Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend

  Hope wasn’t very good at emotional blackmail, especially when it had to be passed through a very partial third party, but she waited while Susie passed on the message.

  ‘He says he’ll come round tomorrow before lunch to see Jeremy.’ Susie paused. ‘Um, like, maybe it would be best if you weren’t there.’

  ‘As if I even want to see him.’ It was a pity that Hope couldn’t turn her love off like a stopcock, because Jack was doing everything he could to make her hate him. ‘Believe me, the moment he turns up, I’ll be out of the door.’

  ‘You know, it won’t always be like this,’ Susie said. ‘I get that it’s all come as a bit of a shock, but I did try to warn you, Hopey. When you’ve calmed down, there’s no reason why we can’t all just chillax and be cool.’

  ‘There’s every reason. There’re about a million reasons,’ Hope spluttered and she actually had to stop spluttering and do a quick mental review of the facts at hand to see if she was being completely unreasonable, given the circumstances. No, she was being entirely reasonable. Some would even commend Hope for her restraint. Yes, she’d trashed an iPhone and slapped Jack around the face, but when they’d been doing their teacher training, Lauren had got up close and very personal with one of the tutors and then keyed his car once she found out that he was also up close and personal with half a dozen other wannabe teachers. Even Elaine in her wilder, rock ’n’ roll days had smashed Simon’s vintage Les Paul guitar and had climbed up on stage at a gig in Aylesbury to kick him in the nuts when one of his groupies looked like she was becoming a permanent fixture.

  Hope realised that she was still on the phone because she could hear Susie squawking at her something about how … ‘this is difficult for everyone, Hopey. Bet you anything that one day – OK, maybe a really long time from now – we’ll go out for a drink and laugh about all this.’

  There were no words. Or there were words, but every single one of them carried a Parental Advisory warning, so Hope pinged the elastic band, which she’d started wearing again only thirty minutes earlier so she wouldn’t be tempted to shout at her whiny little brother, hung up, then wandered back into the living room where Jeremy was sitting on the sofa, still wearing his army jacket and a truculent expression.

  ‘Just spoken to Jack,’ she said, managing not to flinch as she said his name. ‘He’ll be round tomorrow. So, anyway, shall we go and get the food shopping done?’

  ‘I want to go to the skate shop in Covent Garden.’

  ‘You can do that with Jack,’ Hope said firmly. ‘Shall we make a list before we hit the shops or shall we just kick it freestyle?’

  ‘I didn’t get up at six this morning to come to London so I could go to a supermarket,’ he huffed. ‘I can go to Covent Garden by myself.’

  ‘Over my dead body will you go by yourself!’

  ‘But I looked it up in the A to Z!’ Jeremy pulled out of his rucksack a battered, yellowing A to Z that looked very familiar. The same A to Z that Hope had pored over as a teenager, tracing the main thoroughfares of Camden Town that she’d read about in the NME, and vowing that one day she’d live on one of those hallowed streets. Of course now Camden Town was a mere husk of what it used to be; the market sold dodgy tie-dyed T-shirts, bootleg concert DVDs and hideous hippie jewellery, and the Stables markets, which at least had some decent vintage stalls, were being torn down to make way for a massive shopping centre. Besides which …

  ‘That A to Z is so old that it’s missing at least four underground lines and I don’t know how many streets,’ Hope told Jeremy. ‘Mum and Dad bought it when they came down to London for the Silver Jubilee. Matthew had only just been born!’

  Jeremy stuck out his chin in that familiar dogged Delafield way, one of the traits which all five children had inherited from their mother (which also included an irrational hatred of hedgehogs and the inability to digest smoked mackerel). ‘But the Piccadilly Line is still there and if I get the tube at Holloway Road I don’t even have to change lines. I checked, and I know exactly where to go after that, and I won’t talk to anyone I don’t know, apart from the staff in the skate shop because I want to get a new set of wheels and maybe some decals. And I promised my friends I’d go and I’d take pictures – and if I don’t, they’ll think I’m a lying twat. Please, Hope, don’t be so boring. You’re acting just like Mum!’

