The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride (4 page)

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ I interrupted, terrified that she might make a fuss and make them think I was a prima donna. ‘I quite enjoy it really, and it’s good for promoting the show.’

‘Sweet of you to have their interests at heart,’ she growled, ‘but we mustn’t let them exploit you. We won’t say anything until you’ve started appearing on the screens and have built a fan base, then we can start making a few demands.’

‘The public may absolutely hate Nikki,’ I said, ‘in which case I may be looking for another job in a few months.’

‘That’s not the buzz at the company. They’ve been making noises about tying you in to a longer contract, although I’m not agreeing to anything like that yet.’

‘Why do they want to do that?’

‘They think you’re going to be a star.’

I couldn’t think of anything else to say to that. It was like she’d punched me in the stomach and knocked all the air out of me.

Commuting to work from Pete’s grotty squat had proved pretty impossible, and Mum warned me that it still wasn’t safe for me to go home just yet, so I’d had to look around for somewhere a bit closer to the studios. There was a cameraman, called Gerry, who I’d got to know quite well in the canteen and from sitting around on set. Cameramen are funny blokes. Sometimes it seems like actors don’t exist for them. I suppose they get used to just staring at us through their lenses, thinking of us in terms of light and shade and filling the frame; they forget we’re people too. He was good looking in a rugged sort of way, never seemed to take much notice of his clothes or grooming, but I kind of liked that. He didn’t even try to hit on
me and it was me who struck up our first conversation. There’s something about the ‘strong silent’ types that makes me want to find out what makes them tick. The more enigmatic they are the more I want to get to the bottom of them. He was around thirty and had spent the last few years travelling around the world making documentaries but had moved back home with his parents since getting the job on
The Towers.
They lived just a short walk from the studios.

‘We’ve got a spare room you could rent, if you like,’ he offered, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘That would be great.’ I jumped at the offer. ‘I wouldn’t be in the way at weekends, it would just be somewhere to sleep during the week so I can get in and out of work easily.’

Gerry’s family were just so sweet, like something out of a commercial but thirty years out of date. The house was one of those semi-detached places and they gave me a thing that was like a combined alarm clock, kettle and teapot, which woke me up each morning with a lot of hissing and clanking as it came to the boil and automatically made a cup of tea. How cool is that? Gerry’s mum was always up and dressed by the time I came downstairs, happy to cook me breakfast, and his dad would read bits out of the
Daily Mail,
which they would discuss and ask my opinion on. They were just the cutest people and what I really liked was Gerry didn’t make any apologies for how they were, didn’t try to show that he was cooler than they were. He accepted them for what they were, just as he had accepted me. Some people always seem to want to change other people rather than just accepting them for who they are, but Gerry wasn’t one of them. Maybe that was
why he was a good cameraman, just watching what went on and recording it rather than trying to influence it like a director might. The whole family were just so peaceful together that when Gerry slipped into my bed in the middle of the night the first time I didn’t have the heart to turf him out. He was actually wearing pyjamas, with a cord and flies and everything! It just seemed so easy and natural and comfortable. He made me feel safe and I was grateful to him for being such a good friend.

The night that my first episode was being aired I didn’t have the nerve to stay in and watch it with Gerry’s family, which I think disappointed them a bit, but I just couldn’t have stood the embarrassment. I couldn’t go to Pete’s either, because the electricity supply was so unreliable and I doubted if any of the others there would want to sit through a soap opera even if the telly was working. So I took up Dora’s offer of watching it round at her place. Mum rang to tell me that Dad had banned them all from watching it at home, but she and the girls were going to go round to Auntie Pat’s. ‘Sod him,’ she said, ‘he can sit in on his own for a few hours and contemplate his sins. I’m not missing this, girl.’ Part of me would have liked to have gone round there with them, but there would have been too much noise and I would have wanted to concentrate. And I wouldn’t have been able to say anything without sounding like I was really up myself.

Dora had bought a bottle of champagne, bless her, and some snacks from Marks & Spencer, and she had those old-fashioned,
flat champagne glasses like they always used in vintage black-and-white movies. My heart was thumping like it was trying to break through my rib cage. I’d seen rushes and all the rest at work, so I sort of knew what I looked like on the screen, but it was different when it was actually out there in the real world, with the familiar voice of the continuity announcer talking about programmes coming later, and then the theme tune that I must have heard three thousand times before, and the story lines that just the night before I had been following along with the rest of the country – and suddenly there was Nikki. And it was her, not me, up on the screen. It didn’t feel like me in any way, just like the photos from the shoot. Luckily, she wasn’t on the screen that much in the first episode because I probably would have suffocated, since I didn’t seem to be able to breathe when she was there.

I didn’t dare to look at Dora until the final credits were rolling up and seeing the tears in her eyes set me off crying too. She covered her embarrassment by topping up my champagne glass. In a way it felt like a relief to have got over the hurdle. Nikki was out there now and it was up to the public whether they took to her or not.

My phone peeped that I had a text. It was from Mum. ‘I have never been so proud. You are a star!’ I was grateful to her for texting and not ringing, because I don’t know how I would have reacted to too much praise at that moment. She always did get that sort of thing right, which was why she was so good with the children in the home where she worked.

Dora and I got well plastered that night. She even broke out some hash that she must have been saving since the
Sixties. She had recorded the show and insisted on playing it back, fast-forwarding through the bits where Nikki was off-screen, and giving me a few more acting tips. She didn’t lavish me with praise, which I was grateful for, just talked as if it was another day’s work, treating me like a professional. I wasn’t in any fit state to go anywhere that night, so I dossed down on her couch, which smelled a bit of old ladies and cats.

