The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride (5 page)

‘OK, girls,’ I said, as breezily as I could, ‘let’s go somewhere else. This place ain’t so fucking great anyway.’

We stalked off into the night, feeling a hundred pairs of eyes on our backs. None of us felt like chancing a second rejection, so we parted in a bit of a chilly atmosphere and they headed home. The story made it into enough papers for them to be well and truly humiliated at school the following week and they never asked me for anything after that. In fact, they hardly ever called me at all – it always had to be me calling them – and then they would act all off-hand, like I was bothering them all the time. I could understand that, after what had happened, but it still didn’t feel nice.

‘They’ll come round,’ Mum assured me when I told her what had happened. ‘They’re young and they’ve had their pride dented. Just give them a little time.’

I knew she was right, but I was frightened that with my increasingly hectic schedule I might not have the necessary time to keep our relationships going without a bit of help
from them. It felt like I was drifting further and further from the family and the tone of the press stories about the rejection outside the club made me nervous. It was as if the journalists were pleased to see me and my family being taken down a peg or two. It was nothing terrible in the great scheme of things, just gentle teasing really, but it seemed like a warning of what might be to come if anything went seriously wrong. It was like I was sailing out to sea in a little dinghy, having no idea what sort of storms might lie ahead and not having my family there for back-up if I got into trouble. I stepped up the work schedule to stop myself from brooding on it.

‘
O
K,’ Dora said, ‘here’s the deal. You need to buy yourself a house. I’ve been on to
OK!
and they’re willing to pay two hundred thousand for the exclusive rights to photograph you moving in, and they’ll furnish it for you and do it up.’

‘You’re joking me, aren’t you?’ I was trying to take it all in. ‘A magazine is basically willing to pay me enough to buy a house, just for the rights to photograph me in it?’

‘Well, you may have to get a mortgage for a bit more than that, but nothing that we can’t manage from your salary.’

‘I don’t know, Dora, do I want the responsibility of a house? I’m not very good at all the paperwork and stuff.’

‘You just leave all that to me. You can’t go on sleeping on other people’s sofas and God knows where else forever. I’m sure your career will keep going now, but if it doesn’t you don’t want to have wasted this opportunity to get a roof over your head. If
The Towers
was axed tomorrow, you might not work again for years.’

‘Shit, really?’ When she put it like that, I could see what she was getting at.

‘Think of the advantages. You could have your mum and the rest of them round to visit whenever you wanted. You
could get some privacy after a hard day’s work. You might even get yourself a proper boyfriend.’

I let that one pass. I was well aware that Dora was not a big fan of Pete’s, but she had only met him once and she had never seen how sweet he could be when we were alone together; well, alone apart from the others in the squat. The one time they’d met he’d wandered into an interview I was doing in a hotel. I’d told him I’d meet him afterwards in the pub next door, but he got impatient and came looking for me. He was being a bit lairy, feeling out of his depth I guess, and had obviously had a few drinks, which never brought out his nicest side. When Dora politely asked him to wait until I’d finished, he got all arsey and accused me of giving the journalist a blow-job or something. Luckily the journalist was a decent bloke and didn’t put any of that in the article. If it had been one of the tabloids, we would have been in serious trouble.

Dora gave me a big talking-to afterwards, told me he was a liability and all the rest. I knew she was right, but you can’t just chuck someone because they’re a bit of a hopeless case, can you? Not when you love them.

I don’t know what I would have done without Dora. I mean, I know she was going to be getting ten per cent of whatever I earned, but that wasn’t exactly a fortune, and she seemed to be willing to take over my whole life, like a replacement mother.

‘I feel really bad about asking you to do so much for me,’ I told her. ‘But I just don’t seem to have time for anything.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she brushed aside my worries, ‘when you’re making a fortune I’ll be getting my pound of flesh.’

‘But you do much more than anyone else’s agent.’

‘Listen, kid,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in this shitty business for nearly half a century, ever since my mother dragged me to my first ballet class. You are by far the most talented person I have come across in all those years. I’m enjoying being the wind beneath your wings, as the song goes. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – and that’s all the clichés you’re getting out of me today.’

So that shut me up. I just gave her a hug, which reminded me how long it had been since I’d been able to hug any of the members of my family when I wanted to. I’d hugged Pete a couple of nights before, but he’d been unconscious on something so he didn’t exactly reciprocate. Thank God for Dora, that’s all I can say.

