The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

Chapter Twenty Three

Maggie’s ghostwriter was obediently emailing material through to me every few days and I would print it off and take it into work with me to read. I have to say it was a gripping story. It sounded like she had come from pretty much the same sort of family as Gerry, really straight and maybe a bit boring. Rebelling at fifteen she left home in search of adventure in London, and found plenty of that. She became a page three model within a few days of arriving in the city, (lying about her age), and was working for an escort agency within a few months. She wanted to act and sing, but everywhere she turned she was told she needed an ‘equity card’, which was like a union membership, but she couldn’t get one unless she was in work – bit of a Catch22 really. One sort of work that would get her the card was stripping, so that was how she ended up at Raymond’s Revue Bar.

     Bloody hell. That was a bit of a thought-provoker. Would I have been willing to put myself through all that in order to get into the business? Yeah, I guess I would have done. And would I have ended up in the same horrible mess? Almost certainly. The further I read into the story the more I could identify with her. She painted a scary picture of what life in London must have been like in the Seventies and all in all it made me grateful that I’d been born when I had.

     As the days passed and the pages kept arriving I came to terms with the idea of Maggie spilling the beans. Even when she reached the part describing her fling with Dad, which only took a few pages if I’m honest, I didn’t think it was going to be too hurtful to Mum. When it came to talking about giving me away it was a bit hard to read and it took several tries before I was able to do it without choking up, but she did have the grace to make Mum out as a sort of modern-day saint.

     Lulled into a false sense of relief, I wasn’t braced for the next blow, which came from a completely different direction and knocked the breath out of me all over again. I should have realised that Quentin was up to something the night we had dinner together, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that Dad might also writing a book until the serialisation came out in the Daily Mirror. The whole concept of Dad, the man who thought reading anything other than the Daily Mirror or News of the World was ‘a bit poofy’, writing a book was almost too surreal to take in.

     ‘My dad is your f***ing client too?’ I raged down the phone on the morning the serialisation appeared. ‘Have you signed up my entire f***ing family?’

    ‘Not quite,’ he chuckled, ‘you’re still holding out, but I’m hopeful you’ll see the light soon.’

     ‘Couldn’t you have at least warned me this was coming?’

     ‘Would have felt obliged to if you were my client,’ he said, smarmy git. ‘But as it is I had to protect my existing client’s confidentiality.’

     ‘That is such crap, Quentin, and you know it.’ I hung up, angry but pretty impressed at the same time.

     Dad’s story was very different to Maggie’s. The first extract in the paper mainly covered his childhood, up till the time he came across to England from Ireland in search of work on his eighteenth birthday. The main thrust of the story was his relationship with his father. I’d never met my grandfather, never even heard Dad talk about him, and now I knew why. The man was a monster. He beat the children to within an inch of their lives, as well as his wife, and had sex with all of them as if it was his divine right. How the ghostwriter had got Dad to open up about such personal stuff, when he had kept it all bottled up for so long, God alone knows, but he had made up for lost time. Every gory detail was there, but at the same time he painted kind of a nice picture of growing up in Ireland in the Sixties, buried away deep in the countryside. There was obviously terrible poverty in the family as well as the cruelty, but Dad had managed to describe a way of life that I would imagine not many people still experience, at least not in Britain. As I read his words I felt so sorry for the small boy telling the story, and for the first time ever I actually understood why Dad was the way he was; why he drank to try to silence the voices in his memory and why he had been guarding the family’s privacy so fiercely. I felt sad and guilty that my success had forced him to reveal so many of his secrets, but at the same time I felt a sort of relief that it was now all out in the open. Maybe he would be happier and more at peace now, not having to carry all this around in his head.

     Gerry came round that evening, having read the pieces himself and knowing just how badly rocked I was feeling. He didn’t try to talk about it; he was just there for me, his arm around me, comforting me.

     ‘Your dad’s an okay guy,’ he’d said soon after our disastrous visit home, making me even angrier with him. ‘He’s had a hard time.’

     Now I realised how right Gerry had been and how intuitive and how understanding. Maybe it was a bloke thing; maybe they all have some silent language when they’re drinking together that lets them instinctively know about one another’s wounds, where we girls would have to vocalise the whole thing to get it out there.

     ‘Are you coming to the recording of this “Meet the Real..” thing?’ I asked later in the evening as we cuddled on the sofa watching the pleasure boats gliding past on the river, covered in fairy lights.

     ‘Nah,’ he laughed. ‘That’s just for celebrities.’

     ‘What do you mean?’

     ‘They’re not letting any civilians in.’

     ‘I could get you in,’ I protested. ‘I’ll have a word.’

     ‘No, really, I know my place.’

     ‘That is such bullshit.’

     ‘Listen, I spend my whole time waiting around in television studios for things to happen; it won’t break my heart to have a night off.’

     To be honest I was a bit sad that he didn’t want to be there to see me in my hour of triumph, but I could hardly admit that, could I? Not when he was being so modest and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It would have made me sound like a right prima donna, so I just left it.

     I rang Dad later that evening, once I’d collected my thoughts a bit. He didn’t hang up.

     ‘Read your story in the paper, Dad.’

     ‘Yeah?’ his voice was slow and slurred. ‘Well you don’t want to be believing everything you read in those rags.’

     ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

     ‘I’m saying nothing.’ He sounded belligerent and I didn’t feel like fighting.

     ‘Okay. I love you Dad.’

     ‘Hah!’

     I have no idea what he meant by that because he hung up and when I tried to ring back no one was answering the phones again. I could imagine that seeing his words edited up by a paper must have been a bit of a shock, but then he had been the one to say that reporters were all ‘slimy’ anyway, so maybe he would have anticipated it. I knew the newspaper would have picked out all the shocking bits from the book and left out a lot of the parts that he probably thought gave a more accurate, rounded picture of his life. Welcome to my world, Dad.

     The next day there was another extract, all about his meeting with Maggie. There were pictures too, showing a surprisingly handsome young man. I’m not sure I would have recognised him. He and Maggie would have made a good-looking couple. I could see why she might have been attracted to him that night in the club. He talked about Mum too, and it was obvious how much he loved her. I guess the ghostwriter must have helped him with those words because they weren’t any I’d ever heard him utter, or could even imagine him saying. Dad prided himself on being a hard man and hard men didn’t go in for all that romantic stuff, but the emotions rang true as they were written. It made me cry to think how much it would mean to Mum to read those words. Then he talked about my birth and how he was determined to bring me up and do his best to guide me in life. You can forgive someone a lot of sins when you know that they were willing to do something like that for you. I didn’t bother to ring him that evening; I felt we both knew where we stood now.