Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (9 page)

‘It’s thirteen years, actually. Lots of marriages don’t last that long.’

‘… but I thought we were heading towards something serious, and so if there is more to this than a bit of flirting and one sodding kiss, then, yes, I’m upset about it. But, unlike you, I don’t go in for hysterics and hand-wringing.’

‘I am not hysterical!’ Hope yelled, and she actually flailed on the car seat in a way that would have her squirming when she played this whole sorry scene back at a later date. ‘If you’re not going to drive me into town, then fine! I can make my own way but I don’t have to sit here and listen to you pretend that I’ve blown this whole thing out of proportion because I’m hysterical and I overreact when you …’

‘Christ!’ Wilson started the car with an angry twist of the ignition key. ‘I’ll take you into town as long as you promise to just shut the hell up!’

Hope closed her mouth with an audible snap so she could
grind
her teeth so furiously that her jaw started to ache, and if she kept that up, she’d be back to wearing a mouth guard at night like she had when she was a teenager and had had far less control on her temper than she did now. Well, not right at this second, but generally she’d learned to control her hissy-fitting by deep breathing. Deep breathing wasn’t an option when she was struggling with a veritable tsunami of rage. ‘You have no right …’ she began, her voice murderously low.

‘Not another bloody word!’

She settled back into a fulminating silence and for want of anything better to do, like giving Wilson a piece of her mind, Hope delved into the carrier bag and pulled out her phone. She switched it on and yes! There were missed calls. Ten of them. Ten ways for Jack to say he was sorry and make it convincing because she wanted him to be sorry and to promise that it (whatever
it
really was) would never happen again. But when she investigated further, eight of them were from Lauren and Allison, there was one from Marvin and even one from Otto, but nothing from Jack. Except, oh! He’d sent her a text.

R U OK?

And no. No, Hope wasn’t OK. Not when he couldn’t even take the time to send her a text that contained more than five characters. FIVE!

‘I hate him so much right now,’ Hope spat out, and she also hated that she had to qualify the statement. That she couldn’t just outright hate Jack, but she had to give it a disclaimer. ‘I don’t even know who he is any more, and I want to blame Susie for all of this, but y’know, when I saw them … well, it was obvious that Jack wasn’t being forced against his will.’

‘I thought we’d decided that we weren’t going to talk about this any more.’

‘But don’t you think we should talk about this?’ Hope persisted. ‘We’re the only two people who
can
talk about it.’

Wilson glanced over at her. ‘What part of “shut the hell up” are you having a problem with?’

‘You’re
horrible
!’ Hope ground out, literally ground out because her back molars were now clamped so tightly together it felt as if they’d have to be chiselled apart. ‘No wonder Susie has to …’

‘If you finish that sentence how I think you’re going to finish it, then I’m throwing you out of the car
now
, and I won’t care that we’re in Somers Town and you’ll probably get mugged by crackheads.’

There were a million things that Hope still wanted to say but she couldn’t say them. Not because she believed Wilson’s threats or that she was scared of crackheads (she’d willingly give them her Stella McCartney wedges to flog on eBay). But because she’d reached that knuckle-cracking, limb-stiffening, white-noise place where she was so angry that all she could do now was burst into tears.

It was almost a relief to be crying – not like she’d been crying before, when she’d felt alone and betrayed and sick to the stomach at the thought of Jack and Susie together, but crying because she’d worked herself up into such a temper that all she could do was cry. Unfortunately, angry crying was loud, verging on howling, and Hope knew from bitter experience that her face was scrunched up, wet with tears and livid red, not that she even cared. Her nose started running and she wiped it on the back of her hand and carried on crying, her whole body shaking with sobs – but it didn’t make her feel better or less angry, not when she wanted to shout and scream and smash a few glasses or pieces of china.

‘Can you stop that racket?’ Wilson asked as he drove past University College Hospital and up Gower Street. ‘Crying isn’t going to help.’

Hope didn’t trust herself to speak. She wasn’t even sure that any words she could manage to get out would be intelligible, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d
really
lost it like this. Not since she was at Leeds University and had confronted one of her housemates for letting her sister and her sister’s unwashed boyfriend have sex in Hope’s bed when she’d gone home for the weekend.

Wilson muttered something under his breath, and then he dared to pat her knee and let his hand rest there. Anyone could have told him that when Hope was crying angry tears, then you should never, ever attempt to touch her, not unless you wanted to get slapped.

Hope smacked his hand off her knee. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she spluttered, her voice clogged with mucus.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Wilson demanded. It was a valid question. Hope herself wanted to know what was so wrong with her that Jack and Susie had had to find solace in each other. ‘You’re meant to teach six-year-olds, not act like one.’

Wilson wasn’t helping. He was making everything worse, and some small part of Hope that wasn’t subsumed by rage and snot understood that; and the other larger part of her that was currently making all the decisions had come to the conclusion that enough was enough. As Wilson stopped at the traffic lights at Cambridge Circus, she scrabbled for the door handle.

‘Now what are you doing, you silly woman?’

Hope succeeded in wrenching the door open. ‘I can take it from here,’ she sobbed, but they were quieter sobs because she was almost,
almost
, all cried out.

‘I’m not letting you wander around Soho in this state,’ Wilson said, but he sounded reluctant and Hope couldn’t really blame him, which meant that her rationality and reason were beginning to return. ‘Just stay where you are.’

