The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride (6 page)

‘It’s possible that it’s the studio PR people who are putting the rumours about,’ she suggested. ‘They like it when their stars get into the papers. It boosts ratings. If another half a million people tune in to
The Towers
to see how skinny you are, they’re more than happy.’

‘Half a million people?’ I was having trouble getting my head round this.

‘I’m just guessing. But you used to be a fan, you know how it is.’

It seemed odd to think that just a few months earlier I would have been reading these stories, watching the programme and then going into work the next day to gossip about what I’d seen with a load of other people who didn’t have the slightest idea what was really going on. From this side of the looking glass, everything looked so different.

‘Yeah, s’pose so. Need to give it some thought. Should I issue a statement or whatever it is people do when they want to deny something?’

‘I think a dignified silence might be more appropriate at
this stage. Don’t want to make it look like you’re “protesting too much”.’

‘That Shakespeare,’ I thought, ‘has a little something to say for every occasion.’

‘I was going to ring you this evening about something else,’ Dora went on. ‘Am I right in thinking you can sing?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I’ve never thought there was any point in false modesty. I hate people who know they’re really good at something but have to go through the whole charade of pretending they aren’t until someone else comes forward and speaks up on their behalf. I don’t think it’s big-headed or anything to say I can sing, because it’s not like I’ve done anything to make myself good at it. I just happen to have been born with a good ear and a voice to match.

‘There’s a production company that’s putting together a singing talent competition thing for celebrities. They’re going to pair each of you up with professional singers and have them mentor you and do duets and stuff. It’s got a prime
Saturday-night
spot, so it would be good exposure.’

‘At least people would be able to see I wasn’t anorexic,’ I said.

‘Exactly. And it wouldn’t hurt to show them you can sing, in case a West End show came up later on.’

‘Really?’ I liked that idea.

‘Never say never.’

It was a couple of days before I heard from her again.

‘
L
uke Lewis?’ I could hardly find the breath to speak. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Why, is that a problem?’ Dora asked.

‘No, it’s not a problem. Well, yes, actually it might be.’

I’d only been in love with Luke Lewis for around five years, from when I was about 12 till I was at least 17, and when I say ‘in love’ I mean the whole weeping, screaming, tearing my hair out and hanging around outside stage doors passion. He was lead singer with West End Boys, who were just the most beautiful boy band that ever existed. I read somewhere they had more number-one hits than Take That, Boyzone or Westlife, I mean they were immense. During those five years I would have died for Luke if he’d asked me, but fortunately he never asked. In fact, he never even saw me, walked right past my outstretched fingers every time I managed to get to the front of the pack. I never once managed to catch his eye from the stage, no matter how loudly I screamed his name. I even tried fainting at a concert once, but I just got carted off by some smelly middle-aged biker who insisted that I needed to have my clothing loosened and gave me a drink of water, which meant I’d lost my place in the front row by the time I got back.

‘I had a bit of a crush on him when I was a kid,’ I confessed.

‘Oh, well, now you’ll have a chance to live out all those fantasies, because he’s going to be your partner.’

The celebrity singing show had become a reality. I’d been for a sort of audition, although they weren’t that bothered whether the celebrities involved could sing or not since they were just as happy to have us make fools of ourselves in front of millions of people as to knock ’em dead. I could see they were quite surprised by my voice, which was a nice feeling, and once they’d realised I could sing they had sort of lost interest in the audition and talked more about the format of the show and the publicity they wanted to rev up around it.

I quite liked the idea of the publicity because the anorexic story seemed to be running and running. Other pictures had appeared with bits of me airbrushed out, but the more I tried to point that out to journalists who asked, the more it sounded like I was covering something up. I was accusing the media of faking the stories, and they couldn’t accept that, so the myth just kept on growing, even though they could see the truth with their own eyes when they interviewed me or watched Nikki taking her kit off on telly (which she did most nights of the week, what with repeats and omnibus editions and everything). I was beginning to see how the newspapers worked. Once they found a story that their readers were interested in they did everything they could to keep it going, just like our scriptwriters would keep a plot line going for as long as they could, only changing it when the public showed signs of getting bored.

Every journalist in the world seemed to have decided they
wanted to be my mother, even the men, and they were all writing articles telling me what I should be eating and how I should be handling my fame and my career, worrying that I was getting too much success too soon and wouldn’t be able to handle it. I couldn’t understand how so many people I had never met could have so many opinions about me. I only had one opinion about them: I thought they should all shut the fuck up. As far as I could see, my ‘successful’ career consisted of remembering to set the alarm clock each morning and making sure I knew the lines by the time the cameras were rolling. We were doing three new episodes a week and Nikki was in virtually all of them, so, when you added on the other jobs Dora was cramming in, I didn’t have time for anything – including reading most of the magazines and articles, thank God.

