Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend

by Sarra Manning

  It was how they used to be. Kind of predictable and a little bit boring, but after the last month, Hope was a little bit in love with kind of predictable and a little bit boring.

  Jack had agreed to take two days off work during half-term to babysit Jeremy and take him to the IMAX cinema and a Doctor Who exhibition. Hope had got through the Harvest Festival with only five tins of marrowfat peas to be donated to the poor and needy of the borough (last year it had been nine) and a minor spat with one of the Trustafarian mothers who couldn’t understand why the poor and needy didn’t want the five elderly courgettes that had been left over from her weekly Ocado delivery, even if they were organic.

  Perhaps it had been going too well, and when a large manila envelope, with her name written on it in a vaguely familiar hand, turned up by recorded delivery it was actually a timely reminder that there were still hairline cracks in Hope and Jack’s version of normal.

  Hope gingerly opened the envelope as if she suspected there might be anthrax inside, and not several contact sheets and six large glossy photographs. Hope fanned out the black-and-white images; there were group shots of her class beaming gummily; two adorable pictures of Sorcha and Timothy crouching down to study some plants; a shot of Javan pretending to jump into the pond with Sirhan and Luca grabbing on to his arms; and a photo of her sitting on the bench.

  As far as Hope could remember she’d been studiously scribbling in her notebook, but Wilson had snapped her staring pensively into the middle distance, eyes cloudy, mouth set in a tight thin line. She looked sulky as anything and at least ten years older.

  There was also a handwritten sheet of paper with Wilson’s scrawl on it. He’d once admitted, under duress and much baiting from Susie, that he had to write in block capitals to ensure that people could decipher a single word.

  HOPE,

  HEREWITH PHOTOS FROM CAMLEY STREET NATURAL PARK. I PRINTED UP THE ONES I PREFERRED, BUT HAVE INCLUDED THE CONTACT SHEETS SO YOU CAN PICK OUT YOUR FAVOURITES TOO. LET ME KNOW WHICH PRINTS YOU’D LIKE.

  HOPE ALL ELSE IS GOOD WITH YOU.

  REGARDS,

  WILSON

  Considering that their every encounter went from showdown to stand-off within five minutes, it was actually a sweet (if stilted) note, but it still sent Hope into a tailspin.

  When it had just been her and Jack trying to move forward it was all right. Better than all right. But now Wilson’s note reminded Hope of why she and Jack were trying to move forward in the first place.

  Hope stuffed the envelope in her tote bag to take to school with her. It was time that she left for work, except Jack was still in bed and refusing to get up. There was nothing new about this; it simply meant that Hope would leave the house late, run to catch the bus, then run all the way to school from the bus stop and arrive hot and sweaty just before the bell rang with no time to gather herself or her lesson plans.

  She stuck her head round the bedroom door to see a lump under the duvet, just the top of Jack’s head visible.

  ‘Come on,’ she wheedled. ‘It’s time to get up or you’ll be late and you’ve already made me late. Again.’

  There was an indistinct grunt, which Hope correctly translated as, ‘Just five more minutes and then I’ll get up, I swear.’

  Except five minutes would pass, then he’d want another five minutes, and now that Wilson’s presence by way of the Royal Mail had watered the seeds of doubt and suspicion in Hope’s mind, she didn’t feel inclined to indulge Jack.

  ‘This is your five-second warning,’ Hope said firmly. ‘I’m counting to five and then I’m going to work.’

  This time the grunt sounded plaintive, which meant that Jack was mumbling something about having to have worked late the night before. Or had he? Maybe working late really meant sucking face with Susie. Or even one of the impossibly pretty girls from Skirt’s fashion department.

  Just the mental image that conjured up was enough to make Hope bite out, ‘Onetwothreefourfive!’ super quickly, which was against the rules of counting up to five, but then Jack hadn’t cared about the rules when he kissed Susie.

  She’d gone over to the dark side once more, and as Jack hadn’t stirred, despite fair warning, he could be late for work and suffer the consequences. Though as he was one of only three straight men in the Skirt office and all the female staff doted on him, the consequences were never that dire.

