A Home for Broken Hearts, page 22
‘And that’s it, your marriage is over?’ Ellen found it hard to believe.
‘Not quite.’ Sabine glanced at her watch. ‘We have an appointment for a Skype chat in a little while,’ she said. ‘To talk about my decision.’
‘So he’s not rushing off to try and be with this woman then, even though you told him to go?’ Ellen asked her, as curious as she was shocked. ‘He still wants to talk? That’s a good sign.’
‘Is it?’ Sabine sighed. ‘Or is he just absolving himself? After all, if I’ve told him to go, given him my blessing, then he has no reason to feel guilty does he?’
‘Goodness,’ Ellen said. ‘Are you sure you want to give him that freedom?’
‘Not really. But what other choice is there? If I force him to stay I will always be wondering if he would rather be somewhere else.’
‘And you wouldn’t think of, oh I don’t know, finding someone here to have a revenge fling with, or something?’
Sabine looked appalled at the idea.
‘English men leave me very cold,’ she told Ellen, adding as an afterthought, ‘Well, Matt is very sexy, and you can tell by looking at him that he knows his way around a woman’s body.’
‘Do you think so?’ Ellen asked her, leaning a little towards her, realising that the third of a bottle of wine she had drunk earlier combined with strong German beer had made her somewhat tipsy, almost tipsy enough to numb her body’s physical tics. ‘Do you think he’d be a passionate lover?’
‘Do you?’ Sabine asked her, amused. Ellen leaned her chin into the heel of her hand, missing her mark so that her head slipped and her neck jarred.
‘Allegra thinks I should take him as my lover, as if I could just sort of lift him off the supermarket shelf and get him to satisfy my every whim. Stud-on-a-stick sort of thing.’
Sabine spluttered beer as she laughed. ‘Allegra is probably right. Matt would go to bed with you, I’m sure you wouldn’t have to go to much effort if that was what you wanted. But don’t think it would be love, Ellen, or anything like it. For him it would be a sexual experience and nothing more. Don’t go down that road unless you are prepared to accept that.’
‘Oh God, I’m not going to go down that road at all,’ Ellen laughed. ‘Going down roads is the last thing I want to do, at least according to my son! No, I’m a widow and a mother. I’m thirty-eight, boring and old. Besides, I have a lot more things to worry about. A sister who’s lost her job and a son who thinks I’m agoraphobic, can you imagine?’
‘Agoraphobic?’ Sabine repeated the word as a question. ‘Interesting.’
‘Yes, you know, someone who is afraid of going outside. He’s got it into his head that that’s me. That I’m scared to set foot outside my own front door. Just because I’m a homebody, and I don’t like people or crowds or a lot of noise. But that’s just me, I’m quiet, and shy. I am a very quiet and shy person, Sabine, I am not the sort of person to be having emotion-free sex with a much younger man.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’ Sabine looked amused and then thoughtful. ‘Actually Ellen, I have lived here nearly a month now and I hope you don’t mind me saying that I don’t think I have seen you go out once, not even into the garden.’
Ellen shrugged. ‘Well I’m not sure I have been out in the last month. But that’s not that unusual for me. I mean I work from home, I have to be at home for Charlie when he gets in from school. My life is in this house, there isn’t any need for me to go anywhere.’
‘No need perhaps, but you don’t even want to go for a walk to the park, sit on a bench and enjoy the sun on your face?’
‘That would be all very well if I had time, but I don’t. Time is not something I have,’ Ellen insisted. ‘I really don’t think it’s that big a deal.’
Sabine glanced at her watch again. ‘I expect you are right,’ she said. ‘Now I must go and talk to my husband. I hope you manage to get in touch with Hannah. I’m sorry that I worried you and Charlie so much.’
‘Don’t be, I’m glad I know that something’s going on with her, it sort of explains why she’s been the way she has recently. It will be some big Hannah drama, some man at the bottom of it, no doubt. Sooner or later I’ll find out what it is and it will all blow over. Good luck with Eric.’
