Soap Star
Authors: Rowan Coleman
Rowan Coleman
For Lily
You can’t stop things changing, because other people – adults – think they always know what’s for the best. It’s like it’s sort of not officially your life until you’re grown up. As if the way you think and feel doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really mean
anything
: almost as if you don’t even really feel it. As if, because you are only thirteen, everything you think and feel is just in your imagination. I feel like I should have some say about what happens to
me
in
my
life, but I never do. My life just happens to me and other people make the decisions. The wrong decisions, mostly.
Just recently I’ve felt like I spend my life trying to keep things exactly the same as they’ve always been and it’s sort of felt like I’m running up a down escalator. Just when I feel like I’m getting somewhere, I lose my footing and off I go down and down until I find the energy to start going uphill all over again. Some of the things that have happened to me in my life have been amazing. Some of them have been the sort of things that other girls my age
lie in bed at night and dream about happening to them. But I bet none of them dream about what happened to me this morning. It’s like a fairy tale in reverse with the happy ending at the beginning.
This morning I found out that I am officially the frumpiest thirteen-year-old in the entire history of the whole world. You might say, like my mum does, that everyone feels that way sometimes. That it’s a phase and I’ll get over it and that one day I’ll turn into a swan and boys will follow me around begging
me
to look at
them.
But it doesn’t feel like a phase any more, it feels like the end of the world. The end of my world, at least.
If I was just Ruby Parker, girl, it wouldn’t matter so much. OK I’d be doomed to a life of never having a boyfriend, but I could work on being interesting and funny instead and maybe be “unusually attractive” like the heroines of my mum’s books that I’m secretly reading. Once I got past about, say, thirty-five I expect I wouldn’t even mind that much any more.
But I’m not Ruby Parker, girl.
I’m Ruby Parker, Soap Star. And, in my world, being an ugly dumpy thirteen-year-old means the end of that, and the end of going to my school, and maybe the end of everything else I’ve been trying to hold together too.
If you saw me, Ruby Parker, standing outside the classroom waiting to go in for double maths on the first day of last term, you’d have said I’m a pretty ordinary girl. Not the sort of girl who’d be singled out for any special sort of attention, good or bad. Sort of medium height, sort of medium build (apart from the obvious, but more about those later), sort of medium hair: hair that had been shiny and blonde when I was little, but has gradually got browner and darker and danker and lanker. Average skin – you’d say not too many spots – quite a nice nose and not a bad profile.
You’d notice that most of the other girls in my class really don’t bother talking to me, although they frequently talk
about
me: usually in stage whispers behind my back to make sure I can hear everything they’re saying. And you’d notice that while I just hang about in the corridor waiting for Miss Greenstreet to arrive, some of the other girls are practising their ballet positions against the wall, and Menakshi Shah is reciting Juliet’s balcony speech from
Romeo and Juliet,
flicking her hair all around as she does it and trying to catch Michael Henderson’s eye. (Not that he’d look at her in six million years because everyone knows that he and Anne-Marie Chance will
never
spilt up
and will be together for EVER and end up presenting a daytime chat show like
Richard and Judy.
)
Anyway, you’d have noticed that none of the boys talk to me either, although they sometimes creep up behind me and twang my bra strap and say things like, “Oi, Ruby, have you seen my football? Me and Mac have lost our footballs and…oh look they’re down your top! Give us ‘em back!” And they pretend to lunge at me and try and grab my boobs, then I scream and hit them over the heads with my folder and my best friend Nydia Assimin charges at them, which usually sends them packing, but shouting really nasty stuff like, “Watch out, it’s a herd of elephants!”
You’d also notice that almost all the boys are pretty well turned out for thirteen-year-olds. None of them smell and most of them wash their hair more than twice a week. Some, like Danny Harvey (who always smells of apples), wash it every day. And you’d notice that they’re all what my mum calls “natural extroverts”. You might think that all boys are always shouting and mucking about, but the boys at my school do it with excellent projection and perfect enunciation.