  ‘I’m going,’ Hope said. ‘Hope you manage to get to work before lunchtime.’

  Jack obviously thought this was just an empty threat because he barely, stirred and Hope was just about to make good on it when she caught sight of Jack’s iPhone charging on top of the chest of drawers. They were always mixing up each other’s iPhones, especially since they were both encased in identical black-rubber cases. Jack had bought Hope her case, after two incidents of Hope dropping her iPhone on unyielding surfaces and shattering the glass. Which had actually been very sweet of him, and how was Hope repaying him now?

  By stealthily padding back into the room to carefully unplug his phone so she could stash it in the pocket of her denim jacket, that’s how. Even as she was doing it, Hope was repulsed by her actions – but not repulsed enough to put Jack’s phone back where she found it.

  But she had to know once and for all if Jack really had seen the error of his ways. Yes, she could just ask him, but he’d swear blind he was innocent and then they’d have another row about her trust issues. So, really, this was the only choice she had.

  EVEN THOUGH IT was a dead weight in her jacket pocket, Hope couldn’t bring herself to take out the phone and start scrolling through Jack’s text messages and emails. It went against everything she believed in. She was meant to be a role model to her pupils, not a lowdown dirty sneak who invaded other people’s privacy. Just thinking about sliding the lock on Jack’s phone made her feel bilious, so bilious that Hope was resolved to rush home at lunchtime, shove the phone under the pile of clothes that also lived on top of the chest of drawers and pretend the whole shameful episode had never happened.

  Hope was a lot of things, and she’d discovered a side of herself that she didn’t much like during the last few weeks, but she wasn’t going to let herself become that girl, she decided.

  Her mind made up, she waited until after she’d taken the register to call Blue Class up in groups of five to show them Wilson’s photos so they could choose which pictures they wanted to stick on their nature wall.

  It all got a little heated. Blue Class refused to grasp the concept that a free vote was the cornerstone of democracy, and Hope was just about to invoke her right as ipso facto Head of State to cast the deciding vote when Mr Gonzales, the headmaster, walked into the classroom.

  Usually Mr Gonzales was only seen at morning assembly, although he and snotty Stuart were much better acquainted, but occasionally he did a sweep of the school. He said it was because he missed the thrill of grass-roots teaching, but Hope and Elaine suspected that he longed to catch his staff mucking about on Facebook while their class watched a DVD.

  As it was, Hope was horrified when he strolled in, but quickly realised that she couldn’t look a gift-horse headmaster in the mouth. ‘This is what happens when you can’t behave,’ she told Blue Class. ‘You’ve been making so much noise that Mr Gonzales could hear you all the way over in the junior school.’

  Blue Class had never been so quiet, all sitting behind their desks, bottom lips quivering, eyes like saucers. Mr Gonzales, who was in his forties, eschewed suit and tie in favour of chinos and open-necked plaid shirts, and liked to refer to himself as ‘an originator as well as an educator’ on the school’s website.

  He came to stand by Hope’s desk and smiled encouragingly at the class. ‘Well, what’s got you all so excited?’ He pointed at Luca. ‘What has Ms Delafield been teaching you this morning?’

  Luca bit his lip and scrunched up his face with the effort of remembering exactly what Hope had been saying in a dull roar. ‘We was gonna choose the photos for our nature wall bu
t then we argued and Miss started talking about demer … demokassy and me and Javan said it wasn’t fair that our picture didn’t get chose and Miss said that life wasn’t fair and …’

  ‘Yes, I think Mr Gonzales gets the general drift,’ Hope said quickly, even though Mr Gonzales’ eyebrows were up around his hairline. There was nothing for it but to launch into a hurried explanation of their first visit to Camley Street Natural Park, making sure that she asked the more articulate members of the class to chime in on the chorus.

  Mr Gonzales leafed through the contact sheets and even shared a wry smile with Hope as he looked at the shots of Javan, Sirhan and Luca mugging for the camera. ‘Do you know what I think?’ he asked Blue Class, who clearly didn’t have a freaking clue. ‘I think these pictures would look very good on the wall outside my office. Would you like to make a big display all about your class project?’