But Hope already had the door open and the lights had turned green and Wilson was holding up a stream of traffic, all tooting their horns. Still faintly weeping but mostly hicupping, she scrambled out of the car and stumbled across
the
road. Wilson shouted something after her but it was swallowed up by the night, and Hope ducked down a side street and stayed there until she was absolutely sure that he wasn’t coming after her.

HOPE SPENT WHAT
was left of the night in Soho. She couldn’t face the journey to South London and Lauren’s pity and concern that would make her come undone all over again, so she stayed where she was.

Well, first she sat on the stone steps of the Seven Dials monument in Covent Garden but she kept getting harassed by lagered-up men and one lagered-up woman who needed help getting her shoe back on, so eventually Hope hobbled to Bar Italia in Soho. She had to wait an hour for a seat and once she had one, she kept ordering coffees that she didn’t drink and paninis that she didn’t eat just so she had squatter’s rights. An endless stream of clubbers, scene-kids and hipsters, most of them chugging espressos to keep the come-down at bay, was entertaining enough that Hope could sit there and not really have to think about anything.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there but her bottom had gone numb and the sight of her fifth cup of cold cappuccino and a congealed panini was starting to make her feel sick. She couldn’t stay there for ever, even if she’d wanted to. One of the counter staff had been over to wipe her table down at least ten times in the last half hour, so with a heavy heart and even heavier feet, Hope gathered up her carrier bag and headed out to meet her uncertain future.

It was a glorious day. The sun was already high up in a soft blue sky. A man was walking his schnauzer, a copy of
the
Sunday Times
tucked under his arm. Hope checked her phone; it was only a little past seven. She hadn’t been up this early on a Sunday since she’d stayed up all of Saturday night at Latitude dancing with Susie.

Hope wished that she didn’t have to go home. Ever. Again. She was almost tempted to prolong the inevitable and hunker down in her favourite West End greasy spoon for a fortifying mug of tea and a bacon sandwich, which she might actually eat, but common sense prevailed. Tomorrow was the first inset day of the new school year and she’d promised the deputy head that she’d make her famous chocolate brownies for the infants
v
. juniors staffroom bake-off they had at the beginning of each new term.

The thought of having to do anything oven-related after yesterday’s dinner party was almost enough to make Hope cry the first tears of a new day. Instead, she stopped at a Tesco Metro to buy ingredients for the brownies, then stuck out her hand to hail a black cab rather than taking the tube. Her shoes were no less painful than they had been last night and if a black cab had its light on before eight on a Sunday morning, then God obviously wanted her to take it.

Hope stood outside 47 Dunhill Road for long, long moments after the taxi had driven away. If God had really been on her side, he’d have forgotten about gifting Hope with a cab for hire and arranged instead for a handy tornado to pick up the building and its inhabitants and deposit them in a field miles away. But it was still standing there in the middle of the terrace and Hope had no option but to drag herself up the garden path.

As Hope picked her way down the steps that led to the basement flat, she could hear the front door opening and by the time she reached the bottom, Jack was standing there, waiting for her.

His face had been as familiar to her as her own reflection,
but
now Hope felt as if it had changed. Something irrevocable had happened in the few hours that she’d been absent.

She didn’t know the secret heart of him any more. Wasn’t sure that she ever had. And the way he was looking at her, his big blue eyes wide and wary, was shiny and new, too. Maybe he’d changed before now, and she hadn’t even noticed because she’d stopped really looking at him and had simply seen the familiar Jack shape with Jack’s features, and hadn’t bothered to delve any deeper.

They stood there staring at each other, until Hope dropped her eyes to stare at her feet and the chipped nail polish on her big toe because she couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

‘You’re home … I was worried about you,’ Jack began brokenly. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Well, Wilson gave me a lift into town and I spent the night in Bar Italia,’ Hope said shortly, as she moved past Jack, all of her tensed in case she accidentally made contact with him in the process. ‘Like you even care where I’ve been.’

‘Hopey! Please, don’t be like this,’ Jack said, touching her shoulder as he followed her into their flat, but letting his hand drop away as soon as he felt the rigid set of her muscles. ‘You have to know … I never meant to hurt you.’

‘Never meant me to find out, you mean,’ Hope countered, and she wasn’t sure why she was getting in an argument, when all she really wanted to do was demand dates and facts. When did it start? How did it start? Why did it start? Was it my fault? Did I drive you away? Is she better in bed than me? Do you think she’s more beautiful than me? Do you love her?

She looked around her. The living room was no longer a dining room, and over Jack’s shoulder, Hope could see that the kitchen was back to its usual pristine state. Or rather, it was far more pristine than if she’d been clearing up. Perhaps
Lauren
and Allison had stayed behind to help or, more likely, given the gleam on the stainless-steel bread bin, Jack had done it. Had he coaxed Susie back after she’d stormed off, and after having sex in Hope’s bed, they’d scrubbed down the kitchen together?

Hope decided that the bathroom was her only viable place of retreat. Normally she’d have stripped off on the way, but she didn’t want to be naked and vulnerable in front of Jack, especially as he’d compare her body to Susie’s, and that was another battle that Hope would lose.

‘Are we over?’ she asked hoarsely. ‘Now that you don’t love me any more.’

Jack’s aghastness was momentarily gratifying, but only for one very brief moment. ‘What? No! Of course we’re not over!’ He gave her a cowed look, like a dog expecting to have its nose wiped into the area rug that it had just soiled. ‘You don’t really think I’ve stopped loving you, do you?’