How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints)

by Kathy Lette

  Cassie: Justifies being a duplicitous, lying maggot, you mean. What are you going to do?

  Jazz: Kick him out, I suppose. Well, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life counting his condoms, do I?

  Cassie: You could always attach a tracking device to his undies – a Shag Tag. Shit! Gotta go. Scroope in playground sniffing the air like a bloodhound. It’s parent-teacher evening.

  Jazz: C U 2night at Hannah’s opening do at the gallery. Plse don’t be late. There’s something else I need to discuss with you.

  Cassie: How to find a proctologist with really cold hands to do your husband’s next rectal examination?

  Jazz: I’ve found a lump. In my tit.

  A lump? I looked at the little green cursor on the computer screen as it blinked neurotically. Jazz’s mother had just died of breast cancer. And wasn’t it hereditary.

  I taught my afternoon class and sat through my parent-teacher meetings in a state of bowel-knotted angst. The ten-year-old girls in my care had just endured their 11-plus exams to see which high school they would get into. The competitiveness between the parents was sickening. London parents are so desperate to get their kids into the right school they sprint to the doors of top nurseries, clutching their pregnancy kits, pink sticks still dripping with urine.

  ‘My daughter got straight As, so we’re confident she’ll get her music scholarship. She’s only grade Five, but she got top distinctions. She wants to be a soloist and a brain surgeon. You have a daughter, don’t you? What did she tell prospective school principals she wanted to be?’

  ‘A trampolinist and a spy, I believe is what Jenny said.’

  ‘Oh.’ Brief silence, followed by pitying smile. ‘How, um . . . original.’

  The overly ambitious parent wears the dazzling but terrified smile of a highwire acrobat. One of the beaming mothers was concerned that her son was reading cowboy comics instead of the classics. What was my advice?

  ‘Um . . . not to squat down with his spurs on?’

  My own son had just joined a band called ‘Jerk to Inflate’ and penned a song titled ‘My Dog Ate Hitler’s Brain’, so really I was in no position to give advice to anyone.

  It was 8.35 p.m. before I staggered out of the classroom. Usually I’d meet the other female teachers for a drink to finalize ‘The Most Fanciable Father Competition’, but tonight I had to get to Jasmine. I was stampeding for the door when the Head slid out of his office like an eel from under a rock.

  ‘During assembly, when the children were told to stand for the National Anthem, apparently several of your class stood on their heads. When sent to my office, they maintained that you told them that that nobody had actually specified which part they had to stand on.’

  ‘Well, actually nobody did. And blood to the brain does revitalize the—’

  ‘I would appreciate it, Ms O’Carroll, if you would keep your anti-Royalist sentiments to yourself – if you want to pursue a career in education, that is. And do you really think trousers are acceptable for a woman to wear to work?’

  What I wanted to know was how acceptable it was to have a Head Teacher who was so fat and wore a suit so small he looked like a condom full of porridge. And how unacceptable it was to be told off in front of my rival Perdita, who was lurking behind him with a cat-that-licked-the-cream countenance.

  ‘Yes, sir. No, sir,’ was my gutless reply. I was too submissive, I knew that. I possessed the kind of compliance that foretold a long career in check-out-chicking. It also meant that from now on I’d have to sport the Modified Nun Look. Lovely.

  ‘Cassandra,’ said Perdita, after the Head had steamed off down the hall, a sixty-year-old battleship with moral guns blazing, ‘I know we’re both up for the same job and may the best girl win! But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be chums. Why don’t we go for a drink one evening?’

  I’d rather be staked out by my labia over an ants’ nest. How about never? Does never work for you? is what I thought. But, ‘I’ll have to check my diary,’ is what I said. I really did need a course in Cattle-Prodding for Beginners because Perdita didn’t want to be friends. She wanted to pick over my brain as though it were a chicken carcass. School Inspectors were now looking for creativity. Perdita was thorough but unimaginative. When she saw my kids’ whacky art on the wall, she expressed a condescending curiosity, but was well aware that it got me Excellence in teaching on my reports from Inspectors.

  When I finally made it to Hannah’s gallery later that night, for the Private View of her latest show, I was not only shattered from thirty parent-teacher interviews, a bollocking from the Headmaster, and anxiety about my exile in Orgasm Siberia, but I was also gibbering about the state of my best friend’s breasts.

