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

presumed she was giving birth – and to a woman pretty much her own size. The range of reactions available to me as a Homo sapien seemed completely inadequate to the situation. I needed to spontaneously combust. Or go to another galaxy, warp factor 5.

When Bianca saw me, she broke off from kissing my husband and encouraged me to join in, with the line, ‘It’s just experimentation. A new technique of mine – tongue-reiki.’

‘Rory,’ I said, ‘if you could manage to extricate your tongue from our therapist’s navel, I think it’s time to go now.’

‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’ Rory asked. ‘Bianca says you have no feel for the erotic.’

‘Actually, it’s not erotic, or exotic. It’s psychotic. There are not enough circuses for all the freaks in this room. You don’t need a therapist – you need an exorcist. You’re possessed. I don’t exactly know how Bianca got the job of marriage counsellor, but I’d be very surprised if it didn’t involve a satanic ritual at some point.’

‘You are so straight, Cass,’ my husband sighed. Unlike the sexy and sophisticated Bianca, whose limits were obviously limitless.

‘If she bores any more, she’ll strike oil,’ Bianca giggled.

Rory laughed with her and I felt my face burn.

‘Listen, Rore. You can stay here watching strangers licking each other’s genitals or wait until your wife is sectioned under the Mental Health Act. It’s your choice.’

He answered me by dropping a kiss, or rather ‘tongue-reiki’, on the nape of Bianca’s bare neck.

I lunged then, trying to wrench Rory from the Husband Truffler’s embrace, but slipped in my leather shoes on a melted patch of cream. I skidded and in the fall, must have hit my head because when I came to, my forehead was being bathed by a self-confessed coprophiliac. Does it get any better than this? I asked myself.

Yes, it does. I had a sensual interactive surprise for Rory too. I was off to meet Jazz and her prison pals in the Boom Boom bar for a slow, comfortable screw.

15. High Infidelity

Billy Boston was not that hard to spot. A Pointillist portrait of a naked Pamela Anderson lay supine on his left bicep; Marilyn Monroe on the other. He had small, close set eyes, which made me wonder if the guy’s frontal lobe had been hammered. They were eyes that screamed ‘maximum security prison’. He looked so much like a hardened criminal, I couldn’t believe that the bar manager wasn’t already sending off the CCTV footage to the police.

If Jazz, who was wearing what can only be described as Slapper Chic, had been a dog, she’d have been sniffing at his crotch.

I made my way towards them through the Boom Boom bar, which was full of sherbet-eye-shadowed teenage girls and their scrofulous, shaggy-haired male companions, dancing like things in pain, curling and coiling and jumping from foot to foot. There wasn’t a defined side-parting in sight. But past the dance floor, there was another breed prominent. The forty-year-old hottie. From their hipster jeans to the Justin Timberlake tracks on their iPods, these women were the opposite of the alcoholic Mrs Robinson. And Jazz was the most glamorous of them all.

My best friend patted the bar stool next to her and introduced Billy, whose opening remark was, ‘More posh totty, eh? I like youse birds from the big end of town.’ He crushed my fingers in a chiropractic handshake. ‘Youse talks so good, ja know? Youse have got articulate-ness.’

Then Billy moved off towards the end of the bar to buy me something called a ‘Slippery Nipple’. He walked as if on a trampoline, bouncing along, buoyant on his own hot air.

‘Isn’t he sex on legs?’ Jazz thrilled, readjusting her micro-mini for maximum stocking-top glimpses. ‘When I look at him, all I can think is “take me”.’

‘Really? When I look at him all I can think is “pubic lice”.’

It was clear to me that Billy was in his late twenties – and possibly always would be. But the prison poet friend Jazz introduced moments later was another case altogether. The Trinidadian who sidled onto the stool next to me, cocked an elbow on the bar and said hello in such a silky voice with lips curved into the most dreamy smile, that the overall effect, the voice and smile, so at odds with his stealthy eyes, was completely unnerving. I wasn’t sure whether his splayed nose was the original edition or had been broken, but it gave Trueheart Jones a certain devilish, dangerous charm. This was only accentuated by his opening remark.

‘I didn’t know angels could fly so low. But hey.’ He placed his large warm hand on my shoulderblades. ‘Here are your wings.’

To a sane woman, a woman who only used the word wings when it was attached to the other word ‘pantyliner’, this might have sounded trite. But to a deranged female whose husband was at a whipped-cream orgy, it was music to her neglected ears.

For the past fifteen years, a ‘stud’ had meant little more than a drawing pin on the school noticeboard. But here was one flirting with me. Things like this didn’t happen to married mothers of two. Let me just check my self-esteem-ometer. Yep – empty. Who was this delicious stranger? Jazz had been wolfing down men as though they were hors d’oeuvres and I was beginning to see why. I wanted some magical, mysterious hours, learning other men’s stories and inventing my own. That wild recklessness I could hear in the music, where was that in my own little life? My timid existence had all the excitement of a tin of tuna.

‘Are you flirting with me? I am way too old for you,’ I flirted. I hadn’t felt this excited since I went up to a 34B when breastfeeding.

‘I like to feel time passed in the skin. No less than I like to see it in the face. Where there’s no record of event, I can have no curiosity. And where there’s no curiosity,