She gave Angela a tight, thin smile as the other woman looked at them both thoughtfully. ‘I’m sure this decision to reconcile is very exciting—’
‘We’re not reconciling. We’re thinking about reconciling,’ Hope interrupted, because no one seemed to be getting the message that she wanted to take this very slowly. Glacially slowly.
‘Hope, we need to do so much work on that impulse control of yours,’ Angela said reproachfully. She rearranged her cardigan. ‘As I was saying, it’s very exciting, but I advise caution. You both need to be certain that your relationship can evolve and take into account the changes that you’ve both gone through, so I’m going to set you some homework for the holidays. Why don’t you each write a list of the things you love about each other and exchange them on Christmas Day?’
Hope was tempted to make gagging noises, but then she felt guilty. She owed it to Jack to at least try and make a go of things, instead of snarking and bitching. She sat up straight and tried to look on board with Angela’s idea. Then she risked a glance at Jack, who pulled a face at her.
‘I think it will be very romantic.’ Angela was all but simpering now. ‘And I’ll let you decide how you wish to progress with your intimate relations …’
‘It’s OK,’ Hope said hurriedly, because intimate relations wouldn’t be happening. Not for months, and she had visions of a red-faced Angela handing over a series of instructional booklets complete with flowcharts and diagrams. ‘We’re all over it.’
‘Yeah, we can take it from here.’
Angela clasped her hands together and looked up at the ceiling as if she was asking for divine assistance. ‘In that case, I’ll just wish you both a Happy Christmas and bonne chance, mes braves.’
‘YOU WAIT TILL you see your Christmas present, Hopey,’ Jack crowed for the umpteenth time that day, as they walked up to Highbury Corner and the little bar where Allison’s band, The Fuck Puppets, were having their Christmas party. ‘It’s going to blow your brain right out of your ears.’
‘I hope you haven’t spent a lot of money,’ Hope said carefully. ‘What with us being kind of broke.’
‘Money, schmoney. Anyway, you can’t put a price tag on happiness.’
Hope was pretty sure that you could, but she didn’t want to dent his buoyant mood. Jack had been stuffed full of good cheer ever since their counselling session three days before. He’d nod and smile every time Hope reminded him that they were taking things slow, but the words didn’t seem to be sinking in. He was constantly dropping hints about sleeping together ‘just so we can cuddle all night long’, and the evening before, when Hope was trying to wrap her Christmas presents, Jack had decided that the sofa could be put to much better use for an impromptu snogging session.
It was very hard not to be swept up in Jack’s optimism, and the more she resisted, the more Hope was aware that she had to cut Jack huge amounts of slack. He was trying to prove his love, and though Hope doubted his motives and his staying power, she had to let him try. Just like Jack had let her try to win him back, though if she’d been as annoying as he was, with his constant attempts to give her backrubs and gaze soulfully into her eyes when she was trying to read or watch TV or do the washing-up, even when she was putting the bins out, Hope was beginning to understand why she hadn’t been successful. All she wanted was time and space to marshal her scattered thoughts. She’d even had to write a hurried and apologetic Christmas card to Wilson while she was sitting on the loo, because it was the only time that Jack left her alone. And now she was back to feeling like an ungrateful bitch again.
‘You really don’t need to get me anything special. A handmade certificate saying that you’ll do the washing-up for a year would make me ecstatically happy,’ she said, and Jack laughed even as Hope frowned and wondered if all his good resolutions and promises to change would last for another year.
To banish these dark thoughts, in fact so she wouldn’t have to think at all, as soon as they reached the basement bar next to Highbury and Islington tube station, Hope set out on a single-minded mission to get as drunk as she could.
‘You’re caning it a bit hard, aren’t you?’ Jack remarked when Hope exhorted him to match her drink for drink. ‘If I kept up with you, I’d still be way over the limit for the drive back home tomorrow morning.’
‘Well, let’s go up the day after, then,’ Hope shouted over the cacophonous racket of The Fuck Puppets’ support act, an all-girl Sex Pistols tribute band.
