How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

was sighing as she walked, as if in sympathy with her true feelings. Bearing trays of dessert, Jazz swept back into the dining room to find the Pop Princess sitting on her husband’s lap. She noted David’s concupiscent glance down the Pop Princess’s cleavage and smiled until her face cramped and her teeth looked ready to fall out.

‘You doan mind, do ya?’ Kinkee purred in explanation, clutching Dr Studlands’s hand as she heaved her ample bosom. ‘I just wanted to shake the hand that has saved so many lives in Africa.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it’s shaken a few other things as well,’ Jazz retorted with contrived friendliness, handing out her confectionary delights. ‘Although, darling, don’t you think she’s a little young for you?’ she said to her husband. ‘Of course, it’s the height of bad taste to point out the onset of your baldness, so I suppose that’s why I do it.’

I held my breath as my eyes jumped in Studz’s direction. But his face just creased with amusement.

‘My lovely and long-suffering wife is cross about my midlife-crisis motorbike. Pathetically clichéd, I know.’

‘Oh no, I don’t mind the bike, darling. I’m sure it must be reassuring to finally have something hard between your legs.’

My head spun to scrutinize my friend. Jazz’s mouth rose at the corners, smile held stiffly in place as if for an invisible photographer.

A murmur ran around the table, but Studz simply chuckled and raised a glass to his wife. ‘In celebration of twenty wonderful years with the only woman in the world who can keep me grounded.’

Jazz, now back at the opposite head of the table, raised her glass in reciprocation. ‘Darling,’ she enthused, and even I couldn’t tell if her buoyancy was counterfeit. She smiled luminously at her husband and we guests all exhaled for the first time in five minutes.

‘Yes, my love?’ Studz gave a languorous smile of anticipation.

‘Do you realize,’ she said sweetly, and we prepared for a loving statement of mutual warmth and respect on their twentieth wedding anniversary, ‘. . . that if I’d shot you the first time I seriously contemplated it, I’d be out on parole by now? Now, who’s up for a little partner swapping? Car keys in the centre of the table, please!’

As a way of bringing a dinner party to an abrupt end, it was fantastically successful. Under the circumstances, I could only refer to it as premature social ejaculation.

At the door, while I waited for Rory to collect me after his veterinary call-out, Jazz took my arm.

‘If you do have sex tonight I bet you it’s from behind so you don’t have to worry about not kissing . . . Or face the truth – which is that you don’t want to.’

‘Our sex-life is fine,’ I told her emphatically, flinching from the cold January draught. ‘In fact, it’s fabulous.’ I felt sorry for her. Her disappointment and humiliation were understandable, but I wouldn’t be contaminated by her rage. Rory was a kind, genial man with a big heart.

‘Sexual freedom?’ Jazz scoffed drunkenly as I fled down the steps and into Rory’s warm car. ‘Ha! Well, for married women do you know what that means? THE FREEDOM NOT TO FUCK THE BASTARD!’

Her voice echoed around the Georgian square. ‘Bastard . . .! Bastard . . .! Bastard . . .!’

‘I told you we should have roped ourselves together for safety,’ Rory grinned as I buckled up.

I squeezed his hand as we sped home. Jazz was wrong. Our sex-life was intimate and loving and tender and orgasmic. It truly was – wasn’t it?

3. The Hand – A Modern Gothic Horror Story

It was a dark and eerie night. With rain thrumming on the windowpane and the wind nagging in the treetops, our heroine was just curling up against the shadows into a cocoon of sleepy contentment when her skin pinpricked in dread as she felt The Hand. Her heart thudded against her ribcage and she stifled a scream in her dry throat. She flinched. She winced. She wound herself up tighter than the white lace nightie twisted around her quivering frame . . .

It is the stuff of horror movies. Every woman’s worst nightmare.

Men make horror movies about The Blob or The Alien or The Thing. What terrorises men is Wolfman, the Zombie, Dracula, Frankenstein. What terrorises women – well, weary mothers, that is – is The Hand. The Hand groping over the sheets for you when you’re on the cusp of sleep. You shrink from it. ‘No! No! Not The Hand, I’m a sleep-deprived mother!’ You feign catatonia, pneumonia, death. Anything to get away from those wandering digits.

The Hand creeps stealthily over from its side of the marital bed and clamps demonically onto your tit, tweak, tweak, tweaking. The Hand, that most predictable of matrimonial gestures that signals conjugal rights are being requested despite your bone-achingly deep state of exhaustion. Forget The Silence of the Lamb’s cannibal Hannibal. The Hand would be the scary movie which I would make. Cue creepy music, the goggle eyes of the terrified heroine. ‘Tie me to the railway tracks! Lock me in a tower! Anything but leave me to the mercy of The Hand.’

It was my own fault. When we got home from Jazz’s dinner party I’d kissed Rory goodnight on the ear. How could I have forgotten that husbands invariably interpret the smallest act of affection as foreplay?

As Rory ran his tongue around my upper molars, once, twice, around and around and around until the titillation became so intense that I was tempted to flick on the telly to watch the Darts final, I realized with dismay that Jazz was bloody well right. A wife will do everything to discourage her husband, bar stretching razor wire around her bed and setting bait traps. While men want the tumbling in the hay to recommence six weeks after childbirth, mothers want to tie up the sheaves and put them in the barn. Sure, I’d joked with my girlfriends about how my favourite position in bed was the