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

it’s surprising how many women your age are a lot younger than you are. Time is a great healer, Jazz, but it sure ain’t no beauty therapist,’ commiserated Hannah, handing Jazz her cosmetic surgeon’s card.

‘You’re right, Hannah. These are not laughter lines around my mouth, they’re fucking fjords.’ Jazz swigged at her whisky. ‘I think I’ll just have my whole head cosmetically removed.’

With forty-five minutes till touchdown, I ordered Jazz to turn again and began massaging the brown globules into her belly over the small corduroy ridges of her baby marks. We’d often shared our post-natal woes; confessional stretchmark-comparing conversations were a regular. But we hadn’t taken it seriously, until now.

‘If we want to keep our husbands, we need to do the maintenance,’ Hannah prompted, crunching noisily on a dry cracker – no doubt her main meal of the day. ‘I think you should catch whatever’s falling – including your face, dah-ling. You too, Cassie. Don’t you ever want to be desired for your body instead of your cryptic crossword abilities?’

‘My answer is two down, five letters, past participle abbreviated,’ I replied.

‘Ugh.’ Jazz caught sight of herself in the bank of mirrors above my kitchen table. ‘My skin just doesn’t fit me any more,’ she sighed, a funereal droop to her shoulders.

‘Chin up, Jazz,’ I said gently. ‘Despite what Hannah says, you do only have one of them.’ Oh, the hours of my life I had wasted having conversations like this one. If only time would stop flying. If only it would sit it out at the airport duty-free store. If only it would walk, stroll, take a slow bus and stop tormenting women.

‘Everyone knows David has an impending sainthood, so how can it not be my fault?’

‘Saint? More like the Prince of Darkness.’ I moved on to painting Jasmine’s biceps. ‘Tell me, when you first met Studz, couldn’t you see those clouds of sulphur he was trailing?’

Hannah turned on me, while irritatedly attacking another cracker. ‘Cassandra! You are talking about the woman’s husband, you realize. The putz, despite it all, whom Jasmine loves.’

I rolled my eyes so far into the top of my head, I could see my brain cells renewing. Hannah reprovingly confiscated the fake-tan bottle and swept Jazz’s fair hair on top of her head in order to paint her shoulders.

‘Okay,’ I amended. ‘Studz is not quite the devil incarnate, but you could easily confuse them in an identity parade. He’s behaved like an evil pig.’

‘He’s behaved like a man, dah-ling. Men rotate car tyres, they put three-in-one oil on their hedge trimmers and they fuck around to prove their sex-ismo. Now eat. You need to regain your strength.’ Hannah lifted the cheese plate towards Jazz, who just crouched over it, eating nothing.

In the silence I thought about what Hannah had said. As a wife and mother of a son, I could definitely testify that the male brain is made up of an Internet obsession lobe, a gi-normous football gland, a minuscule personal hygiene particle and a teeny-weeny, incy-wincy relationship molecule. But surely sexual incontinence was an optional extra? Rory was faithful to me . . . wasn’t he?

‘Boys will be boys, dah-ling, and so will a lot of middle-aged men who should know better,’ Hannah stated.

Jazz put down her whisky glass so decisively that it nearly shattered. ‘If David’s having a midlife crisis, couldn’t he just, I dunno, buy an impractical car? Or cross the Channel on a homemade raft? I mean, wasn’t that ridiculous motorbike enough?’

Hannah was daubing on the fake tan as though she were Michelangelo. With twenty minutes till landing, a Fast Pass through Customs and an estimated hour ride home from the airport, I became so frustrated I snatched back the bottle and began frantically slathering tan around Jazz’s imaginary bikini line and under both rounded boobs.

Hannah munched disgruntledly on another cracker. ‘Look, nobody ever said marriage was going to be easy. In sickness and in health and all that . . . and believe me, dah-ling, if you marry into allergies like I did, there’s always going to be a little something wrong. He’ll always have a niggling ache somewhere.’ She topped up Jasmine’s glass. ‘All husbands have their bad points. It could be worse. He could be a gambler or a child molester. Or,’ she shuddered, ‘play golf.’

But Jazz remained inconsolable. Despite being only half-painted, she began pacing now, naked, back and forth across my chaotic kitchen, with me and the tan bottle in pursuit.

‘In my twenties I took up two new hobbies, marriage and insanity. I mean, Cassie is right. Good God! Why couldn’t I see what Studz was really bloody like?’ The husband Jazz had worshipped for twenty years was wavering in the heat of her scrutiny. What she’d thought was real had become nothing more than a marital mirage. ‘I . . . I thought we were h . . . h . . . happy.’ She gave another desolate howl.

Hannah sloshed more whisky into Jasmine’s glass. ‘Come on, dah-ling. Let’s not get all Sylvia Plath about it.’

Jazz’s cry was like a rusty hinge. She pressed her hand against her forehead. It was a silent-movie gesture of a helpless damsel in great danger.

I kicked Hannah under the table. ‘What?’ she mouthed at me. ‘What did I say?’

‘I put that wanker through his hospital training!’ Giving vent to feelings long hidden, Jazz yowled even louder. ‘I devoted myself to Studz, body and soul.’ Her voice seesawed with emotion. ‘I loved my job but I stupidly gave that up too! All for him.’

‘Well, dah-ling, I for one have never understood why you gave up chefing,’ Hannah the career woman tut-tutted as she smugly crossed her lithe, lasered legs.

Jazz levelled Hannah with a steely glare. ‘I decided to stay home and mother my own child so that Josh would inherit my personality flaws, and not those of the au pair with the eating disorder. Okay?’

As I manoeuvred my half-basted friend in front of the fan heater (we had about five minutes till touchdown), I thought how Jazz really did have