Jack shook his head. ‘Hopita! That’s crazy talk. My mother would write me out of the will, and Caroline would probably banish you to the garden shed for the duration of our stay.’
‘Oh well, sod it. I’m going to get another drink,’ Hope decided, pushing past Jack so she wouldn’t have to look at his happy face for a second longer, because she should be happy too. But maybe she’d been unhappy for so long that she’d got out of the habit.
Still, drinking made Hope happy, even if it was a temporary fix, and hanging out with Lauren and Allison made her happy too, because she hadn’t seen either of them in ages. Lauren was all loved up and in the first throes of romance after the success of the first date, and all the subsequent dates after that, with the man she’d been eyeing up on her morning bus for months. Allison, however, was not loved up, and consequently was annoyed with both of them. ‘I’ve almost forgotten what the pair of you look like,’ Allison complained, just before she disappeared backstage to get into her stage outfit. ‘But at least Lauren replies to texts and Facebook messages – unlike a certain person with red hair who, unbelievably, seems to be back with the guy who shagged around behind her back.’
These were all fair points and serious obstacles to Hope getting happy. She tried to explain about the Winter Pageant and the counselling, and that working through their relationship issues had taken quite a bit of time, but Lauren and Allison were both unimpressed.
‘Love Jack, I really do,’ Lauren said, once Allison had gone to get ready. ‘But I have a zero-tolerance policy on cheating. How on earth do you come back from your bloke fucking another girl? He lied to you for months. That night that you had the dinner party, he looked me right in the eye and swore there was nothing going on between him and Floozie. I’ll never feel the same way about him now, and I’ve known him since I was three. I just don’t understand how you could take him back.’
‘It’s not as black and white as that,’ Hope argued. ‘He thought he was in love with Susie, and no matter how much it hurts, you can’t really blame him for falling in love with someone who isn’t me. It’s one of those things that no one has any control over.’
‘Don’t they?’ Lauren folded her arms. ‘How about keeping your dick in your jeans? It’s not that difficult to do. It’s what separates us from the animals.’
‘Yeah, but things weren’t that good between us, we were having problems, and anyway, maybe I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, too.’
Lauren’s elfin face was all eyes. ‘What kind of things? Things with someone else? With someone else’s penis?’ Hope would have thought it wasn’t even possible, but Lauren’s eyes widened even further. ‘It wasn’t Floozie’s boyfriend, was it? The snarky one with the glasses? What was his name again?’
Hope had to down her vodka and cranberry in one before she could answer. ‘Wilson?’ she answered, which was as much as she could say without incriminating herself. She made her own eyes go wide. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘I don’t know. Just that he always used to stare at you without blinking. Was never sure if that was creepy or sexy.’ Lauren tried to stare at Hope without blinking but it ended up as more of a squint, and Hope realised that Lauren was somewhere between tipsy and squiffy, and if she could distract her with drink, then Lauren would forget what they’d been talking about altogether. She always phoned Hope after a night on the sauce to have the blanks filled in. ‘Have you ever touched a penis that didn’t belong to Jack, Hopey? It would be kind of weird if you hadn’t.’
>
‘Yeah, but it would be kind of weird to just randomly touch random penises, or penii. Whatever. Shall I go to the bar?’ Hope asked a little desperately. ‘Come on, let’s do some shots.’
‘I swore off shots after the time I ended up in Theydon Bois at three in the morning.’ Lauren was wavering. ‘But it is nearly Christmas.’
‘And there’s no school in the morning.’ Hope nudged Lauren. ‘Tequila, vodka, Sambuca, all of the above?’
‘Let’s start with vodka and see how we get on.’
Despite the night’s shaky start, the addition of vodka shots meant that by the time The Fuck Puppets took to the stage dressed as slutty Christmas trees, both Hope and Lauren were long past squiffy and heading straight for good, old-fashioned drunk, and needed very little encouragement to get on stage for the encore and shout their way through ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Jingle Bell Rock’.
