The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Two

This 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.’

    ‘F*** 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.

     ‘Okay,’ 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 amongst 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.