Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (5 page)

‘Great name for a band,’ Hope said brightly. ‘The Post-Capitalist Dystopias. In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw them playing the second stage at Latitude.’

‘You spent the whole weekend trolleyed so I don’t think you saw much of anything,’ Lauren reminded her wryly, as she ran a hand through her close-cropped brown hair – ever since she and Hope had seen
A Bout de Souffle
at the impressionable age of sixteen, Lauren had decided that gamine would be her USP. ‘And you still owe me for my tent, which you wrecked.’

‘How on earth did Hope manage to wreck your tent?’ Otto sounded incredulous.

‘You really don’t want to know,’ Lauren said, grinning as Hope made zipping motions.

‘Oh I do, I really do.’

‘Hopey will kill me!’

Lauren and Otto were back on track and Hope could revert to chilling mode and catch up on the drinking; there were at least nine finished bottles waiting to go in the recycling bin. Her eyes skittered down the length of the table, counting the empty plates as she went, until she reached the other end, where Susie and Jack were sitting opposite each other and generally looking like they were having a good time. And at the foot of the table was Wilson, not talking to anyone and generally looking like a man who was scheduled for major surgery the next day.

Hope knew that she should be a good hostess and try to engage Wilson in conversation, but there was a huge expanse of table between them and engaging Wilson in conversation was usually a painful and ultimately futile experience.

He’d only been seeing Susie for the last six months, and Hope wasn’t even sure that they were that serious about each other, but she knew that Susie could do so much better. Wilson was entirely lacking in any kind of charisma and he always made Hope feel as if she was an empty-headed, superficial, shallow
girl
who had nothing to say that he would want to hear. He wasn’t rude, but Hope always wanted to shiver when he gave her one of those wintry smiles that never reached his steely-grey eyes and, try as she might, she and Wilson had never progressed much further than, ‘It’s my round, what are you having?’ and ‘Yeah, it’s a bit nippy for this time of year, isn’t it?’

Susie was one of her three best friends and Hope wished Wilson was more user-friendly because then they could go out as a foursome a lot more than they did and Jack would have someone to talk boy stuff with while she and Susie
debated
everything from politics to nail varnishes, but it hadn’t worked out like that.

Wilson was a photographer who lived in a converted loft in Kentish Town and used the downstairs space as his studio, where he got paid huge sums of money to shoot advertising campaigns and moody black-and-white shots of the great and good for the Sunday supplements. He drove a vintage Saab and collected vintage cameras and saw the world through a pair of vintage horn-rimmed glasses. He wore his black hair short at the back and swept up into a quiff at the front and was never seen in anything but Dark Wash 501s, snowy-white T-shirts and black V-necks; he and Jack had
nothing
in common, apart from the fact that their respective girlfriends liked spending serious quality time together.

‘But what do you see in Wilson?’ Hope had once asked Susie during one of their regular let’s-bitch-about-our-boyfriends sessions.

Susie had given the matter some serious thought. ‘Well, he does have good cheekbones,’ she said finally. ‘But mostly what I see in him is that he’s got a big dick and he knows what to do with it.’

It didn’t sound like a compelling enough reason to see Wilson on a regular basis, but it did mean that it was Susie’s responsibility to entertain him. Usually she didn’t seem to have any problem engaging with Wilson, though most of their conversation consisted of gently taking the piss out of each other, but this evening she’d all but ignored him in favour of talking to Lauren or Jack, and now she was standing up. ‘I’m going to have a post-prandial fag in the garden,’ she announced. ‘Anyone care to join me?’

There was a regretful murmur of dissent. The table was evenly split between those who didn’t and those who were currently trying to quit.

‘You’re all a bunch of lightweights.’ Susie sighed, shaking her head. ‘After I’ve topped up my nicotine levels, I’ll make a start on the dishes.’
‘You
don’t have to do that,’ Hope said half-heartedly. She made a lacklustre attempt at standing up herself, but Susie tutted and flapped her hands at Hope, then at Lauren and Allison who were also making unenthusiastic noises about slapping on the Marigolds.

‘You all just sit tight,’ Susie insisted firmly. ‘It will only take ten minutes and the kitchen is really too small to have four people in there all arguing about who’s going to dry.’

It was very sweet of Susie and also very uncharacteristic. She’d already tried to avoid doing anything that might jeopardise her manicure. Wilson certainly seemed to think so. ‘Just yell if you run into trouble,’ he advised Susie, as she slowly began to squeeze her way out of the room, which involved Marvin and Allison tucking their chairs as close to the table as they possibly could. ‘And the green stuff in the bottle by the sink is Fairy Liquid; you’ll need some of that.’ Hope thought it might have been the first thing he’d said since he’d sat down.

‘Very funny,’ Susie snapped, as she finally reached the doorway. ‘Didn’t know you’d invited Oscar Wilde, Hope.’

She left the room grumbling about how smokers were a dying breed, as Jack got to his feet and started gathering up the empty bottles. ‘We need more booze,’ he said. ‘Two bottles of white, one of red. Wilson? I think I’ve got some more of that Belgian microbrew.’

‘Just water. I’m driving. San Pellegrino, if you’ve got it, thanks,’ Wilson said.

Hope realised that as Jack and Susie had left the table, Wilson had no one sitting next to him and she’d have to get up and take Jack’s seat so Wilson wouldn’t be a total Billy no-mates. She was just glancing down the table to ascertain that yes, Wilson still looked as if he was suffering from a particularly painful bout of lockjaw, when he lifted his eyes from silent contemplation of his pudding spoon and caught her eye.

