Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (43 page)

It was easier when Hope was at work because she didn’t have time to think about Jack, or worry about where their relationship was going, or if he was meeting Susie in his lunch break for a quickie. There was no time to think about anything but making sure Blue Class were ever so slightly ahead of the National Curriculum, as Dorothy had got a tip-off that the Council was planning a spot-inspection. It was all Hope could do to get her charges through her intensive lesson plans with the incentive of extended Golden Time on a Friday afternoon. She’d also managed to crowbar in another trip to Camley Street Natural Park on a day when it had rained solidly, and she now had Stuart’s mother threatening to sue Hope, the school and the Board of Governors because his chesty cough had returned, and there had been five reported cases of TB in Islington in the last week, according to the local paper.

When she wasn’t drumming knowledge into over-taxed little brains, Hope doled out stickers, filled in reports, and spent every break and at least an hour after school working
on
the Winter Pageant. She had started rehearsing the junior school two afternoons a week, sweet-talked a local club-owner into lending her his PA system, and persuaded the local traders’ association into providing raffle prizes. She’d even found a rabbi to come in and explain the Chanukah story to Yellow Class. Then she’d had to field a reporter from the local paper who’d heard about her ambitious plan for a human menorah and thought she was setting nine seven-year-olds on fire. The journalist was very disappointed when Hope icily explained that they’d be wearing woolly hats with red, yellow and orange streamers sewn to them as a substitute for living flame.

Hope had imagined that after every stress-filled day, she’d dread coming home to work on her intimacy skills with Jack, but, much to her surprise, they’d stuck to their agreement to run in the evenings. Though he was barely able to leave work before eight, as soon as he got home, Jack and Hope would get into their running gear, complete with reflective tabards that she’d found tucked away in a staffroom cupboard, and would pound the cold, wet pavements of Holloway together.

The actual running, or jogging, wasn’t much fun but at least the cold meant that Hope didn’t sweat like a woolly mammoth in a sauna, and instead of checking the pedometer app on her iPhone to see how long she’d been running and, more importantly, how many calories she’d burnt, they talked. Jack had read somewhere that in order to run effectively, you shouldn’t be so out of breath that you couldn’t talk. Whenever Hope started panting heavily and was on the verge of calling it quits and limping home, he’d say, ‘OK, you have to tell me the three things that happened at work today that pissed you off the most.’

Despite the lack of oxygen getting through to her lungs, it was a request that Hope could never ignore. Then she’d ask Jack the same question, and by the end of the third week of their rapprochement, they were managing an hour’s run
every
other night as they complained and whined and generally bellyached about their jobs, their colleagues and the big mistake they’d made in choosing their respective careers.

Then, when they got home, they very democratically took it in turns to have the first shower and not use up all the hot water. They also took turns to sleep on the sofa, though Hope suspected that if they were sharing a bed sex would be the very last thing that either of them felt like, not when she stank of Deep Heat spray and Jack insisted on having a round of toast and Marmite just before he turned out the light.

Maybe the reconciliation wouldn’t be going so well if their jobs were humming along and they weren’t both so stressed. Still, Hope comforted herself with the knowledge that not so long ago, they’d have taken the stress out on each other, but at least now they were communicating and she could almost get back into her jeans again.

The only thing that was coming between them was Jack’s iPhone. It started ringing in the morning, before he’d even got up, but Hope had learned her lesson and didn’t go near it. Or she went near enough that she could see ‘Blocked Number’ flash up on the screen. The phantom caller would ring three times, then hang up. Ring three times and hang up, until Jack grunted his permission for Hope to turn the phone off.

Jack claimed that it was ‘just someone playing silly buggers’, but obviously it was Susie. Hope hadn’t given much thought to how Jack had ended things with Susie, but it appeared she’d been cut off in a fairly brutal fashion. The end justified the means, as far as Hope was concerned, but one Thursday evening, when they’d come back from their run and it was her turn to grab the first shower, she was forced to reconsider her position.

