‘You do go on, don’t you?’ Wilson pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Stop whining and do something about it. Send him packing, go on a diet, just do something.’
Hope marched out of the restaurant, without even bothering to see if Wilson was behind her. The truth really hurt, but what was a little more hurt on top of all her current agonies? None of this was her fault and, quite frankly, there had been times over the last six weeks when a bag of Kettle Chips and a box of Ferrero Rocher had been her only friends.
Wilson caught up with her in mere seconds. Hope could sense him looking at her, but she forced her features to remain absolutely boot-faced. It was barely a five-minute walk to the Forum, where they’d have to wait in the cold for at least half an hour for Jeremy to emerge.
In the normal way, Hope would have suggested they go for a quick drink, but she’d rather stand about, freezing her bits off, than sit around another small table with Wilson while he doled out some home truths that she really didn’t want to hear. What Wilson was saying made perfect sense, of course it did, but if Hope changed the locks and donated all of Jack’s belongings to Oxfam and asked Gary from upstairs to value their flat and put it on the market, she wasn’t just moving on, she was making it impossible for her and Jack to work through this. Because he might have said things when he was angry and upset, but things that were said in anger weren’t always true, and Jack might still come back and they could salvage their relationship. They could move on together.
Deep in thought, Hope marched up the street and only came to a halt when it was time to cross over the road that led to the big industrial estate that sprawled out behind the high street. Wilson stopped too, then suddenly took her arm and began to pull her down a road where there was nothing more exciting than factories and lock-ups and a Royal Mail sorting office.
‘You’re going totally the wrong way,’ Hope insisted, trying and failing to tug her arm free. ‘How long have you lived in Kentish Town, anyway? Everyone knows where the Forum is.’
‘Shut up,’ Wilson said, then he yanked her into a dark gully between two squat office blocks and kissed her.
Hope’s initial reaction was to struggle and flap her hands against Wilson’s shoulders.
Her second reaction was to kiss him back, because as soon as she felt his mouth on hers, her brain kicked in with the message that this was a really good kiss and she’d be mad to end it by slapping Wilson’s face in a fit of maidenly outrage. So Hope stopped trying to hit him and let him press his body against her, curved her arms around him and savoured the pleasure of kissing and being kissed. It wasn’t just that she needed to feel as if she was still desirable and any pair of lips would do; it was solely about Wilson’s lips and how he had one hand around her waist and the other cupping the side of her face, his fingers gentle as he kissed her hard.
Then his hand bypassed knitted coat and shirt dress, and when Hope made an approving sound and arched closer, Wilson stroked the slope of her breast, which was spilling over a bra that was at least one cup size too small, and rubbed his thumb against one tightly budded nipple.
Hope gasped, not just because his hand was cold, but because it wasn’t enough. She wanted Wilson’s hands everywhere, wanted to do more than arch against his hard body, wanted that body on top of her, wanted the hard cock she could feel against her hip inside her. But they were on the outskirts of an industrial estate on a freezing-cold night and yanking down her constricting leggings for a quick knee-trembler … it shouldn’t be like that. Not that Hope was sure that it was a good idea but God, she hadn’t wanted someone this badly since …
Before she could go to that dark place where Jack was always centre-stage, Hope lifted her hand so she could stroke the back of Wilson’s neck and gently tugged his plump earlobe between her teeth. He tweaked her nipple in revenge and kissed her with even more ferocity, and just as Hope was re-thinking her position on knee-tremblers, he pulled away.
It wasn’t a regroup. It was ‘time to pick up our respective teens’.
Hope adjusted her clothing so she wasn’t flashing her breasts to the world and adjusted the belt on her coatigan a little more tightly than was strictly necessary.
‘So what was that about?’ she asked, as they started walking back towards the high street.
