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

‘Okay, okay, enough already,’ Hannah huffed, thin-lipped. ‘The baroque ecstasy, the grotesque compulsion of your conquests is, frankly, disgusting.’

‘Oh well,’ I rationalized to Hannah. ‘At least with a man with tattoos, if the sex gets dull there is always something to read.’

Next in Jazz’s game of relationship roulette was the lead singer of the ‘Suicide Bombers’.

‘A rock star? Ugh,’ I cringed. ‘How can you put him in your mouth? I mean, you never know where he’s been!’

‘Hey, don’t knock unhygienic until you’ve tried it. He won’t let me shower before he goes down on me,’ Jazz divulged, with sassy insouciance. ‘Actually he prefers me not to shower for a few days!’

‘Bravo,’ Hannah countered, with equal cool. ‘You must send away for the Germaine Greer Feminist gift pack.’

We were lurking up the back of our Pilates class.

‘Don’t pretend you aren’t jealous. That man has made masturbation pleasurable for millions of women. He says he loves my ass.’

To be honest, I could understand her excitement. To have your bottom admired by a famous rock star, who not only counts them to get to sleep at night, but has also had more bottoms than hot dinners, often simultaneously, is a compliment indeed. I felt an unsettling twinge of chagrin.

‘It’s sooo exciting, sweetie, don’t you think?’

‘What I think is that you should be put on some register and shunned by polite society,’ Hannah decried.

‘You’re so bland, Hannah, you could dilute water, do you know that?’ Jazz told our mutual friend affectionately. ‘Have you any idea how lovely it is to feel desired again?’ There was a trace of grief in her voice, which she quickly extinguished. Jazz was like one of those 3-D cards you buy in a gift shop which change depending on how you tilt them. Sometimes she was a femme fatale, other times I could see the wounded wife in her. ‘Feeling desired is my new hobby,’ she said, leaving for the changing room. ‘And so much more fun than Pilates.’

And a lot more fun than couples’ counselling, I mused. Jazz may have a rock star, but I was beginning to think that I had rocks too . . . in my head.

Last and most definitely least, was a performance poet she picked up at Tate Modern. The reason he didn’t last was that he lost her keys. When I received Jazz’s SOS phone call to come and pick her up from the Marriott Hotel, I thought she meant he had lost the keys to her car.

‘No. To the handcuffs.’

‘Jazz, handcuffs are only acceptable if you’re an undercover cop with Scotland Yard,’ I chided.

When Hannah and I collected her from the side entrance of the hotel in Swiss Cottage to drive her to the locksmiths, a coat flung around her negligéed shoulders, her hands shackled before her, Hannah shook her head disapprovingly.

‘Dah-ling, aren’t you afraid you’re going to lose your amateur status?’

‘Amateur’ just about summed up my feelings about my counsellor too. By the end of June I had enough advice to see me through several husbands. I also had a hunch that if I told my therapist I had suicidal feelings, she would have asked me to pay in advance. So far, she had talked me into buying a state-of-theart vibrator which was ‘totally realistic’. ‘Oh, so it cums, coughs, farts, goes limp then switches off?’ I asked bleakly. When I saw the size of the cheque Rory wrote her, I was tempted to insert her slide projector, pointer and maybe even a beanbag into an intensely private part of her own anatomy.

Next, she pressured me into buying testosterone patches to cure my ‘Desire Disorder.’

‘Testosterone?’ I looked at her in disbelief. ‘Oh yes. That’s bound to make me more attractive. To gay men!’

She also tried to book me in for Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation, a mere snip, literally, at £3,000. ‘A little labial trimming would give you a designer vagina. An Armani Punani would solve all of your sexual inhibitions,’ she purred.

The only inhibition I had now was Baggy Fanny Phobia. I could never again have sex with my husband for fear of losing him in that aircraft hangar between my legs.

Just when I felt that it was pretty well impossible for my counsellor to be able to counsel me into feeling any worse about myself, she decided that what I lacked was experimentation. I tried to develop kinks, I really did. I wore Rory’s underwear. I even went commando. But, believe me, as a mother of two with no pelvic floor, one must be cautious about not wearing any knickers. On one occasion, one of the Benwah balls Bianca had made me buy, fell out in a staff meeting. I had to pretend to be a player of miniature bowling.

When I complained, Bianca insisted on a one-on-one session during which she pursed her lips before crisply placing crosses in boxes on her questionnaire. ‘Do you like the lights on or the lights off?’ she grilled me.

‘I like to have the lights on,’ Bianca’s eyes lit up for a moment, until I added, ‘so I can read.’

‘Do you like S and M?’ she persevered, pen-wielding.

‘Certainly not! I don’t like to be beaten. Not even at Monopoly.’

‘Well, what about talking dirty?’ Bianca asked exasperatedly.

‘Talking dirty for me is “James, wash your face. Jenny, your room is a pigsty!”’

‘Do you talk in bed at all?’ she asked, in despair.

‘Oh yes – usually about whose turn it is to do the school run and when the plumber’s coming to repair the leaky loo.’

‘Well, do you have any questions for me?’ the therapist asked tetchily, smacking her clipboard down onto the table.

‘Well, yes, my most burning question is . . .’

‘Yes?’ Bianca leaned forward expectantly.

‘Can you use flavoured yoghurt for thrush or not? It’s all I’ve got in the fridge.’

Bianca was not amused. ‘You need to develop an erotic portfolio,’ she announced curtly. ‘I understand that you are not that comfortable with or good at oral sex. You should start by practising fellatio on