Soap Star

by Rowan Coleman

  “No problem,” he said miserably, looking at the pavement. “Er, Ruby…?” I backed away from him another couple of steps and looked at the door. My heart was racing.

  “Yes?” I said with a brittle smile. Danny looked up at me and then shook his head.

  “Oh, nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you on the set.” He turned and, shoving his hands deep into his pockets, he walked away quickly.

  I stood outside the front door and waited for a long moment until my heart slowed down and I could breathe again. I didn’t really understand that: all that heart-thundering, fizzy dizziness. It couldn’t have been Danny that made me feel like that. It must have been nerves about seeing Dad in his new place. And indigestion. Nerves and indigestion, that would be it. I looked down the street and saw Danny disappear round the corner. It couldn’t be Danny because it was Justin who I was in love with, after all.

  At last I rang the doorbell to Dad’s flat and after a few seconds I went in. I went into the place where he now lived without me.

  It was all right at Dad’s in the end. For the first few minutes none of it seemed real and, anyway, half of my head was still standing on the pavement outside his flat wondering if Danny really had been about to kiss me, and wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t taken that quick step back.

  Dad sat me down on a worn-out beige sofa and went into the small kitchen that led off the living room.

  “Fancy a juice?” he called out to me.

  “Yeah, OK,” I said. I looked around. It was a small room with a big bay window wreathed in grey and decaying net curtains that made the room seem darker than it was. It was strange to see Dad’s jacket laid across the back of an unfamiliar chair and his shoes kicked under someone else’s fold-down table.

  “So what do you think?” Dad smiled at me, gesturing to the room around him.

  I looked up at him.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I suppose it will be OK once you’ve cleaned it and taken down those nets.”

  Dad sat down next to me and looked at me closely.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” I told him. “I’m not going to cry or anything.” He sort of smiled and handed me a glass of weak orange squash. I looked at it; I hadn’t drunk orange squash since I was about eight years old. But I suppose it was never Dad who got me drinks, it was always Mum and me. Why would he even know? At least now he’d start to know more things about me: small things he never knew before. Things like the fact I only like fresh juice.

  “I’ve missed you,” Dad said.

  “Have you?” I replied quickly. “I thought you would have been too busy with your girlfriend.” I didn’t mean to be cruel, it just came out before I could stop it.

  Dad sighed. “She’s not my girlfriend, Ruby, Sally’s just…a friend.” I shrugged and chewed my lip. It was strange to be in a strange room, not knowing what to say to my own dad.

  “How’s Everest?” Dad asked me. “Still eating us out of house and home?” I smiled because only that morning Everest had jumped on the kitchen worktop and taken two slices of toast straight out of the toaster when no one was looking. He must be the only cat in the world who loves to hunt bread. Probably because he’s such a lazy cat and couldn’t be bothered to chase anything that might actually move.

  “Yeah, he is,” I said without elaborating. After all, it wasn’t “us” Everest was eating out of house and home. It was just me and Mum now. There was another long moment of silence.

  “I heard this great joke this morning – shall I tell it to you?” Dad asked me hopefully. I looked at him.

  “No,” I said. His face fell. “No, Dad, it’s not that I don’t want to hear it, but it’s just that…well don’t you think it’s pointless us pretending that all this is fine and normal?” I thought of what Danny had said to me at lunch. “The thing is, it’s going to take a long time for me to get my head around this. I think…I think I’m beginning to know that it will be OK in the end. That one day all this will make sense to me and one day it will be normal. But it won’t just happen like that. I won’t just feel better over a glass of squash and some bad jokes. There are all these things going through my head: round and round in circles. If we pretend everything’s all right, it never will be. We need to talk about it, Dad.” Dad leaned his forehead against mine and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “You’re right, Ruby,” he said. “I’m not sure when it was you got so wise, but you’re right.”

  He hugged me close to him and, for the first time since the night he told me he was going, he felt like my dad again.

  “And, Dad?” I told him. “I’ve missed you too.”

  Ruby Parker

  Dear Naomi,

  I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to write back to you. When I first got your letter it felt a bit strange because you were right – I do know what you’re going through. But not because of what’s happened to Angel on the show. Because my mum and dad are splitting up too.

  It hurts, doesn’t it? I know it has hurt me very much, but even though I still wish I could make things go back to the way they were before, I know that I can’t. I’m still sad about it, and scared and angry, but at least now I know how things are going to be. At least I’m not waiting for it to happen.

  It must be very difficult for you. It sounds like your mum and dad are very angry with each other and that they’re putting you in the middle of it. I don’t think that either one of them really knows how much this is affecting you or your brother. If they did I’m sure they would stop and try to work things out. It sounds like they don’t really think this is happening to you too. You could try and talk to them, explain how you feel, but if they are too angry and too hurt to listen, then find another adult to talk to – someone who will speak to them for you. But most of all, remember that everything that is happening is happening to you, not because of you. It will be all right one day, Naomi, I don’t know when but I know that it will be.

  Please write to me again and let me know how you are.

  Ruby x

  Chapter Nineteen

  Claire was finishing off my hair by running a pair of straighteners through it.

