The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  Ellen stopped in her tracks as she ran the sentence over again, hearing the words as if for the first time. “You kept asking me to forgive you.…”

  Slowly, Hannah set the kettle down and turned around. When Ellen looked into her eyes, she knew the truth.

  “You had sex with Nick,” she said slowly. “You had sex with my husband.”

  “Oh, God.” Hannah buried her bruised face in her hands. “Oh, God, I was afraid I’d let it slip, after all this time.…”

  Ellen battled against the words that demanded repetition and lost. “You had sex with my husband. My sister had sex with my husband. Oh my God…” She lurched forward, then steadied herself heavily on the tabletop. “Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. You threw yourself at him, you threw yourself at the one thing I had that was mine!”

  “No.” Hannah took a tentative step toward Ellen. “No, it wasn’t like that. You have to listen. It wasn’t just sex… and it wasn’t because either of us didn’t love you—it was… it wasn’t just sex, Ellen, we… Nick and I loved each other, too.”

  Ellen stared at Hannah, every sinew in her body caught in the moment, every fiber straining against what she was hearing.

  “Get out,” Ellen said. “Get out of my home now.”

  “Ellen, please, I’ve tried. I’ve tried not to tell you, but I had to. I don’t know what would have happened if I kept it to myself any longer. At least now you know, we can talk, we can work things through, we can support each other. … Please, all I want is for you and me to be okay.”

  In that second, Ellen snapped. She grabbed her sister by the arm, oblivious to the pain that shot across Hannah’s face, and dragged and pushed her in turn into the hallway and out the front door, giving her one violent shove after the other up the garden path and onto the street.

  “Get out, get out, get out,” Ellen repeated, deaf to Hannah’s protests.

  Finally, with the midday sun blazing down on their heads, the two of them stood in the road. “You’re right,” Ellen told her sister. “I hope they hurt you, I hope they used you and hurt you, because you were right, you deserved everything that happened to you. You’re nothing more than a common whore.”

  Turning her back on her sister, Ellen felt the world tip and tilt, felt herself no longer bound by the rules of gravity, about to slip off the face of the earth. She felt the oxygen rush from her collapsing lungs, her heart pounding, about to explode in her chest as sank onto her knees, the hot paving stones burning her bare skin. Suddenly the front door seemed a thousand miles away and still the world slipped on its axis, revolving ever upward as if she were a parasite it was keen to be rid of. Breaking her nails against the stones, Ellen began to claw her way to the shadow and shelter of the house, fighting for each breath as she went. After what seemed an eternity, she was aware of someone at her side, thin fingers supporting her under her armpits, dragging her, guiding her toward the distant country of her home, of what once had been her home, and at last the sun was eclipsed by shadow and Ellen felt the cool ceramic tiles pressed against her cheek.

  As Allegra shut the door firmly on Hannah, Ellen lay there, waiting for the world to right itself again, and then she realized that was impossible now. Nothing would ever be right again.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  Since he had arrived at work that morning to find Lucy locked and loaded and waiting for him, Matt’s head had been swimming with a thousand images, of Hannah beaten and bruised, of the photos of half-naked women tacked, taped, and spread out all around him, like an obscene collection of butterflies pinned up for his delectation, and most of all of Ellen in the moments before he had awakened her and dragged her into a world of confusion and chaos.

  She had looked beautiful, not in an interesting or flawed way. Not because of the usual frailties that so often fascinated him about women, but because to him, she simply was beautiful. Her hair had been spread across the pillow, entwined between her fingers, her lips had been slightly parted as if in preparation for a kiss, and her bare throat had shone in the half-light, a glowing pathway that promised to lead to an undiscovered country. For reasons that Matt could not fathom, the sight of her then had taken him back ten years to an English class in which he thought he had not been paying attention, to a poem by some dead bloke whose name he would never remember in a million years. And yet, just then, one single line that must have slotted its way into his brain on that wet and wintry morning all those years ago presented itself to him as if it had been waiting all these years to make itself known: “Oh my America, my newfound land.”

