The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Thirteen

     Mum came across as pretty much a saint in the whole thing – if perhaps a bit of a doormat to dad – and the paper didn’t hesitate to remind its readers of how I had told my acting class about Dad beating her up. I felt really sorry for her, but I was also beginning to feel a bit pissed off with her as well. If even part of this woman’s story was true, how come she had never told me? How had she let me go for so long believing she was my mum? Why wasn’t she ringing me and coming round and helping me to come to terms with things, explaining the story from her side? Unless, of course, Dad wasn’t letting her. That was likely, but why was she letting him do that to both of us? Why didn’t she stand up to him for once? I loved her like mad, but I had to admit she was coming out of this looking like a bit of a serial victim.

     It also pissed me off to think that Dad had been lecturing me about the family’s ‘reputation’, when he had pulled a stunt like this. How dare he refuse to talk to me when he’d been lying to me all these years? If I was endangering the family’s good name by being an actress what was he doing that night in Soho?

      The more I thought about the whole situation the more my head was spinning. Most of all I felt like I’d been isolated even further from the family. If the story was true my brothers and sisters didn’t even share the same mother as me, I truly was an outsider. 

    Gerry came to bed with me that night, but he didn’t even attempt sex, just cuddled me until my whirling thoughts finally allowed me to go to sleep. I was grateful for that. My head was still full of Luke and it wouldn’t have felt right to be doing it with someone else, not yet, not even Gerry.

     The next morning we set off for the studios together like an old married couple, falling back into our old routine. There were a few press lurking around outside the studio doors but they didn’t even give a second glance to the scruffy young couple in the battered old car. As the day progressed they started to find ways of getting through to me inside the studio, despite security. One got into the canteen at lunchtime, posing as an actor on some other programme, another managed to get me paged on the studio landline by pretending to be calling about my grandmother dying. A third got through to my mobile when someone else answered it for me while I was filming. They were all making the same offers of protection if I sold them my side of the story. I said nothing to any of them, just pretended I couldn’t hear them, as if they didn’t exist. I can understand now how film stars or other people in the media get that glazed look in their eyes when they’re walking through crowds. They have to make the outside world invisible otherwise it would overwhelm them with its attentions. I don’t know why I’m talking about them like they’re another species; I had become one of them and it was a very scary feeling. At least film stars have their millions to protect them, and their studio minders, and the big politicians have policemen at their doors. All I had between me and the pack was Gerry and his mum and dad.    

     The whole day I had a lot of trouble concentrating on work, which worried me. I had a big scene to do with one other character, just the two of us, spitting and fighting over the same man – Nikki had been up to her tricks with someone else’s husband and the shit was just hitting the fan. We did take after take and in the end I just had to summon every ounce of energy and block everything else out of my mind. I really let rip, which had the desired effect, taking my fellow actress by surprise, which worked for the scene. The crew gave me a round of applause at the end, which made me feel good for about ten seconds before I remembered what I was going to be doing that evening after work.

     I was still very unclear what I was in for once I got to Quentin James’s office. Mum had been too choked up to really explain anything over the phone, and then Dad must have come back into the room she was calling from because she suddenly pretended to be talking to someone else and hung up, all breezy and cheerful; I was coming to the conclusion she was a better actress than I had previously given her credit for. A few days earlier I would have assumed that was where I’d inherited my talent from, but now I didn’t know anything any more. That was what was really freaking me out. Who the f*** was I? Was Dad really my dad? Was I adopted? I hadn’t been able to get any questions out during the call and when I tried to ring back again later her phone had been turned off. Chances were he’d guessed who she was talking to and had smashed it to pieces. If he was cross with me before, he must have been a thousand times angrier by then and just thinking about it made me want to cry again.