Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (15 page)

‘I’m coming in,’ they both said in unison, and to Hope’s eternal shame, both she and Susie tried to elbow each other out of the way as they fought to get into the studio first.

In the same circumstances, Hope would have put two of her six-year-old pupils in a time-out and she couldn’t really blame Georgie for employing the same tactics. She frogmarched them both into the studio, made them place their mats in opposite corners and instructed them to do nothing more than sit cross-legged and focus on their breathing.

It was only after ten minutes that they were both allowed to move on to sun salutes. Hope soon realised that she couldn’t even get as far as the plank pose, not when she wanted to leap up from her mat and bash Susie over the head with a bar bell, especially as the other girl was already doing a perfect upward dog.

As soon as they’d finished their cooling-down stretches, Susie was at Hope’s side. ‘Look, I’ve been an out-and-out bitch and what I did was beyond wrong,’ she said quickly while Hope was still opening and shutting her mouth and unable to make anything come out of it but huffs and puffs of sheer indignation. ‘Can’t you find a way to forgive me so we can go back to being friends again? Please.’

‘How? How are we meant to be friends?’ Hope asked incredulously. ‘Do you really think that we can go back to how we were before? Like, we’ll just go down All Bar One and have a laugh and maybe compare notes on Jack’s technique? Do you really think we can do that?’

Susie shook her head impatiently so her glossy dark hair fanned out around her. ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. I
promise
I won’t see him ever again … I mean, I haven’t … Not since …’

Whether she had or she hadn’t suddenly didn’t seem to matter that much, because Hope was sick of the whole subject. Fed up with feeling sad or angry or guilty, and more usually a gut-churning combination of all three. ‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said. ‘Everything’s spoiled now. Look, you can have yoga.’

‘I don’t care about yoga,’ Susie insisted, and if Hope didn’t know Susie better, she’d have sworn she was on the verge of tears. ‘I care about us. Please, Hope, you know I find it hard to make friends with other women.’

No wonder, if you try to steal their boyfriends
, Hope thought to herself. ‘You can have yoga,’ she repeated, turning away as a new class entered the studio. ‘You’d probably better go now, I’m staying for step aerobics.’

‘You hate step aerobics,’ Susie scoffed, but Hope ignored her as she hurried to the corner of the studio to claim a step and drag it to a part of the room where she was guaranteed to get regular cold blasts from the air-conditioning unit.

‘Hopey … we can’t let it end like this.’

Hope stood behind her step and began marching on the spot, staring fixedly at herself in the mirror so she could see Susie shoot her one last exasperated look and her own thighs wobbling. Maybe if her thighs didn’t wobble and she lost the extra pounds, then Jack would never so much as look at another girl again – and maybe life wasn’t that simple. Because as Susie shut the studio door behind her and the aerobics instructor started up some truly awful thumping dance music, Hope felt like a little piece of her heart was gone for ever. She loved her friends, but Jack had always had the lion’s share of her love, demanded the greater part of her time and affection, and when friends had drifted away as some friends did, it hadn’t mattered so much and anyway, they were still there on Facebook posting
status
updates about how hungover they were and showing off their holiday snaps.

But breaking up with Susie was the hardest thing Hope had ever done. The first time she’d ever had to tell someone that there was no room in her life or her heart for them any more. And it was Susie … Not someone from school or university or work, but a friend she’d chosen solely for herself, someone who got her like hardly anyone else did, except Jack.

Hope scowled at her reflection and began to pump her arms as she jumped on her step, then jumped back down again. What if it wasn’t that Jack and Susie understood her better than anyone else? What if Hope wasn’t even in the equation and it was Jack and Susie that got each other? What if it hadn’t been just a kiss? What if there really had been something going on between them? What if it was still going on?

These were horrible thoughts to have, especially when accompanied by a soundtrack that segued from ‘Bad Romance’ to ‘Toxic’. Hope pumped her arms even harder and made sure she touched her elbow to her knee when they did repeaters, much to the delight of the instructor.

The pain wasn’t even a little bit gone after an hour so Hope stayed for kickboxing and when she finally got home just after eight, after walking all the way, she still hurt and could barely feel her legs. The bits of her legs she could still feel ached beyond the telling of it.

Jack was waiting for her at the door with a cross expression on his face. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked querulously. ‘I thought you were making dinner.’

Hope threw her gym bag at his feet by way of reply. ‘I do have a life of my own outside school hours, you know. A life that doesn’t revolve around having a two-course meal ready for you when you get home. Jesus!’

‘But you said you were cooking dinner,’ Jack reminded her carefully, not sure how to react to a Hope who was
snapping
and snarling and completely contravening the rules of their non-aggression pact. ‘You actually mentioned the words “beef”, “stir” and “fry”.’

She had. Jack was right, which was infuriating and way off-message when there were more important things to discuss like, ‘I saw Susie earlier,’ which Hope flung over her shoulder at Jack as she stomped through to the bedroom so she could peel off her sweat-soaked gym clothes. ‘Mutual throwing yourself at each other?
Mutual?
’

‘What do you mean, you saw Susie earlier?’ Jack asked in a quiet voice. ‘I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t do that.’

‘It was far more important that
you
didn’t see her so you wouldn’t be tempted to jump her,’ Hope said venomously, as she yanked off her yoga pants and hurled them into the corner. ‘Apparently you didn’t need a whole lot of persuading to stick your tongue down her throat.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Jack protested, but he wasn’t shouting and Hope would have preferred shouting and maybe even a bit of door-slamming or some crockery-breakage. Something impassioned to reassure her that Susie had been lying and Jack was furious at her lies and plotting to render them asunder.

