How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

his wife lay bleeding to death outside his house in a hire car. I moved Jazz over into the passenger seat, took the wheel and swerved toward home, too upset to drive straight.

Jazz cried for an hour before I could coax her inside. ‘He took her home to our bed! Actually it’s not my home any more. It’s Fuckingham Palace.’

She was in agony. Childbirth with no epidural would hurt less than this. ‘Come on, darl,’ I said gently. ‘You need a drink.’

‘What I need is to climb into the bath with an electrical appliance,’ she replied between wracking sobs.

Once inside, I made inadequate comments along the lines of how most men are like worms, only taller, but Jazz just took to the spare bed in the flat behind Rory’s surgery, curling herself foetally around a whisky bottle. The sight of her burned itself indelibly into my retinas. Rubbing the small of her back, I reflected that husbands should come with a warning. This person could be dangerous to your mental health. I also got a feeling that Jazz had never read the small print on her marriage licence.

On Tuesday night the mood in our hire car was sombre as we followed Jazz’s husband to a fundraiser for AIDS in Africa organized by the Prime Minister’s wife in a marquee at Kensington Palace. High-pitched quartet music twanged in the background. Two freezing hours later, Studz and others adjourned to Chinawhite for a nightcap.

‘How long do you think they’ll be?’ I asked. Clouds were scudding low across the night sky as though it was cloud rush-hour and they were in a desperate hurry to get home. Everyone was in a rush, except for us, apparently. ‘I’ve got loads of maths homework to mark. “A circle is a straight line except that it goes around and has a hole in the middle of it”,’ I quoted from one kid’s paper. ‘These children need help!’

Jazz shrugged dismally, too miserable to speak.

‘Oh, okay,’ I conceded. ‘But let’s not stay for too long. Should I go for food supplies?’

She shrugged again, then said weakly, ‘Get something vaguely healthy.’

I returned with two low-fat muffins. ‘Would madam like the banana Styrofoam or the blueberry Styrofoam?’

But Jazz left her banana cake after one bite because her husband had just emerged, along with the Pop Princess recently appointed a Good Will Ambassador by the UN. We trailed them back to the Savoy Hotel – the more discreet River Entrance. Studz parked the car on a double yellow line and tossed the keys to the doorman as though this were routine.

‘Maybe they’re just going to the American Bar, for a cocktail of puréed unhusked wheat kernels or whatever the hell is her preferred non-carcinogenic tipple,’ I suggested feebly.

Jazz just stared grimly ahead. Here, by the river, the streets were creamy with fog. Having parked, we just sat watching the leering grille of Studz’s Jaguar. After one hour, I reminded Jazz that a celebrity is nothing but a nonentity who got lucky. The Thames twitched beside us, pale as milk in the misty moonlight. After two hours, I pointed out how one day Kinkee’s youth would fade and she’d end up going ‘Whoo, Whoo’ behind a J-Lo female impersonator tribute band. My only answer was the seagulls squawking like teething babies. I tried to mark geometry sheets by the streetlamp glow, ‘An angle has wings and comes from God’, but quickly lost the will to live. After three hours, my best friend started crying without any noise at all; she just hunched there, shuddering.

‘What do you want to do?’ I asked dispiritedly. ‘Perhaps a call to one of the tabloids would be appropriate? You know, the News of the Fatuous Gossips? or Louth mouthed, Inane, Ill-informed Perspectives OF THE WEEK.’ I was trying to cheer her, but Jazz curled up into a ball.

‘I couldn’t do it to Joshua,’ she said in a whisper, before the smell of banana vomit invaded the car.

On day three of Jasmine’s Indian Ocean holiday, we took yet another trip down Infidelity Lane. From the anonymous safety of our hire car parked opposite, we saw Jazz’s husband waiting at the stage door of a West End theatre where they were performing a revival of Cats. The side alley where he had parked was urinous, villainous and dark as a ditch. But with the nocturnal accuracy of a bat, David Studlands could home in on any pretty woman. He was waiting for a kitten who appeared wearing spray-on snakeskin trousers, killer heels and a fedora hat. He took her arm and steered her into his Jag.

In silhouette, we saw them kiss. We then watched open-mouthed as they clambered over into the back seat and the car started shaking and quaking. The Jag was rocking so hard on its springs that I thought it might be in labour. I kept checking the exhaust pipe to see if two or three miniature versions of Studz’s Jaguar had popped out.

‘Really she’s in the wrong musical. It should be “Guys In Dolls”,’ I said. It was a little laboured but I was desperate to kick-start some of Jazz’s trademark caustic humour.

Jazz blew her nose cacophonously. ‘I think it’s time Andrew Lloyd-Webber sold those cats to some lab for cosmetic testing, don’t you?’ she said with melancholic acerbity.

One thing was for sure. Three women in three nights? It was no wonder he was mainlining Viagra. Jazz’s surgeon husband obviously thought he was in a Carry On, Doctor movie.

Day four and Studz was appearing in a live debate on the use of torture to combat terrorism. We knew because the programme had been flagged on the BBC all day. I tried to talk Jazz out of stalking and into having an early night. Three nights of no sleep and my face had gone a fetching shade of green. The livid semicircles beneath my eyes gave me the look of a suicidal racoon. It was my turn to drive, but I was so tired I was