by Kathy Lette
‘I want you,’ Rory says, and I can feel his voice in the pit of my stomach like some Mills & Boon heroine. Feelings long blunted, erupt hot. My salivary glands shift into overdrive. And then he kisses me, with everything he feels. The tiny wedge of beard he’s grown tickles me enticingly, making the nerves in my neck jump wildly. As his hand slides up under my skirt, he nuzzles words into my ear, words like adoration, devotion. He also seems to have developed a new dedication to the C words. Commitment is mentioned. As is Compromise. Followed by Communication. Then Cleaning.
‘Cleaning?’ I marvel, but as I breathe in, I inhale the piney smell of skirting boards which no longer have topsoil, and feel heady with delight. Rory kisses me with increasing warmth, savouring my neck and throat until I’m slippery as a fish, the seaweed tendrils of my pubic hair coiling moistly around his fingers. He tugs at my panties and I have a ludicrous pang of embarrassment about him seeing me naked. He’s seen me naked so many times – hell, I’ve pooed on the man in childbirth! – but it feels awkward suddenly somehow. But then he brushes his fingertips across my clitoris and, ‘Ohmygod,’ I’m gasping ‘Yes! Yes!’ And I’m clawing at his jeans buttons, Versace, I notice and not ones I’ve bought him either – but they could be polkadotted hot pants for all I care at this particular moment. My husband then eases me open with steady, strong strokes, deeper and deeper with his fingers and, kneeling before me, his tongue. The tension twists tighter inside me as the rhythm builds along with the pleasure. My fingers are in his hair. I feel the surge in my blood and I’m flooded with heat and starting to shudder.
And I can feel an orgasm taxi-ing onto the runway, into holding position and preparing for takeoff. My ears are popping, obviously due to a change in latitude, because he’s lying me down on the oh-so-freshly vacuumed carpet, parting my knees with his body and pressing into me. I radio air-traffic control. Air-traffic control itemizes its checklist.
He’s more focused on your pleasure than his? Check.
He’s shown emotional intimacy? Check.
He’s cleaned the house? Check.
He’s made gravy? Check.
He’s made you feel cherished, loved, respected, adored? Check. Check. Check. You are now cleared for takeoff.
Booster Thrust Engines on. Hormonal Houston, we have lift-off!
It’s time to call Lost and Found. Located, one orgasm. One bonemarrow-melting, heartstopping, knock-out, knock-kneed ohmygodgasm. The Marie Celeste is salvaged. Amelia Earhart – discovered at last, alive and well. The Bermuda Triangle, mapped. The Loch-Ness Monster, netted. The Yeti, tamed. The square root of the hypotenuse . . . Oh, for God’s sake. Who cares about maths at a time like this?!
The inner quake that has so eluded me, takes hold. Until there’s nothing but obliterating sensation.
‘Luckily you’re a woman who doesn’t need a lot of foreplay,’ Rory says with cheery rascality.
I squeeze open one blurry eye, too consumed with the incandescent aftershocks to get my breath back.
‘It’s a joke. Okay, too early to joke, but kitten – wahey!’ he grins darkly. Rory then picks me up off the floor like a marauding Viking and carries me, wearing nothing but my boots, over his shoulder to our bedroom. The room is sparkling clean, and rioting with flowers. He tips me onto sheets which are lemon-scented from fresh laundering and crisp as snow and, oh-I-havedied-and-gone-to-heaven, ironed.
‘Wahey!’ I reply.
And we’re entwined once more, reverberating. And, well, I didn’t just find my orgasm again. Hell, I found two. I had waited so long and yearned so much, it made Krakatoa look like a slight tremor. Sex in a marriage? Well, it’s like when it slips your mind that you’ve put your windscreen wipers onto intermittent. You’ve forgotten about it and then – WHOOSH!
Lying there in my picture-postcard-perfect house in my dazzlingly immaculate bed, with my New and Improved Husband, basking in the sweet and sour scent of our bodies, I stretch as contentedly as a cat – the cats I no longer have to put up with.
‘So I can come home? You wanted me to make some changes, some of which I’ve agreed to – but all of which I’ll do,’ Rory promises. He starts to make love to me again, then stops abruptly. ‘Oh wait. Let me wash the dishes first.’
