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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 2008
Copyright © Shari Low 2008
Shari Low asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781847560124
Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007334964
Version: 2018-06-19
MY BEST FRIEND’S LIFE
by
Shari Low
To Rosina Hill, for your support, your courage
and your huge big heart…
To John, just everything, always…
And to my gorgeous, incredible boys, Callan
and Brad…Now go tidy your rooms.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One - Tom, Harry, Forget about Dick
Chapter Two - I Feel the Earth Move
Chapter Three - Don’t Go Changing
Chapter Four
Chapter Five - We Are Family
Chapter Six - The Love Shack
Chapter Seven - Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?
Chapter Eight - These Boots are Made for Walking
Chapter Nine - Doctor Feelgood
Chapter Ten - Many Rivers to Cross
Chapter Eleven - Blowing in the Wind
Chapter Twelve - Man, I Feel Like a Woman
Chapter Thirteen - Have I Told You Lately?
Chapter Fourteen - Do That to Me One More Time
Chapter Fifteen - Stop, in the Name of Love
Chapter Sixteen - Easy
Chapter Seventeen - Baby Love
Chapter Eighteen - I Got You, Babe
Chapter Nineteen - If You Leave Me Now
Chapter Twenty - Unbreak My Heart
Chapter Twenty One - Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Daily Globe 22 June 2006
The Prime Minister announced today that, in line with European legislation, the government has decided to ease restrictions currently placed on the operation of brothels within the UK.
In this controversial move, it is proposed that from 1 July this year, local authorities will have the power to license and oversee premises engaged in the business of providing sex for payment.
Announcing the new regulations, the Prime Minister released the following statement:
‘It has been clear for some time that current legislation pertaining to the adult entertainment industry is neither realistic nor effective. In recent years we have seen dramatic increases both in the number of arrests for prostitution and in the influx of sex trade workers from other EU countries. This government has concluded that the only progressive, sensible way forward is to legitimise this industry, therefore allowing it to be controlled and regulated.
I’d like to give my firm commitment that I–assisted by a focus group comprised of six cross-party MPs to be called the Adult Entertainment Regulatory Commission–will personally monitor the success of the new guidelines and be fully involved in the forthcoming months in the evolution of progressive policies to further develop this sector.’
The Prime Minister refused to confirm, however, that applications to join the Regulatory Commission reached an unprecedented level, with 91 per cent of government members requesting a position.
ONE Tom, Harry, Forget about Dick
Ginny’s bedroom, the village of Farnham Hills, near Chipping Sodbury, Autumn 2007
‘So you mean, like, a penis embargo?’
‘Correct,’ replied Roxy. ‘I’m going to be an official willy-free zone. I’m on a twelve-step male-genital detox programme: Step number one, boyfriend is history. Step number two, I quit my job. Step number three, I recruit my best friend to help me get a new job. Er, Ginny, honey, that’s you.’
There was a pause so pregnant it could have applied to Social Services for free milk vouchers and child benefit.
Roxy waited for a reaction. None. Nada. Okay, so this wasn’t going to plan. Normally she could rely on Ginny to react in exactly the way she’d been reacting to everything Roxy said since they were sitting side by side in the playpen.
Act one: Rolling of eyes.
Act two: Loud tutting noise.
Act three: Adopts the approximate expression of someone who has just discovered that she is chewing a wasp.
Act four: Capitulates, offers sympathy, then digs friend out of big hole.
But no. Ginny was staring mournfully into space, as if she’d slipped into one of those cosmic, out-of-body trances that pass the time while you’re waiting in the bank queue or having a smear test.
‘Ginny?’ she probed, attempting to snap her friend’s focus back to the most important thing in life–herself.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear me? I need help! Ginny, I’m single, I’m unemployed, I’m devastated…I’m desperate!’
From her cramp-inducing position on a tatty beanbag (circa 1990), Ginny looked over at her clapped-out single bed and the female reclining on it–probably the least desperate-looking woman she had ever set eyes on. Roxy’s jet-black hair hung in sleek, shiny slates from her middle parting to her shoulder bones. Her perfect, size twelve, über-toned frame was adorned in her standard uniform of black Prada boot-cut trousers, a black Nicole Farhi cashmere roll-neck and lethal four-inch stiletto Gina boots. Skin: flawless. Nails: perfectly plastic. Make-up: subtle. Breasts: pert. And Ginny just knew without looking that there were no hairs on Roxy’s legs, no hard skin on her feet, and her nethers had applied for permanent residence in Brazil.
There was no doubt about it: Roxy Galloway was channelling Angelina Jolie.
Ginny Wallis, meanwhile, was channelling the bag lady who sat outside Superdrug on an inner tube flogging jewellery she’d made out of string and discarded scratchcards.