Wilson didn’t answer at first, then he gave her a swift, wicked grin. ‘Just giving you some options,’ he said.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a week made. It was Saturday morning and Hope was back at Euston station, her mother texting every five minutes to check what time Jeremy’s train left, and what time it would arrive in Rochdale, and did he still have his ticket, and Hope really needed to get him some food for the journey because it was far too expensive to buy anything from the buffet car.
‘I swear I’m this close to giving my phone to the first beggar I see,’ she said to Jeremy, as they sat in Caffè Nero drinking cappuccinos because his train didn’t leave for another half hour and there was still plenty of time to get him a sandwich and crisps.
Jeremy grinned. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have had my hair cut. Now she’s going to be able to tell I’m listening to my iPod rather than to her.’
‘You haven’t?’ Hope looked at him aghast while secretly wishing that iPods had been around when she was Jeremy’s age, and she could have used the same tactics whenever her mother had pencilled in a little chat about the birds and bees and how ‘you’ll get a terrible infection if you let a boy touch you in your special place when he hasn’t washed his hands’.
‘Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t,’ Jeremy stated and they had a quick tussle with their elbows until Hope reached up to ruffle his shorn head.
‘I know it sucked to start, but did you have a good week?’ she asked.
‘It’s been the best week ever,’ Jeremy said gravely. ‘Even the bits that sucked, ’cause if I had hung out with Jack then I wouldn’t have met Wilson and Alfie and three of my favourite bands and well, I wouldn’t have got to hang out with you, like properly spend time with you.’ He looked horrified as Hope’s bottom lip wobbled. ‘I mean, you’re all right when you’re not crying in public and embarrassing me.’
‘I am not crying,’ Hope said indignantly. ‘And you’re all right too. You can come and stay any time. Mi casa es tu casa, and all that.’
‘But it won’t be your casa for much longer, will it?’ Jeremy stated plainly, like it was an irrefutable fact. ‘Like, now that Jack’s moved out, you’ll have to find your own place.’
‘Well, it’s not as simple as that,’ Hope began, then she stopped because actually it was that simple. Jack had moved out. It didn’t get much more simple than that, no matter that the way she felt about it was messy and confused. ‘You can come and stay with me wherever I’m living,’ Hope hastily amended, then looked at Jeremy from under her lashes.
‘What?’ he asked, instantly suspicious. ‘I know that look.’
‘What look?’
‘The look you used to give me when I was little and you were about to force me into a dress and make me sing and dance for your friends,’ Jeremy reminded Hope, who flushed with shame. She really had been a little beast, although Jeremy’s performance of ‘Like a Prayer’ had always been a show-stopper, and it explained why he was probably the only teenage boy in Whitfield to experiment with eyeliner and crimping irons. ‘You want me to do something that I probably don’t want to do.’
‘It’s nothing, except, well, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t mention to Mum or Marge what’s going on with us,’ Hope said imploringly, even squeezing Jeremy’s arm meaningfully so he could be in no doubt that this was a heartfelt request. ‘Not until I’m absolutely sure what’s going on …’
‘No! Hopey, I can’t! She even asked me to look out for signs that you and Jack might finally be getting officially engaged and she’ll interrogate me, you know she will, and I’ll start twitching, and she’ll badger me and won’t let it go until I’ve told her everything.’ Jeremy flailed his hands in agit
ation and managed to knock over his cappuccino.
Hope was not impressed. ‘Why can’t you just lie?’ she demanded. ‘God, what is wrong with you?’
Jeremy remained resolute. ‘I’m a crap liar. It’s probably because you left home before you could give me any pointers.’
‘True,’ Hope conceded, as she jumped down from her stool. ‘Come on, we’d better go. I need to get you a sandwich from M&S so you don’t expire from hunger on the train.’
They gathered up their stuff, Hope sent Jeremy back for his skateboard, which he’d left under their table, and when he turned up in M&S he had a sly smile on his face. Now it was her turn to look suspicious. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said innocently as he selected a BLT sarnie. ‘It’s just, well, if you throw in a large bag of chilli-flavoured crisps and a tub of chocolate mini-rolls, I swear your secret will be safe with me.’
