The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “Get him out of here now.” The barman had leaped across the bar and now stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the sodden man. “I can’t have him in here, intimidating the customers, swearing his head off. It’s my job on the line if my boss hears of it. One more stunt like that and he’s barred and so are the rest of you cocky bastards.”

  He glared at Matt.

  “God, I’m sorry—we’re going, I won’t let it happen again.…” Matt tried to imagine the aftermath of Dan and the lads finding out that they’d been banned from their favorite pub because the rookie had let Pete get out of hand. It shouldn’t be a reason for him to fail his probation, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

  It took Matt some minutes to drag the angry and resentful Pete to his feet and then a good deal more to stagger with him, reeking with stale alcohol and something more, which Matt didn’t want to think about, to the door and out into the hot, exhaust-filled, oppressive afternoon on Fulham Palace Road. The hundred yards to their office entrance and the air-conditioned shelter it offered seemed very far away.

  “Let’s not go back,” Pete coaxed blearily in Matt’s ear. “Let’s go over the road to that Irish pub. They’ll serve any fucker.…”

  “Pete, we’ve got an editorial meeting in under an hour and you’re totally fucked. You need to get back and sober up quick.” Matt was resolute.

  “I’ll be fine,” Pete said, lurching into Matt so that he in turn staggered into a passing woman, nearly knocking her off her feet and unleashing a tirade of curses from her in a language that he was very grateful not to understand.

  “No, you will not. We’re going back.” Matt put one arm around Pete’s back, supporting him under his hot and fetid armpit, and with gritted determination propelled him down the road and into the office building. With relief he saw the lift doors slide open, and he bowled his charge into the cubicle before it could move.

  It was only when he had Pete propped in a corner, pinned in place by Matt’s steadying hand on his chest, and the doors had closed that Matt realized he was not alone. The associate editor stood in the corner, staring resolutely at the panel of illuminated numbers. His gut sinking, Matt really wished that he had found the time to make that call after all.

  “Hello…” Matt had called her associate editor so repeatedly that her actual name had escaped him.

  “You got home okay then?” he inquired belatedly, talking to her back. “The other night?” Matt watched her shoulders rise and fall in an almost imperceptible sigh before she turned to face him, her pretty features set and tense.

  “Yes, thanks, luckily I found a taxi driver at the end of the road who didn’t turn out to be a mugger or a rapist.” Unsurprisingly, she was angry with him, but not as angry as she would be if she ever got sight of that column, he thought. He remembered Ellen in the kitchen, her quiet disapproval when he’d told her about his night with the associate editor, and he squirmed internally.

  “Everything okay then…?” Matt cursed himself inwardly, her name simply would not come to mind.

  She barked a mirthless laugh. “Lucy,” she said flatly. “My name is Lucy, and yes, everything is fine, except that I’m the kind of idiot who wakes up with a fuck of a hangover after letting someone who is obviously an utter, utter twat take me home, get me into bed, and then kick me out in the middle of the night without so much as even phoning me a taxi. And you don’t even remember my name, you arsehole!” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “God, I hate myself. I make myself sick. I just did everything the magazine I work for is constantly telling its readers not to do—and for you, of all fuckwits—I mean sure, you’re pretty, but that’s about it. You’ve got the conversational skills of a mentally impaired rottweiler and your bedroom skills are frankly lacking in finesse.” She sighed as the lift stopped at her floor. “When will women finally learn what cunts men are?”

  “Hey, hang on, that’s not fair—Lucy!” Feeling compelled to go after her and to have his moment of decency, albeit a couple of weeks late, Matt momentarily stepped away from Pete, who immediately threatened to topple like a felled tree, forcing Matt to stay where he was to shore him up again. He called out of the lift just as the doors began to slide shut, “I didn’t turn you out, it was like I told you, my landlady… and anyway, I was going to call you…” The lift doors closed before Matt could finish his explanation, which he realized belatedly wouldn’t have exactly done him any favors with Ellen.