  Outside the gallery I shucked off my trainers and tortured my toes into the high heels I was carrying in a plastic bag. As I balanced precariously on one leg, steadying myself by holding onto the arm of the steroid-addled doorman, I could hear the murmur of voices; of laughter, smug and luxurious. I peeked through the window and groaned inwardly.

  I am not good with posh people. Hannah took me fox-hunting once with one of her clients and I got my jodhpur caught in my stirrup, lurched into a bramble bush and was bitten by a hound. The fox died, yes, but only because he was killing himself laughing.

  I milled around pretending to look at the paintings, but really ogling Liz Hurley, Mick Jagger, Elton John and an overweight movie mogul whom Jazz always described as ‘the man who ate showbiz’. Their noses were so high in the air, I kept expecting trolley dollies with trays to appear by each nostril.

  Also attending were the usual aristocratic cliques – the lusty patriarchs and their long-suffering, alienated wives, the Number 1 mistresses, the slightly eccentric cocaine-sniffing outsider elder sons back from rehab – all being buttered up by Hannah to buy paintings from her latest discovery. It seems to me that good art is in the wallet of the beholder. No doubt this was why Hannah had the fat taken from her buttocks and injected into her lips because ‘kissing ass’ was part of her job.

  I wished Rory was with me for support, but he hated modern art. He refused to come and look at dead sharks in formaldehyde. He felt that a dead shark was not an objet d’art, but a mouldy fish finger.

  Unaccustomed to wearing pointy high heels, I minced painfully around the party, looking for Jazz. ‘The work speaks to the inner beast, yes?’ a man in a dress asked me. Help! I had to find Jazz and fast, if only because I was the only guest not fluent in designese.

  Jazz was sitting on the stairs in a funereal cocktail dress, her long hair loose, nursing a glass of chardonnay and pretending to smoke a cigarette for HRT patch camouflage.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, darl. What happened? Did you have a mammogram? How was it?’ I perched on the stair below her.

  ‘Well, they squash your tits into a blender until your brain erupts through your ears, but it’s no worse, painwise, than your average divorce.’

  A comment like that should be stepped around as carefully as a dozing anaconda. ‘But what did the doctor find? What did she say?’

  ‘She found a lump, which looked malignant. I had the biopsy straight away, because of my history,’ she said flatly. ‘Results in a week.’

  ‘Oh God. It’s bound to be nothing, Jazz. It’s probably just a cyst.’ I sounded calm but my heart was thudding against my Wonderbra. ‘Did Studz go with you?’

  ‘No. He had another lump in mind. That lump of land in the bloated midriff of Europe solely interested in the pursuit of Michelin starred extramarital affairs, otherwise known as France.’

  She’d obviously had plenty of time to work on that line in the hospital. I squeezed her leg sympathetically. ‘I would have gone with you for the mammogram, love.’

  She shrugged. ‘Silly me. I thought he’d realize at the last minute that his wife is more important than a meeting at UNESCO. It’s no wonder I’ve contracted cancer really. Except for playing with asbestos, there’s no greater health hazard than an unhappy marriage.’<
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  I was groping for a reply when Hannah swanned past. She was blending into the background, as usual, in an orange velvet dress and a turquoise turban. ‘Oh, there you are, you two!’ She rested one Jimmy Choo on the bottom stair and looked us up and down. ‘Cassandra, how little you must think of yourself to buy shmatte like that when I keep offering you my cast-offs,’ she said. Hannah’s motto is If the dress fits, buy it in at least four colours. ‘Where’s Studz?’

  ‘Addressing UNESCO. Allegedly. He’s coming straight here from Waterloo Station.’

  ‘That man will work himself to death.’

  Jazz shrugged one delicate, bare shoulder. ‘Oh well. We’ve all got to die sometime.’

  I gave Hannah a ‘shut up’ look.

  ‘What?’ she mouthed at me. ‘What did I say?’ But she was looking up at us with such rumpled perplexity that Jazz just burst out laughing.

  ‘I’ve had a lumpectomy,’ she announced. ‘And I’m divorcing my husband.’

