N^arriage, I’d now realized, is for Extreme Sports enthusiasts. It’s a highwire act with no safety net. The Amazing, Dare-Devil, Flying Married Couple! Trapeze Artists Extraordinaire!
And Jazz had fallen. Splat. Leaving Hannah and me to try to pick up the pieces. It was Sunday afternoon and we were sitting around my crowded kitchen drinking neat Scotch and painting Jazz’s naked body with fake tan before a fan heater. She was due back at Heathrow from her Sri Lankan holiday in an hour. Hence this crisis meeting.
I was slightly nervous as I don’t often entertain visitors. This is mainly to do with the abundance of methane-gas-producing canines. Guests were constantly reeling back, eyes smarting, lungs scrambling for oxygen, great-grandfathers reliving the mustard gas attacks they endured in the trenches ... or worse. The one and only time I’d attempted sweet-talking my Headmaster, Mr Scroope, over dinner about the up-and-coming Deputy Head
vacancy, he’d fled in humiliation after one of Rory’s pet rats tried to mate with his hairpiece. But this was an emergency. My kids had been banished to their rooms and some dental-drill rap was now vibrating down through the ceiling.
Predictably, the conversation kicked off with Jazz blaming herself. As 1 sloshed whisky into chipped glasses, she began to make a squeaking noise like a stuck drawer.
‘It must be my fault.’ She peered through her wispy fringe like a startled woodland creature. ‘David just doesn’t find me sexy any more.’
Hannah and I immediately went into our roles as human Wonderbras, uplifting, supportive and making our girlfriend look bigger and better. But with Jazz’s melted-lemon-drop hair and skin as pale and smooth as vanilla ice cream, we didn’t need to exaggerate.
‘Jazz, darl, you are so beautiful. 1 mean, look at your hair. It never has a bad day. And you’re soooo slim. Unlike me. Which is bloody unfair when I’m the one always dieting,’ I complained, goodnaturedly. ‘In my life I’ve lost 147 stone, do you know that?’
Grief was devouring our friend and I ached for her. Banging your head against a wall also uses up 150 calories an hour and that seemed to be Jasmine’s current form of exercise.
‘Yes. And I’m the one who’s bought every cream. Creams for toes, tummies, eyelids, inner goddamn insteps even. And all for nothing,’ Hannah added lightheartedly. ‘I have more lines than British Telecom.’
But Jazz couldn’t be cheered. She just stared mournfully at her whisky glass, as if it were a crystal ball.
‘Turn,’ I ordered. As though basting a chicken, I began slathering fake tan onto my girlfriend’s haunches. She looked pensive and delicate in the wintry light. Naked, her thinness
shook me. She seemed to have dropped seven pounds in the last week.
‘Maybe I breastfed too long> My tits have gone all tribeswoman. All I need are the bongos. Then there’s my stretchmarks, crepe-paper bum, pelvic-floor muscles shot to pieces. That’s the one thing about childbirth which nobody tells you. That you will never be able to laugh again without peeing yourself,’ Jazz whimpered.
‘It’s true,’ I confirmed. ‘At your dinner party the other night I laughed so hard, tears were running down my legs.’
Childfree Hannah squawked a laugh, but at the mention of pelvic floors Jazz and I suddenly got that expression you see on the faces of people whose dogs are crapping on the street: that vacant, preoccupied, this-isn’t-my-dog look, as we secretly contracted our vaginal muscles.
‘Listen, dah-ling, it’s surprising how many women your age are a lot younger than you are. Time is a great healer. Jazz, but it sure ain’t no beauty therapist,’ commiserated Hannah, handing Jazz her cosmetic surgeon’s card.
‘You’re right, Hannah. These are not laughter lines around my mouth, they’re fucking fjords.’ Jazz swigged at her whisky. ‘I think I’ll just have my whole head cosmetically removed.’
With forty-five minutes till touchdown, I ordered Jazz to turn again and began massaging the brown globules into her belly over the small corduroy ridges of her baby marks. We’d often shared our post-natal woes; confessional stretchmark-comparing conversations were a regular. But we hadn’t taken it seriously, until now.
‘If we want to keep our husbands, we need to do the maintenance,’ Hannah prompted, crunching noisily on a dry cracker — no doubt her main meal of the day. ‘I think you should
catch whatever’s falling — including your face, dah-ling. You too, Cassie. Don’t you ever want to be desired for your body instead of your cryptic crossword abilities^’
‘My answer is two down, five letters, past participle abbreviated,’ I replied.
‘Ugh.’ Jazz caught sight of herself in the bank of mirrors above my kitchen table. ‘My skin just doesn’t fit me any more,’ she sighed, a funereal droop to her shoulders.
