A Home for Broken Hearts, page 13
‘Sounds awful,’ Ellen said drily. ‘How on earth did you cope?’
‘To be honest, that kind of girl who’s so up for it is a turn-off. There’s no challenge, no mystery.’
‘Which is why you exercised your free will and said no thank you very much young lady,’ Ellen observed, hating how much she sounded like his sensible maiden aunt.
‘I know. I know that’s what I should have done. But she’s a woman, a hot woman and she wanted to go to bed with me. Like I said, I’m shallow.’
‘Was it worth it, the sex?’ Ellen found herself asking him, edging closer to the table and sitting down.
‘It was fine,’ Matt said. ‘It was nice, but the second it was over I didn’t want to talk to her any more. I wanted her to go. So I invented the whole dragon-landlady thing, sorry.’
‘I don’t think it’s me you should be apologising to,’ Ellen said, sounding much primmer and older than she intended. ‘I mean, you must have made the poor girl feel as if you were really interested in her, you must have made her feel that it was OK to come back to bed with you.’
Matt scrutinised her long enough to make her dip her chin and break eye contact with him.
‘Do you think I’m a shit?’ he asked her.
Ellen shrugged, suddenly feeling overwhelmed with tiredness. She wasn’t sure if she was expected to work with Allegra on a Saturday or not, but she would definitely have to get up to make her breakfast.
‘I expect that when the poor girl wakes up in the morning she’ll feel foolish and vulnerable and she’ll think that you’re a shit.’ Ellen yawned. ‘But at least you’re honest. You don’t dress up how you feel or think about things, you more sort of sling on a towel and lounge around half naked.’
‘Oh shit.’ Matt looked down at himself as if he’d only just remembered what he was not wearing. ‘Shit. I’ve been here – what, five days? And I’ve pissed off your son, called you a dragon and made an idiot of myself. Am I evicted?’
Ellen smiled at him, glad to see him like this, young, brash, half drunk, half naked and awkward. The real Matt, as disarming and as handsome as he might be, was nothing like the captain in her dreams. Perhaps avoiding him was the wrong thing to do after all; the better she got to know him the less he would embody that perfect hero in her head.
‘Goodnight Matt,’ she said. ‘Get some sleep.’
‘Night Ellen, and …’ Matt paused, suddenly bashful. ‘I’m glad you were up. It’s not often you meet a woman you can talk to.’
‘Unlike the ones you can have sex with,’ Ellen replied. ‘They’re a dime a dozen.’
Chapter Nine
‘Don’t you reckon, heh?’ Pete chuckled into his third lunchtime pint. A rising tide of red was creeping over his jowls and towards the tips of his ears with each swig of beer. ‘Heh? Matt?’
Matt looked up from his own untouched beer and realised that he hadn’t been listening to a word Pete had said since they’d sat down at the table. This was his third week at Bang It! and he was halfway through his probation. His first two columns had gone down well, with Dan and best of all with the readers. He’d had quite a lot of actual letters, which was rare in the Bang It! office. They usually got Suze to make them up in her lunch hour. Dan was pleased with him, but the more he worked for Pete the more he realised that half of his job consisted of babysitting his boss and keeping him at least vaguely on track. Nobody had said it out loud, of course, but the fact was Pete was an alcoholic, with a fondness for the odd line of mid-morning coke. Matt had no idea how Pete kept his job, but he did and he got the distinct feeling that as the rookie in the pack it was his duty to help Pete keep it. Still, the more he saw of his boss, who was permanently messed up – and even Dan, whose good looks and vigour were already being blurred by a lifestyle that would eventually erode them – Matt secretly wondered if this was his dream job after all. Was this really what he’d been hoping for all those years back when he’d first tried his hand at journalism? He’d landed a job that meant he woke up every morning with a hangover, that was giving him a worrying laissez-faire attitude to naked breasts and that required of him, as a pinnacle of creativity, to think up ten different ways to write ‘blow job’. He was sure he’d had other aspirations as a kid, when a report on News at Ten from a massacre in India had both brought him to tears and inspired him to want to do what that reporter had done, bring the really important news home to people in a way that made it seem personal, that made it matter. Somehow he had ended up here, an expert babe-hound, living the bachelor life surrounded by women. It had to be his dream job, how could it not be? Even if his drunken boss did somewhat take the edge off.