She found me a nice little terraced house not far from Gerry and his family, so I would still be able to drop in for meals now and then after a hard day at the studios, and the deal with
OK!
was all set up. I felt strangely sad about leaving Gerry’s family, almost like I was leaving home again. Gerry was so incredibly cool about it. I’d been afraid he’d get difficult and try to dissuade me – after all, he’d basically had sex on tap with me there – but he never said a word, quite happy to fit in with my plans. We would still spend most of our days together at the studio and he didn’t seem to mind whether we slept together or not – which was a bit insulting in one way, but really restful in another. He was a hard one to figure out, which was partly why I stayed interested, I guess.

The décor and furniture that the magazine supplied weren’t exactly what I would have chosen – they’d pimped it
up to be a bit ‘footballers’ wives’, to be honest – but it was another gift horse that didn’t need its dentures checking.

The photoshoot was a major embarrassment, and I just had to grit my teeth and keep telling myself that they were basically giving me a house and the agony would soon be over. I had to drape myself around the furniture, trying to look funky and sexy at the same time, which was more of a test of my acting than anything I’d ever had to do on any stage or in front of any camera. They filled the place with flowers, which was nice of them, even if they did take them away with them again at the end of the day. They even brought in a fluffy kitten that I had to pretend was mine, since I didn’t have a celebrity boyfriend I could show off to them. I didn’t tell them about Pete in case they actually suggested I brought him along. He definitely wouldn’t have been the sort of image they were looking for, and he most likely would have been laughing too much at the whole set-up to get any pictures done anyway.

Once they’d all gone, including the kitten, I ordered in a pizza and opened a few beers and for a while it felt really nice to have a place of my own. Then I felt a bit lonely, so I rang Mum to see if she and the girls fancied coming over. About two hours later they all turned up because Dad had gone down the pub. I thought it would be really fun, like it had been when we were all living together at home, but they were all a bit weird. Mum was really sweet, saying how well I was doing and how proud she was of me, and the others were impressed by the place and spent the whole time playing with the electronics, but none of them really relaxed. They seemed
completely different, like they were on a day out somewhere where they had to behave themselves, like they had to be polite to me because I had invited them to my home.

I was shocked by how scruffy they looked alongside everything in the house, which was all so gleaming new and shiny, and that immediately made me feel guilty for looking down on them. I really wanted them to relax and make some mess around the place, like a proper party, but it ended up all being a bit embarrassing and they all went home at about midnight, even though I said they could stay and sleep on the sofas and stuff. I couldn’t understand quite what had happened and I felt bad for the rest of the night.

I tried asking Mum if she thought that Dad would come round to forgiving me soon and if I would be able to come home again to hang out with them. I noticed her eyes were suddenly tearful, but she made a big effort to stay cheerful and suggested I just ‘give him a bit longer to get used to everything’. It felt like there was something else going on that she wasn’t telling me, but I couldn’t think of the right questions to ask to get it out of her.

I missed Mum more than any of the others. Sometimes I would ring her twenty times a day, just to say ‘hi’ and find out some of the gossip.

‘Are you all right, Steff?’ she asked on one call I was making during a break in filming, while the lighting people were taking a bloody age to get the shadows right and I was afraid that if I didn’t distract myself I would end up eating all the way through the bag of doughnuts Gerry had just given me.

‘Yeah, I think so, why?’

‘There’s this rumour the girls found in a magazine, about you being anorexic, that’s all.’

‘Fucking hell, Mum, you know how much I eat. How could anyone eat a ton of chips a day and have a fucking eating disorder? You saw me a few days ago, did I look thin?’

‘That’s what I told them, but they showed me the picture and you do look a bit skinny. The last few times we’ve seen you you’ve been wearing all those baggy clothes and I always worry.’

‘You don’t have to worry about that. What magazine was it?’

She couldn’t remember the name of the magazine so after work I popped into the newsagent on the way home, which is always a bit embarrassing when everyone is staring and it’s obvious you’re looking for stories about yourself. Anyway, I didn’t have to look for long – the story was everywhere, illustrated with the same bloody picture. I grabbed an armful of magazines, paid for them, trying to smile politely as the woman behind the till went through the whole double-take thing of working out who I was, and then telling me – like I didn’t know already – and I scuttled home to study the stories in more detail.

Not that it was that easy to get in through my own front door, as there were photographers everywhere, all flashing away and shouting questions. I was wearing an old tracksuit that I always pull on after work. It’s not the most flattering of items and it helps to distract people from recognising me. It’s really comfortable and I love it, but it isn’t exactly the item I would have chosen to put on if I’d known I was going to be photographed. Call me vain, but I would prefer not to have to see myself all over the papers looking like some pikey
housewife who’s given up the battle of life. Unable to think of any other strategy, I tucked my chin into my chest, covered as much of my face as possible with the magazines and made a dash for it, ignoring their shouts.

