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

‘Hmm. On balance I think I’d rather take up heroin. Less dangerous. What you both should do is rekindle your passion. I saw some sex guru on the telly saying that married couples should liaise in the bedroom mid-afternoon.’

‘Mid-afternoon? Are you mad? Where am I supposed to put the children? Under the sink with the lethal household substances?’ ‘Liaise’ sounded so full of Gaullist suavity. But the only vaguely French thing about me were the tufts of armpit hair I’d sprouted during the winter.

From her supine position in a poolside lounge chair, Hannah’s eyes interrogated me. ‘And where exactly has she met this lover of hers?’

‘An Internet chat room,’ I verbally fumbled.

‘Oh, how romantic. What’s it gonna be, your homepage or mine? So we’re talking about a perfect stranger?’

‘Yes – except I doubt he’s perfect. He listed his hobby as “aura grooming”. Oh, and there was a star sign mentioned too, I think.’

Hannah grimaced, her small face a knot of opinion. ‘Some women like to just pack a pair of spare panties, paint on their lipstick, go to a bar, see what gorgeous Love God fate throws into their laps, then go home with him for a night of wild, rampant sex . . . Most of these women are never seen again.’

‘Jazz says his emails are really sweet and polite.’

‘Oh, that’s reassuring. She’s found the most polite sexual psychopath in London. Great.’

‘That’s why she wants me to drive her there. To the rendezvous. Just to be careful.’

The pool area was flooding with mums and toddlers for junior swim class so Hannah didn’t speak again until we were in adjoining shower cubicles, dodging Band Aids and verruca viruses. Her shampoo-foamed head giraffed over the partition.

‘It’s such meshuggeneh talk. Completely crazy. And we have got to stop her, Cassie.’

We? We was rapidly becoming my least favourite word in the English language. No way, I thought. ‘Of course,’ I said, even though I’d rather lick the sneeze hood over a salad bar.

‘So what are you saying? That I should just give up on sex?’ Hannah timed her confrontation with Jazz until we were midway through our Sunday-morning power walk on Hampstead Heath. We were standing atop Parliament Hill, panting. Beyond the inky calligraphy of trees, the city lay scribbled below. The smoggy air in the basin of London was thick as broth. You could almost spoon it.

‘Having sex three times a week burns about seventy-five hundred calories a year and is the equivalent of jogging seventy-five miles,’ Jazz enthused.

‘Shtuping a man you meet on the Internet will be about as much fun as jogging seventy-five miles,’ countered Hannah. She was on all fours, executing her push-ups rhythmically, mindlessly.

‘Man? Did I say man?’ Jazz smiled in an almost regal way. ‘He’s twenty-two.’

‘Mind the gap,’ I said, in the scratchy voice of a tube announcer.

Hannah sprang to her feet. ‘Ohmygod. What if he rapes you? Or beats you? Or kills you!’

‘There are far more effective ways to destroy a woman, you know. You can just marry her,’ Jazz said in an aggrieved tone. ‘Anyway, statistically most women get murdered by their husbands, not some stranger. He sent his photo. His upper arms look like two footballs caught in a stocking.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mrs Robinson.’ Hannah glanced at Jasmine sharply. ‘Cassie, did you know Jazz had taken up residence on Sunset Boulevard?’

I paused in my bench presses and flumped onto my back on grass thickly buttered with daffodils. ‘Um, well, I dunno. I do think Missy Eliott CDs are slightly unseemly at our age, Jazz.’

Jazz gave us both a sidelong, withering look. ‘Another nice thing about being a woman, even a woman of “our age”,’ she said thinly, ‘is that, unlike men “of our age”, we don’t have to pay for sex.’ She lifted a leg onto the bench and bent into a stretch. ‘We can just take a toy boy.’

‘Having a toy boy, you have to pay for everything anyway; dinner, theatre, holidays,’ I said lightheartedly, gazing up at the interlaced limbs of the trees. ‘Paying for sex actually would cost you less!’

But despite our attempts to saw raggedly through Jasmine’s fantasies like a bread-knife through a frozen loaf of wholemeal, she remained determined. Hannah urged me on with her eyes.

‘Besides, do you really want to start going to comedy clubs again?’ I added. ‘And putting up with his nagging about recycling? And endless talk about the fate of the ozone layer whenever you use your hairspray??’

‘Oh sweetie, I don’t intend to be talking!’

And with that, Jasmine pranced off down the hill, dismissing us with a perky, four-fingered wave.

‘You are not to help her. Is that clear?’ Hannah ordered me, before moving off after Jazz in a miffed manner.

Oh yes, as clear as the view from Parliament Hill.

And so it was that on a day in late March, Jasmine Jardine, a forty-three-year-old housewife and mother of one, left her home in the leafy environs of Hampstead, climbed into the family Volvo estate and drove down to the grimier environs of Southwark. Her husband was under the impression that she was going to the cinema. But she drove straight past the Swiss Cottage Cineplex and on and on over the river until she reached a dilapidated terrace, where she parked, adjusted her hair, straightened the seam in her stay-up stockings and sashayed to the paint-peeled door. It was the first time she had been on a date for more than twenty years. And the first time she had ever been with a man who could lick his own eyebrows (the toyboy’s latest Internet revelation).

I know all this because I was with her in the car, armed with a can of mace and the local police number. It was bad enough we’d had to go south of the river. Southwark’s local industries are kneecapping and drug dealing. The area has cockroaches so big you can hear the pitter patter pat of their huge hairy feet. As I waited in the car