Be still, my beating heart! While he’s downstairs, the phone rings and the answermachine picks up. I can hear Bianca screaming down the phone. Rory doesn’t answer and I feel even more deeply satisfied. I notice he’s put a basketball hoop above the laundry basket to encourage his aim, and laugh. (It was something I must teach my son – do half the housework and your wife’s spirits will know nothing of Sir Isaac Newton and his absurd gravitational theories.) Ten minutes later, he’s back, taking me in his arms, all the mess of my life purged, the past purified.
‘Yes. You can come home.’ Peace of mind softens his face, until I postscript, ‘I, however, am leaving for a while.’
‘What?’ He jerks up onto one elbow. ‘Why?’
‘Well, the Board rang at the weekend to officially offer me Scroope’s old job. However, the appointment doesn’t come into effect until after Easter. So, before then, I’m taking a little sabbatical. I have some urgent sitting-around-chatting-with-mygirlfriends-while-you-look-after-the-kids to do. The way I see it, you owe me at least three and a half years of saying “Have you cleaned your teeth?” You owe me at least five years of wiping up after them at mealtimes. Six months of queuing for rides at funfairs, years of being rained on at sports galas and a decade of sitting around the local pool bored to death watching them not win the hopping-across-the-shallow-end-on-one-foot-unaided events.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Rory nods sheepishly. ‘But when you come back? We will be together again, won’t we?’
‘Maybe,’ I say warily. ‘Let’s just see how you go.’
And he takes that as his cue to go again, touching me in all the places I love to be touched, as he looks into my eyes and tells me he loves me. And I gaze back, living in each kiss. Sliding up against his muscled body I try to tell him I love him too, but my heart seems to be in my throat.
Cheesy? Hell, it’s the whole Stilton.
27. How To Kill Your Husband – (and other handy household hints)
The English think optimism is an eye disease. But me? I’m a sunny-side-of-the-streeter. I always have a secret hope that Juliet’s snooze alarm will wake her up in time to stop Romeo from quaffing the poison potion. That Desdemona will tell Othello to stop the paranoia and book in for some anger management. That Hamlet will get some grief counselling and marry Ophelia. So, when it came to Jazz and Hannah, I had high hopes of salvaging our friendship.
Friends define us far more than our partners or family. Lovers and husbands come and go, children fly the nest, but girlfriends, in all their bickering, ribbing, chortling glory, are the backbone to your life.
It was this realization, Hannah’s offer of bail money and her timely holiday rental of a Caribbean yacht complete with crew, which convinced Jazz to put the Freudian hiccough of her son’s seduction behind her. We’d been in the bar near the Old Bailey, celebrating Jazz’s freedom, when Hannah had phoned from the Turks and Caicos Islands to extend her exotic invitation. ‘So, you’ll come and join me, dah-ling, to go island-hopping?’
‘Well, actually I have to go pluck a few stray nipple hairs. Of course I’ll come, you idiot. Are you kidding me?’
‘I wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire,’ Jazz had grumbled when I passed on Hannah’s invite, but I knew she was already planning her wax. Josh, weary of press attention and coming to terms with the loss of his indifferent dad, had opted to go backpacking with some older friends on their gap year. He would do his A levels later at a college. So, there really was nothing to hold Jasmine back.
Which is why, two weeks after Jazz’s release, I have my lips locked around the first of many cocktails as aqueous sunlight ripples over the deck of Hannah’s gleaming white yacht. This life would make pigs in clover look maltreated.
Hannah, the h
uman swizzle-stick, comes on deck, looking decidedly plump in white culottes and T-shirt.
‘Have I put on weight?’ she asks.
‘No, love,’ I say, while whispering to Jazz, ‘Weight?! Jesus Christ. Military planes might mistake her for an aircraft-carrier and land on her abdomen.’
There are other changes too. She’s wearing no make-up, her skin is brown as a violin and nothing’s very well shaved.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.
If the boat’s sails were hoisted, the united gasp Jazz and I make would have propelled us to St Kitts. But the yacht stays anchored with the other big boats in port, snuffling up to their moorings.
‘Dear God.’ Jazz sits down hard on the deck. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re carrying my grandchild?’
