by A. J. Crofts
I guess there must be a fair bit of Dad’s temper lurking inside me somewhere because I lost my patience and flared up, telling him not to be such a fucking wuss and to be happy that I loved him, that I didn’t care whether he had number one records or not, that it was him I cared for not his fucking talent. Wrong thing to say again, apparently; I might as well have told him straight out he was a talentless nobody.
Realising my mistake I tried changing tack, telling him how talented he was, reminding him how much I’d loved his music when I was a kid. Well, that finally did it. Not only was I calling him talentless, I was telling him he was a has-been, over the hill, lucky to have someone as hot as me as a girlfriend. At that stage I lost all hope of being able to pull the whole thing back from the brink. In fact, I lost the will to even try.
I stormed out of his flat, bursting with anger, but by the time the taxi had delivered me back to my house the anger had been replaced by a terrible feeling of emptiness and desolation; an awareness that the best relationship of my life had just disintegrated in front of my eyes. Starting a relationship with Luke had been like another of my childhood dreams coming true, and now it had vanished as quickly as it had arrived. It felt horrible that I wasn’t even going to be able to see his family to say goodbye properly. They had been a big part of the last few months of my life and with next to no contact from home they were pretty much all I had apart from Dora.
Maybe, I tried to tell myself, it was for the best. If my feelings for Luke had just been an extension of a childhood fantasy, perhaps it wasn’t the most grown-up basis for a relationship. Was this the moment when I had to grow up and realise that dreams didn’t always come true, even for someone enjoying a run of luck like mine?
All the way home the taxi driver insisted on chatting about The Towers, telling me everything about it that he hated. At the time, feeling trapped and unable to think straight, I just wanted to scream at him to shut up, but in fact he did me a favour by distracting me. At moments like that I hated the fact that people like him knew so much about my life and my work, or at least thought they did, while I knew nothing about them. I didn’t know if he was the kind of guy who beat his wife and children, or anything about him. How come he was free to tell me about my life?
The moment I was inside the house I pulled all the curtains, not wanting anyone to be able to look in, and poured myself a vodka and Coke, adding an extra couple of slugs of vodka in the hope of speeding up a lift in my mood. I tried to fill the silence with the television, but the upbeat tones that seemed to come from every channel grated on my nerves and I had to turn the sound down low, just keeping the flickering picture for company. I tried ringing Mum but her phone was switched off, so I left a message. I tried my sisters and got through but they were in a hurry to go because they were getting ready to go out. There was nothing I could have said to them anyway – they didn’t know anything about my relationship with Luke. How could I complain to them about anything in my life when they believed I’d had all the lucky breaks that they would have wanted? I poured myself another drink, my mood still not lifting, but the pain beginning to numb a little.
When my phone went off, I just picked it up and answered without checking who it was. I don’t know why I did that. I never usually did. I suppose I just assumed it would be Luke or Mum.
‘Hi, Steffi, Quentin James here.’
‘How did you get this number?’That came out too sharply, but I was past caring about politeness. Had he heard about the split with Luke already? Was there nothing this bloody man didn’t know about?
‘No one can escape me,’ he chuckled, in a voice that I guess was supposed to sound jokey but actually came across as spooky. ‘I think we need to meet.’
‘No, really,’ I said, the vodka making me bold, ‘I truly don’t want to sell my story to the papers.’
I was even more certain of that having seen the damage my career choices so far had done to my private life. My father was refusing to speak to me ever again and now the love of my life had dumped me. The last thing I needed was to raise my profile any further.
‘Well, as you know, I think you’re wrong on that. But this is about something different. Someone else has come forward with a story that affects you and I thought I ought to give you a chance to hear it first.’
‘I’m really not interested.’ This was more than I could cope with. ‘If it’s another old school friend dishing the dirt then do your worst.’
A sudden, horrible thought struck me. ‘Is it Luke?’
‘No.’ He paused and I realised I had accidentally given him a glimpse into my head. ‘Why would it be Luke? Have you two fallen out?’
‘No,’ I said, too fast to be convincing. ‘I don’t want to be rude but I’m going to hang up because I really don’t want to talk now.’
I hung up before he could protest, feeling rude but terrified I would give something else away if I kept talking. He tried to ring back but I ignored it, draining my drink then pouring myself another vodka, leaving out the Coke.
I didn’t answer any more calls from unknown numbers, and there seemed to be an awful lot of them, although I was getting a bit confused and dropped the phone quite a few times as I squinted at it, trying to work out who kept ringing and ringing. Eventually I realised it was the doorbell not the phone and I staggered out to answer it. I hoped it would be Mum, responding to my message from earlier, or Luke, realising he’d made a mistake and wanting to make up. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to open my door without checking at the peephole first, when I’d been going to so much trouble not to answer my phone, but there wasn’t anything very logical going on in my brain by then. Maybe I just craved a bit of company, somebody to help me empty out the rest of the vodka. Maybe I tried to look but hadn’t been able to focus my eyes properly by that stage.
