What Now? Read online

  What Now?

  Shari Low

  To every reader who has picked up my books and allowed me to share my stories for 20 years… Thank you.

  With love,

  Shari x

  Contents

  Before you turn the page…

  Prologue – August 2019

  How it all started…

  1. London, Sunday 31st March, 2019

  2. Fifteen Minutes Later – Kate’s House Next Door

  3. Later That Afternoon

  4. Sunday 28th July, 2019

  5. New York, Friday, 28th July, 2000

  6. Sunday 28th July, 2019

  7. Still Sunday 28th July, 2019

  8. Later That Evening – 28th July, 2019

  9. Hong Kong, 1994

  10. Los Angeles, 28th July, 2019

  11. Los Angeles, 28th July, 2019

  12. Sam’s House, LA

  13. LA. The Next Morning

  14. Sam’s House, The Next Day

  15. Sam’s Pool, Eleven Days Later

  16. Sam’s Kitchen, That Evening

  17. Los Angeles, June, 2008

  18. Los Angeles, 13th August, 2019

  19. New York, 13th Aug 2019

  20. Glasgow, 1999

  21. New York, August, 2019

  22. New York, Half An Hour Later

  23. New York, The Next Morning

  24. Late Morning, Same Day

  25. New York, The Next Morning

  26. Los Angeles, 8.12 p.m

  27. London, July 2010

  28. Back In LA, 2019

  29. Los Angeles – Four Days Later

  30. That Night and The Next Morning, Los Angeles and London

  31. Carly’s Kitchen, Shortly Afterwards

  32. Carly’s House, Twenty Minutes Later

  33. Later That Night

  34. The Next Morning

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgment

  More from Shari Low

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  Before you turn the page…

  A Note From Shari

  Lovely readers,

  Twenty years ago, in January 2001, my first novel, What If? was released. It was the story of Carly Cooper and her merry band of friends, Kate, Sarah, Carol and Jess, all of them navigating their way through life and love.

  In that book, Carly was having a pre-Millennium crisis. Single and restless, she quit her job, her home and her life and set off to track down the six men she’d almost married, determined to see if she’d accidentally said goodbye to her soulmate.

  It hit the shelves for the second time, when my publisher, Boldwood Books, rereleased a special anniversary edition in 2020.

  If you haven’t read What If?, don’t worry. All that matters is that you know that in the end, Carly found her happy ever after and as the new century dawned, she celebrated with her rekindled flame, Mark Barwick, her best friends, and cocktails. Lots of cocktails.

  So what happened next?

  It’s a question that many readers have asked over the years, and to be honest, I was pretty curious too.

  Did Carly and Mark stroll hand and hand into the sunset? Did Sarah find happiness after escaping an abusive marriage? Did Jess ever recover from her scandalous affair? Did Carol’s marriage to Carly’s brother, Callum, go the distance? And did Kate get a sainthood for being the cool, loving voice of reason in every situation?

  All the answers are right here, in the pages of What Now?

  Thank you for coming back to catch up on Carly. And thank you, thank you, thank you, to all of you have read my books over the years. You’ve changed my life and I’m so grateful to have spent two decades telling stories.

  As for the future? Well, I’m already wondering what Carly will be up to twenty years from now…

  Much love,

  Shari xxx

  Prologue – August 2019

  Independent Women – Destiny’s Child

  There are so many clichés in the story about how this whole thing started that I’m embarrassed to revisit them. Or ‘pure morto’, as one of my teenagers would say, right before he calls me a ‘beamer’ and asks why I can’t be the kind of mother who has a mature dignity, cooks edible meals, does Pilates and keeps their disasters private. Thankfully, I suffer from chronic oversharing, so my mortification threshold is low enough for me to just blurt it all out and then pretend I said nothing. I’m a big fan of self-denial. Except when it comes to anything involving chocolate, cocktails or Robert Downey Jr.

  Cliché number one: there was alcohol involved. Number two: it seemed like a good idea at the time. Number three: we should have known better. And number four: we shouldn’t be allowed to gather without the presence of a responsible adult. The fact that four of the people who were present are approaching middle age with the speed of a bullet train rushing towards Menopause Central, and the fifth one has already passed that station, tells you everything you need to know about the maturity levels of my friends. There isn’t an ounce of responsibility between us.

  And yet, should I really be surprised? After all, I have form for being irresponsible and spontaneous in the face of adversity.

  I’m Carly Cooper. Mother of teenagers, Mac and Benny. Soon to be ex-wife of Mark Barwick. Turns out that keeping my own name when we married twenty years ago saved me a whole lot of paperwork then and now.

  Not that keeping my name was some statement of independence or pessimism. It was just one of those things I never got round to, too caught up in a whirlwind of fast love, great sex, and transforming just about every other thing about my life.

  When I married Mark, I gave up a varied career that included everything from managing nightclubs in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Scotland, to selling the toilet rolls that took care of corporate bottoms all over the UK.

  Now, I make my living as a writer, thanks to two confessional novels I penned many moons ago: Nipple Alert (please don’t judge me for the awful title – it was the nineties and my publisher wanted something that would stand out, no pun intended) and Sleeping Under A Star.