  If Hannah could have raised a brow, I’m sure she would have, but being Botoxed, all we got was a tiny flutter of lashes to show her distress.

  ‘A lump? Fuck. Well, do you really think you should be smoking?’ Hannah snatched the cigarette Jazz was pretending to puff and put it in an ashtray. ‘And Divorce? You can’t possibly divorce. What about Josh? What kind of role model will that make you?’

  Jazz defiantly lit up another fag. ‘Being a role model for your teenagers takes all the fun out of middle age, don’t you think?’

  Hannah placed her perfectly painted hands on her Atkins-dieted hips. ‘My parents divorced when I was in Kindergarten, but anyway, enough about why I bit my nails till they bled until I was, oh, twenty-fucking-seven.’

  ‘Look, sweetie,’ Jazz amended, ‘I didn’t believe in divorce either – until I got married.’

  ‘Anyone can divorce. Lasting is the hard thing,’ Hannah lectured. ‘I’m sure Studz is just having a little midlife crisis, dah-ling. Can’t you keep an open mind until he gets over it?’

  ‘My mind hasn’t been open, it’s been vacant. I’ve had enough of the small humiliations, Hannah,’ Jazz explained, her voice a miserable whisper. ‘I think, therefore I’m divorced.’

  ‘Speaking of which . . .’ I nodded in the direction of the door. Jazz’s dashingly handsome husband had just swept into the gallery, briefcase and black leather coat in hand. He glittered. He shone. He outblazed the chandeliers. The room was full of models thin as skittles. And it was Dr Studlands who bowled them over. Women were leaping onto him as though he were the last helicopter out of Saigon.

  For a moment Jazz put on her Madame Defarge face, as she watched, gimlet-eyed, from the sidelines. Then her expression cracked and she abruptly turned her back. ‘I’m so sick of watching my husband parade around like some Medieval King taking his pick of fertile maidens.’

  Hannah’s ring-encrusted hand was on her arm, reassuringly. ‘When do you get the biopsy results?’

  ‘End of the week.’

  ‘Let’s deal with that before you undergo any marital chemo,’ I suggested kindly. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t do anything till then, dah-ling. We need to talk it through,’ Hannah advised.

  So talk we did. We talked so much our lips lost weight. It was like facial aerobics. The Talkins Diet.

  We talked in the loo queue at a West End theatre with its usual combination of 250 desperate women and two backed-up toilets.

  ‘But why divorce?’ Hannah was putting on red lipstick expertly without the aid of a mirror.

  ‘Because, sadly, the use of the hemlock-poisoned chalice seems to have died out in modern marriage,’ Jazz said facetiously.

  ‘Does his infidelity really matter when you have so much else?’ Hannah wanted to know.

  It struck me as extraordinary that wives consider a husband staying faithful a far greater achievement than, say, a cure for whooping cough.

  ‘Pascal predicts a return to nineteenth-century values. Fidelité et séduction, he calls it,’ she continued. ‘Pleasing and charming and caressing the tender feelings.’

  ‘That just means he doesn’t fancy you any more,’ Jazz pronounced.

  ‘How dare you!’ Hannah said with rigid grace.

  ‘If all you’re doing is a lot of connubial cuddling, well, it’s over, sweetie. Truth is, sex is like air,’ Jazz pronounced. ‘No big deal unless you’re not getting any. Especially when he obviously is,’ she concluded poignantly.

  The interval bells were sounding the five-minute warning, but the loo queue seemed to be enjoying our private mini-drama much more than the critically acclaimed Ibsen.

  ‘You could agree to an arrangement. You know, the way the French do,’ Hannah suggested. ‘Couldn’t she, Cassie?’

  One of life’s great truisms, like the fact that nudists are always the very people you don’t ever want to see naked, is that you should never interfere in a girlfriend’s marriage. ‘Um . . .’

  ‘An arrangement? Yes, that’s a splendid idea,’ Jazz jumped in. ‘David can arrange to fuck around and I can arrange to kill him.’

  The loo queue cheered their support. It seems that wives are recycling husbands so fast there should be a recycling bin at the bottle bank just for them. Green glass, brown glass, clear glass, and then the Boring Cheating Husband bin.