‘Chin up. Jazz,’ I said gently. ‘Despite what Hannah says, you do only have one of them.’ Oh, the hours of my life I had wasted having conversations like this one. If only time would stop flying. If only it would sit it out at the airport duty-free store. If only it would walk, stroll, take a slow bus and stop tormenting women.
‘Everyone knows David has an impending sainthood, so how can it not be my faults
‘Saint? More like the Prince of Darkness.’ I moved on to painting Jasmine’s biceps. ‘Tell me, when you first met Studz, couldn’t you see those clouds of sulphur he was trailing?’
Hannah turned on me, while irritatedly attacking another cracker. ‘Cassandra! You are talking about the woman’s husband, you realize. The putz, despite it all, whom Jasmine loves.’
I rolled my eyes so far into the top of my head, 1 could see my brain cells renewing. Hannah reprovingly confiscated the fake- tan bottle and swept Jazz’s fair hair on top of her head in order to paint her shoulders.
‘Okay,’ I amended. ‘Studz is not quite the devil incarnate, but you could easily confuse them in an identity parade. He’s behaved like an evil pig.’
‘He’s behaved like a man, dah-ling. Men rotate car tyres, they put three-in-one oil on their hedge trimmers and they fuck
around to prove their sex-ismo. Now eat. You need to regain your strength.’ Hannah lifted the cheese plate towards Jazz, who just crouched over it, eating nothing.
In the silence I thought about what Hannah had said. As a wife and mother of a son, I could definitely testify that the male hrain is made up of an Internet obsession lobe, a gi-normous football gland, a minuscule personal hygiene particle and a teeny- weeny, incy-wincy relationship molecule. But surely sexual incontinence was an optional extra? Rory was faithful to me . . . wasn’t he?
‘Boys will be boys, dah-ling, and so will a lot of middle-aged men who should know better,’ Hannah stated.
Jazz put down her whisky glass so decisively that it nearly shattered. ‘If David’s having a midlife crisis, couldn’t he just, I dunno, buy an impractical car? Or cross the Channel on a homemade raft? I mean, wasn’t that ridiculous motorbike enough?’
Hannah was daubing on the fake tan as though she were Michelangelo. With twenty minutes till landing, a Fast Pass through Customs and an estimated hour ride home from the airport, I became so frustrated I snatched back the bottle and began frantically slathering tan around Jazz’s imaginary bikini line and under both rounded boobs.
Hannah munched disgruntledly on another cracker. ‘Look, nobody ever said marriage was going to be easy. In sickness and in health and all that. . . and believe me, dah-ling, if you marry into allergies like I did, there’s always going to be a little something wrong. He’ll always have a niggling ache somewhere.’ She topped up Jasmine’s glass. ‘All husbands have their bad points. It could be worse. He could be a gambler or a child molester. Or,’ she shuddered, ‘play golf.’
But Jazz remained inconsolable. Despite being only half- painted, she began pacing now, naked, back and forth across my chaotic kitchen, with me and the tan bottle in pursuit.
‘In my twenties I took up two new hobbies, marriage and insanity. I mean, Cassie is right. Good God! Why couldn’t I see what Studz was really bloody likef The husband Jazz had worshipped for twenty years was wavering in the heat of her scrutiny. What she’d thought was real had become nothing more than a marital mirage. ‘I... I thought we were h . . . h . . . happy.’ She gave another desolate howl.
Hannah sloshed more whisky into Jasmine’s glass. ‘Come on, dah-ling. Let’s not get all Sylvia Plath about it.’
Jazz’s cry was like a rusty hinge. She pressed her hand against her forehead. It was a silent-movie gesture of a helpless damsel in great danger.
I kicked Hannah under the table. ‘WhatP she mouthed at me. ‘What did I sayV
‘I put that wanker through his hospital training!’ Giving vent to feelings long hidden. Jazz yowled even louder. ‘I devoted myself to Studz, body and soul.’ Her voice seesawed with emotion. ‘I loved my job but I stupidly gave that up too! All for him.'
‘Well, dah-ling, I for one have never understood why you gave up chefing,’ Hannah the career woman tut-tutted as she smugly crossed her lithe, lasered legs.
Jazz levelled Hannah with a steely glare. ‘I decided to stay home and mother my own child so that Josh would inherit my personality flaws, and not those of the Czechoslovakian au pair with the eating disorder. Okay?’
As I manoeuvred my half-basted friend in front of the fan heater (we had about five minutes till touchdown), I thought
how Jazz really did have a point. Fd never met any female executive, no matter how senior, who didn’t jettison the financial pages to turn to the scare story about how the children of mothers who work fulltime have less chance of progressing to A level and are more prone to collect Nazi memorabilia in later life.
