Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (32 page)

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 unfinished – 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.

Hope chewed ruminatively on the end of her pen and wondered if she should ask Gary from upstairs for some advice, but she wasn’t up to him kicking her skirting boards again, and wanting to know what had happened between her and Jack. Besides, he was leery enough without knowing that Hope would soon be on the market along with ‘a bijou garden flat, beautifully maintained by its current occupiers. Perfect first-time buy.’

Hope didn’t even want to know the sheer extent of the home improvements that needed to be done, but like so many other things in her life, they couldn’t be avoided. And it was only making a list – it wasn’t as if she needed to immediately drive to B&Q to buy grouting and nails and twenty pots of very cheap white paint.

She started with the bathroom because it was the smallest room in the house and the one that needed the least amount of work. They’d had the whole room redone soon after they’d moved in, when it became evident that there was some major leakage going on behind the washbasin. From there, Hope did an inventory in the bedroom, lounge and hall, and then returned to the kitchen to catalogue that room’s many faults, from dodgy electrics to torn lino to the broken carousel in the corner cupboard.

It took five pages to list all the wrongs that needed to be made right, but some of them were just little things that anyone could do. Anyone who wasn’t Hope, who didn’t even know how to put music on her iPod because Jack had always done it for her, and her extreme vertigo meant that anything involving stepladders was also out. Still, she reasoned, as she got up to give the soup a poke and a stir, she could wield a mean paintbrush and possibly she might be able to hammer in some nails under close supervision.

The soup tasted heavenly after Hope added a little more nutmeg, and she was just cutting a slice of the sourdough bread she’d also bought at the farmers’ market when the front door opened and Jack walked in.

Everything in Hope’s body, from sphincter to fists to throat, clenched. Jack first stood where he was and looked around like he wasn’t sure of his bearings. It was the oddest thing, but it seemed to Hope that he didn’t belong in their flat any more, and he certainly didn’t belong in their kitchen, which was where he was currently headed.

Last night in her great packing purge she’d wrapped all of Jack’s Alessi kitchen gadgets and stark-white china in
newspaper,
then placed them in a cardboard box, which was now perched on a stool. ‘“Jack’s kitchen stuff”’, he read out loud, then gestured at the pile of black bin bags in the hall. ‘Can see you’ve been busy, then.’

He sounded belligerent, like he was still sore about the iPhone and a bunch of other things he didn’t have any right to be sore about, because he was the one who was breaking up their once-happy home.

Hope put down the bread knife, because after the iPhone incident she didn’t want Jack to think she was still harbouring violent thoughts, and folded her arms. ‘I’m so sick of fighting with you,’ she said, cocking her head to look at him, trying to strip away the thunderous expression and the hip new clothes. Somewhere underneath that hostile exterior was the ghost of the boy she used to know. ‘We’re, both of us, better than that.’

Jack nodded. ‘I just came to get more of my stuff,’ he said in a less confrontational way. ‘Didn’t think it would be all packed up and waiting for me.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be a declaration of war,’ Hope explained, picking up the bread knife again so she could saw away at the loaf, though her appetite had deserted her. ‘I had to do
something
to make myself accept the situation, something that wasn’t eating ice-cream and moping.’

He had the grace to squirm a little. ‘So, how have you been?’ he asked. ‘Were things OK with Jeremy? I felt bad about ducking out on him like that, but he was so aggro and it didn’t seem like he wanted to spend quality time with me.’ Jack scratched his chin. ‘Or any other sort of time, come to that.’

‘Everything was fine. He ended up having a really great week.’ Hope didn’t want Jack to get off that easily, because making Jeremy suffer for Jack’s sins might have been his most nefarious deed to date, but she didn’t have the emotional reserves for another argument. Not when she was trying so hard to make plans and move forward.
‘And
I’ve been fine too. Or I’m getting there, at least.’

Hope didn’t know what to say next. She couldn’t ask Jack where he’d been, or how he’d been, because he’d been with Susie and Susie made him much happier than she could, and it was hard to understand how you could know someone all your life, think that you knew everything about them, then one Sunday they’d be standing in the kitchen of the flat that you both owned and seem like a total stranger.

