Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (65 page)

The voice in her head was so terrifying that Hope ignored the sweat that was dripping into her eyes and making them sting, she even ignored her phone, which had suddenly started to ring, the shock making the ladder wobble again. She ignored everything but the message her brain was passing on to her hands to reach up and screw in the lightbulb.

Once she was done, Hope couldn’t believe that she was done. Instead of scrambling to safety, she actually stayed where she was to check that she had just done the unthinkable and changed the lightbulb all by herself. And then
she
stayed up the ladder for the time it took to clasp her hands over her head in victory, which made the ladder teeter alarmingly and Hope scramble down to safety in record time.

When her feet were firmly planted back on the kitchen floor Hope hugged her sweaty self in triumph. She felt utterly elated, as if she’d just run a marathon, and she wished that there was someone to hand who understood the enormity of what she’d just achieved. It wasn’t three rungs on a ladder but one giant step for Hope. Her phone rang again just as she was contemplating whether she could climb the ladder again to paint the upper cupboards,
just because she could
.

As she picked up her phone, she saw she had a missed call from Jack and he was calling her again. She really didn’t want to segue into the next instalment of their ongoing fight, or to hear all the horrible things he’d had half an hour to work on. Hope even thought about not answering, but then she decided that if she could get up a ladder to change a lightbulb then she could take Jack’s call.

Even so, her ‘Hello?’ was extremely cautious.

‘Hopey! Thank God, you’re all right,’ Jack gasped. ‘When you didn’t answer before, I thought you’d broken your neck and were lying dead on the kitchen floor.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ Hope sniffed.

‘Look, I’m sorry about earlier. I’ve just been getting it from all sides, and every time I see your mum, she gets tearful and starts going on about how much you hate her.’

Hope sighed. ‘I don’t hate her. Don’t particularly like her very much at the moment, but I don’t hate her.’

‘Well, do you think you could ring her and tell her that?’

She could, but she wasn’t going to. ‘Did you not hear the part where I said that she was way down on my list of favourite people?’ If her mother was that racked with remorse, she could change the habits of a lifetime and ring her only daughter to apologise, which would happen the
day
that the apocalypse began. ‘So, now we’ve established that I’m not dead, is there anything else?’

She sounded cold, Hope knew that, but maybe cold was the way to go. When she forgot and treated Jack like her friend, or her boyfriend, it was confusing for both of them.

‘I’m sorry about before, about snapping at you,’ Jack said. ‘And I could ring Otto, he’s around, he might be able to come and change the bulb.’

Hope sucked at being cold. ‘That’s really sweet of you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have rung you, but I’m used to ringing you. It’s going to be a hard habit to break.’

‘So, this isn’t just a temporary break or a trial separation, and then when I come back we’ll start counselling ag—’

‘No, Jack, no. It’s real,’ Hope told him, all her glee and exhilaration gone, and now she was on the verge of tears. ‘I shouldn’t have called you. It was thoughtless and selfish and … and I think we need to not talk until after Christmas, because this isn’t helping either of us.’

There was silence and Hope began to wonder if they’d been cut off until she heard Jack swallow. ‘Is that what you really want?’

Hope wasn’t sure that she even knew what she really wanted, but she knew what she didn’t want. ‘Yes, yes it is.’

‘But what about the lightbulb?’

‘Oh, that? Actually, I did it myself,’ Hope said.

‘You climbed up on the ladder?’ Jack sounded incredulous.

‘Yeah, that’s why I didn’t answer the first time you called. I was frozen with terror, and I knew that if I got down to answer the phone, I’d never get back up again.’

‘You climbed up a ladder,’ Jack repeated. ‘Oh, Hopita Bonita, you don’t need me any more, do you?’

‘Please don’t think that. Just so you know, I loved you for a lot more reasons than what I wrote on that stupid list. Not just because you were handy to have about the place.’ Hope tried to laugh but it was entirely without mirth.
‘Though
you can wield a screwdriver like no one else.’