She sighed wearily, so immune to Roxy’s perpetual melodramas that she’d slipped into a moment of reflection instead of enthusiastically participating in the panic. The contrast of her glam, glitzy, cutting-edge friend with the greyness of Ginny’s life somehow highlighted the fact that Ginny was twenty-seven and still living at home in a bedroom that hadn’t changed since the Nineties. The duvet was a tribute to the golden days when boy bands ruled the world. If the carpet ever revisited its former life it would have been baby pink and orange–now, ten years of spills and wear later, it was a delicate shade of road-kill. Even woodworm would shun the furniture. And the curtains were obviously designed by someone on LSD, bought by someone on crack and then hung by someone on two bottles of cider and a Lambert & Butler that Roxy had stolen from her mother’s handbag.
And they had paid for that wild, drunken, smoky, teenage night of fabric-hanging by being grounded for a month and having their Christmas Top Shop vouchers confiscated.
Urgh, it was depressing. Ginny pulled a bit of fluff off her hoodie, and pushed her riot of mousey-brown frizz back off her forehead.
‘Roxy, when did I become so old that I thought jogging bottoms and sweatshirts were acceptable as everyday outerwear?’
‘Honey, until four o’clock this afternoon when I resigned from my erstwhile employment, I worked with people who thought a crotch-baring French maid’s costume, nipple rings and five-inch Perspex platforms were acceptable everyday outerwear.’ Roxy’s bottom lip trembled. ‘Oh, I miss them,’ she wailed. ‘Have I made a mistake? I mean, it was a prestigious career in the hospitality industry…’
‘Roxy, you worked in a whorehouse,’ Ginny interjected, with a tut and a roll of the eyes.
Phew. Normal service was almost resumed. All they needed was the wasp-chewing face and they were back on track to Moral Support Central.
‘A classy, cosmopolitan, extremely upmarket entertainment club, if you don’t mind.’
Actually Ginny did mind. It wasn’t that she was a prude, it’s just that, well, she’d never understood Roxy’s career choice. Receptionist at the Seismic Lounge: guaranteed to make the earth move. Yep, whatever marketing genius had thought up that slogan was probably now enjoying a fulfilling career flipping burgers. Or making scratchcard jewellery next to the bag lady outside Superdrug.
Roxy had been ecstatic when she got the job. The club had opened the day after the government legalised brothels–definitely some insider information at work there–and it was on one of the most exclusive streets in Mayfair. Four hours of copulation cost the same as a second-hand Corsa, most of the girls spoke with accents that could crack windows, and the sex toys came gold-plated. It oozed class and made no apologies for targeting only the extremely wealthy. It even employed chauffeurs to collect the clients in blacked-out Range Rovers and bring them in through a private underground car park so that the paparazzi never got a recognisable shot. Actually, that wasn’t true–Stephen Knight, notorious B-list movie star, usually arrived in his open-top Aston Martin DB7 and parked it right outside the door. He was obviously channelling Charlie Sheen.
To Roxy, it was all so decadently glamorous. Short of becoming a fake-tan consultant or adopting a serial football-player-shagging habit, it seemed like the easiest way to hobnob with the rich and/or famous on a daily basis.
Glitz, high rollers, decadence and dosh–it was the life she’d always dreamt of (although, to be honest, she hadn’t exactly foreseen that the high life would carry a faint whiff of antibacterial cleaning spray and that she’d witness all the activity from behind a desk).
Roxy had always thought it was an aberration that she’d been born in Farnham Hills. She’d decided at an early age that the stork had obviously been on its way to a four-storey, three-million-pound townhouse in Belgravia when it was cruelly struck down by a shot from an armed robber’s rifle (yes, she had a very vivid imagination, even as a child) and forced to drop its precious bundle in an environment in which she clearly didn’t belong. When her classmates were splashing their pocket money on Just Seventeen, she was buying Vogue. When, at sixteen, they were fantasising about a fortnight in Faliraki, she was dreaming of a weekend in St Tropez. And when they were imagining their future husbands, children, and three-bedroom semis on the new housing estate on the edge of the village, she was imagining tunnelling to freedom and spending the rest of her life shagging an obscenely rich bloke, surrounded by walnut panelling in the master suite of his custom-built yacht.
And okay, so she wasn’t quite there yet, but when she was offered the job at the Seismic she instinctively knew that she had opened the door to the world she belonged in.
And the bonus was that, as receptionist, she only had to meet, greet and keep the customer records up to date. The money was great, the tips were outstanding and, unlike the rest of the girls, her pay packet didn’t come at the expense of cystitis.