  Again, Blue Class were silent and unable to speak to Mr Gonzales unless he specifically pointed at one of them and asked Hope who they were.

  ‘That’s very exciting, isn’t it?’ Hope said brightly. ‘We can include some of our nature samples, and we’re all getting much better at colouring inside the lines.’

  After a brief yet agonising pep talk about how pleased Mr Gonzales was that Hope was on board with the Winter Pageant, he left the room. There were thirty seconds of utter silence, then Blue Class erupted into noisy squeals. Hope was just threatening them with dire sticker consequences when there was a knock at the classroom door.

  ‘That’s probably Mr Gonzales coming back to say that he can’t have a special display outside his office from such noisy children,’ Hope told them, almost believing it herself as she saw Kathryn, Mr Gonzales’ PA, beckoning to her urgently.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Hope,’ she said in a stage whisper. ‘Can you call your boyfriend on his office number? Family emergency.’

  The words struck terror into Hope’s heart. Her father’s mother was getting very doddery, and Caroline Delafield was always claiming that it was only a matter of time before she broke a hip and promptly died from shock. ‘I don’t have any cover,’ she hissed, looking over her shoulder. Andy volunteered at a centre for adults with learning difficulties on alternate Fridays.

  Now it was Kathryn’s turn to look terrified. ‘Well, I suppose I could stand in for five minutes.’ She peered round the door. ‘I wouldn’t have to teach them, would I?’

  Hope shook her head. ‘Just stand there and look friendly, but don’t engage with them and don’t let them smell your fear,’ Hope said, leading Kathryn into the classroom. ‘Mrs MacDonald is going to keep an eye on you while you do some quiet reading.’

  Hope grabbed her phone and fairly galloped for the staffroom, her mind racing with awful possibilities. Maybe the family emergency was about Jack’s paternal grandmother who’d been suffering with dementia for years, in which case it would still be terrible, but a blessed relief. And his other grandmother had had a double mastectomy last year.

  The parents would have to cancel their trip to Corfu, and instead of picking up Jeremy from Euston tomorrow, she and Jack would probably be driving to Lancashire. Oh! She’d have to cancel the two-day drama workshop. Dorothy was going to explode with rage if they refused to refund the course fees, but a death in the family took precedent over learning dramatic techniques for the under-eights.

  By the time Hope was shutting the staffroom door behind her, mentally she was already in Lancashire making salmon paste and cucumber sandwiches for the wake. ‘My God, are you OK?’ she asked as soon as Jack answered the phone. ‘Is it your Granny Thwaites? I thought she was looking really frail last time we saw her.’

  ‘No, she’s fine,’ Jack replied. ‘It’s just that …’

  ‘Christ! It’s not my grandma, is it? I was meant to call her on the weekend and …’

  ‘No,’ Jack said sharply to cut Hope off before she began castigating herself for being a neglectful granddaughter. ‘No one’s died.’

  Hope still didn’t dare to relax. ‘Has someone broken a hip, then?’

  Jack sighed in exasperation. ‘No! I only said it was a family emergency so they’d get you out of class and you could turn your phone back on.’

  ‘Well, this had better be bloody good,’ Hope snapped, because really death was about the only acceptable reason for having her dragged out of class.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Hopey, I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important. It’s just … did you see my phone before you left this morning? And oh, thanks for waking me. I didn’t get to work until after eleven.’

  Hope gasped with relief and a little bit of indignation too. ‘Oh, please!’ she scoffed. ‘I woke you up about fifteen times and each time you hit “snooze” and went back to sleep. I do have a job to get to myself, thank you very much.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. My phone, have you seen it? I’m sure I left it charging on the chest of drawers but it wasn’t there this morning. I looked in the drawers, I even pulled the whole thing out to see if it had fallen down the back. I’ve tried ringing it, but no one picks up, so I wondered if you’d mistaken it for yours and it might be in your bag.’ Jack took a deep breath. ‘Like, if you have got it, I can send a bike for it.’ He took a deeper breath. ‘No need to turn it on or anything, just pop it in a jiffy bag and I’ll have a courier come and collect it within the hour.’

