Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (2 page)

‘Do you promise?’ Jack asked, taking Hope’s sticky,
garlicky,
pine-nutty hand and placing it over her heart. ‘You have to promise.’

‘I promise,’ Hope said, wiping her hand off on her T-shirt, which was already smeared with olive oil, butter and jam. ‘I mean, I like cooking. Just not when everything has to be perfect and weighed out and …’

‘You end up using every single dish and utensil that we own,’ Jack interrupted, as he rose to full height and surveyed the kitchen, which had pots and pans and cutlery heaped on every surface and even stacked on the two gas rings that Hope wasn’t using. ‘It’s a small kitchen …’

‘I think you meant to say “poky”.’ Hope flapped her arms to illustrate said pokiness. Jack could actually stand at the epicentre of their kitchen, stretch out his arms and touch the walls. ‘A poky kitchen in a poky basement flat.’

‘It’s not poky; it’s bijou,’ Jack argued. ‘It’s not a basement flat; it’s a garden flat. And it’s your first step on the property ladder, young lady.’

‘The scary thing is that I can’t tell whether you sound more like my mum or your mum,’ Hope said, picking up her spoon so she could poke her roulade again.

‘Well, when they start on the topic of owning your first home they’re pretty interchangeable,’ Jack said absently as he looked around at the havoc that Hope had wrought. ‘You know, if you just tidied up as you went along, then it wouldn’t get so chaotic and you could tick off each item on your checklist and you’d feel a lot calmer. I bet you don’t even know where the list is.’

Hope knew exactly where the list was. Nowhere, because she’d never got round to making a list. Jack was all about tidying up as he went along and lists and minimalism and sleek, modern lines, and she was about letting things happen in an organic fashion until they all happened at once, like now, and Jack had to force her to write a to-do list, while he started on the washing-up.

Jack was also very anti leaving things on the draining
board
instead of drying them with a tea towel and putting them away so the whole process took half an hour, though Hope put up a spirited defence against putting away things that she’d need again in five minutes, until Jack scooped up a handful of sudsy water and flung it at her so the ends of her red hair, which weren’t skewered in a bun held together with two HB pencils, were soaked and her T-shirt clung to her breasts.

‘Don’t you feel better now that you’ve got a list?’ Jack demanded, adroitly fending Hope off as she tried to get in on the dishwater action. ‘Like everything’s under control?’

‘Well, I suppose,’ Hope panted, as she tried to duck under Jack’s arm. ‘The thought of making the list wasn’t as bad as the actual making of it, but I’m
drenched
.’

‘I know,’ Jack said with a leer, reaching up with a wet hand to give her sodden left breast a quick squeeze. ‘By the way, nice tits.’

Hope pretended to glare at him but after twenty-six years of knowing her, Jack could spot one of her fake glares at fifty paces so he just grinned as he slyly tweaked her other breast. And even after twenty-six years of knowing him, when Jack was beaming at her like that, Hope was powerless to resist him.

‘You’ll never get to see them again if you keep doing that,’ she told him sternly, because it didn’t do Jack any good to know just how potent the power of his smile was.

It was no wonder that Lottie and Nancy from next door, who were ten and twelve respectively, went red in the face and giggly every time they saw Jack. The week before, Jack had been bare-chested as he watered the garden with the hose, and the giggling from the other side of the garden fence had got so shrill and frequent that Hope, who’d been treating her roses for greenfly, had feared for her eardrums.

But if you were a tween, then Jack was all your pre-pubescent fantasies made flesh and living next door. He was tall and slim with thickly lashed blue eyes and a pretty,
pouty
mouth that wore a perpetual smile. He had a moptop of thick brown hair that was half Beatle, half Justin Bieber, and he dressed just like a teen popstar who’d been given a rock ‘n’ roll makeover by his stylist: tight jeans that were just loose enough to slip down and show his pert, boxer-shorted arse to the world, Chuck Taylors and skinny T-shirts, which clung lovingly to his chest and proved quite emphatically that he didn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere about his person.