Two complete strangers stood on the doorstep, a man and a woman. I could see they were startled by the state I was in. They announced they were from the News of the World. I was getting sick of hearing that name, and told them so. They didn’t really seem to hear, but it’s possible my words were a bit slurred by then and hard to make out. They said they’d been trying to get me by phone because they were following up a story. I tried really hard to understand what they were telling me. It sounded like they were saying a woman had come forward claiming she was my mother. Why would that be interesting to them? Mum wasn’t exactly a state secret. Maybe it was to do with Dad smacking her about. I was about to ask them if that was the best they could do for a story this week, then thought better of it. The man on the doorstep was holding up a picture of a woman who looked like an actress, although I didn’t recognise her. He was asking if I knew her.
I leaned forward and squinted really hard, but the effort made me lose my balance and I toppled into his arms, which really wasn’t what I intended. My legs didn’t seem to be responding very well and so they helped me back into the sitting room and laid me out on the sofa. That was a mistake, because I promptly threw up over the man’s shoes – which should have been embarrassing, but for some reason I didn’t seem to care about anything any more. I did, however, feel a bit better and had another go at trying to understand what they were going on about. They seemed to think that this woman in the photograph was my mother. I explained that she was the wrong colour for one thing – which made me laugh a lot, but not them – and that I had never seen her before in my life. After a while they seemed to accept that they were wasting their time. The female reporter left the woman’s photograph on the table, and a card with her mobile number on, and said I could call her if I wanted to give an interview and that’s the last thing I remember. I guess I must have passed out and they must have let themselves out of the house because by the time I woke up, probably around 14 hours later, there was no one else there.
The room was a pretty good mess and it looked like I had been sick a bit more in my sleep – most of the vomit had matted into my hair and dried to a crust on the sofa cushions.
It took me a few moments to delve far enough back through the nauseous feelings before I remembered why I was so drunk and a dull emotional pain mixed in with all the others.
Little snatches of what had happened the previous night were beginning to come back to me. Seeing the picture of the woman on the table brought a vague memory back, but it wasn’t clear. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t work out what it was. I drank a glass of water, made myself some coffee and toast and sat down to stare at it.
After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I staggered out to the corner shop, collar turned up, Beanie hat pulled way down and Ray-Bans over the eyes, bought a paper, and hurried back home as quickly as possible in case any opportunist decided to take a picture. I guessed it was inevitable after my performance for the reporters that they would soon all be following up my ‘problems with drink’ story.
It had taken me a while to get to the stage of disguising myself when I went out. I didn’t like doing it to start with because I thought it made it seem like I thought I was something important; who does she think she is, then, that she has to go around in disguise? I also quite liked being recognised, especially as everyone was always so friendly, and anyway it was Nikki they were talking to really, not me. But that had very quickly become the problem, because people talked dirty to Nikki, due to the fact that she was a bit of an unashamed slapper. I can talk as dirty as the next person, so it wasn’t that I was shocked or anything, but it does get kind of boring when every bloody man you pass in the street shouts out one of a limited selection of jokes: ‘Fancy a shag?’, ‘Any chance of a blow-job?’, ‘What can I get for a fiver?’ – that sort of thing – obviously believing that he’s the first person in the world to think of such a witty comment.
It became a bit less comfortable still when people started to get the hang of who Steffi was, and started talking to me rather than to Nikki. I know that sounds a bit daft, but it was the way I felt. I didn’t mind answering back to questions like, ‘How much for a blow-job?’ or ‘Fancy a quickie?’ when I could kid myself I was just pretending to be Nikki, but it seemed a bit more personal when it was me; a bit threatening, if I’m honest. Some blokes have a way of letting you know that they really mean it too, that it isn’t just a bit of blokish fun; they’re the sort of guys you wouldn’t ever want to be trapped with alone in a lift, if you know what I mean. There’d been a few of them around the estate when I was a kid, but there I could always avoid them. Now it felt like it was becoming harder to become invisible.
Once the revelations about the squat were published everything went up a notch. Anyone who had coughed up a few pence for a newspaper felt they had the right to talk to me about what they read in it. I guess there is some poetic justice in that, but it doesn’t half get on your nerves after about the tenth time in a half-hour trip to the shops.
But it’s not too hard to make yourself invisible if you don’t mind looking a bit of a mess. In fact, it could be quite liberating to go out looking a bit dowdy and not getting any looks or catcalls. It makes me think I could get the hang of wearing those Muslim outfits where only the eyes are visible. Put one of those on and you can watch the world in private, invisible to them all, like looking out through the darkened glass of a limousine. I can see how that might become a bit comfortable, but maybe not if you have to do it all the time.
Anyway, I managed to get back to the house with the newspapers without a single person giving me a second look, and without throwing up my toast and coffee.