I asked Pete if he thought I was too thin and he got that sort of glazed, puzzled look he gets with most of the questions he’s asked. It’s not that he’s thick or anything, it’s more like the drugs have rearranged everything he’s ever learned in his head and he has trouble laying his hands on the right file when he needs it. Bless him.

‘Do you think I’m too fat?’ I asked again in a silly momentary panic.

‘Jesus, give me a break,’ he wailed, as if I was always nagging him with my questions. I honestly think it was the first time I’d ever raised the subject with him.

Mum was as scornful of the stories as I was, but she still kept turning up with extra food, and would then sit around the kitchen watching me as I ate it. I didn’t protest because it
was nice to have her there and it gave us a chance to catch up on the family gossip. The one subject we both seemed to spend most of our time avoiding was Dad. If I did mention him I could see a look in her face that was somewhere between panic and misery and I didn’t want to put her through that when we had so little time together, so I steered clear of it.

When the production company for the singing competition asked me to nominate a charity to donate my prize money to, should I win, I put forward the children’s home that Mum worked in – because you never know with charities just where the money would go, do you, but I knew Mum would keep an eye on it. She’d talked about ‘her kids’ to us so often over the years that I almost felt like I knew them all personally. One or two of them had come to the house for Sunday lunch from time to time, or to stay for a night or two once they turned 18 and the system turfed them out on to the street. They never stayed long because Dad would make his views very clear on how he felt about putting a roof over the heads of other people’s kids, ‘when I have enough trouble affording a roof over my own kids’ heads’. Once or twice Mum put up a fight about it, but mostly she would just smile and secretly slip them a bit of money before sending them off into the world on their own.

Now, even more bizarre than the anorexia story, the magazines and papers also had me down as a ‘fashion icon’. Not only was it weird that they were all telling me I was too thin, but at the same time they were telling their readers that they should try to dress like me. It was doubly weird, because
I hadn’t bought any new clothes since God knows when. Firstly, I didn’t have that much spare money yet, as Dora was still getting all that side of things sorted out, but more importantly I didn’t have the time to go shopping. If you’re filming all day, and people are staring at you whenever you go out to the shops, you can’t really spend a couple of hours wandering around Topshop with any comfort. So I’d just been wearing all the things I had collected up till then, the same sort of stuff I would wear when hanging out at the squat with Pete, like cheap little dresses over jeans, second-hand jumpers, Oxfam bargains, all the usual stuff. But the fashion editors seemed to think it was a genuine look that I was cultivating. I kept appearing in their ‘best-dressed’ lists and they would have arrows pointing to various items, telling the readers where to get them (and they never seemed to get that right either). I liked the fact that people thought I looked good in my clothes, but I was a bit spooked by the thought that little girls might believe what they read and would actually spend their hard-earned Saturday-job money trying to reproduce a look that should have been more or less free.

‘You’re thinking about it too much,’ Dora said when I voiced my fears. ‘They’ll turn on you soon enough and you’ll find you’re on the “worst-dressed” lists instead. Just enjoy it while it lasts.’

The good part of it was that I started to get invites to go to fashion shows and some of the shops would give me free stuff. I hardly ever wore any of it, because it was nearly always awful, but I would give it to other people at work or ask Mum to pass it round at home.

‘You were always the one for dressing up,’ Mum chuckled happily one day when I was handing over some of my freebies for her to give to my sisters. ‘I remember when I used to come home and find you had turned out all my cupboards and would be strutting round the house in my high heels and scarves.’

I remembered that so well. I would spend hours playing with clothes, dressing my little sisters up like dolls. Mum used to have drawers full of brightly coloured Caribbean scarves and materials that could be twisted round our little bodies into exotic dresses and piled up on our heads as turbans as we paraded around, making up characters and acting them out in stories which were always the same. I used to play with the girls a lot in those days, when they were still young enough to do whatever I told them. I would construct plays – with me in the leading roles, naturally. I was the big star, they were happy to be the chorus girls, obeying my directions. Once they started to complain that they wanted to have their share of the limelight I lost interest. Gradually, I had found myself becoming distanced from them; they got friends and interests of their own, none of which held my attention. I started to like it better playing inside my own head, or lying in front of the television, drinking in the films and soaps and music videos like my life depended on it. Mum would worry sometimes that I didn’t seem to socialise like the others, didn’t like hanging around in big groups. She seemed to think it wasn’t natural for a young girl to spend so much time with her own thoughts.

