Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (63 page)

‘No, you decided and, as usual, I agreed with you, just like when you got struck by a lightning bolt and realised you were still in love with me and that we were all systems go, I eventually went along with that, too.’ Hope placed her hand on Jack’s arm, a gesture that she’d made maybe ten thousand times so that touching Jack was as familiar as brushing the hair out of her eyes or scratching her nose, but now, in this moment, touching Jack felt like something she wasn’t allowed to do. But touching Jack also made him Jack again, and not just the man she was going to leave.

‘You have to get over this, Hopey,’ he said in a low voice.

‘I can’t, and for all my nagging and shouting, we both know that you drive this relationship. We always end up doing what you want – but not this time,’ Hope said, her voice thrumming with resolve. ‘We are not good for each other. Susie, for all her faults, and she has many, won’t stand for your shit. Not like I do. It’s over, Jack. We can’t do this any more.’

‘But we’re on our way home!’ Jack pointed out. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have proposed, but we’ve got Christmas to get through, and then we’ll come back to London and we’ll have more counselling and …’

‘No,’ Hope said firmly. ‘No.’ She unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘I’m not going home. I’m staying in London.’

Jack looked at her with a mixture of shock and awe. ‘You can’t. Your mum will kill you.’

‘Just watch me.’ Hope was just about to open the door, when Jack touched her arm. It was a light, tentative touch as if, like her, he already felt that he didn’t have the right to touch her any more. ‘You can’t just make a decision like this in five seconds flat.’

Hope turned to him with troubled eyes. ‘The thing is … this decision wasn’t made in the last five seconds. I think I’ve been working up to it for the last three months.’

Jack bent his head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, but it made no difference.

‘It’s OK,’ Hope said, swallowing down her anger, because she was sick of being angry with Jack. ‘I’m sorry, too.’

Jack scrambled out of the car to open the boot and help drag out her suitcase. ‘I could drive you back to Holloway, if you like?’ he offered, but Hope shook her head.

‘I’ll be fine. I mean, technically, I think I’m still in London.’

‘This is so surreal. Like, fifteen minutes ago I was proposing, and now you’re leaving me and I’m letting you go.’ Jack looked baffled. ‘This is all so fucked up. You’re going to have to spend Christmas on your own.’

The thought of spending Christmas on her own, of being on her own, wasn’t a horrifying one. ‘I’ll be fine,’ Hope insisted. ‘I could always go round to Elaine’s or Alice from next door would probably have me.’

‘But, it can’t end like this, what about …’ Hope was sure that Jack had more to say, but she couldn’t bear to listen to it, so she rose up on tiptoe to press a last, lingering kiss on his mouth.

It was the saddest kiss in the world.

WITH THE HELP
of Google Maps, Hope was on a bus within thirty minutes of abandoning Jack in the car park like an unwanted puppy.

In an hour she was on a tube train, and not even an hour after that, she was home. She hadn’t cried, although she felt as if she should be crying, but she had a tense quickening in her stomach as if a million tiny birds were flapping their wings against her abdominal walls. Hope couldn’t tell if it was dread or exhilaration or a heady combination of both, but she knew she couldn’t stay in the flat they’d bought together. Besides, she’d planned to spend the next six days in Whitfield and there was nothing to eat in the house, apart from several huge tins of chocolates and a couple of fancy biscuit-selection boxes.

Hope was determined not to wallow in chocolate and self-pity. Now wasn’t the time for wallowing, it was the time for re-grouping, nursing her wounded soul and making some nourishing soup, while she painted the kitchen. As soon as she was back from the bloodbath that was people doing their Christmas food shopping in Morrisons, she turned round and went out again, this time to the big DIY store on Holloway Road, to buy paint and things to apply paint with.

The third time she walked through the front door, Hope’s mind was already racing with options that would force her to go out again, but she ignored the clamouring voices and instead put on the ill-advised dungarees she’d bought a
couple
of years back, which could only be improved by a splattering of buttermilk-coloured paint, tied her hair up in a scarf and tried out a Rosie the Riveter pose in the bathroom mirror.

Then she got busy with masking tape and a paint-roller, and listened to Radio 4 as she painted all the kitchen-cupboard doors that she could reach without a ladder. But then there was nothing to do until tomorrow when the doors would be dry enough for a second coat, and now Hope couldn’t even make a sandwich because she didn’t want to smudge the paint.

She decided to run a hot bath so she could soak and scrub at the blobs of dry paint. Hope had only just carefully eased herself into the water when her phone rang. Mindful that she didn’t want to compound her misery by dropping her phone in the water, she carefully picked it up with a damp hand.

Hope almost wished her phone had gone to a watery grave when her mother opened the conversation with, ‘Well, you’ve really gone and done it now, haven’t you, young lady?’

‘I was going to call you,’ Hope said weakly, although she hadn’t been going to at all. ‘I know it might have come as a bit of a shock, but not really, if you think about how things have been between Jack and I.’

‘Jack and me,’ her mother barked. ‘The poor boy is in pieces, and what about your father and me? Or Marge and Roger? You’ve ruined Christmas for everyone. I hope you’re happy!’

‘Well, no, I’m not even a little bit happy.’ Hope sank as far down in the water as she dared. ‘I was going to wait until after Christmas, but then when Jack proposed …’

‘He actually
proposed
?’ her mother queried sharply. ‘What
is
wrong with you, Hope?’

‘We don’t love each other. Not like we used to.’

