The Home for Broken Hearts (40 page)

As Ellen talked, she glanced back up at Charlie and saw his eyes fill with unshed tears, and she realized how much pressure her son had been under, how much pressure she had unwittingly placed on him.

“I’m ill and I need to get some help to put me back on my feet, but the good news is, I can get the help and it will work and I will get better and I’ll be dragging you round the shops in no time. So we don’t have to worry about me anymore.” Ellen glanced back at Hannah’s bedroom door. “For now we have to look after Hannah.”

Matt appeared from the living room where Ellen knew he had been listening to her conversation with Charlie.

“Tell you what, why don’t you and Matt make a pot of coffee and I’ll see if I can wake up Hannah and see how she’s feeling.”

Charlie scowled at Matt. “Can’t I stay here with you and see how she is?”

“I think she’ll want a bit of time to get herself together, Charlie. Give her a bit of space, okay?” Ellen watched her son eye Matt. “I did tell you, nothing happened between me and Matt. We’re just friends.”

“Okay, I s’pose,” Charlie said. “Mum… she will be all right, won’t she, Aunt Hannah?”

Ellen stopped herself from responding reflexively. How could she reassure him that everything was going to be okay anymore? If there had ever been any boy who knew that things weren’t always all right in the end, it was Charlie.

“I hope so,” Ellen said. “The main thing is to be here and to look after her and help her as much as we can. Go and put some coffee on and make some toast, too; if I know Hannah, she won’t have eaten.”

Matt put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder and guided him down the hallway toward the kitchen. Taking a deep breath, Ellen went back into Hannah’s room.

“So how the bloody hell does this work?” Matt said, staring at an orange Gaggia espresso machine. It looked like it had never been used and had been bought more to go with the other orange accent features in the smart kitchen than to provide a daily shot of caffeine.

“I don’t know why you’re here,” Charlie said, reaching up and taking an orange cafetière out of a cupboard. “You’ve got nothing to do with this. And Aunt Hannah never uses that—she uses this. I can do it.”

“Good one,” Matt said, wondering why, as he went to the fridge to look for milk, he felt as if he were being interviewed by a stern father, which was ironic because he’d spent most of his adult life avoiding fathers of any description. The fridge was empty except for three bottles of wine, half a bottle of gin, two bottles of tonic water, and half a lime. Matt slammed the door shut and turned around to find Charlie carefully pouring boiling water into the cafetière.

“I’m here to help your mum, Charlie. She needed a hand to get over here, but I swear, nothing would have stopped her from coming after you. She didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“And what about you?” Charlie asked. “Did you want me to get the wrong idea?”

“Not sure I follow,” Matt said, perplexed.

“Well, first of all you’re all matey with me, following me around, being a laugh, and then you make moves on my mum. On my mum! Why?” Charlie’s blue eyes narrowed dangerously. “I thought… well, I thought you were my friend. I thought you liked me.”

“I would never… That’s not what it’s about. I am your friend, Charlie, I made friends with you because you’re a laugh and I like you, even if you are a gooner. And as for your mum, well… I like her a lot, too.” Matt gestured at the empty fridge. “Look, fancy walking down to the shop with me to get some milk while that’s brewing?”

“I can go on my own,” Charlie said bullishly, and then after a moment’s hesitation he held out his hand. “Give us a couple of quid.”

“Look, mate—I get why you’re pissed off,” Matt said. “You think I’ve been trying it on your mum. You’re bound to be riled about that. Any bloke would be, it’s natural—you want to protect your mum.”

“Well, yeah, I do—but that’s not the only reason I’m pissed off.” Charlie retracted his hand and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What then? ’Cause you and me are mates, and you know what—you’re right—the first rule of mates is that you never go after a mate’s woman, especially not if that woman is also his mother.”

Charlie shook his head. “Arsehole,” he said, deliberately failing to keep the utterance under his breath.

“Arsehole?” Matt laughed, noticing a twitch of a smile around Charlie’s mouth in response. “Fuck, say it like it is.”