  “Nervous?” she asked my reflection as she looked at me in the mirror. I thought about it. In about twenty minutes, my – Ruby Parker’s – lips would be meeting the lips of Justin de Souza.

  “No,” I said, and strangely it was true. Claire smiled and shook her head as if she didn’t believe me. “They really think a lot of you here, you know. Don’t be nervous: if you can survive Brett, you can survive a kiss scene, believe me.”

  I frowned at her reflection in the mirror.

  “I don’t think you should be rude about Brett, Claire,” I said. “I know you both have your differences, but, well – she’s done a lot for me.”

  Claire set down the straighteners and crossed her arms.

  “You really must be an angel, the way you look up to Brett. And after everything she’s done to you.” She gave a little shrug. “And anyway, she doesn’t pay my wages any more. You may have noticed that I’m not exclusively her make-up designer now, which is why I’m doing you today. I resigned and I told Liz I’d work on the show only on the condition that I don’t have to work with her – the miserable old cow.”

  “Claire!” I said, laughing despite myself. I sat up in my chair and looked at myself in the mirror. It didn’t really look like me or Angel. They’d put gold highlights through my hair and just enough make-up to make me look, well, kind of pretty, I supposed. The hair, plus some carefully applied colour on my cheeks, a light lip gloss and black/brown mascara looked pretty nice. The sort of thing I’d never be able to do to myself in a million years.

  I remembered I was sticking up for Brett. “Brett’s always been really good to me…”

  Claire brandished some hairspray at me.

  “You still believe that?” she said. “Even after Brett demanded that you should be fired from the show or she was leaving?”

&n
bsp; “Look, no matter what you think of her…” Her words caught up with my ears and my jaw dropped. “What?” I said. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. Claire looked at me with disbelief.

  “You honestly didn’t know, did you? You poor kid.” She leaned back against the dressing-table top and crossed her arms. “God only knows how you don’t – it was all over the set. Everyone can see that Brett hasn’t got it any more. She drinks all the time and swans around like she owns the place – and anyway, the public don’t even care about her any more. She’s jealous of all the young talent. She heard that Liz and Trudy wanted to build your part and she couldn’t stand it. She told them it was her or you. I heard they did discuss giving in to her because, after all, it was Brett who was the star in the beginning, but then she pushed her luck too far with Liz and Liz put her in her place. She looks like a pussycat, Liz does, but she’s got a tiger lurking in there too. So anyway – they chose you.”

  My mind was racing, piecing together conversations I’d overheard or had with Brett: the night I’d talked to her on my phone; Claire’s reaction when she took the credit for keeping me on the show. Was it true? Could it be true?

  “But, it can’t be true,” I said. “Because I’m still here and so is Brett. Brett hasn’t gone.”

  Claire nodded and glanced at the door as if to check that no one was listening. She lowered her voice. “Because when they told her they had no intention of firing you, she realised she couldn’t win. She knew she’d never get another job after this, not at her age. So she just stayed on and carried on acting like a witch. Did you really not know any of that, Ruby?”

  I stared at her and shook my head.

  “Well I had a few other things on my mind,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe Brett had said all of those things about me behind my back and then had pretended that me staying was all down to her. And yet now that Claire said it, it did all seem to fit. It seemed that I had done exactly what some of the viewers of the show do. I’d mixed Brett up with Angel’s mum. I was so used to being exactly like Angel that I just assumed everyone else was like their characters too.

  As I walked out of the make-up room and started to make my way on to the set, my mind was racing and I felt a wave of heat sweeping across me. I felt angry and sort of, well, suddenly I felt free.

  It wasn’t only Brett that suddenly looked like a fake. Suddenly all the house fronts and front doors that led on to nothing and that I used to love looked shabby and wobbly. Even the smell seemed fake too. Even I did.

  If I had become so much like Angel, if Angel was really only me with a different name, then maybe I wasn’t an actress at all. Maybe I was a fake too. After all, like Danny made me realise, I didn’t have to try to be her, I just was her. I used to be dumpy plain Angel/Ruby and now I was still fairly dumpy, nice-hair Angel/Ruby. I was a fraud just like Brett.

  The set was already lit when I arrived, everyone was in place. I looked around and instead of seeing the moonlit garden where Angel was supposed to have her first kiss, I only saw the huge arc lights, the painted backdrop and the hydrangea. Up until this moment I’d really believed in this kiss, this kiss was my kiss. But now I saw it exactly for what it was. A fake kiss, in a wobbly set, next to a half-dead hydrangea – a kiss that wasn’t happening to me at all.

  “Oh, Ruby, glad I caught you. Do have a sec?” I looked up. Maria the show’s publicist was standing at my shoulder holding a clipboard. “I was talking to Girls’ World magazine about you and telling them about all the letters you get and they’ve asked you to guest as an agony aunt for the magazine – what do you think? I think it would be fabulous. Raise your profile as an actress rather than just as Angel.”

  “Um, yeah, whatever,” I said. I looked at the plastic grass, and as one of the technicians came through the patio doors that Caspian would walk out of, they wobbled slightly. There was a bustle by the door and Liz and Justin arrived, deep in conversation. She came over and put her arm around me.