She loved it–at least to start with. But over the last couple of months it had all seemed a little too repetitive. The same faces week after week, the endless stream of girls (who invariably quit once they’d earned enough to buy a flat, finished university or received an irresistible offer of marriage from a blue-blooded, upper-class, Eton-educated arms dealer), and the rising scepticism after yet another client did an ‘At Home with the Happy Family’ spread in Hello!. Roxy had to admit it–the job was wearing down her trust in men and turning the loving act of sex into a business transaction. Did you enjoy your ejaculation, sir? Oh, lovely–now would that be Visa, MasterCard or American Express?
She just wanted to be like normal people (porn stars and penile-implant specialists aside) and experience a daily life that wasn’t controlled or influenced by actions of the male reproductive organ.
She could probably have struggled on for another couple of months, but the latest devastation in her love life had tipped her over the edge. She winced. She still couldn’t believe that after two years of devotion Felix was history. Gone. Past tense.
But after spending three days submerged in hysterical mourning she had decided that no man was worth a forty-five per cent increase in wrinkles caused by perpetual sobbing–even if he was the first and–penis-embargo withstanding–last love of her life.
She would never, ever mention his name again.
Ever.
Except in a blatant ploy to get help and sympathy from a bored, indifferent best friend…
‘God, Ginny, you’re so self-absorbed. Since Felix betrayed me I’m experiencing such an overwhelming trauma that I’ve put off having my roots done, I can’t face going out and I’m so bitter that my karma has gone all to fuck. I mean, how would you feel if you were not only unemployed, but you’d caught the love of your life shagging the local florist?’ she wailed. ‘And he didn’t even have the decency to send me a bunch of bloody flowers.’
Ginny nodded in what she hoped vaguely resembled a sympathetic expression. It lasted about three seconds before the truth made a break for freedom.
‘He was a twat anyway.’
‘He was not!’ Roxie protested.
‘Was.’
‘Was not.’
Ginny sighed. ‘You do realise that we’re twenty-seven? Apparently we should have given up on childish, petty, pantomime dialogue somewhere around puberty. Remind me again why we’re friends?’
She had a point. Almost thirty years of friendship, based on having absolutely nothing in common other than the fact that they were born on the same day and their mothers were distantly related. Speaking of which…
‘Hellooooooooooo, girlies.’ The sing-song shriek came from downstairs and was accompanied by a slamming door and the smell of chow mein.
Said girlies groaned. ‘How can you be related to someone who sounds like that? You know, you really have to move out of your mother’s house, Gin–it’s obscene that you still live here at your age.’
‘And is my favourite girlie still up there too?’ screeched another voice, which to the untrained ear sounded very like the first one.
Roxy sighed. ‘And how can I be related to someone who sounds like that?’
Then, louder, ‘Yes, Mum, I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘I’ve got your favourite here, sweetie–prawn crackers and crispy chicken. We thought we’d all have dinner together.’
‘Gin, do you think our mothers are having a lesbian affair? I haven’t seen them apart since about 1974. Urgh, mental image, my mother muff-diving…don’t think I can face those prawn crackers now. And I’m not buying that my mother moved in here just for the companionship.’
Gin giggled. ‘You have a sex-obsessed, twisted mind. They’re not lovers, they’re cousins.’
‘About third cousins, four times removed. I’ve met people in public toilets who are closer relations than that. But think about it. Since your dad popped his clogs and my dad popped Mrs Fleming from the fish shop, they’ve been joined at the hip. Urgh, another mental thought that I could live without.’
‘They’re cousins!’ shrieked Ginny, smacking Roxy with a threadbare, heart-shaped pink pillow, and still her perfect hair didn’t move an inch out of place.
‘There should be a law against parents having sex. Come on then, let’s go join them. But when we’re finished you have to help me update my CV and find a new job, Gin–you know I’m hopeless at that kind of stuff.’
‘And what am I, a careers officer?’ Ginny replied indignantly.
‘You work in a library! There are loads of job information advice thingies in there.’
‘There are also several editions of the Kama Sutra and a whole bloody shelf on the menopause, but I know sod all about those either.’
Objection overruled.
‘Come on, hon, please. I really need you to help me decide what I’m going to do. Maybe I should take a year out and travel a bit. Or go back to university. I only had one year left to do, before…well…before…’
‘Before you got caught giving the philosophy professor a blow job. Under a podium. During a lecture.’
‘Girlies!!!’ came another shriek from downstairs.
Ginny groaned. ‘You know, Rox, you’re right–I have to move out of here. I need to stop wearing clothes with “sweat” in the title, and I need to shred the apron strings.’
Suddenly, a rousing chorus of ‘Hey Big Spender’ filled the room.
‘Rox, either your arse is singing or that’s the naffest ringtone I’ve ever heard.’
Roxy ignored her and checked the screen.
‘Shit. Shit. Bloody shit. It’s Sam at the Seismic.’