  Back in the foyer, we were swept up in the exultant crowd exploding from the bar like champagne, yet I took my seat feeling flat. Even the play, Hedda Gabler, was really just a kind of Norwegian Desperate Housewives. Our angst was nothing new. I definitely had the feeling Hedda had lost her orgasm too – and look where that had got her! Judging by the mounting evidence, marriage was turning out to be as exciting as thrush, only much harder to be rid of. Like a drummer with an IQ, a quiet American or a fat model, it seemed that a happy marriage was an oddity of nature. But Rory and I were still happy, despite a few disagreements and a little disenchantment of late . . . weren’t we?

  We talked when shopping.

  ‘The good thing about being a woman is, no matter how bad things get, we can always go shopping,’ Jazz declared as we rode the Selfridges escalator.

  ‘Armani who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name,’ Hannah genuflected.

  ‘I read this article that said the typical symptoms of stress are eating too much, impulse buying and driving too fast. Are they kidding? That’s my idea of a divine day,’ I added excitedly. I had one whole hour of indulgence before the kids were due to be collected from tennis.

  While we lost ourselves in rack-pawing, sales delirium and guiltless gimme, Hannah tried to convince Jazz that she needed to dress more seductively to win back her husband’s devotions. I was also in the stylistic firing line.

  ‘You’ll never get a promotion in shoes like that. Where did you get those anyway?’ Hannah said, pointing at my suede loafers.

  ‘Somewhere at the back of my closet.’

  ‘Dah-ling, your shoes are so far back in the closet they’re gay. Now . . .’ She checked to see if Jazz was out of earshot. ‘We need to talk. Jazz can’t divorce. There’s so little difference between husbands, she might as well keep the shmuck whose disgusting eating and farting habits she’s got used to.’

  In truth I would rather listen to a Yoko Ono CD than hear Hannah lecturing me on reasons Jazz should stay in her marriage. But as I tried to move away, she seized my arm.

  ‘You really want to condemn your friend to a life on her own, nibbling microwaved Lean Cuisine meals and watching repeats of Sex and the City?’

  ‘I don’t think Jazz is interested in finding another husband, Hannah, although an aged billionaire with a great art collection who is quite ill could hold some appeal, I guess.’

  But Hannah refused to be amused. ‘Divorce is a bad, bad idea, Cassie. And you’ll back me up, yes?’

  Besides manually masturbating caged animals for artificial insemination, I couldn’t think of a worse request. I was going to procrastinate but, as usual, I didn’t quite get round to
it.

  ‘Um, yeah, sure.’

  We talked, naked, in the changing room of the gym after water aerobics.

  ‘If swimming’s so good for losing weight, how do you explain walruses?’ I panted, balancing on one leg like an asthmatic flamingo as I threaded a damp foot into a knicker leg hole. Jazz remained stony-faced. ‘Cheer up, love. Leonardo Di Caprio’s still single. Now that’s something to smile about.’

  ‘No. The reason to smile is that every seven minutes of every day, a husband, somewhere in the world, dies.’ Jazz glanced around to make sure Hannah was not eavesdropping, but our suave friend was still in the showers rubbing on her latest anti-aging cream – some mix of minced Transylvanian fluke fish and puréed sloth.

  ‘We need to talk. You’ve got to back me up against Hannah,’ she said urgently. ‘Without the lubrication of love, the cogs of a marriage grind away into dust. Don’t you think?’

  What I thought was that she’d been listening to too much Leonard Cohen. ‘Um . . .’

  Her fingers dug into my shoulder. ‘There’s nothing lonelier than an unhappy marriage,’ Jazz went on. ‘Gloria Steinem once said that the surest way to be alone was to get married. I’m like a married single mother, and so are you, Cass. But Hannah’s so judgemental. You will back me up, right?’

  Gnawing an Albanian weight-lifter’s jockstrap would be a preferable option. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  My best friend jumped for joy.

  So did I – right off the nearest bridge.

  The day Jazz’s results were due the hospital called to say they needed to do more tests. This did not bode well. Hannah and I immediately dropped everything. After a frantic ring around to arrange play dates and vowing yet again to get an au pair (most middle-class English kids have no idea that their au pair is not their mother until they’re about ten, which can be quite a trauma as they can only speak Croatian), I went straight to Jazz’s house after school.