  If in fact Matt remembered rightly, that poem was the reason he had become interested in writing in the first place. He’d forgotten that entirely until that moment, and he wondered how he could have forgotten something as pivotal as that. And what was it about Ellen that made him remember that moment all those years ago in a cold, dingy classroom where he’d been unexpectedly inspired to write a love poem, to simply write?

  As Matt found himself in the middle of all the images of Hannah and the parade of topless models that assaulted him from all angles, he wondered, too, what would have happened if he had walked into Ellen’s bedroom to wake her for another reason entirely.

  He worked through his exhaustion, laboring away for the column over a fictionalized account of what had not happened between him and Ellen, but every time he tried to make it seem like a funny or racy anecdote, he’d realize that it had become romantic and fantastical. As if he was trying to remember that poem and rewrite it in prose for a men’s magazine. Still, Pete didn’t have to know that, so Matt went with it, allowing himself free rein to think about her, to describe her in every detail, and to imagine coaxing her to reveal herself to him, layer by layer, a lazy unveiling that when he pictured it got him much hotter under the collar than any of the photos that surrounded him. Which was odd, because Matt always maintained that men were simple creatures with simple desires, yet nothing that he had started to feel for Ellen was simple. “On His Mistress Going to Bed,” that’s what that poem was called; the title had suddenly popped into his brain. How odd that he’d remember that now, all these years later. Matt allowed himself to idle away a few more minutes, reimagining Ellen in that poem, and then caught Pete’s eye across the office. He had to resign himself to the fact that there was no place for poetry at Bang It! Unless you counted the limerick someone had scrawled on the wall in the gents’.

  As soon as the sun was up in Nevada, Matt put in a call to Fifi’s Cathouse, which had a drive-through brothel where the self-employed girls chose between renting a room in the house or entertaining their clients in the comfort of their cars in a series of dingy garages. Of course, the sun coming up seemed to mean that the workforce went to bed, but eventually Matt got through to someone and he was not surprised to discover that his was not nearly the first request for information. A very pleasant-sounding woman called Angel Delight said she would email him a press pack and line up some Skype interviews with a selection of the professionals, but he would have to wait until eight o’clock that evening for them to begin, which gave him some time to kill. Matt wondered about phoning Ellen to find out how she and Hannah were. Then he wondered if it was appropriate—he thought it should be, after all, he was the one who had discovered Hannah, who’d brought her back and stayed up all night with Ellen. He was the one whom Ellen had embraced, but somehow Matt wasn’t sure that gave him any special privileges. He remembered telling a girl he’d dated for a week or two back in Manchester that one of the reasons he wanted to break up with her was that she was too clingy.

  “Too clingy? You call my calling you after nearly a week too clingy?” she had exclaimed. “You don’t mind sleeping with me, seeing me a couple of times a week for sex, but only as long as I know my place and I don’t expect that you sharing my bed gives me the right to actually talk to you every once in a while? I don’t play those games, Matt. Either we’re together or we’re not. Which is it?”

  Matt had r
esponded with a resounding “not” and gone on his way without giving the girl a second thought. Except for today—today he understood how intimacy, even simple emotional intimacy, could lead a person to think it was okay to phone another person to see if she was okay. Only what if the other person thought he was being invasive, nosy, or even clingy? Matt realized that Ellen made him feel like a girl, which he wasn’t entirely thrilled about. This was how he’d been making girls feel for years.

  As the clock ticked on toward eight, Pete invited him to sit in on a casting; a couple of girls were in Dan’s office, stripping down to their underwear in the hope of making a spread. But as several staff members, including the postroom boy, found spurious reasons why they absolutely had to be there, Matt realized that he didn’t want to look at them. Instead, he had to resist the urge to walk in there and tell them to cover themselves up and have a little self-respect. That of course would have been career suicide, and even though he was beginning to wonder if this was the right career for him, he couldn’t afford just to walk away from it. How would he pay Ellen rent then?