That’s because I go to a stage school. I go to Silvia Lighthouse’s Academy for the Performing Arts. Every single one of the kids who was standing outside my classroom waiting to go in for maths on the last day of
term wants to be an actor, a singer or a TV presenter. Or all three usually.
We have all our normal lessons in the morning, and then after lunch we have dance, acting and music until four, which might sound like a laugh – and it is – but it’s hard too. Especially when your speech and drama coach is a raving lunatic, hung up about the fact that she never made it big and ended up teaching a load of snotty stuck-up posh kids instead (except for me and Nydia) which might be why she hates me more than anyone else on account of the fact that I’m on telly. But even though I don’t have that many friends, at least I have Nydia. And although sometimes it feels like I’m always working and never have time to just relax, I love the school.
School is the only place where I feel like I am actually me. The person I feel like inside and not the person everyone else sees, I mean. When I’m dancing or acting or singing it doesn’t matter that I’m not popular or very thin or don’t have a boyfriend. And although the teachers make you work twice as hard as other school kids and remind you that not everyone will make it, they do believe that sometimes dreams do come true. I don’t know many adults who do that.
I’ve been going to the academy since I was eight, but it was only when Nydia arrived on a scholarship last
year that I made a real friend for the first time, because Nydia and I come from the same sort of background, the same sort of terraced house and normal mum and dad’s life. Everyone else here is super rich with parents that frequently feature in
Hello!.
Nydia and I are only at the academy because she got the scholarship and I got famous by mistake, which pays fairly well as it turns out. Not that I see a penny. I have a trust fund where most of my money goes to keep it safe until I’m twenty-one. Twenty-one! That’s practically my whole life so far again before I get to see any of it! And despite the fact that I think I have quite a lot of money we have a very normal life. Mum says it’s important that I keep my feet on the ground so I don’t get into drugs and alcohol like some child stars. So I still have to ask her for stuff and she mostly still says no.
Nydia is quite an unusual girl. She’s got the loudest voice in our year and the loudest laugh you’ve ever heard, which she says is because she always has to shout to get heard over her four brothers, but I think she’s just got inbuilt “theatrical projection”. Nydia’s family originally came from Nigeria, but Nydia was born in the same hospital as me, only two months later than I was. I was on the fifteenth and she was on the eighteenth. So like we say, apart from the fact she’s black
and I’m white, and the fact that we have different parents and everything, we could practically be twins. It feels like we are twins sometimes, because sometimes we just start thinking the same thing at the same time, like a joke or something, and we start laughing for no reason. Then everyone looks at us, but
we
both know why we’re laughing and it makes us laugh even more. It makes me feel safe and sort of warm inside to have a friend like Nydia. While everything keeps changing, Nydia and me will always be the same, because we’re like twins.
Nydia’s mum and dad aren’t rich like most of the parents of the kids that go to this school. She won her place, beating over four thousand other applicants through the Sylvia Lighthouse scholarship programme, which makes her better than probably anyone else in our year. But that doesn’t stop the other girls picking on her, calling her fat and stupid. Anne-Marie even said no wonder so many people are starving in Africa, because obviously Nydia ate all the food; but she said that in front of Miss Greenstreet and then we got lectured for over an hour about the Third World debt, so she hasn’t made
that
crack twice. And she’s a moron anyway, because Nydia grew up in Hackney just like I did and has never even been to Africa. But that’s Anne-Marie for you: the brains of a pile of damp pants.
And besides, Nydia is a very good actress, better than any of them. She wants to be a character actress, which Anne-Marie says means an ugly, fat actress, but if you ask me it’s better than being a character
less
actress like Anne-Marie, because she looks just the same as everyone else: tall, thin and blonde, which means she’s bound to get a part on
Hollyoaks.
(When the current cast get too old and ugly and get sacked.) But at least they
will
be old, like twenty-five or something. Not only thirteen, like me.