  Still, Matt felt unjustly slighted. How did Lucy know that he hadn’t been about to call her and ask her out again, how did she know that he hadn’t been telling the truth about his landlady being a dragon and that of course he would have called her a cab only his mobile was dead and… and the land line had been cut off? Matt sighed as the elevator rose one more floor, groaning as if it, too, could smell Pete’s rancid fragrance. Lucy was right, he’d behaved like an awful shit. She had him bang to rights, and, weirdly, he liked her more in that moment than he had in any other in their brief acquaintance. What he should do, what he wanted to do, was to find that column and pull it from the shared folder and replace it with something else. That would be the fair thing to do, but Pete and Dan had already seen it and liked it, so he would look like some kind of cowardly idiot if he tried to come up with a reason to change it now.

  “You fucked her, too? You bastard,” Pete slurred as Matt dragged him into the magazine office. After a moment’s hesitation about what to do with his addled charge, Matt bundled him into the men’s toilet and pushed him into a cubicle.

  “Stay there, don’t move, I’m going to get you coffee.”

  “Bastard,” Pete murmured, resting his forehead against the cubicle wall, his eyes closing and his jaw slackening simultaneously.

  Matt paused briefly to look at himself in the mirror, running his fingers under the cold tap and then through his hair, before patting his damp palms against his hot cheeks. Then he headed out to find coffee.

  “That for Pete?” Suze asked him coolly as he filled first one and then a second plastic cup at the coffee machine. Matt considered lying, but as Dan’s PA, Suze missed nothing; besides, it was fairly obvious that Suze did not like him, which was a bad thing. Suze seemed to wield a disproportionate amount of power in the office. She was the only woman whom none of the lads talked or joked or made smutty innuendos about, and she ran Dan like a military operation, making him look much more efficient and good at his job than he really was, and everybody knew that if you were on the wrong side of Suze, it was only a matter of time before you’d be on the wrong side of Dan. Matt had been trying to warm her up to him since he’d first arrived, but no amount of flattery or charm would coax that perfect pout into a smile. Maybe by showing that he was taking care of Pete, if accompanying a known alcoholic to the pub could strictly be called taking care of, he would somehow impress her, show her that he was more than just another jack-the-lad.

  “Yep,” Matt told her, grimly serious. “I’m trying to sober him up again. He does this a lot, doesn’t he? This is the worst I’ve seen him, but I bet it’s not the first time.”

  “Or the last,” Suze said primly. “Dan puts up with it because Pete helped him a lot when he was a rookie, got him some breaks that got him where he is today. That’s why he’s practically the only person in the industry who’ll give Pete a job—but he won’t be able to turn a blind eye for much longer. The old fool’s getting out of hand.”

  “What should I do?” Matt asked miserably, hoping that by appealing to her expertise, she’d be flattered and impressed by him.

  “Get that down him, then get him into his office to sleep it off. Whatever you do, don’t let him come to the meeting. If he turns up drunk, then Dan’ll have no choice but to sack him, which would put him in a foul mood, which is bad news for the rest of us. The trick is to keep him on an even enough keel to make it okay to keep him on.”

  “Right,” Matt said, staring at the two coffees and wondering if the watery gray concoctions would be nearl
y enough to perform the required miracle. “But how do I stop him leaving his office if I’m at the meeting?”

  Suze looked him up and down with an ill-disguised sneer that made Matt worry about what exactly he’d done to deserve it, and shrugged.

  “You’ll have to stay with him,” she instructed. “Don’t worry, Dan loves your columns, especially the one about Carla—he laughed out loud when he read it. Everyone thought it was the funniest thing they’d read in ages. You did a real hatchet job on her, didn’t you? You don’t need to be at the meeting to impress him.”

  “You do realize that it wasn’t really about Carla, don’t you?” Matt winced, beginning to understand the chill in the air that had persisted ever since his first column had been printed.

