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

‘It’s a joke. Okay, too early to joke, but kitten – wahey!’ he grins darkly. Rory then picks me up off the floor like a marauding Viking and carries me, wearing nothing but my boots, over his shoulder to our bedroom. The room is sparkling clean, and rioting with flowers. He tips me onto sheets which are lemon-scented from fresh laundering and crisp as snow and, oh-I-havedied-and-gone-to-heaven, ironed.

‘Wahey!’ I reply.

And we’re entwined once more, reverberating. And, well, I didn’t just find my orgasm again. Hell, I found two. I had waited so long and yearned so much, it made Krakatoa look like a slight tremor. Sex in a marriage? Well, it’s like when it slips your mind that you’ve put your windscreen wipers onto intermittent. You’ve forgotten about it and then – WHOOSH!

Lying there in my picture-postcard-perfect house in my dazzlingly immaculate bed, with my New and Improved Husband, basking in the sweet and sour scent of our bodies, I stretch as contentedly as a cat – the cats I no longer have to put up with.

‘So I can come home? You wanted me to make some changes, some of which I’ve agreed to – but all of which I’ll do,’ Rory promises. He starts to make love to me again, then stops abruptly. ‘Oh wait. Let me wash the dishes first.’

Be still, my beating heart! While he’s downstairs, the phone rings and the answermachine picks up. I can hear Bianca screaming down the phone. Rory doesn’t answer and I feel even more deeply satisfied. I notice he’s put a basketball hoop above the laundry basket to encourage his aim, and laugh. (It was something I must teach my son – do half the housework and your wife’s spirits will know nothing of Sir Isaac Newton and his absurd gravitational theories.) Ten minutes later, he’s back, taking me in his arms, all the mess of my life purged, the past purified.

‘Yes. You can come home.’ Peace of mind softens his face, until I postscript, ‘I, however, am leaving for a while.’

‘What?’ He jerks up onto one elbow. ‘Why?’

‘Well, the Board rang at the weekend to officially offer me Scroope’s old job. However, the appointment doesn’t come into effect until after Easter. So, before then, I’m taking a little sabbatical. I have some urgent sitting-around-chatting-with-mygirlfriends-while-you-look-after-the-kids to do. The way I see it, you owe me at least three and a half years of saying “Have you cleaned your teeth?” You owe me at least five years of wiping up after them at mealtimes. Six months of queuing for rides at funfairs, years of being rained on at sports galas and a decade of sitting around the local pool bored to death watching them not win the hopping-across-the-shallow-end-on-one-foot-unaided events.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Rory nods sheepishly. ‘But when you come back? We will be together again, won’t we?’

‘Maybe,’ I say warily. ‘Let’s just see how you go.’

And he takes that as his cue to go again, touching me in all the places I love to be touched, as he looks into my eyes and tells me he loves me. And I gaze back, living in each kiss. Sliding up against his muscled body I try to tell him I love him too, but my heart seems to be in my throat.

Cheesy? Hell, it’s the whole Stilton.

27. How To Kill Your Husband – (and other handy household hints)

The English think optimism is an eye disease. But me? I’m a sunny-side-of-the-streeter. I always have a secret hope that Juliet’s snooze alarm will wake her up in time to stop Romeo from quaffing the poison potion. That Desdemona will tell Othello to stop the paranoia and book in for some anger management. That Hamlet will get some grief counselling and marry Ophelia. So, when it came to Jazz and Hannah, I had high hopes of salvaging our friendship.

Friends define us far more than our partners or family. Lovers and husbands come and go, children fly the nest, but girlfriends, in all their bickering, ribbing, chortling glory, are the backbone to your life.

It was this realization, Hannah’s offer of bail money and her timely holiday rental of a Caribbean yacht complete with crew, which convinced Jazz to put the Freudian hiccough of her son’s seduction behind her. We’d been in the bar near the Old Bailey, celebrating Jazz’s freedom, when Hannah had phoned from the Turks and Caicos Islands to extend her exotic invitation. ‘So, you’ll come and join me, dah-ling, to go island-hopping?’

‘Well, actually I have to go pluck a few stray nipple hairs. Of course I’ll come, you idiot. Are you kidding me?’

‘I wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire,’ Jazz had grumbled when I passed on Hannah’s invite, but I knew she was already planning her wax. Josh, weary of press attention and coming to terms with the loss of his indifferent dad, had opted to go backpacking with some older friends on their gap year. He would do his A levels later at a college. So, there really was nothing to hold Jasmine back.

Which is why, two weeks after Jazz’s release, I have my lips locked around the first of many cocktails as aqueous sunlight ripples over the deck of Hannah’s gleaming white yacht. This life would make pigs in clover look maltreated.

Hannah, the human swizzle-stick, comes on deck, looking decidedly plump in white culottes and T-shirt.

‘Have I put on weight?’ she asks.

‘No, love,’ I say, while whispering to Jazz, ‘Weight?! Jesus Christ. Military planes might mistake her for an aircraft-carrier and land on her abdomen.’

There are other changes too. She’s wearing no make-up, her skin is brown as a violin and nothing’s very well shaved.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.

If the boat’s sails were hoisted, the united gasp Jazz and I make would have propelled us to St Kitts. But the yacht stays anchored with the other big boats in port, snuffling up to their moorings.

‘Dear God.’ Jazz sits down hard on the deck. ‘Please don’t tell me