by Shari Low
Praise for Shari Low:
‘Funny, sexy and insightful,
prepare to be thoroughly entertained!’ – Closer
‘More fun than a girl’s night out!’ - OK!
‘There are only two words for Shari Low: utterly hilarious’ - Carmen Reid
‘Totally captivating and it felt like I’d lost a new best friend when it came to the end’ - Closer
‘Shari Low writes with humour and skill about the complicated subtleties of adult relationships. A gentle warning to smug marrieds everywhere’ - Dorothy Koomson
‘A lovely, warm-hearted tale’ - Now
‘Great fun from start to finish’ - Jenny Colgan
‘Absolutely hilarious. A brilliant read that keeps your attention right up until the end’ - Bookbag
To find out more about Shari, visit her website at
www.sharilow.com
By Shari Low:
What If?
Why Not?
Double Trouble
The Motherhood Walk of Fame
My Best Friend’s Life
A Brand New Me
Temptation Street
Friday Night With The Girls
The Moment of Truth
The Other Wives Club
The Story Of Our Life
A Life Without You
One Day In Winter
Another Day In Winter
The Last Day of Winter
With Or Without You
This Is Me
Non-Fiction
Because Mummy Said So
Shari King Novels (written with Ross King)
Taking Hollywood
Breaking Hollywood
Shari Low
First published in Great Britain as a paperback original in 2011
Copyright © Shari Low 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication,
other than those clearly in the public domain,
are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of the author,
nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781520758732
Cover design – Leah Jacobs-Gordon
To John, Callan and Brad. Everything. Always.
One
2008
Friday Night . . . The St Kentigern Hotel, Glasgow, 8pm
‘. . . and the study concluded that the majority of women prefer to have a lunch or night out with their girlfriends than a night of hubba hubba with their partner.’
Puffed up with the thrill of having delivered this little nugget of anthropological interest, Ginger took a large slug of her Jack Daniel’s and Coke and waited for a response.
Next to me, Lizzy was nodding thoughtfully. ‘Well, there are definitely advantages. And by the way, you’re far too old to be referring to sex as hubba hubba.’
I jumped in before Ginger had a chance to come over all lingo-defensive. ‘Actually I think I agree with the survey. At least when you’re out with the girls you don’t have to suck your stomach in and spend the whole time trying to keep your arse in a flattering light.’
‘I can’t believe you do that.’ Lizzy looked shocked. I understood her surprise. It was ridiculous that I felt that way. Surely I should be able to exhale at least once during sex? On one hand, I was sure I could win a medal for Olympic-standard lung capacity, but on the other hand shouldn’t I be comfortable enough to be honest, open and slightly spongy in the abdominal area?
‘You’re right,’ I agreed, ‘I should just let it all hang out.’
Now she looked even more incredulous. ‘No you shouldn’t – you should just switch the light off!’
Ginger and I dissolved into giggles but Lizzy was unrepentant. ‘I haven’t had sex with the light on since nineteen eighty-seven.’
We tried to regain a touch of decorum as a very pretty waitress placed a new round of drinks on the table. Ginger groaned as soon as she was out of earshot. ‘What does it say about me that she looks way too young to work here? God, I’m old. Old. A haggard old crumbling specimen of womanhood.’
‘And shallow. You forgot to mention shallow.’ I picked up my large glass of red wine, careful not to spill a drop on my brand- new white chiffon tunic. It had been a spontaneous buy from Zara that afternoon and I’d swept caution to the wind by wearing it despite the potential hazard created by tonight’s triple threat of red wine, soup and a chocolate sponge dripping with butterscotch ice cream.
This weekend had been Ginger’s idea. Her treat. Three nights in the St Kentigern Hotel, a five-star spa oasis in the centre of Glasgow. It was hugely indulgent given that I only lived fifteen minutes away and there is a perfectly good salon on the High Street that does a special on gel nails, eyebrow threads and a Brazilian for fifty quid, with a free paracetamol thrown in to numb the pain. However Ginger insisted that we merited a joint treat to celebrate our birthdays, all of them within a few weeks of each other. Given everything that had happened over the last few months, I’d thought about cancelling but I was glad now that I’d come.
I needed this. I needed a break from . . . Nope, I wasn’t going to go there. I was just going to be thankful that I’d been here three hours and had so far managed not to give a thought to anything more important than the minibar. And of course . . .
‘I hope Cassie has this. You know, friends like this, that she’ll go through life with and share all the good stuff.’
Cassie. My daughter. A seven-year-old with a personality that was reminiscent of tropical weather – sunny, warm, adorable, good for the soul, but with occasional hurricanes and tornados which necessitated boarding up the windows and hiding under a bed until they passed.
Ginger was shaking her head so furiously that she didn’t even notice that strands of her wild mane of red corkscrew curls had caught in her drink and were sprinkling Jack Daniel’s back and forward across a Gucci top that had cost what I make in a month.
‘No way. Friends, yes. Friends like us?’
