It was a good plan, so Hope could concentrate on the afternoon lessons, but her mind was still distracted, and Blue Class were restless as they hadn’t accrued enough stickers to qualify for half an hour of Golden Time at the end of the day, when they’d sit on the carpet and have the story of their choice read to them before finishing the week with a rousing song.
‘You still need another ten stickers,’ Hope told them, because she hadn’t planned anything for the last half hour of school and was as desperate for Golden Time as they were. ‘How might you earn them?’
‘We could get them for sitting on our chairs properly?’ piped up a voice from the back of the class.
Hope shook her head. ‘You should be sitting on your chairs properly anyway. What areas do we need to work on?’
They spent some time practising queuing up in single file and walking quietly down the corridor, but failed miserably. Things were looking grim, and a couple of the more highly strung girls even started crying at the prospect of missing Golden Time. Eventually inspiration struck, and Hope set them to tidying up the nature wall, the little class library, the stationery cupboard and the art corner, which they did quietly and intently, so she could then issue them with ten more class stars and they could have Golden Time. Six-year-olds were so malleable, Hope thought, as Blue Class charged into the playground for afternoon break. Maybe she should have had Jack on a sticker-reward programme, it would have simpled things up so much.
Hope avoided the staffroom and Marta and Elaine’s knowing looks at break, but after a read-through of The Gruffalo, with a lot of class participation, and a medley of Motown hits, which Blue Class had been learning with the music teacher, there was no putting it off any longer.
‘Give me the phone,’ Hope demanded of Elaine, who was still tidying up her classroom. ‘Give it to me. Now.’
‘Are you sure?’ Elaine asked doubtfully. She took the phone from her bag and offered it to Hope, who grabbed it and then did nothing but stare down at the silent but potentially deadly device encased in black rubber. Since when had Apple started to manufacture Pandora’s boxes?
‘Do you really want to do this?’ Elaine asked again, though given Hope’s grim, resolute expression it was obviously a rhetorical question.
‘How can I not?’ Hope shook her head. ‘I’m a terrible, terrible person, but if Jack’s doing what I think he might be doing, then he’s much worse than I am. All this time he’s been lying to me. How could he do that?’
‘You still don’t know that he is doing anything. Look, let’s go down the Midnight Bell, order a vat of wine, and I’ll be there if you want to have a little peek, just to set your mind at ease.’
It sounded good, or the vat of wine did at any rate, but Hope preferred that there shouldn’t be any witnesses if and when her world crumbled to nothing more than a pile of dust. ‘Except I’m meeting Lauren and Allison in town tonight for cheap cocktails so I’d better hold off until then,’ she said, turning away to make her escape, but Elaine’s hand on her shoulder stilled her.
‘Prepare for the worst, hope for the best,’ she advised. ‘I’m sure it was just that one-off kiss. That’s not so bad, is it?’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ Hope agreed, and with every single fibre of her being she hoped that her sneaky, shameful behaviour would confirm only that she was sneaky and shameful and nothing else. ‘Anyway, I’d better go. Have a nice half-term.’
‘You too, sweetie. Hope the drama workshop isn’t the same ninth circle of hell that it was when I did it,’ Elaine said cheerfully, though she’d been careful not to share that little fact with Hope until now. ‘Give me a call and let me know how things turn out. Oh, and maybe Jeremy can hang out with Lola and Abby later on in the week – he doesn’t sound like the sort of boy who might impregnate them while my back’s turned.’
‘God, no!’ Hope said, genuinely grinning as she thought of Jeremy coming face to face with Lola and Abby, who both looked at least twenty-five and were usually caked in badly applied make-up and poured into skintight jeans and teeny tops from which their burgeoning bosoms always threatened to break free. They’d eat him alive.
AS SOON AS she got home, before she’d even taken off her jacket or put her keys down, Hope was pulling out Jack’s phone, staring at its John Lennon wallpaper, and then unlocking it.
