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

Mr Scroope draws in a fractious breath. In the staffroom we often joke that our Head would have been discharged from Saddam Hussein’s hit squad for being too brutal. When he loses his temper, which he does daily, one suspects he’s missed his vocation. The man should definitely have followed the career path marked US Postal Worker.

‘ARE YOU SERIOUS ABOUT THIS PROMOTION, MS O’CARROLL? MR DUNDEE IS LEAVING AT THE END OF THE SUMMER TERM AND I WILL NEED TO REPLACE HIM WITH A CAPABLE AND CONSCIENTIOUS TEACHER. YOU ARE THE MOST SENIOR APPLICANT, AND THE INSPECTORS AND THE CHILDREN LIKE YOU, TRUE, BUT I AM NOT SEEING LEADERSHIP QUALITIES IN YOU.’

As he rants on about ‘re-engineering priorities’ and ‘downsizing’ and ‘rightsizing’, I study his comb-over. It looks like limp spaghetti draped over a hardboiled egg. Examining the coffee-cup rings on his desk as he interrogates me about what I’ve allegedly written on my forms, I contemplate asking him what he writes on his passport under Hair colour, seeing as he is, you know, borderline BALD.

Behind him I see Perdita sashaying across the playground in her twinset and pearls, rested, relaxed, poised and, well, perfect. Ah, I think, there but for the grace of a househusband, go I.

Friday

What teachers drink in the staffroom tells you a lot about them. Most stagger into school clutching Starbucks hard-core espresso. Mr Scroope is a milky tea, two sugars type. Perdita – a rosemary-infused herbal. The rest of the day we boil the old kettle full of limescale and drink randomly from ironically sloganed mugs – Teachers Do It With Class, Teachers Make You Do It Till You Get It Right. Perdita’s tea mug, on the other hand, was sacrosanct. It was also emblazoned, ominously, with Best Teacher.

I slump onto a threadbare sofa which resembles a yak that has been dead for some time and sip a cup of staffroom coffee. It tastes as lukewarm as I feel. I dwell dispiritedly on my past week. Like tidemarks left around the bath, like toenail clippings abandoned on bedside tables, the evidence has begun to mount up that Rory has truanted from the How To Be A Good Husband School.

Whoever said, ‘Life is just one thing after another’? For working mothers it’s just the same thing, again and again and over and over. But at a very fast pace. Like jogging in quicksand. For working mums, every day is a lot like holding a live hand-grenade with the pin pulled half-out.

No matter how much I wanted to be one of those women who can change a nappy with one hand whilst whipping up a soufflé with the other at the same time as I’m taking a conference call, what I had become, instead, was a cliché. When I heard those homilies coming out of my mouth like, ‘Where were you born? In a tent?’ it’s as though I’ve been secretly brain-washed during my sleep by suggestive tapes entitled Wifely Clichés, Vol. 2.

Was it any wonder that by Friday night I’d developed the demeanour, aching legs and mood swings of a long-haul flight attendant? Maybe Jazz was right after all. Maybe I was angry with Rory, which was why I didn’t feel affectionate towards him in bed. Oh great. Now I had to add sulking to an already over-booked schedule.

I also had the feeling that it was time for a coup in the Holy State of Matrimony.

7. Ladies Who Lynch

In my opinion, advice is like syphilis. It’s better to give than to receive.

Should I leave my husband? That was the typed question blinking out at me from my computer screen in the staffroom as Jazz and I emailed each other a week later.

I quailed. It was one of life’s unanswerable questions, equivalent to why ‘monosyllabism’ is such a long word.

But I was not going to contaminate her with my influence. I looked around the shabby staffroom at the rest of the female staff. Two divorcees. Three separated. Four unhappily married. The trouble is, women marry without a Matrimonial Safety Drill. No one ever said to us, ‘Your exits are here, here and here.’ But I was not going to be the one to ever tell a girlfriend to parachute into the unknown.

Another message zapped up on the screen.

Jazz: When Studz got home last night from Haiti I told him how and why he’d broken my heart. The Great Healer’s advice? To take two aspirin and lie down. With him. He put my constant crying down to ‘excessive lachrymonal activity’.

Cassie: Sensitive bastard.

Jazz: He said that the awful reality of trying to stitch together landmine victims has made him numb. He said that war has chloroformed his compassion, and that the grim sights on his operating table have left him etherized . . . And that he only has affairs to feel alive again.

Cassie: Ironic, as you’re about to kill him! What a conman! As he’s taking Viagra, that makes him a hardened criminal. (Pathetic, I know, but the best I can do, having taught science all morning.) What else did he say?

Jazz: He asked if I wanted him to sleep in another bed. I said yes, preferably in another hemisphere.

Cassie: Is he going to stop seeing those other women?

Jazz: He said that obviously affairs fulfill some need that isn’t being met within the marriage and, as long as that need continues to be unmet, so the dissatisfied partner will continue to be unfaithful. Rather than destroy the marriage, he said it was kinder to look elsewhere for things that are missing. According to him infidelity is a strategy for maintaining our marriage. It is an act of preservation, rather than destruction. That’s how he justifies being a repeat cheat.

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