  Suze pursed her glossy lips and tipped her chin back. “Let me see—how did it go? ‘Redheads are supposed to be fiery in the bedroom (and every other room) and this makeup-girl minx was no exception,’” she quoted verbatim. “‘It was obvious from the first minute that we met that it wouldn’t take much to get her to take her clothes off, but what took me pleasantly by surprise was how quickly she ripped off mine! The second we got into her apartment, she had me pinned up against the wall, powerless to resist as she rubbed her gorgeous body up against me.…’” Suze broke off, shaking her head in disgust. “I get it, I get that I work for a magazine that treats women like lumps of meat to be pawed at. But at least those girls in the pictures choose to take their clothes off and want a load of men they don’t know to whack off over them. It’s their choice. Carla didn’t choose that.”

  “She chose to come out with me, though,” Matt defended himself. “And she chose to go to bed with me, even if it wasn’t exactly like that. It’s not as if I forced her. She chose to be with me.”

  “Yes—the poor bloody bitch,” Suze said bitterly. “And it’s all my fault. I’ve been encouraging her to get out there again and meet men. I’ve been telling her that not all men are bastards like her ex and that she should take a chance.” Suze shook her head. “Did you think for a second to find out anything about her apart from her cup size? For the last year she’s been trying to break free from some tosser of a photographer who cheated on her, stole from her, and beat her up. A few weeks ago she finally got the guts to get shut of him for good and the poor girl’s been in pieces ever since. Then you turn up and act all sweet and charming, act like you’re interested in her, and she makes the mistake of taking you at face value and going too far too fast. That makes her naïve—but it doesn’t give you the right to treat her like a joke and it doesn’t give you the right to spread her all over the pages of a national magazine like one of those cheap sluts on the cover. She was just about getting her act back together and you’ve destroyed her all over again. But don’t worry about it, Matt—because Pete and Dan and all the arseholes out there on the floor think it’s hilarious. So, good for you, Matt. Bravo. Enjoy babysitting Pete.”

  Suze thundered out of the office, jogging Matt’s elbow as she went so that some of the coffee in the plastic cups slurped over the side and burned the back of his hand, causing him to drop both of them on the floor.

  “Fuck,” Matt muttered under his breath as he pulled out reams of hand towels from the dispenser, dropped them on the floor, and trod them into the slowly spreading lake of machine coffee. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  What was it about the women around here that made them want to break his balls today? It must be something in the water, he thought; he’d never got this grief back in Manchester. But then again, he never messed about in his own backyard back home either, except on that one very, very ill-advised occasion. It probably wasn’t that London women were more pissed off than northern ones, it was more that they knew where to find him.

  And in his mind’s eye there was still that image he couldn’t get rid of that made him feel all the more uncomfortable about what he had done since he had arrived here.

  Ellen in her red pajamas, standing in her bare feet on those cold kitchen tiles.

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  Ellen paused, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. Eliza, who was just on the point of being ravished by a Royalist rogue who had kidnapped her on the road, had broken free and killed her attacker in her first fiery display of determination not to be made a victim again. Ellen was breathless with excitement. She had fallen headfirst into the story as Allegra talked and she typed, the office, the computer fading out—her former dining room transforming into a stale-smelling bedroom in a seventeenth-century coaching inn. And then, just as Eliza put a permanent end to her attacker’s assault, Allegra had stopped talking. Ellen raised her head to look at the older woman, who was reclining on her chaise longue, her eyes closed. They had decided that morning that considering how late Allegra was with the book, it would be quicker for her to dictate to Ellen, who would type it directly into an electronic format. Ellen waited and still her boss did not move a muscle.