‘Speak for yourself, I’m a great friend.’ Lizzy was talking just a little louder than usual. I believe the official decibel rating was ‘Four glasses of cava and a pre-dinner Cosmo’.
‘You are,’ I agreed, speaking just a little quieter than normal in the hope that Lizzy would follow suit.
Ginger was busy looking suitably incredulous. ‘I know, but come on – do you remember nothing? Do you seriously want Cassie to repeat history? We’ve been friends for how long?’
‘Since we were eleven.’
‘Eleven. That’s . . .’ Ginger put on her ‘doing calculations’ face, then switched straight to horror. ‘Oh my God, that’s getting close to thirty years. Thirty! I’m still telling people I’m only twenty-nine! I really need to start avoiding you two and get younger friends.’
‘We can only hope,’ I said to Lizzy, with a wink. She grinned, and for the first time I noticed the tiredness aroun
d her eyes. Not that anyone else would see it. Strangers would notice the stunning taupe satin strapless dress, the incredible figure and the poker-straight, Demi Moore black hair. They wouldn’t see the slight shading under her eyes or the smile that stopped just short of full beam because she hadn’t had a decent sleep in months.
‘Thirty years,’ Lizzy repeated. ‘It’s hard to believe that we’ve fitted it all in, yet it seems like only yesterday that we were getting ready in your bedroom on a Saturday night and getting up to absolutely no good.’
‘That’s my point,’ Ginger said. ‘We’ve had so much drama, so many disasters – do you want her to do all the things that we did? Make all the same mistakes?’
‘Yes! I wouldn’t change a single thing about anything we did.’
As soon as it was out I realised that wasn’t true and so did the others.
‘OK, apart from the obvious,’ I conceded. ‘But nothing else. Not the dramas, not the disasters, not the dodgy boyfriends . . .’
Lizzy collapsed into giggles and blurted, ‘Gary Collins!’
The shrieks that followed almost derailed a waiter carrying a silver tray the size of a small island.
‘You see – this is what I mean. We’ve shared everything and we’ve had some fantastic times. That’s what I want for Cassie. I want her to know about all the stuff that happened to us, and then when she makes her own mistakes I want her to have great friends that will dig her out of every mess she gets into and she’ll do the same for them.’
I surreptitiously opened the top button of my black crepe trousers. Chocolate cake remorse was alive and well at my side of the table.
‘It might be time to start making some selective choices with her friends then.’ There was a plopping noise as Ginger transferred the remaining ice lingering at the bottom of her otherwise empty glass into her next drink.
‘Why?’ I asked puzzled.
‘Because it would really help if one of them was related to a good lawyer.’
‘Because . . . ?’ Lizzy asked.
Ginger was laughing hard now. ‘Harry’s Bar.’
‘Oh my God, do you remember?’ Lizzy’s smile made it to full beam this time. ‘One day we have to tell Cassie about that!’
‘Definitely,’ I agreed. ‘But not until I’ve hired a legal team and put a padlock on the drinks cabinet.’ A scene from the past flipped out of my memory and I could see it all like it was yesterday. ‘That all started in my bedroom too. Lizzy, you were dancing to Wham! and, Ginger, you were . . .’
Two
Lou
1986 – Aged 16
‘Turn it up, turn it up, I love this song!’
Lizzy jumped up onto the bed and started to dance around in only her pink polka-dot bra and knickers. If the old bloke across the street was looking through his telescope he’d have a stroke. Sure, he said it was for his astronomy but I was pretty sure he couldn’t tell Jupiter from one of Saturn’s rings.
The boys (and girls) from Wham! were belting out ‘I’m Your Man’ and Lizzy was shaking her hips into a near frenzy.
‘God, I still can’t believe they’ve split up. Apparently George Michael wanted to be taken more seriously as a songwriter. Like ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ wasn’t a classic,’ she gasped between shimmies.
I made a mental note to remind her to take her asthma inhaler tonight.
Just in time, the DJ on Radio Clyde announced that he was taking the pace down and we all simultaneously groaned. We liked ‘pace up’. Getting ready to go out on Saturday night had to be done to a throbbing beat with the one exception being, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!’
Cue exception. ‘Take My Breath Away’ by Berlin. Top Gun. Goosebumps. Heart racing. And a deep certainty that I knew without any doubt the identity of my future husband. I flopped back on the pink candlewick and joined in, reminding everyone within earshot why I wasn’t a member of Bananarama.
Just before the high bit that made me sound like I was having my fingers amputated without anaesthetic, I switched back to conversation. ‘D’you think Tom will sing that to me when we’re married?’
From her semi-concealed position of hanging out of the side window, smoking a St. Moritz cigarette (because she thought the gold band on the tip made her look sophisticated), Ginger said, ‘Yeah, right. Think again there Loopy Lou because Tom is mine. You can have that Iceman bloke. Or the one that copped it.’
I would have argued, but I knew Ginger would probably win on account of her obvious anatomical advantages.
