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

But how to choose between my friends? As usual, my indecision was final.

PART THREE

12. Genitalia Failure

The volume of her orgasm made the objets d’art – lean mahogany phallic things collected by the therapist on her travels to New Guinea – rock precariously on their bookshelf perches.

‘A few months of my classes and you too will be able to orgasm at will!’ the couples counsellor promised in a velvety voice. This didn’t seem to reassure the pear-shaped woman with dry flaky skin, lank hair and defeated, astonished eyes sitting next to me, who was surveying the sex therapist with horror.

The spontaneous orgasm had emanated from a curvaceous thirty-year-old redhead who was wearing emphatic lip-liner, a push-up bra and a nametag which read Bianca. This Life Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Marital Healer had the endless vitality usually associated with cruise-ship directors. Bianca stood up from her chair behind her desk . . . and then she kept on standing up for what seemed like hours. Her long legs were finely shaped and fishnet clad.

‘So, how many months have you and your wife been sexually dysfunctional?’ She sashayed towards Rory, who was smouldering in a beanbag the shade of dog poo. She flicked her tangerine-coloured tresses over her shoulder, took my husband’s hand in hers and smiled. This woman smiled as the sun shines over the Aussie outback of my childhood – relentlessly.

Rory glared savagely in my direction. When I’d suggested therapy, he’d told me he’d rather have steel spikes jackhammered up each nostril. But after I threatened to deny him sex for the rest of his natural life, he’d sullenly relented – although driving to Muswell Hill in rush hour with an angry husband on the wrong side of the road was probably not the kind of marital therapy we needed, actually.

My beanbag, which was attempting to eat me alive, was so tatty and cheap it could only be made of imitation vinyl. My thighs stuck to it in pools of nervous sweat.

‘Dysfunctional, yes . . .’ Bianca checked her clipboard. ‘Your Significant Other feels you haven’t noticed that she takes longer to reach arousal. What’s your reaction to that . . .’ Bianca peered at the crayoned nametag I’d stuck to my husband’s chest, ‘Rory?’

Rory turned his prisoner-of-conscience countenance in my direction and glowered even more angrily.

‘Well?’ Bianca insisted, squeezing his meaty palm.

‘Well, ugh . . . um. According to my wife, our marriage has . . .’ Rory sank further into his sludge-coloured beanbag as he groped for the right words ‘. . . blown a gasket. Got a flat. Needs a tune up.’

The therapist’s mint-green eyes, hard as peppermint candies, glittered. A husband who talked of emotions by using car terminology? She was mentally reaching for the speed dial number of her accountant to inform him that she would be able to afford that gazebo, after all, as this was obviously going to take years!

Bianca sidled around the rest of the group introducing herself. There was a pallid pair of newlyweds. A bloke whose John Lennon specs were overwhelmed by his jowly face and lugubrious expression, and by his large librarian wife, who announced that he could only get an erection when wearing her underwear. In the beanbag beside them was a client who was in the middle of a third hysterical pregnancy . . . and he was male. The man whose toupee resembled a dead animal which had just happened to pass away on his head, had brought an imaginary friend.

In other words, just the sort of people with whom you’d like to share your most intimate sex secrets.

As Bianca put on her Enya CD, lit her essential oils in the infuser and made her little introductory jokes (i.e. ‘How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One – but the light bulb has to really want to change!’) I took the opportunity to examine my surroundings.

The Therapy Centre, a utilitarian, two-storey brick building in North London, had the décor of a shabby motel lobby on a motorway. It was all exhausted pot-plants, worn, grey carpet, cheap beige desks, fluorescent lighting and unwashed windows. The room had the friendly ambience of a concentration camp.

I could see it was also the kind of place where you needed to look at your shoes a lot, because when I tuned back into the conversation, my husband was telling Bianca that, yes, his wife took a little longer to reach arousal, ‘Say a day and a half!’

‘Um, you can shut up any time now,’ I interrupted, embarrassed.

But no matter how squeamish it made me and how much Jazz would disapprove, to agree to pay £35 an hour to have my sexual shortcomings paraded in public proved beyond a doubt that I really did need therapy.

‘And then. . .’ said Jazz, kittenishly brushing her hair from her eyes, ‘he ate strawberries out of my fanny. They were halfcooked and well marinated by the time he devoured them!’

‘I’m so pleased to see you’re both looking after your nutrition,’ I replied, trying not to sound flummoxed.

It was later the same night and we were sitting around my kitchen table, listening in awe to details of Jazz’s erotic adventures with her Internet toy boy. It was like a sexual tutorial.

‘And then, after we’d drunk champagne in the bath, I let him fuck me gently with the neck of the bottle. The bathwater was so hot and the bottle neck was so cold . . .’

‘Oy veh! Obviously dignity is the only thing alcohol doesn’t preserve,’ Hannah put in primly, but nothing was going to interrupt Jasmine’s epiphany.

‘And then, he took some of the ice cubes from the champagne bucket and slipped them inside me, while he licked me. Oh, the sensation of my hot juice and his hot tongue and the melting ice trickling down my thighs,’ she reminisced in a sighing staccato, before concluding with breezy impudence, ‘So, how was your day, Cassie?’

‘Oh great,’ I replied dispiritedly. ‘I learned to put a