The Home for Broken Hearts (32 page)

“So you’ve seen the column then,” Matt said wearily, wondering why on earth he had thought it was a good idea to date a woman who worked one floor down—and what’s more, why on earth he had decided to write about her. What had he been thinking? The truth was that he hadn’t been thinking since he’d got here, at least not with his head. The truth was that he hadn’t been thinking with his head especially since 1998 when his hormones kicked in.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “And I’ve come to thank you.”

“Thank me?” Matt shifted from one foot to the other. Suddenly he felt confused and afraid, very afraid.

“Er…”

“You see,” Lucy said, snapping her legs down from his desk in one smooth maneuver and twisting his chair around to face him. “If you hadn’t written your column about me, if you hadn’t written, for example”—she scanned the page—“‘This little vixen was all over me from the moment we sat down, wearing a dress that left nothing to the imagination, and let me know just exactly what sort of a good time I was in for. I offered her another drink but she was already good to go and practically dragged me back to my place.…’ If you hadn’t written that, for example, then I would never have had the idea for my own piece. And I never would have been pissed off and ballsy enough to take it to my editor and ask her for a chance to write for the magazine. But you did and so did I,
et voilà!
”

Lucy handed him a copy of her own magazine. “You’ve given me my very first byline.” She beamed at him, her bright eyes sparkling.

Dragging his eyes off her, Matt looked down at the glossy page. The headline shouted
HOW TO AVOID TERRIBLE SEX
! He read the first line: “We’ve all done it, we’ve all felt a little low, got a little drunk, and found ourselves in a compromising
situation with a man we barely know. We think this liberates us, sets us free, but invariably the next morning we feel foolish and used and worst of all have usually experienced a night of terrible sex. The last time this happened to me was only a few weeks ago.…”

Matt looked up. “You’ve written about me and you?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yep.” Lucy nodded, a wicked grin lighting up her face. “What? Not thrilled for me? Don’t want to read on? Don’t worry, I’ve memorized it. Let me recite for you: ‘This guy, let’s call him Matt…’”

“Hey—that’s my real name!” he protested.

“Yes, but the readers don’t know that.” Lucy continued reading aloud: “‘This guy obviously thought he was the cat’s pajamas in bed. But the truth is, from the moment we got into his bedroom I was looking for a reason to leave. Was it his cheesy predictable lines that put me off? After all, how many times have you heard them tell you they’ve never seen a woman with eyes as beautiful as yours, yeah, right, like they care about your eyes! Or was it his fumbling, amateurish kisses that felt a bit like I was being slobbered all over by a Labrador? Why don’t men ever learn that less is so much more when it comes to tongue? No, it was none of that, it was simply that the moment I let him get into my bed, I realized I was going to be bored—bored, bored, bored—and that for the next five minutes I was going to have to try my best to look like I wasn’t.’” Lucy stood up and strutted to Matt, so that she was standing very close to him, her eyes sparkling with fury and laughter, the heady scent of her perfume in his nostrils. “‘And that’s what I’m talking about, ladies,’” she went on, quoting her piece. “‘That’s why we are all doomed to a terrible sex life unless we take action now. No more pretending that his fumbling at your privates is a turn-on, no more moaning and groaning out loud when really you’re wondering if you remembered to record
Grey’s Anatomy.
And most of all, no
more pretending that you’ve had an orgasm after a couple of minutes of squelching about, when we all know that it takes a lot longer and a lot more effort to get one of those. Take a stand now! Say “no more” to terrible sex just to make some guy feel good about himself. If they’re awful at it, tell them so. And if you’re reading this, Matt—just so you know—you are shocking in bed.’”

As she finished her manifesto, she dropped her magazine at his feet, turned on her high heels, and strutted out of the office, to rapturous applause.

“Hey, mate?” Raffa clapped him on the shoulder. “Have you lost a bit of weight?”

“What?” Matt looked at him.

“It’s just I think that bird just left with your balls!”

Matt blinked as the office doors swung shut behind Lucy. He’d had no idea that she was so… well, so cool.

