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

Hannah and I locked eyes in dismay. I thought now would be a good time for Rory to hold forth on the mating habits of the Giant Squid, but it was a difficult concept to communicate to him using only sign language.

‘Have some wine,’ Hannah offered in an effort to derail the Pop Princess. The smiles of the other guests, aware that Jazz had just lost her mother to cancer, seemed spackled on as we all telepathically begged her to shut the hell up.

‘Them preservatives they use in wine are carcinogenic too,’ Kinkee lectured. Perhaps it was an opportune moment to tell her that she’d left the price tag on her tits.

The skin on Jasmine’s smooth cheek tic-ed. All night there’d been an ocean of chatter, eddying around the table, but we were now conversationally becalmed. The dinner party suddenly seemed to have been going on longer than the war in Iraq – and we were only on the main course.

‘Worrying will give you wrinkles,’ I cajoled, but the Pop Princess shot me a censorious look.

‘You should be like really, really, really like worried. I mean, what’s that shit in your hair? Chemicals?’

‘Sure is. You could nuke al Qaeda terrorist cells with this stuff.’

‘Ohmygod. That will definitely give you cancer.’

Jasmine’s eyebrows quirked as though she were about to cry.

The screech of Rory’s mobile relieved the suffocating silence. No doubt some hamster-related emergency.

‘Oh, you use a cellphone? I don’t,’ said the actress self-righteously as my husband rushed off to assist some lemming to suicide or something equally ‘urgent’. ‘Not any more, anyways. Because—’

‘Yes, yes, it’s carcinogenic,’ snapped Hannah.

‘I think too much, doan I? That’s my trouble,’ the Pop Princess giggled.

The men nodded in eager agreement. Could have fooled me. I would have guessed that her ambition was to be a contestant on Big Brother – only she didn’t have the IQ.

As the Pop Princess rabbited on about the cancerous tumours caused by mobile-phone masts, Jazz kept looking at her lap. And Hannah kept gesturing helplessly at me, to which I responded with my own social SOS hand signals. There was so much semaphore going on around that table we could have landed an aeroplane.

What topic could I raise that would divert her? I racked my brain. A barbed comment utilizing the F word would cover things nicely. What did people normally talk about at London dinner parties? School league tables, foreign policy, remortgaging. The one time I actually wanted them to discuss how much they’d paid for their houses and how much more they’re worth today, what did I get? Nothing. What suitable subject-matter would interest a Californian pop star? Then I hit upon the foolproof small-talk safety net. ‘I know – what’s your star sign?’ I asked enthusiastically.

The entire table of guests looked at the Pop Princess in eager anticipation.

‘Cancer,’ she replied.

With that, Hannah, Jasmine and I were up out of our seats, dashing to the kitchen on the pretext of culinary duties. Once there, we exploded into helpless laughter. We fuelled our hysteria with comments about ending world hunger by eating more pop princesses and references to genetically modified vegetables i.e. aged male intellectuals. By now we were rolling around on the floor as only old friends can. I laughed so hard I had to take off my jacket, exposing the big silver safety pin securing my trousers, which only made us howl more.

The hilarity subsided slightly when Hannah announced that she’d laughed so hard she now had a headache. Jazz tripped upstairs for Panadol. ‘I’m sure David’s got some in his bathroom,’ she said, still chuckling. ‘He is a doctor, after all.’

While Jazz was rummaging in her husband’s bathroom cabinet, I examined her kitchen. The Le Creuset, the whole range, matched the aubergine-tiled splashback. On the walls, around the Bang & Olufsen plasma television screen, were tasteful black and white photos of their working holidays in Namibia and Sri Lanka. With her Neff stainless steel double oven, Miele fridge, cappuccino machine and breadmaker, everything was Vogue Perfect Living. Flowers in coronets of tissue paper lay on the counter waiting for vases. I thought of my own kitchen – the bowls of leftovers growing fur, the Himalayan piles of plates in the sink, the forgotten hot dogs in the microwave which savaged me when I discovered them three weeks later – and felt a pang of envy for my friend’s perfect husband, perfect son, perfect life. I would have gargled Satan’s sperm to have a life like hers.

‘Right, I’ve got Panadol, Aspirin . . .’ As Jazz handed each packet to Hannah, she read aloud the names of the pills. ‘Nurofen, Ibuprofin, Viagra . . .’

The word was out of her mouth before she could catch it.

‘Viagra?’ Hannah asked as we formed a clot around the offending packet. ‘How long has Studz been using Viagra?’

Jazz’s face took on a cloudy cast. ‘I didn’t know he was.’

‘Oy veh!’ Hannah exclaimed, wide-eyed, before recovering her composure. ‘Not that it matters that you didn’t know. It’s rather nice that he wanted to keep it from you. We’ll stay shtum, won’t we, Cassie? Cone of silence.’

‘Of course. Cone of silence,’ I added. ‘I’m sure Pascal takes Viagra as well and Hannah doesn’t know. He’d only have to take quarter-strength Viagra, though, ’cause he’s such a wanker,’ I teased.

Normally, Jazz delighted in any remark which belittled the pseudo-artist, but now her face remained frozen.

‘And Rory is definitely taking Viagra, on account of the fact that he’s got so much taller,’ Hannah rejoindered, but Jazz was still doing her Easter Island statuette impression. ‘Oh, come on, Jazz,’ she soothed. ‘It’s no big deal, dah-ling. All men of David’s age pop the odd pleasure pill to help them shtup.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know,’ Jazz replied stonily, ‘as we don’t have sex. Haven’t had any sex at all for one year, one month, two weeks, five days and um . . .’ she checked her watch ‘. . . seven hours.’

The air around us suddenly thickened. ‘Oh,’ was pretty much all Hannah or I could say