At just after twelve thirty Pete had arrived at Matt’s desk looking hot and uncomfortable in a too-tight shirt and food-stained tie, beads of sweat decorating his brow despite the air-conditioned office, and once again commanded Matt to join him for a liquid lunch.
‘Got to get out of this shit hole for an hour,’ he’d sighed, pulling at his shirt collar as he glared around at the rest of the room. Everyone studiously avoided making eye contact with him. Matt got the distinct impression that his colleagues were smirking at him behind his back.
‘I’d love to, but the thing is I still have to put this review to bed and I need to polish up my column a bit …’ Matt began.
‘What? No you don’t, that draft you gave me was fine. I sent it to the features folder last night.’
‘What? Pete!’ Matt shook his head. ‘I thought I told you, that was a first draft, I hadn’t … refined it yet.’
‘Refined it? Bollocks, this is Bang It!, mate, not Woman & Home. You’re writing about shagging, not how to fluff up a muffin – although now I come to think of it that makes a pretty good euphemism.’ Pete’s chuckle was filthy. ‘Take it from an expert, that column was perfect. Now get your coat, you’ve pulled.’
Reluctantly Matt had slid back his chair and followed Pete out into the midday glare of the street and to the Red Lion, the pub that was just around the corner from the office. That column had been perfect, perfect for Pete that was. Matt had written it based on his evening with the subeditor. Last week he’d rehashed a column from his Manchester days, but he didn’t know London well enough to make it completely authentic. He had thought that one city would be very much like the next, but that wasn’t true. While Manchester was big, vibrant and packed full of all kinds of life, compared to London it felt almost like a village. Of course he felt more at home in Manchester, it was his home – he’d grown up there. But it was more than that. London was so huge, both dirty and beautiful, sprawling and crawling with humanity, layer upon layer of life that he’d barely had a chance to scratch the surface of, that Matt wasn’t sure he could begin to get his head around what made the place tick, or even the little bit of it he had seen so far.
He knew he had to work harder to capture the essence of his ‘hunting ground’ in his column, so he’d written his subeditor article with Pete in mind, and as a consequence it was dirty and graphic and treated its female focus in turn as an object of lust and then ridicule. If he was honest Matt had knocked it out in minutes, returning to the office one evening after a stint in the pub, feeling gung-ho and keen on impressing his new bosses. But since then he’d had second thoughts. Thoughts that involved the subeditor, who had been funny and generous, passionate and open. He’d called her easy, but easy wasn’t really the right word. More that she was willing, willing to take a chance on him, willing to live life to the full – and after all that was pretty much his motto. The poor girl hadn’t really done anything wrong other than trust him, and it seemed unfair that she should be pilloried for it. Even if he had invented a name for her and changed her job to that of editorial assistant she would know it was about her.
And now the piece was out there and there was nothing that Matt could do about it, unless he wanted to make himself look like an idiot. He’d probably hurt a perfectly nice girl, for no good reason. Matt struggled with this latest bout of guilt. Back home he’d written piece after piece about girls he’d met in passing and it had never seemed to matter then. But recently, maybe after everything that had happened just before he left, he had started to see, to feel, the consequences of his actions. It was a new awareness that was not a particularly useful attribute for a features writer on a lads’ mag, and it was something he’d have to stamp out if he wanted to really fit in at Bang It!. Matt couldn’t put his finger on when exactly these reservations had started to insinuate their way into his psyche, but he was fairly sure it was before he got on the train to London. He was certain that his landlady had had an awful lot to do with how his conscience was now pricking him, at precisely the wrong moment in his life.
