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The Motherhood Walk of Fame
Shari Low
Carly Cooper, harassed mother and disillusioned writer, has often been tempted to head for the hills. She just never imagined they'd be the Hollywood ones…A hilarious romantic comedy for anyone who’s ever had their head in the clouds…Carly's living the dream. Almost. She has the kids, the husband, the lethargic sex life, and who cares if her novels aren't exactly bestsellers – pole-vaulting her ironing pile is excitement enough.Just when she's resigned to domestic mediocrity, a phone call from Hollywood changes everything. Carly is off to Tinseltown…As she arrives in LA, Carly knows life will be transformed…but she doesn't count on marital disaster, a career roller-coaster and an A-list movie star who wants to offer her more than just a friendly welcome.Carly Cooper is strutting along the Hollywood Walk of Fame but can she get to the end without falling flat on her face?
SHARI LOW
The Motherhood Walk of Fame
Copyright (#u88773cfe-7bee-5b2b-9b8c-773701013536)
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 (http://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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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
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 (#u62aeea03-fd3a-54a2-8b8d-6222dbb00819)
Copyright (#u0109d68e-4160-50b7-bf60-f2872d9cee4b)
Prologue (#u0d05a2a0-1de2-5a6c-a016-42cc87b7b4dd)
Chapter 1 Step One (#u38530a0c-5c3e-545b-b94e-bf6c28791882)
Chapter 2 Step Two (#u0713cef7-6aab-58b0-b533-bb077a60a128)
Chapter 3 Step Three (#u1bad24b8-84c6-5489-87b5-c486e6ccb4f0)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 Step Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 Step Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 Step Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 Step Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 Step Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 Step Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 Step Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 Step Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 Step Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 Step Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 Step Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 Step Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 Step Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Carly Calling … (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 Step Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 Step Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 Step Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u88773cfe-7bee-5b2b-9b8c-773701013536)
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 isnothing 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.
