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

manoeuvring the hire car to Shepherd’s Bush like a pill-crazed, long-haul truck driver. ‘There are only two jobs where eye bags don’t count against you. President of the United States and a Vulcan crewmember on the Starship Enterprise,’ I whined, parking by the security gate.

But Jazz maintained that her husband was a snake. And that snakes always hunt at night – their sensors striking in the dark at anything warm . . . even a famous BBC interviewer, I realized, as Studz flashed past us in her chauffeured car. Jazz had an eerie calm about her which I didn’t like. ‘You’re thinking about how to kill him, aren’t you?’

‘Let’s just put it this way. I wouldn’t advise him to start watching any long-running soaps on TV,’ she said grimly.

When Jazz’s husband disappeared into the presenter’s house in Notting Hill Gate, my best friend suggested I get a mop and bucket because we would need it when she removed her husband’s kidneys with her nail scissors to sell on the black market. ‘Well, why not? He’s got two of them . . . just like he’s got two faces.’

Scrutinizing Jazz in the wan light, I realized that she wasn’t joking. If I were David Studlands, I’d be thinking long and hard about what happened to John Bobbitt.

I touched her arm tenderly. ‘Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?’

‘Yes, I must cheer up. After all, I read somewhere that it takes forty-two muscles to frown but only four to pull back my trigger finger on my father’s hunting gun,’ she replied menacingly.

‘The only shooting you’re supposed to do are the rolls of film from your tropical holiday,’ I reminded her. ‘Speaking of which – you must get to a tanning salon before Sunday.’

But Jazz wasn’t listening. She put her hands in the prayer position. ‘God grant me the patience to tolerate the things I cannot change, change the things I cannot tolerate, and to find a really good hiding-place for the body of my philandering arsehole of a husband.’

Day five found Studz in the company of a glamorous Mayfair feline. She was a mink-lined-hatbox, white-poodle-on-adiamond-lead, invitation-to-spend-summer-on-Valentino’s-yacht kind of woman.

‘Ohmygod. I sat next to her at the quiz night to aid the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in the Caribbean,’ Jazz reported amazedly.

Actually, at that moment I would have liked nothing more than to bring back the death penalty, in England. Not for every crime. Just for, say, breaking your wife’s heart.

‘Oh, I know the breed. One of those glamour-puss models who married for money and is now busily developing a social conscience to compensate for her fading career,’ I guessed.

‘But David hated her! God! I’m overheating.’ Red-faced, Jazz opened the window to guzzle down the chilly air. ‘He said she had the IQ of a school of plankton.’

We trailed them to an exclusive restaurant in Piccadilly. ‘You wouldn’t believe how mean Studz is with me. He makes me reuse my dental floss! He cleans it with alcohol and then hangs it out to dry. “I do so hate to discard a length of essentially unworn floss, Jasmine” and then he takes her to the Caprice???’ she said tragically. ‘Is there air conditioning in this car? I’m burning up here,’ she gasped, fanning her flushed face, as I sat shivering.

By the time we shadowed them to the woman’s Mayfair mansion, Jazz was gesticulating like the heroine of some Jacobean tragedy.

‘You’re upset because you’re faking the odd orgasm with Rory? But men! Men can fake a whole fucking marriage.’

On day six, Studz ventured into the wilds of Hackney. I couldn’t believe that he could possibly seduce another female. I mean, if so, David Studland’s appendage would be a celebrity in its own right. It would need its own agent. ‘Your hubby is a spermicidal maniac,’ I observed dubiously as Studz got out of his car.

For this excursion Jasmine’s husband had dressed down in jeans and leather jacket. Having beeped his Jag locked, he ventured into a grimy-looking Irish pub which boasted live music by bands called, invitingly, ‘The Red Hot Sticky Helmets’ and ‘Right To Devour’.

As we loitered outside in our hire car, a group of yobs swaggered by, kicking vehicles. We’d discussed the danger of muggers here and had decided that telling them, ‘Jesus says I am the Chosen One’ would act as a suitable repellent. In the end, we settled on a demand from me in my best headmistressy voice as to whether or not they’d done their homework? And did they know that a hooligan was just a polygon with seven sides?

At this, the yobs dispersed in double-quick time, so we alighted and pressed our noses up against the pub windows. Studz was sharing pints with a twenty-something girl with caramel freckles and thick honey-blonde hair which she’d torniqueted into a ponytail.

‘Good God! It’s our masseuse, Carmel,’ Jazz said damply, as damply as the low sky which bulged with rain.

‘Et tu, cutie,’ I surmized as the wind slapped our faces.

We watched agog as Studz loosened the girl’s ponytail so that her fair hair fell wantonly over her shapely shoulders.

‘She’s been our masseuse for three years. I mean, how long do you think he’s been seeing her?’

The man really was a dastardly moustache twirler. All that was missing was the railway track. It shocked me how we all thought of Studz as being so brave, bringing medical help to war-torn, disease-riddled countries, when it was clear that Jazz didn’t even have to leave her home to find a hostile environment.

‘You should have frisked the bastard for cruel intentions when you first met at Cambridge.’

We’d parked outside a seedy Japanese restaurant, beneath the neon gaze of its electronic sign – Nippon Tuck. By its harsh strobing light, I saw my friend’s face creased with pain. ‘Trouble is, like most intellectuals, he’s just a clutch of paradoxes,’ Jazz adjudicated sourly. ‘Like the dedicated spanker of teenage prostitutes who publically campaigns against smacking children. Or the sixteen-year-old anti-materialistic vegan daughter who drinks all