  Jeremy was making a very compelling argument, and he was talking to her using whole sentences with prepositions and active verbs, which was a welcome relief. Also, Hope was nothing like Mrs Delafield. ‘But what about the time you ended up in Hull?’

  ‘Four words: rail replacement bus service!’ he practically shouted.

  ‘Oh, well, yeah, that explains everything,’ Hope agreed. ‘Are you sure you know where to go after you come out of the tube?’

  ‘Yes! I go straight ahead, down Neal Street until I find Shorts Gardens on my left, then I come to a shop selling stinky cheese and there’s a little alley and that’s where the skate shop is.’ Jeremy had obviously memorised the directions, and it was a much better set of directions than Hope would have given him.

  ‘You have to take the A to Z with you. And phone me when you get there. Then phone me when you’re at Holloway Road tube station and I’ll come and meet you.’ She was struck by a sudden inspiration. ‘This’ll be our little secret. No need to tell Mum about this.’

  It was a miracle, but Jeremy was smiling. At her. So even with the badly crimped hair and cack-handed application of guyliner he looked a lot like the winsome toddler that Hope had had no time for when she’d been a surly, belligerent teenager herself. ‘Thanks, Hopey, you’re the best big sister ever. Now can you go and put a bra on?’

  HOPE SAW JEREMY to the tube, then set off for Morrisons with a list of his favourite foods, which consisted of potato-based snacks, meat pies and biscuits. She even allowed herself a reason to feel cheery – maybe having Jeremy around for the week might even be fun, once he realised that Hope wasn’t a younger version of their mother, but actually his cool elder sister.

  Hope had been eleven when Jeremy was born and it was a moot point who was more shocked; her or her forty-four-year-old mother who thought she was going through an early menopause. How completely gross to be at the same primary school where her mother was deputy head and for everyone to know that her parents still had sex. Urgh!

  No wonder Hope had been such a stroppy teenager, listening to angry girl guitar bands and screaming at the annoying little brother who followed her around like a puppy and put his sticky hands all over her stuff. By the time she’d grown out of her stroppy stage (though her mother swore that she still hadn’t) and Jeremy had grown out of smearing chocolate over her CDs and magazines, Hope had left to go to university, and they’d never had the chance to develop a proper relationship. And, poor sod, he’d had eight years of being alone with Mum and Dad with no siblings to ease the burden. Hope had often hated having three older brothers, especially when they ganged up on her for being a girl, but at least she’d had a ready-made gang and, as an added bonus, she’d always got preferential treatment from their parents because she was the only girl.

  As she walked back from the shops, laden down with junk food and a few token vegetables, Hope allowed herself a little fantasy of Jeremy studying for his degree in London. They’d go to art galleries and plays together and he’d introduce her to his girlfriends, who’d look up to her as the voice of womanly experience.

  ‘Hopey’s not just my cool, older sister,’ Jeremy would say at one of Hope’s well-attended, gastronomically daring dinner parties, Hope thought to herself as she opened the front door. ‘She’s my best friend.’

  Except what Jeremy should actually have been saying right then was, ‘I’m at Covent Garden tube station, heading due north towards Shorts Gardens.’

  Hope dropped the shopping on the kitchen floor and rooted for her iPhone. There were no missed calls or text messages, and when she tried to call Jeremy, his phone went straight to voicemail. He couldn??
?t still be on the tube. Not unless the whole skate-shop thing was a cunning ruse and he was really en route to Heathrow Airport where he’d board the first plane to New York and never be heard from again.

  There was nothing to do but sweat it out. Hope unpacked the shopping, tidied up, stuck a wash on and even vacuumed. Then there was nothing to do but pace her miniscule square-footage and imagine all the awful things that could have happened to Jeremy. Worse, she’d have to tell her mother that she’d lost him, and he’d last been seen happily climbing into a white transit van belonging to four suicide bombers.

  Two long hours later, during which Hope had aged at least ten years, Jeremy rang. ‘Where the hell are you?’ Hope shrieked. ‘I’ve been worried sick!’

  There was a bit of heavy breathing at the other end of the line, then a pitiful, ‘Don’t shout at me, but I’m in East Ham.’

  ‘East Ham?’ Hope shouted. ‘How did you get to bloody East Ham?’

