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

‘Oh, spare us the details!’ Jazz roared, in a voice that could have moved the earth out of its orbit.

Hannah uttered a little hiss of amusement. ‘But you’re the one who told me to take a toy boy. “The bitch is back”, you said.’ She swivelled onto a kitchen barstool and casually filed a nail. ‘“Kiss my tiara”. “You have to be mean to be queen” . . .’

Jazz listened dumbfounded as her own words came back to haunt her. ‘For God’s sake, Hannah. He’s seventeen!’

Hannah gave a brittle laugh. ‘When you were molesting your tennis coach and I suggested that it was best, in general, not to shtup someone you could have given birth to, you said, and I quote, that was “ageist bullshit”.’ Her lips were moving like a pair of garden shears. And her remarks were suitably cutting.

Jazz was looking at her with the kind of expression you’d give an incontinent nudist who’d just relieved himself on your trousseau.

‘I remember you said that sex with a younger man is the equivalent of jogging seventy-five miles – but sooo much more enjoyable! And you’re so right. I mean – look at me! I’m glowing!’

Jazz gave a horrified moan. ‘He’s my son!’ she croaked. ‘If you were a mother you’d understand! Just as well you never had a baby, Hannah. Although no, wait – you could have farmed the collagen from the umbilical cord to puff up your lying lips.’

This time it was Hannah’s turn to be cut by a sharp remark. But it was not hard to comprehend Jazz’s wrath. The answer to, ‘How do you keep your youth?’ should not be: ‘At my best friend’s house in an upstairs bedroom.’

‘Why don’t you just crawl back to whatever sulphur-scented depths spawned you, you bitch. Do you have any idea how devastating this is for me?’ Jazz said.

Hannah gave a sour smile. ‘Well, I’m glad you now know what it’s like to have your life devastated,’ she said. ‘Join the fucking club.’ Her laughter crashed like a hailstorm all around us.

I looked at Hannah, aghast. This was all for revenge? It was a rationalization so convoluted I’d need Stephen Hawking to explain it. ‘Have you no heart?’ I asked. It seemed to me Hannah could qualify as an artificial heart donor, right at this moment.

‘No heart and no decency!’ Jazz spat. ‘You’re nothing but a calculating sexual predator.’

Hannah guffawed. ‘Why do the words “pot”, “kettle” and “black” spring to mind, I wonder?’

‘But you deliberately sought out the most vulnerable of victims. Josh has just lost his family home. His parents are at war. His A levels are looming.’ Jazz paced as she catalogued our friend’s cruelties. ‘You’ve acted with the most callous disregard to the damage you could cause him. Or me! Worse still, you have absolutely no remorse. I never ever want to see you again.’ Her voice spiralled up into a shriek. ‘Fuck off and die, do you hear me?’

Hannah tried to justify herself once more, but Jazz screeched over the top of her. ‘Here, let me give you a twenty pence piece so you can go and ring someone who gives a fuck. If you come near my son once more, I will kill you.’

Kill was a little strong, I thought, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Hannah were to lose a limb in a bizarre Moulinex accident.

In the handbook on ways to get rid of a girlfriend, the third most effective method would be to say, ‘I’m going to miss you. I mean, hanging out with you makes me look so much slimmer!’ The second most effective technique would be something along the lines of, ‘Here’s the pound I owe your husband for going down on me.’ But the ultimate had to be to sleep with her son.

‘Cassie,’ Jazz turned to me. ‘You must choose now. Me or Her.’

‘Go on – take her side. You usually do,’ crabbed Hannah, ‘because you’re so intimidated by her. This is the woman who sabotaged your marriage!’

I looked from one to the other, debating the wisdom of a response. I had to orchestrate a reconciliation. But how? To say my best girlfriends weren’t getting on was putting it mildly. They had the same rapport as a gun-toting Islamic fundamentalist and an armed American GI. But I’d hesitated a moment too long because Jazz was exiting, slow and deliberate, like a matador turning his back on the bull.

‘Hannah! Apologize. You must run after her.’

Hannah just laughed mirthlessly.

By the time I’d blundered down onto the street, Jazz and her imitation Prada handbag had been eaten up by mist.

The menthol coldness of winter was upon us once more, but it was the coldness between we three that was truly arctic. The social frostbite felt more chilly and bitter than the nights. Mistrust, like a slow drift of snow, had banked up around us, making it icy and treacherous. Silence deepened in drifts.

I rang Jazz and Hannah constantly, to no avail. It was hard to believe that our twenty-five-year relationship was seeping away, almost mimicking the evenings, which were now dwindling into sepia grey, then darkness. How could something so delicately established over decades, be torn asunder so quickly? The centrifugal forces of loving friendship had held us in their grip, but suddenly gravity had evaporated and we were all flying off into space.

I thought of writing to Jazz, but what could I say? Am so sorry your husband is a diseased philanderer, your house has been remortgaged and sold from under you, and your best friend is shagging your son. But there just didn’t seem to be a Hallmark card to cover that.

Lose a friend, gain a mother. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, my mother moved in. She said she had left my father because of the other ‘she’ in his life – the shed. Apparently he was always in there, mucking around with bolts and wires and computery things. ‘On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger