“So tell me about how you became the shittiest man on earth,” Ellen said.
“You know what,” Matt said, stretching his legs out and smiling at her, feeling an unfamiliar sense of peace descend. “It doesn’t really seem that important anymore.”
CHAPTER
Eleven
Matt watched Ellen watching Charlie across the kitchen table over breakfast. For once, he had arrived downstairs and was ready for school on time, which was interesting because as far as Matt could tell, Charlie still wasn’t talking to Ellen.
“Good morning, darling,” Ellen had said, unable to disguise her surprise and pleasure at the prospect of getting fifteen minutes to make amends with Charlie before he went to school. “Did you sleep okay? I came up to talk to you last night but you were flat out already.” Tentatively she reached over and touched the top of his head as if she were about to ruffle his hair, but then she thought better of it a second too late to completely pull out of the maneuver. Charlie shrugged off her touch and picked up a piece of toast that she had put in front of him.
“Look.” Ellen sat down opposite him. “I’m sorry I shouted and got so angry last night. It was because I was worried, Charlie—I got all worked up and, well, by the time you came home, all the worry had turned into anger and I took it out on you. That was wrong.”
Charlie said nothing, keeping his eyes down as he munched.
Ellen sighed and sat back in her chair. “But it was wrong of you to go off without telling me where you were going or who with, too. And it was wrong of you to lie to Hannah about telling me.” Still Charlie was unresponsive. “So I’ve decided that I’m not going to take the games console back.…”
Charlie’s snort was sarcastic and derisory as he rolled his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head, Matt noticed with interest as he ate his cornflakes leaning up against the fridge.
“And,” Ellen continued, “if you apologize to me and to Hannah for lying, then we can say that it’s a birthday present and you can have it in September. What do you say?”
Charlie looked at her, his blue eyes vivid in the morning sunshine as he appraised his mother with near-naked contempt. If Matt had been able to place a bet on what the boy was about to say just then, he would have put all his money on something bitter, reproachful, and insightful, something cruel but true, because the cruelest things were often the most true. But Matt would have lost all his money, because Charlie uttered only one word.
“Whatever,” he said.
Matt watched Ellen’s shoulders tense, her whole body a battlefield where her anger and her desire to be friends with Charlie again fought on.
“So what do you have to say?” Ellen asked.
Charlie got up, scraping his chair across the kitchen tiles so that they screeched.
“Take it back to the shop,” he told her levelly. “I’m not apologizing.”
He picked up his school bag in one hand and his remaining piece of toast in the other and walked out, slamming the front door behind him with such force that the mugs rattled on the draining board.
“I didn’t handle that too well, did I?” Ellen said, more to herself than to Matt. “You know, this is my job, being a mother—it’s what I’ve made my whole life about and now I can’t even do that anymore.…”
Matt put his cereal bowl down on the table and briefly rested a consoling hand on her shoulder before picking up his keys and laptop bag. He’d stayed in last night, watching TV in his room, aware that Ellen had gone to bed early and exhausted. As a consequence they had missed their post-midnight meeting, and when he’d woken up that morning, well rested and without a hangover, Matt realized that he had missed it.
“If he didn’t care about you or what you thought or what you said, then he’d have just gone straight to school,” Matt told her, grabbing his jacket. “But he didn’t. He got up and ready early so that he could come down here and ignore and insult you—see, it’s not all that bad!”