After a few seconds Hope wished that he’d stop looking at
her
because his gaze seemed rather resentful, like he begrudged having to spend the evening eating all the lovely things she’d cooked when he could be polishing his collection of horn-rimmed spectacles or alphabetising his scratchy vinyl records. Both her grandmothers and her mother were insistent that a good hostess made her guests feel welcome and included, no matter what, but it had been a really long day and she had a bread-and-butter pudding in the oven, and Hope’s grandmothers and mother would never know that Hope’s way of dealing with a difficult dinner guest was by removing herself from the room.

‘I’m going to check on pudding,’ Hope said loudly, scraping back her chair and standing up. Her voice was perilously high and her face felt as if it was on fire. ‘And I’m going to find out why Jack’s taking so long to bring us more booze.’

With that, Hope squeezed past Allison and fled from the room without even pausing to pick up any of the dirty dishes.

BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP!

The sound of the oven timer pierced the air and Hope jumped back, just as Jack and Susie tore themselves away from each other.

It was strange that when Hope’s world was falling into pieces, tiny, torn pieces that couldn’t be stitched back together, she still had the presence of mind to scurry out into the hall so she could re-enter the kitchen and even bang a saucepan lid down on the worktop as if she was in a tearing hurry to turn off the oven before her pudding burnt.

BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP!

Hope could hear Susie and Jack talking over the sound of the shrieking alarm but it was impossible to know if they were panicking because they’d seen her jump back from the door, or if they were congratulating themselves for fooling her yet again – and God, just how long had this been going on, anyway?

There were a million thoughts racing through Hope’s head, a million fragments that she needed to trace back to their original source but …

BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP! BEEEEEEPPPP!

‘Fuck off!’ she screamed at the oven, scrabbling to turn off the timer as she wrenched open the door and yanked out the Pyrex dish.

‘Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!’ she howled, dropping the dish on
the
floor so she could clutch her burnt hand to her mouth. ‘Fucking fuck!’

Jack was already rushing in through the back door, closely followed by Susie. ‘Hopita! What’s up?’

Hope couldn’t speak. She just stared at him with eyes widened in pain and horror that had nothing to do with pulling a blisteringly hot dish from an oven without the aid of a glove or even a wadded-up tea towel.

‘Shit! Poor baby,’ Jack cooed, trying gently to take hold of Hope’s arm, but she flinched away. ‘You look like you’re going to faint.’

Susie had already pushed past him, so she could take the teetering pile of crockery out of the sink and start running the cold tap. ‘Come here!’ she ordered sharply.

Hope blinked at her. Everything looked strange and frighteningly hyper-real, from the congealed pesto on the worktop to Susie and Jack’s concerned faces and the red and white mess of her own hand. Even the hum from the fluorescent strip light sounded deafening.

‘Is everything all right in there?’ said a voice from the hall and Hope looked over Jack’s shoulder to see five anxious faces staring back at her.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Susie said, grabbing a handful of Hope’s dress so she could drag her over to the sink, seize her wrist in a punishing grip and force her hand under the gushing tap.

Instantly the pain became less inner and much more outer and Hope almost welcomed the stinging agony of icy-cold water sluicing against her damaged flesh. The skin on her palm had blistered and bubbled and the sharp waves of pain were beginning to fade into a nagging throb that Hope focused on, matching her breaths to the rhythm of each pulsation, because if she had to think about anything else, what she’d just seen … what she’d heard … the two of them …

‘Stop touching me,’ she said in a low voice, still firmly
looking
down at her hand, because even glimpsing the peach silk of Susie’s top out of the corner of her eye made Hope forget that she was trying to be all Zen about her pain and instead long to gouge Susie’s heart out with the potato peeler. ‘Get off me.’

‘You have to promise you’ll keep your hand under the tap,’ Susie demanded, but she was already letting go so Allison could take her place and rub Hope‘s back in soothing circles.

‘You OK?’ she asked Hope softly.

Hope shook her head. ‘Alli, everything’s so fucked up,’ she whispered.

‘No, it’s all good. Really. The pudding’s still intact,’ Allison told her cheerfully. ‘You’d think the dish would have shattered.’

‘It’s going to get cold,’ Hope said, trying to get away from the sink so she could salvage something from the evening, even if it was just her brioche bread-and-butter pudding. ‘I need to put it back in the oven.’

‘Where do you think you’re going? I’ll sort it out,’ said Lauren, sifting through the kitchen debris to find the oven gloves, then crouching down to pick up the dish. ‘You need to keep your hand under that tap for ten to twenty minutes, then we need to wrap it in clingfilm.’

‘Yes, thank you, Florence Nightingale,’ Allison snapped, even though her hands were gentle as she continued to rub Hope’s back. ‘You’re not the only one who’s a qualified first-aider.’

‘Are you sure you’re all right, Hopita?’ asked Jack, and Hope swivelled round again to see him standing by the back door, next to Susie, and the depth of his deception struck her anew and the pain rose up again and roared.

‘Do I fucking look like I’m fucking all right?’ she shouted, wrenching away from Allison and the cold water. ‘Do I really look like everything in my world is sunshine and rainbows right now?’

Jack reared back but he didn’t look guilty. He looked concerned, as if Hope’s pain was his pain. ‘C’mon, Hopey, stiff upper lip,’ he said gently. ‘Do you think you need to go to A&E?’

Everyone was looking at her warily, as if they were waiting for another flash of temper, and Hope knew that this wasn’t the time or the place. She turned away and stuck her hand back under the tap so she didn’t have to look at anyone. ‘I’m fine,’ Hope insisted, slightly astounded at how steady her voice was. ‘It’s just the shock that’s making me act like a crazy lady.’