The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  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.

  “Oh, God, I’m a total failure,” Matt half joked.

  “Don’t be silly! You are still young, this might be where you are starting out, but it doesn’t have to be where you end up.”

  “And what about you,” Matt asked. “What new heights will you achieve now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ellen answered absently, curling a tress of hair around her finger. “I’d like to get the oven cleaned by Friday, though.”

  When Matt laughed, Ellen couldn’t see what was so funny, which made him like her all the more.

  He couldn’t exactly claim that he had made any friends since he’d arrived in London—mates, yes, through work; lads to have a laugh and a drink with. He had underestimated exactly how much it mattered to have someone you could really talk to without needing to put on a front or an attitude. Matt had left his lifelong best friend behind in Manchester along with his PlayStation, and it was his fault that they didn’t talk anymore. Unwittingly, Ellen had become the nearest thing to a friend that he had in the huge, sprawling, unforgiving city, and theirs was small-hours friendship characterized by crumpled cotton pajamas, tangled scooped-up hair, and steaming cups of tea on sweltering summer nights.

  As Matt had traveled to work that morning he kept picturing her as they had both knelt on the kitchen floor that day when Charlie had flipped out about his dad’s chair, the tears welling in her eyes, displaying her raw vulnerability in front of a virtual stranger. And then he could not shake the image of her when they had first met in the kitchen later that day. She had been wearing those stupid red pajamas that hid whatever curves she might have, her face worn with worry. He sat in the kitchen, the body heat of the associate editor still cooling on his skin, and yet he realized that he would rather have spent time talking to Ellen than be in bed with any willing blonde. And she had told him off, only a little and so mildly that he might not have noticed, but when he finally tumbled into the already rumpled sheets of his bed alone, he realized that he felt regret about what had happened between him and the associate editor. It was not a sensation that he was familiar with. He decided that he would call her, not to ask her out again or to try to take the relationship further, but just because calling her seemed like the decent thing to do, and after fifteen minutes in the company of Ellen, Matt found that he wanted to be decent. It was a complaint that intensified the more he got to know her. Nevertheless, it was two weeks since his night with the associate editor and he hadn’t called her yet. It seemed that the desire to be decent and the actuality of it weren’t quite on a par yet.

  What had begun to trouble Matt was just how often he thought about his landlady, and whether or not the kinds of things he was thinking or feeling were the kinds of things that invariably ended up trashing a friendship. Even now, as Pete went on about some women at the bar, Matt kept thinking about Ellen standing barefoot in those pajamas. There could not have been a less sexually stimulating image of a woman, and when he thought about her, it wasn’t sex that was at the forefront of his mind at all; but for some reason he was unable to shake that image that seemed so firmly lodged in his brain, and it would pop up at any given moment, quite taking him off guard.

  “Bloody hell, mate—that brunette—look at her, you can tell she likes sex. Look at them hips, they are the hips of a girl who doesn’t mind getting flipped over, grabbed by the arse, and properly shagged from behind.”

  Dragging his thoughts back to the present, in the pub, Matt looked up. Sitting at the bar were two women enjoying a lunchtime drink, both dressed in what seemed like the unofficial uniform of office workers around here, pencil skirts and white shirts, although the blonde’s had a faint pink candy stripe. They both had long, glossy, straightened hair. The blonde was slightly skinnier, with what looked like small, high breasts that offered no challenge to the buttons of her shirt, and the brunette was curvy, rounded in all the right places. They were both pretty, Matt thought, but he especially liked the way the zipper at the back of the brunette’s skirt strained against the girth of her hips. She was by no means fat, but like so many women, she’d chosen to squeeze into a skirt one size too small for her, which, personally, Matt didn’t mind at all. He imagined the red welts that her discarded garments would leave bitten into her skin when she removed her clothes that night and absently thought about how he’d like to trace a finger along those phantom seams and find out where they led.

  “You take the blonde, I’m going for that hippy little minx.” Pete surged up out of his chair and, finding his feet entirely out of touch with his legs, immediately blundered back down into it again. He scowled at his empty glass.

  “Fuck, they’ve made the beer stronger in here.”

  “Or you had a couple of vodkas on the quiet before we even came to lunch?” Matt asked mildly. How on earth was he supposed to police a man who kept bottles of spirits concealed all around his office?

  �
�I’ll be all right in a second, I just need a few of these peanuts to line my gut,” Pete slurred. “Here’s the plan. You go over there, sweeten them up; keep your hands off the one with the big tits, she’s mine. Tell ’em we work at the magazine, offer ’em a photo shoot, tell ’em you can make them rich and famous, and then arrange to meet them in here later. I’ll be your wingman.”

  Matt looked up at the girls, who by now had noticed the attention they were getting. They looked neither impressed nor flattered, and the blonde waved her credit card at the barman, clearly keen to settle up and get back to work.

  “I don’t think they’re interested, mate,” Matt said. “Tell you what, how about we get you back to the office and get a few coffees down you before the features meeting this afternoon. Maybe you could have a little kip in your office.”

  “No, no, no—they’re interested,” Pete insisted, slamming the palm of his hand firmly on the tabletop, talking loudly enough for the whole bar to hear. “That blonde’s giving you the eye—go on, mate, you go over, give ’em some of that charm you’re so famous for, go on. Warm the frigid bitches up.”

  The two women stood up, collected their bags, and, shooting Matt a contemptuous look, mouthing something under their breath that Matt strongly suspected was the word arseholes, left with their noses in the air.

  Relieved, Matt glanced at his watch. “Time we should be gone, too.”

  “Fucking hell!” Pete shouted, angrily gesturing with his hand so that Matt’s nearly full pint shot across the table and rolled onto the floor, spreading a sea of lager across the polished boards. “You fucking let them get away! I haven’t had a decent shag in fucking weeks. Fucking hell, Matt, you…”