Matt paused to look at Ellen. She was dressed in a man’s shirt again, her long hair as yet unbrushed, tumbling over her shoulders in a rare moment of abandonment before being twisted into the knot at the nape of her neck that she favored. She looked like she’d just got out of bed with a lover, Matt realized with a tiny internal thrill, letting his mind wander just a little further for one illicit moment, picturing Ellen in the seconds before she had pulled that shirt on, imagining her lying semiclad on her bed, her black hair spread out on the pillow, trickling between her breasts, which were… It was hard to guess exactly what her body was like under the clothes she wore, which was partly the reason why wondering about her was so interesting. Unlike the women who made it their mission to obliterate mystery with low-cut tops and high-cut skirts—and in the case of the models who graced the pages of Bang It!, barely any clothes at all—Ellen kept everything hidden, covered. She locked her body away, which just at this second and to Matt’s great surprise made it seem even more intriguing. And Matt knew that even if, when he unbuttoned that shirt, the body underneath it was far from the air-brushed perfection that he was bombarded with daily, he would still feel that rush of discovering a newfound land; that he would still desire her, for all the physical frailties and scars that made her the woman she was, as vulnerable as a piece of glass—a piece of glass that for that dangerous moment he wanted to hold in his hands.
There are places that you don’t go, mate, Matt reminded himself sternly as Ellen, feeling his gaze on her, looked up and then down quickly, heat flaring across the bridge of her nose as if she had guessed exactly what he was thinking. And your widowed landlady is one of them.
Women were wrong about him. Carla, and Lucy, the associate editor, and all the angry, bitter girls he’d left in Manchester thought he was a moral void, an incarnation of women-hating evil, even though he had always, mostly always, been up front and honest with them about his intentions, if not about the column that they were quite likely to appear in. But he had some standards, and Ellen was the line he would not cross. As much as she had started to fascinate him, there was something else going on—he liked her. He liked her too much to try to sleep with her, and more than that he wanted to help her, he wanted to do something to smooth that frown that dissected her brow so neatly in half.
“Better run,” Matt said. “End of the week—the whole place goes crazy! But look, try not to worry, all right—this is just boy stuff, it’ll pass.”
Ellen did not look up at Matt as he left, which meant that she was probably still trying to work out just exactly what he had been thinking when she’d caught him looking at her as if he could see right through her clothes.
“Oi! Charlie!” Sweat trickled down Matt’s back as he jogged to catch up with the boy before he reached the end of the road. “Hold up, mate!”
Charlie stopped and frowned, puzzled, as Matt came to a halt by his side, bending over and resting his hands on his knees as he struggled to reclaim his breath.
“Bloody hell, I need to get back in the gym,” he wheezed, nodding at the blazing sky. “It’s going to be another hot one, by the looks of things.”
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked flatly.
“Well, we go the same way, more or less,” Matt lied. “Thought I’d walk with you.”
Charlie scrutinized him through his mother’s black lashes and shrugged his assent.
“So,” Matt said as they began to walk slowly in the direction opposite his bus stop. “That was all a bit of a palaver last night, wasn’t it?”
“S’pose.” Charlie sighed wearily.
“You do know your mum was worried sick about you, don’t you, mate? You do realize that all that shouting last night at you and your aunty Hannah was all about how much she loves you, that’s all. And you know you were out of order with all the lying and shit.”
Charlie giggled at the swear word, like a little boy would.
“So why’d you do it? Not tell your mum where you were going.”
“Because I knew she wou
ldn’t let me go, she never does. She doesn’t like me going places. It’s like if I’m not at school or at home, she freaks out; even when I do phone her and say I’m going to the park or round a mate’s house or whatever, she pretends she’s cool about it, but I know she isn’t. I know she’s sitting at home worrying, waiting for me to come back, and that spoils everything. I can’t have any fun when I know she’s in the house, all anxious. So I thought I wouldn’t tell her—I thought if I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t worry. I told Aunt Hannah we had to be back by five but she’s always late, that’s just what she’s like—she doesn’t worry about anything, you see. She has a laugh.” Charlie shifted his school bag from one shoulder to the other, slipping his blazer off his shoulders at the same time in one practiced movement.
“Okay, I sort of get why you didn’t tell her,” Matt said. “But you must have known she wouldn’t be best pleased about you coming home with a great big expensive present.”
“Dad would have let me have it,” Charlie muttered, kicking an empty Coke can with the toe of his shoe.