‘Thank you,’ Sabine said very politely, leaving Ellen sitting alone in her kitchen. After a second she rose from her chair and preheated the grill for Charlie’s fish fingers. Then she started to get out the ingredients she needed to make Allegra’s risotto primavera.
As she stood at the kitchen sink filling a pan with water, she looked down the length of the back garden towards the gate that had long been obscured by undergrowth, at the line of rooftops that serrated the skyline beyond it, silhouetted against the stubbornly faultless blue sky.
When was the last time she went out, she wondered, as the water filled the pan and then began to run over its edges, numbing her reddening hands as she stood there motionless. Ellen thought of the empty calendar that lay open on the table behind her, devoid of both dates and memories. Her mind tracked back over month after month, struggling to recall anything particularly memorable in any of them. There had been Charlie, her books and the pain from the horrible gaping seeping open wound that losing Nick had carved into her, and that was all she could remember. Each day – which had seemed like an uncrossable desert that she had had to claw herself across from dawn till dusk – now seemed like one featureless globule of time, an existence that had been occupied by very little besides her treacherous body’s continued insistence on staying alive, no matter how she felt about it.
The truth was that Ellen couldn’t remember the last time she had ventured further than her front door. Dropping the pan in the sink and slopping freezing water everywhere, she turned and with numb damp fingers picked up the pristine calendar of Sussex views, gazing at each empty month, stretching her mind as far back as it would allow, to last Christmas.
It had been a dark, desolate affair, made all the more despairing by the effort that went on around her and Charlie to make it at least bearable. Her parents, confused and embarrassed by her grief, were driven up from Hove by Hannah, bringing Christmas lunch with them packed neatly in her mother’s twenty-year-old Tupperware. After giving and receiving unwanted gifts the five of them had laboured over lunch, in what would have been silence if Ellen’s mother hadn’t insisted on filling them all in on the details of Mrs Hopkins’ hysterectomy. Hannah had drunk herself slowly into oblivion, Charlie had bolted to his room at the first available opportunity and Ellen, paralysed by the memory of how Christmas used to be, of what it should have been like now and how it would never, never be the same again, had sat through the Queen’s speech with her mother while her father snored in the corner.
With a shock, Ellen realised that she had no memory of going out of the house even then. What little shopping she had done had all been online, her family and a succession of well-meaning but unwanted visitors had come to her. Was it truly possible that she hadn’t left the house in six months?
Feeling suddenly sober and washed with the same kind of dread that she got when she felt she had forgotten something important, but wasn’t sure what it was, Ellen forced herself to scratch around in her memory for anything, any detail or incident in her life since Nick had died that would allow her to get a grip on some event or happening. As much as she racked her brain she could find nothing until just a few weeks ago, when Hannah told her that she had to take in lodgers.
She sat back in her chair and looked around at her kitchen, rigid with horror as she realised the truth.
She had not left this house since her husband’s funeral. She had not been out in almost a year, and worst of all – she had not noticed.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Your round, rookie,’ Pete told Matt, his sweaty booze-saturated face looming far too close for comfort. ‘Get ’em in, son.’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK – when do I stop being a rookie?’ Matt asked him, gathering up a selection of half-empty glasses and taking orders for the assembled staff of Bang It!. Thursday night and that week’s issue had just been put to bed, after what he now realised was a customary routine that involved panic, shouting and a large amount of swearing blind that the whole thing was going to shit even though somehow it didn’t. Naturally when they pulled off their weekly miracle of getting Bang It! to press, everyone went down the pub to celebrate by getting as many beers as possible straight down their necks in the shortest period of time, or in Pete’s case the whisky that seemed to seep out of his open pores. It was an exhausting and strangely dissatisfying routine, and Matt still struggled to really feel a part of it. He’d expected to thrive on the adrenalin rush of putting a weekly magazine together in a matter of days, but when the first fresh copies rolled in, looking and reading almost exactly like those of the previous weeks, he found himself wondering what the point was. Then he’d remind himself that this was his dream job, and that soon enough he’d have killed so many brain cells through alcohol abuse that he wouldn’t worry about it any more anyway.
