‘Don’t start that all over again! Is that what this is all about?’ Jack shouted, and he suddenly wrenched open the door of the car so he could hurl his cup of coffee as far as he could, which actually wasn’t that far. ‘How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?’
She hadn’t wanted to do it like this. In fact, it had been merely minutes ago that Hope had even realised that she was going to do this, and now they were shouting at each other in a small car in the Scratchwood Services car park, and even though Jack had slammed his door shut again, people were walking past the car and peering at them curiously as it was obvious they were having the mother of all rows. ‘Look,’ Hope said, clinging on to the edge of her seat, like she was clinging on to her temper. ‘Look, you did fall in love with Susie. You did sleep with her and it changed everything.’
‘You think I don’t know that,’ Jack said bitterly, and he tossed the jewellery box on to the dashboard. ‘I did one bad, stupid, horrible thing in thirteen years. Can you just give me a break?’
‘You have no idea, do you?’ Hope clutched her hands through her hair. ‘It isn’t just the cheating, you’ve put me through hell. You made me tell our mums that we were breaking up. You stormed out whenever you felt like it. I even took it in turns with you to sleep on the fucking sofa! Why did I have to sleep on the sofa?’
‘You agreed. We agreed that it was fair to take turns,’ Jack reminded her, but Hope shook her head.
‘No, you decided and, as usual, I agreed with you, just like when you got struck by a lightning bolt and realised you were still in love with me and that we were all systems go, I eventually went along with that, too.’ Hope placed her hand on Jack’s arm, a gesture that she’d made maybe ten thousand times so that touching Jack was as familiar as brushing the hair out of her eyes or scratching her nose, but now, in this moment, touching Jack felt like something she wasn’t allowed to do. But touching Jack also made him Jack again, and not just the man she was going to leave.
‘You have to get over this, Hopey,’ he said in a low voice.
‘I can’t, and for all my nagging and shouting, we both know that you drive this relationship. We always end up doing what you want – but not this time,’ Hope said, her voice thrumming with resolve. ‘We are not good for each other. Susie, for all her faults, and she has many, won’t stand for your shit. Not like I do. It’s over, Jack. We can’t do this any more.’
‘But we’re on our way home!’ Jack pointed out. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have proposed, but we’ve got Christmas to get through, and then we’ll come back to London and we’ll have more counselling and …’
‘No,’ Hope said firmly. ‘No.’ She unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘I’m not going home. I’m staying in London.’
Jack looked at her with a mixture of shock and awe. ‘You can’t. Your mum will kill you.’
‘Just watch me.’ Hope was just about to open the door, when Jack touched her arm. It was a light, tentative touch as if, like her, he already felt that he didn’t have the right to touch her any more. ‘You can’t just make a decision like this in five seconds flat.’
Hope turned to him with troubled eyes. ‘The thing is … this decision wasn’t made in the last five seconds. I think I’ve been working up to it for the last three months.’
Jack bent his head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, but it made no difference.
‘It’s OK,’ Hope said, swallowing down her anger, because she was sick of being angry with Jack. ‘I’m sorry, too.’
Jack scrambled out of the car to open the boot and help drag out her suitcase. ‘I could drive you back to Holloway, if you like?’ he offered, but Hope shook her head.
‘I’ll be fine. I mean, technically, I think I’m still in London.’
‘This is so surreal. Like, fifteen minutes ago I was proposing, and now you’re leaving me and I’m letting you go.’ Jack looked baffled. ‘This is all so fucked up. You’re going to have to spend Christmas on your own.’
The thought of spending Christmas on her own, of being on her own, wasn’t a horrifying one. ‘I’ll be fine,’ Hope insisted. ‘I could always go round to Elaine’s or Alice from next door would probably have me.’
‘But, it can’t end like this, what about …’ Hope was sure that Jack had more to say, but she couldn’t bear to listen to it, so she rose up on tiptoe to press a last, lingering kiss on his mouth.
It was the saddest kiss in the world.