“Wow, that’s never happened before,” Matt said, sinking into his chair. He felt embarrassed, exposed, and vulnerable—as if she’d told the world his secret… which was exactly what he’d been doing to various women for the last year. Matt closed his eyes. What a prick he was! What a prick he had been—he’d been doing to women what Lucy had just done to him for over a year. And as clever and as funny as Lucy’s piece was, as much as it would make her readers laugh, it hurt him; it stung like a very hard slap. How many people had he hurt that way without a second thought?

“Never been bitch slapped in public before?” Pete sneered.

“Never been stung by a revenge column. You got to hand it to her, the girl’s got balls.”

“Yeah, yours,” Raffa repeated his joke, clearly annoyed that it hadn’t got a big enough laugh the first time.

“You need to pull it together, son,” Pete told him. “Where’s the dark destroyer, hey? And more important, where’s your piece on that drive-through brothel?”

“Hang on—I only got the brief yesterday,” Matt said, although last night in the pub did seem like an eon ago. “I wasn’t entirely sure that Dan was even serious.”

“Dan is always serious. Come on, mate, you’ve got a week to go until the end of your probation, and I’ve got to say it, you look knackered. Please tell me the reason you let that little tramp walk all over you is because you were up all night seeing to your landlady?”

“Lucy isn’t a tramp,” Matt said, defending his nemesis, and then, seeing the look on Pete’s face, he added, “And yeah, I was up with Ellen all night. It’s true what they say about older women being at their sexual peak!” Matt’s grin was perfectly synchronized with his sense of inner self-loathing. Lucy, Hannah, the idea of writing a piece on a drive-through brothel—after what he’d seen last night and this morning, he felt sick to his stomach. Half-naked girls who were no more than breasts and bums, writing about sex week in and week out—that wasn’t his dream job. It had never been his dream job, and Matt couldn’t remember anymore why he had ever thought it was. Lucy, Hannah—especially Ellen. They reminded him that he liked women, he loved them. He found them interesting and funny and beautiful in ways that were somehow more subtle and complex than their cup size or how much they’d had to drink. How on earth had that joy and fascination with the opposite sex turned itself into this? Matt sighed. Now, on the cusp of completing his probation, was not the time to be developing a conscience or a desire for something better. But nevertheless, both of those impulses were there and he couldn’t shake them off. What was happening to him? he wondered miserably. And then a memory of the scent of her hair as she had embraced him that morning came back to him, and he realized. Ellen, Ellen was happening to him. He had a crush on his landlady.

“Then there’s your next column,” Pete said. “Get your research on the brothel done and a first draft for your column
today, and as for that piece of work that just came in here and stomped all over us?”

“Who, Lucy?” Matt said anxiously.

“That’s war, mate,” Pete declared. “That’s magazine war. Come up with a plan of attack by the end of the day.”

As Pete lurched away, Matt sank farther into his chair and considered what would happen if he just got up and walked out of the office and never came back again, because right now, after everything that had happened recently, after everything that had happened last night, the
Bang It!
offices were the very last place he wanted to be.

Ellen rubbed her eyes and looked at the monitor. Allegra had dictated to her, and her typing was riddled with red and green squiggly lines. For the first time since she had begun working for Allegra, Ellen hadn’t really been involved in what Allegra was saying.

“So what do you think should happen next?” Allegra asked.

Ellen looked at the older woman. She was immaculately dressed, as ever, but there were violet shadows under her eyes, and there was something else about her that was different, too, that Ellen couldn’t quite put her finger on. In the current scene the captain had visited Eliza in her cell to tell her that she was to hang at dawn. Ellen’s tired eyes had welled with tears as Allegra described the emotion in the captain’s voice as he struggled between his sense of duty and his love for Eliza. And then, just when Ellen could not see how Eliza could possibly escape, the captain had left a key and a dagger for her, hidden in a blanket. Allegra had stopped just at the point where Eliza was about to escape.

“I don’t know,” Ellen said wearily. “Is the captain waiting for her outside the gates with a horse? Is he going to rescue her after all?” She glanced at the ceiling, thinking of Hannah, who was still asleep. After Matt had gone to work, Ellen had
gone back upstairs and, dragging the piles of clothes off the velvet armchair by the window, had sat and looked at Hannah, watching her closely. She had been sleeping peacefully, especially after she’d taken the pain medication, and as relieved as Ellen was to see her sister sleeping peacefully, she was fearful of how she would be when she woke, sober and with a clear head. Ellen was afraid of what Hannah would remember.

