The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride (2 page)

I auditioned for Dora, but I knew that I would have to have been monumentally crap for her to have turned me down. If she had restricted herself to taking on people who had any chance of making it, she would have been sitting on her own most evenings. We went through the charade of her ‘offering me a place’ and pretended it was all a pukka drama school. I didn’t mention it at home, just pretended I was working evenings. I really enjoyed being there – partly, if I’m honest, because I knew I was the best in the class.

That evening, at the end, Dora asked me to hang on a second as the others went out, chattering, on the usual high that the whole thing gave us all. Drama classes are great therapy when you’re feeling a bit down, brilliant for taking you out of yourself. The two visitors were still huddled in the corner, blowing their noses and talking in low voices, avoiding everyone’s eyes.

‘I want you to meet someone, Steffi,’ Dora said, taking me over. ‘This is Tom and Audrey, they’re the casting directors for
The Towers.’

I don’t think I actually believed her for a moment. I mean,
The Towers
was the biggest soap in the country. All my life I’d
been watching it and reading about the actors who starred in it. In fact, it was really a bit sad how addicted I was to the whole thing. I felt like I knew all the characters personally, as well as all the actors who played them. It didn’t seem possible that these two tatty old specimens were part of the world of glittering awards ceremonies and titillating tabloid scandals that were all part of
The Towers’
world. When I’d talked to Dave about my addiction to the series once, he suggested that I liked it so much because it reflected my own life on the estate.

‘Fuck off,’ I scoffed, ‘do you really think life on the estate is that exciting? There’s about three murders a week in
The Towers,
we’re lucky if we hear of one mugging.’ For some reason he thought that was incredibly funny, which gave me the right hump.

‘We’re looking for a young girl to be part of a new family moving into the area,’ the woman called Audrey was saying.

‘You mean into the Goddards’ flat?’ I said, slightly giving the game away that I was an avid fan when I probably should have been trying to show I was a bit cooler.

‘Yes.’ Audrey smiled rather sweetly at me, which made her look a lot younger. ‘You’re a fan, then?’

‘Yeah.’ I think I might have blushed.

‘We think you might be great for the part. Would you be interested in coming to the studios to audition?’

‘OK.’

OK! That was all I could think to say, and I said it in the flattest, most pathetic little voice. I suppose I thought it would be uncool to jump about screaming and to throw my arms around Audrey and Tom and cover them in kisses and bugger
the germs, which was what I really wanted to do. Or maybe I was just frightened that if I once let my excitement out of the box I would never be able to get it back in again, that I would just explode into a million tiny pieces.

T
his was a bit of news I wasn’t going to be able to keep to myself, no matter how uncool it might seem, and I blurted it out almost the moment I walked through the door that evening. The whole family was there and the noise level hardly faltered; they obviously didn’t believe me, or weren’t even bothering to listen.

I tried again. ‘I’ve been asked to audition for a part in
The Towers.’

‘Fuck off, Steffi,’ Jeremiah, my older brother, said. ‘You are such a little liar. Since when do they go talent spotting in hotel kitchens?’

‘I’ve been doing some acting classes and these casting people from the telly company came to watch.’

One or two of them had stopped talking and were taking in what I was saying.

‘You’re auditioning for
The Towers
?’ Mum asked, a puzzled look on her face.

‘Over my dead body,’ Dad growled and suddenly everyone was silent.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, trying to keep the shake out of my voice.

‘You’ve got a perfectly good job, you don’t need to do that rubbish.’

‘Steffi might end up a star,’ one of my little sisters piped up – Jenny, I think. The girls were beginning to get the idea. ‘That would be so cool. She’d be able to get us into clubs for free and stuff.’

‘And have every slimy newspaper reporter in the world sniffing through our bins looking for stories,’ Dad exploded. ‘No thank you.’

‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in my bins,’ Mum protested, which made some of them laugh and sort of defused things a bit, although Dad’s face was still like thunder.

‘OK.’ I shrugged, having no intention of causing a major row. ‘I probably wouldn’t have got it anyway.’

‘Oh, that is so unfair,’ Jenny squeaked. She was always the bravest at speaking up when Dad was in a mood – for some reason she got away with more than the rest of us. ‘I wish someone would ask me to be in
The Towers.
You’ll be a celebrity and everything.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Dad bellowed, making even Jenny cower. ‘We are a respectable family and we don’t want to have anything to do with that sort of thing.’