  “Allegra?” Ellen’s voice was low. Perhaps the old lady had drifted off, although Ellen could not believe that was possible after the breathless excitement of the passage that she had just typed up. More likely she was in the throes of some creative moment of enlightenment—having never spent much time around truly creative people before, Ellen wasn’t sure what the throes of creative enlightenment would look like. Simon had said that Allegra was suffering something of a writer’s block, or at least a problem with establishing the flow of the story, but Ellen couldn’t see what he meant. When she attempted to write her own stories, something she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do in several months, she’d sit in her chair at the kitchen table and chew the end of a Biro until something came out, usually some stuff and nonsense about a woman and her house and her husband and her son. She’d um and er and huff and puff over a couple of paragraphs at the most, which had always made Nick chuckle—her attempts at authordom, as he referred to them; he’d come in, peer over her shoulder for a brief moment, then rub the back of her neck and say something along the lines of “still no inspiration strike then, I see?” And perhaps he had been right, perhaps her labored efforts and scribbling and scrawling had shown that she’d never had a real feel for writing. Look at Allegra, she had just mentally downloaded at least a couple of thousand words in one go. Perhaps for real writers, real artists like Allegra surely was, the process was much more spiritual, like an emotional release. Afraid of disturbing Allegra but uncertain of what to do now, Ellen whispered her name again.

  “Allegra?”

  “Ellen.” Allegra spoke her name with some resignation, as if she had just been awakened from a rather wonderful dream.

  “That was—that was utterly brilliant!” Ellen was unable to contain herself. “I was right in the moment, with Eliza. It’s so exhilarating and liberating! What happens next? Will Captain Parker come and rescue her and take her back to the manor?”

  Allegra’s nearly translucent lids fluttered open as she observed Ellen from across the room.

  “No, my dear, it’s rather too soon in the story arc for a happy ending. We need to put Eliza in rather more peril first, I’d say.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ellen agreed. “It’s just that if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be a story arc; all of the characters would start out happy, be happy, and then end up happy. But I suppose that would make for a rather dull read.”

  “Have you ever worked on any of Melanie Love’s titles, Ellen?”

  “Yes, once or twice.” Ellen nodded, thinking of the sugary-sweet faux-regency romance novels where the nearest any of the characters got to peril was dropping a handkerchief.

  “Well, then you’ll know that dull is exactly what that kind of book is. Not to mention moronic, but still, if there are people to read that kind of rubbish, there will always be people to write it.” Allegra’s smile was razor sharp. “Now, it was you that got these rusty cogs working again, and the words flowing. What do you think Eliza would do next?”

  Ellen thought for a momen
t, thinking of Eliza standing over the corpse of her attacker. How would she feel? Frightened, exhilarated, confused? Allegra had already decided to move the action to London, so now it was just a question of how to get a fugitive female murderer there.

  “What if she dressed herself in his clothes, cut her hair, took his horse, and made her way to London dressed as a man? It was your idea that Eliza would fight off her latest attacker and escape to London dressed as a man,” Ellen suggested tentatively.

  “How very Shakespearean,” Allegra mused. “It could work, though. How much of a fraud does it make me exactly? I wonder that my assistant is the one coming up with all the ideas.”

  Ellen got up from her chair and walked around the desk, resisting the urge to sit on its polished walnut surface, as she was certain that Allegra would not approve. Instead she leaned against it, enjoying the slight breeze that wafted in through the open french doors, carrying with it a scent of roses in full bloom, mingled with the perfume of next door’s freshly cut lawn and beneath that the earthy stench of moldering plant life, last summer’s dead splendor, never cleared away and still rotting slowly into the earth. Beyond the unruly and unpruned cherry tree at the bottom of the garden, its fruit rotting amid its roots, there would be the neatly trimmed and weeded borders of the garden that backed onto hers, and the garden that backed onto that one, going on and on forever in a suburban patchwork of love and attention, leading Ellen to imagine her own garden standing out, a single frayed, unruly square besmirching the whole design. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps it might be time to venture into the garden again. She watched a pair of cabbage white butterflies dance and flutter around the open door before lifting off in haphazard zigzags into the empty sky. Perhaps another day she’d go out there and assess the situation; she’d think about it, anyway. She turned back to her boss.