Even doing that felt like the worst thing in the world. Rooting around on Jack’s phone went against everything Hope believed in, and in the same position, if Jack, or anyone, invaded her privacy she’d be furious, and rightly so. She couldn’t do this, Hope decided, glancing down at the screen, which happened to show Jack’s recent text messages … and there was Susie’s name, and all of a sudden Jack’s right to privacy didn’t seem to matter any more. Not when he was texting Susie, even though he’d sworn six weeks before, on his life and his mother’s life and his Beatles vinyl, that he wouldn’t be in contact with Susie ever again. That was it. All the proof that Hope needed, but she was still scrolling up the screen so she could read all the messages that Susie and Jack had sent and received.
The first message was dated the night before at ten thirty, just before Jack had come home from working late. Love you. Love fucking you. Wish I hadn’t had to go. Talk to you tomorrow. Jack x
It was everything Hope had feared. Everything, and more, and so much worse, and for one crazy, tip-tilting second, she was relieved. Relieved to know that she’d been right all along, although being right had never, ever felt so wrong. She hadn’t been going crazy, and she hadn’t been creating drama for the sake of it. It was more than one kiss. It wasn’t even just sex, which would have been horrific enough, they were having a love affair. They were in love.
Hope put her hand on her heart to check if it was still working, as she tried to scroll through the stream of text messages. Some of them were pornographic – things they’d done, things they wanted to do, things they wanted to repeat – but the words that hurt like sharp knives, tearing into her guts, were the tender ones. The I love you’s. The I miss you’s. The I’m going crazy not knowing when I’m going to see you again’s.
Hope sank to the hall floor. She couldn’t bear to load the earlier texts, so she started to read the emails, tracing the affair back to the email Jack had sent Susie the week before Hope’s birthday last May:
Hey Susie Q
Help a mate out with a huge favour. Want to get Hope something really cool for her birthday and not something that she says she likes, then goes through my pockets looking for the receipt an hour later.
She’s pored over the Grazia shoe supplement three times in the last day and keeps sighing and looking at me pointedly, but she always moans that she can’t do heels. Or should I get her a bag? Obviously something from Topshop isn’t going to cut it, but can I get her a statement pair of shoes or bag for less than £200?
Are you free for a lunchtime shopping trip sometime this week?
Laters, taters
Jack
There was much emailing back and forth about dates, with links to netaporter.com and talk of discount cards that Jack could sweet-talk from the fashion girls at work.
Then, one lunchtime shopping date and Hope’s pair of Stella McCartney wedge sandals later, there was an email from Susie:
Oh, Jacky boy
Shit! What have we done? All I can think about is how it would destroy Hopey if she knew, but how much I want to do it again.
Still sore and I’ve got a carpet burn on my back, which smarts like fuck, but God, it was so good.
We’re going straight to hell for this, aren’t we?
Love, Susie
May? May? MAY? It was almost the end of October now. Jack had been fucking Susie for over five months, ever since Hope and Jack had got back from not getting officially engaged in Barcelona.
Not just fucking Susie but lying to Hope for every single day of those just over five months. There was absolutely no comfort knowing that this was something Jack had done of his own free wi
ll, and that it wasn’t Hope’s wild mood-swings and erratic behaviour since The Kiss that had hurled him into Susie’s arms. No, there was absolutely no comfort in that at all.
Hope only skimmed the rest of the emails as far as August, which were all variations on the themes of ‘we’re terrible people’, ‘oh poor Hopey’, ‘you’re the best fuck I’ve ever had’. After August, well … What did it really matter? They’d been found out, and whatever the emails revealed about their thoughts on being found out, they’d still continued to do exactly what they wanted, no matter how much it would hurt Hope.
The sheer scale of Jack’s betrayal struck Hope anew. He’d looked her right in the eye on numerous occasions and had sworn on the lives of his loved ones that nothing had happened, and all that time … Hope had never known that Jack could lie so well, but it was obvious that she didn’t know Jack at all.