I didn’t intend to make a big fight of it – not yet, not when there was still a chance I wouldn’t get the job anyway – but  I didn’t intend to miss the opportunity to go to the studios either. It was like an invitation to step into my own magic kingdom, instead of just having my nose pressed to the screen, so to speak; I would actually be able to walk among my heroes
and heroines – just thinking about it had made me come over all Shakespearean.

Dora, being the wily old bird again, had realised I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get to the studios, since they were right over the other side of London in some suburb I’d never heard of, and she had offered to drive me there. It was kind of her, don’t get me wrong, but I knew she really wanted to be there herself because she got as much buzz out of the thought of hanging out with the stars as I did. She might put on this act of having seen it all and done it all, but if they had offered her the part of an old bag lady she would have been down on all fours kissing their feet. I knew that and she knew I knew. We had a bit of an unspoken understanding, Dora and me.

When I got to her flat the next day I hardly recognised her. She’d even washed her hair instead of just piling it on top of her head and sticking it together with pins, and she was wearing make-up, which actually looked a bit spooky, like a small child had painted a woman’s face on her. Her car was a pretty good disaster. I doubt if she had ever removed a single piece of rubbish from it in all the years she’d owned it and it reeked of old fag butts, which upset me a bit since I’d spent about an hour in the bathroom that morning, before anyone else was awake, trying to make myself smell like a meadow in springtime.

‘Just be yourself,’ she kept saying as we drove, which seemed pretty rich coming from someone who looked totally unlike her usual self. ‘They’ll love you.’

‘OK.’

Funnily enough, I wasn’t nervous about the actual audition, but I was excited at the thought of maybe meeting some of the cast and seeing what things were like inside a real television studio.

‘I feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass,’ I told her, ‘about to step through the screen into a world of make-believe.’

‘You’ve read Lewis Carroll?’ she asked, obviously surprised.

‘Nah,’ I laughed, ‘I saw it on telly one Christmas. Did he write it, then?’

Dora laughed and nodded. I made a mental note to see if I could get a copy. I always tried to do that. If I heard someone talking about a book I would go into a bookshop and ask for it. I never read around the house, that was asking for trouble, but I liked to have a book in my bag for travelling on the bus and for my breaks at work. Everyone at home, apart from Mum, thought reading books was a sign of weirdness. She’d given up trying to persuade them different. Maybe some of the others were doing it on the quiet too, like me. Dave had been useful for recommending stuff. He used to lend me things he’d read and liked as well.

The reception area at the television studios lived up to all my fantasies, with giant blow-ups on the walls from all my favourite programmes and a gigantic glass reception desk with beautiful women in immaculate suits dealing with the visitors. As Dora and I waited to be fetched I scanned every passing face in the hope of spotting someone famous. I was sure I recognised some of them, but it was hard to tell when they just looked like ordinary people going to work.

Everyone seemed to be so busy and it was almost as if we
were invisible. Well, that’s not strictly true – it was just me, really. It was almost as if I had vanished, or at least wasn’t someone they could talk to directly. Women with clipboards and earphones kept talking to Dora as if I wasn’t there.

‘Is this Steffi McBride?’

‘Does she have an appointment?’

‘Does she have an agent?’

Hello? I do have a brain, you know, was what I wanted to say, but I didn’t – mainly because I was so thrilled to be there at all, but also because Dora seemed to take it all for granted. It was like she was a farmer bringing her prize young heifer to market, to have her prodded around by potential buyers before they started haggling over a price.

‘Should I have an agent?’ I whispered, in a moment when they had all gone away again.

‘Probably. Certainly if they offer you the job.’

‘How do I find one?’

‘That won’t be hard. I know plenty.’

‘Couldn’t you do it? You know how all this stuff works.’ The idea grew on me. ‘Tell them you’re my agent. They only seem to want to talk to you anyway.’

‘OK.’

She was acting all cool about it, but I could tell she was made up that I’d asked. I was quite happy with the idea because I trusted her, and anyway it was only because of her that I was there at all. I was starting to get even more excited as this woman with an earpiece led us off through loads of corridors. She explained as we walked that they’d already held mass auditions for this part.

‘They’ve seen about eighty people,’ she burbled, ‘done recalls and everything, but they just can’t make up their minds. Apparently, they want to build this family up to be a big part of the series, so they’re taking the casting really seriously.’

That piece of information certainly didn’t do anything to calm my growing nerves.

