How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (7 ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Through bribery (what Jazz calls ‘rewards’), I manage to get the kids into bed. Ironic how you can’t get kids out of their beds in the morning, but can’t get them into their beds at night. Pour glass of wine. Finally settle down to write Self-Assessment form.

9.50: Piercing scream from Jen’s room. Steeplechase furniture and gallop upstairs in athletic spasm. Having run out of clean linen, I’d made her bed up with her brother’s old Batman sheets. The fluorescent illustrations of the Joker and the Riddler, all grinning maniacally, has induced the world’s first linen-related nightmare. Try to replace the single Batman duvet cover with one of my king-sized ones, but get lost inside it. Feel like an Arctic explorer, having a white-out. Give up. Put her in our bed.

10.00: Settle down to decode Scroope’s obfuscatory educational jargon when suddenly remember I must record The Six Wives of Henry VIII for Jamie’s school assignment.

Japan’s revenge for losing the war is to manufacture goods with indecipherable booklets; a psychological torture more painful than bamboo shoots under the nails. While lying on stomach on floor prodding various VCR buttons, I notice tumbleweeds of dust. If only houses could be like ovens and self-clean – but with the weekly cleaner not due till Friday it’s down to me again. I spend the next hour scrubbing and scouring. Remember how diligent I was as a new bride. When Jamie was born everything had to be sterilized. By the time Jenny arrived, I sterilized the dummy by sucking on it – the old saliva disinfectant process. A decade later, my domesticity has dwindled to using a grey flannel to wipe down anything that doesn’t talk back.

At 11 p.m. I make school lunches to save time in the morning. Take meat out of the freezer for next day’s dinner. Put on a load of washing. Iron clothes for meeting with Head. Talk to pot-plants, which are wilting. Feed menagerie of animals. Make shopping lists. Put away Monopoly. Load dishwasher. Finish fairy costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream onto which tinsel refuses to bloody well stick bloody bloody bugger it! Just knuckling down to work – when Rory swaggers in.

‘You see? How peaceful. Aren’t you glad I stayed out of your hair all night? Don’t worry about getting me any dinner either. I ate out. Got the surgery consent form signed too. Let’s go to bed and celebrate, shall we?’ He winks.

Oh great. The perfect way to top off my horror movie of a day – The Hand.

Then I remember that Jenny’s in our bed. Phew. Safe. It’s the first time Rory had been right in ages: Children really can be so rewarding at times.

Wednesday

‘So?’ Jazz asks me over lunchtime coffee at the deli near school. It’s Wednesday, halfway through my week, thank God. ‘How did it go with the Head?’

‘Slept in.’

‘What?! I thought Rory was going to take over last night?’

I shrug. ‘Some surgery emergency.’

‘Stop concocting excuses for that lazy pig. It’s hard to make a comeback, Cass, if you haven’t been anywhere.’

I watch in alarm as Jazz extracts a packet of fags from her bag. ‘Since when did you take up smoking?’

‘I haven’t.’ She lights up. ‘I’m just faking it, so that when I wear my HRT patch, you still get periods you know. I can tell everyone it’s an anti-smoking device.’

‘If only they made Husband Patches, so that we can slowly withdraw from them,’ I say, blowing on my toupee of cappuccino froth.

‘How true, sweetie. Husbands are becoming less and less relevant. They’re probably going to devolve – like tonsils and appendixes.’

The Incredible Shrinking Spouse. As there’s no way I can be late again for my Deputy Head interview, and Rory’s busy with his seminar, I decide to take matters into my own hands. I’m deluding myself of course. But still, a girl never knows what’s she’s incapable of, until she tries. . .

Thursday morning

Having made the kids sleep in their uniforms, I pack them off in a minicab to breakfast at the McDonald’s near their schools, meaning I’m out of the door by 7.45 a.m.

8.00: Finally find car. Somewhere near Wales.

8.03: Start engine. Dashboard making funny, blinking signs. Unfortunately my car only speaks to me in Japanese. Using all my powers of mechanical genius, deduce that flashing light signals empty petrol tank. Bloody Rory. He’d promised to fill it up for me last weekend.

8.08: Fill up at garage. Go to pay. Computers down.

8.15: Sprint to cash machine opposite. Five people in front of me. We’re all waiting behind a man who is probably a shoe bomber. He is shoving his card upside down into the slot. He looks at the card. He looks at the slot. He looks up to God. Ignores offers of help. Shoves card back into slot and pushes in the wrong number – three times. And the machine gobbles up his card, prompting him to scream and curse and no doubt shortly reach for his backpack detonator. Proof of my deranged state is that all I can think is that at least if he is a suicide bomber it will mean I won’t have to make up another lame excuse for being late.

In desperation, I leave my car in the garage forecourt and run the rest of the way to work. My Headmaster is cut from the same tweedy mixture of snobbery and violence that supplied the warp and weft of the colonial empire. When I barrel into the admin block, eight minutes late, sweaty chest heaving asthmatically, he breaks off his chatty little conversation with my rival, Perdita Pendal, raises a thick pelt of eyebrow and says thinly, ‘This lateness of yours is getting to be a habit, Ms O’Carroll.’

‘Well, I’ve tried being early, but the trouble with being punctual, of course, is that there is usually nobody there to appreciate it,’ I wheeze.

He gives one of his meagre little smiles. What will follow will be a softening of his voice which all his staff, me