The Home for Broken Hearts

by Rowan Coleman

  “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.”

  Matt pushed the plunger through the coffee, watching the dark liquid swirl and surge through the filter. “I don’t reckon she’d say yes,” he said. “I don’t reckon she’d think it would be a very good idea. I mean, like you say, I’m not exactly boyfriend material.”

  “You could write her a poem,” Charlie suggested. “Show her you’re sensitive and romantic.”

  Matt snorted a derisory laugh. “I don’t know, I’ve been writing bollocks for so long now that I’m not sure I could.”

  “Tell you what,” Charlie said. “You write her a poem and I’ll write Emily a poem and we can read each other’s and see if they are bad or not, and if they aren’t too bad we’ll give them to them on the same day and ask them out. Like a pact.”

  “A suicide pact?” Matt joked, but he saw that Charlie was deadly serious and he remembered what it was like to be Charlie’s age for a moment, when anything was possible and the future was a place waiting to be filled with dreams come true. “You know what,” Matt said, holding out his hand, “let’s do it.”

  Charlie spat in his palm, took Matt’s hand, and shook it.

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Cool,” Matt replied. “But the spitting was a bit over the top, mate.”

  “Hannah?” Ellen knelt beside the bed so that her face was level with her sister’s. “Hannah? Wake up, sis. You need to eat.”

  Hannah stirred, mumbling something unintelligible, moaning as she rolled over, turning her back on Ellen, reminding her of the days when it had been her job to drag her teenage sister out of bed and cajole her into going to school.

  “Hans, Hannah—wake up, come on now.” Gingerly, Ellen shook Hannah’s bruised shoulder, scared of hurting her again.

  Slowly, stiffly, Hannah rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, although only one was able to open completely. She turned her head and looked at her sister. “Ellen?” she whispered through dry, cracked lips. “Are you here?”

  “Yes,” Ellen said awkwardly. She had no idea how to reconcile her feelings, the fury and anger that she still felt every time she looked at Hannah because of what she had done to her and the pity and horror at what her sister had been through. She felt like she needed to be two people, or have two sisters, to be able to slip through a hole in time and exist in two parallel universes simultaneously. She had no idea how to handle this. There was no choice but to take it second by second. “Charlie came round this morning, we had a bit of a disagreement and he came round here. I wasn’t sure what you would say to him.”

  Ellen thought Hannah might have frowned, but her features were immobilized by swelling. “You thought I’d tell him about me and Nick?”

  Ellen felt stung, just as if Hannah had slapped her in the face. She hadn’t been making it up, then; Ellen hadn’t imagined it. It really was true.

  “You didn’t really tell me before, exactly what happened between you and Nick,” Ellen said steadily. “And I need to know before I drive myself mad. Was it a one-off thing? Were you drunk? Where did it happen?”

  With some difficulty, Hannah turned to look at Ellen. “It wasn’t a one-off thing… it was a relationship. We were together for about a year.”

  Ellen pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle the wave of nausea that swept over her. She nodded, gesturing that Hannah should go on.

  “You know that I never really liked Nick, not when I first met him. I thought he was pompous and overbearing and that he was changing you. I always thought you were so cool, so together, and then Nick came along and… you weren’t my big sis anymore, you were his wife. Your whole life was about being his wife. You never seemed to understand how much I looked up to you, wanted to be like you. I was so jealous of you, but the more I tried to be like you, the less you liked me.”

  “You were jealous of me?” Ellen asked, disbelieving. “You hated me ever having anything that was mine, you always tried to take it, always—even… even my husband.”

  “Ellen, that’s not true!” Hannah sobbed. “Look, I know I like the limelight, making everyone look at me, me, me—but only because I don’t have what you have. I don’t have your… presence. I’m all smoke and mirrors, hollow inside. You… you are everything I’ve always wanted to be, but that isn’t why Nick and I… that just happened. I wasn’t looking for it, he came to me.”

  Ellen didn’t say anything; she couldn’t.

  “We were at a family thing, a Christmas thing, and I’d been feeling a bit down. You know, another New Year’s coming up and still no Mr. Right. I was in Mum and Dad’s kitchen, knocking back the Baileys, and he came in. He asked me what was up. I can’t remember what I said, something rude probably, telling him where to go, and he just leaned over and kissed me. Not a massive snog or anything, just a kiss on the lips, and he said that no woman like me should be alone on New Year’s Eve. That’s when it started, when I started to see him, when I started to fall for him.”

  Hannah paused and reached for a glass of stale water by her bed; her voice was paper dry.

  “I tried to stay away from him, I swear. I suddenly got it. I suddenly got how much you loved him, and why he saw me. He saw the good in me, and I knew that’s why you loved him so much. And I never, never wanted to… but then one night he just turned up at the flat. It was dark and raining and he just arrived. He stood there on the doorstep in the rain, just looking at me, and then we… we kissed. He said he’d tried to stay away, too, he’d tried but he couldn’t. He said he needed me. It started then and I… I loved him, Ellen, I loved him and he loved me, too. We were going to tell you. We were going to face up to it all and be together, until… The last year, it’s been hell beca
use I’ve had to grieve for him in secret, knowing how I’ve betrayed you. Torn between wanting to be near you, with you and Charlie, and running away so that you two would never find out what I’ve done.”

  “But if Nick hadn’t died, if you two had run off together, Charlie would have found out then. You can’t have cared about that.”

  Ellen watched for a second as Hannah struggled to sit up and then she hooked her arms under Hannah’s and helped her rise, plumping pillows behind her to support her back.

  “I did. I thought about it all the time and so did Nick. We worried and worried about it. Nick never wanted to hurt Charlie or you. If it had been up to him he would have left it as it was. Living at home with you, coming round to me two or three times a week. If I loved you, I should have been able to live with that. But I’m not like you, Ellen. I’m not the sort of person who can live on the sidelines. I wanted to be everything to him, so I forced his hand. I gave him an ultimatum. I told him he had to choose, either me or you. Just before he died he promised me that it was going to be me, that he just wanted to wait a few more weeks and then we’d be together. We decided we’d talk to you together and then he’d talk to Charlie. I made him promise that he’d look after you, financially. That you’d be able to keep the house and he’d make sure you were comfortable.”

  “How big of you,” Ellen said coolly.

  Hannah burst into painful-sounding coughs, clasping her ribs with each spasm. “I know what it sounds like,” she said. “I know that I sound like a heartless bitch, but, Ellen, nobody ever loved me the way he did. No one ever looked at me the way he did. He made me feel so special, so beautiful.”

  “Yes, he was good at that,” Ellen said bitterly. Hannah had recited almost word for word what she had told Allegra about her husband only a few days earlier.

  “I know you loved him,” Hannah went on. “And I know he loved you, too, once. But people change and grow apart.”

  “I know that he changed me,” Ellen said. “I know that he stopped me in my tracks at a point in my life when I could have been anything or anyone and he made me into his wife. He would have changed you, too, Hannah, in the end.”