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

‘No! I’m sorry about Josh. It lasted all of a week. I think I must have been having some kind of a breakdown. But not any more! I’m nearly three months gone. At forty-four. Amazing, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think it’s wise to have a baby at your age? You might put it down somewhere and forget where you left it,’ Jazz, still smarting, comments bitchily. As we cast off upon the sunsequinned sea, in an act of revenge, she then regales Hannah with every hideous birthing story she can remember. ‘I bet those eyes are starting to water, eh? Beginning to regret all that nookie with your cabin boy now, right?’

Hannah, lounging back in her deckchair, interrupts to explain that she bought the sperm and then had her egg fertilized, outside the womb. ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she tells us. ‘You must have been to more than one baby shower that had two mothers and a sperm donor or a single mum and a turkey baster.’

‘At least you’re programmed to the baby’s schedule – up all night drinking,’ I laugh, but to be honest, I can’t quite picture Hannah with the carcasses of plastic action figures in her canopied, mahogany bed.

As we slip past coves, lagoons and luminescent, powdery white beaches, Jazz stretches out on a pink towel in a peach bikini. ‘I don’t get it. For years you’ve lectured us on the fact that raising kids is tedious beyond belief.’

‘So is writing a two-hundred-page marketing report on art-price fluctuations, already. But a marketing report doesn’t kiss and cuddle and come to visit you in the nursing home when you smell faintly of pee, now, does it?’

The midday sun may be pitiless but I look at my friend with sympathy and affection. Even Jazz eventually softens.

‘I’m happy for you, I suppose,’ she concedes. ‘Now just go and give birth in shame and degradation like God intended. And make sure it’s a boy so I can seduce him while I still have the use of my legs.’

‘But the money, Hannah,’ I ask, gesturing around. ‘Where is it all coming from? I mean, with the palimony for Pascal and . . .’

Hannah’s grey eyes go a shade darker and narrow like a cardsharp’s. ‘Cone of silence, you two?’ she demands and we nod, affirming our discretion. ‘Well, Pascal wanted half of everything. And, despite how he’s betrayed me, I was willing to be generous. I sold our house to pay him off. But when that shmuck insisted I cash in my beloved art collection as well so he could get half the dosh . . . I couldn’t let him get away with it. So . . . I had them copied.’

‘Forgeries?’ I ask, painting on a thick paste of sunscreen.

‘Expert forgeries. Well, as you can imagine, I have made quite a few contacts in the art underworld over the years, dah-ling.’

Once again, Jazz and I gasp with such force that this time, as the sails are up, the boat does momentarily change course for Columbia.

‘I gave Pascal the fakes. That putz, the great artist, didn’t even realize they were shlock. Then I secretly sold the real canvases on the black market.’ Hannah plumps up the deck cushions behind her back. ‘Needless to say, dah-lings, I can’t go back home for quite a while. These islands are a pretty agreeable place for a tax haven, don’t you think.’

‘You can have your Turks and Caicos and eat it too,’ I suggest, as the alcohol kicks in.

‘I can’t go back either,’ agrees Jazz, lighting up her tenth cigarette of the day.

‘Oh Jasmine.’ Hannah waves away the cigarette smoke, but for once doesn’t complain. ‘You have been through the most awful ordeal, dah-ling. I can’t imagine being put in prison when all the time you’re innocent. At least your conscience was clear.’

Jazz exhales smoke down her nostrils, like a dragon. ‘A clear conscience just means a really bad memory, sweetie.’

The sunlight on the water dazzles, launching quasars at her jade-green eyes so I can’t quite read them. Still, sitting downwind I’m more concerned with the fact that I’m choking on her cigarette smoke. ‘Why are you still smoking those vile things? You can tell Hannah about the HRT patch, darl. Cone of silence?’ I ask, and Hannah agrees. ‘Jazz has been wearing this HRT patch since last January. She only took up smoking so people would think it was a nicotine patch, ’cause she didn’t want anyone to know she was going through the menopause.’

‘You’re menopausal?’ Hannah is amazed. ‘At least it cuts down on winter heating bills, dah-ling.’

‘I think it was brought on by stress. Ironically though, all that time I was pretending to smoke, I actually did get addicted to nicotine. Now I really am wearing a Nicorette patch.’ Jazz laughs, revealing the small square Band Aid on the underside of her arm.

I laugh too, but then add, ‘So where’s your HRT patch? On your ass?’

‘Oh, HRT didn’t suit me, sweetie. I started putting on weight so I gave it up. Haven’t had a period since June. It’s quite liberating actually!’

‘But . . . what about the blood-soaked tampon in the back pocket of David’s bathers?’ I ask, bewildered.

It is now Jasmine’s turn to demand the cone of silence. When we nod our agreement, she explains, ‘Well, I didn’t say it was my blood. Losing a husband can be very hard. And in my case it was almost impossible! You have no idea how many filet steaks I had to buy on that Oz trip. I found that steaks contain the most blood for soaking up into tampons. I was buying steaks and soaking tampons for the entire goddamn trip. Broome, The Barrier Reef, Cottesloe Beach in Perth – loads of people have been eaten by sharks there, the southern end of Bondi which has a famously treacherous rip nicknamed “the backpacker’s express”. I would just paddle on the shore, you understand . . . Then at Cape Catastrophe, South Australia, a shark finally took the bait.’

The shimmering sea seems