Usually when Hope was this drunk, Jack disowned her. Or kept warning her that she ‘was making a right show of herself’, but this night, he didn’t seem to mind at all. On the contrary, he was complicit in keeping Hope’s alcohol levels topped up, even though he switched to root beer so he’d be able to handle the long drive back to the mother country in the morning. After the bands had finished, Hope persuaded the DJ to play ‘Twist and Shout’ and Jack even took to the dancefloor with her. He didn’t dance so much as shuffle from one foot to the other with his arms tight around Hope, but he was dancing. More than that, he was trying really, really hard to get them back to a happier place.
Hope knew she’d been putting up walls, but she felt something inside her come tumbling down when she glanced up at Jack’s face and saw it pitted with effort, hair falling into his eyes, his bottom lip caught between his teeth as he jerkily propelled them around the tiny dancefloor.
‘I do love you, Jack,’ Hope murmured, but he couldn’t hear her over the music so she had to bellow it, which wasn’t very romantic, but Jack’s eyes lit up and he gave her a goofy, elastic grin that she hadn’t seen for a long, long time. Hope hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it, how much she’d missed Jack when he was being loving and silly and not trying to be cool. Looking up at him now, Hope was sure she could see the boy she fell in love with. She just needed to find a way back to him.
Even having to wait for the bus home while it tipped down with rain couldn’t dent Hope’s newfound sanguinity or the effect of all the spirits she’d drunk. Once they were home, she was going to throw herself heart, body and soul into reconciling them. She was going to show Jack that she was in. She was so in. They were going to have intimate relations tonight, if it killed her.
‘Put the kettle on and make me a cuppa, there’s a love,’ she begged Jack, as soon as they got through the front door and were still dripping on the hall lino. ‘I’m going to put on my black lace knickers.’
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ Jack asked, snuggling up behind Hope and nuzzling through damp hair until he could kiss her neck. ‘And why put them on if they’re going to be taken off after five minutes?’
Hope started as Jack’s hand closed over her breast and gave it a quick friendly squeeze. ‘Ten minutes,’ she insisted. ‘At least ten minutes of foreplay before the knickers come down.’
‘Is that before or after you drink your tea?’ Jack’s hand crept down because it was the turn of her left buttock to get a squeeze.
‘I’m excellent at multi-tasking,’ Hope reminded him as she twisted out of range of his hands. ‘Right, I’m on knicker duty, you get on with the tea-making.’
It was all clear to Hope now. Intimate relations would have sorted them out weeks ago if Angela hadn’t tried to get all smart and reverse psychology on them. If they’d been having sex, then obviously everything would have been better, and there would have been none of that business with Wilson. She couldn’t feel guilty about the night because it had been wonderful and Wilson had been wonderful, but maybe it had been nothing more than finding solace with another man because she was skin-starved and desperate to be wanted by someone and Jack wasn’t there any more.
But Jack was right there in the kitchen now and tunelessly whistling as he waited for the kettle to boil and if they had sex now and set the alarm for ten, they could probably have sex again in the morning and still make it back to Whitfield in plenty of time for dinner.
Taking off her sopping leopard faux-fur coat was a step in the right direction, especially as it smelt of wet dog. Or maybe it smelt of wet leopard. A fake wet leopard, Hope decided as she tugged off her black knee-high boots without unzipping them first and nearly fell over.
Hope kept all her sexy stuff in the bottom drawer of her nightstand, even though her sexy stuff consisted of one pair of black lace knickers, a copy of The Story of O, which squicked her out rather than turned her on, a Rabbit, which Jack had brought her with the ridiculous idea that she’d let him watch while she used it, and a pair of pink fun-fur handcuffs, which were far more tacky than they were sexy.
Really her collection of sexy stuff was pitiful, Hope thought, as she yanked off her tights and boring white cotton pants and threaded one foot through her seductive black lace boy-cut shorts, which chafed her unmentionables if she wore them for too long. Putting them on standing up proved to be far more complicated than Hope had expected, so she lay down on the bed.