  Matt decided to kill time in the pub. With a bit of luck, the rest of the lads who hadn’t found a way into Dan’s office would be caught up watching the secret filming of the casting in the conference room for at least an hour, and he’d get a chance to think.

  Of course, Lucy was in the lift when Matt stepped in. She looked him up and down and then studied the wall with interest.

  “I thought that was pretty cool today,” Matt said.

  “What’s this, a line?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the wall. “Trying to trick me into thinking you’re not so bad after all, to prove to all those gormless goons up there that you can get me back into bed?”

  Matt smiled. “That would have been a plan of pure evil genius, but no—actually that thought hadn’t occurred to me. Seriously, I… I treated you like shit and I used you and I deserved all of that. I really did.” Matt seemed even more surprised by his confession than Lucy, who peered at him suspiciously.

  “Have you found God or something, because even if you have, I’m still not going to have sex with you ever again.”

  “Well, I’d hate for you to be bored,” Matt said as the lift reached the ground floor and they stepped out into the foyer, pleased to see a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her glossed lips. “Or have to fake anything.”

  Lucy grinned at him as they walked out into the blaze of the evening.

  “Isn’t it funny that two people can do something so intimate and so… close and not really know each other at all?”

  “I suppose it is,” Matt said.

  “I mean, here I am looking at you and you’re cute and everything, but it seems like another person who went to bed with you, another person who I went to bed with. I never ever would have gone to bed with you if I’d gotten to know you.”

  “Bloody hell, Lucy.” Matt winced. “You’ve had your revenge in a national magazine. Can’t you lay off now?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that you are far too nice to have sex with.”

  “Oh, God,” Matt groaned.

  “You’re more like a brother, really,” Lucy went on.

  “Shut up!” Matt cried.

  “Yes, that’s it—a little gay brother.”

  “Right, fine, fine—I’m your nice little gay brother. Sex is totally off the table. Now we’ve established the facts, what are the chances you’ll come and have a drink with me? We can talk about fashion, and shoes and…”

  “What?” Lucy grinned at him. “Interior design?”

  “Remember that dragon of a landlady I was telling you about?” Matt said, sensing that even after everything that had happened, he could trust Lucy. “Well, she’s got me feeling a bit confused.”

  “Oh, so you are gay after all. Tell all to Agony Aunt Lucy, I’ll set you straight.”

  Matt remembered that Lucy liked white wine spritzers and set one down in front of her as she openly flirted with a man in a tight T-shirt who was standing at the bar.

  “Don’t sleep with him,” Matt advised, pushing the drink across the surface of the table. “He’s even more of a prick than I am.”

  “How do you know?” Lucy asked. Matt nodded at the man’s left hand, where a faint white mark was visible on his ring finger.

  “Oh my God,” Lucy moaned, covering her face with her hands. “Why am I such a terrible judge of character?”

  “Start from the assumption that every man you meet is out to get you. Keep them far, far away until you know different, and then eventually you’ll meet one who will see all the brilliant things about you, apart from your face and your body. They’ll go dippy over the way you tell a joke, and how your eyes flash when you’re mad, and that sweet weird little dimple on your right shoulder. And they won’t be able to stop thinking about you, and wondering about you, and you’ll have them wrapped around your little finger, I promise.”

  Lucy looked at Matt for a long minute. “You’re sure you’re not in love with me, aren’t you, because you’re nice and everything, but really…”

  “No, it’s not you. It’s my dragon landlady. I’ve become a bit obsessed with her.”

  “In a stalky, weird, want-her-because-you-can’t-have-her sort of way?” Lucy asked. “Because let me tell you, there is nothing that pisses me off more than a man who’s all about the thrill of the chase and then as soon as he’s got you, he goes off you.”

  “No, no—not in that sort of way. In a wanting-to-write-her-a-love-poem sort of way. In a caring-about-what-she’s-thinking-and-feeling-and-worrying-about-her sort of way. In a wanting-to-lie-down-beside-her-and-hold-her-and-stroke-her-hair sort of way.” Matt’s confession poured out of him, because once he’d started to talk about the way he felt about Ellen, he discovered that he didn’t want to stop. “She’s got this inner quiet about her, you know. A sort of stillness and silence. I look at her and I get the feeling she’d bring me… peace.”

