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

if the cheap motel we’d no doubt end up in had no opening windows? No, no, I would just have to engineer situations where I only met him whilst lying on my side – the only foolproof position guaranteed to make a woman’s post-breastfeeding boobs look bigger . . . I could just walk with my arms crossed to push my cleavage out . . . But the only look this achieves is of an insane asylum escapee contorted into a permanent straightjacket position. And I suspected that neither option was particularly conducive to seduction.

‘By the time you’ve got him into bed, none of that will matter. The trick is getting him in there. And for that you can just cheat,’ Jazz suggested. ‘Men lie about their sporting feats and childhood heroics all the time. So, why can’t we lie a little? Silicone-gel bras, padding . . .’

‘Okay! Bring me my breasts!’ I demanded.

‘Oh goodee!’ she thrilled. ‘You soooo need a stint in image rehab.’

Her first attempt involved insertible bra pads, only they kept working their way out of my bra, so that I left a trail of white miniature petal-shaped cushions wherever I went. Mind you, this was very handy when people were looking for me. Especially my husband. I would just lead him, Hansel and Gretel like, to my wanton whereabouts.

Gel inserts were her next technique for making mountains out of my molehills. These are silicone pouches you wear in your bra, only I’d no doubt forget they were there – until, that is, Trueheart found one during foreplay.

‘Shit, what are these?’ he would ask, holding the illicit quivering jellyfish between forefinger and thumb.

‘Um . . . would you believe, an innovative way of defrosting poultry?’ No, this was ridiculous. I was not going to sleep with him.

‘I know you’re not going to sleep with him, sweetie, but you might as well pop on a party thong to be prepared. Just in case you’re in an accident or something,’ Jazz replied, steering me into the lingerie department of Selfridges.

Now personally, I favour 100 per cent cotton knickers the size of a small emerging nation. You know, pants you could also use as a spinnaker on a yacht. But Jazz soon had me in teddies you need an engineering degree to operate. After ten minutes of wrestling with a frilly teddy, my head was sticking out of the crotch slit, one breast was in the neck hole and my pudenda tufts were fetchingly framed in lace portholes.

‘What are you up to in there?’ Jazz knocked on the changing room door.

‘Oh just busily flunking femininity.’

‘You certainly are not!’ The next thing I knew, I was in the beauty salon being waxed. Believe me, the pain of waxing will kill you – and there’s not much point in being smooth and hairless, if you’re dead. Then I was coiffured, after which my bouffant was so heavy I could hardly move my head, such was its cargo of hairspray. Bouffy the Vampire Slayer looked back at me from the mirror. Finally, I was plucked. ‘They’re not chin hairs. They’re just eyelashes which fell down.’ Men are so lucky. Not only do they need only one pair of shoes, and in one colour, for their entire adult lives, but they also have an option about growing a moustache.

Determined to spin gold from straw, Jazz’s sartorial Rumplestiltskinning began with her trying to squeeze me into the latest designer skin-tight trousers, but found the space already occupied with legs.

‘I like that dress,’ I said to the sales assistant in Joseph, ‘but have you got it in a heavier bone size?’ The only dress I found which was vaguely flattering, sported the price label Guess.

‘Gee, I dunno. More than a week’s salary?’

In the end, I settled on a new wardrobe from Top Shop and just sat up all night writing Pucci and Prada onto all my cheap bags, shirts and shoes.

Jazz also believed in the King Canute property of face creams, and made me buy every lotion and potion which promised to hold back the sea of time. Needless to say, she did not seem very impressed by my make-up drawer which contained one mini-mascara I’d had for four years that dried up after the third eyelash, plus a freebee lipstick the colour of which was so vile that a mortician wouldn’t use it on a cadaver. But Jazz’s beauticians did finally manage to transform me . . . Only trouble was, I could never go anywhere spontaneously ever again, because I needed to start getting ready at least forty-eight hours before.

Then there were the control-top tights, as easy to get in and out of as, say, a wetsuit. It was hardly striptease material. I wore them to school for practice and they were fine, but struggling out of my Extra-Hold Thigh Shapers that night proved so strenuous that I pulled a muscle and had to be taken to hospital.

I sat in the Accident and Emergency room rapidly going off the infidelity idea. Affairs sounded easy, but they were actually so bloody dangerous. And not just physically. I mean, what if Trueheart got serious? What if he got cloying and annoying? I could always call out my husband’s name in bed. That would probably be enough to put him off . . . Or perhaps I could become more sexually demanding – in a weird way. Or I could tell him I had a stalker and police protection. That would make an ex-con run for his life.

But what if Trueheart became the stalker? Then I could just tell him that I had a restraining order out on my husband because he’d threatened to kill any man who slept with me.

Christ. But what if I got serious about him? There never really is a good time to tell your husband that you’re divorcing him for a twenty-nine-year-old poet with serious pecs appeal – oh, and a criminal conviction for cannabis dealing. No, no, I couldn’t go through with it.

To cement my view, I was at Jasmine’s when the blonde-haired