The Motherhood Walk of Fame

by Shari Low

  I did my very best pout–the one that I hoped made me look like Angelina Jolie, but was probably a bit nearer a puffer fish who’s just been smacked in the mouth.

  ‘You, my big stud, are going to be pampered, preened and fussed over. I’ve made you a gorgeous meal. There’s wine, there’s food and there’s romance. And in return, all you have to do is shag me senseless. What do you think?’

  Was it my imagination or did he hesitate slightly?

  He tossed his jacket, pressed me up against the kitchen wall and kissed me like he’d just remembered how it was done. Oooooh, I liked that. With one hand he pulled up my top and whisked it right over my head (definite ripping sound–mental note to remember to give it back to Carol with a grovelling apology and a box of After Eights). I tore off his tie, then his shirt, and pressed my tits up against him as my tongue searched for his tonsils and my legs came up around his waist. Suddenly, he pushed them back down and took a step back, a playful look on his face. His eyes ran from the top of my body to my feet. Then, and believe me, I’m getting a hot flush just thinking about this, he dropped to his knees, opened my jeans and tore them down, to reveal–yes, drum roll and trumpets please–new, sexy lace knickers that actually matched my bra. Then he leaned over and ran his tongue very slowly up the inside of my thigh. My fingers were in his hair as I gasped, trying desperately not to come and spoil what I was sure were going to be the most deliciously filthy and downright buttock-clenchingly horny moments of my life.

  He ran his tongue over my other thigh. Then at the top, he paused and moved my slut thong over to one side. And then slowly, sexily, gently, he blew. Thank God I’d done the bikini line or the resulting whiplash could have taken out an eye.

  It was all too much for me. I yanked him up by the follicles, deftly unbuckled his belt, undid his button, wrenched down his zip then pushed down his boxers, releasing the most magnificent erection I’d seen since before that first little blue line appeared on a stick all those years before.

  And when faced with that kind of apparatus, what else is a girl to do but climb on, hold on and scream until the neighbours call the police.

  We’ve done it, I thought smugly, as we snuggled down, very sore, very sleepy and very happy. We’d rediscovered each other. We’d reconnected our hearts and re-engaged our libidos. Oh yes, baby, we’d relit our sexual fires.

  But little did I know that Mark’s obviously lived in damp conditions because the bloody thing kept going out again. While my sex drive was once again motoring along like a Formula One car with no brakes, Mark’s was spluttering to life once every week or two, going out for a quick spin then crawling back into the pit lanes for a refuel and a rest. Over the following weeks, months and years, and much to my general discontent (although to the pleasure of Ashif, who ran the grocer’s at the end of the street where I bought batteries for a certain adult toy on a far too frequent basis) our sex life was reduced to the occasional mildly satisfying romp. Whenever I broached the subject with Mark, it was always the same–he was tired, he was under pressure, he worked long hours, he loved me, it would get better, now cuddle in, go to sleep, and cross my heart I’ll make it up to you at the weekend.

  Occasionally he did. But more often than not life, kids, bills, work and sleep took over. Still, it could be worse. We still laughed. We had the family we always wanted. We genuinely loved each other. And Ashif was now able to send the wife and kids to Center Parcs for a fortnight. In the grand scheme of things, surely a less than perfect sex life was a small price to pay for all the other great things in our lives.

  Definitely. Absolutely. It was.

  ‘CARLY!’ I snapped my head up, spilling my coffee on my tracky bottoms. It didn’t matter. They were washable at 40 degrees and dryable on a radiator. Well, if he wasn’t going to sustain the effort then neither was I.

  Carol was laughing. ‘What are you thinking about–you were on another planet there.’

  Which was ironic, since Kate was now doing something that required bending her spine into an unnatural position and sticking her arse in the air. I decided I was far too refined to make a joke about Uranus.

  ‘Sex,’ I replied truthfully.

  Of course, what goes on between Mark and me, in the privacy of our own home and within the sanctity of our marriage is sacrosanct, and I would never, ever divulge the intimacies of our lives with anyone.

