The Motherhood Walk of Fame

SHARI LOW

The Motherhood Walk of Fame

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Shari Low 2007

Shari Low asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Spiderman Words and Music by Stephen Lemberg © Kama Sutra Music Inc, USA EMI United Partnership Ltd, London WC2H 0QY (Publishing) and Alfred Publishing Co, USA (Print) Administered in Europe by Faber Music Ltd Reproduced by permission All rights reserved. Batman Theme Words by Neal Hefti © 1966 EMI Catalogue Partnership and EMI Miller Catalog Inc, USA EMI United Partnership Ltd, London WC2H 0QY (Publishing) and Alfred Publishing Co, USA (Print) Administered in Europe by Faber Music Ltd Reproduced by permission All rights reserved. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847560032

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007334919

Version: 2018-06-18

With huge gratitude to the two fabulous women who

guided this book to print: Sheila Crowley at AP Watt

and Maxine Hitchcock at Avon. Ladies, thank you–

working with you has been an absolute joy.

To the rest of the wonderful team at Avon–

I love my new home!

And to the others who give their unfailing support:

Linda Shaughnessy, Rob Kraitt, Teresa Nicholls and

the rest of the team at AP Watt. I’m counting my

blessings…Sxx

To Betty Murphy–we’ll never stop missing you.

And to my big guy and two little ones…

Everything, always…

Now can one of you go put the tea on.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1 Step One

Chapter 2 Step Two

Chapter 3 Step Three

Carly Calling …

Chapter 4 Step Four

Chapter 5 Step Five

Carly Calling …

Chapter 6 Step Six

Carly Calling …

Chapter 7 Step Seven

Chapter 8 Step Eight

Carly Calling …

Chapter 9 Step Nine

Chapter 10 Step Ten

Carly Calling …

Chapter 11 Step Eleven

Chapter 12 Step Twelve

Carly Calling …

Chapter 13 Step Thirteen

Chapter 14 Step Fourteen

Carly Calling …

Chapter 15 Step Fifteen

Chapter 16 Step Sixteen

Carly Calling …

Chapter 17 Step Seventeen

Chapter 18 Step Eighteen

Chapter 19 Step Nineteen

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

I knew something was wrong. As I bit down on an apple Danish, one of my five daily fruit and vegetable portions as recommended by Government health guidelines, I had that vaguely edgy feeling of unease–the one I normally get when PMT is raging and I want to commit acts that’ll guarantee me a starring role on Crimewatch.

Actually, I never watch that programme. The minute the theme music starts I have to switch over, because a feeling of crushing guilt comes over me even though I know that I don’t own a balaclava and I was nowhere near the Kensington Post Office three weeks ago last Thursday at 10.24 a.m.

Still, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was bugging me. It was just another normal Monday morning. And up until that point, everything had been pretty much uneventful. My husband, Mark, had risen at some ungodly hour, staggered to the bathroom, peed with his eyes still shut, shaved with one eye open, returned to our bedroom and dressed in the dark. Due to this well-practised regime, all his business clothes were of the same colour to avoid ritual humiliation and ridicule.

He tripped over his briefcase at the bottom of the stairs, before picking himself back up, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl and checking his reflection in the hall mirror. At that point, by some power of cosmic wonderment, his transformation was complete. Gone was the zombied, scruff-ball dosser who couldn’t even manage to pee in a stationary receptacle without leaving splash marks on the surrounding area; and in his place was Mark Barwick, corporate lawyer and all-round babe-magnet.

He then got into his flash sports car, flicked on the flash radio and set off on his mind-numbing commute from our Richmond semi to his flash office in a flash tower block in a flash area of London.

Of course, I’m assuming all of the above because it would take medical intervention and explosives to wake me at that time in the morning. But his routine hadn’t varied in the seven years we’d been together so I doubt that he somersaulted out of bed, had a quick espresso and a chocolate croissant then spent twenty minutes deciding which tie suitably expressed his mood that day.

And anyway, Mark only has one mood–stable. No ecstatic ups. No wrist-slitting lows. Just…stable. Which is a good thing. Great. Fantastic. How I love having a stable, dependable guy who is the perfect balance for my rather more changeable disposition. I do. And never, ever have I been tempted to call him a boring, predictable git. At least not out loud. Oh, okay, but only to my pals.

I took another bite of the Danish and realised that gnawing, restless feeling was still there. That ruled out hunger then. I ran through the other possibilities.