“Well, you are,” Charlie told him. “You are a proper arsehole. Look, my mum likes you a lot. I’m not a kid, I know she goes all stupid around you, and I don’t think I mind if she wants a boyfriend. I want her to be happy and laugh and go out places and dress up again. I think Dad would want her to be happy, too. But not with you, because you won’t even love her, because you are an arsehole.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Matt asked, even though he sensed that was the wrong question. “Why not?”

Charlie went over to his rucksack, which he had thrown in the corner, unzipped it, and brought out last week’s issue of
Bang It!

“I read your column,” he said. “You have sex with girls and then write about it. If you do that to my mum, I’ll kill you, I swear it.” Matt fully believed the glare that Charlie shot at him with deadly accuracy. He watched as the boy flipped through to the center pages, where Kelly from Doncaster lolled, legs
akimbo, squeezing bits of her anatomy together that were designed to make a grown man do a little more than blush. “
And
you spend all your time around young, naked girls. My mum is pretty but she doesn’t look like
that.
” He nodded at Kelly, who pouted sulkily from the pages, her mouth slightly open, and a line of text running beneath the photo that read, “I deserve to be spanked, I’m a very naughty girl.”

“So don’t go pretending to be my mate and my mum’s mate when all you’re doing is making fun of her.”

Oh my America…
The words of the poem sprang into Matt’s head again and he thought of the incredible thrill that had raced through him when he pulled Ellen’s dress away from her breasts, the excitement of discovering the unknown. He picked up the magazine and looked at the image of Kelly, airbrushed and manipulated into impossible perfection; she looked about one step away from a blow-up doll.

Matt sat down at Hannah’s shiny white table, clear of any sign of use except for an orange set of condiment containers.

“Men are simple things,” Matt said. “Mainly we think about sex. And when we think about sex, mostly we think about breasts and bottoms, and somehow at some point it all started to be about girls who looked like this.” He gestured toward Kelly. “In the olden days, it was big pale flabby birds who were where it was at.”

“What?” Charlie asked skeptically.

“Yeah, I saw a program about it once, when the Tivo was broken in the flat and we could only get BBC2. This artist called Rubens used to paint, like, seriously big women and everyone thought that was the bee’s knees. Naked paintings of fat birds were the olden-day
Bang It!
”

“Gross,” Charlie said, wrinkling his nose.

“And then when I was growing up it was all about skinny. No breasts or hips or bottoms. All the fit girls were the skinny ones. At that moment, it was all about this.” He tapped Kelly on the face, which seemed like the only appropriate place to touch her.
“But this isn’t real. Big round breasts aren’t what make a girl beautiful or make you love her.”

“What about the girl you had sex with and wrote about? You said she was blond and had big tits.”

“Did I?” Matt said uncomfortably, thinking about Lucy and how she’d listened to him bleat on about Ellen, how funny and bright she had been once he’d stopped looking down her cleavage and started looking into her eyes.

“She had more than a handful, you wrote,” Charlie said. “Enough in her bra to sprain your tongue, you said.” Charlie wrestled briefly with some internal dilemma and then asked, “How do you sprain your tongue on a girl’s… bosom?”

… My newfound land.
Matt replayed the line again. He’d wanted to write a novel once, or poetry. How had he ever ended up writing about tongue sprain and Nevada cathouses?

“You can’t, not really. I was trying to be funny. I was making it up. Most of that I made up, just like most of this photo is made up. Kelly’s waist isn’t that small, and her breasts aren’t that big and her legs aren’t that long. She’s got a little bit of acne on her chin, and on the day of the shoot she had shadows under her eyes because she’d been up all night. And I’ll tell you something else: she looked a million times prettier in real life than she did in this photo.”

“Did she have her top off?” Charlie asked, wide-eyed.

“No,” Matt lied. “She had all of her clothes on.” Charlie looked disappointed. “And that girl I wrote about, I lied about her, too. In real life she’s funny and smart and kind, but I didn’t write about any of that—any of the stuff that makes her a great person. I just made up a load of stuff to make me look big and clever. I feel pretty shitty about it actually.”