‘You’re a funny one, you are,’ she’d say, but always with
affection in her voice and a twinkle in her eye. I always took comments like that as compliments.

Now that I was getting my head round the idea of the singing programme I was beginning to think it might be a really good thing. (And not just because it meant I could spend time with Luke Lewis.) Maybe it would bring Dad round a bit. I could understand why he didn’t like the idea of his daughter being portrayed as a hooker three times a week for all the world to see, even though I didn’t think it was a reasonable thing to make a fuss about, but surely he couldn’t complain if I was just singing songs? He was always really encouraging when I was in the school choir and all that stuff. Maybe this would be my chance to get back into his affections. He actually cried at Mum’s brother’s wedding when I stood up at the reception and sang ‘Ben’, that Michael Jackson song about a rat. I can’t have been more than eight but I managed to make most of the people in the room water up. Mind you, half of them were either completely bladdered or stoned by that stage and probably would have cried at anything. I remember it helped to calm down the atmosphere a bit because there’d been a few fights just before that.

I know this is going to sound pathetic, but on the day I was due to meet Luke Lewis for the first time as a grown-up I felt as nervous and star-struck as I would have been when I was 12. His career hadn’t exactly been going great guns over the previous couple of years. He hadn’t disappeared from sight altogether, but he certainly hadn’t had a solo hit since the group had disbanded – none of them had. He was the only one whose name and face were still known to the
public at all. It’s hard to exaggerate just how beautiful he was when he was a teenager. He was six years older than me and seemed to be the perfect male specimen as far as I and a few hundred thousand other pre-pubescent girls were concerned. Looking back now, I can see he was still pretty girly himself at the time, but we liked that. When you’re 12 you don’t fancy having your face ripped to pieces with stubble or any of those other smelly, manly realities that we all get a taste for later on. At that stage we just want boy equivalents of ourselves, eyeliner and all.

I’d seen him on telly a few times since then and I knew he was still a bit pretty for someone on the way to thirty, but he was certainly still a looker, and he still had a voice that made me tingle between the legs, reminding me that for five years he was the only man I ever fantasised about. Although I had often seen him live, I had never really taken in how tall he was until he walked into that studio, strode over and shook my hand like it was an honour for him to meet me rather than the other way round. He was well over six foot tall and broadly built – I’ve always liked that in a man, it makes me feel safe, like they could wrap me up in their arms and protect me from all the dangers of the world.

He’d always seemed really nice when he was interviewed as well, all polite and modest and sweet. I knew he was a bit posh because I’d read virtually every bit of magazine biography that had ever appeared about him. He’d even been to a private boarding school, which sounded like living on another planet as far as we were all concerned at my school, but he never seemed up himself. I think his whole band had met at the
same school, although I was aware that might just be a story put about by the media. I was beginning to get the hang of how the whole thing worked on this side of the ‘looking glass’. At least, I thought I was.

That first day in the studio, where we would be recording our first song for the competition, I think the producers were hoping we would be really crap together so they could show how much we had improved by the end of the series, or whatever their game plan was. I wasn’t nervous about the singing because I knew I would be able to do that, but what if I said something really stupid to him? Or what if he remembered my face from all those times I stalked him? How embarrassing would that be?

He was so polite. When he shook my hand I immediately had to apologise because it was all sweaty, making up some stupid story about having to run for the bus, when he knew perfectly well I’d been picked up from home by a driver in an air-conditioned Mercedes. I think he even gave a little bow of the head at the same time as holding my hand while I babbled stupidly on, but I may have imagined that – having a bit of a Jane Austen moment. He was dressed in that sort of preppy way that posh boys sometimes do: chinos and coloured shirts, jumper round the shoulders, anyone for tennis? That sort of thing. He was just gorgeous, even more gorgeous than I remembered from the days when he had a mop of hair spiked up all over the place and dressed like some Brighton art-student junkie.

‘I’m a great fan,’ he said, still holding on to my hand and I thought I was going to pass out. I mean, I had been just about to say exactly the same line to him and now I had nothing
else lined up to say, so I grinned and laughed like some half-witted hyena.

‘Do you know what the first song they’ve chosen for us is?’ he asked, leading me by the hand over to the coffee and croissants.