Factor in the cool job as art editor on
Skirt
magazine, which meant he could procure tickets for premieres of films featuring sparkling vampires, CDs of the latest boyband and, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, tickets for the
X-Factor
final, and it was inevitable that Lottie and Nancy would fall madly and hopelessly in love with Jack, in much the same way that Hope had when she was thirteen and he was fifteen and he’d suddenly stopped being the boy next door and become the measure by which all other boys were judged and found wanting. Back then, though, all that Jack had had in the way of connections was a newspaper round, which meant that he occasionally stole a copy of
J17
for her.

Hope, on the other hand, was a primary-school teacher with red hair, who’d once shouted at Lottie for dashing across the street on her roller skates into the path of a pizza delivery boy on a moped. Even worse, Hope had then frogmarched Lottie back home so she could be shouted at by her mother, Alice, too. Since then Lottie and Nancy had made it perfectly plain that they couldn’t understand what the god-like Jack was doing with that ‘totally mean ginger girl’.

What he was currently doing was running his eyes down Hope’s dinner-party checklist. ‘So you’ve got an hour free now between sealing the roulade and making the mascarpone cream? Shall we sort out the living room?’

Hope nodded unenthusiastically. It was far too hot to be
lugging
furniture about, or serving a main course as heavy as lamb roulade with dauphinoise potatoes, for that matter.

‘Maybe I should sauté the potatoes instead of baking them with loads of cream,’ she pondered out loud. ‘Do you think you could get me some more olive oil when you go out?’

Jack groaned. ‘This is why you need to be more organised. When you go off road, terrible things always happen, Hopita.’

‘No, they don’t,’ Hope insisted, because this was nothing like the time that she’d run out of caster sugar when she was baking and had improvised by mashing up brown sugar cubes. Or when she’d been learning to knit and hadn’t been able to get more of the chunky wool she’d been using so had switched to a fine yarn to give her scarf some texture. ‘It’s our first dinner party and everything has to be just so.’

‘Our
only
dinner party,’ Jack reiterated sharply, as if he hadn’t been joking earlier. ‘We are never doing this again. Not in my lifetime.’

It took them nearly half an hour to tug, shove, lift and heave their futon sofabed (which was uncomfortable both to sit or sleep on) into the bedroom. Hope decided to multitask and use this time to get Jack on board the dinner-party train. After all, she’d invited his two artboy mates, Otto and Marvin, not just to appease Jack but also as potential cannon fodder for Hope’s friends Lauren and Allison, who were both going through a dry spell. Jack had been boringly insistent that they had room for only four guests but Hope had to invite her other friend Susie as a very paltry thank you for buying her a Latitude ticket, even if it did mean that Susie’s grumpy boyfriend, Wilson, had to be invited too. And anyway, ‘Having a dinner party is grown up and now we own our own home and we have two sets of bed linen and spare towels we should be doing more grown-up things.’

Jack shrugged. ‘We don’t actually own our own home. It’s
jointly
owned by our parents, who lent us the deposit, and the Halifax.’ He sat down on their bed, which they’d got on Freecycle and which was almost as uncomfortable as the sofabed, and pulled Hope down to sit alongside him. ‘Sorry. It’s just … well, it’s our last weekend before school starts and you get bogged down with lesson plans and standardised tests. I kinda wanted this weekend to be just the two of us. And now you’re mad at me, aren’t you?’

‘I’m not,’ Hope said, though she kind of was, after all the trouble she’d gone to. ‘At least I’ve learned an important life lesson about planning a menu that can be made days in advance and shoved in the freezer.’

‘Well, as long as it’s been a teachable moment then that’s OK.’ Jack kissed the top of her head, even as he sighed. ‘So, olive oil, and what else have you forgotten? Did you buy a couple of decent bottles of wine that The Pretentious Wanker will deign to drink?’

‘He’s called Wilson,’ Hope said mildly, because Wilson was a pretentious wanker, who only seemed to come with one facial expression, a world-weary sneer. ‘The offy was having a four-for-three promotion, so I did get wine but, hmm, I suppose we do need to get something a lot more expensive with a subtle bouquet.’