Small-hours chats with Ellen in the kitchen had become almost a regular feature over the last couple of weeks, and Matt had begun to realise that he looked forward to finding her sitting cupping a steaming mug of tea between her palms, despite the summer’s unremitting heat. He’d walk into the kitchen, pretend to be surprised to see her, she’d apologise, like she always did for nothing in particular. He’d claim he was just getting a drink of water and she’d say she’d take her cup of tea to bed. Yet invariably they’d sit and talk over the day, the day he’d had trying to make a feature out of lads’ holiday sex, and the day she’d had inventing ever more treacherous situations for the heroine in this book Allegra was writing. Her dry comments and faux-matronly disapproval of his latest antics would always make him laugh – she was unexpectedly witty.
Once he’d given her a draft of his column to read and waited, breath bated, surprised at how anxious he was to find out what she thought of his writing.
‘Wow,’ she’d said after a moment. ‘I’d hate to get on the wrong side of you.’
‘You don’t think it’s funny?’ Matt asked her. It had been a recycled piece about a beautician he’d met back home, who’d made the mistake of hurriedly waxing her bikini line into a Brazilian while Matt waited for her in the living room, believing her to simply be visiting the toilet. It had turned out that it was a job best not rushed, and the poor girl had emerged in pain and bleeding quite profusely from some rather delicate areas. She’d tried to cover it up but had eventually confessed, and Matt, ever the gentleman, had soothed the affected area with an ice pack. There were jokes about plucked chickens and stubble rash. Pete had loved it.
‘It is funny, I suppose,’ Ellen said uncertainly. ‘But it’s also kind of … mean. Does your column always have to be mean?’ Matt had thought about it for a moment and concluded that for Bang It! it probably did. He hadn’t shown her any of his work again, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have plenty to talk about.
Although he would have never guessed it in a million years, he found her life fascinating, watching her feel her way through each day, tackling a world that was entirely new to her, reinventing each minute that passed, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Matt recognised her valour, and admired it.
He couldn’t exactly claim that he had made any friends since he arrived in London. He had mates, yes, through work, lads to have a laugh and a drink with, but he had underestimated how much it mattered to have someone you could really talk to, without needing to put on a front or an attitude. Matt had left his lifelong best friend behind in Manchester along with his PlayStation, and it was his fault that they didn’t talk any more. Ellen had become the nearest thing to a friend that he had in this huge, sprawling, unforgiving city. No, that was wrong, she was a friend and theirs was a small-hours friendship, characterised by crumpled cotton pyjamas, tangled scooped-up hair and steaming cups of tea on sweltering summer nights.
As Matt had travelled into work that morning after their first small-hours talk, he’d found that he kept picturing her as they had both knelt on the kitchen floor, when Charlie had kicked off about his dad’s chair, the tears standing in her eyes, displaying the raw vulnerability that she wasn’t even strong enough to hide from him, a virtual stranger as he had been then. And he could not shake the image of her later, in the kitchen, in those stupid red pyjamas that hid whatever curves she might have, her face worn with worry. He had sat there, the body heat of the subeditor still cooling on his skin, and for those few minutes at least he was happier just talking to Ellen than frolicking with any willing blonde. And she had told him off, only a little and so mildly that he might not have noticed, but when he finally tumbled into the already rumpled sheets of his bed he realised that he felt regret about what had happened between him and the subeditor. It was not a sensation familiar to him. He decided that he would call her, not to ask her out again or to try and take the relationship further, but just because calling her seemed like the decent thing to do. After fifteen minutes in the company of Ellen, Matt found that he wanted to be decent. It was a feeling that intensified the more he got to know her. Nevertheless it was now two weeks since his night with the subeditor and he hadn’t called her yet. It seemed like the desire to be decent was not strong enough to impel him to act.