  ‘Mark still not putting out?’ asked Kate.

  Busted.

  ‘He’d need a satellite navigation system to find my clitoris these days,’ I admitted.

  ‘So that’s why you’re looking so pissed off today then,’ Carol interjected.

  But no, I was sure she was wrong. After all, my sex life had been crap for years–why would it suddenly upset me now?

  ‘Nah, I don’t think so. I’m just having a down day. No idea why.’

  ‘PMT?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No, that was last week–remember the whole dry-cleaners weeping over a ketchup stain/threatening a traffic warden expedition,’ I said ruefully.

  ‘Work?’ asked Carol, with a wary look on her face. Carol had the same reaction as most men when faced with an emotional woman–she donned a crash helmet and checked out the nearest exits. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It’s just that when God was giving out empathy and sympathy she was down in the ‘superficial aesthetics’ department picking out the best face, the best body and getting a manicure, pedicure and permanent teeth whitening.

  ‘Work’s work,’ I replied with a shrug.

  ‘See what I mean?’ grinned Kate, talking to Carol but gesticulating to me. ‘I just told her that with her acutely incisive powers of descriptive narrative she should really be a writer.’

  There’s nothing worse than a pal with a gift for irony. Except a pal with a gift for irony who now had her legs spread like an acrobatic porn star.

  ‘Will you stop with that bloody yoga?’ I demanded petulantly. Carol had just put a chocolate éclair in front of me and Kate’s bendy stuff was putting me right off. She looked at me, took on board my distress, considered our lifelong bond, evoked the emotion of all we’d been through together, then carried on regardless.

  I took another gulp of cold coffee. Work. Well, I suppose on a scale of phenomenal excitement to turgid banality it was somewhere in the middle. I was gutted that my books hadn’t propelled me directly onto the world stage and my bank manager’s Christmas card list. I always thought that the minute my novels hit the shelves my adoring public would form an orderly queue that would stretch for miles. I’d be the new big thing. I’d be windswept and interesting, Richard and Judy would be my new best friends, and newspapers and magazines would clamour for my opinion on the really important issues.

  Crisis in the Middle East? Let’s ask Carly Cooper for her informed opinion as to the path to resolution.

  Are ‘new’ men really just ‘old’ men with cosmetics? Carly Cooper will know.

  Is a daily orgasm essential for great mental and physical health? Actually, for obvious reasons I’d probably have to pass that one on to Jilly Cooper.

  Obviously, my stellar rise to hot author of the year and ‘she with the finger on the zeitgeist of modern social culture’ hadn’t quite happened. But then, I suppose that, like the whole sex thing, I’d been too busy with babies, house and banalities to notice.

  I was under contract to write one more book for the publisher who’d purchased my first two, but I had to admit I was struggling to conjure up the motivation.

  I really liked the people who worked at my publisher’s–all six of them. One of the factors contributing to my pitiful income and my definite non-arrival as a literary force was probably that I was signed to a small independent publisher who did minuscule print runs and had the advertising budget of the average office Christmas kitty.

  With both books I’d already released, the first issues sold out within a few weeks–not difficult when most shops held a grand stock of about four–never to be replenished, because the
publisher had already moved on to the following month’s titles.

  If book deals were like recording contracts then I was the second runner-up on a past season of the X Factor who had a couple of tiny hits and was looking forward to a career on the cruise ships.

  Still, I was grateful for the heady excitement of actually seeing my name in print, and following the old adage that as one door closes, a crow bar and a bit of brute force opens another, I did get my weekly column out of it. It might not be much, but it paid for the weekly jaunt around Sainsbury’s, with a bit left over for the holiday fund.

  Was I disappointed? Sure I was. But then, I hadn’t quite given up yet. I still had nine months left before my deadline for the next book, so I’d work at that, submit it, and fulfil my contract. Then I’d decide what I really wanted to do when I grew up.

