A home for broken hearts, p.27
A Home for Broken Hearts, page 27
She finished her rant, her eyes blazing, the meaning of the words she had spat out catching up with her after a second’s delay.
‘I expect you are right,’ Allegra said stiffly, every one of her seventy or so years suddenly apparent on her face. ‘After all, here I am living in the former dining room of a woman I barely know. No husband, no children, not a single relative to turn to when I’m made homeless. The only friend I have ever kept is Simon, and the only other person I have met in decades who I am remotely interested in knowing is you. So I expect you are right, I expect I have got it all wrong. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think we should leave it for today. I think I might take myself for a little walk. It’s been a long time since I felt the sun on my face.’
‘Allegra, I’m so sorry …’ Ellen began, but before she could say any more the dining-room door opened and Hannah appeared around it. From that moment everything in the room was eclipsed by the sight of her sister, her face swollen and bruised.
‘Sorry, am I interrupting anything? Only I can’t find the bread knife.’ Hannah’s voice was thick and still a little slurred.
‘God, Hannah, look at you,’ Ellen whispered. ‘Go and sit down, I’ll get you something to eat.’
‘Goodness,’ Allegra said, what little colour there was in her cheeks draining rapidly.
Gingerly Hannah touched her face. ‘Yeah, that was some drinking binge …’
‘Drinking binge – Hannah, you’ve been attacked,’ Ellen told her, wishing she could retract the brutal words as soon as she had uttered them, but also realising that she needed to hear them out loud just as much as Hannah did.
Hannah’s face was so immobilised by swelling it was hard to tell how she reacted, except that she turned her head away, unable to look Ellen in the eye.
‘Anyway, I’m ashamed to say that last night is all a bit hazy. What exactly did I say when I got in? Didn’t make a fool of myself did I, Ellie?’
‘That’s it? That’s all you’re worried about? What you said? Hannah, stop it! Stop trying to pretend this didn’t happen!’ Ellen took her sister’s wrist and led her into the kitchen, where she pulled her dirty clothes out of the washer, holding up Hannah’s skirt.
‘Look at this, it’s ripped, there’s blood and … and semen. Hannah, whatever happened you don’t have to put a brave face on it. You don’t have to shrug this off like you’ve grazed your knee!’ Ellen ignored her sister’s wince as she took her by the shoulder and propelled her to the hall mirror. ‘Look at your face! Someone did that to you, Hannah. Why are you acting like it doesn’t matter?’
Ellen stood behind Hannah as she forced her to confront her reflection, watching her. Hannah’s good eye stared back at itself for a long time and then slowly a tear fell from her blackened and swollen eye, making its way down her livid cheek.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘I got drunk and took something, and got given something and had sex with some man, maybe men, I didn’t know, who roughed me up a bit. It’s my own fault, Ellen, I deserve it. I went out on my own, wearing next to nothing, got drunk and got fucked. I’m an adult, I knew what I was doing, I deserved it. So anyway, I was pretty far gone by the time I got here, what did I say again?’
Ellen stared at Hannah’s reflection, unable to understand what she was saying.
‘Hannah, no matter what you were wearing, no matter how drunk you were, you didn’t deserve that, no woman deserves that. You’re so bright and beautiful and in charge of your life. You should know better than anyone else that whatever happened last night was wrong.’ Ellen released her grip on Hannah’s shoulders, slipping her arms around them and hugging her from behind. ‘Please let me help you. I know I’ve been … stuck, stuck inside my own head and my own life, not just since Nick, but for years possibly. And I know I let you go, pushed you away. But I do love you, Hannah, and I can’t bear this. I can’t bear to see you of all people like this, as if … as if it doesn’t matter what happens to you any more.’
‘But don’t you see, Ellie, I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me any more,’ Hannah said bleakly as Allegra emerged from the dining room. She stood uncertainly in the hallway, just as appalled by Hannah’s appearance as Ellen was.
‘Look. I think you may be in shock or something, but even though you’ve had a bath it’s not too late. We’ve still got evidence, I haven’t washed your clothes. I can still call the police …’
‘Ellen please, please tell me, what did I say last night?’ Painfully Hannah removed Ellen’s arms from around her and turned to face her. ‘Did I … did I talk about Nick?’
‘What? Ellen struggled to understand. ‘Nick? Yes, yes – that’s right. You said that one of the men you were with was called Nick too, so that’s something to go on. That’s something we can tell the police. Please let me call them.’
Hannah shook her head.
‘And that’s it, that’s all? I didn’t say anything else about Nick, about your Nick?’ she asked urgently.
‘Hannah, why is this important, what if you did? What is important now is that you face this and do something about it. What if they attack another woman tonight, you have to …’
Hannah shook her head again and with some difficulty made her way back into the kitchen, where she stood at the sink filling the kettle. Ellen looked at Allegra, shrugging in despair.
