by Kathy Lette
She couldn’t even cook for him as the poky kitchen was so decrepit. I suggested that we shop for some new fittings. ‘There must be something cheap and cheerful we can stump up for?’
‘Oh, good idea!’ Jazz replied sarcastically. ‘Just what I need when I’m this depressed and my husband’s being blackmailed by a Sylvia Plath expert – an extra oven lying around.’
For Hannah, it was all over bar the shouting and the exchange of real estate. Her twenty-year marriage was now confined to a file in a divorce lawyer’s office. A marriage is about as manoeuvrable as a supertanker, but at least she had started the process of changing course. Her husband, who had promised that no sperm of his would ever get near an ovary without written permission, had moved in with the mother of his child.
Hannah was so humiliated by the realization that her life had been nothing more than a mirage of convenience, that she was threatening to change her name and move to another member state of the European union. And I had a strong desire to join her.
My marriage to Rory had dwindled to one affair, a mortgage and two children between us. As news seeped out, women friends clucked sympathetically, but were secretly relieved that it was me and not them. I felt like a rubber glove which had been turned inside out.
Rory, meanwhile, had gone on holiday to Greece with Bianca. As she always seemed to be drawing on our savings, I now referred to her as Biancaccount, and our dwindling finances as Rory’s Bonk Statement.
Otherwise things were great. Fab. Hunky-fucking-dory.
Like a war-weary soldier, I crawled back to my parent’s house to seek refuge over the holiday month. It’s the only time in my adult life that I’ve cried in my mother’s arms. I was always teasing my parents with complaints that they should have screwed me up more when I was a kid as ‘I’ve got nobody to blame now.’ Well, my kids would have nothing to worry about in that department because I was about to screw them up big time. When I told them that Rory and I had separated, they looked at me with huge, dismayed eyes, no longer tough and cool, but frightened little babies. Jenny, who’d now turned twelve, shattered into tears. I set her down on my lap gingerly, as if she were a Ming vase. How could I have coquetted with divorce? I was like a woman who flirts with a sex offender and is then surprised to be indecently assaulted.
I tried to distract them with endless excursions to funfairs for rides on the ‘Twist and Vomit’ or the ‘Plunge and Chunder’, but nothing could lift their gloomy spirits. My marital chaos must have been contagious because by the end of the summer, my parents were also fighting. My mother maintained that she was a computer widow, a shed widow and a golf widow. She told my dad that the reason he loves his computer is because he is a computer – hard to figure out and never enough memory.
‘You’re lucky to have got rid of your husband,’ Mum told me, loudly over dinner one night, within Dad’s earshot. ‘You must be so relieved you no longer have to make a pretence of finding him attractive in the bedroom.’
But I did still find Rory attractive. Rory was my rock, my lighthouse. I missed the blinking, intermittent warmth of him. Every time the phone rang I lunged for the receiver – but it was never my man.
I heard from regular clients and neighbours that the surgery was no longer taking mottled strays or giving freebie consultations to the poor and the elderly, but only administering to pedigree pooches. When neighbours did glimpse Rory, he usually had a pair of poodle clippers in his hand. Not a good look on a red-blooded man. Now that Rory had two households to help finance, Bianca had initiated a more lucrative line of work which she called ‘feline feng shui’.
All Rory’s years of rigorous medical training were now being utilized to run pet masturbation workshops for overly sexed cats. (It gave a whole new meaning to ‘Heavy Petting’.) The rest of the time he spent on ‘pet bereavement counselling’. Losing a beloved pet can be as devastating as losing a spouse, Bianca’s brochure blurbed.
No, it couldn’t, I thought acrimoniously.
By the time the kids and I got back to London at the beginning of September, our Kilburn house had a meek, defeated look. Much like me, I thought. I tried to make myself feel at home – until I remembered that’s where I was, goddamn it.
When my husband, as I still thought of him, in the odd proprietorial spasm, came to collect the children for a meal at the local Chinese or a movie, it was like a hospital visit, formal and tense. This is how it went on all through September, borrowing and returning the kids as though they were library books.