WITH THE HELP of Google Maps, Hope was on a bus within thirty minutes of abandoning Jack in the car park like an unwanted puppy.
In an hour she was on a tube train, and not even an hour after that, she was home. She hadn’t cried, although she felt as if she should be crying, but she had a tense quickening in her stomach as if a million tiny birds were flapping their wings against her abdominal walls. Hope couldn’t tell if it was dread or exhilaration or a heady combination of both, but she knew she couldn’t stay in the flat they’d bought together. Besides, she’d planned to spend the next six days in Whitfield and there was nothing to eat in the house, apart from several huge tins of chocolates and a couple of fancy biscuit-selection boxes.
Hope was determined not to wallow in chocolate and self-pity. Now wasn’t the time for wallowing, it was the time for re-grouping, nursing her wounded soul and making some nourishing soup, while she painted the kitchen. As soon as she was back from the bloodbath that was people doing their Christmas food shopping in Morrisons, she turned round and went out again, this time to the big DIY store on Holloway Road, to buy paint and things to apply paint with.
The third time she walked through the front door, Hope’s mind was already racing with options that would force her to go out again, but she ignored the clamouring voices and instead put on the ill-advised dungarees she’d bought a couple of years back, which could only be improved by a splattering of buttermilk-coloured paint, tied her hair up in a scarf and tried out a Rosie the Riveter pose in the bathroom mirror.
Then she got busy with masking tape and a paint-roller, and listened to Radio 4 as she painted all the kitchen-cupboard doors that she could reach without a ladder. But then there was nothing to do until tomorrow when the doors would be dry enough for a second coat, and now Hope couldn’t even make a sandwich because she didn’t want to smudge the paint.
She decided to run a hot bath so she could soak and scrub at the blobs of dry paint. Hope had only just carefully eased herself into the water when her phone rang. Mindful that she didn’t want to compound her misery by dropping her phone in the water, she carefully picked it up with a damp hand.
Hope almost wished her phone had gone to a watery grave when her mother opened the conversation with, ‘Well, you’ve really gone and done it now, haven’t you, young lady?’
‘I was going to call you,’ Hope said weakly, although she hadn’t been going to at all. ‘I know it might have come as a bit of a shock, but not really, if you think about how things have been between Jack and I.’
‘Jack and me,’ her mother barked. ‘The poor boy is in pieces, and what about your father and me? Or Marge and Roger? You’ve ruined Christmas for everyone. I hope you’re happy!’
‘Well, no, I’m not even a little bit happy.’ Hope sank as far down in the water as she dared. ‘I was going to wait until after Christmas, but then when Jack proposed …’
‘He actually proposed?’ her mother queried sharply. ‘What is wrong with you, Hope?’
‘We don’t love each other. Not like we used to.’
‘What’s love got to do with it? You’re not a teenager any more, and you’re throwing thirteen years out of the window because you have this silly notion that you need to find yourself. Well, all you’ll find is a selfish, inconsiderate girl. You’ve let everyone down.’
‘Oh, I think I’d have let them down more if me and Jack, sorry, Jack and I, had got married, then decided to get a divorce a few months later,’ Hope snapped. ‘And don’t you dare call me selfish! You don’t give a shit about what I wa
nt or what Jack really wants, it’s all about you and Marge and this ridiculous idea that you’ve been peddling all our lives that we’re perfect for each other. We’re not!’
Her mother didn’t say anything for a while, though Hope could hear her choked gasps like she was holding back her sobs.
‘Mum,’ she said in a much gentler voice. ‘It’s really not the end of the world. Couples break up all the time, but surely you can understand why I couldn’t spend six days with Jack and both our families after telling him that we were over?’
‘No, I don’t understand at all. It’s Christmas and you know that none of your grandparents are in good health,’ her mother reminded her grimly. ‘This could be the last Christmas that we all spend together, and now you won’t be here. I hope you can live with that.’
It made Hope feel guilty, as it did every time her mother sang the same song, but both her grandfathers usually dozed between meals, her father’s mother was always glued to the TV and made everyone take a vow of silence during the Queen’s speech, and she’d call her other grandma in a couple of days to explain the situation, and she was sure she’d get a much more sympathetic reaction than she was currently getting from her own mother.