Me: short, 32B, a face that veered towards unremarkable and - before the head stylist at my Saturday job in the hairdressers came over all experimental-punk and ran amok with a blue semi-permanent colour - my crowning glory was a vibrant shade of mouse.
Ginger: 5 feet 8 inches, 34DD, athletically toned, with a mane of stunning red corkscrew curls that made her look like the West of Scotland version of Diana Ross.
On aesthetics, it was a clear victory for Motown.
‘Anyway.’ Ginger said it in two separate syllables, popping out a smoke ring in the middle. ‘I’ll be Tom’s obvious choice because he’ll be far more comfortable with someone who has the same level of fame.’
Lizzy and I howled with laughter. Despite having no discernible talent or marketable skill whatsoever, Ginger had been telling us that she was going to be famous since we were six. We reminded her often that there was only one success story from our town who had ever gone on to achieve a level of national fame and that was a horse born on McCormack’s farm that won the Grand National. She was determined though. She was going to act. Or model. Or perform. Or marry Tom Cruise. What did it say about our lives that the last one seemed like the best idea of the bunch?
I turned my focus to things that were slightly closer to home than Tom’s Beverly Hills mansion – my friend who was now pretending to waltz on the other side of my bed.
‘Lizzy, will you stop dancing up there. Last time you did that I had to get a new mattress and my mother is still docking my wages two pounds a week,’ I said.
‘Where is your mum anyway? Thought she’d have been in doing ciggie patrol before now.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I’m guessing, er . . .’ Quick calculation. ‘On the M8 somewhere around Livingston.’
‘Why?’
‘Because my dad fell asleep on the train on the way home from the football and missed his stop. Again. A train guard phoned from Waverly Station to say that they’d found him when the train reached the end of the line, but they’re refusing to send him back the way because he’s too pissed. Apparently they had to try twenty-six different telephone numbers because he’s so incoherent they couldn’t make out what he was saying. Do you think Tom Crui – I mean, Val Kilmer, will end up a drunken arse and have me driving around the country looking for him every Saturday?’
‘Definitely,’ Ginger replied, stubbing her cigarette out on the windowsill and then flushing away the ash with a splash from her green plastic beaker of vodka and fresh orange. Some bright spark – I think it was Ginger’s older brother, Red (his name was actually Richard, but the follicular pre-disposition to ginger was a family trait) – had once told us always to drink vodka because it didn’t leave a smell on your breath and therefore no one would know that you were drinking alcohol. It was a great theory even if it was cancelled out by the fact that the last time the very accident-prone Lizzy consumed one too many odourless vodkas, she attempted – in a drunken over estimation of her super-powers – to leapfrog a bollard, fell right over it and cracked her front two teeth. Thankfully her uncle is the local dentist so he sorted out the physical damage. The mental trauma of being grounded for three months, with daily rollickings from her mother, Saint Carla of the Holy Screech, may never heal. Nor will the indignity suffered when it became public knowledge five minutes after it happened. That’s the thing about living in a small town. Weirbank may be less than twenty miles from the throbbing metropolis of Glasgow, but everyone knows everyone and even a minor hum
iliation is considered entertainment for the whole town.
‘Take My Breath Away’ ended and the cheesy DJ on Radio Clyde made an even cheesier link to Notorious. I don’t get the fuss over Simon Le Bon but I’d give my entire stock of Silk Cut Menthol, my Avon lipstick collection, all my mixed tapes and a kidney, for a night with the guitarist John Taylor. I think it’s the emaciated look and the way his fringe falls in his face. I could be good for that man. I could feed him my signature dish (there’s nothing wrong with fish finger sandwiches), give him a good haircut and then snog him giddy. But only if Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer were unavailable.
I stood up and smoothed out the creases on my purple taffeta puffball skirt. It (and the matching boob tube and bolero) had taken two weeks’ wages to buy but it was so worth it. Even Ginger was jealous and she’d made enough cash from her Saturday job in the fish shop to buy a new pair of green suede tukka boots, shocking-pink leg warmers and a white fake leather skirt that looked like a small pelmet for her nethers. If my Auntie Josie were here she’d be warning Ginger about life-threatening chills and losing her virginity just by bending over in male company.
My Aunt Josie is my dad’s sister. Three years older than him, she is loud, opinionated and doesn’t put up with any of his crap. He hates her almost as much as I love her. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished there was a slight reshuffle in the gene pool when God was giving out offspring and I’d been given to Auntie Josie. Instead, Josie had my cousins Michael and Avril and I got Dave and Della Cairney – the poster couple for ‘co-dependent relationships’. I heard that term on an old Dallas repeat. Mary Crosby used it some time before she lost the plot and shot JR. It fits my mum and dad perfectly. He’s arrogant, egotistical, completely self-absorbed and demands to be the centre of her world at all times, and she adores him so much that she’s happy to oblige. If I thought I was going to turn out like that I’d line up next to JR and hope Mary Crosby had two bullets.