“Would he?” Matt asked tentatively. He wanted to know about Charlie’s dad, Ellen’s late husband—but he didn’t want to frighten the kid off by asking too many questions. “Big on presents, was he—your dad?”
“He liked to surprise me.” Charlie’s mouth evolved briefly into a smile. “He used to go away a lot, on business trips and stuff, and he’d always bring me something really cool back and not just something you’d get at an airport. Once he brought me back a BMX, and I had an iPod before any of my mates, and the last time, the last thing he brought me was my DS. It never used to matter if it was my birthday or not. Dad never needed a reason to give me a present.”
“He sounds like a pretty generous guy,” Matt observed, privately wondering if the gifts were to make up for a father’s long absences.
“He was,” Charlie affirmed with a nod. “And he was funny. He was the funniest man ever, he really used to make me and Mum laugh. She used to laugh so hard that tears would come out of her eyes, seriously!” Charlie looked at Matt, determined to make sure that he believed him about his father’s peerless comedy talents.
“I bet,” Matt said, wondering what it would take to make Ellen laugh like that again. “What else do you miss about him?”
“His smell,” Charlie said, softly. “He had this smell that was just Dad. When he’d get in from work he’d always come and see me, even if it was really late. Give me a kiss, because you know, I was still a little kid then and I liked kisses. And he used to smell of aftershave and the cigarettes that Mummy used to pretend she didn’t know he smoked and just… him. Even if I was properly asleep when he came to kiss me good night, I’d still know he was there. I’d smell him in my sleep. And I miss his hugs. And playing football with him in the garden on the Sundays when he was home, and taking our bikes down to the park, and last May he had a bit of time off of work so he took me, just me and him on our own, to Center Parc for a long weekend and we did all these things, biking and climbing and swimming, just us. And we had dinner together and we talked and talked and talked, just us two. And he said that he’d always love me, no matter what happened. I should always remember that he loved me more than anything.…”
Charlie trailed off and Matt didn’t attempt to prompt him further, taken back fifteen years by those words. He’d heard that phrase before: “No matter what happens, remember I love you, son.” His dad had said that to him one Saturday over a McDonald’s after he’d taken him to see his favorite soccer team, Manchester United. Matt remembered that he’d blushed and told his dad not to be so worried that someone might overhear. What he hadn’t realized as he sat there on those hard plastic chairs under the strip lighting was that that was the last Saturday, the last day he would ever spend with his dad. By Sunday morning his dad had gone, God knows where, with this woman whom he’d told his mother in a note, written on the back of a takeaway menu for the local Indian, that he “could not live without.” Matt had never seen him again, and from that day on he had always considered his father a liar, and worse, that a father’s love was a pointless, meaningless thing if it meant that you could live without your children. Had Charlie’s dad been preparing his son for some change or upheaval, too? The anniversary of the accident was coming up; Matt wasn’t sure exactly when but he knew it was sometime in July, because Hannah had warned him that it might be a sensitive time. Was it possible that Nick Woods had known exactly what he was doing when he crashed that car? Maybe things had been so bad with his business that he had thought that cashing in his life insurance was the only way to look after Ellen and Charlie, and he’d taken Charlie away for a final holiday, to give the boy some memories. Then again, he hadn’t exactly thought that through, Matt reflected; causing your own death ruled out any insurance payout, which was why Ellen was in such a financial bind now, and by the sound of him, Nick had been quite a controlling guy—not the sort of person who’d make such a basic mistake.
Besides, suicide didn’t ring true. From what little Matt knew about the man, he didn’t seem the kind of guy to throw it all in, no matter how noble his motivations might have been. Nick had been a huge man, metaphorically if not literally. He’d loomed large in his family’s life. That kind of man wouldn’t ever have given up, he’d have battled on to make sure that his wife and son always saw him that way, as their hero. So, if Charlie’s dad hadn’t been preparing him for his death, what had he been preparing him for?