Matt sighed. He was starting to wonder exactly who he was. This identity that he’d been nurturing for so long was slipping like a mask and he wasn’t exactly sure that there was anything behind it.

“One day you’ll realize, wanting someone, falling in…
you know—like sort of love, isn’t just about bits of bodies. It’s about attraction, yeah, but not the obvious sort. Like your mum. When she thinks you’re talking rubbish, she sucks in the left corner of her bottom lip, just a fraction. She doesn’t even know that she does it and it makes you think…”
It makes you think about kissing her until she laughs,
Matt wanted to say, but he refrained. “It makes you think about how nice her mouth is, and how she expresses what she’s thinking even when she thinks she’s not.”

“Like Emily’s hair,” Charlie said thoughtfully.

“Whose what?” Matt wondered if he was talking about another
Bang It!
model.

“This girl at school, Emily. She’s got long hair that reaches all the way down her back; it’s sort of a dark yellow color, but when the sun shines on it, it looks amber, like honey running down her back. And she plays the electric guitar in a band and when she’s onstage she looks like…” Charlie trailed off. “Like the whole world can go and jump in a lake because she doesn’t care about anything but the music. She’s the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”

“Sounds to me like you like this Emily bird,” Matt said seriously, without a hint of mockery or condescension.

“I really, really do,” Charlie confessed earnestly. “But every time I try to talk to her I go all stupid and say crap and she looks at me like she thinks I’m mental and pathetic.”

“Maybe you should write her a poem,” Matt suggested.

“What, so then she’d think I was gay too?” Charlie exclaimed in horror.

“No, trust me, poetry can be one of the best ways of pulling a girl ever. Look at Shakespeare, or this bloke John Donne, who wrote this poem I can’t get out of my head recently. They knew exactly how to woo a lady with the power of words.”

“To what a lady? Is wooing a lady how you sprain your tongue?”

Matt shook his head. “That stuff you said about Emily’s
hair, about it looking like honey and shit. That’s romantic. You should write that down and give it to her, and I bet you she wouldn’t think you were gay. She’d think you were sensitive and romantic, and not because you’re acting sensitive and romantic to get her to snog you, but because you are that way, Charlie.”

“Am I?” Charlie looked skeptical.

“You are if you’re anything like your mother.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “All I can think about is what it would be like to touch a girl’s… bosom.”

“Yeah.” Matt nodded. “And that probably won’t change until the day you die. Even after you’ve touched a girl’s bosom, you’ll be wondering what it would be like to touch another girl’s bosom and another’s. That’s just being a bloke. It’s just this thing we’re lumbered with. But it doesn’t mean you can’t care about a girl or, you know, like love her and shit.”

Charlie looked at him with his level blue eyes and Matt shifted uncomfortably on his chair.

“So are you saying that you could fall in love with my mother then, even though she’s old and a bit fat?”

“She’s neither of those things.” Matt chuckled. “She’s… she’s lovely, and brave, and strong in ways she’s doesn’t know, and she’s beautiful. And yeah, I could fall in love with your mum, I reckon. If things were different.”

“If what things were different?” Charlie challenged.

“Well, you know, it wasn’t long ago that your dad died, and then there’s all this stuff with her sister and the going-out business and… other stuff.”

“You helped her today,” Charlie stated.

“I got her here, I don’t know if that actually counts as helping. There’s a small possibility that I’ve permanently traumatized her.”

“She likes talking to you,” Charlie said. “You make her smile. I hadn’t seen her smile or laugh, not a real smile that she means, not until you came.”

“That’s not exactly surprising. You’ve both had a shit year.”

“Yes, but I don’t want next year to be shit, too. I miss Dad, and I love him, but I want to be happy again. I want Mum to be happy and you make her laugh. So if you promise not to write about her and not to be mean to her, then I don’t mind if you ask her out on a date. But I don’t think you should have sex right away.”