Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (8 page)

Was he fucking kidding her? ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

‘It was just a theory.’ Wilson shrugged, and Hope noticed for the first time that he’d pulled into the kerb. ‘So, shall I take you home?’

Even the abstract thought of home made Hope experience a moment of sheer blind panic. ‘Not home,’ she mumbled, opening her purse and hunting for her Oyster card. ‘Could you maybe drive me to Holloway Road or Archway station, whichever one is nearer?’

Wilson couldn’t because, as he smugly pointed out, it was nearly one in the morning and the tube had stopped running.

‘OK,’ she conceded weakly. ‘I can get a nightbus from Holloway Road. It will take me longer to get to South London, but if I call Lauren she won’t mind waiting up for me.’

‘Fine,’ Wilson said, like he didn’t care where she went, just as long as she went somewhere.

THEY DROVE IN
a tense, uncomfortable silence down narrow roads that all looked the same. It wasn’t until they drove past Archway station and hit Junction Road that Hope stirred.

‘You can just drop me here,’ she said.

‘I’m driving you into town, so you can get a nightbus to South London,’ Wilson said.

‘Oh, you don’t have to do that.’

‘Well, I’m doing it. End of discussion.’ Hope had been a teacher for two years and she doubted that even if she stayed a teacher for another thirty, she’d ever be able to get the same note of don’t-fuck-with-me-ness in her voice that Wilson had. ‘Anyway, how’s your hand?’

Hope had completely forgotten about her singed palm. Unbelievably, it was still firmly swathed in clingfilm. She stared down at the raised welt, which throbbed with a fair-to-middling pain, but compared to the pinched agony of her feet in her Stella McCartney wedges, the clenched knot where her stomach usually was, and the hollow feeling in her chest – which may or may not have indicated a broken heart – it was the very least of all her current ouches.

‘It’s OK, I guess,’ she mumbled. ‘Doesn’t hurt that much.’

Wilson nodded. ‘Are you going to keep it wrapped up like that?’

Hope knew the answer to this, she was a trained first-aider after all, but she couldn’t even remember what ‘ICE’
stood
for, let alone the proper treatment for superficial burns. ‘Hmm, maybe it needs a dressing,’ she murmured half to herself. ‘So it doesn’t get infected. I’ll sort it out when I get to Lauren’s. She’s much better at treating minor injuries than I am.’

That short burst of conversation was followed by another painful silence until they got to Camden and Wilson had to jam on the brakes to avoid mowing down two really drunk teenagers who’d suddenly lurched into the road. Hope was thrown forward and then jerked back by her seatbelt, and just as she was wondering if she’d manage to make it to morning without breaking a rib or getting a mild concussion, Wilson turned down a side road and suddenly stopped the car.

‘How could you not know?’ he demanded, before the engine had even died. ‘Don’t tell me that you thought everything was all right?’

‘What? No!’ Hope shook her head firmly. ‘Of course I didn’t. Like, why would I?’

‘Well, it’s not as if they were that discreet about it.’ Wilson leaned towards her and Hope shrunk back in her seat because they were in a confined space and Wilson looming at her when he was so angry wasn’t doing much for her tattered nerves. ‘God, you’re either the most unobservant or the most self-involved person I’ve ever met.’

Hope bristled at the accusation, which was untrue and unfair on both counts. ‘I am neither … Hang on! What do you mean about them not being discreet? Oh my God, did you know about this? You did, didn’t you? You knew!’

‘I didn’t know for sure,’ Wilson said gruffly, but he didn’t sound quite so furious. ‘I had my suspicions.’

Hope had forgotten that having a conversation with Wilson was like trying to thread a rusty needle with a frayed piece of cotton. ‘What kind of suspicions?’

‘The usual kind.’ When Hope let out a tiny growl of
frustration
at his utter inarticulacy, he shifted uncomfortably as if he realised that he had to do better. ‘OK, OK. I thought maybe she was seeing someone else, I just didn’t think it was your bloke. Well, not until we all went to that thing in Clissold Park.’

Hope frowned as she cast her mind back to that Saturday afternoon a few weeks before when the four of them had gone to a one-day festival in Stoke Newington, all buoyed up with the prospect of not having to camp in a field and with shiny backstage passes on lanyards, courtesy of
Skirt
magazine. As hard as she tried, Hope couldn’t remember any instances when she’d caught Jack and Susie exchanging heated glances. Or sloping off together without any explanation and returning a long time later, all hot and flustered.

But then she had spent most of the day getting very merry on the free cocktails supplied by the vodka company sponsoring the backstage hospitality, then queuing for the Portaloos. Still, Hope was sure that if there’d been something going on that day, she’d have noticed it. This was her boyfriend and her best friend they were talking about, after all. Or her ex-best friend and her ex … No, she couldn’t bear to think of Jack as her ex-anything. Couldn’t even form the thought.

‘I don’t remember them doing anything out of the ordinary,’ she insisted weakly. ‘Can you be more specific?’

Wilson shrugged. ‘She’d send a text on her phone. A split second later, he’d get a text and read it with a smirk on his face. Then he’d text, she’d get a text, smirk, text, smirk, text.’

‘But that could have just been a coincidence!’

‘It could have been, except it looks like it wasn’t. You saw them together. What
did
you see, anyway?’

Although Hope had been trying to convince herself that the heated embrace was a trick of the light and she’d put two and two together and ended up with a number that was way, way greater than four, when she cast her mind back to
what
she’d seen earlier, she had perfect recall of Susie’s hands inside Jack’s jeans, his hands on her tits, the hungry slurping sound as they kissed … God, it would be etched right into her cerebral cortex until the day she died.

