The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Thirteen

Gerry could see I was in shock and put his arm around me. I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from shaking, like I was coming down from a bad trip, or staggering out of a car crash. I just couldn’t get things straight in my head.

     ‘She says it’s true,’ I managed to say eventually.

     ‘Shit.’ He hung onto me for a minute, then said, ‘we need to get you out of here before the rest of the press arrive.’

     ‘Where can I go? I could go to a hotel, I suppose.’

     ‘No,’ he sounded firm, calm, in control. ‘We’ll go to Mum and Dad’s. No one will think of looking for you there.’

     ‘What about your neighbours?’ I asked, remembering the video camera at the bedroom window outside my house the night Pete came round.

     ‘I don’t even know who the neighbours are,’ he admitted. ‘Mum and Dad have always pretty much kept themselves to themselves. As long as you aren’t seen going in we’ll be fine. No one would think of connecting you to us.’

     The idea of being anonymous again, like Gerry and his family, seemed incredibly attractive. I had always thought that being famous was the passport to everything good in life, not realising it would mean never being able to escape from anyone who might be looking for me.

     From a quick glance at my reflection in the mirror I could see it was unlikely anyone was going to recognise me from a casual glance just at the moment. To be honest I looked like a complete minger and if anyone did manage to get a picture it would make the front pages just because it showed what a state I’d got myself into. The press were still trying to get through on the phone, but when Gerry peered out there was no sign of any activity yet in the street. I shoved a few essentials into a bag, drew the rest of the curtains so they wouldn’t know whether I was there or not, and we scurried down the road to Gerry’s battered old Saab. I glanced up at the bedroom opposite but there was no one there. He’d be kicking himself if he knew what he was missing, the nosey bastard.

     When we got there it felt a bit like coming home. Gerry’s mum and dad were so sweet, just acting like it was a normal Sunday and I was just a normal girlfriend that their son was bringing home for a visit. They were Sunday Express readers, not News of the World, so they hadn’t heard anything about this latest twist in my parallel tabloid life. Going there was exactly the right thing to do, to just be having a normal Sunday at home with a normal family. Gerry was so kind to me, not trying to force me to talk if I didn’t want to, just making sure I had food and warmth and an endless river of hot tea.

     As the shock of the revelations began to wear off and the shaking died down, I found I could actually read the story and take it in. The woman’s name was Maggie, although she might have been making that up because her whole life seemed to be a bit of a sham. The story was that she had been a bit of a ‘vice girl’ herself in the seventies and eighties, (their words, not mine, and probably not hers either, I guess, knowing how reporters work). She claimed she’d had a one-night stand with Dad when they met in a strip club in Soho when Dad was on a stag night with some mates.

     That was a pretty revolting picture to get my head round, but I managed to do it without losing the little bit of lunch that I’d managed to choke down. She then went into a whole load of crap about how she had to give me up because of the stigma of being an unmarried mother in ‘those days’ and the pressures of society – I mean we’re hardly talking about Victorian times here are we? It was the late bloody 1980s for f***’s sake! Seemed more likely it was the pressures of being a career ‘vice girl’ that helped her towards her decision, but I kept telling myself I shouldn’t judge the woman on things I read in the press because it was impossible to know which were her own words and which ones had been put into her mouth by reporters. She did say that giving me up to Mum had been ‘the most painful day of her life’. Well, good!