Once I was back at North Primrose Primary, supposedly refreshed for a new school year, the octopus tentacles of misery really took their stranglehold. Six months ago, I’d been so blasé about our marriage, but now the wild panic of no longer having Rory made me lose my moorings. Without him, I just failed to add up to a person. A whole person. For a while I thought his attraction to Bianca would pass, but by October I had to face the vertiginous terror of being alone. It was worse late at night, when the silence of my world would roar steadily in my ears. Then I would sit in Rory’s favourite chair, so I could feel his contours in the way the seat moulded under me – and ache for him. I missed the hot rush of his laugh, and his rather gruff adoration. I would sleep in his shirt and cry all night. I even missed the animals. Oh for a pet piranha in the bath; an incubator full of snakes in the airing cupboard; a sabre-toothed llama in the living room.
Stupid little things would ambush me, leaving me tsunamied in tears – the sight of the knee-guard he wore for squash, or stepping on his spearmint dental floss. The worst night was when I went to the flat, at the back of the surgery, to retrieve some books, and there on the floor were a pair of his jeans, the legs pointing out at an angle of half past seven, as if he’d just stepped out of them. Jagged black edges sliced and tore me up. Time fractured, and it was two hours before I could climb the steps back into my house, arms clutched around myself, attempting to contain the dreadful hurt inside.
I tried to sleep but was savaged by nightmares. I shrank from my thoughts as if they were blows. Was it all my fault? I went over and over it in my mind; fingering the rosary of guilt, each bead well worn by my mental touch. Bitter regrets, like ghosts, skulked out of my shadowy subconscious to claim retribution.
I began listening to country and western songs with cheery, up-beat titles like ‘What Can You Expect From A Day That Begins With Waking Up’. I took to tearfully singing ‘Wichita Linesman’ and Tina Arena’s ‘Chains’, in between sloping to the shops wearing slippers, a duffel coat and pyjama bottoms to buy more booze.
I took to cooking with wine – and forgetting to add any food. The warmth of the alcohol sinking into my body was all that would calm the chaos of my heart. Some mornings I was still drunk from the night before. Then I’d have to rummage around my brain for a few remaining cells and attempt to strap them on to a bit of caffeine so I could get to school on time. What a way to start the day, trying to saddle up a coffee bean then ride it round the kitchen. But I couldn’t risk being late.
With the Deputy Head announcement due in November, Perdita had become terminally sycophantic. I was one strike down already. And a second was looming. Raw with lack of sleep and excess emotion, I was not at my best to handle a confrontation with a pushy father.
‘My daughter is in the choir. When I come to the choir performance, will I be able to hear her individually?’
‘Um . . . it’s a choir. They all sing together.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘Actually, do you know what’s not good enough? The way you push Lilly. Your daughter is already top of the class, yet you’re always insisting she has more holiday homework; more tutoring; that she’s failing. You’re the one who is failing, Mr Farber. An infant prodigy is nothing more than a rug-rat with an overly ambitious parent.’
If that didn’t get me the sack, nothing would. I had the distinct feeling I’d soon be making both weekends meet.
Sure enough, the next day I received my second writte
n warning. When Scroope called me to his office, he was using his deceptive voice, as mild as a kindergarten teacher. Once the door was closed, he just laughed flatulently. ‘You might have been the Board of Governors’ favourite choice and pet of the Inspectors, but this is just one more reason for me not to promote you. Thank you, Ms O’Carroll.’
I tried to tell myself that it could be worse. I could be a teacher at the Robert Mugabe Charm School. Or the Gary Glitter Dating Academy. But I just sank lower into despair.
I would have booked in for some really serious drinking time, if it hadn’t been for Jazz and Hannah. The best thing about having girlfriends is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else always does. When I stopped answering her calls, Jazz came around and banged on the front door until I opened it, to see two of her standing there. I blinked frantically and reduced the two Jasmines to one.
‘You should answer my calls now and then, sweetie. Look on it as a useful distraction from daytime television,’ Jazz lectured me. ‘You look awful,’ she added tactfully. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Oh, obviously at my Joy and Euphoria Seminar,’ I replied sourly.
