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

Okay, so it was poetry on L-plates, but I found it oddly enchanting. I couldn’t even use alcohol as an excuse. I was just disarmed and charmed. He was all mouth . . . and all trousers.

‘So you’re a poet?’

He shrugged. ‘Won a prize. While I was in Pentonville. But in the tradition of all great Oscar acceptance speeches, I couldn’t be there to make it,’ he grinned.

I laughed. It felt like an age since a handsome young man had talked to me like this. ‘Poetry is a great literary gift, mainly because you can’t sell it. Am I right?’

He chuckled and I experienced an unexpected pang of pleasure as I realized with a jolt that it had been too long since I had felt amusing.

And then he placed a companionable arm around my shoulders. Goose pimples as big as acne erupted on my skin. I suddenly felt so hot I was worried the sprinklers might start gushing and the smoke alarm would wail. This was the sort of guy who knew how to wake a girl up smiling. Walking might be difficult, but smiling would be a cinch. And he was schmoozing me. I would have to keep my legs crossed for the entire duration of the evening. Actually, they were so tightly crossed, I doubted I’d get any feeling back for – oh say, the next two years.

But what was I thinking? I was at the age where, if a man asked me to ‘slip into something more comfortable’, I’d put on Ugg boots and trackie bottoms. ‘You know, I have to go. I have a husband and kids and homework to mark and . . .’ I blustered, flustered. ‘I just came down here in a moment of irrational madness. I—’

But the poet saw straight through me. ‘So tell me, baby. Were these feelings of irrational madness prompted by anythin’ unusual? Or did they develop naturally in the course of a normal marriage?’

Here I was, a Guardian Woman’s-Page-reading, Simone de Beauvoir worshipper, yet I loved it when he called me ‘baby’.

I hurried home to Kilburn, to a house dull with despair. The children, sensing something was up between their parents, had become so clingy and whiney of late, and unruly when I was out. They’d put Jamie’s Red Ant Farm under the babysitter’s chair with the trap door left open and she was threatening not to come again. I was so guilt-riddled about having abandoned them for the Boom Boom bar I felt sure they’d grow up to write the sequel to Mommy Dearest. Rory’s dogs, also deprived of attention, whimpered to be taken for walks. There were piles of unpaid bills, unopened mail and urgent requests from irate pet owners. I tried to wait up for Rory, jealousy thumping in my head like a migraine, but fell, eventually, into a deep sleep. When I awoke at dawn to see his crumpled, rumpled head on our pillows, a wave of relief washed over me.

I stretched a tentative hand across the sheets. Men suffer not from ADD but EDD – Erection Deficit Disorder. Rory might forget birthdays and favourite foods, but he always paid attention when sex was on offer. However, he pulled away from my touch.

It was as though I’d been thrown headfirst into the cold embrace of the sea. Water filled my ears. The silence was unnatural.

‘Rory,’ I finally whispered. ‘I’m just so sorry I ever made you go to therapy. All therapists should be put on a spaceship and launched into a black hole with no booster rockets for earth reentry. Let’s forget her.’ I touched his arm, aching for the smallest gesture, the faintest softness in his voice to reassure me. ‘Let’s just go back to how we were. You can play air guitar and I’ll chase the hamster around and we can be happy again.’

I gently laid my cheek against my husband’s mouth, but his lips stayed stony. And cold.

‘I think you’re right, Cassie. Our marriage is lacking something. I think I should move into the surgery flat for a while.’

Every word burned me. ‘The flat?’ I repeated blankly. ‘Why?’

‘Because . . .’

I resolutely steadied my lips to stop from crying. I just didn’t think there could be a good end to that sentence.

‘Because I need some space.’

‘Space?’ Who was he, Buzz Aldrich? ‘What do you mean, space? Are you . . . leaving me?’

‘No.’

‘Has someone put you up to this?’ I steeled myself to absorb the blow. ‘What exactly went on last night? Did you have sex with some other woman? Was it B . . . B . . .’ I couldn’t stand the taste of her name in my mouth. ‘That woman?’

‘Who are you – the Crown Prosecutor? It was just tongue-reiki, that’s all.’

I buried my face in the pillow for a moment so that he couldn’t see what I was feeling for him. ‘I think you just officially forfeited your chances of winning Husband of the Year,’ I said, yearning for the miraculous comfort of his smile.

But no smile lit up his face. ‘I’ll be back for some clothes and stuff.’ His chilly monotone signalled that the conversation was over. Then he left.

It was that simple. It was that easy. To assassinate a woman.

16. Wet Adulteresses of NW1

‘Eeteezotorault,’ Jazz mumbled, pouring me a glass of whisky and cracking open an emergency packet of Green & Black chocolate.

‘What?’ In a state of numb despair I’d dropped the kids with their friends at the Sunday cinema club, giving me exactly ninety minutes to sort my life out. Like a creature in a nature documentary with homing instincts, I’d then driven on remote control to Jasmine’s place.

Jazz removed her tooth bleaching trays and tried again. ‘It is not your fault.’

‘Do you think he’s left me? God! What am I going to tell the children? I mean, how can they not notice their father is sleeping in the surgery flat? Maybe I could say he has to give pills to postoperative cats in the night