‘You utter little shit!’ Hope exclaimed. ‘After all I’ve done for you.’
Jeremy looked completely unrepentant. ‘What can I say? I learned from the best.’
With Jeremy on the Rochdale train, Jack still MIA, and Lauren cancelling their plans to go out that evening because she was going on a date with the bloke she’d been eyeing up on the bus into work for months, Hope had no choice but to start putting her house in order.
Well, she did have a choice but it involved sacking out on the sofa with a packet of chocolate digestives and all the episodes of Glee that had mounted up on the SKY box, but what would that really accomplish? Nothing but a chocolate hangover.
Wilson had been right last night. She couldn’t just drift along, waiting for Jack to make up his mind. It was painfully obvious that Jack’s future plans didn’t include Hope. So the first thing she did was to empty out the kitchen cupboards and the fridge and the secret hidey place at the back of her knicker drawer where she stashed her emergency chocolate bars. Hope held back one bag of Lindt truffle balls just in case she relapsed, but stuffed the rest in two carrier bags and took them to her neighbours.
‘Haven’t seen Jack around much lately,’ Alice from next door said, her eyes gleaming inquisitively. ‘Away on a work trip, is he?’
‘He’s moved out,’ Hope said baldly, because part of admitting it to herself was admitting it to other people. ‘You must have heard the rows.’
Alice nodded sympathetically. She and her husband, Robert, were always going at it in a spectacular fashion, too. Hope could set her watch by the argument they had at ten to six every Sunday about whose turn it was to persuade their daughters that they needed to have an early night.
‘Anyway, I thought Lottie and Nancy might be able to munch their way through this lot,’ Hope continued, handing over her calorific contraband and giving a little start as Alice took the bags and gave Hope’s hand a quick squeeze at the same time.
‘I’m here if you ever want to talk,’ she said. ‘In that brief window of time on a Saturday morning when the girls are at ballet and Robert’s kicking a ball around with his mates and pretending that he’s David Beckham.’ She sniffed. ‘I admire you, you know, having the guts to get out before you’re in too deep.’
‘Well, it’s not quite like that.’ Hope started edging towards the door. She was touched by Alice’s concern, but her own relationship woes were about all she could handle, without having to listen to anyone else’s. ‘But, anyway, yes, we should totally get together for a coffee.’
‘The girls are going to be upset if you move out,’ Alice called after Hope as she hurried down the path. ‘They love Jack so much!’
The obvious thing to do after ridding the flat of junk food was head to the gym, even though Hope had great difficulty in squeezing herself into a racer-back sports bra and finding a pair of tracksuit bottoms that didn’t make her arse look like two wobbly blancmanges encased in black lycra. She jogged to the gym and once there, she forced herself to pick all the machines that were placed in front of mirrors for added motivation. Looking at her red sweaty face and seeing her flesh jiggling about was a salient lesson that just because she’d done some exercise, it didn’t mean that she had free rein to order a Chinese takeaway when she got home.
After a quick shower and a mushroom omelette, because three elderly mushrooms appeared to be the only vegetables in the fridge, Hope steeled herself for the next part of her plan.
It was hard. Simply walking into their bedroom felt as if she was crossing a minefield. Hope’s courage almost deserted her, because it was all very well making plans, but the next item on the agenda was to dismantle their life together on her own because Jack wasn’t there. And why wasn’t he there? Because he was already busy making a new life for himself.
Hope sat down on the bed, a roll of heavy-duty black bin bags in her lap, and thought about the only feasible option that she had. It was Wilson. Wilson kissing her and touching her and making her want him so badly that even now, almost twenty-four hours later, she could still feel the ghost echo of that need that had clawed up inside her and made her press and rub and writhe against him.