Kids. One deposited at preschool, and the other one had just started nursery that very week. Mac, the oldest at four, was in his third month of preschool and he loved it. Touch wood, I hadn’t yet been called up to the headmistress for a dressing-down, primarily, I suspected, because I’d endeavoured to keep him on the non-violent side of Power Rangers by telling him that cameras in the lampposts around the school allowed me to watch his every move via the internet. I’m sure the teachers must wonder why he keeps looking heavenwards and shouting, ‘I didn’t mean it, Mum, honest!’

Mac definitely has his mother’s genes. His vocabulary is starting to broaden now but they’ll be ice-skating in hell before it includes the word ‘stable’.

Mac’s little brother, however, is a whole different splash in the gene pool. When I was pregnant for the second time I told Mark that I wanted to name the new baby Big. I figured we were a shoo-in for a McDonald’s sponsorship deal. But in the end we settled for Benny, and he’s the cutest, most adorable little thing on earth. Not that I’m biased. But honestly, he should be doing the conga in a cowboy suit in a nappy advert.

Anyway, my kids were fine, so I crossed them off the ‘Why am I discontented today?’ questionnaire. They were wild, mad, crazy, and no doubt destined for borstal, but for now they were fine.

Maybe career? I find it difficult to discuss my career in isolation as it’s actually inextricably linked to my family background. You see, I am not, as appearances, birth certificates and DNA suggest, the daughter of a haughtily superior schoolteacher and a woefully inadequate finance salesman who shared every penny the family ever had with his pals Johnnie Walker and Jack Daniel’s. I am, actually, the secret love-child of Jackie Collins and Sidney Sheldon. I haven’t quite worked out how I managed to find my way to a Scottish maternity ward all those years ago, but I’m sure that Jackie had a good reason for giving me up for adoption. Maybe the Mafia were after her and she feared for my safety. Perhaps she didn’t want me to grow up spoiled and superficial and thought I’d become a more grounded, soulful person if my childhood was spent in an area of urban deprivation on the outskirts of Glasgow (in which case, Mom, I can assure you that it worked–I’m lovely, now please come and get me). Anyway, whatever the reason, for my whole life I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer, just like my real parents. I’d write a ton of salacious best sellers, go to live in LA, have a kidney-shaped swimming pool and do dirty things to brooding Italian studs.

Sadly, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. My first book, Nipple Alert, did pretty well for a debut. Fab! magazine even said it was a ‘riotous romp’. Okay, so they say that about everything with a pink cover, but it’s a start. My second book, Pre-Mental Syndrome, sold pretty well too. Not Marian-Keyes-oh-my-God-let’s-buy-a-Ferrari well, but it sold out its first and second print run. So I should be loaded, right? Wrong. Why did no one tell me that unless you sell ten gazillion books the dosh doesn’t trickle in until about 347 years after you’re dead?

So to keep the bank manager off my back and my secret credit card in the black, I write a pathetically pretentious weekly column on the joys of motherhood for Family Values magazine. Which should really be called OK Ya!, because it’s nothing but an upmarket, incredibly naff suck-up to upper-class and celebrity mothers. Excuse me, my gag reflex is trembling again. The magazine demands that it’s written from the perspective of the perfect mother, so to write it I need a massive stretch of imagination and a sick bag on hand for the really nauseating bits. But hey, I’m a mother with a Tonka-truck of bills so I’ll take the money and keep on churning out the gospel according to a mother that I’d want to kill if I ever met her.

Life hasn’t exactly turned out how I imagined, has it? Sunny Beverly Hills? Great career? Kidney-shaped pool? Italian studs? I got pissing-down Richmond, a ridiculous job, a puddle out the back door, and I suppose if Mark clutched a pizza and kept his mouth shut he might just pass for someone who once spent half an hour in a transit lounge in Rome.

I opened the back door and lit a Benson & Hedges. Filthy habit. I’m so glad I stopped doing it in public years ago. Far better to freeze one’s arse off in secret in the valiant pursuit of an iron lung than to acknowledge to your husband and children that you have the willpower of Pavarotti in Pizza Express.

I could hear music coming from next door. I use that term loosely. It sounded like the greatest hits from the Nepalese panpipe charts. Then I caught sight of two feet dangling upside-down in midair, through next-door’s kitchen window. There’s only one thing bloody worse than a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music, and that’s a neighbour who listens to Nepalese panpipe music while they’re doing yoga. How’s a girl supposed to enjoy toxic free-radicals and poisonous chemicals destroying her skin and clogging her lungs when the neighbour is spoiling the environment with spiritual music and invigorating exercise?

It shouldn’t be allowed. Especially when the neighbour is supposed to be your best friend. If she were any kind of pal she’d be out here with a sneaky Silk Cut and a Bakewell slice.

