The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Three

The next day my whole life changed. Goodbye to the hotel kitchens, goodbye to being paid bugger all, hello the best job imaginable, starting at fifty grand a year. Fifty grand a year! I couldn’t believe it when Dora told me. I mean, f***ing hell, that’s the sort of money that men in suits and Jaguars earn, isn’t it?

      ‘They’ve sent over the contracts,’ she told me when I phoned, ‘which I’ll go through for you, although I’m sure it’s all standard stuff. You start with a three month contract, with an option for the following three months. And they’ve sent some scripts too, which you had better come and get.’

     She sounded so excited for me it brought tears to my eyes. She was usually such a cynical old bag but I’d always suspected she’d been putting it on to hide her disappointment, or maybe to deal with the boredom of teaching class after class of talentless tossers. No offence meant.

     I went straight over to her flat and she said I could stay there to read the scripts, which was a relief because Pete’s place was a bit crowded and there was no electricity, which made everything difficult, and there was no way I could go back home just at the moment unless I was going to grovel to Dad and promise to give up any ideas of becoming an actress – fat chance of that now! Mum said there was no way he was willing to back down yet, so we had a stalemate and I was going to be on Pete’s skanky old mattress for a while yet. I curled up on an old sofa in the corner of Dora’s sitting room, which was covered in shawls and cats, and started to read, while she sat at the kitchen table on the other side of the arch reading the contracts and chain smoking.

    My character was called Nikki and to be honest, she was a bit of a slag. This was not going to be a great stretch for my acting talents. Nikki was on the game, disappearing up the West End the whole time, all glammed up, and then coming home to the family and slopping around the house looking like shit. They wanted this dramatic difference between the two sides of her life. She liked to think of herself as a ‘high class escort’, but actually she was just a slapper willing to turn tricks in return for a few quid. She was a ‘good time girl’, enjoying her work and sometimes even bringing it home with her. I’d met a few like her over the years on the estate. They were often the most interesting to us when we were little because they were the ones with the nice clothes and jewellery; at least it seemed nice to us then, although as I grew up and started reading the decent fashion magazines I realised it was all pretty tacky stuff. What I liked about women like that was that they didn’t care what anyone thought of their morals or anything like that, they just cared about what people thought of their bodies, their nail or hair extensions and their fake tans. They were completely honest about their ambitions and their determination not to get stuck in dead end jobs until they had to and not to get weighed down with kids and useless husbands who treated them like skivvies and knocked them about whenever they’d had a few too many. If I hadn’t had my silly dream about being an actress I probably would have gone much the same route, (actually, I probably wouldn’t because Dad would have knocked seven bells out of me the first time I tried to go out in fishnets and hair extensions).

      Dora said the buzz around the studio was that they were wanting to stir up a bit of controversy with Nikki, get the media tutting over the declining standards of behaviour amongst young people and ‘the shocking things that get shown on telly these days’. Normally I would have been all for that. I like a bit of shocking behaviour myself, but I could just imagine what Dad’s reaction was going to be. This was exactly what he was worried about, me tainting our ‘respectable’ family name. I felt a tiny stirring of nausea, deep inside my stomach, partly because I knew there was no way I wasn’t going to play this one to the hilt. If they wanted a slapper, a slapper was what they were going to get, with all the necessary bells and whistles. I would be the sluttiest f***ing slapper to hit the small screen since … well, since forever. But how long would it take for my father to talk to me again? Although I didn’t know the details, I knew there had been feuds in his family before which had gone on forever, with people refusing to speak to one another all the way to the grave. I’d never even met his mum and dad and he absolutely refused to talk about them. I only knew they were alive because Mum told me one day when he was out, and then made me promise not to mention them to him.