The bathroom was the one room in the flat that always got toasty-warm and stayed free of arctic draughts. In fact,
it
became so steamy that condensation ran down the walls and they had to keep one of the window flaps open while they were having a shower. Then it was a tricky job to stand in the bath just near enough to still be able to hold the shower hose without yanking it off the bath taps, but far enough not be assaulted by icy blasts of air from the open window. That night, just as Hope turned off the taps and dived for a towel, she heard Jack on the phone.

He was standing outside the kitchen door, where she’d seen him and Susie kissing, and talking to someone who could only be Susie.

‘Look, I told you, I need some time to think,’ he was saying fiercely and quietly, so Hope had to climb back into the tub and press her face right up against the frosted-glass window in order to hear better. The window was freezing cold and she was worried that her skin might stick to it, but well, it would serve her right for eavesdropping. ‘You
have
to stop this.’

Hope watched her breath puff out in little clouds until Jack gave a bitten-off groan of frustration. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. I can’t see you right now, you have to respect that.’

Silence.

Hope hadn’t known goose pimples could be so painful, and she was on the verge of giving up and scuttling for the warmth of her fleecy pyjamas, when Jack suddenly snapped, ‘For fuck’s sake, Suze, I owe her that much.’

Hope didn’t want to hear any more. She yanked herself away from the open window so quickly that she almost slid over. It was one thing to believe that Susie was her arch-nemesis who occupied the number-one place on her shit-list of people who’d done her wrong and would get their comeuppance one day, it was quite another to have a ringside seat to the utter humiliation of someone who used to be your best friend. Hope had also been the victim of one of Jack’s sudden changes of heart, and it hurt like a sucking
chest
wound, just like it hurt that Jack seemed to think that counselling was a penance that he had to endure, rather than the cement that would help them rebuild their foundations.

She pulled her pyjamas on then opened the bathroom door. One glance at the knowing yet defiant look on Jack’s face meant Hope didn’t have to confess that she’d been ear-wigging.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Jack said sharply as he brushed past her.

‘But we have to!’

‘We can talk about it tomorrow with Angela there,’ Jack said, shutting the bathroom door in Hope’s face.

They didn’t talk about the phone calls in their therapy session the next evening, because Angela insisted that she wanted them to go on a trip down memory lane, to the very first halcyon days of their relationship.

‘How you
start
a relationship is very often an indication of how you behave in a relationship,’ she told them. ‘It can even be a useful therapy tool in diagnosing and fixing the problems in your relationship.’ She sat back and steepled her fingers, so she could peer anxiously over the top of them. ‘So, how did you two start dating? Jack, you go first.’

Hope didn’t know why he was frowning when the question was a no-brainer. Chaste snog after Youth Club disco, first date the following Saturday at …

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘I mean, we’d lived next door to each other all our lives in a small village. There were only about ten teenagers in the place, so we all knocked about together and everyone just expected me and Hopey to get together, and so we just did. It wasn’t like I sent her a bunch of red roses and asked her to go steady, it was a gradual process, and—’

‘What are you—’

‘Hope, we’ve talked about impulse control,’ Angela cut in
and
reminded her sharply. ‘We have a rule that we don’t interrupt when the other person is talking, don’t we?’

Having been chastised, Hope sank back down. It was the cardinal rule that she was always drilling into Blue Class, except
her
sharp voice could put the fear of God into them.

Even Jack had the nerve to shoot Hope a resentful look, as he picked up his thread. ‘As I was saying, it wasn’t like I asked her out and we started dating. We’d sometimes pair up at parties and get off with each other, and we just ended up dating.’

‘Hope?’ Angela queried.

‘My God, have you got rocks in your head?’ Hope demanded, which was a contravention of another of Angela’s rules, to respect what the other person said. ‘That’s not at all how we started dating. You asked if you could kiss me on the way home from Youth Club on the thirtieth of November, 1998 at approximately ten to ten and then you asked me to go to the cinema with you. Just me. No one else.’