Friends. In the past I’d have waged my worldly goods on at least one of them having a situation that could be responsible for this gnawing feeling, but nope, nothing dramatic, disgraceful or worrying sprung to mind there either. Kate next door is nauseatingly happily married to an architect called Bruce, a nauseatingly great mother to a Walton-like brood, nauseatingly toned and together, and has a nauseatingly glam part-time job as a fashion stylist. Just as well I love her a nauseating amount really. Although, I do realise that it breaks the solemn code of friendship: thou shalt not have a friend that’s skinnier, smarter or more successful, as envy giveth thou frown lines and wrinkles.

Kate and I have been best friends since we were kids on a council estate about five miles from Glasgow. There was a gang of us: me (Carly Cooper, now Barwick–or it would be if I had ever got around to officially changing my name after I got married), Kate, Carol, Sarah and Jess. And we stuck together through thick (Carol flunked O-level cookery), thin (and she makes Posh look like she’s got a high-grade Dairy Milk habit), richer (Sarah married a millionaire), poorer (after she escaped a life of abuse and poverty with her first husband), sickness (Jess once had an affair with politician Basil Asquith, who turned out to be the MP for Very Sick and Perverse Sexual Habits) and health (yoga, panpipes).

Strangely, we didn’t do that normal thing where you lose touch after school, then find each other twenty years later through Friends Reunited, drag your partners along to a reunion party, only for pheromones to fly like pigeons on steroids and the next thing you know you’re throwing your car keys in a bowl and it’s a wife-swapping scandal in the News of the World. Or does that only happen in the Cotswolds?

We all, via jobs, men or missing each other, ended up living in London together for years and although we’re a bit more scattered around now, we’re still pals. We’re kind of like Girls Aloud, only with lower breasts and slight hints of jowls.

In fact, some of us are real family now. Carol, once Scotland’s favourite model and for many years the international face of the Visit Scotland tourism campaign, married my brother Cal, also a model and once the face and bollocks of the Calvin Klein underwear range. What was I thinking when I was in the womb? I was obviously so busy floating around doing frivolous things like developing internal organs that I left all the best-looking genes to my brother. Anyway, they now live in one of the really big expensive houses up on the edge of Richmond Park with their twins in the attic and my other brother Michael in the basement. Michael asked them if they’d mind if he slept over one night. That was four years ago.

Jess lives in France now with partner Keith and her son Josh. I think she went for the peace and quiet. She was a major tabloid story here when her affair with the MP was rumbled and splashed across the Sunday Echo. Lord, do I have any normal friends? Anyway, she then married the journalist who exposed the story, had Josh, discovered her husband was a no-good cheating bastard, left him and met Keith–a lovely builder who adores her. They renovate old properties in a wine region in the South (could be Champagne, Chardonnay, Lambrini…I’m never sure) and keep chickens.

And Sarah? Aw, get ready to say ‘aaaah’ and have your faith in human nature restored. Sarah left school, went straight into a horrendous relationship with a psycho, had two kids, finally fled from Sleeping with the Enemy a year later, met Nick Russo–celebrated restaurant owner and the man I lost my virginity to, although I’m sure the two aren’t connected–fell in love, married him and now they’re in New York overseeing the opening of Nick’s fourteenth restaurant.

Lord, when I read all that back I realised nope, I don’t have any normal pals. Although for the first time in about, well, forever, we were all settled, happy, in good relationships and there wasn’t a drama, dilemma, disaster or devastation in sight.

Nope, all was well with the world. My life was a paragon of peace and tranquillity.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

But sometimes those inexplicable gnawing feelings are more than just your hormones reminding you of their existence. They’re subliminal signals from the Goddess of Womanhood that it’s all about to go the way of the Wonderbra generation–unanimously tits up.

Family Values Magazine

PUTTING THE YUMMY IN MUMMY THIS WEEK…MAKING TIME FOR YOU

Remember, ladies, it’s not just the children who need to be nurtured. What about Mummy and Daddy? Yes, we all get tired, stressed and our priorities change, but it’s essential that you take time for yourself and your relationship. Make sure you get to that weekly Pilates class, think about taking up a new hobby or interest to stimulate your mind and, most importantly, find time to pamper yourself.

Have one afternoon every week that is just for you–how about a manicure, a facial or a cheeky little pedicure to reduce those stress levels and leave you looking gorgeous at the same time? Don’t lose touch with your inner self–take at least fifteen minutes every day for reflection and contemplation. And remember, girls, when you travel the road to contentment, take your cosmetics with you. Colour on those cheeks, gloss on the lips…just a few moments of maintenance every morning will leave you feeling refreshed and ready to face the day.

