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

to shiver at her revelation. Even the waves appear to recoil from the bow in revulsion. The air is laced with currents; currents as treacherous as the sea, as treacherous as Jasmine Jardine. The ocean’s hypnotic boil, the reek of salt, brine and rotting seaweed, overwhelms me for a minute and I rush to the railings to be sick. Feel as though I’m underwater. Can’t breathe. Hang my head over the side, silently heaving. Eventually collapse against the cold steel, my watery eye on the horizon. There is one last headland before we hit the open sea. It juts out into the bay like a bent thumb, as though it wants to hitch-hike to some other continent; some place where desperate housewives do not kill their husbands.

I try to see Hannah’s expression, but it’s hidden from me by her hatbrim.

Hannah’s captain steers our boat through the straits and into calmer waters. A meal comes and goes on deck as Jazz talks us through what happened on that beach all those months ago. She talks until the sun sinks in a positively murderous display of bruised purple and violent reds. She talks about how she married on an impulse, an event that should be included in the Elite SAS survival course. She talks about how her husband changed; how he became self-obsessed and ruthless, craving prestige and then power. She talks about how she began to fear for her life, maintaining that she only acted out of self defence. ‘I didn’t kill him. I just increased the risk factor in his risky life.’

But it seems to me Jazz has excised him as cleanly and completely as the tumour she thought he’d given her. I poke at my sashimi with the tip of one chopstick, lifting the slices of raw fish as if they are evidence at a crime scene. Hannah plays with her food too, culling the prawns from the rice and lining them up on the table like little pink commas. Later on, moored in a bay under the stars, as the tide burbles beneath the boat, we are still trying to come to terms with Jazz’s deception.

‘Come on, girls. A good girlfriend bails you out of jail. A great girlfriend will be running away from the police with you, squealing, “Good God! That was bloody close!”’

I look at her in the gloaming. Her smile is so luminous that even on this moonless night, ships would detour around her, fearing for rocks. She is a wild, fishlike creature of moist, perfumed heat. Jazz talks on for most of the night, pouring her heart out.

‘Ironic, isn’t it, that such a misogynist male was killed by a tampon. A point no doubt lost on the coroner, dah-ling,’ Hannah finally announces, pre-dawn. ‘In some ways it’s an update of Madame Bovary: unhappy wife is unfaithful, but he dies and she gets away with it – don’t you think, Cassie?’

What I think is that it’s pretty safe to say that after twenty-five years of worshipping Jasmine Jardine, she is now officially no longer my role model. I’m also thinking about turning her in. But what good would it do? A twelve-week trial before a dozen people not smart enough to get out of jury service, chosen to deliberate over who can afford the best lawyer?

At 5 a.m. Hannah fetches champagne to proffer a toast to the three of us, as we deserve some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for enduring all our cat fights, all that infidelity, paying all that palimony, suffering through a divorce, a death and, in my case, dodgy DIY and living to tell the tale. She then suggests that we form a kind of coven and throw our wedding rings into the sea so that we can start again. At dawn we lean on the railings at the prow of the ship, the murderess, the forger and me, Head Teacher and Blackmailer.

‘On the count of three. One, two, three . . .’

I see my wedding ring fall and then the sea’s foaming lips close over it. I do still want Rory, but Under New Management.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Hannah asks Jazz, as we sit down companionably to revive ourselves with hot coffee and croissants.

‘I’m going back to work,’ says Jazz, the Domestic Goddess, basking like a lioness in the early morning sun.

‘As a chef?’

‘Yes, but in my own restaurant.’

‘You can say you came into some money through a lucky stroke – your husband’s,’ I quip pointedly.

‘Maybe in Australia. They’re used to criminals there,’ Jazz retorts.

‘Oh really?’ I sniff. ‘Actually my grandma didn’t want my family to move to England because she said that’s where all those dreadful convicts came from!’

‘And no more men. I’m just going to buy a super deluxe, top of the range vibrator, which can do everything imaginable.’

‘Like changing nappies?’ asks Hannah hopefully. ‘It’s all booties and bottles for me from now on,’ announces the shoulder-padded careerwoman. ‘One thing’s for sure, I’m not giving advice any more. Except never to sit in the front row of a Briss . . . Jewish male circumcision,’ she decodes for her shiksa friends.

‘From now on my only advice is never to give advice,’ a reformed Jazz adds. ‘And what about you, Cassie?’

And what about me? I look at my oldest friends and dwell on the seismic changes which have taken hold of us this year. It’s been such a marital saga. Something old – a stale marriage. Something new – a toy boy. Something borrowed – sleeping with your best friend’s son. Something blue – finding my orgasm. And what I’ve realized through it all, is that marriage is happiness and joy – followed by children, chaos, disappointments, terror, tenderness, surprises, betrayals and more chaos. You muddle on for another decade or so then you come to your children’s children, meaning more chaos, disappointments, terror, surprises, betrayals and yet more chaos. And then, in the end, happiness and joy that you survived all that chaos, children, disappointment, terror, tenderness, surprises, betrayals