‘But that’s—’

‘Don’t interrupt!’ Hope barked at him. ‘And we went to see the sequel to
Babe
on the fifth of December, and you paid extra for the superior-comfort seats, and because it was a film about a talking bloody pig and neither of us had any interest in watching it, we started snogging as soon as it began.’ Hope pushed back a stray lock of hair with an angry hand. ‘The fifth of December, Jack! Making tomorrow our thirteenth anniversary.’

‘To tell you the truth, I thought you picked that date at random because you didn’t know when we started dating either,’ Jack muttered apologetically as Hope turned to Angela, who visibly shrank back in her chair. ‘Anyway, I thought we’d already had our anniversary. You’re
always
going on about how we’ve been together for thirteen years.’

Hope rolled her eyes. ‘I was rounding up. That’s how it
works.
Everyone knows that.’ She sighed. ‘Well, if any of that is indicative of the state of our relationship, then I’d say our relationship is FUBAR, wouldn’t you?’

‘Um, what’s “FUBAR”?’

‘Fucked up beyond all recognition,’ Hope replied. She rubbed the tips of her fingers over her temples. ‘Jesus, Jack, that was one of the most important moments in my entire life and you can’t even remember it!’

‘I do remember going to see
Babe: Pig in the bloody City
,’ Jack said sulkily. ‘Look, so I don’t have total recall of every single last hour of our relationship, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I love you. I’ve loved you for so long that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you.’

Angela beamed at them both, but mostly at Jack. Hope suspected that she much preferred Jack, who never had to be told off for poor impulse control, which was ironic, considering that it was his poor impulse control that had led them here in the first place. ‘Well, you’ve both done some very good work in this session. I think that’s all we’ve got time for.’

Hope could have sworn that their sessions were getting shorter as the weeks went by. They hadn’t even had a chance to discuss Susie’s phone-bombing and how Jack was totally not dealing with it. ‘I think that’s only been forty-five minutes, actually, Angela,’ she insisted.

‘Oh God, just stop it,’ Jack hissed at her, as Angela squirmed in exactly the same way as Sorcha did when she needed a wee and was too scared to put her hand up.

‘No, no, I think that’s all for today,’ Angela squeaked, brandishing her pad as if she was trying to ward off evil spirits, or deflect all the negative energy that Hope was sending her way. ‘Your homework for this week. I’d like both of you to think of your five big relationship milestones.’

Jack practically dragged Hope up from the sofa, though she had been prepared to stay there and argue that they had
at
least another five minutes of the session to go. Ninety quid for forty-five minutes. Angela had to be minted.

‘You’re unbelievable,’ Hope exploded as Jack was still pushing her out of the front door. ‘You act like life is something that happens to you, rather than you being an active participant in it.’

‘No, I don’t!’

‘And you knew I wanted to talk about Susie and the phone calls. You can’t just keep avoiding stuff.’

‘I hate it when you’re like this. You get all angry and you won’t let things go and your face stays red for hours.’

‘You need to sort things out properly with Susie,’ Hope said, even though she couldn’t believe she was actually saying it. ‘I’m not saying that I want you to choose between us yet, not when we still have another two weeks of counselling, but you need to let her know where she stands. Firmly but fairly.’

‘I’ve tried, I really have, but she won’t give me any space.’ They were just about to turn the corner into the street that led up to the Finchley Road when Jack came to a halt and sank down on the kerb. ‘I can’t take this. I feel like everyone keeps trying to pull me in a different direction.’

‘Don’t sit down on the ground. It’s cold and you’ll get haemorrhoids,’ Hope said worriedly, placing her hand on Jack’s bowed head. He looked so lost, and all of a sudden, she wasn’t sure that she knew how to find him. ‘Come on, we’re in therapy. Of course it’s going to bring up things that are painful but it’s all part of the healing process, right?’