of this shit hole for an hour,” he’d said with a sigh, pulling at his shirt collar as he glared around at the rest of the room, studiously avoiding eye contact with his colleagues. Matt got the distinct impression that they were smirking at him behind his back.

“I’d love to, but the thing is, I still have to put this review to bed and I need to polish up my column a bit—,” Matt began.

“What? No, you don’t, that draft you gave me was fine. I sent it to the features folder last night.”

“What? Pete!” Matt shook his head. “I thought I told you, that was a first draft, I hadn’t… refined it yet.”

“Refined it? This is
Bang It!
, mate, not
Woman and Home
. You’re writing about shagging, not how to fluff up a muffin—although now I come to think of this, that makes a pretty good
euphemism.” Pete’s chuckle was filthy. “Take it from an expert, that column was perfect. Now get your coat.”

Reluctantly, Matt slid back his chair and followed Pete out into the midday glare of the street and to The Red Lion, the pub that was just around the corner from their office. That column
had
been perfect—perfect for Pete, that is. Matt had written it based on his evening with the associate editor, deciding to wait for a week or two before he used the material after what had happened with Carla. He had seen neither the associate editor nor Carla since, which was a blessing that he knew he didn’t deserve. Last week he’d rehashed a column from his Manchester days but he didn’t know London well enough to make it completely authentic. He had thought that one city would be very much like the next, but that wasn’t true. While Manchester was big, vibrant, and packed full of all kinds of life, it seemed almost like a village compared to London. Of course, he felt more at home in Manchester, it
was
his home—he’d grown up there. But it was more than that. London was so huge, both dirty and beautiful, sprawling and crawling with humanity. It was built not just of mere bricks, concrete, and steel but of layer upon layer of life that he’d barely had a chance to scratch the surface of. Matt wasn’t sure he could begin to get his head around what made the place tick, or even the little bit of it that he had seen so far. But he knew he had to work harder to capture the essence of his “hunting ground” in his column, so he’d written his column with Pete in mind, and as a consequence it was dirty and graphic and treated its female focus in turn as an object of lust and then of ridicule. Matt had knocked it out in minutes, returning to the office one evening after a stint in the pub, feeling gung ho and keen on impressing his new bosses. But since then he’d had second thoughts. Thoughts that involved the associate editor, who had been funny and generous, passionate and open. He had called her easy, but
easy
wasn’t really the right word. It was more that she was willing—willing to take a chance on
him, willing to live life to the fullest—and after all, that was pretty much his motto. The poor girl hadn’t really done anything wrong other than trust him, and it seemed unfair that she should be pilloried for it; even though he had invented a name for her and changed her job title to that of editorial assistant, she would know it was about her. And now the piece was out there and there was nothing that Matt could do about it unless he wanted to make himself look like an idiot. He’d probably hurt a perfectly nice girl, for no good reason.

Matt struggled with this latest bout of guilt. For some reason, everything he did now, everything he wrote, seemed more real than it ever had before. Back home, he’d written piece after piece about girls he’d met in passing and it had never seemed to matter then. But recently, maybe after everything that had happened just before he’d left, he had started to see, to feel, the consequences of his actions. It was a new awareness that was not a particularly useful skill for a features writer on a lads’ mag, and it was one he’d have to stamp out if he wanted to really fit in at
Bang It!
Matt couldn’t put his finger on when exactly a little inkling of conscience had started to insinuate its way into his makeup, but he was fairly sure it had begun before he got on the train to London and he was certain that his landlady had an awful lot to do with the way it had gone, at precisely the wrong moment in his life.

His small-hours chats with Ellen in the kitchen had become almost a regular feature over the last couple of weeks, and Matt began to realize that he looked forward to finding Ellen sitting in the kitchen, cupping a steaming mug of tea between her palms despite the summer’s unremitting heat. Take last night.

He’d walked into the kitchen hoping to find her there, but had been careful to look surprised when he did, as if sharing a cup of tea with her was the last thing on his mind. She had apologized, like she always did for nothing in particular, and he had claimed that he was just getting a drink of water, while
she told him she was taking her cup of tea to bed. Yet, they had sat and talked for almost two hours.

“How’s life as the sorceress’s apprentice?” Matt asked Ellen as she hesitated by the kettle—she always seemed as if she took the greatest thought over every tiny decision, even choosing a mug for her tea, as if making the wrong choice might have terrible consequences. Matt nodded at the chair he had found to represent Allegra, a reproduction of a fancy French affair, with a violet velvet seat pad and arms that had been spray-painted gold. “It must be a bit like working for the queen.”