  “Are you ready, Ruby?” she asked me kindly. I smiled at her.

  “Of course I am, Liz, it’s just another scene,” I said. She patted me on the shoulder and turned to speak to the crew.

  “OK, are we ready?” Liz shouted. “Everyone on their marks, please.” I waited for my heart to skip as Justin walked over to me, but it didn’t. It didn’t even wobble.

  “Sorry about the other day, babe,” Justin whispered in my ear. “I was with my girlfriend and, well, I just totally forgot about it. Good old Dan the Man showed up, though, didn’t he?”

  I nodded dumbly and went to my mark by the hydrangea. I should have been heartbroken just then. I should have been disgusted because Justin had just forgotten me after all and Danny had only made up all that stuff about something important coming up so I wouldn’t be hurt. But I didn’t feel anything. Somehow, since I found out about Brett I’d lost the ability to feel anything about anyone. I was in shock. I suddenly knew that when Justin came out of those wobbly patio doors and came over to kiss me, I would have to act after all. I would have to act my socks off to make it look like I was in love with him. Because really, really and truly, I wasn’t in love with him, not me, Ruby Parker. I was just in love with the daydream version of him. To have him as a boyfriend in real life – that would be a nightmare.

  “OK, take one!” somebody shouted.

  “Angel?” Caspian said. “Don’t stay out here on your own. Come inside – it’s almost time for the cake.”

  “Cut!” A round of applause rippled across the set. Liz came out of the shadows and rushed up to both of us. She kissed Justin and then hugged me.

  “That was wonderful, just wonderful – and on the first take! Perfection. You both played that just right, and as for you, Ruby…” Liz squeezed me again until her jewellery jangled. “Well, you were amazing. Sometimes I don’t think we deserve a talent like yours. You were so convincing then, you just caught Angel’s feeling exactly.”

  Justin smiled and winked at me.

  “Well you never know, Liz,” he said, with a swagger, “maybe Ruby didn’t have to act like she was in love with me.”

  Everyone laughed and as I felt my face flush bright red I caught Danny’s eye. He was standing behind one of the cameras almost in shadow. He looked at me for a long moment then turned round abruptly and left.

  And the strangest thing was that all the butterflies and trembles and heart thumping that didn’t happen when I kissed Justin, happened just then when Danny looked at me. It was like a rock band had started a concert in my chest. I was sure anyone who looked at me right then would know…

  I had fallen for Danny Harvey by mistake.

  “Um, Liz?” I broke into Justin and Liz’s conversation. “Is it all right if I pop out for five minutes before the next scene? I need some air.”

  Liz patted me on the shoulder. “Off you go, Ruby. Justin and I need to sort out his motivation for the party scene anyway.” I walked quickly off the set, my mind racing, stopping only to pick up my bag as I went. At last I got out on to the lot and, despite it being a baking hot day, the air still felt cool on my cheeks. I sat on the steps that lead up to the auction house door that leads nowhere, pulled my phone out of my bag and phoned Nydia. She answered immediately.

  “So how did it go?” she asked by way of a hello.

  “How did what go?” I asked her. My brain was still in shock.

  “Your kiss, idiot! With Justin!” I blinked in the bright sunlight and rubbed my hand across my forehead.

  “Oh, well you know, it was nothing really. We said our lines and then he just kissed me. It was like he just put his lips on mine. And nothing.” There was a short silence at the other end of the line.

  “Nothing?” Nydia said, clearly disappointed.

  “Nope,” I told her. “Everything’s gone a bit weird, Nydia. Just all of a sudden. It’s like, I don’t know. I think I’ve been so focused on keeping everything the same and trying to stop my life from changing that I had
n’t realised – I’ve changed too.” I looked around me. There was no one around so I could talk.

  “Do you mean your highlights?” Nydia asked me seriously.

  “No! I mean me,” I told her. “Look, I haven’t really got it all straight in my own head yet, but the thing is…I found out today that it was Brett who wanted me off the show…”

  “Brett Summers!” Nydia screeched. “But she’s your mentor!”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “And that was a shock because, well, I thought I could trust Brett. I thought she really did care about me. Now I realise that all of that was just fake.” I watched an ant trail across the step beneath my feet. “And then I thought, I’ve been doing this for so long, I’ve been Angel for so long and she’s been me, that we’ve just blurred into one. Like when I had a crush on Justin, she had a crush on Caspian. Maybe I only thought I fancied him because she did? It’s like I don’t know where I finish and she begins. And that’s not acting. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” Nydia said simply. I couldn’t blame her, I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what I meant.

  “Well anyway,” I continued, “then today came the big scene, the all-important moment in my life – in Angel’s life – and suddenly I didn’t care any more. I didn’t care if I kissed Justin or a plank of wood – and funnily enough I don’t think there would have been much difference.” Nydia laughed uncertainly. “But…I had to act as if it was the most wonderful moment of my life. I had to act it, Nydia, and I did. And I was pretty good too.” I remembered how I felt when Liz had praised me. “I got this amazing buzz from it. I can’t remember the last time I had that.”

  “You’re sure that it wasn’t Justin’s hot lips?” Nydia asked me playfully.