by Kathy Lette
Easier? I don’t think she realizes the emotional roller-coaster I’m about to take her on. The woman needs an official warning not to strap herself in if she has neck problems or is pregnant. What I want to say is, ‘This is a bumpy ride. For safety reasons, please keep all arms and legs within the speeding vehicle.’
Instead, I pick up the yellow paper.
I’m supposed to spend the day correcting Year 6 exercises on grammar.
Question: What comes at the end of a sentence?
Answer: Life imprisonment for murder.
2. How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
All husbands think they’re gods. If only their wives weren’t atheists . . .
During my twenties I thought I’d developed tinnitus, but it was just the endless ringing of wedding bells as all my friends got hitched. I married Rory, a vet, which is ironic as I’ve never been much of an animal person – possibly because I teach them all day. (Little bit of pathetic staff room humour there.) To me, animals are at their best on a barbecue. I especially hate dogs. Dogs have far too many teeth for a supposedly friendly nature. If I had to have a pet it would be a crocodile – so it could eat all the others.
And it’s not just our four-legged friends I loathe. I’m paranoid about all creatures, two-legged, one-legged, eight-legged. Each night before getting into bed, I check my sheets for scorpions – in England.
You may think you like animals, but believe me, if you were married to a vet you’d soon be cured. At any one time we have seven or eight dogs in the house, the same number of cats and a lot of mice which aren’t pets. When I was pregnant, Rory told people that I was ‘whelping’. Quite often he absentmindedly scratches me behind the ear and says, ‘Good girl.’ Pretty soon he’ll start throwing me a tennis ball to chew on.
If I had to imagine Rory as an animal, he’d be a Labrador – faithful and fun. I met him when he was dangling from the minute hand of the clock tower at college, which he’d climbed whilst inebriated, just so he could use the pick-up line, ‘Do you have the time?’ Rory is an outdoorsman. He has thighs the width of two seven-year-old kids put together and biceps the size of a guest bathroom. He’s built for outward-bound survival quests. A born frontiersman, he could ford a mighty river, scale a snow-capped mountain, fell a redwood forest, build a ranch house and have ‘vittels’ simmering in a pot – and all before I could say, ‘Who wants to eat at McDonald’s?’
For me, the Great Outdoors is the bit between Bond Street tube station and the front door of Selfridges. I grew up in Sydney (my parents moved here when I was sixteen). The only geography I have of London is how to get to Harrods then home again. When friends ask me to their country retreats in say, Scotland, their directions consist of, ‘Go to Harvey Nichols and turn right.’
I married Rory because he made me laugh.
The first time he took me to meet his mum in Cricklewood, he referred to the phenomenon of a son having lunch with his mother as the ‘edible complex’. The aquamarine eyes and the tawny curls springing out of his cranium in all directions kinda helped too. As did the way his face is lit up by that ready smile, which renders him instantly likeable. I also adore the way he cocks his elbow onto the window ledge of his car whilst whistling a tune. Oh, and his compassion. Even back then he was devoting half his time to voluntary work in homeless animal shelters. And nothing much has changed. He now has his own veterinary clinic adjoining our house in Kilburn, but does a lot of work for free.
Still, we are – or we were then – allies, spun together like silkworms. My love has always covered him, like treacle. And when he looks at me, a fondness spills and ripples over his face in a way that has always set my nipples on fire. After fifteen years of marriage, I’m far from oblivious to his downsides. He wears a battered leather jacket in all weathers, and owns the largest collection of T-shirts in the Western world. Formal wear for Rory consists of an ironed T-shirt. Even worse, he doesn’t like my friends. He says that London dinner parties account for three-quarters of the world supply of Condescension. He attends Jazz and Hannah’s social gatherings under duress, slumps in a corner and says nothing. ‘Oh, that’s your husband? I thought he was a bookend.’ Which is why he didn’t want us to go to Jazz and Studz’s twentieth wedding anniversary party last January. If only I’d listened to him. . .
It was meant to be a quiet celebratory dinner, with their oldest friends from university. But thanks to Studz’s inability to separate work from pleasure, the whole thing had become bigger than Dolly Parton’s hair.