‘There’s not really much I can do about that, Mum,’ Hope sighed.
‘What you can do about it is to get off your bottom, make your way to Euston and buy a train ticket. There’s no way that you’ll get a seat at such short notice so you’ll have to stand for the entire journey, but let that be a lesson to you.’
Hope ground her teeth and felt a shooting pain in her jaw. ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Well … How … No? No?’
She gave her mother a lot of backchat and bad temper but rarely outright defiance. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days,’ Hope said with what she felt was great daring. ‘Love to Dad.’
‘Now just wait a minute. You will not call me in a couple of days, I want you home tomorrow, do you hear me?’ Caroline Delafield was shouting so loudly that Hope was sure that even Alice from next door could hear her.
‘Short of making Dad drive all the way down to London, physically restrain me and carry me to the car, you can’t make me come home.’ Hope kicked her legs out in frustration and sent a wave of water sloshing on to the bathroom floor. ‘You might find it hard to believe, but I’m actually having a pretty crappy time, and you haven’t even asked if I’m all right. Do you dislike me so much that you can only stand to be around me if Jack is there to sweeten the deal? Why can’t you be on my side for once? Is that too much to ask?’
‘That’s not fair, Hopey!’
‘Good, so you know what it feels like then, don’t you?’
Then Hope did something that she’d never dared to do before and hung up on her mother, then switched off her phone so her mother couldn’t call her back to harangue her. Both the phone call and the hanging-up rattled Hope so much that once she got out of the bath after a quick lather and rinse and not the long, luxurious soak she’d planned, she realised that she’d been going about this all wrong.
She needed to wallow for a little bit. Wallowing was all part of the grieving process. Her mind made up, Hope climbed into her cosiest, fleeciest pyjamas, made up a hot-water bottle, stuck the first season of Sex and the City into the DVD player (Jack had always refused to let her watch it when he was around), then got a tub of pralines and cream ice-cream out of the freezer and a bottle of Baileys that had been a present from a grateful parent from the fridge.
Eating a whole tub of ice-cream drenched in Baileys and sobbing as soon as Mr Big appeared on the screen didn’t make Hope feel even a little better. Inevitably, she had to suddenly scramble off the sofa and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up the sickly concoction. She stayed on the bathroom floor, almost curled around the toilet bowl, and knew that the sobbing she’d done on the settee had just been a little warm-up for these tears. She was crying because of Jack, that was a given, and because she had a terrible relationship with her mother, and because she’d just been sick, and because now her future was a blank page. She could be who she wanted to be, go anywhere in the world, do anything she wanted, and that kind of unfettered freedom was utterly terrifying. So terrifying that Hope found herself rising to her knees to throw up again, although there was nothing left in her stomach but bile.
As she crawled into bed with nothing but a hot-water bottle for comfort, Hope had never felt so alone. Lauren had gone up to Manchester today to see her sister before she ended her journey in Whitfield. Allison had flown out to Mauritius as she had no truck with her mother insisting that she came home for Christmas. There was Elaine, but they didn’t have the kind of friendship that could stand tearful phone calls at almost midnight, unless all of Blue Class had suddenly been wiped out in a freak accident. Hope could only think of one person that she could call, and knew that they’d drop everything to come round and make her toast and tea – and that was Wilson. He’d be sure to tell her in no uncertain terms what he thought of her unreasonable demands, but he’d still do it. And it was a tempting thought, but God knows, she’d made enough unreasonable demands on him to last several lifetimes.
Instead she lay in the darkness, and every time she fought her way to a place of relative calm so she might be able to go to sleep, a fresh wave of panic and regret and horrible, bone-aching, heart-rending sadness washed over her, and she cried until the tears trickled across her cheeks and into her ears and she had to keep shifting position.