But was that an option or was it just lust? Was it wanting to be wanted by somebody, by anybody, to make her feel better because Jack didn’t want her any more? Hope sat there and thought about it – thought about going out with Wilson or being in a relationship with him – but all she could imagine was a couple of hours of fairly laboured conversation before they had sex. Sex with Wilson and his big dick that had got rave reviews from Susie. Hope was sure that if she ever found herself having sex with Wilson, then Susie would be all that she would think about.
Did Susie think about Hope when she was fucking Jack, or had she got past that now to regard Jack as her own personal property, rather than something she’d borrowed without asking first? Hope sighed because there was no point in torturing herself with these hypothetical questions. It was easier to just have a plan and stick to it, she thought, as she forced herself to get off the bed and move purposefully towards the chest of drawers.
She started off with Jack’s socks and underwear. It was hard to get emotional about packing away fifteen pairs of black socks and countless grey and black boxer shorts. The T-shirts were much harder. There was the Pantone T-shirt she’d bought him in a pop-up Gap store when they’d gone to New York for the weekend to celebrate Jack’s twenty-fifth birthday. It was Pantone shade 14-0848, which was exactly the same shade of blue as Jack’s eyes. And the black Beatles T-shirt with the apple logo that Jack had been wearing on the day they moved in to the flat, and stuffed right at the back of the drawer was the greying, faded, holey Coldplay T-shirt that she’d taken off Jack and slept in the night they’d had sex for the first time in the little B&B in Bloomsbury, even though Jack now pretended that he’d never liked Coldplay.
They weren’t clothes, they were memories and Hope was folding each one and packing it away, stopping occasionally to gulp away tears. She had an almost-cry when she carefully packed away the really expensive Marc Jacobs suit he’d bought (with a borrowed discount card from the Skirt fashion department) last summer because they’d had four weddings, one christening, his grandparents’ fiftieth-anniversary party and a ball to go to. Jack had looked so sleek and handsome every time he wore it, Hope remembered sadly as she reverently placed it between sheets of crêpe paper, which were left over from last year’s Blue Class art project.
Once the clothes were in bin bags, the rest was relatively easy. Hope was determined not to be one of those clingy ex-girlfriends who caused a scene about who owned what, and technically they’d bought some of the CDs and DVDs together or from their joint account, but whatever. Jack could have the CDs, they’d all been ripped to iTunes anyway, and he could have a lot of the DVDs as well. In fact, Hope could finally admit to herself that she didn’t find Monty Python the least bit funny, and she didn’t care if she never saw any of the Star Wars films ever again.
It was past one o’clock when Hope finished. She dragged all the bags into the hall and now the bedroom looked bare and un
finished – a bit like her current emotional state. The clocks were going back that night so she could have stayed up a while longer to clear the bathroom of Jack’s vast array of expensive grooming products, but instead she went to bed and slept better than she had done in weeks.
Hope did have a little cry when she woke up the next morning and remembered why the bedroom was looking a lot less like a jumble sale, with all her clothes neatly tidied away thanks to the extra drawer space.
There was no point in moping around the flat, so she set out for the local farmers’ market to buy organic, home-grown vegetables and absolutely no organic, home-grown cakes. Hope always felt as if winter officially started once the clocks had gone back, and winter meant putting the flannel sheets on the bed and making soup. There’d been a recipe for pumpkin soup in last week’s Observer, and her body was yearning for some vegetable nourishment after weeks of stuffing down sugar, grease and carbohydrates.
The soup was simmering on the hob when Hope sat down at the kitchen counter with a hardback A4 notebook that she’d bought on the way back from the market. It was the notebook that would contain ‘The Plans For The Rest Of My Life’, or at least for the next six months.
If she wrote them down, then the facts were indisputable.
1. Jack doesn’t love me any more.
2. Jack is not my lover or my boyfriend, or my unofficial fiancé.
3. Jack is my ex-boyfriend.
4. Jack is shagging Susie.
5. Jack is shacking up with Susie.
6. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own.