  Writing had seemed like a great idea when I thought it was a step on the journey to fame, riches and my biological mother, but the harsh reality was that it actually involved endless hours of solitude spent sitting in a room making up imaginary friends. In some countries they locked people up for that. I was convinced all that solitude and angst was detrimental to one’s mental health and I already had the proof that it had fairly detrimental physical effects–all the pondering inevitably caused boredom-fuelled comfort eating which, unchecked, could lead to a mightily fat arse.

  I squirmed as I registered that my waistband was just a tad tighter than comfort demanded. Perhaps I’d skip the chocolate éclair.

  I watched Kate finally getting up from the floor. Thank God that was over. Then, like Jean Claude Van Damme in the presence of really bad men, she suddenly kicked her leg up, twisted it around onto the kitchen worktop and did a ballet/stretchy thingy.

  That’s it, my appetite was completely gone now. Mainly because I knew that if I so much as attempted that manoeuvre my kidneys would fall out, my skin would burst like an overripe marrow and I’d need stitches in my secret garden.

  ‘Right, it’s been a wee slice of heaven, but I need to go. Benson & Hedges, the ironing and children are calling.’

  ‘Where is my gorgeous little Benny the Ball today?’ asked Carol. I know, how rude! He might have a slight weakness for extra puddings, but a space-hopper he was not.

  ‘He started nursery yesterday. I’ve to collect him at three.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Kate, in a doom-laden voice. My head spun around to face her as inwardly I groaned. Dear God, don’t let one of her muscles have snapped or her back have frozen in that position. Her legs were still at a ninety-degree angle to each other, and if we had to take her to hospital in that position then one limb was going to have to go out through the sunroof.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked fearfully.

  ‘You’re not getting wild jungle sex,’ she stated.

  I appreciated the recap on my love life but was pretty sure we’d already moved on from that subject.

  ‘And nothing is going on work-wise to make you remotely inspired or enthusiastic.’

  Correct. Did she want to see me cry?

  ‘And Benny has just started nursery.’

  Look, didn’t I just say that?

  ‘Carly, you know what’s going on, don’t you? You, my darling, are suffering from acute non-stimulation of the neural passageways and cranial cavity.’

  ‘What?’

  She laughed. ‘You’re bored! Out of your head. Off your tits. Restless. Fed-up. Your va-va-voom has vucked off.’

  I processed this for a minute. How could I be bored? I had a house to run, a book to write, a husband to manipulate into giving up sexual favours, two demanding children to be fed, watered and diverted from a life of crime, friends that did bloody yoga…Oh, shite, she was right. I was bored rigid.

  Where was the excitement? Where was the adrenalin rush? Where was that little flutter of anticipation when I woke up each morning wondering what the day would bring? Bored. Rigid. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d been this bored.

  ‘I remember the last time you were this bored,’ piped up psychic Carol, scaring the crap out of me. The day that Carol got in touch with the thoughts and feelings of another woman was the day that the skies would be awash with large pink animals that snorted and whiffed of bacon.

  ‘It was right before you left,’ she continued. ‘You know, before you did the whole mid-life crisis, desperate cow, psycho stalker, any port in a shower thing.’

  Well put, I thought. She was right. Much as I cringed with embarrassment at the thought.

  Okay, so here it is–the thing I alluded to earlier that should really only be mentioned after I’m dead, when my body has been handed over for medical research and the scientists are dissecting my brain in a bid to understand the primitive behaviour of deluded, hormone-fuelled, biological-clock-powered women.

  You see, I once made a huge cock-up. Massive. Mortifying. Actually there were several. About a year before I met Mark at the wedding, I had what can only be called a mental aberration. At that time I was single, in a job I hated (selling toilet rolls–you couldn’t make it up), living in a grotty rented flat and generally discontented with where my life had gone. Especially when it had at one time shown so much promise. In the preceding ten years, I’d worked in London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Shanghai. I’d visited New York and Ireland. I’d had wild, crazy jobs managing nightclubs in some of the most exotic places on earth. I’d met some amazing people, I’d been engaged six times, I’d bought gorgeous clothes, and I’d earned and spent a fortune…

  Nope, even when I hide it in the middle there it still sticks out like a nun in an S&M basement. I got engaged six times. Two informal promises and four full-blown sparkly-rings-phone-the-vicar ones.