  There was a garbled explanation about the Piccadilly Line being suspended at King’s Cross for engineering works and how the Hammersmith and City Line had led Jeremy astray by pretending to be the Circle Line but the upshot of it was Hope growling, ‘Stay right where you are. Don’t even twitch a bloody eyelash – I’m coming to get you.’

  It took Hope nearly two hours to get to East Ham. She used the time to work on the skin-stripping telling-off she’d give Jeremy, but when she finally reached her destination the sight of him huddled miserably at the station entrance, his guyliner smudged like there’d been a few tears shed, had her biting her tongue and pinging her elastic band.

  They travelled back in silence and when they got home, Jeremy said he was tired and wanted to go to bed. Hope left him curled up on the sofa under the patchwork quilt, a much-loved present from some of the mums of last year’s Blue Class.

  It was only eight o’clock, which was far too early to go to bed on a Saturday night, but it had been twenty-four of some of the most hideous hours of her life and Hope couldn’t wait to get into bed with a well-thumbed Jilly Cooper and a packet of chocolate digestives.

  Jeremy was very subdued the next day. He barely had any appetite for breakfast and didn’t notice how jumpy Hope was.

  ‘I’ll probably go out for a walk when Jack gets here,’ she said, after many moments of mental rehearsal. ‘Give you two a chance to catch up without me getting in the way.’

  But Jeremy was back to merely grunting. The only reason that Hope knew he wasn’t completely catatonic was because he’d managed to fire up the Xbox and was giving some horribly violent shoot-’em-up game his full attention.

  Having Jeremy around made Hope feel like a stranger in her own home, or maybe it was the expectation of Jack’s arrival. She wasn’t sure what time he was going to show up, which meant she couldn’t settle to anything.

  Jack was still a no-show at eleven when Hope, still in pyjama bottoms, an old Kenickie T-shirt and, in deference to Jeremy, a bra, was slumped over the kitchen counter, mindlessly eating handfuls of Rice Krispies straight from the box and reading the bumf from the drama workshop for the twentieth time. Then she heard his key in the lock.

  Hope had already decided that she wasn’t going to get angry with Jack. There was no point. It didn’t make her feel the least bit better. It didn’t make Jack even the least bit contrite, and then she stayed angry for the next forty-eight hours and the only way to squash it down was with huge amounts of chocolate.

  She straightened up, tried to arrange her face into a neutral expression and resolved to stay calm and detached.

  Jack didn’t even look in her direction, but disappeared into the lounge where the sounds of gunfire were suddenly paused. Whatever he had to say to Jeremy didn’t last long, certainly not long enough for Hope to finish getting changed. She was struggling to do up her most forgiving pair of jeans, the ones she wore when she was suffering from pre-menstrual bloat, when Jack walked into the bedroom.

  It was hard to stay calm and detached with your muffin top on display and your breasts spilling over the cups of a bra that had been through the wash too many times. Especially when the sight of Jack made her catch her breath. He had the ability to do that to her sometimes, when the sight of him caught Hope unawares and it was as if she was seeing his beauty for the first time all over again.

  Unlike Hope, whose pain and suffering were written all over her face and emphasised by the dark circles under her eyes, the stress spots and the puffy cheeks where at least half of the week’s extra calories were lodged, Jack looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He’d had his hair cut shorter, which accentuated the clean, delicate lines of his face, and was wearing a pair of slim-cut trousers, a navy-blue shirt that Hope hadn’t seen before and his old denim jacket, which Hope had seen before. She’d even sewed up the holes on the elbow, but the overall effect was stylish in an urban, Hoxton-ish kind of way. It felt as if they were a million worlds apart.

  Jack didn’t say anything right away and, flustered, Hope snatched up one of her Breton tops, which she pulled on before she remembered that horizontal stripes were not her friends these days.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, as she sat down to pull on socks. ‘I’ll clear out so you and Jeremy can have a proper chat. It’s just I didn’t know what time you were coming round.’

  ‘You might have told him that if he was going to play on the Xbox to put the games back in their cases once he was finished,’ Jack spat out as he reached up to grab a holdall from the top of the wardrobe, and dislodged a laundry bag full of Hope’s old clothes. ‘Oh, Christ, Hope, can’t you ever throw anything away?’