‘What’s love got to do with it? You’re not a teenager any
more,
and you’re throwing thirteen years out of the window because you have this silly notion that you need to find yourself. Well, all you’ll find is a selfish, inconsiderate girl. You’ve let everyone down.’

‘Oh, I think I’d have let them down more if me and Jack, sorry, Jack and I, had got married, then decided to get a divorce a few months later,’ Hope snapped. ‘And don’t you dare call me selfish! You don’t give a shit about what I want or what Jack really wants, it’s all about you and Marge and this ridiculous idea that you’ve been peddling all our lives that we’re perfect for each other. We’re not!’

Her mother didn’t say anything for a while, though Hope could hear her choked gasps like she was holding back her sobs.

‘Mum,’ she said in a much gentler voice. ‘It’s really not the end of the world. Couples break up all the time, but surely you can understand why I couldn’t spend six days with Jack and both our families after telling him that we were over?’

‘No, I don’t understand at all. It’s Christmas and you know that none of your grandparents are in good health,’ her mother reminded her grimly. ‘This could be the last Christmas that we all spend together, and now you won’t be here. I hope you can live with that.’

It made Hope feel guilty, as it did every time her mother sang the same song, but both her grandfathers usually dozed between meals, her father’s mother was always glued to the TV and made everyone take a vow of silence during the Queen’s speech, and she’d call her other grandma in a couple of days to explain the situation, and she was sure she’d get a much more sympathetic reaction than she was currently getting from her own mother.

‘There’s not really much I can do about that, Mum,’ Hope sighed.

‘What you can do about it is to get off your bottom, make your way to Euston and buy a train ticket. There’s no way
that
you’ll get a seat at such short notice so you’ll have to stand for the entire journey, but let that be a lesson to you.’

Hope ground her teeth and felt a shooting pain in her jaw. ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Well … How … No? No?’

She gave her mother a lot of backchat and bad temper but rarely outright defiance. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days,’ Hope said with what she felt was great daring. ‘Love to Dad.’

‘Now just wait a minute. You will not call me in a couple of days, I want you home tomorrow, do you hear me?’ Caroline Delafield was shouting so loudly that Hope was sure that even Alice from next door could hear her.

‘Short of making Dad drive all the way down to London, physically restrain me and carry me to the car, you can’t make me come home.’ Hope kicked her legs out in frustration and sent a wave of water sloshing on to the bathroom floor. ‘You might find it hard to believe, but I’m actually having a pretty crappy time, and you haven’t even asked if I’m all right. Do you dislike me so much that you can only stand to be around me if Jack is there to sweeten the deal? Why can’t you be on
my
side for once? Is that too much to ask?’

‘That’s not fair, Hopey!’

‘Good, so you know what it feels like then, don’t you?’

Then Hope did something that she’d never dared to do before and hung up on her mother,
then
switched off her phone so her mother couldn’t call her back to harangue her. Both the phone call and the hanging-up rattled Hope so much that once she got out of the bath after a quick lather and rinse and not the long, luxurious soak she’d planned, she realised that she’d been going about this all wrong.

She needed to wallow for a little bit. Wallowing was all part of the grieving process. Her mind made up, Hope climbed into her cosiest, fleeciest pyjamas, made up a hot-water bottle, stuck the first season of
Sex and the City
into the DVD player (Jack had always refused to let her watch it
when
he was around), then got a tub of pralines and cream ice-cream out of the freezer and a bottle of Baileys that had been a present from a grateful parent from the fridge.

Eating a whole tub of ice-cream drenched in Baileys and sobbing as soon as Mr Big appeared on the screen didn’t make Hope feel even a little better. Inevitably, she had to suddenly scramble off the sofa and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up the sickly concoction. She stayed on the bathroom floor, almost curled around the toilet bowl, and knew that the sobbing she’d done on the settee had just been a little warm-up for these tears. She was crying because of Jack, that was a given, and because she had a terrible relationship with her mother, and because she’d just been sick, and because now her future was a blank page. She could be who she wanted to be, go anywhere in the world, do anything she wanted, and that kind of unfettered freedom was utterly terrifying. So terrifying that Hope found herself rising to her knees to throw up again, although there was nothing left in her stomach but bile.

As she crawled into bed with nothing but a hot-water bottle for comfort, Hope had never felt so alone. Lauren had gone up to Manchester today to see her sister before she ended her journey in Whitfield. Allison had flown out to Mauritius as she had no truck with her mother insisting that she came home for Christmas. There was Elaine, but they didn’t have the kind of friendship that could stand tearful phone calls at almost midnight, unless all of Blue Class had suddenly been wiped out in a freak accident. Hope could only think of one person that she could call, and knew that they’d drop everything to come round and make her toast and tea – and that was Wilson. He’d be sure to tell her in no uncertain terms what he thought of her unreasonable demands, but he’d still do it. And it was a tempting thought, but God knows, she’d made enough unreasonable demands on him to last several lifetimes.

Instead she lay in the darkness, and every time she fought
her
way to a place of relative calm so she might be able to go to sleep, a fresh wave of panic and regret and horrible, bone-aching, heart-rending sadness washed over her, and she cried until the tears trickled across her cheeks and into her ears and she had to keep shifting position.

The twenty-third of December was a brand-new day, heralded by bright winter sun pouring down on Hope as she slowly and carefully uncurled her limbs and stretched so she could assess how her wounds, both physical and emotional, were faring. She ached from the excesses of the night before, head faintly pounding, stomach slightly bruised, and she still felt miserable, but she didn’t feel as if the end of the world was quite so nigh.