This was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with. The man she referred to as ‘my better half’, and even though she always said it with a smirk, Hope had meant it. The Jack she’d known was kind and funny and sweet and yes, he was handsome, but it was the kind and the funny and the sweet bits of him that she loved most of all. But all her love and devotion obviously didn’t mean anything to Jack. If they had, then how could he? How could he?
He never texted Hope even once a day to say that he loved her, unless they were in the middle of a fight. And he’d never, ever texted Hope to let her know that she was the best fuck that he’d ever had and he was hard just thinking about her. Not ever.
Just to torment herself a little more, Hope had a quick look at Jack’s photos, then wished she hadn’t when she saw a snap of Susie lolling stark-naked on her expensive Heal’s bed with the padded-leather headboard, glistening pink and wet, her legs wide apart. She was a perfect pornographic priestess, whereas Hope wouldn’t even let Jack take a picture of her in a swimsuit.
The thirteen years they’d been together counted for nothing when compared to Susie and all her charms – Hope couldn’t begin to compete.
She got up from the floor, and it was good that she hadn’t taken her jacket off and still had her handbag strap looped around her wrist. It meant that she didn’t have to waste any time, but could head straight out of the door. Normally for a night out with Lauren and Allison – hopping between any number of bars that did cheap cocktails and ending up in a nightclub, the tackier the better – Hope would spend a couple of hours getting ready. Even going to the trouble of straightening her hair, and doing her make-up properly, rather than just applying a dash of mascara and a quick smear of tinted lip-gloss. But now Hope didn’t even care that she was still in her work-rumpled clothes, with felt-tip stains on her floral blouse, and that her hair was scraped back in a severe bun as she hadn’t had time to wash it that morning because she’d wasted valuable minutes trying to rouse Jack from sleep.
Even thinking his name sent a shooting stab of pain to the base of Hope’s skull. She was going to fucking kill him. And then she might fucking kill herself because it was the only way she could think of not to feel like this.
With murder on her mind, Hope didn’t bother with the Piccadilly Line but stuck out her hand the minute she hit Holloway Road and saw a cab with its light on. It was late in the afternoon and there was little traffic going into town. The taxi pulled up outside the Magnum Media building a scant twenty minutes later. Hope stuffed a £20 note in the driver’s hand and insisted that he could keep the £7.40 change because she couldn’t wait the vital ten seconds for him to count out the money.
Then she marched into the chrome and marble lobby, up to the reception desk, and said that she had an urgent delivery for Jack Benson on Skirt magazine. The receptionist dialled Jack’s extension even as she directed Hope to the lifts.
She could see Jack waiting as the lift doors opened on the fourth floor. For one moment he looked utterly flummoxed to see Hope standing there – he even did a swift double-take before he smiled. Hope wanted to smack it right off his face.
‘This is a nice surprise,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I thought you were meeting up with Lauren and Alli for a night of hard drinking.’
‘I am,’ Hope said, and she marvelled that she could sound reasonably sane. ‘I found your phone.’
Jack allowed himself one small sigh of relief then tensed up. ‘Oh, really? Where was it?’
‘Well, you were right, it was charging on the chest of drawers this morning when I took it and put it in my bag,’ Hope said without even a flicker of guilt because she’d got over that a couple of hours ago.
‘Right.’ Jack nodded. The tips of his ears were so red they looked as if they might start smoking. ‘So, did you mistake it for yours?’
‘No, I knew it was yours.’ Hope struck a pensive pose, one hip jutting out, a finger on her chin. ‘It was a moment of madness because I was still convinced there was something going on between you and Susie, and I had to know one way or another. I’ve spent most of the day wrestling with my conscience.’
Jack was almost dancing on the spot, unsure if he should back away or move closer to snatch his phone as Hope pulled it out of her pocket. ‘But you didn’t look through my phone, did you?’ he asked shakily. Hope could see his fear and uncertainty, but then he shook his head. ‘Of course you didn’t, because you always do the right thing.’