‘You stop being a rookie when I say so,’ Pete told him, accompanying him to the bar where Matt waved a twenty at one of the bar staff, knowing full well he’d need at least another one of those to pay for everyone’s drinks. ‘You’re still on probation, and so far you haven’t exactly excelled yourself.’
‘What?’ Matt said. ‘Bollocks.’
‘I’m serious, mate, you’re coasting it – you look lazy.’
‘Lazy?’ Matt protested. ‘I’ve worked my arse off since I got here. Literally.’
‘Look, the writing’s good, funny and that – but so far you’ve pulled two girls who more or less dropped in your lap and rehashed a load of old stuff. We need more from you, more derring-do and adventure. Birds from the same office building are OK, but they’re easy pickings. Our readers want you to be what they’re not – the hunter, the master, the maestro – the man that can have any woman any time. The dark destroyer. You need some variety-shagging, mate. A policewoman maybe, or a nurse.’
‘So you’re saying I should base my column around your top ten all-time favourite stripper costumes?’ Matt shook his head.
‘It’s not my worst idea.’ Pete shrugged, taking as many of the assembled drinks as he could carry, including his own large single malt whisky, and teetering off towards the table where the waiting hordes greeted him with a cheer after he lost only one of the drinks. Downing his own shot in one, Matt ordered a replacement. They’d been in here for an hour and already he could feel his head swimming with the heat and the alcohol, not that he’d want any of them to know that. Being able to drink like a bastard and still turn up for work the next day was one of the job requirements, but for some reason Matt just hadn’t been in the mood for it recently. The pub made him feel restless and uneasy, and he realised with something of a shock that at that moment he’d much rather have been at Ellen’s house, sitting at the kitchen table while she pottered around, drinking cups of tea and seeing whether he could make her laugh. Steeling himself, Matt ordered another shot and downed that too. He was far too young to want to be in instead of out; he’d have to drown the impulse with booze before it took hold completely and he bought a pair of slippers and started planning his life around television. He went back to join his colleagues.
‘I was just saying,’ Pete belched at Dan as he lumbered back into his seat, ‘I reckon we need more of a challenge for young Matt here. Give the readers something to be impressed by. I mean that Carla, anyone could have had her if they could be bothered with the stringy little thing.’
‘Everyone has,’ Raffa joked with a wink directed at Matt.
‘Ha, ha,’ Matt said drily.
‘And that little blonde piece downstairs, from the tarts’ magazine – she’s always got her arse and tits hanging out, looks like a hooker. Pulling her took about as much effort as scoring a burger from a drive-through McDonald’s.’
Matt chuckled as he gazed into his beer, but privately he was thinking of Lucy marching out of the lift, her eyes glittering with rage. He had the distinct feeling he’d underestimated her. Almost like he hadn’t seen her, even when they’d been in bed together.
‘Drive-through shags, there’s an idea,’ Dan said, stroking his chin. ‘Look that up on the Internet, Raffa, do it now, son. If there isn’t a drive-through brothel somewhere in Nevada, next round of drinks are on me. If there is, which there will be, then, Matt, I want a feature on that by Monday, cool? Interview some of the girls, the punters, get some pics – you should be able to do it all online and on the phone.’
‘Sure,’ Matt said, wondering how the hell he was going to pull that off, imagining himself making a call that went, ‘Oh hello, are you the madam? Hello, I’m a journalist you’ve never heard of from England writing a piece for a magazine you’ve never heard of. Please can I interview your hookers on the joys of working in a drive-through brothel, and would you mind sending me some pictures? But only of the fit ones.’
The sad truth was that that was exactly how the conversation would go.
‘I’ve got it!’ Pete bellowed, making Matt wince. ‘We pick his next victim. All of us tonight. We pick a girl from this pub and that’s the bird he’s got to bed for his next column and his challenge is to make it happen, no matter who we choose.’
‘Right, well hang on a minute,’ Matt started to protest, but he was shouted down.
‘What, like pull-a-pig night?’ Raffa chimed in. ‘Like we pick a proper minger and he’s got to do her no matter what?’ The assembled men guffawed at the idea.
