Star Struck (20 page)

Catherine looked up, blushing when she saw her sisters. ‘Hi!’

‘How did you do?’ Jo asked, crossing every digit she had.

‘I got through to the next round. I’m going to London. I’m in Richard’s group.’

Jo heard Claire and Maria gasp and then all three sisters ran forward and hugged Catherine tightly, jumping around squealing.

Claire was so excited that she did something so out of character it made Jo burst out laughing. She grabbed Richard Forster by the head, kissed him on the forehead and said, ‘You beauty.’

Richard was clearly taken aback but laughed and struck up a conversation with Claire and a very star-struck Maria.

‘I know, I can’t believe it,’ Catherine said excitedly to Jo. And then quietly added, ‘But what about Dad?’

Jo looked around. She knew she was probably going to
dampen
the mood slightly, but she wanted to reassure her sister. ‘It’s OK, Catherine, you’re fine to go. We’ll sort Dad out. I’ve told them.’

‘You’ve told them?’ Catherine asked, shocked.

‘I had to, Catherine, what were we going to do?’ Jo asked, as Catherine marched past her and out of the room.

‘You promised,’ she shouted at Jo.

‘Catherine, come back!’ Jo followed her sister, kicking herself for telling Catherine now that her sisters knew about Dad. She could at least have waited until they were in the car. Given Catherine a few minutes to savour her success. Jo couldn’t believe that she had managed to spoil the one time in Catherine’s life when she had achieved something special by bringing her down to earth with a big fat bang.

Chapter 8

THE FOUR-BEDROOM SEMI
where Catherine had grown up seemed smaller somehow on her return. The through lounge and dining room seemed even more cluttered with Mick’s knick-knacks than usual. Catherine usually kept a daily vigil over what her father acquired and what he kept. Jo said that Mick would end up on
A Life of Grime
– a documentary about environmental health inspectors – if he wasn’t careful. He seemed to think he was going to become an eBay millionaire, but was hampered by the fact that he couldn’t bear to let anything go. There were old football programmes that had been brought up from the cellar, a motorbike engine that was half polished, half dripping in grease next to the TV and a taxidermy squirrel that looked rather startled by the whole experience. The home felt small, especially now that Maria was back. Catherine often wondered how they’d all managed to fit in the house, growing up. The one good thing about the Reilly residence was that Mick had bought it for less than a thousand pounds years ago and the mortgage had been paid off well before Karen left. Mick had given his wife some form of severance money when she left and she wasn’t entitled to anything else. So at least they had a secure home throughout Mick’s years of unemployment.

Catherine was lying in bed, looking at her ceiling. The excitement of the afternoon had all but faded. She couldn’t
believe
that Jo had told Maria and Claire about dad. She had been so angry with Jo on the way home, but it was hard to keep up that level of anger when everyone around her was a) concerned for their father and b) about to burst with excitement because their sister was going to spend the weekend with Richard Forster.

When she had arrived home Mick had come to the door. Catherine didn’t know if she could tell him. Being excited about being through to the next stage of the competition felt totally inappropriate.

‘She’s through!’ Claire had said excitedly, doing her best impression of someone who didn’t know her dad had cancer.

‘Good lass,’ Mick said and nodded sadly as if he’d already lost Catherine.

Later, when she managed to get him on his own, she said, ‘I don’t have to go, Dad.’

‘I can’t hold you back,’ Mick had said ambiguously. She didn’t know if he meant he didn’t want to hold her back or he had no choice, she would go anyway.

Claire and Maria had behaved so oddly – Claire made her dad some toast and Maria changed the channel for him – that Catherine had to ask Claire to go home and Maria to go out before Mick cottoned on to the fact that they all knew.

