Kathy Lette HRT: HUSBAND REPLACEMENT THERAPY
KATHY LETTE
This is another sharp-tongued and hilarious read from the Puberty Blues author. At her 50th birthday party, Ruby goes a little overboard on the champagne and during her speech decides to tell everyone what she really thinks of them. She accuses husband Harry of having an affair, slams her mother for playing favourites and to top it off, reveals she’s just been diagnosed with cancer. Days later, she’s cashed in her savings and sets sail on a cruise.
I’m dying!” were the first words past my lips as my estranged sisters arrived at the same time from opposite sides of the cafe. “So you cannot stay mad at me!”
Just moments earlier, while waiting for my siblings in the snack bar at the far end of the peninsula, way out past the sand dunes and the oil refinery, I’d read the small print on the ludicrously expensive cruise tickets I’d drunkenly purchased the previous day only to discover they were totally non-refundable, which is why the truth would have to wait. My life had just collapsed like a Chilean mine. My husband had moved out, my friends had disowned me and my kids were busy with their own lives. I had no-one else in the world to take with me. And aside from all that, I really did want to reunite my estranged sisters, who were both so dear to me. Nope, there was nothing else for it. I would just have to pretend I was dying for a teensy bit longer – at least until the boat set sail. I’d fess up the moment we weighed anchor and just hope my furious siblings didn’t give me too severe a lashing with their cat-o’-nine-tongues, or keelhaul my sorry a--e then hang me from a yardarm.
“How are you holding up?” Amber gushed before emitting a high-pitched gasp, swallowing a sob and grabbing me into a bear hug. I glanced over her shoulder at Emerald in astonishment. Amber was more of a paton-the-back type of person. Physical contact was usually so abhorrent to her that Emerald and I couldn’t imagine how she’d ever got pregnant.
“What’s the exact diagnosis?” Emerald demanded, heaving herself into a chair. She wanted details, dates, doctors’ names.
We continued like this for 10 minutes, Emerald peppering me with practical questions while Amber just clutched me and cried.
“Stop blubbing, Amber. That’s not going to help the situation,” Emerald barked.
“You have the warmth and compassion of a piece of granite, do you know that?” Amber retaliated, between sobs.
“Cease and desist, both of you. My dying wish is to have my meals brought to me by a naked Chris Hemsworth … But I’d settle for some sisterly love.”
I was making it up as I went along, but what the previous day had given me was a deep and overwhelming desire to carpe the hell out of the diem; I intended to carpe diem as if there were no tomorrow, even if I had to lie a little longer to do so.
“But you still haven’t answered my question. Tell me exactly what the consultant said,” Emerald probed, her tone as sharp as a scalpel.
I felt as if I’d been pushed on stage in a play where I didn’t know the lines. “I’m calling him Kev. The cancer, I mean. He’s squatting in my pancreas like an evil little toad. I could have surgery to try to evict him, which would mean weeks in hospital with tubes running in and out of me …”
‘What about chemo?’ Emerald persisted.
You’re lying to your sisters,
I thought, with a savage burst of self-loathing. Who was I – Richard bloody Nixon? But then I just ploughed straight ahead and lied some more.
Edited extract from HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy by Kathy Lette, Vintage Australia, RRP$32.99 out now.