Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (58 page)

By the time Elaine left, with the rest of the non-standardised cupcakes and a tin of Roses, which she’d swapped with Hope for a large box of Ferrero Rocher, they were friends again.

‘We’re having people over for Christmas Eve,’ she said to Hope as she stood shivering on the pavement and waiting to wave Elaine off. ‘If you fancy it.’

‘We’re going up North on the twenty-second,’ Hope said, and she literally had to bite her tongue so she didn’t add a ‘just kill me now’ on to the end of the sentence. ‘Have to tell the parents the bad news in person.’

Elaine gave Hope a quick but fierce hug. ‘I’m so sorry about you and Jack, sweetie. Is there no chance that you might get back together?’

Hope shook her head. ‘Seriously? I think he’d made up his mind weeks ago, and agreeing to counselling, well, he was just going through the motions.’ She squirmed unhappily on the doorstep. ‘It’s taken me a while to get my head round it; it’s why I never told you. I thought that I could persuade Jack to stay, especially once the parents became involved, but I was just deluding myself.’

‘So, was that why you copped off with Wilson?’ Elaine asked. ‘To convince yourself, or was it one last attempt to make Jack jealous so he’d realise you were his one true love?’

‘God, no! I mean, Jack’s angry, but I think it’s more self-defensive anger because now he has a vague idea of what he put me through and he feels guilty,’ Hope said. ‘The thing with Wilson happened because I wanted it to. I wanted it very much. Does that make me a bad person?’

‘Of course it doesn’t. You deserve a bit of fun,’ Elaine insisted vehemently. ‘So, I guess I won’t see you until the New Year, then?’

‘’Fraid not, but if I was around, you know I’d love to
come
to yours for Christmas Eve. You have the wildest parties,’ Hope added wistfully, as she remembered the time Simon had bought canisters of laughing gas off the internet and decanted it into party balloons so his guests could huff it down and spend the rest of the night giggling like loons. ‘Like I say, if you do happen to be around, you know where we’ll be,’ Elaine said, and she shrugged and did a weird, starey thing with her eyes that Hope couldn’t decipher, but then again she was so sleep-deprived that she could barely see straight as it was.

Three hours later, Hope was at the wired, teeth-chattering, about-to-start-hallucinating-little-green-men stage of tiredness. She sat in Angela’s waiting room and wondered if Jack was going to be a no-show. She’d already seen the patient who had the appointment before them rush out with his head down as was his wont, and Jack should have been here by now. Hope prayed that it wouldn’t just be her and Angela.

A minute before their session started, Jack arrived, red-faced and out of breath. ‘Sorry, I’m la …’ he began, then Hope saw him mentally check himself, because he was still angry with her and didn’t owe her an apology for being late. ‘Christ, you could have made a bit more of an effort, couldn’t you?’

He was also going to pick on everything she said and did, because it was what Jack did when he was in a bad mood, especially when Hope was the cause of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a conciliatory fashion, because she’d decided to take Jack’s anger as her due and she simply didn’t have the energy to get angry too. Hope gestured at her sloppy sweater, leggings and Uggs ensemble. ‘It was the closest I could come to wearing pyjamas, without actually wearing pyjamas.’

‘Yeah well, if you hadn’t been out all hours shagging that pretentious wanker, then you wouldn’t be so tired,’ Jack snapped.

‘I told you, there was no actual shagging,’ Hope sighed, like that really mattered. It still counted as cheating even if there hadn’t been a penis entering a vagina, but before she could get into specifics, Hope realised that Angela was standing in the doorway and looking as if her eyeballs might hurl themselves out of their sockets.

‘Right, well, best to get started right away,’ she said, as she hustled the pair of them down the corridor that led to her room. Hope had a horrible feeling that this evening their session wouldn’t be cut short by fifteen minutes. ‘So, how
are
you two?’ Angela asked before their bottoms had even made contact with the sofa.