‘What did he say when you resigned?’
‘Actually I just left a note. Couldn’t face them.’
To Ginny, this didn’t exactly come as a newsflash. It was vintage Roxy. Roxy, who couldn’t face up to life’s un-pleasantries if her Miu Miu mules depended on it. It had been the same their whole lives. Roxy couldn’t tell a boy she didn’t like him any more so she sent Ginny. Roxy never did her homework, she just copied Ginny’s. Roxy didn’t want to tell her mother she was leaving home, so she did a midnight flit. Ginny carried the bags. Crazy, impetuous, dramatic, spontaneous, endlessly fucking irritating Roxy.
But then…
Wasn’t that the same Roxy who had poured a can of Vimto down the front of Kevin Smith trousers in primary school because he’d put chewing gum in Ginny’s hair? The poor guy was probably still in therapy trying to eradicate the nightmare of spending the next ten years with the nickname Pisspants.
And wasn’t that the same Roxy who’d bought Ginny her very first box of tampons? Actually, she’d stolen them from a fifth-year prefect’s gym bag, but the thought was still there.
And that was definitely the same Roxy who had invented the care package that got Ginny through every teenage moment of doubt, insecurity or low self-esteem: two Mars Bars, a packet of Silk Cut, a bottle of Diamond White and the Dirty Dancing video.
Ginny’s face reverted to pensive-slash-wasp-chewing as she grudgingly conceded that, despite all Roxy’s faults, she was more than a friend and general irritation: she was the closest thing Ginny had ever had to a sister. One who was insanely annoying, spoilt, demanding, high maintenance, yet still managed to make Ginny laugh more than anyone else on earth. And, if she was totally honest, sometimes she admired Roxy’s spirit. At least Roxy had taken chances in life, she’d broken the mould and experienced a bit of excitement and danger–although that police caution for flashing her baps at a bus full of American tourists travelling down Farnham Hills High Street had been a jolly jape too far.
Nope, at least Roxy would never be boring, Ginny conceded dolefully.
Unlike her chum, no one would ever call Ginny spontaneous. Her life’s CV could fill one paragraph: Same job since she left school almost a decade earlier, same boyfriend for twelve years, still lives in the same village she’s lived in all her life, with her mother, in a bedroom that she hasn’t decorated since before the millennium. Ginny was so ponderous that she took two weeks to decide to order something out of a catalogue, and that was with the safety net of a money-back guarantee.
Boring? Check. Restrained? Check. Dead? It was pretty close…
Ginny pulled at a thread at the bottom of her sleeve and half the cuff unravelled. Fabulous. She hastily shoved the sleeve halfway up her arm to conceal the demise of a sweatshirt that had given her years of loyal service.
She glanced at Roxy and guessed that Roxy probably didn’t have a single thing in her wardrobe that was more than six months old. Urgh, sometimes Ginny really felt like the bland, wardrobe-challenged poor relation. But then, this was the life she’d chosen. This is what made her happy. Content. Satisfied with her lot. Condemned to a lifetime of mediocrity. Ouch, where had that come from?
It was just that sometimes…Well, just sometimes she’d like to know what it felt like to get dressed up to the nines in designer togs, in a bra and pants that weren’t matching shades of grey, in shoes that didn’t lace up and come in three different shades of boring, and spend just one day where she couldn’t predict–down to the last second–everything that would happen.
She shrugged off her melancholy. It didn’t matter if she had the odd moment of regret–she’d already chosen her path, and her ship hadn’t so much sailed as sprung a leak, capsized, and plummeted to the bottom of the local pond. And anyway, who was to say that any other life would make her happier than the one she had here with her mother, long-standing boyfriend and steady job, in the village she’d always lived in, with the same people she’d been seeing every single day of her life? This was it. And it was as good as it was going to get. Wasn’t it?
Over on the bed, Roxy was blustering into the phone. ‘But I don’t know anyone who can cover it! Okay. Okay. I understand. Okay. I’ll get back to you. Sorry, Sam.’
She snapped the phone shut.
‘Fuck.’
Ginny climbed out of the pond and rejoined the drama. ‘Problem?’
‘He says I can’t just walk out–something about a one-month notice period, blah, blah, blah. He sounds really pissed off. Apparently Sascha has gone off with herpes and Tilly has been barricaded in a hotel by the News of the World because she’s doing a kiss-and-tell on some MP this week, so they’ve got no one to cover for me. He says I’ll lose my holiday pay and my salary and, oh, I don’t know, a bloody kidney if I’m not at the desk tomorrow. So much for turning over a new leaf.’
Roxy looked at her watch. ‘The new, penis-avoiding me lasted for a whole eight hours…’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘…and now Felix will know where to find me and he’ll come begging me to take him back.’