After that, it all became a bit of a blur. The woman took us through to the studios and there I was, in my own personal Narnia. It was like walking into a gigantic warehouse full of room sets, a bit like Ikea, only the room sets were actually recognisable from the series. There was the Goddards’ kitchen, and someone else’s sitting room and the local pub. They all looked strangely vulnerable with their missing walls and ceilings. Some of the ones that weren’t used so often had been packed up and stored on giant trolleys, labelled with their fictional owners’ names. It was like walking across one of those Hollywood back lots you see in the old Fred Astaire movies.

There was a central sitting area where the actors were all lurking around while the technicians and directors and everyone got ready. Everywhere I looked I saw familiar faces from
The Towers.
One or two of the men were quite friendly, a bit lechy if I’m being honest, but most of them seemed to look right through me as though I was invisible again, especially the women. Audrey with the roots was there and she’d scooped up a few actors to do a scene with me; we headed off to a room on the other side of the studio where there was a giant table, like a company boardroom, and we all sat down.

She gave me a script and said I could just read it, I didn’t have to learn it – but I read it once and then I was able to chuck it away. For some reason, I’ve always been able to learn scripts; it’s a knack. It’s not that I’m bright – quite the opposite, the only GCSEs I got were art and drama – but I just seem to absorb scripts after one read-through. I can do it after one hearing too. I can recite virtually every episode of
Friends
or
Sex and the City,
which drives my sisters mad at home because I say the lines a split second before the characters do when we’re watching the DVDs. I just can’t help myself. I could even learn the Shakespeare pieces that Dave used to give us. It would drive me insane when the others were still using their books at rehearsals and I was trying to do my Helen Mirren thing and be all professional. It’s the same with songs; I hear them once or twice and then I can sing them straight through. Not exactly the most useful skill in the world, but nice to know I can do something.

They gave me some background notes about the character and her family history and how she came to be the person she was. I can’t describe how much I loved doing those little scenes that day. The moment I started speaking all my nerves went and I forgot that I was staring at soap stars I’d been watching on the screen since as long as I could remember. I just got so into it, and what made it even better was that I could tell they were all impressed. There hadn’t been many moments in my life when I’d impressed people, more often I seemed to disappoint or exasperate them, so those times kind of stuck in my memory. The other actors weren’t looking through me any more; they were actually
talking to me and looking me in the eye, like I was one of them. The producers had loads of photographs, which I discovered later were of actors they had already cast to be part of the new family. They kept looking at the pictures and then up at me, narrowing their eyes, straining to see if they could imagine a family resemblance.

Audrey and Dora were virtually purring with pleasure on the sidelines and I noticed other cast members were drifting into the room to watch. At the end everyone was gathered around chatting to me, like I was the star and they were the fans. I told Audrey that I wanted Dora to be my agent and Audrey said she would be talking to her the next day. They kept saying that they couldn’t promise anything, but they all seemed dead certain I was the one for the part. Dora was certainly acting like it was a done deal.

‘What will your boyfriend have to say about all this?’ she asked as we drove back across London.

‘Pete?’ I was shocked to realise I hadn’t given him a second thought all day. ‘Pete doesn’t have much to say about anything really. He’ll be cool.’

Pete and me had been together since year ten at school. He was the opposite to me. Whereas I had a Jamaican mum and an Irish dad, he had an Irish mum who worked behind the bar in our local and a Jamaican reggae-singer dad. Pete’s dad was the most chilled guy I had ever met, mainly because he was stoned most of the time, and Pete was pretty much following in his footsteps. At school he had been fairly alert, but the more drugs he did and the more into his music he got, the more spaced out he became. I still loved him but I had
to admit he was pretty useless for anything except lying around having a laugh. When it came to lying around, Pete was pretty much king of the world.

His dad didn’t mind that he was useless – if they were together, they would just make music all the time – but it drove his poor mum insane. She was one of those women who had worked all her life, having to bring up her younger brothers and sisters from when she was ten years old, all that sort of thing, and her feckless Caribbean men drove her bananas. In the end she threw Pete out, guitar, stash and all. Not that it bothered him much because he’d heard of an empty flat on the other side of the estate, so he just broke in there and started a squat, which was handy for me when I was keen to get away from one of Dad’s moodies. We’d had some good times round there, and some pretty weird ones too.

It had been a real surprise to me, the day Pete first showed an interest. Up till then I’d hardly been the most popular girl in school. Actually, I’d been pretty unpopular in some quarters and had been getting a spot of bullying from one or two of the ‘cool’ girls, who thought I was a bit of a geek with the drama and everything. There was this incident on the way home one afternoon when they ganged up on me. I guess they were only fooling around, but it was a bit scary and they knocked my books out of my hands and ran off with them.