Pete seemed to be blissfully unaware that anything had changed in my life. Maybe he was pretending not to notice, but I don’t think so. I think he really was just not quite firmly enough on this planet. Very few people are able to completely avoid a media flash flood, but Pete was one of them. He didn’t watch television or listen to the radio, he never read a newspaper or a magazine, so virtually every ‘overnight sensation’ that hit the headlines passed him by. I think that was part of the attraction. He seemed to have the soul of a poet, floating above the vulgar hurly-burly of everyday life.

‘You all right, babe?’ he would enquire pleasantly when I crawled in through the broken window, falling on top of him and a couple of others as they sat on the mattress below, completely unaware that his girlfriend’s face was plastered over virtually every paper and magazine on the newsstands, or that in order to reach him I’d had to dodge through a restaurant and out through the kitchens to avoid a photographer who seemed to have decided to stalk me 24/7.

Nikki, it seemed, had struck a chord in the national affections. A journalist on one of the heavy papers wrote a whole long piece comparing her to Elsie Tanner, Melina Mercouri and Catherine Deneuve. Dora had to explain to
me that Elsie Tanner was another slapper character who had been the first person to be seen by the public on
Coronation
Street;
the other two I knew had played hookers in famous old movies because I’d watched them when Dave was trying to get a foreign-movie club going at the school. He’d decided to start with a season of hooker movies because he thought that would encourage more boys to join the club, which it did, but it also got him closed down by the headmaster after one term. Apparently, some of the parents complained. I happened to know which parents it was, and if they had actually known what their daughters were up to in the evenings they might not have been quite so up themselves about a few art-house films.

The
Elle
magazine fashion spread came out a short time after Nikki first appeared on-screen and the pictures went everywhere. Dora was becoming quite the ruthless businesswoman, making phone calls and holding meetings and shouting at people about me being exploited and how I deserved a slice of the money-making machine that was building up around Nikki. She had managed to get a clause into my contract that allowed me to do advertising work as long as it didn’t interfere with my filming schedule. She kept telling me about deals she had set up and the money all seemed to be fantastic, though I didn’t really have the time to follow exactly what she was up to. I kept quiet and let her get on with it, just turning up in photographers’ studios when I was told. It was all a bit of a laugh, modelling clothes and make-up and whatever, but what I really wanted to do each day was get back to the studio and develop Nikki’s character.

The biggest problem with Nikki was that she kept having love scenes. Well, not really ‘love’, since she was with punters half the time, but I still had to get my kit off and get down and dirty with a varied selection of men. I got over the embarrassment factor after a couple of weeks, but there was still the yuck factor to overcome from time to time. They weren’t all old and disgusting, but some of them were. It wasn’t so bad sliding into bed and then cavorting around, it was the kissing that was the worst. There’s no way out of it, of course, if it’s in the scripts, but I would dread hearing the director shouting, ‘Tongues, please!’ when I was writhing around with yet another bit-part actor I’d only met that morning. I can see why hookers don’t like kissing and I did question whether Nikki would be quite so keen to do that sort of thing with punters, but they told me she was confused about where the line was between her professional and personal behaviour. I didn’t want to sound like I was being difficult so I just braced myself and got on with it.

I didn’t get to see much of Mum and the rest of them because my working hours coincided with Dad’s most days and he was still adamant that he wasn’t going to have me in the house. Whenever I did have a day off, Dora crammed it full of advertising and promotional work, which was quite nice because it meant I didn’t have a chance to brood over how much I missed the family. We met up whenever we could, but if it was in a public place there was always the problem of people staring or coming over and asking for autographs and pictures. It was great to get all the attention, but embarrassing when you’re trying to have a proper conversation with your
mother or your sisters. It’s bloody hard to sign an autograph without feeling like you’re ‘putting on airs and fecking graces’, as Dad would have put it. But to refuse to sign would have looked even worse. Being with them made me feel sad, especially when they had to leave. I just wanted to go back with them, back to my home, to be part of the bickering and the laughing, not be the one left on my own. But no matter how much I missed being with them, nothing would have persuaded me to give up what I was doing.

Whenever I saw them or rang them, the girls were always on at me to take them clubbing. The boys not so much so. I guess the boys didn’t think it was cool to be freeloading on their sister, but the girls weren’t worried about anything like that. We had to arrange a night when there was no danger Dad would find out where they were, so Mum waited till she knew he was going away for a weekend’s fishing with his mates. We met up in the West End and the girls had really gone to a lot of trouble, bless them. They must have been primping and pimping themselves for fucking hours. They sparkled from head to toe and they just could not keep the grins off their faces. I was so proud of them and was looking forward to showing them off around town. We had a couple of cocktails in a bar first, to get us in the mood, and then headed for the velvet ropes of a club I knew they would love. They had all got themselves kitted out with false IDs to get them past the doormen. We were having such a great time.

‘Sorry, girls.’ The doorman had his hand up behind me, clipping the rope back into place, leaving my sisters on the other side.

‘They’re with me,’ I said.

‘Sorry, Miss McBride –’ these guys knew their show business ‘– club policy.’

‘They’ve got ID,’ I pleaded.

‘It’s not the age,’ he said, ‘it’s the look.’

There was some sniggering rising among the queue, people happy to see potential queue-bargers brought down to size. The girls’ little faces broke my heart. People were starting to take pictures with their phones and I knew that if I made a fuss this could be a big story and their humiliation would be a hundred times worse.