What had begun to trouble Matt was just how often he thought about his landlady, and whether the kinds of things he was thinking or feeling were the kinds of things that invariably ended up trashing a friendship. Even now, as Pete went on about some women at the bar, Matt kept thinking about Ellen standing barefoot in those pyjamas. There could not be a less sexually stimulating image of a woman, and when he thought about her it wasn’t sex that was at the forefront of his mind at all, but for some reason he was unable to shake that memory that seemed so firmly lodged in his brain. It would pop up at any given moment, quite taking him off guard.
‘Bloody hell, mate – that brunette. Look at her, you can tell she likes sex. Look at them hips, they are not the hips of a girl who doesn’t get flipped over, grabbed by the arse and properly shagged from behind.’
Dragging his thoughts back into the pub, Matt looked up. Sitting at the bar were two women enjoying a lunchtime drink, both dressed in what seemed like the unofficial uniform of office workers round here of pencil skirts and white shirts, although the blonde’s had a faint pink candy stripe. They both had long glossy straightened hair. The blonde was slightly skinnier, with small high breasts that offered no challenge to the buttons of her shirt, and the brunette was curvy, rounded in all the right places. They were both pretty, Matt thought, but he especially liked the way the zip at the back of the brunette’s skirt strained against the girth of her hips. She was by no means fat, but like so many women she’d chosen to squeeze into a skirt one size too small for her, which personally Matt didn’t mind at all. He imagined the red welts that her discarded garments would leave bitten into her skin when she undressed later that night, and absently thought how he’d like to trace a finger along those phantom seams and find out where they led.
‘You take the blonde, I’m going for that hippy little minx.’ Pete surged up out of his chair and finding his feet entirely out of touch with his legs, immediately blundered back down into it again. He scowled at his empty glass.
‘Fuck, they’ve made the beer stronger in here.’
‘Or you had a couple of vodkas on the quiet before we even went to lunch?’ Matt suggested mildly. How on earth was he supposed to police a man who kept bottles of spirits concealed all around his office?
‘I’ll be all right in a second, I just need a few of these peanuts to line my gut,’ Pete slurred. ‘Here’s the plan. You go over there, sweeten them up, keep your hands off the one with the big tits, she’s mine. Tell ’em we work at the magazine, offer ’em a photo shoot, tell ’em you can make them rich and famous and then arrange to meet them in here later. I’ll be your wingman.’
Matt looked up at the girls, who by now had noticed the attention they were getting. They looked neither impressed nor flattered and the blonde waved her credit card at the barman, clearly keen to settle up and get back to work.
‘I don’t think they’re interested, mate,’ Matt said. ‘Tell you what, how about we get you back to the office and get a few coffees down you before the features meeting this afternoon? Maybe you could have a little kip.’
‘No, no, no – they’re interested,’ Pete insisted, slamming the palm of his hand firmly on the tabletop, talking loudly enough for the whole bar to hear. ‘That blonde’s giving you the eye, go on mate, you go over, give ’em some of that charm you’re so famous for, go on. Warm the frigid bitches up.’
The two women stood up, collected their bags and shooting Matt a contemptuous look, mouthed something under their breath that he strongly suspected was the word ‘arseholes’, and left with their noses in the air.
‘They’ve gone, mate,’ Matt said, relieved, glancing at his watch. ‘Time we should be gone too.’
‘Fucking hell!’ Pete shouted, angrily gesturing with his hand so that Matt’s nearly full pint shot across the table and rolled on to the floor, spreading a sea of lager across the polished boards. ‘You fucking let them get away! I haven’t had a decent shag in fucking weeks. Fucking hell, Matt, you …’
‘Get him out of here now.’ The barman had leapt 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, genuinely angry.
‘God, I’m sorry – we’re going, I won’t let it happen again …’ Matt tried to imagine the fall-out from Dan and the lads finding out that they’d been banned from their favourite 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 some minutes to drag an angry and resentful Pete to his feet and many more to push him, reeking of stale alcohol and something more that Matt didn’t want to think about, to the door and out into an exhaust-filled and oppressive afternoon on the Fulham Palace Road. The hundred yards to the office entrance and the air-conditioned shelter it offered seemed very far away.
