Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (53 page)

‘It’s your lucky night,’ said Wilson behind her, and Hope turned round, nearly landing flat on her face in the process, to see him standing there with her shoe and bag in his hands.

‘Oh God, I don’t know how to thank you!’ Hope cried, cradling her bag to her chest and looking inside. Everything seemed present and correct. She looked up in time to catch the leer on Wilson’s face, like he had a really good idea of a way she could thank him. It was only there for one blink of her eyes, then his face settled back into its usual austere lines. ‘I’m so on to you now, Wilson. That grumpy thing doesn’t cut it any more.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Wilson snapped. ‘I was born grumpy and you … You’re very drunk, aren’t you?’

Hope didn’t know why he sounded so surprised. ‘How
come
you’re not drunk? You matched me shot for shot.’

Wilson held up his index finger and slowly brought it towards his nose. If he hadn’t been wearing glasses, he’d have poked himself in the eye. ‘I might not seem drunk to the casual observer, but on the inside I’m absolutely spannered.’

‘Good.’ Hope nodded in satisfaction, then grabbed his arm to keep herself upright as she put on her other shoe. Her tights and the hem of her dress were covered in talcum powder. ‘Shall we get gone?’

‘Taxi?’

‘Hell, yes!’ It seemed perfectly natural, though rather impractical, to cling to Wilson as they tottered down the narrow, twisty stairs that led to the side entrance of the pub. There was a little crowd gathered in the doorway, shivering and not showing any inclination to move, so Hope and Wilson were forced to push through them and came to a grinding halt as they stared out on to a world that was heaped with mounds of snow. Yet more big, fat flakes were falling from the sky and turning Eversholt Street, usually a soulless thoroughfare that roared with traffic, into a scene from a Christmas card.

Hope stepped out and tipped her head back to try and catch a snowflake on the tip of her tongue. Within a few seconds even her eyelashes were so thickly coated with snow that she couldn’t see, and she gave an excited little shriek and surged forward, not even caring that the snow was seeping through the thin soles of her party shoes.

She loved the snow, and not just because it made her think of snow days and missing school. Snow made everything look white and magical. It hid all the grey, all the rough edges, and always gave Hope the same kind of satisfaction she got from putting freshly laundered linen on the bed, or achieving a perfect glossy smoothness when she was icing a cake. Oh God, she didn’t even want to think about icing cakes, or frosting then icing fifty cupcakes, to be more specific.

‘You’re not really wearing the right footwear for frolicking in five inches of snow,’ Wilson said, coming up behind her. ‘You’ll get chilblains.’

‘Do people still get chilblains?’ Hope wondered aloud, as she skidded precariously along the street. ‘You know, I think the cold air has sobered me up.’

Then she promptly fell over.

Wilson was laughing so hard that it was a while before he could help Hope to her feet. She realised that her hair was soaked because she hadn’t put her hat on, and she was so cold that her teeth were chattering and her bones were aching, and, actually, she didn’t like the snow half as much as she remembered.

Camden High Street was snowed-in, only a few cars were inching slowly down the road. Hope’s heart sank as they approached a bus stop and saw a miserable huddle of people standing there like they were waiting to buy bread in an Eastern Bloc country some time in the 1970s.

‘Been waiting long?’ Wilson asked as Hope glanced up at the countdown board to see when the next bus was due. It was annoyingly, unhelpfully devoid of all information.

‘For ever,’ someone said glumly.

‘At least half an hour,’ someone else clarified.

Wilson turned to Hope with a resigned expression. ‘We’ll have to walk.’

Hope had walked home from Camden before, but that was on a balmy Saturday night when it had taken just under an hour and had included a mercy dash to the garage on Camden Road where she’d spent ten minutes begging and pleading with the staff to use their loo. But walking home in a fricking blizzard in high heels was quite another matter.

‘Let’s walk up to the station and see if we can get a dodgy minicab,’ she said, and although Wilson looked disapproving he also looked as if he wasn’t relishing the thought of walking home either.

It was the only night in living memory when even the dodgy minicab drivers were tucked up indoors. ‘I’m not walking home,’ Hope insisted. ‘I can’t. I’ll die of frostbite. There must be a hotel somewhere near here.’

‘I thought you were a hardy North Country lass, not a poncey Southerner,’ Wilson scoffed, and it was all right for him in his brogues with the thick soles and a T-shirt and a jumper and a thick, lined woollen coat and scarf and hat.

‘But when it snowed in Whitfield, my Mum made me wear wellies and thermal underwear,’ Hope all but wailed.

‘Look, it’s ten minutes to mine …’

‘More like half an hour in these conditions!’

‘Twenty minutes to mine, and you can crash there or at least warm up.’

It was as good an idea as any. Though as they began to walk again, she didn’t know whether she could manage even one single minute. Her feet were wet and cold. In fact, they were so cold that the word ‘cold’ ceased to have any real meaning any more. Same with the word ‘frozen’. Her face, contorted in agony as it was, must have given her away even though she was trying to be a brave little soldier.

‘Can you really not walk any more?’ Wilson asked.

‘I’m all right,’ Hope said in a tiny, uncertain voice.

Wilson stopped and looked at Hope and her face, which was scrunched up in pain and discomfort. ‘Well, I could carry you,’ he offered.

‘Don’t be daft! It’s really slippery, and we’ve got at least a mile to walk, and I’m not exactly a featherweight.’

He was already squatting down. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a piggyback,’ he said. ‘I’m used to hefting around heavy pieces of equipment.’

‘Gosh, thanks for that,’ Hope said, and she thought that Wilson must also still be quite drunk to volunteer for such a kamikaze mission, and maybe she was too because she was hitching up her skirt, giggling wildly as she did so, and
climbing
on to Wilson’s back. He wrapped his arms around her thighs and rose slowly to his full height. ‘Don’t drop me!’ she squealed.