  ‘I might be able to get into those again one day,’ Hope said, scooping up the size-ten Topshop bodycon dress, which she’d only been able to wear for the halcyon week when she’d got food poisoning very soon after a bout of swine flu.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Jack sneered. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Wow! That’s kind of mean,’ Hope said to Jack’s back as he began packing clothes neatly into his bag. ‘Can we try and be civil to each other?’

  ‘You weren’t civil to me on Friday, were you?’ Jack still sounded bullish, but then he turned round and looked at her. Hope was proud of herself for standing there and looking right back at him calmly. She didn’t even have to ping her elastic band. As she stood there and Jack could see that she was really trying and not about to make any sudden movements with concealed weapons, Hope watched the fight go out of him. ‘Yeah, you’re right, we should try and be grown-ups about this.’

  Hope nodded. ‘So, what’s going on, then? Are you moving in with Susie … permanently?’ She had to swallow round the last word, and it hung in the air like an invisible barrier between them.

  ‘Well, I can hardly stay here with you. That’s not an option, is it?’

  Hope looked up at the ceiling as if she might find inspiration there. ‘If you were unhappy with me, you should have said something ages ago, not started an affair with my best friend because you were too chickenshit to end it any other way.’

  Jack closed his eyes like he’d suddenly been struck. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said tightly. ‘This thing, it’s not about you and me. It’s about me and Susie.’

  Now it was Hope’s turn to close her eyes. ‘But you and her aren’t a for-ever kind of deal. I mean, Jack, we can’t be over. Not like this.’ She sank back down on the bed. ‘We’ve been together for thirteen years and …’

  ‘I know! I fucking know. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think that doesn’t keep me up at night?’ Jack now started stuffing clothes into his bag furiously, without any of his usual fussy precision. ‘Thirteen years, when it really comes down to it, doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a bloody long amount of time.’

  ‘It means everything. And don’t I mean something?’ Despite all her good intentions and the way that Jack’s anguish was tugging at her heart – even though he had no right to act like he was suffering too – Hope could feel the anger bubbling up. ‘God, yo
u haven’t even said you’re sorry!’

  ‘Well, of course I’m sorry!’ Jack said, like it was obvious when it really, really wasn’t. ‘It goes without saying.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. You should have at least, at the very least, said you were sorry. Are you sorry? Are you?’ Hope didn’t know why she was getting so riled up about saying sorry, when Jack’s failure to say sorry was the most minor of all his crimes.

  ‘How can you even ask me that?’ Jack demanded and he sounded as if he was also losing his grip on behaving like a calm, reasonable adult. ‘I might not have said those exact words but …’

  ‘Well, you should have, because they’re fucking important words,’ Hope snapped and she was never going to get over this, because she’d never be able to bury the hurt deep enough, it would always be lurking just below the surface, ready to rise to the top and scream out its pain. ‘You should have said sorry for fucking her and lying, God, you’ve lied so much … You’re disgusting!’

  Jack threw his phone charger across the room. ‘I did a disgusting thing, that doesn’t make me a disgusting person,’ he shouted back. ‘You ever thought that maybe if everything was good between us I wouldn’t have even looked twice at Susie? But things haven’t been good for ages, and that’s just as much your fault as it is mine. Maybe more, because you’re the one with this pathological need to get engaged and you use sex as a bargaining tool and then there’s the way you …’

  Hope sank down on to the bed and clapped her hands over her ears because she couldn’t bear to listen to this. It was all her worst fears realised. She let Jack’s words become white noise, a static, chaotic screeching in her head, and it took her some time to realise that Jeremy was standing in the bedroom doorway, his mouth open, and she shook her head just in time to hear him roar at Jack, ‘Don’t you dare talk to my sister like that!’

  Then he charged at Jack with an angry bellow, while all Hope could do was stare in frozen horror, until Jeremy tripped over the laundry basket she’d left in the middle of the floor and the moment shifted from high-octane drama to slapstick, as Jeremy windmilled his arms and pedalled his legs in an effort to stay upright.