‘I saw them kissing,’ she said, and she was amazed that her voice sounded so clear and calm. ‘And it was the kind of kissing that people do when they’re shagging each other but they can’t actually shag each other at that particular moment.’

‘Right.’ Wilson folded his arms. ‘You sure you’re not just jumping to conclusions? Because I’ve noticed that you tend to do that.’

‘I do
not
!’ Hope said indignantly, because she didn’t. Apart from the whole engagement-ring fiasco in Barcelona, but that was because Jack had unwittingly led her on. Besides … ‘Since when were you such an authority on me? You’ve only ever said about five sentences to me in the whole time I’ve known you.’

‘Well, maybe I might have taken the trouble to get to know you better if you weren’t always glaring at me or getting annoyingly drunk and giggly with my girlfriend.’

‘I don’t giggle,’ Hope informed Wilson icily, and the way she was feeling right now, she didn’t think she’d ever knowingly giggle ever again. ‘Anyway, we’re getting wildly off-topic. So, when you had these “suspicions”’ – Hope did air-quotes, which, pleasingly, made Wilson wince – ‘did you confront Susie about them?’

‘Well, no, not then,’ Wilson said.

‘But you did ask her about them later?’

‘I started to ask her but it just turned into an argument about me being half an hour late to pick her up the week before,’ Wilson said dryly.

‘So you didn’t pursue it?’ This was even harder than the time Hope had tried to get to the awful truth of who’d let Herbert, the class hamster, out of his cage.

‘To be honest, I didn’t want to start dragging up stuff if
it
meant that all my worst thoughts were confirmed.’ Wilson scratched his chin. ‘No one but a masochist wants to put themselves in a position where they’re likely to get hurt.’

In all her rage and pity and getting really, really annoyed that Wilson was giving her the third-degree like this was all her fault, Hope had been forgetting something – this wasn’t just about her. Wilson was also an innocent victim in all this. She reached out to touch Wilson’s arm, which made him flinch, but then they’d never touched before. The slight displacement of air when they had leaned in and pursed their lips at a spot approximately five centimetres away from the other’s cheek couldn’t be classed as touching. But now her hand rested on his arm and stayed there. ‘Wilson? Look, I’m sorry.’

He shook his head and pulled his arm away from her. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’

‘No, I mean, I’m sorry that I’ve made this all about me when you must be feeling pretty cut up about it too.’ Hope swallowed past that lump that had taken up residence in her throat again. ‘It’s just … well, I know what you’re feeling right now, because I’m feeling it too, and it hurts.’

‘It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation, probably won’t be the last,’ Wilson said brusquely. ‘Still, it’s not something you ever get used to, your girlfriend cheating on you. If she is … All you actually saw was a kiss. One kiss.’

It wasn’t just one kiss. It had been so much more than that. There had been hands in places where they had no right to be and grinding and groping and breathy little gasps and moans. ‘Do you really think I’d be this upset if it had just been one kiss?’

‘But you did only see them kiss, and Susie said it was just a drunken snog and OK, so maybe they do fancy each other, is that so bad?’ Wilson didn’t sound like he wanted Hope’s opinion but as if he was trying to do damage limitation.
Square
away the facts until they seemed a lot less incriminating. ‘They fancied each other, they’d both had a skinful, stuff happened and you kicked off, and then Susie kicked off because that’s what women do, they love to kick off, and in a few days’ time, it will all have blown over, and Jack and Susie probably won’t even be able to look at each other. That’s what I think, anyway.’

Wilson was a regular chatty Cathy tonight, Hope thought sourly. ‘Well, that’s not what I think,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t see them. I did, and I know exactly what I saw and it’s just about broken my heart.’

The light was dim, but Hope was sure that Wilson had just rolled his eyes. ‘If this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, then you’ve led a very sheltered life.’

She had led a sheltered life, Hope knew that. Both her parents were still alive and gainfully employed, so there’d always been food, heat and light, and a bit left over for luxuries like trips to the cinema and two weeks on a campsite in Provence every summer. She’d got ten GCSEs, four A-levels, a degree in History and her SCITT with the requisite amounts of revision-related tears but no major angst. She’d dated the boy next door. She’d only ever shagged the boy next door once she was past the age of consent. Then Hope had moved in with the boy next door after university, and bought a flat with the boy next door as soon as she was bringing in her first wage.

At least she’d managed to get out of Lancashire and live in London, when most of the girls she’d been at school with already had kids. Some of them were even on their second marriages, but Wilson was kind of right: Hope didn’t just have a sheltered life, it was a very small life, too. ‘I’m sorry if my emotional distress is boring the pants off you,’ Hope said as she pointedly scooched across the seat so she was almost hugging the car door. ‘Maybe if I’d had a succession of crappy relationships, I’d be inured to the pain by now, but
I
haven’t. And well, it hurts like hell.’ Her voice throbbed and broke at the end of the sentence and Hope waited to see if she was going to burst into tears again, but no, she was resolutely dry-eyed as Wilson wriggled where he sat and then coughed a little bit.

‘I’m just saying that this is probably something and nothing, and it doesn’t help the situation if you’re going to completely overreact,’ he said in a much gentler voice. ‘You need to calm down.’

There was nothing more likely to make Hope start to hiss and bristle than someone telling her to calm down. ‘At least I have feelings,’ she snarled. ‘You’re just acting like the whole thing is a minor inconvenience to you. Don’t you even care that Susie’s been cheating on you?’

‘Of course I care!’ Wilson would never do anything as uncool as shout but his volume knob was definitely edging towards seven. ‘Susie and I might not have been together for twenty bloody years like you and Jack—’