The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Seventeen

     Not knowing what to do with her hands without a constant supply of cigarettes she took too many nervous sips at her glass and was having to refill it while I was still only half way down mine.

     ‘Were you ever married?’ I asked.

     ‘Came close a few times, in the early days, when rich men were still taking an interest. I worked at a casino in the West End as a croupier and had a couple interesting proposals there.’

    ‘Why didn’t you, then?’

     She narrowed her eyes and stared at me and for a moment I thought she was going to tell me to mind my own business. ‘Couldn’t imagine giving up my ambitions. What man would be willing to put up with a woman hustling her way up through the show business jungle? If I’d married I would’ve had to admit defeat on all that; give up my dream.’

    We both fell silent at that, me thinking about the fact that I’d given up Luke and her probably thinking about a lot more than that.

     ‘Can you understand that?’ she asked eventually.

     ‘Oh, yes.’

     ‘Not many women can. Most of them, by the time they get to my age, think I’ve made all the wrong choices. They look at this,’ she gestured round the room, ‘and they compare it to their big houses and their family holidays and their big fat pensions, and they think I’m deluded. But they’ve never known what it feels like to be standing in a spotlight with every pair of eyes in the room on you as you dance or sing or whatever. Or if they have, they’ve forgotten it. They’ve forgotten what it feels like to be the centre of attention. Would I rather be spending my days cooking meals, doing school runs and going to coffee mornings?’

     She left the question unanswered and I waited for her to go on.

     ‘I know I haven’t made it yet, but I still could. Every day that I wake up there’s a chance that something amazing will happen; a hit record or a television job, something that will be the big break I need to get back on top.’

     ‘Did you act then?’

     ‘Still do when I can get the jobs. It’s usually background work but sometimes I get a line and you never know, do you? I played a patient in Casualty a year or so ago, but they made me up to be dying of cancer so you’d never have known. If this makeover programme does okay it could lead to something else. Maybe I could end up as your neighbour at The Towers.’

     I laughed politely, but I actually felt a tremor of anxiety, like she was threatening my private territory. I was happy to spend time with her as long as it was here, in her dingy basement, which I could escape from at any time. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about having her in my life any more than that. I was shocked by my readiness to reject her as quickly as she had once rejected me. She topped my glass up. If she had seen the horror on my face she didn’t mention it.

     ‘What other stories has Quentin sold for you in the past?’ I asked.

     ‘Kiss and tell, you know the sort of thing. I hung out with the pop groups in the seventies, and with a few footballers later on. There was a politician once. The media loves all that. Stories about Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies; names that won’t mean much to you now but were big in their time.’

     ‘Didn’t you feel guilty about grassing on your lovers?’

     ‘They always benefited in the end, raised their profiles in the media, came out looking like super-studs.’

     ‘What about their marriages?’

     ‘If they were screwing girls like me on the side their marriages were pretty f***ed anyway, don’t you think? Some girls I knew would encourage their lovers to get divorces and marry them, and then take them to the cleaners later. At least I never did that.’

     ‘Most people end up getting married and then staying together though, don’t they?’

     ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘But then most people give up on their dreams quite quickly, maybe before they’ve even left school. I never wanted to do that.’

     ‘How do you know that your dreams aren’t just fantasies?’

     ‘Well you don’t, until they come true. But having fantasies can be fun too. I’m not sure most people’s reality is that great.’

     It felt like I was talking to a real-life older version of Nikki. Maggie was a one-woman research project for an aspiring young actress.

    ‘What about you?’ she changed the subject. ‘What was the story behind the boy with the gun?’

     ‘Pete? He was my first love, childhood sweetheart, but he got too much into the drugs, frazzled his brain. He was sweet though.’

     ‘Yeah, but a gun; f***ing hell, Steff…’

     ‘I know; but it’s all calmed down now. Quentin’s trying to get him a music career.’

     She laughed. ‘That man never misses a trick. With Quentin behind him it just might happen.  And what about the pop singer?’

     ‘Luke? I’ve been in love with him since I twelve.’ I grinned sheepishly.

     ‘Ah, so you have fantasies too. Or is it a dream come true?’

      I shrugged, not wanting to let her into that part of my life, not yet anyway. It was still all much too raw and painful. I changed the subject.

    ‘Did you mean it when you said I could wear your dress for the Baftas?’