‘Then don’t make any sudden movements,’ he warned her as he set off slowly through the snow.

Hope wasn’t cold any more. Well, she was, her feet were like size-six blocks of ice and she had a draught of arctic air whistling around her legs, but the rest of her, pressed up against Wilson as he trudged up Kentish Town Road, was toasty. Positively sizzling, in fact.

There wasn’t much Hope could do to help him, short of losing a couple of stone within the next five seconds, so she decided to keep talking so Wilson didn’t suddenly keel over from over-exertion and go to sleep in a snow drift, never to wake up again.

‘I think that I could really love Northern Soul,’ she said. ‘But isn’t it all on little seven-inch records? I don’t even have a turntable.’

‘Well, luckily for you, I have lots of little seven-inch Northern Soul records that I’ve converted to MP3s,’ Wilson panted. ‘You can put them on your iPod while you’re thawing out.’

‘That would be great, except you’ll have to do it for me. I don’t know how to put songs on to my iPod. Someone else always does it for me.’ She didn’t want to say Jack’s name, even though Jack was probably snoring away under their 14-tog duvet, unaware that his only-just-ex-girlfriend had her legs wrapped around another man, and might actually die from hypothermia before the night was out.

She heard Wilson suck in a breath and thought that his keeling over was imminent until he exclaimed sharply, ‘That’s
pathetic
. It’s not difficult to put songs on an iPod, even my seven-year-old niece can do it.’

‘I’ve never got round to figuring out how to do it myself.’ Hope wrapped her arms tighter around Wilson and rested
her
chin on the top of his head. ‘I can change a plug but don’t ever ask me to change a lightbulb.’

‘Changing a lightbulb is much easier than changing a plug.’

‘Not when you have severe vertigo.’ Hope decided that Wilson didn’t need to know that often she needed to hold someone’s hand when she was going down stairs if she wasn’t in the right, very focused headspace to master them unaided.

Wilson grunted as he took a left so they were off the main road and not that far from his loft. Hope really didn’t want to walk, but she could hear his laboured breathing increasing with every step he took, so she dug her knees into him.

‘Stop. Stop!’ she said again, when he ignored her. ‘I can do the last bit.’

‘Are you sure?’ Wilson asked, but he was letting Hope slide down and missed the agonised expression on her face as her feet made contact with the ground – or the thick snow that covered the ground. ‘Let’s just go as fast as we can.’

He tucked his arm tightly around her and they hurried through the narrow streets, without even the track of someone else’s footsteps to make it easier. Hope went as fast as she could, feet trying to slip from under her, but even though she wasn’t on his back any more, Wilson was still holding her up and she didn’t doubt that if she did fall, he’d catch her before she could hit the ground.

IT ONLY TOOK
three minutes to reach Wilson’s building but they were the longest three minutes of Hope’s life. The ten seconds it took Wilson to tap in the security code to open the door were longer still, and walking up the four flights of stairs on cold, unrelenting concrete hurt even more than tramping through virgin snow in paper-thin shoes.

As soon as the door was open, Hope scurried across the studio floor. ‘Sorry to make myself at home, but can I put the kettle on?’ she called over her shoulder as she hobbled up the spiral staircase that led to Wilson’s bachelor pad, the metal steps adding insult to severe injury.

Wilson caught up with Hope before she’d even had time to locate the kettle and fill it with water.

‘Bath,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s the only way you’re going to warm up and not contract pneumonia. I’ll make tea and find you something to wear while you’re in the tub.’ Wilson took Hope’s elbow and steered her to the bathroom, which was more of an alcove, but at least it had a door.

It took a couple of minutes to fill the claw-foot, roll-top bath with steaming-hot water, and then Hope was quickly stripping off her clothes. Getting naked in another man’s home felt like a betrayal, especially when she could hear the other man pottering about on the other side of the door. Especially when Hope knew that if the other man knocked on the door and asked if he could come in, she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d refuse him permission. God, what
was
wrong with her? Her and Jack were barely over, and as it was, Hope still wasn’t 100 per cent convinced they were over until Jack looked their parents in the eye and told them it was over. Or he moved out and left his key. Or changed his Facebook Relationship Status to Single. Until then, they weren’t properly broken up, which was why it felt so wrong to currently be naked in Wilson’s bathroom, but she could hardly have a medicinal bath with her clothes on.

Hope slid into the bath and knew a moment of perfect bliss as her chilled, goose-pimpled flesh met silky-hot water. Then her flesh turned from an unattractive bluey-white to bright red, and she had to bite her lip hard to stop herself from crying out in pain when her feet suddenly felt as if they were under attack from millions of razor-toothed beasties.

Hope sat there with a fist wedged into her mouth as her icy flesh stung its way back to full working order, hardly daring to move because even wiggling her toes caused untold agonies.

There was a gentle tap on the door. ‘I can’t hear any splashing. You haven’t drowned, have you?’

‘No,’ Hope called out in a voice that trembled a little. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

‘I’ve left you some stuff outside and there’s a robe on the back of the door.’

God, talking to Wilson while she was naked felt even worse than betrayal. But not so bad that Hope stopped wondering what would happen if she emerged from the bathroom absolutely starkers and slippery wet. The wave of lust that hit her, as she imagined pressing her naked body against black cashmere and dark-blue denim and feeling Wilson hard and getting harder through his clothes, was a warning that she needed to pull herself together. She still loved Jack and unlike Jack, Hope did have some semblance of self-control. Still, it was no wonder that when she
stepped
out of the bath and caught sight of herself in the mirror that took up one wall, all of her was flushed a rosy pink that owed more to her feverish imagination than to the hot bath.