More likely, Matt thought, dropping a consoling hand on Charlie’s shoulder, he was letting his own past color what Charlie had just told him. It was more likely that Charlie had had the kind of father who’d really loved him, who had searched out time to spend with him, who had simply wanted his son to know exactly how important he was in his father’s life, and for Charlie’s sake, and in some small way his own, Matt really wanted that to be true.
“Mate,” Matt said, “this must be fucking awful for you.”
“It is.” Charlie stifled a sob, half turning away from Matt, coughing up words on each gulp of air. “It is fucking awful because he’s dead and he isn’t coming back. I’m not going to get to go biking or swimming or do anything with him or… or smell him or hug him ever again… am I?” The question was so plaintive and desolately hopeful that Matt felt tears sting his eyes. He guided Charlie to a bench in a bus shelter and sat him down, standing in front of him to shield him from the prying eyes of passersby.
“Listen, if you want to cry, mate—you cry. It’s good for a bloke to cry every now and again. I’ll stand here and make sure no one sees.”
Matt felt a curious feeling in his chest, like a slow tear that ran from his sternum to his gut, as he stood there looking down at Charlie, who buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Matt dug a hand into his pocket and pulled out, along with some change and half a packet of gum, a screwed-up tissue.
“Here.” He tucked it into Charlie’s hand. “You can mop up the snot with that.” Matt wasn’t sure how long he stood there over Charlie as he cried, directing his threatening gaze at anyone who tried to intrude on what little privacy the boy had, but he knew that it was long enough to make him late for work and Charlie late for school. He would be even later to turn up at the office than he’d planned, as he’d have to take Charlie into school now, he couldn’t let him go the rest of the way alone.
After a load of people had congregated at the stop and then lurched away on the next bus, Charlie screwed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and blew his nose on the sodden tissue. He looked up at Matt.
“Do I look like I’ve been crying?” he asked anxiously, the blue of his eyes made all the more intense by his red-rimmed lids.
“Yeah, a bit,” Matt said. “But you can say it’s hay fever. Hay fever makes you look all puffy and shit, too.”
Charlie nodded and looked at his watch and leaped up. “I’d better get to school, else they’ll be calling Mum and she’ll freak out aga
in.”
“I’ll come with you,” Matt offered. “Tell them it was my fault you were late.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Charlie said.
“I know, mate,” Matt said. “But I want to, okay?”
They stood side by side, swaying in silence as they waited for the next bus. After a while, Charlie asked him a question.
“When was the last time you cried?”
Matt glanced down at the boy. The last time he had cried was when his best mate from childhood, Gaz, had found him having sex with his girlfriend in the back of a night club last year. His friend had punched him in the face and told his sobbing girlfriend—the girl Matt knew Gaz had been planning to propose to that night, because he’d shown Matt the ring and already recruited him as best man—that she was a whore and a slag and he never wanted to see her again. Matt remembered the way she’d looked at him, Angie, tears and snot streaming down her face, blaming him, begging him to sort it out, to tell Gaz that it was all his fault, that he’d started it. But he hadn’t done that.
Gaz had not been able to forgive either him or Angie, and Matt realized that he’d lost one of the few constant things in his life because he had been unable to resist the temptation of having that which was taboo. It didn’t matter that Angie had been flirting with him for months, that whenever Gaz wasn’t around she’d find a reason to touch him, brush against him, make sure that he could see down her top or up her skirt at every available opportunity. It didn’t matter that she’d been playing a game with him. He shouldn’t have gone there. He shouldn’t have crossed the line, and when he’d realized that he’d broken Gaz’s heart and his own, too, he had cried. He’d curled up on the floor and cried his heart out.
“Last time I cried?” Matt glanced skyward. “When Arsenal beat the mighty Man United—but that was ages ago, so I’m over it now.”
Charlie smiled. “You’ve just been lucky is all. You wait, once our defense matures, we’ll be back on top again.”
The Home for Broken Hearts Page 18