It was still quite tricky to concentrate on the print without the room starting to spin around again and the nausea rising back up, but it wasn’t hard to spot the offending article. There was a headline right across the front page, advertising the story inside: ‘Steffi’s real mum steps out of the past’.
‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘what kind of fuckery is this?’ (Thank you, Amy Winehouse, for the invention of the perfect phrase to fit so many situations.)
I found the page they were talking about, with the same woman’s face staring out of it. The headlines were big enough for me to be able to digest them without too much effort, but beyond that it was just a mass of dirty grey print.
There were four whole pages of it, with big pictures of this silly old tart posing for the cameras like she was still a teenager, pouting and fluttering her eyelashes. There were old pictures too, from when she actually was young and pretty, which looked like they were from the 1970s, all platform shoes and weird hair. Who the fuck was she?
The pictures made it look like she thought she was some sort of celebrity but I’d never heard of her. I tried to read the text, but the words didn’t seem to make sense to me. My eyes were bleary with tears and I was having trouble getting enough air, which was making me feel faint and sick at the same time. I stopped for a moment, took some deep breaths and stared out the window, but when I looked back down my eyes had gone even more out of focus. It was like this woman and the reporter she was talking to had managed to climb into the very deepest, darkest, most private part of me. They were attacking Mum and Dad and the very core of who I was. There was even a fuzzy old picture of Dad, looking a lot younger than I ever remembered, and a new picture of him peering out through the net curtains at home like some trapped animal or a seedy old criminal in hiding. The press must have had the flat under siege in order to get that shot and I knew how horrible that felt.
I remembered the reporters coming to see me; the woman’s card was still lying on the table. I thought about ringing her and asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing making up such a bloody stupid load of crap, but I stopped myself. The tiny bit of common sense that was still able to function among the flood of adrenalin told me that I needed to have at least read the whole story before I started sounding off. I also knew that if I rang then I would lose my temper and end up in floods of tears, which would not be helpful.
Although I couldn’t concentrate enough to read the main part of the text, I could make out some of the bits they had extracted and put into bigger print, and I could read the captions under the pictures. She seemed to be saying that she’d had an affair with Dad, got pregnant and that Mum had agreed to bring me up as her own. She also seemed to be claiming that giving me away had broken her heart, which was why she had never been able to make contact with me again.
Part of me wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but another part immediately thought how hurt and upset Mum would be by such a horrible story. I reached for the phone and dialled her number, but it was switched off. Things were beginning to feel bad. I really needed to speak to her, to explain that this was nothing to do with me, to apologise for bringing all this to their door, to tell her how much I loved her. I plucked up my courage and dialled the home number. Dad answered, the first time I’d heard his voice since he’d phoned to say I was no daughter of his and never would be again.
‘Can I speak to Mum, please?’ I asked, fighting to keep my voice steady.
He hung up. I rang back, angry now, but the phone just kept ringing. I could imagine him shouting at everyone not to answer it, that it was just that bitch of a non-daughter who had brought disgrace on the whole family. I had never felt so alone in my life. Part of me wanted to ring Luke, but a small stubborn streak – inherited from Dad, I guess – wouldn’t let me be the first one to make contact there. Dora’s phone was switched off and I couldn’t think of anyone else. Then I saw Gerry’s name and dialled without thinking, knowing he would be pleased to hear from me, feeling safe, feeling guilty that I was turning to him like this in my hour of need.
‘Hi, Gerry, it’s me.’
‘Are you OK?’ he asked. I wondered if he’d seen the paper or if he could just tell from my voice.
‘No. Can you come over?’
‘Of course. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Gerry had been on my conscience a bit. He was always so nice to me around the studio, never putting me under any pressure, even though it was obvious
how he felt about me, but always happy to chat in the canteen or during the quiet bits of the day when we were all waiting for something to happen. I’d taken to reading books a lot during the quiet periods and he always seemed to have read them all and remembered all the plots and characters.
‘I had to travel a lot before I got this gig,’ he’d reminded me, ‘doing documentaries up mountains and in jungles and the rest. You get a lot of time to read when you’re on planes or lying awake in tents listening to insects.’
I was really getting into all the telly ‘classics’, things like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. I fancied doing some of those, sitting around in posh houses in pretty costumes twittering about husbands and the rest. I wanted something that would show I could do the posh accent, that I wasn’t just doing Nikki well because she sounded like me.
Some of the other actors read a lot too, but others would tease me for being a boffin, a bit like my family might have done or my friends at school, but more good natured. That was pretty much the extent of my relationship with Gerry since I’d moved out of his house and I was worried that I might be using him by only calling on him now I was completely alone and confused. I needn’t have worried – the moment he arrived it was obvious he was happy to be asked and was only concerned by how upset he could see I was. The ease with which he wore his friendship for me made me want to cry all over again.