‘And some bottles of fancy imported lager that are teeny tiny and cost three quid each,’ Jack said sourly. ‘God, he’s such a pretentious wanker.’

‘Really is,’ Hope agreed, pleased that they were finally back in sync, even if it was over the wankerdom of Wilson. ‘And if you’re popping into Waitrose anyway, can you get some clotted-cream vanilla ice-cream in case my mascarpone curdles in the heat?’

Jack grumbled a little more about the dinner party bankrupting them and how they’d have to live on SupaNoodles for the rest of the month, but Hope ignored him as she added a few more items to the shopping list and sent him off to B&Q with a cheery wave.

Their cunning plan to get around the obstacle of not having a dining table was to buy a wallpaper-pasting table, which they’d return tomorrow in pristine condition. Hope had promised Jack faithfully that she’d put down newspaper under the tablecloth, in case of spillages. Of course they needed eight chairs too, but Jack and Hope would sit on their kitchen stools and Gary the estate agent, who lived in spacious splendour in the rest of the house above them, had promised that they could borrow his four expensive Heal’s chairs, though Hope had had to flirt with him for ten very long minutes (‘Really? You’ve doubled your commission in the last six months? Wow! You must be
so
good at selling houses …’). He even carried the chairs down the crumbling concrete stairs that led to the basement flat and into the re-purposed living room.

Hope was now meant to go next door, according to her checklist, and borrow two chairs from Alice, Lottie and Nancy’s long-suffering mum, but she wasted valuable time following Gary around the flat as he kicked at their skirting boards and advised Hope that she and Jack would ‘easily add another ten thou on your resale value if you ripped out the kitchen and put a new one in’. Jack was much better at dealing with Alice anyway as she always wanted to badger Hope about primary-school league tables and whether Nancy had ADD, dyslexia or was just plain lazy.

She was loath to admit it, but having a list made it easier to finish all the preparations, and less than an hour later Hope had nothing left to do in the kitchen until soon before her guests arrived. She couldn’t lay a table that didn’t exist and so had no choice but to indulge in a long soaky bath, and when Jack still hadn’t come home, she even took the time to blow-dry her hair sort of straight.

By now it was after five, Jack had been gone nearly two hours, and Hope’s Facebook invites stated quite clearly that pre-dinner drinks would be at seven sharp.

Where are you?
she texted him, and it wasn’t until she’d
finished
putting her make-up on that he texted back,
On my way. Arsenal r playing @ home. Holloway Rd blocked solid
.

‘Why didn’t you take the back roads then?’ Hope muttered to herself, as she applied one last coat of mascara and stepped back to assess her appearance in the mirror glued to the inside of one of the wardrobe doors.

To make up for the rustic, make-do charm of their borrowed table and mismatched chairs, Hope had been going for a look that shrieked effortless glamour, but she wasn’t entirely sure she’d succeeded.

She’d started with the shoes; her beloved Stella McCartney leopard-print satin wedges, which had been an unexpected birthday present from Jack – he usually bought her a dress that was at least a size too small and the biggest box of chocolates he could find. The wedges were higher than Hope was used to and so far she hadn’t dared to wear them outside, but they went beautifully with her black broderie anglaise maxi dress.

Hope was always grateful that she was the sort of redhead that tanned, or rather freckled until all her freckles mostly joined up to create a tan, and the thin straps of the dress showed off her sun-kissed shoulders. The fabric fell in graceful folds over her pot belly. Hope ran a hand over her tummy, which always made its presence felt during the school holidays. When school broke up, she was always full of plans to visit the gym every day and swim and go on long walks, but the plans usually petered out before the end of the first week in favour of meeting friends for coffee and cake, or lunch, or a cinema outing which involved ice-cream and popcorn. In fact, eating vast quantities of food in a social setting won out over the gym every time, leaving Hope ten pounds heavier at the beginning of term. Although she was hating her midriff right now, she knew that spending seven-hour days wrangling a class of six-year-olds, and going to the gym to alleviate the stress of seven hours spent wrangling a class of six-year-olds, would make
the
belly fat melt away pretty quickly. Until then it was big knickers and maxi dresses all the way, all the time.