  I wrote Nipple Alert in the months after our wedding. It was based on the true story of how I chucked my job, my flat and my life, and went off to track down six blokes I’d almost married in my twenties. Disastrous doesn’t even begin to cover it. If you haven’t read it, all I’ll say here is that the story, and my life, had a most unexpected ending, when I found myself in the arms of Mark Barwick, high-school sweetheart and all-round male-type superhero… Or so I thought. But I’ll come back to that.

  My second book, Sleeping Under A Star, told the story of a regular girl who contemplated leaving her husband for an ex-boyfriend who’d become an A-list movie star. You know, just your average, everyday, common-as-chips-type tale. And Sam Morton, my real-life movie star ex-boyfriend (I swear I’m not making him up) says he believes me when I say it’s not based on him. My face flushed a little when I wrote that last sentence because it’s a blatant lie. Sorry. Full disclosure – a few years after I married Mark, I went to live with Sam in LA for a couple of months to try to land a movie deal for the first book. While I was there, some feelings began to bubble under the platonic surface, and I briefly wondered if I’d picked the wrong man. However, Mark swooped back in and I realised our marriage was worth saving, so I said goodbye to Sam for the second time. Thankfully, he forgave me and he’s been one of my closest friends ever since.

  For a while it looked like that trip to LA to flog my novels would lead to a starry screenwriting career and I’d be best friends with Kate Winslet, but that never happened. Both books did okay, but Danielle Steel wasn’t exactly budging up to give me a space on the bestselling author bench.

  Like so many other nineties writers whose funny, romantic books were
labelled at ‘chick lit’, my pink-covered flames burned brightly at the turn of the millennium, only for my publisher to chuck me as soon as sales dipped and the next literary trend took over. If my memory serves me right, ‘misery lit’ became the next big thing. I could have written about the tragic demise of my career as a novelist, but luckily, my two works of (almost) fiction led to a couple of side gigs that have put money in the bank for the last two decades. First, I landed the dubious honour of penning an unbearably smug, achingly obnoxious weekly parenting column for the lifestyle magazine of a broadsheet newspaper. I hate every word and have to shower after I’ve written it, but I got over the complete vacuum of integrity by reminding myself that it pays the bills. In real life, I supress the shallow cow who writes the column by trapping her under the wheels of a fictional £3000 designer buggy and only bringing her out when she needs to get in 1000 words of chai-drinking, nanny-hiring, personal-trainer shagging, pretentious yummy mummy nonsense. I’m not proud.

  More recently, I’ve made a living ghost-writing fiction and non-fiction for people who are cashing in on their fifteen minutes of fame. I’ve done two novels by former contestants on Love Island, one for a dancer on Strictly Come Dancing (and he’s still proclaiming in interviews that he wrote it himself) and a couple of autobiographies for reality TV stars. I’m naturally nosy and happy to exist in the background, so it suits me fine.

  Lately, however, my own life has been as turbulent as the ones I write about. You see, it’s fairly safe to say that I’ve hit an all-time, and quite unexpected, low.

  A flashback to a day almost two decades ago ricochets into my head.

  It was one year into the new millennium. I was with my girlfriends, Sarah, Kate (Smith, not Winslet), Jess and Carol – the four women who have been my pals since primary school and, remarkably, we’d all reached a happy plateau in life. I was twenty-nine, at the end of my epic adventure, and I’d found the man of my dreams, the house of my dreams and I was pretty sure I was in for the life of my dreams.

  Actually, let me rewind a second, and take you back to my thoughts in that very moment, twenty years ago. Here’s the scene exactly as it played out:

  We’re now coming to the end of the year 2000, and I’ve been Mrs Barwick for six months. Mark always jokes about two things: one is that he’s spent his life saving my ass and the other is that he always had money in the bank until he met me. His wedding present to me was to pay off the credit-card bills I’d run up trekking the world to find my ex-boyfriends, much to the relief of the financial institutions involved. My present to him was to throw away three packets of contraceptive pills, two diaphragms and a family-size box of condoms (you can never be too careful) and start trying for his much-wanted brood. We decided to settle in London and he transferred to his company’s office here, so he’s now the hardest-working lawyer in London. I don’t want to be nauseatingly sentimental, but God, I love him. He’s everything. We fit perfectly and I still can’t believe that the right guy for me was there all along, and I didn’t see it.

  Our future kids will have two gorgeous cousins to play with as Carol and my brother, Callum, are expecting twins next month. Carol is delighted about it now, but it took her six months to get over the shock of losing her supermodel figure and her life on the catwalk. She’s covered up every mirror in the house. They can’t decide on names for the babies. We suggested ‘American’ and ‘Express’; at least then she’ll bond with them immediately.

  Sarah and Nick also got married this year. Sarah is still studying and hopes to be a qualified teacher by next summer. Nick treats her like a princess. They were made for each other.