‘I’ll sort Jerry out a goodie bag from work,’ Jack said, as he frowned at the mound of pumpkin debris still heaped on the chopping board, but if he didn’t live here any more then he didn’t have the right to nag her about tidying up as she cooked. ‘What are you making?’

Hope gestured at the big pan on the stove. ‘Pumpkin soup. You can have a bowl, if you like,’ she offered magnanimously. ‘I added a teensy bit of cumin and nutmeg to give it a bit of welly.’

Jack was already getting down a bowl. ‘You’re so predictable, Hopey,’ he said with his back to her, as he rooted through the cutlery drawer, which had degenerated into chaos in his absence, to find a spoon. ‘You always make soup the day that the clocks go back. I bet you even put the flannel sheets on the bed.’

‘Well, it’s winter now, and why do you have to start picking on me within five minutes of walking through the door?’ Hope saw that she was brandishing the bread knife in what could be misconstrued as a threatening manner, and put it down again. ‘I told you, I don’t want to fight, so you can either stay and have a bowl of soup or you can, well, like, leave.’ She said it calmly and reasonably without shouting or whining and it was impossible to know which one of them was more shocked.

It was probably Jack, because he narrowed his eyes as if he suspected that Hope had devised some new subtle way to exact revenge on him.

‘Are you going to have some soup? It’s not like I’ve spat in it or anything,’ Hope said dryly.

Jack slowly nodded. ‘It smells good,’ he conceded, with a tiny shrug. ‘Well, I guess I could stay for a spot of lunch, if you don’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Hope said, and she wondered why this careful, cautious politeness was more painful than when they were screaming at each other. She carefully ladled out a bowl of soup and even grated some fresh nutmeg to sit prettily on the surface. ‘Help yourself to bread.’

It felt just like how they used to be: Jack happily eating something she’d cooked and making appreciative noises while he did so. Even looking up and smiling at Hope as she half-heartedly began to clear up the mess she’d made. She was just wiping down the worktop with a damp piece of kitchen roll and ignoring Jack, who was telling her to use the sponge cloths they’d bought expressly for that purpose, when her phone rang.

Hope glanced at the wall clock and her heart sank before she’d even looked at the name that was flashing up on her phone.

It was quarter past two. It was her mother, who wasn’t meant to be calling for another fifteen minutes.

Hope pulled a face as she picked up her phone. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said brightly. ‘Did you have a nice week away? What was the weather like?’

‘Rained every day until the morning we left,’ came the glum reply. ‘Your father and Roger couldn’t play golf so they kept getting under our feet.’

‘Oh dear,’ Hope cooed, glancing over at Jack, who was leafing through her DIY of Doom lists and looking completely pole-axed at the sheer amount of work that had to be done before they could go their separate ways. He looked as if he might start to cry, which did Hope’s already bruised ego the world of good. ‘So did Jerry get back OK?’

He had, though her mother had a very dim view of his
new
haircut and the fact that her express approval hadn’t been obtained before Hope had taken him to the barber’s.

‘Mum,’ Hope groaned. ‘His hair looks much better now there’s much less of it. Please don’t give him a hard time. We had a lovely week together.’

She grimaced at Jack and expected him to grimace back at her, because it was what they did during these Sunday-afternoon calls, but he was still reading her list with a face like boiled suet.

‘Well, the week wasn’t that lovely, was it?’ her mother said acidly and before Hope’s stomach could begin to churn, she got down to business. ‘He told me about you and Jack. Really, Hope, what have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything!’ she insisted weakly, and she should have prepared better for this, because it was inevitable. Hope was amazed that Jeremy had managed to hold out for a whole twenty-four hours.

‘Because you do nag him a lot. Marge and I remarked on it last time we saw you both, and you do have that temper.’

‘So, it must be my fault,’ Hope hissed down the phone. ‘Just like I suppose it was my fault that Jack decided to shag my best friend behind my back for months. Yeah, I can see that
that
was all my fault!’

Her mother was beyond words; all she could do was gasp in shock as Hope steeled herself to shoot Jack a defiant look, because why the hell should she have to keep his sordid little secret for him? But the defiance slipped away because when she actually looked at Jack, he was sitting there
crying
. His face was all crumpled up and red, and tears were streaming down his cheeks and when he saw her looking he buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.