Catherine looked up at the ceiling and at the comforting little cobweb that had hung in the corner since she was a little girl, since before their mum had left home. Catherine never removed it because she liked it being there. It made her feel safe – stupid really – that her one constant in life was a cobweb in the corner of her room.
She
had stared at that cobweb on Christmas eves as a child, waiting excitedly for the hours to tick by and to be allowed downstairs to see if Santa had been. She had stared at it the night before her GCSE exams, going over everything she could remember about
Twelfth Night
and Boyle’s Law and The Potsdam Conference. She had stared at it the night that she had been unceremoniously chucked by Darren Gleeson. And she had stared at it the night that her mum left home to live with Jay in Chorlton, listening to her dad crying downstairs as he sank a bottle of whisky and listened to ‘You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille’ over and over. Now she was lying staring at the cobweb and thinking that if she went ahead with taking her place in the
Star Maker
competition and her father became seriously ill, she would never forgive herself. It was her that he depended on, not the others. He trusted her. She knew where everything was that he needed. Jo would forget to give him his tablets and Maria would lose her patience with him and Claire would go home when he got too cantankerous for her, which was a given as he couldn’t go ten minutes without a bout of cantankerousness. She really didn’t know what to do.

‘Hello.’ Jo pushed the door open.

‘Hi.’

‘Would you like me to feed you some grapes? Or get you a big feather fan?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Come on … you’re nearly famous. You need to start with some diva demands or you’ll never get into Boujis.’

‘What’s Boujis?’

‘A nightclub that Prince Harry’s always falling out of
in
London – you probably get dragged there with Richard. Note I’m calling him “Richard” now, because he’s my mate.’ Jo looked around the room as if she was searching for something to comment on. ‘Right,’ she said finally, ‘I’m a nob, I know that, but I think that this isn’t something that can be kept secret.’

Catherine wanted to be angry with Jo, to tell her that she had no right telling their sisters without consulting her first, but Jo was right. It wasn’t something that should be kept secret. At least not between them. Whether they told their dad today that they all knew was an entirely different matter. Catherine didn’t think it would do him any good to know that everyone knew. But she had a feeling that things were now out of her hands.

‘I know.’ Catherine nodded.

‘You can’t wrap him in cotton wool. You know what he’s like, he’d be making you feel bad about something anyway. At least he’s got something proper.’

‘Jo!’ Catherine said, sitting up angrily, ‘What a thing to say.’

‘Look, I’m not being tight, I’m just saying that sometimes people come through in the face of absurdity.’

‘Adversity.’

‘What did I say?’

‘Absur— it doesn’t matter, go on.’

‘You know, you hear these stories of people who are just normal and then all of a sudden they find this hidden strength, you know, picking cars off kids that have been crushed, that sort of thing.’

‘Yeah, but Dad’s not normal. He’s not been well for years.’

‘No, he’s not been well according to him. It’s all in his head. Now with the …’ Jo swallowed hard, ‘… cancer, he has something real to fight.’

‘I don’t know, Jo. I just think he’s going to pieces.’

‘Well, all the more reason to confront him about it. Tell him we’ll help him.’

‘He wants me, though.’

‘What for? Balloon rides over the Serengeti?’

‘He said something about going on the big wheel in town.’

‘That’s what I like about Dad, sets his sights high.’

‘If something happens to him I’ll never forgive myself.’

Jo stood up and took Catherine’s Calvin Klein perfume and sprayed it up her jumper. ‘What does that mean? You are going to London next week if I have to take you myself.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I do. This bullshit stops now.’

‘Why? What are you doing?’

Jo walked towards the door. ‘Never mind what I’m doing. Get your beauty sleep. You’re going to be on the telly.’

‘Jo?’ Jo turned around and looked at Catherine. ‘Put the perfume back, it cost me twenty quid.’

Jo was always rooting around, seeing if there was anything worth pinching.

She laughed, knowing she’d been caught red-handed. ‘Damn. So near, yet so far.’

Catherine smiled at her sister. You had to love her for trying. Her phone began to ring. Catherine looked at the number, didn’t recognise it and didn’t know who would want to call her at eleven in the evening anyway. She
looked
at it for a moment, thinking that she should let it go through to voicemail, but curiosity got the better of her. ‘Hello?’

‘Catherine Reilly?’ a woman asked. Catherine didn’t recognise the voice.

‘Yes.’

‘How does it feel to be going to London?’

‘Who is this?’

‘It must be a thrill to be in Richard Forster’s group.’