‘Give her some time,’ Allegra said. The two women followed Hannah into the kitchen where Ellen stood for some moments, struggling to find the right words. If her sister wanted to know what had happened after she got here last night, she would tell her.
‘Matt found you,’ she began. ‘You’d made your way to the bottom of the street and he found you. He thinks you’d passed out in some neighbour’s garden, it was lucky you came round when he was there. He brought you home and woke me up. When I saw you I was horrified, I was trying to get you to tell me what had happened, but you were out of it. You told me that you had had sex with Nick and you kept asking me to forgive you. You kept making me promise that I would always love you. Nothing you said made any sense really …’
Ellen stopped in her tracks as she ran the last sentences over again, hearing the words as if for the first time. ‘You kept asking me to forgive you …’
At last 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, steadying 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 towards her. ‘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 fibre straining against what she was hearing.
‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Get out of my home now.’
‘Ellen, please, I’ve tried. I’ve tried not to tell you. 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 OK.’
In that second Ellen snapped. She grabbed her sister by the arm, oblivious to the pain that shot across Hannah’s face, and she dragged and pushed her by turn into the hallway and out of the front door, shoving her with one violent push after another up the garden path and on to the street.
‘Get out, get out, get out,’ she repeated over and over again, 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, 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 fight and pound, about to explode in her chest as she sank on to her knees, the boiling 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 upwards 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 like an eternity she was aware of someone at her side, thin fingers supporting her under her armpits, dragging her, guiding her towards the distant country of her home, of what once had been her home, and at last the sun was eclipsed by shadow and she 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, and then she realised that was impossible now. Nothing would ever be right again.
Chapter Seventeen
It took Matt a long time to work out why he did and did not want to go home.
Since he had arrived at work that morning to find Lucy locked and loaded and waiting for him, his head had swum with a thousand images, of Hannah beaten and bruised, of the photos of half-naked women tacked, taped, sprawled 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 woken 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, twined between her fingers, her lips were 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 had taken him back twenty years to an English class and 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 otherwise inattentive brain on that wet and wintry morning all those years ago presented itself to him as if it had been waiting ever since that time to make itself known.
‘O my America, my new found land.’
In fact, if Matt remembered rightly, that poem had been the reason he became interested in writing in the first place. He’d forgotten that entirely until now. How could he have forgotten something as pivotal as that? And what was it about Ellen that made him remember that moment, 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?
And in the middle of the images of Hannah and the parade of topless models that assailed him from all angles, Matt found himself wondering what would have happened if he had walked into Ellen’s bedroom to wake her for another reason entirely.
He worked through his exhaustion, labouring away over a fictionalised account of what had not happened between him and Ellen for the column, but every time he tried to make it seem like a funny or racy anecdote he’d realise 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 had gone 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. ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’, that was what that poem was called, the title suddenly popped into his brain. How odd that he’d remembered that now, all these years later. Matt had allowed himself a few more minutes imagining himself reading that poem to Ellen as if he were its author and as if she were the mistress of his heart. Then he 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 had put a call in to Fifi’s Cat House and 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 had promised to email him a press pack and had lined up some Skype interviews with a selection of the professionals, but he had to wait until eight o’clock that evening for them to begin, which still gave him a couple of hours to kill. Matt wondered about phoning Ellen to find out how Hannah was, and how she was. He wondered if it was appropriate. He thought it should be – after all he had been the one who’d found Hannah, who’d brought her back and stayed up all night with Ellen. He’d been the one whom Ellen had embraced, but somehow he wasn’t sure that gave him any special privileges. He remembered telling this girl he’d dated for a week or two in Manchester that one of the reasons he wanted to break up with her was because she was too clingy.
‘Too clingy? You call me 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 responded with a resounding ‘not’, and gone on his way without giving the girl a second thought. But today he understood how intimacy, even simply emotional intimacy, could lead a person to think it was OK to phone another person and see if they were OK. Only what if the other person thought he was being invasive, nosy or even clingy? Matt realised that Ellen made him feel like a girl, which was a sensation he wasn’t entirely thrilled about. This was how he’d been making girls feel for years.
As the clock ticked on towards eight Pete had 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 post-room boy, found spurious reasons why they absolutely had to be there, Matt realised that he didn’t want to be part of it. Instead he had to resist the urge to walk in there and tell the girls to cover themselves up, and have a little self-respect. That, of course, would have been career suicide, and even if he was beginning to wonder if this was the 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 stepped into the lift when it stopped at her floor. 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 him, 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.’ He felt surprised by his confession, perhaps even more surprised than Lucy. She 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 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 corner of her glossed lips. ‘Or to 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?’ she remarked.
‘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, not me at all. I never ever would have gone to bed with you if I’d got to know you.’
‘Bloody hell, Luce.’ Matt winced. ‘You’ve had your revenge in a national magazine. Can’t you lay off now?’
‘No, that’s not what I mean,’ Lucy said. ‘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 little nice 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 …’