Jazz married David Studlands while he was a young houseman on a surgical team at a big teaching hospital in Cambridge. She fell for him the first day they met. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ Jazz told me. ‘I just want to pop him on a canapé and eat him whole.’ Jazz, who graduated as a Home Economics teacher, supported him while he climbed the hospital ladder, by cooking in restaurants. Studz is now so wealthy he has a walk-in wallet and drives a rhymes-with-banker Jaguar, which he parks outside his private clinic in Harley Street. The man is not only handsome but so tall he has to radio down to us mere mortals below to see what the weather is like at street-level.
Even nearing fifty, Studz’s body has remained slimmed and gymmed. He has a profile so sharp you could shave your legs with it and an equally cutting tongue. His style is mocking, although he mainly mocks himself – but in a way which only amplifies his charms. As a top surgeon in reconstruction and burns repairs, Studz gets his academic kudos by working in an NHS teaching hospital as a consultant. The family’s luxurious lifestyle is financed by his private practice in cosmetic surgery. (‘You’re a neurotic time-wasting narcissist. However, if you want to consult me privately, just lie back and open your chequebook wide.’)
To absolve his conscience for operating on people who don’t need it, Studz regularly takes unpaid leave to work on medical ships which sail around Africa, providing free surgical treatment to war victims. He talent-scouts doctors for aid organizations and is famous for advising his junior registrars to do six months’ volunteer work with Médecins Sans Frontières for the sake of their souls. He also donates his time to the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of War and is an expert adviser to the World Health Organisation. Yep, the man has already been summoned to Buckingham Palace for a halo fitting. And it was in honour of this altruistic part of his nature that Jasmine Jardine, our very own scintillating and saucy It Girl on campus, carved his name into her headboard.
Jazz had actually wanted to cancel the wedding anniversary party, as her mother had died, after a protracted battle with breast cancer, just before Christmas. However, Studz had insisted the celebration go ahead. Hannah and I hoped that this bash would be our friend’s passport out of her state of grief. To achieve this, it was our job to make sure there was no mention of the dreaded ‘C’ word.
It was 8 p.m. and I was running late. Hannah had ordered me to look chic – which for me means employing a special effects movie stunt team, since the dress code for female teachers, in case you hadn’t noticed, is flat shoes and ‘interesting’ earrings. My shambolic clothes are usually missing buttons, always trailing hems, and are often Rory’s. I base my daily fashion sense on what doesn’t need ironing. Jasmine has looks which turn heads. Mine turns stomachs. You think I’m exaggerating? Lately I’ve taken to wearing shell suits – and not because I like to put them to my ear to listen for the Atlantic, either.
When we met, Jazz used to say that I was the classic ‘girl next door’ – attractive enough to be special, but not pretty enough to be hated by other women. However, I didn’t care if I was pretty or not because, meeting Rory, I was beautiful at last. Nearly two decades later, I would have to say that I still look good from a distance . . . a distance of, say, 200 miles. So what happened?
Motherhood, that’s what. As a girl, I hated exposing my scrawny limbs. The day I got married I weighed seven and a half stone. A few years later I was in Top Shop, hyperventilating as I tried to pull a pair of size 10 jeans up over my h
ips. I looked in the mirror and there was my mother – all small boobs and big bum.
When did I pass nine stone? I’d meant to go to the gym after the baby was born, but who would look after him? Being at home so much in my pyjamas meant that pretty soon I was pregnant again. Now that my kids Jenny, eleven and Jamie, thirteen, are older I could go to the gym but, as a working mum, it’s amazing that I have the energy to turn on the microwave to defrost the store-bought dinner. And kids are so calorific. As you cook their tea, leftovers just get hoovered up into your mouth – sausages drenched in ketchup, buttery mashed potatoes, ice cream left melting in bowls, all so sensationally slimming. Well, you can’t waste it, can you? So you store it on your waist. Luckily I adore my mother, which is fortunate, seeing as I’ve become her!
When I was finally ready to go to the party, dressed in an M&S pre-baby trouser suit, with the trousers pinned together beneath the long-ish jacket, I noticed that my hair was moving. It seemed to be waving at me from the mirror. Oh God. Nits. An occupational hazard of teaching in a primary school. My choices were to run through the streets ringing a bell, shouting, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and perhaps painting a big X on the door, or, a less Dickensian option, to Chernobyl my scalp with chemicals. Which I did. The only way a nit could survive in there now was in a flame-retardant wetsuit and an aqualung. I was no longer contagious, but I don’t think ‘chic’ quite covered it.