The thing that happened to me that other girls just dream about? I got famous. Not just a little bit famous like Anne-Marie, whose dad is a film producer and who was once in the EuroDisney advert on TV.
Not just famous because my dad used to be a rock star and my mum was an ex-supermodel, like Jade Caruso’s parents.
Not famous for modelling in the Kay’s Autumn/Winter catalogue like Danny Harvey. (Who looked nice, by the way, even if he didn’t exactly smile. According to Menakshi – who obviously fancies him, as she fancies more or less ALL boys – he thinks he’s too good for everyone else at the academy, even the popular kids. She’s probably right. He used to be quite a laugh, then about a year ago he seemed to change over night.)
Anyway, I am famous in my own right. I’m famous
because every year since I was six I’ve appeared in Britain’s most popular serialised soap
Kensington Heights.
Unless you come from outer space or something you’ll have heard of it. It’s set in the cut-and-thrust world of an auction house and it’s all about very rich, glamorous people buying antiques (and having sex with each other’s husbands, usually). Every year from mid-August to February,
Kensington Heights
runs once a week at eight o’clock on Wednesdays and I’m in nearly every episode, playing Angel MacFarley.
That’s how I got to be famous and not just in Britain, either. I’m famous in eastern Europe, Pakistan and Japan, and even a bit famous in America. I don’t know this for sure, but
Kensington Heights
runs on the BBC America channel and I read in
Heat
magazine the week before last that Brad Pitt watches it and is a big fan! Imagine that! Brad Pitt has seen
me
on TV! Which is why it’s a shame that Angel MacFarley is about as glamorous as Tesco’s-own trainers. But it’s only to be expected because, of course,
I’m
not even slightly glamorous. Even last year when I went to the British Soap Awards all the other girls from the show wore backless and strapless dresses and glitter and heels. I had on my black trouser suit and a blue velvet top and no real make-up, just foundation and lip gloss. Mum said
I had to look my age. I said, “I don’t want to look my age, I hate my age!” And she said that the only way to get round that was to grow up, which I clearly wasn’t ready to do if I was going to make a fuss about it. Like I said, she’s pretty keen on me being normal – even when being normal makes me look stupid.
Everyone else in the soap is super gorgeous, of course, except my family, the MacFarleys, because we’re what the producers call “social realism”, although Angel’s mum, played by former model Brett Summers, is still pretty attractive – even in an M&S top. And anyhow, I don’t know that it was very realistic when it turned out that Angel’s dad had a long-lost identical twin brother who came back whilst he was away nursing his sick mother and tried to trick Angel’s mum into going to bed with him when normally she’d never cheat, because we are the only family in the soap that doesn’t do stuff like that.
In the end Angel found out about him and stopped it just in time. I got a lot of letters after that episode. You’d be amazed how many kids actually do find out that one of their parents is cheating on the other one (although only two letters concerned actual identical twins). And they get all stressed and upset and don’t know if they should say anything and it’s all horrible. I don’t know why they write to me as if I actually know anything
about
anything
in real life, but I always write back and put in some leaflets and the number for ChildLine and suggest they talk to a teacher if they are worried. The other teenagers on the show get letters from people telling them how much they love them, especially Justin de Souza (who I’m madly in love with, by the way). All I get is people’s problems and that practically says it all, to be honest.
Mum says it’s because I’m famous that the other girls at school aren’t that nice to me. She says it’s because every summer break when I go off to film the next series of
Kensington Heights
they wish it was them instead. And I say, why would a load of thin, pretty girls, who actually get a holiday all summer long, be jealous of me stuck at the BBC studios filming
Kensington Heights
? And she rolls her eyes and tells me I don’t know how lucky I am. I suppose she’s right, because most of the letters I get from other girls tell me more or less the same thing, even if sometimes they don’t realise that Ruby Parker and Angel MacFarley are two different people.
The thing is, you don’t know how lucky you really are until it looks like everything is going to be taken away. I thought it was all right that I was just normal-looking, because my character was normal-looking.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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