‘Oh, so-so,’ Hope prevaricated, but she could feel the full weight of Jack’s glare, even though she was staring resolutely ahead at a spot 5 centimetres to the left of Angela’s left ear. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Why don’t you tell Angela how it is?’ Jack demanded, before directly addressing Angela, who was quivering where she sat. ‘She went out last night and shagged Susie’s ex to get back at me, or because she’s pissed off that I don’t want to stay with her and get married and have babies. I don’t know. Hope’s not exactly been forthcoming on the details, even though I practically caught them at it on the doorstep this morning.’

There were so many half-truths and untruths in Jack’s statement that Hope wasn’t sure how to defend herself. ‘We were kissing,’ she told Angela, because for once it was easier to talk to Angela than to Jack. ‘This morning. It was just kissing.’

When the man you were kissing wasn’t the man you’d been in a relationship with for the last thirteen years, it was always a lot more than ‘just kissing’, but Angela nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did have hidden depths after all.

‘And spending the night with another man?’ Angela queried, her voice almost breaking on the last word. ‘When
Jack
was seeing someone else it altered the equilibrium in the relationship; by mirroring Jack’s behaviour, were you hoping to shift it the other way?’

You
what
? ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested weakly. ‘Jack and I aren’t in a relationship any more, so technically I didn’t do anything wrong, even if my timing was lousy. But, the thing is, Jack, that I get it. I get what happened with you and Susie now. About wanting someone so badly that even though there’s a million good reasons why you shouldn’t, that one selfish reason cancels them all out.’

Jack sneered, as if he’d never been in that position and didn’t have even the vaguest idea of what Hope was talking about. ‘Did you even think about what it might do to me?’

‘I didn’t really see how it would affect you one way or another,’ Hope admitted. ‘So I tried not to think about you at all.’

It sounded so callous when she tried to be honest, Hope thought despairingly. Jack obviously thought so too. ‘Not good enough,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I think you owe me an explanation.’

‘Why should I?’ Hope asked, wishing that they weren’t doing this when she’d had no sleep for thirty-six hours, was still in the grip of a tequila hangover and felt so vulnerable that it seemed as if her skin had been stripped off and her nerve endings had come to the surface. ‘There are some things that you’re better off not knowing, and there are some things that are none of your business. You absolutely refused to talk about your affair with Susie even though you knew I was in utter hell about it.’

‘Ha! You see?’ Jack crowed triumphantly. ‘I knew this was about Susie. I knew it was about revenge.’

‘God, you haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said, have you? Jack, you’re my
ex
-boyfriend, you don’t have a say in who I see or what I get up to any more.’ And she knew she was being childish, but Hope curled her legs up under her, tucked her arms into her chest and bowed her head, to
show
that she was absenting herself from the proceedings, because between Jack and Jack’s ego there really wasn’t any room left for her.

There was silence. The kind of silence that had teeth and claws, so Hope tried to focus on the sound of her own breathing, making it deep and even and regular, so that despite all the emotional distress, she was close to falling asleep when Angela cleared her throat timidly.

‘Well, this is all rather … well …’ Hope lifted her head in time to see the utter helplessness on Angela’s face as she struggled to summarise the shit that Hope and Jack were in. ‘So, did you have a chance to do the homework?’ Angela asked a little desperately.

Jack cleared his throat. ‘You really want us to go through our homework assignment? Really?’

Hope had to agree with him. What did it matter where they were going to be in ten years’ time? It certainly wasn’t going to be with each other.

‘Well, I do think it’s a very useful exercise,’ Angela insisted, and she looked so woebegone that Hope started to feel sorry for her, and even Jack sighed in capitulation.

‘Right, so I had a definite plan of where I’d be ten years from now, and it was in a live/work space in Hoxton where I ran my own design company, and I got to travel a lot and had all this interesting work, and the latest gadgets, and that was great, just what I wanted, even if it did feel a little shallow – but somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see Susie in the picture.’

Hope cautiously raised her head out of the crook of her arms, only to see Jack giving her the evil eye. Then he shrugged. ‘I tried so hard to put Susie into my future, then Hope didn’t come home last night and when she did rock up she was with
him
, and I could have killed them both.’

Angela actually gasped at Jack’s display of uncharacteristic machismo, though Hope was less than impressed. ‘Well, I could have told you that Susie wasn’t cut
out
for a life of domestic bliss, even if it was in a live/work space in Hoxton,’ she said, and she sounded bitter but she’d earned the right to be bitter.

