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

Rory had settled into his usual metronomic rhythm with habitual grunting. Did all married couples practise this kind of sexual samba, with its well-worn steps? When had things deteriorated? With the onset of motherhood, perhaps. There was no denying that childbirth had wreaked havoc with my sex-life. A little something to do with stretching your vagina the customary five kilometres. Despite the bean bags and the water births and the plinky plonky harp music, giving birth still boils down to a doctor putting a knee on your chest, spreading your legs and diving in with a pair of barbecue tongs. As if that’s not traumatic enough, no sooner have the lactation leakage circles dried on your shirtfront than your husband wants hanky-panky. Needless to say, the woman with the recently stitched perineum does not.

Rory wanted to discuss my waning desire, I remember that. But all I wanted to discuss were my post-partum haemorrhoids. Besides which, by that time my husband’s needs were no longer on my radar. I was in that mind-numbing, mother-baby netherworld. A baby is the greatest love affair of a woman’s life. If you do notice your partner at all, it’s to think, Who is that tall, hairy person hanging around ME AND MY BABY? But once the kids started sleeping through the night, we’d still enjoyed the odd bonk-a-thon, hadn’t we?

Rory was still pounding away. If he were working on a DIY creation, I’d have been a bookcase with built-in music cabinet and television swivel panel by now. I wondered if he’d get the hint that I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself if I took out the nail file Hannah had given me and started pushing back my cuticles?

I realized with relief that his momentum was building up.

Rory always came precisely the same way. A series of identical moans, crescendoing into a sequence of mini-moans which rose towards one giant inflection, concluding in a loss of amplitude on the final surge, followed, a few minutes later, by thunderous snoring.

I lay on my side, looking at the landing light sliding in under the bedroom door. Perhaps I should try harder. Don a filmy gown, get a prescription for She-agra – even make the first move? After all, one good turn – gets most of the blankets, I thought, as Rory lurched and the arctic air groped my body.

With a sickening heart, I admitted to myself that Jazz was spot on. The thought of her gloating was unbearable. Drifting off to sleep, I determined not to tell her that ‘sexual freedom’ was, indeed, the freedom not to have sex with your husband.

4. Is There Life After Infidelity?

‘You’re right. Our sex-life sucks,’ I couldn’t help confessing to Jazz the moment I heard her voice. I was on the phone to my best friend first thing next morning.

‘The only thing in the married boudoir which does, sweetie,’ Jazz replied, her voice thick with hangover.

‘I’ve just been in denial, I suppose,’ I went on. ‘What about you, though? What happened after the dinner party? Did you confront Studz about his little honeymoon at Viagra Falls?’

‘I went to bed in a huff. He followed and tried to have sex. Can you believe that? He said that ever since I’d taunted him at dinner, he’d wanted to make love to me so badly.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told him he’d succeeded.’

I snorted with laughter down the phone. ‘But did you ask him about the Viagra?’

‘He said it was for me. That he’d been experimenting privately, on his own, and it hadn’t worked. But that he’d now perfected the dosage.’

‘Do you believe him?’

There was a pause. ‘Does Elton John have his own hair?’

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘It’s time to spy.’

‘And exactly how are you proposing to become Commander Jane Bond?’

‘You know that little holiday to Sri Lanka we were supposed to be going on, to celebrate our wedding anniversary?’

David Studlands, humanitarian doctor, only ever took holidays where there were torture reports to be made. The Congo, Algeria, Sudan, Burma, Aceh – these were the poor woman’s holiday highlights. David wasn’t happy unless in some fungal jungle teeming with malaria-riddled mosquitoes or terrorists. Finally Jazz stopped travelling with him. ‘I don’t like to go on holiday anywhere that’s been too recently traumatized,’ she explained. One year, when Studz announced a trip to Disney World, Jazz was baffled. ‘Disney World? Really? Wow.’ What she hadn’t realized is that Florida has the death penalty, and that Disney World is in close proximity to the maximum-security prison at Gainsville. So, once again, she was on her own, traipsing with a small child around the gigantic funfair – a death sentence of its own for any mother. Call Amnesty, she’d texted me. Help urgently needed. Dead Mother Walking.

‘Sri Lanka?’

‘Yes. David chose it so that he could treat tsunami survivors between pina coladas. Well, he’s cancelled, because of work in London allegedly, but he’s insisting that I still go.’

‘And are you?’

‘I shall tell him I’m going, but . . . Cassie, are you busy for the next few nights?’

‘I’ll probably just be sitting around tweezing my stray facial hairs. Why?’

‘I’m going to pretend to leave for the airport then hide at your place and see what kind of house calls the good doctor makes while I’m supposedly away. Will you help me?’

My heart sank to Titanic depths. ‘Stalking? But isn’t that illegal?’ A day-glo orange jumpsuit beckoned. Yet I couldn’t say no. Jazz always backed me up in any emergency. Hannah was the opposite. ‘Oh dah-ling, I’d like to help but I’m allergic to children.’ But, as I explained to Rory later, I did try to put her off.

‘Of course you’re always welcome, Jazz,’ I said now. ‘But you do realize that I’m married to a vet. A vet whose office is next door to our house. A vet who brings his work home. At night, well, I can never sleep in case something has escaped . . . Something with envenomed fangs