‘Oh, haven’t we all.’ Jazz gave a dispirited sigh. ‘That flat. Ugh. Thank God Studz is rarely there. I can hear entire neighbourhoods through my walls. Someone flushes the toilet two houses down and I reach for the loo roll. I’m finishing my neighbour’s sentences, crossword queries, arguments. Yesterday I said yes to someone else’s marriage proposal.’
‘Lucky girl,’ I moped, snivelling.
‘You are joking?’
I shrugged dismally. ‘I was born married, Jazz. I don’t know how to act any different. I like obsessing about single fitted bunk-bed sheets, I do. I’m so heartsick and petulant and furious at myself for driving Rory away. I should never have dragged him to therapy.’
‘Ain’t that the truth. Bloody Hannah! She’s the one who sabotaged your marriage. You only acted out of love,’ Jazz said. And then she consoled the way she knows best. She cooked. Lasagnes, curries, beef bourguignon, all individually frozen in Tupperware containers for the kids’ dinners. She also spoon-fed me chicken soup made to Hannah’s recipe until I thought I’d grow feathers.
When Jazz wasn’t cooking, Hannah was cleaning.
Hannah, usually so well-groomed, was now sporting hair which stood in a frizzy corona around her head and there were food stains on her Juicy Couture.
‘Pascal says that living with a woman who is more successful drains you,’ she reported, working her way through the Mount Everest of ironing in my laundry basket. ‘He says it made him clinically depressed. Having a baby with Shona cured his depression immediately. Which, he says, proves beyond a doubt that I was the cause of it.’ The iron hissed angrily. ‘Here.’ She handed me a load of washing to sort into piles of whites and colours.
I had intended staying welded to the sofa for the rest of my natural life, but Hannah had threatened to use an oxyacetylene torch to prise my body from its permanently prone position.
‘He says that being a kept man is hard work. It saps a chap’s confidence and destroys his self-respect. In short, it turns him into a woman. He says that he had to schtup Shona, to make himself feel like a man again.’
‘Pascal has enough chips on his shoulder to open a casino,’ I said moodily. Then: ‘But what about the baby?’ I demanded, fossicking for tissues in Jamie’s jeans pockets before they went into the wash. ‘I thought he said that his sperms were blunt-nosed couch potatoes which couldn’t travel?’
‘There’s worse.’ Hannah now began ironing manically, the iron spitting. ‘They’re having another baby.’
It took a moment for the enormity of this to sink in. ‘What?’
‘And I’m forty-four. My eggs are fried. Stale. Scrambled.’
‘But . . . but I thought you didn’t want babies?’
‘Only because he didn’t. I child-proofed my life, but somehow they’d still get in. I feel judged every day, Cassie.’ Hannah was ironing even more furiously, her anger-gorged face sweating. ‘I don’t know what’s worse. To be judged heartless and unfeeling for not wanting children, or the unbearable waves of pity when people hear how I pretended I didn’t want babies to keep my husband happy, only for him to then run off and have babies with a younger woman. Pascal is also citing “fiscal neutering”, which means he plans on inflicting terminal palimony.’
‘So, he wants custody of the cash? Oh, it makes my blood boil. When wives divorce, they’ve raised the children and run the home. They deserve recognition,’ I said defensively. ‘But Pascal has done fuck all! Forget the thirty-five-hour week. He’s been on a thirty-five hour year!’
‘He maintains that he helped support me emotionally, which enabled me to have such a successful career. And that it’s only fair that I make up for ruining his life by giving him half of everything. He’s insisting I sell my favourite paintings.’
‘He’s worse than a cockroach, Hannah. I mean, Pascal doesn’t scuttle under the fridge. He picks the fridge up and carts it out of the kitchen on his back.’
‘And you’ll soon be in the same financial boat, otherwise known as the Titanic. Your ship will come in all right – your hardship. Thanks to Jasmine Jardine.’
Hannah was adamant that it was Jazz who had whisked up my emotions, like some deranged chef stirring up chaos to make everybody as wretched as herself. ‘She put this big hole in your life, Cassie. That gash is not self-inflicted. No, there was someone holding the knife: Jasmine Jardine, marital assassin.’