‘It’s not that,’ Jack said sharply. ‘It’s that I was only thinking about one part of my life, the professional part, and I’ve spent all day being mad at you because when I think about the future, I don’t really want the minimalist designer loft, it’s just something that I think I
should
want. Really, when I look into the future, all I can see is you and me and we’re living somewhere like Brighton, ’cause I could still commute to London from there, or I might freelance or have my own studio or what have you …’ Hope could see him relax, the rigidity slowly ease out of him as he began to describe the Jack and Hope of the future. Because it turned out that
she
was in Jack’s future.

Apparently, ten years from now, they had three children, two boys and a girl, but they were trying for another baby because they didn’t want an odd number of children and, besides, Hope came from a large family and Jack had hated being an only child. They lived in a house five minutes’ walk from the beach and in the catchment area for the best local schools.

Jack wasn’t exactly sure if Hope was still working as a teacher, or had decided to stay at home and go back to work once their youngest child that hadn’t even been born yet started primary school, but she baked a lot of cakes, and they kept chickens in their back garden as well as having an allotment where Hope grew their own vegetables. She was also a stalwart of the local Preservation Society.

Basically, in the space of ten years filled with child-rearing and gardening, Hope had turned into her mother. And, quite frankly, Hope wasn’t on board with the idea that Jack got to do something he loved while she spent all her time barefoot and pregnant. Well, not barefoot – if she was raising chickens and growing spuds, she’d spend most of the time in her wellies.

But despite her disbelief at Jack’s sudden change of heart, there was a part of Hope that liked the sound of this vaguely bucolic existence. With two children, certainly not four. And maybe, instead of chickens, they could have a couple of mini-pigs, and before all this happened, they’d have travelled, seen a bit of the world on at least two other continents, not including Europe.

Hope stuck her head out from beneath the cradle of her arms again. ‘That’s really how you see our future?’

‘Kind of. Though right now I’m still so angry with you I’m not even sure if I’ll get the bus home with you.’

Hope felt her face begin to slacken, as if the tears were all set to fall, but aware of Angela’s beady eyes fixed on her, she willed her muscles to behave. ‘OK, well, I suppose I deserve that.’

Jack had gone back to not looking at her again. ‘Yeah, I guess you do.’

But for all his talk of ten-year plans, Hope refused to let herself get sucked into Jack’s little domestic fantasy. It was just Jack smarting from the night before because he’d never had to think about Hope existing in a world without him, a world where there were men who might actually want her. Besides, Hope couldn’t see further than three months into their future, where Jack would still be pissed off at her and she’d have nothing to listen to but the disapproving voice of her own conscience and his passive-aggressive asides …

‘Hope?’

She realised that Angela was saying something. To her.

‘Sorry. What?’

‘I asked where you saw yourself in ten years’ time,’ Angela repeated. Hope’s eyes drifted to the clock. They only had another fifteen minutes left. Why, oh why, was Angela determined to make them sit through the whole hour? Because she was a sadist who got off on other people’s misery and got paid for it. ‘Well, Hope?’

This time the silence didn’t just have claws and teeth, it
also
had a stun-gun and a machete. Hope could hear the hand of the clock mark off every second that she sat there without answering. She couldn’t even think of some happy-families bullshit because there didn’t seem any point in pretending any more.

‘You couldn’t even be bothered to do the homework, could you?’ Jack suddenly said. ‘Shows how committed you are to making this work.’

‘But we’d already agreed, or you had, that this wasn’t working, so there was no point imagining you and me together ten years from now when I knew that wasn’t going to happen,’ Hope said. ‘But I did try to think about where I’d be in ten years’ time, but I just couldn’t get a definite picture in my head. Like, maybe I want to be living abroad, and I probably will have children or maybe I won’t, not after spending all day looking after other people’s … it’s all just a big blank, really.’ The big blank wasn’t as scary as Hope thought it might be. It actually felt a tiny bit thrilling, like she could do what she wanted, be whoever she wanted to be. Nothing was mapped out. Nothing was planned. It was all possibility.