The twenty-third of December was a brand-new day, heralded by bright winter sun pouring down on Hope as she slowly and carefully uncurled her limbs and stretched so she could assess how her wounds, both physical and emotional, were faring. She ached from the excesses of the night before, head faintly pounding, stomach slightly bruised, and she still felt miserable, but she didn’t feel as if the end of the world was quite so nigh.
Hope lay there for a while, contemplating the rest of her life and how she’d never again wake up with Jack curled around her and snuffling soggily against her neck, his hold tightening as she made a bid for freedom. People always said that being on your own wasn’t the same as being lonely, but Hope knew it would be a while before she could tell the difference. Especially as right now there was no one to moan at until he got out of bed and put the kettle on.
She didn’t have a renewed sense of purpose, but Hope managed to paint a second coat on the lower kitchen cupboards, and she even managed to stand on the second rung of the stepladder for, ooooh, five whole seconds as she contemplated the feasibility of painting the cupboards above the worktop. Five seconds was all it took for her heart to start racing and beads of sweat to pop out along her forehead. Still, there were lots of other bits of wood she could paint, like the windowsill and the skirting boards, and she could even paint halfway up the walls. It wasn’t like she was completely useless.
She was just giving the skirting board a second coat of the duck-egg blue she’d chosen as an accent colour when Hope heard the satisfying thud of the post being dropped through the letterbox. It was just the distraction she needed, but the handful of stiff envelopes containing Christmas cards addressed to ‘Jack and Hope’ threatened to derail her, until she came to a large white Jiffy bag with only her name on it.
As far as Hope could remember all the Christmas presents she’d ordered on the internet had arrived, been wrapped and sent off, or were currently in Jack’s custody, so she couldn’t imagine what it was.
She sat cross-legged on the hall floor and tore into the parcel without any thought of carefully unpicking the flap so she could reuse the padded envelope. When she pulled out the card, it was obvious who’d sent it, because instead of a winter scene or a couple of fat robins in Santa outfits or even the Nativity tableaux favoured by her parents’ friends, the card featured Blue Class all wearing Santa hats and smiling goofily at the camera. Even though he’d been in a mood with her the evening of the Pageant, Wilson had still tak
en the time and effort to arrange this little photographic surprise for her. God, he’d even magicked up thirty Santa hats out of thin air or, rather, he’d sweet-talked them out of Dorothy who’d taken charge of the keys to the prop cupboard and had been very reluctant to let them out of her sight.
DEAR HOPE
HAPPY HOLIDAYS. HOPE (I WISH YOU HAD A DIFFERENT FIRST NAME, BECAUSE IT MAKES WRITING MESSAGES IN CARDS VERY TRICKY, BUT ONLY THE WORD ‘HOPE’ WILL DO) THAT THE COMING YEAR BRINGS YOU THE HUGE AMOUNTS OF LUCK AND HAPPINESS YOU DESERVE.
BEST WISHES
WILSON
As well as the card, there were also three CDs in the Jiffy bag with a typewritten note.
Hope
I asked the DJ at the Northern Soul Night to send me over a copy of his setlist so I could burn you a CD. I also burnt some other tracks that I thought you might like.
More importantly, here are detailed and, dare I say, foolproof instructions on how to put the songs on your iPod.
Wilson
He’d written out a bullet-point list that didn’t seem too onerous, and had even provided a couple of links to online video tutorials that Hope could watch if she didn’t understand a set of clear and concise instructions that even some of Blue Class could follow. Still, for now she could listen to the CDs on the DVD player in the lounge, and she’d be able to hear the music in the kitchen if she really cranked up the volume.
So, the second day after she left Jack turned out to be a good day after all. There was one minor wobble and a weep when she heard Irma Thomas sing ‘It’s Starting to Get to Me Now’ on one of Wilson’s mix CDs, but she managed to steer clear of all alcohol and tins of chocolates. And if she couldn’t get back to sleep after waking up for a pee at three in the morning, because she started to agonise that she’d made a terrible mistake and that Jack was probably at that very moment in a tacky Rochdale nightclub chatting up a nubile eighteen-year-old who was home from university for the Christmas break, that was only to be expected.