It was as if Paul couldn’t get Gemma out of his system. They were one of those couples who seem to be attached by a piece of elastic, pinging back and forwards to each other, breaking up and making up. Perhaps it was the drama that made it addictive.
I had to take a stand, though; nobody gets to have two girlfriends, especially if one of them is me! I called him but he didn’t take the call. I assumed that after Nicky had quizzed Darren, he had warned Paul that I knew. I left a message on his phone saying to call me, and that I didn’t intend to keep phoning him all day. I told him I knew what was going on and I wanted a word. It was a couple of hours before he called back. Paul always hated confrontation and avoided it whenever possible, but this time he had no choice.
‘Lindsey,’ he said straight away, ‘I know how this probably looks to you, but hear me out. You’ve only heard this from Nicky who heard it from Darren – give me a chance to say my piece. Please?’
‘Absolutely, Paul,’ I answered. ‘You go for it, babes. You tell me how, when Darren told Nicky that you were with Gemma again, that he got it all wrong. Did Darren mishear it? Did Nicky not understand what he was saying? Have you not been phoning Gemma, not seeing her, not sleeping with her again?’ Of course, I didn’t know for sure they were having sex again, but I assumed they were.
‘Oh, Lindsey,’ he pleaded. ‘You make it sound so bad, but it wasn’t deliberate. She just kept hanging around me.’
‘And that was it? You just had to give in because she was pestering you? That, Paul Hunter, is a pathetic excuse for being unfaithful to me but it doesn’t matter anyway. We’re finished,’ I told him.
‘Now, babes,’ he said, ‘I know you don’t mean that. I’m really sorry, really sorry. I’ll finish with Gemma then we’ll be fine.’ His voice faltered. He knew I wasn’t going to take this well.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! ‘You’ll finish with her?’ I said. ‘You’ll finish with her? For how long, Paul? A day? A week? You’ve “finished” with her so many times, and gone back to her so many times, that I don’t think you even understand what the word means. Let me show you how it’s done. We, you and me, Lindsey and Paul, are finished. Now watch and see how it really works.’ With that, I put the phone down and switched it off for the rest of the day.
That evening I went round to Nicky’s and her family were all really supportive. Nicky’s mum – who was Paul’s auntie, after all – even went so far as to say that she thought Paul was making a huge mistake, and they all thought I was perfect for him. It was ironic; everyone seemed to think that but Paul.
Funnily enough, I soon got over my initial anger with him. I know he’d cheated on me, but it wasn’t about me. He had a self-destructive streak that sometimes made him spoil the things he cared about the most. In many ways he was just so young and immature, but there was still something about him that made him loveable. He was like a naughty puppy stealing a biscuit from the coffee table; you can’t stay mad at them for long because they’re just doing what’s in their nature. However, I was determined not to back down. I wasn’t a masochist, after all.
Over the following days and weeks, it got harder for me rather than easier. The problem was that I was so close to his cousin Nicky and sister Leanne that I couldn’t avoid hearing about Paul, and it pickled my brain. I always knew what was happening with him and Gemma and I didn’t want to know. I just needed to get over him but I didn’t get the chance. Sometimes I would see them in the distance when we came out of different clubs at the same time, or I would hear from someone that they had been spotted somewhere. I’m not a jealous person but it was really painful seeing Paul with his arm round her and imagining him going home to bed with her. I tried not to torture myself with images of them together but at weak moments I couldn’t help it.
And Paul? He tried to phone me a few times but I never took his calls. There was nothing to say. He’d had his chance to prove that I meant something to him and he’d treated me as though I was little more than a fling.
In the weeks after we split up, two things happened to Paul – he turned 19 and he won the Regal Welsh Open, a tournament that was being televised. He beat lots of well-known players like Steve Davis, and he even beat John Higgins in the final. I watched it at my parents’ house and felt very distant from the person on the screen. The commentator said that Paul was the third youngest winner of a major professional snooker tournament of all time, after Ronnie O’Sullivan and Stephen Hendry. He was on the road to fame now, I thought. There were camera flashbulbs going off everywhere and people clapping him forever. At the end of the presentation, he was interviewed and he got the microphone and said, ‘I’d really like to thank everyone for supporting me, especially my girlfriend back in Leeds.’
I nearly jumped off the sofa, my heart in my mouth! Could he possibly mean me, or was he talking about Gemma? My dad asked, ‘Is he talking about you?’ because I hadn’t told my parents the whole story about what was going on. At that moment, I had to admit to myself that I was still in love with him. Paul had got to me; I’d loved him before, and I still loved him. The fact that he had cheated on me meant that I knew I could never trust him around Gemma again, but I still clung to the hope that he would grow up a bit and figure out what was in his best interests. Me.
Paul was in the papers a lot after he won that tournament. He’d got prize money of £60,000 and found that he had a lot of new friends hanging around, wanting to share his good fortune. He was something of a local hero in Leeds and I saw his face smiling out at me practically every time I walked past a newsstand. One night in November 1997 when I was out on the town with friends, we saw each other in a club and I managed to say ‘hello’, which was very hard. Most of the time he wasn’t around because he was away playing, but I began to hear rumours that he was going off the rails a bit, drinking lots and not practising enough.
Meanwhile, I pulled myself together and decided to try and move on with the rest of my life. I’d always fancied buying a house of my own and this seemed like a good time, so I started viewing properties. In the back of my mind, I admit that even in this I was daydreaming that if Paul and I did get back together, we’d have somewhere we could be alone. Immediately after we split up I’d been so hurt that I was determined never to get back with him, but over time it was almost as if I had forgotten how bad it had been. I know it’s crazy but I just couldn’t get over him.
That Christmas, I needed some sort of project in my life to stop me from missing him, so when I saw a house I liked I moved fast. By February I had moved in. Mum and Dad helped me with the deposit and I still had my savings to buy furniture and do the place up. I started to teach full-time, while treating private clients in the evenings. The wages were good, and I felt quite steady.
From time to time I would ask Nicky and Leanne if Paul was still with Gemma. Half of the time they didn’t know; they would only be able to work it out if she had been round recently. I had spent the last few months trying to get him out of my head and it had only had the opposite effect. I felt as though I was thinking about him all the time. I should have known that I wouldn’t be able to get him out of my system so quickly. He’d got a hold on me in the first place without me having any say in it, and now he was under my skin. Turned out I wasn’t as sensible as I’d always thought – I was certainly a complete fool for Paul Hunter.
1998–2000
By the spring of 1998, I’d settled into my own house and was feeling really confident about life in general. I was still running between three different jobs, but it was worth it. I managed to fit in a good social life and had lots of friends. My parents and my sister Tracy came round to visit me all the time and