All I knew was that I’d lost my husband, my orgasm, my mind and quite soon perhaps, my job. I wanted to make my mark in the world, but all I seemed to have was an eraser.
All through October and November, it was as though a time bomb was ticking on beneath our lives. What happened next, the whole drama of it, was an accident that wasn’t so much waiting as begging to happen.
Jazz and Hannah, with their duelling broken hearts, had been avoiding each other since the showdown. We were all entwined in a slow motion game of Emotional Twister.
It was a sunny, crisp-as-a-Granny-Smith autumn morning when we three women met accidentally. The kids had gone gokarting with Rory and I was panting my way through a morning walk on Hampstead Heath before starting my Sunday ritual of housework and homework marking. The earth steamed and sunlight glinted on the rust-coloured leaves. As they fell around me in the dappled woods, I felt my spirits lift a little. It was such a glorious day, I was not the only one who’d been lured out of her pyjamas. In our favourite coffee shop on Hampstead High Street, I bumped into Hannah. The next voice I heard belonged to Jazz.
‘Look at us!’ Jazz exclaimed, peeling off her gloves and hat. ‘All on the dating-market again. Just like when we met at college. Love is the dirtiest four-letter word. Marriage is to love, what thermal underwear is to sex. We are soooo much better off without it.’
Hannah merely grunted. My two best friends were conversationally circling each other like wrestlers.
‘When a woman runs off with your husband, there is no better revenge than to let her keep him! Just remember Lot’s wife and don’t look back,’ Jazz breezed, strolling to the counter to order a semi-skimmed latté. When she returned to our table, she seized my mobile phone from the tabletop and scrolled through my call register.
‘Why does your phone register ten calls an hour to Rory’s mobile?’
‘Must be the kids,’ I lied, even though I had worn my fingerprint off pressing ‘redial’. Rory’s mobile phone beeped entreatingly, but he never picked up. Like the rare Spotted Finch, there had been some sightings of him though, trailing after Bianca with ice-skates or roller-blades over his shoulder, looking exhausted, limp no doubt with fatigue from mapping Bianca’s most elusive erogenous zones. Like the pet poodles he now pampered for a living, Bianca kept him on a very short leash.
‘I see,’ said Jazz, handing back my phone in a peeved manner and peering over Hannah’s shoulder at something she�
��d ringed in the paper, ‘Taurus? That’s Pascal’s sign. Even though he’s told you he’s marrying Shona as soon as possible, you’re still reading the bastard’s horoscope?’
When Hannah had heard the news of Pascal’s impending nuptials, all she’d done was weep copiously. If it were me, I’d have turned up at the wedding in a hearse, wearing a black veil with the stake I was going to plunge into the bride’s heart.
Jazz then launched into yet another diatribe on the usual theme, that a husband is something you make do with once you’re too old for a toy boy, when Hannah stopped her mid-sentence with a momentous announcement.
‘Stop lecturing me already. I have actually heeded your advice and taken a lover,’ she blinked neutrally, ‘for your information.’
Jasmine sloshed coffee accidentally down her front. ‘Really? Since when?’ she probed.
Hannah’s expression remained unfathomable. ‘Oh, a little while now.’
‘That’s just what you need, sweetie!’ Jazz was more excited than by a ‘free gift with purchase’. ‘Well, who is it?’
‘I’d rather not say,’ Hannah replied coolly. She finished her coffee, stood up and moved outside. We followed suit.
‘How old is he then?’ Jazz interrogated, buttoning up her coat.
Hannah’s face flushed elusive expressions. ‘Young enough.’
‘Oh, tell us! Younger men are so much fun. You can educate them, Pygmalion-style,’ Jazz enthused, pulling on her gloves. ‘How old is he? Come on – make us jealous.’
‘He’s an art student, actually.’
Jazz made a fist and jerked her elbow back hard. ‘Yes! A student? When I said take a younger man, Hannah, I didn’t mean adopt!’ She laughed. ‘So, what did you say to him? “You have been a very naughty boy, now go to my room!”’ She was practically dancing round Hannah now. ‘Does he have a phosphorescent map of the planets glued to his bedroom ceiling? Does he short-sheet your bed?’