  Our MENSA-member, Jess, is still working as a researcher in the House of Commons, however, she is now awash with passion for the very journalist who exposed her affair with a married MP to the nation. It brings a whole new meaning to having press contacts.

  And Kate? Well, Kate’s been fired from her job in a desperately trendy salon for threatening a diva client with a hot-brush. It’s probably for the best. Since Bruce won the award of ‘UK Architect of the Year’, she’s been frantically busy moving house, hiring nannies and cleaners, shopping and socialising. Now she’s the one having her hair done every week. We live next door to each other now so we see each other every day. Bruce and Mark joke that we should get a bridge built between the two houses to save us from getting wet when it rains. We took their idea literally – the builders are coming to give us a quote tomorrow.

  I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake by chasing my rainbow, but I know I didn’t. I’ve found everything I ever wanted. From now on, there’ll be no more ‘what ifs…?’ No more uncertainty. We’ve all got life sussed out.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t believe we all managed to settle down and sort out our lives,’ Kate says one Sunday morning as we sit around her kitchen table eating brunch. ‘Especially you, Cooper,’ she adds, to the amusement of the others.

  ‘I know. It’s miraculous,’ I tell her, breaking off a chunk of cinnamon bagel from the pile on the plate in front of me. ‘We’re like fully formed grown-ups.’

  ‘You know what I was thinking about the other day though?’ Carol asks, then waits for an answer, as if we could genuinely read her thoughts. Eventually she realises that no one is going to take a guess and she carries on. ‘What will we all be like when we’re fifty? Because you know what they say, with age comes maturity… And bunions, but we can get them lasered off.’

  There were amused groans all round.

  ‘I reckon we’ll be drama-free and enjoying quiet, peaceful lives,’ Jess offers.

  ‘Really?’ asks Sarah, one eyebrow raised in cynicism, and I catch her glancing at me.

  ‘I agree with Jess,’ I say indignantly. ‘Look, I’ve already had enough dramas and disasters to last a lifetime. There’s no way I’m messing up my life again.’

  The others nod in agreement and I sit back, satisfied, happy and positive that from now on I’m in for a smooth ride.

  But what if… what if I couldn’t be more wrong?

  Dear reader, wrong I certainly was.

  Twenty years later, I have two gorgeous teenage sons and although our friendship group has faced tragedy and heartache, the bonds are unbroken and the love has got us through some dark days. And that’s a good thing, because I’m fairly sure that I’ve just plummeted down a well of despair. You see, at this very moment I seem to have found myself unemployed, skint, single, I’ve been publicly shamed, faced national humiliation, my mother has denied knowing me, my kids may never forgive me and…

  ‘Your lawyer is here.’

  Did I mention I’m in a holding cell in a police station and in a whole heap of trouble?

  Well, hello, rock bottom. Let me take you back a few months and tell you how I got here.

  How it all started…

  1

  London, Sunday 31st March, 2019

  One – U2 and Mary J Blige

  Mother’s Day. My soon-to-be ex-husband really knew how to pick his moments. Almost eight months after our separation, it was the first time I’d woken on the annual celebration of motherhood without Mark lying next to me – a thought that was blasted out of my head by the sound of my teenagers banging open my bedroom door. There had been a split second of anxiety until I’d ascertained that it wasn’t a SWAT team breaking into the wrong house, and that it was in fact my sons, bearing a mug of tea and a bacon roll. I pushed myself up, ran my fingers through my short blonde hair, transforming it from ‘loo brush’ to the more subtle ‘Charlize Theron Fast & Furious 9’ bowl cut. Sadly, this is the only thing I have in common with the wealthy, slim, drop-dead gorgeous mega star.

  ‘Happy Mother’s Day, Ma,’ Mac cheered, as he dive-bombed the end of my bed, sending a card flying my way like a frisbee, while Benny put the breakfast treat on my bedside table, making sure the mug was positioned on a coaster. He’s thoughtful that way. In fact, that whole moment summed up their personalities. At sixteen, Mac is an adrenalin junkie, wild,
driven and prone to choose whatever is more fun in any given moment, regardless of whether it’s a good decision or not. I know – that apple fell right under my tree. My sweet, smart Benny, on the other hand, is almost fifteen on the outside, but about forty-two on the inside. He’s comfortable in his own skin, couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of him, and fills his low-key life just partaking of the things he loves: reading, movies, sport.

  When the boys were babies, my Auntie Val, gin drinker, Glasgow-dweller and wise oracle of all knowledge, gave me the best nugget of mothering advice I’ve ever received – keep them fed and exhausted. Taking that on board, I encouraged (some may say ‘pushed’, but I’m admitting nothing) them both to take up a sport and thankfully they each found their own thing. Mac’s life is basketball and Benny is our swimming champ. Traipsing to their daily and nightly training sessions takes up half my waking hours, but the payoff is that they don’t have time to loiter outside the local off-licence on a Saturday night, asking passing adults to buy them a bottle of Mad Dog and six cans of Dragon Soup. The endless sport and working out (definitely theirs, not mine) means I need a HAZMAT suit and a barge pole to tackle the laundry basket, but it’s a price worth paying.