As Rory angled his beaten-up Jeep, reeking of dog piss and guinea pig poo, into an illegal parking spot half on the pavement outside Jazz and David’s Georgian Hampstead home, I looked through the bay windows and could see all sorts of chic people who didn’t have nits, boiling around the drawing room. We could hear the jumbled roar of their exclusive badinage, punctuated by men laughing smuttily. My husband did his Lamb-to-the-Slaughter look.
‘Shit. Jazz and Studz have become the Edmund Hillarys of social climbing. You know I have no head for heights, Cassie. We’d better rope ourselves together in case one of us falls.’
Jazz and Studz were what the papers called a ‘power couple’. They were plugged into the right social socket. Although it was mid-January, the Prime Minister’s personal Christmas card would still be up on the mantelpiece, next to one from Kofi Annan and, no doubt, Nelson Mandela. The most chichi card on my mantelpiece, came from the local dry cleaners to thank me for my custom.
Champagne flûte in hand, Hannah Wolfe answered the door. A quicksilver woman with dark, glassy eyes like those of a doll, she has a soft knob of a nose, a red helmet of hair, eyebrows plucked into two sceptical arches, a granulated voice and opinions as strong as her trademark espressos. She speaks three languages in the same rapid-fire South African Jewish accent and has an endearing bark of a laugh. Hannah is approaching forty, but from the wrong direction. The woman isn’t getting older . . . What she’s getting is injected twice a week with collagen and smeared in foetal lamb membranes.
With her duck-like deportment, hyper-arched back and flattened chest, it’s obvious that Hannah had been tortured in tutus by her mother from a very young age.
Having given up teaching art in a comprehensive and moved into interior design before it was fashionable, Hannah is credited with bringing feng shui (like chop suey, only not as tasty) to the West. In the early days she was compared to Martha Stewart, but insists that she was a rotten, two-faced bitch YEARS before Martha came on the scene. I adore Hannah, despite her grating, ‘Let’s get on with it, already!’ approach. Ms Wolfe always knows exactly which beaded pashmina or faux-chinchilla throw will be this year’s ‘must have’ accessory. This Design Diva could wear a tarpaulin cleverly draped so as to look like a ballgown and get away with it. Every time Hannah sees me in saggy leggings or ink-stained jeans, she adopts the sort of pained expression which makes me think she’s trying to suck her face out through the back of her skull.
After making her first fortune advising heiresses on whether to paint their houses peach or pistachio, Hannah decided she no longer wanted to ‘accept any employment which might interfere with my nails, dah-ling’. Shortly afterwards, she opened her own art gallery in Old Bond Street, and made her second fortune.
This world of spin and spittle provided her with a house in Regents Park so big there’s a toilet for every occasion, and a marriage proposal from Pascal.
When I first met Hannah at teacher training college, she prided herself on only ever dating men whose professions began with P. There was a Polar explorer, a poet, a pornographer, a pianist, a philanthropist, a political dissident and then finally a painter. Well, Pascal called himself a painter. Jazz and I saw him more as a lapsed Satanist.
With his dark good looks, insolent pout, lazily half-closed lids and Medusa dreadlocks aureoling his head, Pascal was the hot-to-trot Love God of Art School. Let’s face it, ‘My name is Pascal Swan. And yes, I mate for life,’ is a pretty persuasive pick-up line. And it seemed to be true. Even if his hair hadn’t lasted, their marriage had.
While Hannah is ever-optimistic, Pascal sees the bad side of everything. If he had his way he’d be skywriting There is no such thing as Santa! over EuroDisney.
Although we hated the way he sponged off Hannah (when Pascal put his arm around his bride at the wedding, Jasmine whispered, ‘Wouldn’t it look more natural with his hand in her purse?’) and even though we got Rory and David to tell him on his stag night that the marriage was not going to work unless he did, what we really resented was the deal he’d struck. He would only marry Hannah if they never had kids, or ‘ruggis ratti’ as he called them.