  “Fuck me, you are gay!” Lucy said, grinning as Matt blushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. What I meant was, it sounds like you have sort of written her poem already. And it sounds like you really do like her.”

  “I really, really do,” Matt said. “And I have no idea what to do about it.”

  “Tell her?” Lucy suggested.

  “I can’t do that—it’s the anniversary of her husband’s death soon, and she’s got a kid, and besides, she’s in the middle of a great big awful mess with her sister. I can’t just tip up and tell her how I feel.”

  “Maybe your doing that is exactly what she needs,” Lucy mused.

  “Plus, I’d actually die before I’d have the guts to,” Matt added.

  “You know what I don’t get?” Lucy scrutinized him. “Is that you, Matt Bolton, trashy-column writer, coming up with all this poetic shit? Either it doesn’t seem like you or you don’t seem like someone who should be writing for Bang It!”

  Lucy had repeated almost exactly what Ellen had said to him.

  “Which is funny, because it’s my dream job,” Matt told her grimly.

  “What, you set out wanting to fill in the gaps between photos of women’s tits, did you? I do admire a man with ambition.”

  Matt laughed. “I thought I did—I thought there couldn’t be a better job for me. But no, the first thing I ever tried to write was a poem, and then when I was a bit older I wanted to be a journalist, like a war correspondent. Then girls happened, my column happened. I fucked up my life in Manchester by having sex with my best friend’s girlfriend and ended up here. I thought I was following a career path, but really I’ve just been letting stuff happen to me. And now I don’t know what to do.”

  “Apologize to your best friend,” Lucy said.

  “That will solve all my problems?” Matt asked. “Anyway, I can’t, he’s not talking to me. He kicked me out and took custody of the PlayStation.”

  “Then try again and keep trying until you get through to him. Show him you c
are enough to persist. Best friends are hard to find, and if you’re about to fall in love with someone, then you’re going to need him for when it all goes horribly wrong and you’re an emotional wreck. Besides, it’s karma. You need to clear up your negative karma, and as tracking down all of the women you’ve upset or offended recently would take about a million years, your only hope is to sort things out with your friend, take stock of your work, and then tell your landlady how you feel about her.”

  “What if she runs a mile?”

  “Life’s not all about dead certs, sunshine,” Lucy said. “It’s not all about lining up some tipsy bit of totty in a bar for ten minutes of fun—”

  “Hang on—it was more like twenty—”

  “It’s about taking risks, it’s about putting yourself out there, really living your life. And I don’t get the feeling that’s what you’re doing now. You’re treading water, and you are too nice and sweet and clever to let that happen to you.”

  “Can you strike the ‘nice and sweet’ bit from that list?” Matt said. “I’m actually the dark destroyer.”

  “No, you are not!” Lucy snorted into her drink. “You’re one of the nice guys. Which means two things: first, that it’s time you admit it, and second, that I can never, ever fancy you again. There’s always a bright side.”

  It was gone ten by the time Matt finished chatting to the ladies of Fifi’s Cathouse, and all very nice they were, too. There were two single mothers who had discovered that this was one of the very few jobs that they could fit in around their children and earn enough to pay the bills. There were a couple of young girls, barely twenty, who just did it for fun, one of whom was putting herself through college while she studied for a degree in medicine, and there was one woman who just plain liked the work. It was only when Matt logged off that he realized he hadn’t got any of the sort of stuff that Dan would be looking for; all the notes he’d made about the women he’d talked to were about them, their backgrounds, their motivations, even the names of their pets, in one case. He hadn’t asked a single one of them what their favorite position was. Maybe Lucy was right, either he was going gay or… Lucy had used the term falling in love. Matt preferred to think of it as “having feelings.” Having feelings seemed a lot less frightening than either of the alternatives.