If you’ve had a particularly hard week, there is nothing like a gentle massage to ease away the memories of those sleepless nights. And for that gorgeous, sensuous treat, ladies, you don’t even need to leave the house. It’s important that we don’t forget our partners, so remember to set aside one night a week and fill it with love and lust. Make a mouth-watering feast, light those candles, turn the music down low and remind each other that desire and parenthood can co-exist in glorious splendour.

The result? Happy parents, happy children, happy home.

Step One

I knocked on Kate’s door and then wandered on in without waiting for a reply. It was probably just as well, because her body was tangled in a position that looked like it was a therapeutic pose for someone suffering from acute constipation.

‘Morning, Madonna,’ I greeted her, while switching the ‘off’ button on the CD.

‘Morning, Fag Ash Lil. How’s you?’

I made some kind of yeeeeurghhh sound that I felt conveyed just the level of discontentment.

‘Very articulate,’ she said. ‘You know, with those profound, descriptive abilities you should really be a writer.’

I pulled the CD out of the machine. ‘One more word and the panpipes get it,’ I warned her. I glanced down at the CD pile and shoved the top disc onto the CD player, which just happened to be ‘Ancora’ by Il Divo.

II Divo–an Italian term for which I believe the exact translation is ‘great arse and a fine set of lungs’.

I poured a coffee (decaf), sat down at the kitchen table and put my feet on another chair. Kate didn’t bat an eyelid but I knew the minute I left she’d sponge down both table and chair with Flash antibacterial. Her whole house was spotless. Not in a freaky ‘I’ll stab you to death if you drop crumbs on my angora shag pile’ kind of way. Just in a super-organised, highly efficient, natural earth mother kind of way.

Kate had been mothering all of us since we were kids. When I was six, she refused to play in the snow with me unless I put gloves on. When we were teenagers she used to put condoms in my bag on the way to the pub. When my boys were babies she insisted on disinfecting my kitchen on a weekly basis because she said that I was–and I quote–‘obviously brought up in a lighthouse because I didn’t seem to be capable of getting into corners’.

Her kitchen was a gleaming showroom of wood units, marble worktops, plants, copper pans, pottery things that served no obvious purpose, kids’ paintings and collages made from leaves and wool. In my house the kids’ stuff made the kitchen look cluttered and messy. In this house it looked charming.

Like I said, the laws of womanhood would normally decree that I would have to hate such perfection, but with Kate it was impossible because she was so goddamn humble and lovely. She was gentle. She was beautiful. If your granny knitted the perfect woman it would look like Kate. Even her children liked her. All three of them–Cameron, Zoe and Tallulah. What were the chances of having three children and all of them thinking that you’re great? My earliest memory is of my mother irritating me incessantly by trying to put ribbons in my hair to make me look like a girl when it was plainly obvious to everyone else that I was a boy. Looking back now I can only assume that my willy fell off somewhere during the long journey with Jackie from Beverly Hills.

Kate disentangled her limbs then folded them into a different position as effortlessly as a bit actor from Wallace & Gromit.

‘Are you sure you’ve still got a skeletal system or have you done a Cher and had bits of it removed?’ I asked. I could honestly say that in my whole life, despite numerous experiences involving alcohol and imaginative sex, the back of my head had never come into contact with my ankle.

She laughed. ‘This one is great for the pelvis and the sex life,’ she said. ‘Do you know that scientists reckon that a woman has seven G-spots?’

‘Yeah, well you’d better call out some Sherpas and a tracker dog cos six of mine are missing.’

The front door slammed and Carol breezed in, all copper tendrils, size-eight hipsters and shopping bags.

‘Jesus, it’d freeze the balls off a brass gorilla out there,’ she said, shivering for effect. She’d never been very good with metaphors. She gave me a hug, then looked at Kate.

‘I know I’ll regret asking, but what are you doing?’

‘Counting her G-spots,’ I interjected.

Carol looked puzzled. ‘Why the plural? I thought we only had one?’

Thank you!

‘Nope, according to some anthropologist expert we’ve got seven,’ said Kate. Although how she could talk when she was staring her privates in the face was beyond me.

Carol giggled. ‘Oh, well there’s something for Cal to look for later then,’ she announced.

I made a very immature teenager, grossed-out face à la Hollyoaks, circa 2001.

‘Carol, we have laws! I’ve told you before–do not talk to me about your sex life with your husband. Due to the fact that he’s also my brother, it gives me mental images that will eventually lead to a psychiatrist’s couch or an appearance on a daytime talk show. Anyway, let’s not talk about sex because my memory is in no mood to be tested this morning.’

Sad, but true. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had one of those ‘alcohol and imaginative sex’ encounters. Don’t get me wrong, Mark and I could do that whole jungle hot and heavy thing. Once upon a time.