Jazz had her arms outstretched as though on the cross so 1 could paint her sides. ‘Haven’t I been a good wife?’ She stuck her chin out nobly. ‘Good God! The things I’ve put up with. The medical emergencies. The Human Rights campaigns . . . My house is always full of one-legged landmine victims. Or literacy- challenged homeless lower Voltans with no refugee status and haemorrhoids. Black trade unionists who talk about “equality” then snap their fingers at me for coffee because I’m a mere female. Oh yes. I’ve graciously entertained them all.’
When Jazz blew her nose, it sounded like the HMS Britannia foghorn. ‘Funny, isn’t it, the delusion among the Bridget Jones set vomiting drunkenly in gutters at three a.m. that marriage will be a step up!’
Hannah corrected her. ‘Not all men are shmucks.’
‘True. Some of them are dead. Men — can’t live with them, can’t slip them a cyanide tablet without being jailed for murder. Oh, I feel sick.’ Clutching her abdomen, hair limp with sweat. Jazz looked like an overripe mango. She mopped at her brow. ‘Your heating’s too high, Cassie. I feel so queasy. And I have a headache. Do you have any peanut butter? I’ve had such a craving for it lately.’
‘Christ, you’re not up the duff, are you?’
Hannah’s eyes rolled like a pantomime dame’s. ‘Yes, that must be it, Cassie. It’s an immaculate conception.’
‘The reason I’m feeling so rotten,’ Jazz went on, ‘is because I’ve only just realized how women are still putting themselves last.
Look at you, Hannah. You didn’t have children because Pascal didn’t want them. And . . .’
This was dangerous territory. I glanced at the kitchen clock. Jazz could easily be through Customs now and at the baggage carousel. I made a pathetic attempt to steer us towards safer conversational ground. ‘I can’t understand why you didn’t have kids, Hannah. If only as an excuse to leave parties early.’
But Hannah was already bristling. ‘My first commitment is to Pascal. We have the life we want.’
Jazz, fuelled by whisky, guffawed. ‘You have the life that he wants. Pascal just wanted to be your only child. The centre of your universe.’
‘Well, at least we’re happy,’ Hannah retorted, a little cruelly.
‘Come on. Jazz. Hannah’s soft furnishings are actually far too nice to have sprog pee all over them.’ I was doing so much defusing I could get work with the Bomb Disposal Squad.
‘Eeeew! I detest children. I detest animals too, but I thought admitting to the former would bring me fewer death threats,’ Hannah crabbed.
Whenever Hannah and Jazz found themselves at each other’s throats, they would reunite by redirecting their dissatisfaction towards me. And we had definitely entered a Hard Hat area.
‘Come on. Jazz, get dressed,’ I insisted. ‘You’d be driving home from the airport by now.’
‘My life is fine,’ Hannah reiterated, flicking dog drool off her fingers in disgust. ‘It’s Cassandra we should be worried about. Cassie should be appearing on a Jewish This is Your Life called TILLS is Your LIFEVL She gestured around her, repulsed, before cringing away from a Doberman which was licking her hand under the table. ‘What the hell is that dog? It looks like the kind of creature which would drag you into the Underworld.’
‘Hannah has a point, Cassie. I mean, why is it that you have a full time joh and yet Rory does fuck all to help youT
As usual, I was exceeding the Daily Recommended Allowance of Cowardice. I bleated for a bit about what a good partner Rory was and how he did half of everything.
‘Half! Women are so crap at maths,’ Jazz exploded. ‘This is why men are able to trick us into believing that they’re doing fifty per cent of the housework, childcare and cooking. It’s like that joke: the reason the bride wears white is because it’s good for the dishwasher to match the stove and the fridge.’ She paused to blow her nose once more. ‘Which is why your sex-life sucks, because underneath you resent him.’
I glared at Jasmine in horror. How could she blurt out my secret like that? Hannah gave me a gluttonous look and for a minute I thought she was finally going to spread something on her cheese cracker — mot.
‘Your sex life sucks?’ she repeated, voraciously.
‘Well, I wasn’t actually planning on broadcasting my sexual secrets i.e. that I don’t have any, but. . .’ I glowered at Jazz once more. Stalling for time, I busied myself wetting Jasmine’s bikini and scrunching it up in a plastic bag, then sprinkling sand from the cat litter into her suitcase. ‘Cone of silence?’ I requested and Hannah nodded. ‘I’ve . . . I’ve . . . Oh God. My pussy has lost its purr,’ I confessed reluctantly.
‘Like most married women, her sex-life is terminally blah,’ Jazz elaborated resentfully.
‘Really? I thought Rory was an animal in bed.’
‘Oh, he is an animal — a hamster.’ I winced. Once, having loads of sex made a woman feel guilty and cheap. After marriage, not having loads of sex made a woman feel guilty and cheap.