Catherine had been warned by the producers that they would start to receive calls from the press. That they would call anyone who had got through to Boot Camp and pretend that they knew that they were through whether they were or weren’t. They would then cobble together a story based on the disparate facts they were given.

‘Who is this?’

‘The other girls in your group are really excited about going.’

Catherine wanted to put the phone down, but she was too polite. She was like this at work in the call centre, someone could be screaming blue murder at her and she’d still be nice to them. If Jo had taken this call she would pretend to be a phone sex line until the person on the other end got bored or offended or enjoyed it so much they had to go anyway.

‘I’m very sorry, but I’m going to put the phone down now. Thank you for calling.’

Catherine pressed the cancel button on her phone tentatively, as if a bomb would be detonated as soon as she touched it. Once the call was cancelled she put the phone under her pillow. It rang again immediately.
Catherine
tried to ignore it. It rang again. When the phone rang for the tenth time she switched it off and threw it across the room. She put her head on her pillow, but it would be another three hours before she finally fell asleep.

Jo was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen flanked by Maria and Claire when Catherine appeared at the door.

‘What are you lot doing?’ Catherine asked, rubbing her eyes.

Jo took a deep breath and scrunched her eyes shut and gabbled an explanation. She didn’t want Catherine to be angry with her, but after last night, when her sister seemed to be wavering about whether to go to London, Jo thought that she needed to take drastic action. ‘We need to tell Dad. We’re all agreed. We’re going to confront him.’

‘Tell him that we know and that we need a plan of action to help him. There’s no point in us all sneaking around pretending that nothing’s going on and we’re all hunky dory,’ Claire said.

‘What do you mean, tell him?’ Catherine looked at her three sisters, sitting in a row as if they were there to interview her.

‘Tell him. Just tell him,’ Maria said, as if Catherine was stupid and she was the brains behind all of this.

‘Like on
Dog the Bounty Hunter
,’ Jo said, thinking that this was the most helpful way of explaining things to Catherine. ‘We’re going to do an “intervention”,’ she said, in her best American accent.

‘He’s going to flip his lid,’ Catherine said, sitting down with a thump.

‘He’s not going to flip anything,’ Claire replied, getting up and pouring water into the teapot. ‘Tea?’

‘Please.’

‘What’s he going to do? Run away and stay somewhere else? He’ll moan at you for telling us, but he’ll moan anyway, won’t he?’

‘Telling you what?’ Mick suddenly appeared at the door.

Jo stared at her dad. This had been her idea, she couldn’t let her bottle desert her now. ‘Dad, can you take a seat?’ she asked politely.

Too politely, she was never this nice to him. He looked at her and then at his other three daughters. ‘Come on then, Witches of Eastwick, spit it out.’

‘You know we worry about you …’ Maria said.

Mick’s face suggested he didn’t think anything of the sort.

‘And we just want to do what’s best for you …’ Claire added.

Catherine let out a sigh. ‘They know you’ve got cancer. I told Jo because I was worried and I was going away and then she told the others because she didn’t want to be the only one that knew and now they’ve—’ Catherine corrected herself, ‘
we
’
ve
decided that we need to speak to you about it.’

‘Who the bloody hell do you lot think you are?’ Mick asked, simultaneously scratching his beard and rearranging himself.

Claire pulled herself up to her full five foot eight. ‘Your daughters!’ she shouted.

Mick stared at her, taken aback. ‘Now you might not
like
the fact that we are bothered about what happens to you, but we are. And we are not going to let you do this on your own …’

‘I wasn’t doing it on my own. You were helping me.’

‘And that’s why we all know now,’ Jo joined in. ‘So that Catherine doesn’t have to deal with it on her own.’

‘It’s me with the cancer, not her,’ Mick said, walking over to the cupboard and pulling down a packet of Rice Krispies and thumping them on the work surface.

‘Yeah?’ Jo asked angrily. She really couldn’t believe her dad’s attitude sometimes, he loved wallowing in self-pity. Maybe her theory that this might give him an extra boost in life was totally wrong. Maybe all it would do was make him feel even sorrier for himself. ‘Well, it’s her with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and she’s not cocking it up just because you want her here at your beck and call.’