by Kathy Lette
‘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 and endless chaos.
I’ve also realized that love comes in spurts. A little, then a lot. It’s not a permanent wave of happiness. Permanent waves only happen to hair – and even then you have to get them redone every six months. Love is an hors d’oeuvre, a caviar-encrusted canapé, not a staple diet. I need the meat and potatoes of family, kids, new tiles for the kitchen, whining about income tax, the stodgy, day-to-day fare of domestic life. They’re the emotional carbohydrates which I crave . . . with, just, the occasional fabulously, fattening sticky pud.
Hannah and Jazz are bantering in the background. I’d like to join in, but how can I stay friends with a murderess? Well, not that Jazz actually murdered Studz. Sure, she’d loaded the gun. But it was fate which had pulled the trigger . . . Maybe one day, I’ll bring it up in therapy . . . Yeah, right.
And so we sail into the sunrise, buoyed up by this friendly fug of banter and bonhomie, sputtering and swaying and shrieking with laughter, though it’d be impossible to explain what we found so funny. Okay, it’s not a perfect friendship. Now that I realize I’m harbouring two felons, it’s rather spectacularly flawed, actually. But hey, what isn’t?
Life is not black and white. It’s kind of grey – like the water in the washing machine – the washing that I hope Rory is still doing diligently. And then I think about my husband. Warm rays of morning sun reach my upturned face like kisses. The air is thick with the savoury tang of the sea. The briny effervescence makes me think of him, naked. A slanting tongue of sunlight warms my lap and my pulse gives a little surge of lust. And as the day begins to thicken into gold, I think that pretty soon, as soon as Rory has become good at Doing Sensitive Things With Snow Peas and has mastered the ironing – oh, the helium-filled happiness of being made love to by a man who adores you – and who has just hoovered your entire house – I might just go home for an orgasm.
Acknowledgements
This novel was completed with only a few minor injuries from girlfriends’ husbands. Needless to say, any likeness between any of the author’s girlfriends’ husbands and the husbands in this book is purely coincidental.
Thanks to my good friend and editor Suzanne Baboneau, my publisher, Ian Chapman and to the Ed-ocet missile of agents, Ed Victor. Thanks also to my first draft endurers, my sisters Liz and Jenny, Victoria Hislop, Michael Brian and Grainne Fox.
Naomi Felber and Mimi Greenburg were kind enough to help their shiksa friend with Yiddish-isms. Angie Mitchell and Siobhan McGrath ran a red pen through the manuscript for verisimilitude about the work of primary school teaching, as did Jeannie Mackie, Jane Belson and Mark Stephens for the family and criminal law, and Sarah Liddon for veterinary facts. In other words, if anything’s wrong you know who to blame!
Thanks also to Tabitha Peebles for all that typing and to my brothers-in-law, Craig Doyle and Tim Robertson for various last minute dashes to copiers and couriers. My heartfelt thanks to Pam Carter for appointing me the Savoy Hotel’s Writer in Residence, where I became seriously suite-wise and began this book.
And to Julius and Georgie, as ever.
About the author
Kathy Lette is a celebrated and outspoken comic writer with an inimitable take on serious current issues. She is the author of fourteen bestselling novels, including Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV miniseries, Mad Cows, which was also made into a film, starring Joanna Lumley, and How to Kill Your Husband (And other handy household hints), which was staged by the Victorian Opera. She pioneered smart, funny, feminist fiction and has been published in seventeen languages.
Kathy is an autodidact (clearly it’s a word she taught herself) but has honorary doctorates from Southampton and Wollongong universities, and a Senior Honorary Fellowship from Regent’s University London.
She is an ambassador for Plan International and the National Autistic Society UK. Kathy lives in Sydney and in London, and can often be found at The Savoy Hotel drinking a cocktail named after her. She cites her career highlights as once teaching Stephen Fry a word and Salman Rushdie the limbo, and scripting Julian Assange’s cameo in the 500th episode of The Simpsons.
Visit her website, www.kathylette.com, to read her blog, follow KathyLetteAuthor on Facebook, @KathyLette on Twitter and @kathy.lette on Instagram.
Also by Kathy Lette
HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy
After the Blues
Best Laid Plans
Courting Trouble
Love is Blind (But Marriage is a Real Eye-Opener)
The Boy Who Fell to Earth
Men: A User’s Guide
To Love, Honour and Betray
Nip ’n’ Tuck
Dead Sexy
Altar Ego
Mad Cows
Hit and Ms
Foetal Attraction
The Llama Parlour
Girls’ Night Out
Puberty Blues (co-author)
Praise for Kathy Lette and How To Kill Your Husband
(And Other Handy Household Hints)
‘In her customary breezy fashion, Lette crystallises all the pitfalls facing the modern working couple: work tensions, sexual tensions and, more darkly, what becomes of two people who have lost all respect for each other. But what makes Lette such a pro is that, as well as insight, she provides her reader with that rarest of things: a good plot’
The Times
‘With a cast of nymphomaniac new-agers, hard-boiled lawyers and power-crazed pedagogues, there’s never a doubt that this will be entertaining. Lette knows how to pace a plot. The result is a darkly funny, pun-filled satire on yummy-mummy culture, with humanity at its heart’
Daily Mail
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First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd in 2006
This edition published in Australia by Penguin Books in 2021
Copyright © Kathy Lette 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover image courtesy of Getty Images
Cover design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
ISBN 9781760145514
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