‘You’re not to worry, you’re going to be fine on your own. Don’t think you’re going to be on your own for long, though. Someone will snap you up in no time at all,’ Jack said, and he sounded misty-eyed and wistful. ‘You just see if they don’t.’

‘You’re just saying that to be kind, but thank you.’

‘No, I’m really not. It’s the truth,’ Jack said sadly. ‘So, I guess I’ll see you after Christmas. Am I allowed to text you with my ETA?’

‘Of course you are!’

There was nothing left to talk about after that except to stammer their way through a goodbye that felt as if it was the last thing they’d ever say to each other.

Hope was in despair for ten long minutes after she got off the phone. Unhappy enough to break into one of the tubs of Celebrations and root through to find the giant Maltesers. Just as she was stuffing the last one into her mouth, she caught sight of the ladder and, still masticating honeycomb, she climbed up it. It was still scary. It was still not one of her favourite things in the world, but she could do it.

It made Hope wonder what else she could do if she put her mind to it. She took that thought and ran with it, gathering up the CDs and the sheet of instructions Wilson had sent her, and hurrying into the bedroom. After a few false tries and a rummage under the bed to locate the right lead, Hope managed to hook up iPhone and computer.

The rest was easy. Hope was almost incandescent with rage when she realised that putting songs on to the iPod was child’s play. Quite literally. Most of Blue Class would have been able to do it, and then she was angry at Jack for never letting her do it herself and controlling what she could play, in some patriarchal plot to force her to listen to The Beatles ad nauseam and lots of scruffy-haired, guitar-led indie bands who all sounded the same. The nerve! Hope bristled as she discovered a folder in iTunes labelled ‘Hope’s crappy
music’,
and in it were all the beloved shouty riot-grrrl bands that she’d adored in her shouty teen years, and her show tunes! Oh, and Gloria Gaynor!

Hope had to stop right there, cue up ‘I Will Survive’, grab a hairbrush and let rip. On the second round of ‘Go on now, go!’ she even jumped on the bed, until she caught sight of herself in the mirror and saw that she was the living embodiment of every wronged-woman, rom-com cliché, and stopped immediately.

She spent a happy hour deleting everything on her iPod, and creating new playlists for the gym and walking to work, and for her sad moments and her happy moments. She even made a playlist for when she had a bad day at work, which ended with ‘Everything’s Coming up Roses’ sung by Ethel Merman. It was only when she started squinting at the computer screen that Hope looked out of the window to discover that it was pitch dark and she was due at Elaine’s in less than an hour.

There wasn’t time to do anything but put a couple of sparkly clips in her raggedy hair, which matched her silver skinny-knit jumper, which she wore with her skinniest skinny jeans – thankfully she could still get into them despite her Celebrations binge. Because she was only going to Elaine’s, who lived a good ten minutes’ walk from the nearest bus stop, and it was freezing outside, Hope shoved her feet in her Uggs.

It wasn’t until she was on the bus heading towards Hackney and she’d got over the novelty of having an iPod full of songs that she actually wanted to listen to, that Hope switched from iPod to iPhone and wondered if calling Wilson would ever be a habit that she got into.

Maybe it would, if he always sounded so pleased to see her number flash up on his phone. ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Really fine.’ As soon as she said it, Hope knew that it was true. Or, at least, she was going to be fine. There
might
be times when she stepped backwards instead of moving towards the light, but she was on the right path.

It turned out that Wilson was fine, too. He’d just finished his last job of the year and was heading over to a little gastropub near Parliament Hill Fields, where his staff were waiting for him to pay for a slap-up meal and all the alcohol they could pour down their throats before the landlord called last orders.

‘And what about you? Are you oop North?’ Wilson asked, exaggerating his Lancashire accent.

‘Down South, and on my way to Hackney for Elaine’s annual Christmas Eve bash. Simon makes a pretty lethal elderflower vodka,’ Hope said.

She heard Wilson suck in his breath. ‘So the two of you decided to stay in London?’