  Shame had swept away Hope’s relief and she’d been all set to feign surprise and admit to inadvertently taking Jack’s phone. But the longer Jack talked, or gibbered in panic, to be more precise, the less shame she felt. In fact, her worst fears were being confirmed, and she was almost inclined to give in to his demands to hand the phone over to a courier without checking its contents first. Almost. But the sound of Jack practically hyperventilating wasn’t the kind of proof that would stand up in a court of law or in the middle of a blazing row.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got your phone,’ she heard herself say as coolly as a cucumber chilling in a fridge on a hot summer’s day. ‘If I do find it in my bag, I’ll let you know.’

  It was only a slight greying of the truth – Hope would definitely let Jack know that she had his phone if she found anything on it that shouldn’t be there. Yup, he’d be the very first to know.

  ‘Would you?’ Jack didn’t sound at all comforted by the thought. ‘And like I said, there’s no need to open it if there’s, like, missed calls or texts or anything. I mean, it was just me trying to locate the bloody thing.’

  ‘Look, I have to go. I have thirty young minds ripe for moulding,’ Hope said. ‘I’m sure your phone will turn up. Maybe it’s in your jeans pocket.’

  ‘But I’m wearing the same jeans I had on yesterday!’ Jack growled, but Hope didn’t want to listen any longer so she hung up on him.

  There was another mad gallop down the corridor to get back to Blue Class, who weren’t quietly reading if the sound of excited chatter was anything to go by. She certainly wasn’t going to rifle through Jack’s phone when they were meant to be having another bash at the two-times table.

  Hope still wasn’t even entirely sure that she was going to rifle through Jack’s phone at all – it was so low. She’d never even read Lauren’s diary when they shared a room for a year at university, and she’d known that Lauren kept it hidden under the mattress.

  Her resolve held all the way through lunch, helped by the fact that she went to Wetherspoon’s with Elaine and Marta, who had got over her nerves and was now happy to bitch about Dorothy and Gurinder and dish the dirt on her more annoying parents. But even as Hope listened to a convoluted story about a helicopter mummy who was mounting a one-woman campaign to have the class worksheets printed on bio-degradable paper, she had one sweaty hand clutched around Jack’s phone.

  Eventually Hope could bear it no longer. ‘I nicked Jack’s phone this morning,’ she blurted out, before Marta could get to the end of her story. ‘I don’t know why, but I have an idea that he might still be seeing Susie and there’ll be some inc
riminating texts on it.’

  Elaine gave a long, low whistle. ‘Really? I thought things were back to normal.’

  ‘I thought they were, too,’ Hope said. ‘But then he had me hauled out of class to ask me if I’d seen his phone, and he was so panic-stricken that for a moment I thought he’d actually stopped breathing.’

  Marta had already heard all about Hope’s relationship woes. ‘My sister suspected that her boyfriend had another Facebook account so she waited until he went to the loo, but was still logged in, and guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He had three other Facebook accounts and he was using them to hook up with other women,’ Marta announced with some relish. ‘It was obvious, really. He had a monobrow. Never trust a man with a monobrow.’

  ‘Jack doesn’t have a monobrow,’ Hope groused.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s already kinda cheated on you once. Or once that you know about,’ Marta added, and Hope had definitely liked her more when she spent most of the break and lunchtimes in a state of abject terror. ‘You have every right to check up on him.’

  Hope turned pleading eyes on Elaine who was looking distinctly disapproving. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves,’ she said, even though this wasn’t technically eavesdropping. Then she shrugged. ‘But if it was me, I probably would, then I’d wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘You’re a lot of help,’ Hope complained as she rested the phone on her palm. ‘Maybe one of you could look for me, and if there is bad stuff on it, you could just summarise. Without too much detail, unless there are details I should know about, and then you …’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Elaine snapped, snatching the phone from Hope. ‘I’ll look after this, and you come and find me at three thirty when I expect you to have made a decision one way or another.’