The room whirled around her once she was horizontal, and Hope had to shut her eyes for a second so everything stopped whirling and stayed still like it was meant to. It was so comfy that ten more seconds couldn’t hurt, and Hope thought about sitting up to put her knickers on but that would have required a Herculean effort on her part, and when Jack came in with her tea not two minutes later, she was naked from the waist down, the knickers clutched in her hand, and snoring gently.
‘HONESTLY, HOPEY, YOU don’t have to keep apologising,’ Jack said the next morning, when he got behind the wheel of their Nissan Micra, which spent most of its days parked several streets away and covered in a tarpaulin. ‘The first ten times was enough.’
‘But I am sorry,’ Hope croaked. ‘Not just for falling asleep when I promised you intimate relations, but for throwing up all over the bathroom floor an hour later.’
‘Yeah, well I am still kind of pissed off about that,’ Jack admitted, as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘Usually you’re really good about being sick in disposable containers or on easy-wipe surfaces, but I’ll let it go just this once if you promise to stop calling it “intimate relations”.’
Hope glanced at Jack suspiciously. He’d have been well within his rights to be seething, even though she had already walked down to Marks & Spencer to stock up on snacks for the journey as an act of contrition. Well, contrition and a futile attempt to clear her pounding head.
She unscrewed the top from her bottle of Diet Coke and swallowed another two paracetamol. They really needed to start working soon. ‘I can’t take music right now, shall we listen to Radio 4 instead?’
‘Radio 4 is for old people,’ Jack said indignantly, but the ready smile of the last few days was hovering on his lips, and Hope was relieved that going to sleep on the job, or before the job had even got started, hadn’t undone days of goodwill. ‘What about a podcast?’
They were becoming experts at compromising, Hope thought to herself a little smugly, as she nixed the idea of listening to a whole load of musos waffle on about the recording of some classic rock album and agreed to a Doctor Who podcast. Soon they were heading through North London to join the M1. Jack didn’t even get angry when the satnav directed him to Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and it took them half an hour to get out of the car park.
‘This good mood of yours, how long is it going to last?’ Hope asked, once they were on the motorway. ‘It’s starting to freak me out a bit. You are allowed to be grumpy if you want.’
‘But I don’t feel grumpy. I feel really happy,’ Jack said simply, turning his head ever so slightly so that he could smile at Hope, before quickly averting his ga
ze. He didn’t like driving on the motorway and preferred to give the road ahead his full attention, but he liked being driven by Hope even less because she crunched the gears and didn’t give the road ahead enough of her attention. ‘You’re going to be really happy, too, when you open your Christmas present. Ecstatic, in fact. Pity that we’re expected to stay in our respective houses, because you’ll be wanting to give me some serious intimate relations as a thank you.’
‘I thought we weren’t going to call it that any more?’ Hope folded her arms and tried not to think about the ordeal that lay ahead, including the separate bedrooms in separate houses, which was more about Caroline and Marge not being able to agree who should host the golden couple than for reasons of propriety. It was much, much nicer to think about the Christmas present that Jack had been bigging up all week. ‘So, what is it, then? Give me a clue.’
‘It’s vintage, and I think it might make your mum even happier than it makes you,’ Jack said obliquely.
‘My mum hates anything vintage. She says it’s just second-hand, and somebody probably died while they were wearing it.’ Hope ripped open a bag of Percy Pigs and shoved one in the direction of Jack’s mouth, which he opened obediently. ‘So, is it something I can wear?’
‘Yeah, but it’s not clothing.’
‘Hmm, is it an accessory?’
‘Kind of.’
‘It either is, or it isn’t.’
Jack shook his head. ‘It’s not so much about what it is, but what it symbolises.’
‘So, what does it symbolise?’
‘Well, how much I love you, for a start,’ Jack said with the same direct, matter-of-factness that made Hope feel a bit teary. ‘Shall we stop at Scratchwood Services for the first cup of coffee of our trek to the ancestral homeland?’
‘Like you even have to ask.’ They always stopped for a coffee at every other service station, which also meant stopping for a pee at every other service station. It broke up the journey. ‘I didn’t think we’d get here again.’