‘No, just me. Jack’s in Whitfield because, y’know, we’re not …’ At the last moment, she couldn’t get the words out because it seemed so desperate, so obvious, and that wasn’t why she was calling him. Well, Hope had thought it wasn’t. ‘Listen, I wanted to thank you for the CDs, and guess what? I put them on my iPod. It was so easy!’

‘I did tell you that,’ Wilson said, but he sounded distracted as if this wasn’t the conversation that he wanted to have.

‘And I climbed up a ladder to change a lightbulb,’ Hope told him, and finally it was all right to be unbearably smug about that major achievement. ‘It took me about half an hour and most of that was spent imagining myself falling off and breaking every bone in my body, but still …’

‘Oh God, I expect you to be running the world by the end of the week,’ Wilson drawled, and even the gaggle of teenage girls surreptitiously swigging from a bottle of cider and shrieking at the back of the bus couldn’t dent Hope’s good mood, or stop her stomach curling in on itself when his voice got all low and drawly like that. ‘Are you disgustingly proud of yourself?’

‘I am. I even went back up the ladder just for kicks.’

‘Course you did – but can we skip back to the part where you’re in London and he’s not? Anything significant about the fact that you’re not spending Christmas together? Like, you’re still broken up?’ Wilson asked, and he made it sound like just an idle enquiry but Hope was sure that she could hear the catch in his voice.

Talk about leading questions. ‘Well, we sort of got back together,’ Hope admitted. ‘And then we broke up again.’

‘Again?’ Wilson didn’t seem that impressed with her statement, and Hope wondered if she’d been getting ahead of herself, if it had been arrogant to think that Wilson might be interested in her news. ‘I can’t keep track, Hope. You’re always breaking up, then getting back together for the sake of the house plants and the fact that you’ve been together for decades.’

‘Well, for starters, we don’t have any house plants, and also thirteen years hardly counts as decades and … and … this time it’s for good.’ Hope lowered her voice as she realised the couple sitting behind her were now leaning forward so they could eavesdrop more effectively on her conversation. ‘This time it’s different because, well, I was the one who broke us up, and it’s over. It’s
so
over. No regrets. No going back. It’s the best thing for both of us,’ Hope said, and it didn’t matter how many times she said it, it was still difficult to say, and it still made her throat ache as the words squeezed their way out. ‘So, Jack drew the short straw and had to go back home for Christmas while I stay here.’

Wilson let out a long, low whistle. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Up and down,’ Hope said truthfully. ‘I’ve been through every emotion it’s possible to go through in the last forty-eight hours, but I absolutely know it was the best thing to do – and I think, deep down, he does too.’

‘You’re not spending Christmas Day on your own, are you? ‘Cause you’re welcome to come round to my sister’s. She’s got enough food in to feed the five thousand and still
have
leftovers to last until New Year’s Day,’ Wilson said.

‘Alice from next door has invited me round for Christmas lunch,’ Hope replied, and she tried to sound as if she was fine with that, though she’d heard Alice and Robert through the party wall having many tense conversations about everything from their free-range organic turkey to just what Alice intended to say to Robert’s mother if she went off on one about Alice’s stuffing. ‘Should be fun.’

‘You know what else might be fun?’ Wilson asked, and Hope was sure that it wasn’t just her imagination and that he was drawling again.

‘What would that be?’

‘If we got together later in the evening. I mean, I could come to yours, if you wanted.’

It was too soon for Wilson to be asking Hope stuff like that in the same purry voice he’d used when he was bringing her off. And far, far too soon to come round to the flat she jointly owned with Jack if there was an outside chance that there might be a repeat performance.

‘Or I could come round to yours?’ Hope heard herself suggest. ‘If you wanted.’

‘Oh, I want,’ Wilson said, and Hope felt as if every millimetre of her skin was blushing. ‘Say, around eight? Shall I come and pick you up?’

‘No, I can walk, though getting home might be a problem, unless I want to pay about a gazillion quid for a taxi.’ Everything Hope said seemed to indicate that she was primed and good to go.