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

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.