‘Er, I don’t think so,’ Matt countered, feeling the alcohol fizzing in his fingertips, his head swimming as he was swept along on a tide of his colleagues’ testosterone. If he was going to survive this he’d have to man up and go with it, they’d eat him alive if they knew that the last thing he wanted to do tonight was chat up some random girl and that really he’d like to go home and drink tea with Ellen. ‘I’m the man, the master – the maestro. Anyone can pick up an old dog grateful for a sniff of any bloke. If you’re going to challenge me then find me something special, something that’s going to take a bit more effort than batting my lashes and giving her a smile.’
‘He’s right, the punters want fantasy, not fact,’ Dan said. ‘We’ve got to pick a fittie. Tell you what, to make it more interesting we get to decide what your opening line is.’
‘Yeah and you have to secretly record it on your phone so we know you’ve done it,’ Greg grinned.
‘And you have to get a picture of her tits on your phone too.’ Raffa nodded. ‘Close up, no face or nothing, just tits – then we can print them in the magazine and score them out of ten.’
‘Oh my fuck, that’s a genius idea.’ Dan clapped Raffa on the shoulder.
‘Whoa, OK,’ Matt laughed to cover his discomfort. ‘And if I pull this off?’
‘Or if she pulls you off,’ Raffa snickered.
‘Your probation ends tomorrow,’ Dan told him. ‘You’re on the team.’
‘And if I don’t?’ Matt countered.
‘Same deal, only you’re off the team.’ Dan raised an eyebrow. ‘Got the balls to take that bet?’
‘Don’t need balls to take that bet. Fucking piss-easy,’ Matt assured him with a beer-based bravado that he didn’t enjoy.
‘OK then.’ Dan twisted in his seat, scanning the bar for a likely target. Matt felt uneasy as he watched him. What Dan was doing was no different from what he himself might do on a night out, looking for a girl to chat up – but when he did it it was random, chance, there was always a possibility that it wouldn’t work out. Dan picking a girl out for him that he was definitely supposed to have sex with really did make it seem as if they were choosing a victim, and Matt never liked to think of any of the women he spent time with as that.
‘Her.’ Dan nodded in the direction of a pillar, where two women dressed in short, flowery summer dresses, were talking, bare tanned legs tapering down to high heels much in evidence, their heads close together as they sipped from straws in some lurid alcopop.
Matt was dimly aware of sniggering and elbow-digging as Dan made his selection. It had to be said they were the fittest women in the bar, and more than that, proper women. Well dressed and confident-looking, as if getting chatted up by a man was the very last thing on their minds. This really would be a challenge.
‘Blonde or brunette?’ Pete asked, with a death’s head grin that Matt found unsettling.
‘Brunette, brunettes always have the best nipples,’ Dan declared, making Raffa’s shoulders shake with uncharacteristically repressed laughter. ‘Are we all agreed?’ The group cheered their rowdy assent in unison, causing the unsuspecting woman to glance up briefly in their direction. Matt caught her eye and held it for a second until she lowered her lashes, turning back to her friend and whispering something that made the other woman laugh. If it was about him, Matt was fairly sure it wasn’t complimentary. She looked about thirty, the high-maintenance type, who obviously lavished much attention on her skin and hair, and clearly worked out, judging by her lightly muscled thighs and arms. There wasn’t a crease on her forehead or a line around her full-lipped mouth, she was perfect, and yet if Matt had been making his own decision she would have been the last woman that he would have chosen. There were no secrets there for him to discover, he was certain. She would have any hint of imperfection concealed.
‘Yeah, I like her,’ Dan said. ‘She looks hot, like a right goer – might teach you a thing or two, Matt, my son. And she’s got a great pair, so couldn’t be more perfect. Off you go now.’
‘Wait a minute, I can’t just pile in there,’ Matt said. ‘I need to do a bit of groundwork first, fleeting eye contact, shy smiles, that sort of bollocks.’
‘Er, no you don’t, you big gay,’ Dan told him. ‘Get in there and set your phone to record. Your opening line is … “I’ve never seen skin as beautiful as yours, do you moisturise?” ’
The table erupted into laughter.