‘Then how was it?’ Hope demanded. ‘When did it start? How did it start? Who made the first move? Did you stop even for one second to think about me, or our guests who were only five feet away? Did you? DID YOU?’

‘Will you give it a rest?’ Hope had wanted Jack to shout, but now she had him roaring so loudly that Gary from upstairs banged on his floor. ‘You have no right to ask me this stuff!’

‘I have every right!’

‘No, we got this all sorted out two weeks ago so why the hell are you bringing it up now?’

They were in each other’s faces, noses almost touching, but not in a sweet Eskimo kiss. In fact, Hope felt like
snapping
her teeth together and biting the end of Jack’s nose off, Ozzy Osbourne-style. ‘But Susie said …’

‘“Susie said”, “Susie said” …’ Jack mocked back. ‘Susie talks utter shite, and we both agreed that we weren’t going to see her ever again.’

‘It wasn’t like I planned it. She was there at the gym, and now she’s taken my yoga class away from me too,’ Hope gabbled. She hated when Jack did this: took her attack and turned it into a counter-attack and tied her up in conversational knots at the same time. ‘What am I meant to do? Stop going to the gym altogether?’

‘Well, it would save us fifty quid a month when you only go to yoga about twice a month,’ Jack sneered, taking a step back and running a dismissive eye down Hope’s body, which was clad only in a sports bra and a pair of shiny black medium-control knickers from Primark. ‘I don’t know why you even bother.’

‘Oh my God! You think I’m fat!’ Hope wasn’t sure which was worse: Jack and Susie’s mutual throwing themselves at each other, or Jack thinking she was a lardarse. They were on a pretty level pegging.

‘Whoa! I never said that,’ Jack insisted, taking a couple of steps back to get out of range of the laser beams of death that Hope was shooting from her eye sockets. ‘But you said that you wouldn’t see her any more.’

As Hope remembered it, the main point of their verbal contract had been that
Jack
would never see, speak or have any other contact with Susie ever again, with an additional clause that Wilson would also join the very short list of people that Hope and Jack had solemnly vowed to cut from their lives. Just thinking of how she’d humiliated herself in front of Wilson and of all the other stand-out features of that awful night made Hope dig her heels in, both metaphorically and literally, as she ground her feet into the scratchy sisal flooring. ‘At least we both know that if I bump into Susie it’s not going to lead to both of us swapping spit
within
ten seconds,’ she shrieked, knowing that her face was as red as her hair and she had a stress rash mottling her chest. At that moment, she couldn’t blame Jack for falling for Susie’s obvious charms when her own were so severely lacking. ‘If I’m such a crap girlfriend then why don’t you just break up with me?’

It was a good question that demanded an honest answer and Jack looked at Hope meditatively, as if he could see the cracked heart that beat erratically under her flabby bits and sturdy underwear. Hope was dreading the words that were about to come out of his mouth but at least, finally, it would be the truth.

Her fists clenched at her sides, Hope waited and waited. Jack continued standing there, and then he turned and walked out of the room.

‘I do not need this shit,’ was all he said before she heard the front door slam shut.

SNAPPING AND SNIPING
at each other was a very stressful way to get through the next week, but it felt a lot more natural to Hope than when they both tried to be on their best behaviour.

For most of that Friday night, Hope had planned to greet Jack with a thin-lipped, bitter ‘Nice of you to grace me with your presence,’ like she hadn’t cared where he’d been, but as it got later and later and then earlier and earlier so that dark became dawn and she was still wide awake and imagining that every noise she could hear on the street outside was Jack coming home, she’d had a change of heart.

Jack had to have been very angry to have stormed off for the whole night. The kind of anger that came from being falsely accused, and if anything was more likely to drive him into another woman’s arms, or more specifically Susie’s arms, it was going to be Hope herself if she kept on flying into jealous rages.

So when Jack finally reappeared just before lunch on Saturday, Hope already had his favourite coffee and walnut cake baking in the oven, four bottles of Budvar chilling in the fridge, and was full of plans to go to Waitrose to buy lemon sole so they could have posh home-made fish and chips for their tea.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, before Jack had even walked through the front door. ‘I’m so sorry that I was such a vile, jealous
bitch
yesterday. And I’m really glad you’ve come home so I can make it up to you.’

Jack put down his keys on the little shelf by the front door and folded his arms, which stopped Hope in her tracks because they couldn’t really hug it out if Jack’s arms were folded. ‘I am not going to keep having this argument over and over again,’ he said sharply. ‘I did a stupid thing. I said I was sorry and you forgave me. You
have
to get over this.’

Hope hung her head. ‘I just get so mad when I think of you and her together,’ she started to explain, but from the grim look on Jack’s face he was done with explanations, too. ‘You remember how the school-guidance counsellor made me wear an elastic band round my wrist and I had to ping it every time I started to get angry? Maybe I should start wearing one again.’

Of course, when Hope had been fourteen, her hormones and prolonged daily exposure to her mother had meant that she had a very tenuous hold on her temper. She didn’t have either of those excuses now, though she did still have a permanent mark on her right wrist from the two years that she’d pinged her elastic band at least twenty times a day. But Jack was nodding in agreement. ‘Yeah, well, maybe you should.’

Hope decided that she would seriously think about it, but in the meantime she shot Jack her best, brightest, most beguiling smile. ‘I’m baking you a coffee and walnut cake. How about I make some filter coffee and we can sit down and talk?’