‘Hey, Steff, over here!’

‘You all right, Steff?’

‘How much do you weigh, Steff?’

‘Show us a bit of leg, girl!’

‘What you having for dinner?’

‘Over here, Steff, over here!’

‘Don’t be a bitch, Steff!’

I hate being rude to anyone and generally if a photographer or a fan shouts something out in the street I will always try to give a friendly, cheerful answer, but that evening I’d been caught off balance. I didn’t know what to say to them and I was slightly afraid I might burst into tears if I tried to fake some cheerfulness, which would give them exactly the sort of picture they needed to confirm that I was having some sort of mental breakdown.

Once I’d got inside, pulled the curtains, had a couple of drinks and calmed down enough to think about it, I realised the picture they were all talking about must have come from the day of the big fashion shoot, although it wasn’t one that
Elle
had used in the end. I was wearing this really skimpy outfit, which showed off my legs and arms, and I was lying in a position that made all my ribs stick out. But even taking all that into consideration, it didn’t look right. Despite all the eating that I do, I am reasonably skinny, always have been, apart from the boobs – fast metabolism or something – but
this was more than that. I had to admit I did look a bit of a bag of bones, but I couldn’t quite work out why.

All the writers in the magazines were saying they were worried about me and it was sweet of them to care. I even pulled off my tracksuit bottoms and stared at my legs in the full-length bedroom mirror to check I wasn’t missing anything. If anything, they looked a bit chubbier than usual to me – oh my God, was that how it started? Was I deluded? I could remember a girl at school who used to do the whole eating-disorder thing. She looked like a matchstick but she was convinced she was grossly fat. Was my brain playing the same tricks on me? But what about the doughnuts, and the bacon sandwich this morning and the pizza in the canteen at lunch? I hadn’t been sticking my fingers down my throat to get rid of that lot, so they must still be in there somewhere. My God, wasn’t there a Mars Bar after lunch as well? Yes there was!

The more I stared at the picture, the more I realised that it had been tampered with. Someone had shaved a few more inches off my thighs and my upper arms with an airbrush, or whatever it is they use. And it looked like they might have increased the shadows under my ribs as well. It was done so subtly it was impossible to tell, but I knew what a good job they had done with my zits, so I could believe it was possible.

I could see why Mum might be a bit worried, but at the same time it was quite a sexy image, mainly because it didn’t look much like the real me, more like some perfect fighting-goddess fantasy woman off a computer game for boys. ‘Fucking hell,’ I thought, ‘who needs to diet when the photographers can do this for you?’

All the same, I knew it wasn’t good. I didn’t want young girls going off and starving themselves in order to look like Nikki when even I didn’t look like this. It was a bit of a liberty. So I rang Dora.

‘I’m ahead of you, darling,’ she drawled. ‘I’ve been on to the photographer’s people and given them hell, but they deny all knowledge of how it got out there. I’ve rung the editors who’ve printed the picture and none of them is saying where it came from. Maybe it was just some guy with a computer out to make a fast buck.’

‘I don’t want everyone thinking I’m sick,’ I grumbled.

‘This happens to every young actress at some time,’ Dora replied, trying to calm me down. ‘They’ll change their tack and start printing pictures showing you’re putting on weight and “letting yourself go” next.’

‘Charming.’

‘Goes with the territory. At least they’re talking about you. It’s when they stop that you have to worry.’

‘S’pose so.’

I wasn’t so sure that it was right that I should have to put up with this sort of treatment. I mean, I was enjoying the whole celebrity lifestyle, like when I would go to a club and would be ushered straight into the VIP section, but I didn’t have that much opportunity to do that sort of thing. By the time I’d got home, made myself some dinner and learned my lines for the next day, I was pretty much ready to drop off, which was pissing Pete off quite a bit. But he could sleep all day, so he was fresh as a daisy by ten o’clock and ready to boogie the night away, as I kept telling him. He always had
stuff that would help me overcome the tiredness, but I didn’t want to be doing that sort of thing too often. I’d seen how quickly it would start to have an effect on people. I didn’t want to end up looking 50 before I was even 25. It was the work I really enjoyed and I didn’t want the executives at the studio reading these stories and thinking I was going to be a problem. Dora had always stressed how important it was for an actress to be reliable and if they thought I was going to be off in rehab the whole time they might decide that Nikki should meet with a prematurely sticky end.