Hope held up the phone. ‘Guess again, Jacky boy,’ she snarled as she hurled it on the floor, which was covered in the same marble tiles as the downstairs reception area. Jack gave a bellow of rage – or was it panic? – as the phone landed and it was too soon to assess any damage, especially as Hope was now stomping on it. She wasn’t wearing her Converses today but her Doc Marten brogues that Jack always said made her look like a lesbian or a policewoman. Or a lesbian policewoman. But Hope was really appreciating how the thick rubber soles could inflict maximum hurt on an iPhone. The glass and innards had shattered into tiny pieces, though, frustratingly, the stainless-steel backing was merely buckled, even after Hope had jumped up and down on it repeatedly.
For weeks now, every time she’d got mad at Jack or suspicious of Jack she’d told herself she was acting like a crazy woman, but now she was acting like a crazy woman, and in front of a small horrified gaggle of Skirt employees gathered by the big double doors that led to the magazine’s offices. In fact, Hope didn’t know why acting like a crazy woman got such a bad press when it felt so good.
‘There!’ she said, kicking what was left of the phone over to where Jack stood, his arms limp, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. ‘You can have it back now.’
‘You had no right,’ Jack mumbled when he finally regained the power of speech. ‘No right …’
‘I had every fucking right!’ Hope shouted. ‘You said it was over. In fact, you said nothing had ever happened. You promised you’d never, ever contact her again, and all the time, you were fucking each other. For months! You’ve been fucking her, and cheating and lying to me. You’ve looked me right in the eye and lied to me. To me!’
Jack opened his mouth, then closed it again when he heard a gasp and a few shocked giggles coming from his colleagues in the corner. He stepped over the high-tech mess that used to be his iPhone to grab Hope by the arm and tug her down the corridor.
‘Get off me!’ she spat out, pulling her arm free so she could swing it back and smack him, with one loud vicious crack against his left cheek. Jack barely reacted, because suddenly he had Hope in an artboy version of a Vulcan death-grip, and he yanked her, squirming and wriggling and telling him that he was a ‘fucking bastard’, into a little kitchen, which smelt of gone-off milk and microwaved food, and slammed the door shut.
It was just the two of them in a stinky, confined space. They were both breathing hard and everything about Jack that Hope had loved – his thick, brown hair that she always wanted to run her fingers through, his guileless blue eyes, the planes and angles of his face, even the gangliness of his limbs – she now hated. She could hardly bear to look at him.
‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why didn’t you dump me when you first started fucking each other, or when I caught you together? You obviously had no intention of giving up Susie, so why didn’t you give me up instead?’
‘Because I fucking love you!’ Jack shouted, as if it was obvious. ‘I love you, all right?’
‘No, it’s not all right,’ Hope hurled back at him. ‘You were hedging your bets, weren’t you? Because Susie has a low boredom threshold and you wanted to make sure that good old Hope was still waiting in the wings. Have you any idea how that makes me feel?’
‘You don’t understand … you don’t know what I’ve been going through.’ Jack stopped as soon as he realised how extremely lame that sounded, or it might have been the inelegant snorting noise Hope was making.
‘It’s not just about me though, is it? What about Wilson? It was obvious that neither of you gave a toss about his feelings either.’
Now it was Jack’s turn to scoff. ‘Since when do you give a toss about Wilson?’
‘Since Wilson knows exactly what I’m going through,’ Hope told him, though that wasn’t strictly true. Wilson had had a much clearer grasp of the depths of Jack and Susie’s deception than Hope, and he’d tried to warn her, but she’d refused to listen. But now the battle lines were drawn. Jack and Susie on one side, Hope and Wilson on the other. In fact, Wilson was like a kindred spirit, but his relationship with Susie barely counted as a relationship compared to the thirteen years Hope and Jack had racked up. So, there was no way that Wilson could ever feel as destroyed as Hope did. It just wasn’t possible. ‘Jesus, how could you do this? Did you never stop to think that what you were doing was wrong and that people were going to get hurt?’ Hope wrapped her arms tightly around herself. ‘You’re … you’re vile!’
Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend Page 15