Whenever Jazz and I complained about our children, Hannah would do a little jig. ‘I’m celebrating National Childless Day, dah-lings. I’m dancing and leaping to celebrate my infertility!’
In short, she brought home the bacon – but not to go with eggs.
Standing now on Jasmine’s threshold, Hannah shook her head in disbelief at the sight of me, silver earrings jangling jauntily from the four holes in her chic little earlobes.
‘What? You’re trying to sell me a used car?’ She pointed at my slicked-back hair. Hannah is the most disloyal person I’ve ever met. That’s what makes her such fun.
‘It’s nit napalm. I have to leave it in for twelve to sixteen hours. Who’s here?’ Shedding my coat, I watched Rory retreat at speed to the kitchen, mumbling about checking on the family’s animals – even though I knew that the only animal Jazz had allowed her son Josh was a pet rock.
‘Oh, the Good and the Great. A few Prime Ministers from Third World fledgling democracies,’ Hannah sighed, ‘a couple of Nobel Prize winners, the World’s Greatest Living Playwright . . .’
‘Oh fab. The Cultural Commissars. Is Jazz at least enjoying herself?’
‘Well, nobody’s mentioned the C word. They’re all besotted with that pop star the United Nations has just appointed as a Good Will Ambassador – at least, I think she’s a pop star. With a name like Kinkee she could also be a hooker. She’s American, blonde, and you can still see the price tag on her store-bought boobs. Says she’s moving into acting, dah-ling. No doubt as Paris Hilton’s pussy double.’
I laughed. ‘Oh, the Parma Syndrome, huh? Thin and hammy. Christ!’ I caught sight of my Al Capone hairstyle in the hallway mirror. I looked underdressed without a sub-machine gun. ‘I can’t go in looking like this.’
But like a sky-diving instructor with a reluctant recruit, Hannah had already shoved me through the drawing-room door. And there was Jazz, all laughing eyes, luscious breasts, honeyed hair and velvet glances, coiffured and sublime in a colourful silk cocktail frock, smiling at me quizzically as I parachuted in.
I kissed her hello. ‘You look like a holiday. I want to go on you.’
She held me at arm’s length whilst scrutinizing my nit napalm. ‘Nits? Just pretend you’re into tits and clits,’ she suggested. ‘Then everyone will just presume that you’ve slicked it back because of the lesbian chic look.’
But there was no need to turn the other chic because all eyes were on the Pop
Princess. In her mid-twenties, with lacquered lips, conical breasts and the obligatory flawless dentition, she was cadaverously pale and, like a jockey, way under her normal weight. All the better for riding, I supposed. What can I tell you? The girl was born to limo. This gym junkie was so determined to show off her time in the ab lab, she was only wearing a boob tube and matching hot pants made from mesh. The woman was so vain she’d no doubt installed a follow spotlight in her bedroom.
Despite the hours we girls had dedicated to looking good, the men were not even aware there were other women within a ten-mile radius. With a Pop Princess present, we were ranked somewhere below lesser invertebrates. As Kinkee jabbered on inanely about Kabbalah and hot-cupping, London’s male socalled intelligentsia hee-hawed appreciatively.
To my alarm, the Pop Princess suddenly broke off and shimmied towards me. A feather boa coiled and writhed like an exotic snake around her snowy neck. ‘Wow! Lesbian chic. I like it.’ The boa jerked as though really alive. ‘Bi-polar, bi-coastal, bisexual. Everything is bi, bi, bi right now. I’ve been thinking a little lesbo action could broaden my career options, ja know?’
The geriatric males, who all had high hopes of turning up sometime in the future on a postage stamp, turned their droopy eyes in my direction. As the centre of their fleeting attention, I tried a simulation of coquetry by giggling and hair-flicking. Only trouble was, I’d forgotten that I was infested so accidentally sent a plague of dead and dying lice into the atmosphere. Perhaps she’d like to come up and see my itchings? It was a bad pun I’d save for Jazz, who’d love it. ‘Well, actually it’s nit lotion,’ I confessed.
This spokeswoman for vermin-afflicted children in the Third World gagged, shrieked and then ricocheted across the room at the speed of light. The United Nations had obviously selected her for her survival skills. Couldn’t wait to see how she was going to endure those field trips to the Congo.