Upon seeing her chair for the first time, Allegra had sniffed, and had haughtily declared that she had no idea what Matt thought that she and that clapped-out, overdressed old fake had in common, but she had winked at him when she said it, and taken the opportunity to pat him on the chest and kiss him on his lips, commenting, “Still, I suppose I must be grateful that you didn’t return home with a commode.”

“Yes, I do have to fight the urge to curtsy whenever I see her.” Ellen smiled. “But on the whole it’s good… frightening, a bit like you’ve been thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool without knowing how to swim. Actually I think that might be what I like about it. I can’t remember the last time I did something so… challenging or satisfying.” Her bright look faded briefly. “Not that being a mother and a wife haven’t been both of those things,
that’s
not what I mean.…”

“You mean it’s good to do something that is just for you?” Matt asked, dropping all pretense that he was leaving and sitting down in his new red-plastic office chair that had casters and swiveled 360 degrees. In the short time he had owned it, he and Charlie had frequently created chair Olympics all around the kitchen and hallway—at least when Ellen wasn’t looking.

Matt felt a surge of pleasure when, after making both of them a cup of tea without asking him if he wanted one, Ellen joined him at the table.

“Yes, do you know what I mean?” Ellen asked, with a compelling intensity in her green eyes that Matt only ever saw in her at this time of day, when she was relaxed and, he guessed, more like herself than she was during all the other tense, wakeful, expectant hours. She had the kind of eyes that Matt wasn’t used to seeing in women, although he routinely told many of them that they had the most beautiful eyes he had ever come across. Ellen’s gaze hinted at hidden depths that he could only guess at. What really made Ellen tick? Matt had begun to wonder more and more often. It seemed to him that since losing her husband she must have developed a habit of shuffling through each day, growing into her role as a staid widowed housewife and a stalwart grieving mother—and when Matt had first met her, that was all that he had seen. But when they had started talking late at night, letting the conversation slip and slide between them with careless ease, he had begun to realize that she was nothing of the sort.

“Not really,” he admitted. “There hasn’t really ever been anybody else to please, apart from myself, in a long time. I’m not in touch with my dad… Mum’s got her own problems. I think I’ve been more or less doing as I pleased since I was sixteen—which has its own kind of pressure, because if I stuff it up, it’s nobody’s fault but my own.”

“But you haven’t stuffed it up, have you?” Ellen raised one quizzical eyebrow as she watched him across the table. “You have your dream job, any man’s dream job apparently. And if you’ve achieved all of that on your own, then that makes you all the more impressive.”

“Impressive,” Matt repeated with a wry smile. “Honestly, Ellen, do you think I’m impressive?”

Ellen paused, and Matt heard the blood beating in his ears as he waited for her to respond.

“I think the fact that you’ve gone after what you want and you’ve got it is impressive,” she hedged, dealing a crushing blow to Matt’s ego with the lightest of touches.

“And what do you think about me?” Matt asked. He’d couched the question carefully, keeping his tone light, a smile playing around his lips. “Do you disapprove of me terribly?”

“As if you care what I think of you!” Ellen chuckled into her tea, and the steam that rose from the mug glistened on her flushed cheeks.

“But pretend I do.” Matt encouraged her. “Pretend you are writing my school report—what would you say if you had to sum me up?” Matt pressed her, despite suffering from a sudden bout of nerves. He had no idea why he needed to know exactly how Ellen saw him, but at that moment it seemed very important indeed.

Ellen sucked in her bottom lip and regarded him with a long, cool stare that he found hard to meet.

“I would say… shows real promise but could do better.”

“Ouch!” Matt winced. “‘Could do better,’ that hurts!”

“I only mean… well, is writing about sex with girls you barely know really your dream job? I mean, you have this real gift for communicating with the written word; what I’ve read of your stuff really delivers its message, quickly and clearly, and you have a distinct style of your own—but, well—does it have to be so trashy?”

“You don’t think it’s funny?” Matt asked.

“Well, that piece you gave me to read the other night…”

Matt nodded. It had been a recycled piece about a beautician he’d met back home, who’d made the mistake of hurriedly waxing her bikini line into a Brazilian while Matt waited for her in the living room. It had turned out that it was a job best not rushed and the poor girl had emerged in pain and bleeding quite profusely from some rather delicate areas. She’d tried to cover it up but had eventually confessed, and Matt, ever the faux gentleman, had soothed the affected area with an icepack. There were jokes about plucked chickens and stubble rash. Pete had loved it.

“It was funny, I suppose,” Ellen said uncertainly. “But it’s
also kind of… mean. Does your column always have to be mean?” Matt thought about it for a moment and concluded that for
Bang It!
it probably did. When he thought about it, though, when he thought about what he
had
wanted and envisaged for his career when he set out to become a journalist, he had to conclude that writing a sex column in a men’s magazine probably wasn’t going to lead to the awards and accolades he’d hoped for.