‘No! I’m sorry about Josh. It lasted all of a week. I think I must have been having some kind of a breakdown. But not any more! I’m nearly three months gone. At forty-four. Amazing, isn’t it?’
‘Do you think it’s wise to have a baby at your age? You might put it down somewhere and forget where you left it,’ Jazz, still smarting, comments bitchily. As we cast off upon the sunsequinned sea, in an act of revenge, she then regales Hannah with every hideous birthing story she can remember. ‘I bet those eyes are starting to water, eh? Beginning to regret all that nookie with your cabin boy now, right?’
Hannah, lounging back in her deckchair, interrupts to explain that she bought the sperm and then had her egg fertilized, outside the womb. ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ she tells us. ‘You must have been to more than one baby shower that had two mothers and a sperm donor or a single mum and a turkey baster.’
‘At least you’re programmed to the baby’s schedule – up all night drinking,’ I laugh, but to be honest, I can’t quite picture Hannah with the carcasses of plastic action figures in her canopied, mahogany bed.
As we slip past coves, lagoons and luminescent, powdery white beaches, Jazz stretches out on a pink towel in a peach bikini. ‘I don’t get it. For years you’ve lectured us on the fact that raising kids is tedious beyond belief.’
‘So is writing a two-hundred-page marketing report on art-price fluctuations, already. But a marketing report doesn’t kiss and cuddle and come to visit you in the nursing home when you smell faintly of pee, now, does it?’
The midday sun may be pitiless but I look at my friend with sympathy and affection. Even Jazz eventually softens.
‘I’m happy for you, I suppose,’ she concedes. ‘Now just go and give birth in shame and degradation like God intended. And make sure it’s a boy so I can seduce him while I still have the use of my legs.’
‘But the money, Hannah,’ I ask, gesturing around. ‘Where is it all coming from? I mean, with the palimony for Pascal and . . .’
Hannah’s grey eyes go a shade darker and narrow like a cardsharp’s. ‘Cone of silence, you two?’ she demands and we nod, affirming our discretion. ‘Well, Pascal wanted half of everything. And, despite how he’s betrayed me, I was willing to be generous. I sold our house to pay him off. But when that shmuck insisted I cash in my beloved art collection as well so he could get half the dosh . . . I couldn’t let him get away with it. So . . . I had them copied.’
‘Forgeries?’ I ask, painting on a thick paste of sunscreen.
‘Expert forgeries. Well, as you can imagine, I have made quite a few contacts in the art underworld over the years, dah-ling.’
Once again, Jazz and I gasp with such force that this time, as the sails are up, the boat does momentarily change course for Columbia.
‘I gave Pascal the fakes. That putz, the great artist, didn’t even realize they were shlock. Then I secretly sold the real canvases on the black market.’ Hannah plumps up the deck cushions behind her back. ‘Needless to say, dah-lings, I can’t go back home for quite a while. These islands are a pretty agreeable place for a tax haven, don’t you think.’
‘You can have your Turks and Caicos and eat it too,’ I suggest, as the alcohol kicks in.
‘I can’t go back either,’ agrees Jazz, lighting up her tenth cigarette of the day.
‘Oh Jasmine.’ Hannah waves away the cigarette smoke, but for once doesn’t complain. ‘You have been through the most awful ordeal, dah-ling. I can’t imagine being put in prison when all the time you’re innocent. At least your conscience was clear.’
Jazz exhales smoke down her nostrils, like a dragon. ‘A clear conscience just means a really bad memory, sweetie.’
The sunlight on the water dazzles, launching quasars at her jade-green eyes so I can’t quite read them. Still, sitting downwind I’m more concerned with the fact that I’m choking on her cigarette smoke. ‘Why are you still smoking those vile things? You can tell Hannah about the HRT patch, darl. Cone of silence?’ I ask, and Hannah agrees. ‘Jazz has been wearing this HRT patch since last January. She only took up smoking so people would think it was a nicotine patch, ’cause she didn’t want anyone to know she was going through the menopause.’
‘You’re menopausal?’ Hannah is amazed. ‘At least it cuts down on winter heating bills, dah-ling.’
‘I think it was brought on by stress. Ironically though, all that time I was pretending to smoke, I actually did get addicted to nicotine. Now I really am wearing a Nicorette patch.’ Jazz laughs, revealing the small square Band Aid on the underside of her arm.