“That would be what my readers would expect,” Allegra confirmed, as if the idea disappointed her.

“Maybe he could be waiting and then Eliza could murder him with her own knife, steal his horse, and run away to America? Maybe we could make this the first ever postmodern feminist bodice ripper,” Ellen suggested testily, wondering what state the man who had hurt Hannah was in as he woke up this morning, if he even had any idea what he had done.

Allegra pressed her lips into a thin smile, and as Ellen focused on her she realized what was out of place. For the first time ever in her presence, Allegra wasn’t wearing her vintage red lipstick.

“Feeling a little tense today?” Allegra asked.

Ellen shook her head, unable to talk for the threat of tears.

“I haven’t asked because I don’t like to pry,” Allegra began deliberately. “I don’t always like to pry, but, Ellen, I am an old woman. On a good night I barely sleep more than three or four hours, and what with all the comings and goings last night I didn’t sleep a wink. I wasn’t going to pry, but I can see that you’ve been up all night and that you are very upset. And if you are upset, we cannot work efficiently. And besides, I worry about you—I like you. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Ellen looked out the open french doors, down the length of the garden. Of course Allegra had been disturbed last night, the poor woman must have heard almost everything. It hadn’t even occurred to Ellen that her lodgers would be affected. She hadn’t seen Sabine at all, not all of last night or this morning,
so she had no idea if Sabine had been awakened by all the to-ing and fro-ing, or if Sabine had chosen to stay out of the way. But of course Allegra had been disturbed. Ellen felt she owed her an explanation, so, slowly, deliberately careful because of her own muddled brain and the strange dreamlike quality of the preceding night, Ellen began to talk.

“And so I don’t know, I don’t know what happened to her, I don’t know why she lost the job that she loves, why she’s gone so utterly off the rails or what really happened to her last night, and worst of all, neither does she.”

Allegra nodded. “And what about Charlie? Does he know?”

Ellen shook her head. “I don’t think so. He was plugged into his iPod all night and he didn’t even mention Hannah when he came down this morning.”

If anything, Charlie had seemed happier than he had been in a long time when he arrived in the kitchen in time for breakfast, probably because he’d been worrying for so long about her, feeling that he couldn’t talk to her, shut out by her grief. The idea of him shut out, unhappy and alone with his problems, tormented her, because it was only now that she realized exactly how much he had been bottling up, and how much she had missed, shuttered up like a closed house as she had been.

When Charlie came down, Ellen had just collected Hannah’s torn and stained clothes from the bathroom floor and had been holding them in her hands, dithering between putting them in the washing machine and saving them as… what? Evidence? Then she’d heard Charlie thundering down the stairs and hastily shoved them into the washing machine. She could always turn it on later.

“Matt gone?” he’d asked her.

Ellen had nodded, slotting two pieces of bread into the toaster. “You sleep okay?”

“I think so,” Charlie said. “So have you had a chance to
think a bit more about, you know, what we talked about yesterday?” His voice was light and high, and Ellen felt her heart contract—he was trying his best to appear unconcerned.

“About my agoraphobia?” Ellen smiled, sitting down at the table with him. “You did make me think, Charlie. I checked the calendar and I realized something pretty shocking. You are right about one thing. I haven’t been out since Dad’s funeral. I haven’t been out in nearly a year, and the frightening thing is, I didn’t even realize it.” Ellen had shrugged, conscious that Charlie was watching her closely. “But I’m not agoraphobic, Charlie.”

“But, Mum—”

“No, wait. I haven’t been outside for a year and that is strange and wrong and I have been hiding in here, but it’s not because I just woke up one morning and decided that I didn’t want to go out anymore, that I was afraid of the outside. To me it seems like yesterday that we found out Dad was gone. Somehow, the last year has both dragged by and gone in the blink of an eye. I’ve been caught up in all this grief and I haven’t noticed or cared about the outside world. I haven’t needed to. I didn’t realize I’d been stuck in this house all those months—but I’m not afraid of going out, Charlie. I’m just out of practice.”