  Yet there I was, at the end of it all, living on my lonesome and existing on ready meals for one. And if Ashif had known me then, his family would be going to Barbados twice a year.

  So I did the sane, rational thing–I made a plan. Sadly, that’s where the ‘sane and rational’ bit ended. I quit my job, relinquished the lease on my flat, grabbed my credit cards and went off round the world to find all the guys I’d been engaged to just in case any of them really had been Mr Right and I’d been too busy signing up as a certified commitment-phobic to notice. It was insane, deranged, desperate and a bigger disaster than George Bush’s contribution to world peace. The ignominy of the memories is too hard to bear, so I’ll give you the pamphlet edition as opposed to War and Peace. Or should I say the Nipple Alert version, as the following story provided shame, embarrassment, disaster, and the plot for my first novel.

  First there was Nick, the man who’d taken my virginity on a hot night in Benidorm. Actually, ‘taken’ isn’t strictly true. I’d lobbed it at him at the approximate speed of an Olympic javelin. But when I rediscovered him in a restaurant in St Andrews, we discovered we had all the sexual tension of custard. Luckily, Sarah was with me, and they fell in love, married and when we’re all together now I manage to blank out the fact that I know what his penis looks like.

  Then there was Joe, a nightclub owner in Amsterdam. By the time I tracked him down he was a millionaire entrepreneur and paragon of chic–and so camp he made Elton John look like Vinnie Jones’s harder brother.

  Next was Doug, who, ironically, dumped me first time around because he caught me shagging Mark–in the days when Mark didn’t think a libido was one of those inflatable things you lie on in the pool on holiday. Anyway, second time around Doug proved that he had the thirst for vengeance of a Sicilian mob boss and totally humiliated me, so I was forced to move on to…

  Tom. Bless him. An Irish farmer with the body of a Greek God. By the time I found him again he was happily married and had the body of a Greek taxi driver called Stavros who existed on ten thousand calories a day.

  Then there was Phil. A complete honey, who was my Shanghai Surprise–never more so than when I discovered that he’d become a big name on the American comedy circuit and had married Lily, the beautiful flower who’d worked wi
th me in a nightclub in deepest darkest Shanghai.

  So that left all my hopes pinned on Sam. Sam Morton. The martial arts expert who I fell madly in love with when I lived in Hong Kong. The one that I knew, just knew, was right for me when I set eyes on him again all those years later. The one who adored me, who said he’d prayed every moment for me to return to him–that is, when he wasn’t really busy doing other things, like shagging half the wealthy female population of South East Asia. Oh, yes, Sam had become a gigolo. A hooker. A man who could fucky-fucky-long-time for mucho dinaro. And thereafter I couldn’t look at him without thinking ‘wire brush and disinfectant’. And believe me, I tried. I even agreed to a holiday on a paradise island to heal our tortured relationship. Result? Loads of sun, sea, sand…and a clitoris that spent the whole time on its own little vacation. Yep, the passion was officially gone, replaced by friendship. Platonic friendship.

  So my great international manhunt fell spectacularly on its buttocks–as did I when the entire congregation at Carol and Cal’s wedding (except my dad, who was deep in an alcoholic slumber) found out that the man who had accompanied me to the wedding–and whom I’d begged to masquerade as my boyfriend for the day to save my embarrassment about the whole round the world/still single debacle–was actually South East Asia’s most prolific rent-a-dick.

  My mother claims she is still taking the anti-anxiety pills.

  But strangely, it didn’t faze Mark, my first love, my childhood sweetheart. He stepped in when my life was falling apart and (literally) picked me up and rescued me. That’s when I realised that throughout my whole life, through every crazy scheme, drama and disaster, Mark Barwick had always been there at the right time, said the right things and saved the day. Yep, his Y-fronts should be worn on top of his trousers at all times. He’s my soul mate and I thank God every day for sending him to me. Well, except when I’ve got PMT and could happily keep the local hitman in business.