I laugh too, but then add, ‘So where’s your HRT patch? On your ass?’
‘Oh, HRT didn’t suit me, sweetie. I started putting on weight so I gave it up. Haven’t had a period since June. It’s quite liberating actually!’
‘But . . . what about the blood-soaked tampon in the back pocket of David’s bathers?’ I ask, bewildered.
It is now Jasmine’s turn to demand the cone of silence. When we nod our agreement, she explains, ‘Well, I didn’t say it was my blood. Losing a husband can be very hard. And in my case it was almost impossible! You have no idea how many filet steaks I had to buy on that Oz trip. I found that steaks contain the most blood for soaking up into tampons. I was buying steaks and soaking tampons for the entire goddamn trip. Broome, The Barrier Reef, Cottesloe Beach in Perth – loads of people have been eaten by sharks there, the southern end of Bondi which has a famously treacherous rip nicknamed “the backpacker’s express”. I would just paddle on the shore, you understand . . . Then at Cape Catastrophe, South Australia, a shark finally took the bait.’
The shimmering sea seems to shiver at her revelation. Even the waves appear to recoil from the bow in revulsion. The air is laced with currents; currents as treacherous as the sea, as treacherous as Jasmine Jardine. The ocean’s hypnotic boil, the reek of salt, brine and rotting seaweed, overwhelms me for a minute and I rush to the railings to be sick. Feel as though I’m underwater. Can’t breathe. Hang my head over the side, silently heaving. Eventually collapse against the cold steel, my watery eye on the horizon. There is one last headland before we hit the open sea. It juts out into the bay like a bent thumb, as though it wants to hitch-hike to some other continent; some place where desperate housewives do not kill their husbands.
I try to see Hannah’s expression, but it’s hidden from me by her hatbrim.
Hannah’s captain steers our boat through the straits and into calmer waters. A meal comes and goes on deck as Jazz talks us through what happened on that beach all those months ago. She talks until the sun sinks in a positively murderous display of bruised purple and violent reds. She talks about how she married on an impulse, an event that should be included in the Elite SAS survival course. She talks about how her husband changed; how he became self-obsessed and ruthless, craving prestige and then power. She talks about how she began to fear for her life, maintaining that she only acted out of self defence. ‘I didn’t kill him. I just increased the risk factor in his risky life.’
But it seems to me Jazz has excised him as cleanly and completely as the tumour she thought he’d given her. I poke at my sashimi with the tip of one chopstick, lifting the slices of r
aw fish as if they are evidence at a crime scene. Hannah plays with her food too, culling the prawns from the rice and lining them up on the table like little pink commas. Later on, moored in a bay under the stars, as the tide burbles beneath the boat, we are still trying to come to terms with Jazz’s deception.
‘Come on, girls. A good girlfriend bails you out of jail. A great girlfriend will be running away from the police with you, squealing, “Good God! That was bloody close!”’
I look at her in the gloaming. Her smile is so luminous that even on this moonless night, ships would detour around her, fearing for rocks. She is a wild, fishlike creature of moist, perfumed heat. Jazz talks on for most of the night, pouring her heart out.
‘Ironic, isn’t it, that such a misogynist male was killed by a tampon. A point no doubt lost on the coroner, dah-ling,’ Hannah finally announces, pre-dawn. ‘In some ways it’s an update of Madame Bovary: unhappy wife is unfaithful, but he dies and she gets away with it – don’t you think, Cassie?’
What I think is that it’s pretty safe to say that after twenty-five years of worshipping Jasmine Jardine, she is now officially no longer my role model. I’m also thinking about turning her in. But what good would it do? A twelve-week trial before a dozen people not smart enough to get out of jury service, chosen to deliberate over who can afford the best lawyer?
At 5 a.m. Hannah fetches champagne to proffer a toast to the three of us, as we deserve some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for enduring all our cat fights, all that infidelity, paying all that palimony, suffering through a divorce, a death and, in my case, dodgy DIY and living to tell the tale. She then suggests that we form a kind of coven and throw our wedding rings into the sea so that we can start again. At dawn we lean on the railings at the prow of the ship, the murderess, the forger and me, Head Teacher and Blackmailer.
