All She Wants

by Jonathan Harvey

  Also, Sandra’s husband Alan is not a cross-dresser. The party was a ‘fancy dress party’ and people had to come dressed as their favourite character from the show – a wonderful ‘theme’, I’m sure you’ll agree – and Alan came as Sorrel the tarty barmaid. Claiming he is a cross-dresser is libellous. He is an upstanding pillar of our local community and a very popular postman (three hundred pounds in ‘Christmas tips’ can’t be wrong).

  Sandra and Alan do not, I repeat not, live in a ‘council house’. It is an ex-council house, and actually, when you think about it or care to drive past it you will find it is in fact a very attractive dormer bungalow with a beautiful Spanish villa-style theme to the outside that is very evocative (of Spain). It is the only residence on Flaxton Road to have a wagon wheel attached to its edifice and many people have commented on how unique that is. Only the other week a complete stranger knocked on Sandra’s door and told her quite blatantly, ‘I think your house is the nicest in the whole street.’ But Sandra is modest and has never told a soul about this incident. She is not a bragger.

  When Sandra said her children were like black identical twins, this makes her sound ‘racist’. She is not. She has many black friends at her workplace and enjoys much banter with them, none of it of an off-colour nature. She actually said, ‘like those black twins off that TV play in the Eighties.’ I forget the name of it now, but it was really good and the actresses in it were really good (whatever happened to them? Maybe you could do a piece on it. But get their names right!). I know she said this because I was standing nearby at the time. I really want to clear this up as I would hate to think that her black friends would phone and ask her what she meant, and point out that she is racist. She is one of the least racist people I have ever met. Phone calls of this nature would really upset her and I would urge anyone who may have made one of these calls (not that I know they have, but just say they had for instance) to apologize to her at work next time they see her. She really does have a heart of gold. (Her favourite light entertainment personality for many a year was Rustie Lee and her favourite pop song is ‘Ebony and Ivory’ by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, who is not only black but blind as well. That’s just what she’s like.)

  You claim Jodie has only ever studied drama at that place on Allerton Road. This is a lie. She went to one of the ‘top London drama schools’, where she shone playing lots of ‘upper crust’ parts such as Lady Bracknell and ‘the like’.

  Her partner Stuart is not an actor. He has a very high-powered job in London and, although he is dishy enough to be a Hollywood action hero in the style of ‘Jean-Claude Van Damme’, he’s never been in front of a camera in his life.

  Finally, Jodie never said those things about her workplace being like a crack den. What she actually said was ‘acting is like a drug to me’. I find your comments ‘obnoxious’ and, actually when you think about it, offensive to Scousers. We are not all crackheads, we are nice, sensible people with good jobs and dormer bungalows with through lounges and serving hatches we pass Sunday roasts through, not heroin, smack or any of those other stereotypically Liverpudlian things. I have a feeling Ms Haynes had a Manchester accent and would actually question why she is ‘employed’ by Merseymouth in the first place.

  The people of Liverpool will not stand for this. It was a lovely party, beautifully organized by Sandra McGee, who is one of the nicest people I have ever met.

  Yours sincerely,

  Maureen O’Flaherty (Mrs)

  That afternoon a note was pushed through the door at Sandalan. It read:

  Sandra,

  Stop writing shite and pretending to be me, it is a cause of deep embarrassment. Also, Mum has taken a turn for the worse so I will do as you suggested at your party and shove my Fiat Uno up my arse.

  Maureen.

  PS Tonys offer of a job for Stuart still stands. Jodies the innocent in all this.

  ‘A job?’ I gasped as we all bent round the letter to read it. Mum immediately tore it into tiny pieces and hurried to the bin in the kitchen to dispose of it. I looked at Stu.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said.

  ‘What a bitch!’ Mum called from the kitchen.

  ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘After all I’ve done for her!’ Mum continued. Dad hurried to her side.

  ‘Don’t let her get to you, love.’

  ‘I think we should move to Liverpool,’ said Stuart.

  Whoops. Rug-pulled-from-under-feet time.

  ‘Y’what?’

  ‘How would she like it’, said Mum, hysterical now, ‘if I stuck a note to her Tony through their door telling him what she got up to with Ged from the Elephant after she won on the bingo that night?’

  Stuart shrugged. ‘We’ll talk about it on the train.’

  ‘No, we’ll talk about it now.’

  ‘He only did it coz he was after her money. She only won a hundred and eighty quid.’

  ‘Look at us, Jode.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘I’m gonna phone him,’ Mum was saying.

  ‘No you’re not,’ Dad was saying.

  ‘It’s at times like this I wish I could text,’ Mum said before lighting a cigarette and going into the garden. Dad followed her.

  ‘We live in that tiny flat,’ Stuart was saying, sounding all needy. ‘Up here we could buy somewhere, get a mortgage. The cost of property’s much cheaper here than in London.’

  ‘But your job’s in London.’

  ‘And yours is here.’

  ‘I’m hardly ever in the show.’ Now I was sounding needy.

  ‘But that’s gonna change.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Minge said. Last night.’

  ‘It’s Ming. You know it’s Ming. But what about your lovely flat in London?’

  ‘Our lovely flat,’ he corrected.

  Actually, if he’d corrected me properly he’d’ve just said, ‘Jodie it’s tiny.’

  ‘We can rent it out, charge a bit more than the mortgage and we’ll have a bit more money to spend each month,’ he added.

  Well that made sense

  ‘But who would we rent it to?’

  ‘Mandy from work said she’d be interested.’

  ‘Mandy the lesbian?’

  He rolled his eyes and nodded, and I felt a bit daft for calling her that, so I made out I was joking.

  ‘Lesbians . . . are allowed to live indoors?’

  He chuckled. Then looked all serious.

  ‘And if you must know . . .’ his voice trailed off and he shoved his hands in his pocket. A sign of defeat. But where was the battle? ‘It’s Jan.’

  Ah, there was the battle.

  ‘Your mum? What about her?’

  Turned out his mum had started turning up at whichever house he was working at towards the end of each working day and hassling him to go for a drink or dinner. He’d not told her where he was working – he was often in a different house each week – but she’d taken to ringing up the office and saying she was his mum and needed to get a message to him. It was starting to piss his bosses off, not to mention him. It was as if she was stalking him. He showed me his phone. He’d had thirty missed calls from her in the past twenty-four hours. He wanted to escape her.

  ‘God, she sounds like a nightmare,’ I said, deflated rather than defeated.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘You should call the police,’ I said. A genius idea.

  ‘She’s my mum. I can hardly say to the rozzers. “My mum keeps ringing me. Keeps coming to see me. They’d go, “So what?”’

  He looked so beautiful, stood there in our hall. And he’d been so lovely to me this past weekend. These past few months, really. Part of me pitied Jan. Of course she wanted to see him, he was her beautiful son. The other part of me wanted to scratch her eyes out, messing with his head like this. How dare she!

  ‘She’s on some sort of medication,’ he ventured.

  ‘And I’m guessing it’s not for hay fever.’


  He shook his head sadly.

  I thought about it. He had a point. Up here we’d be able to buy somewhere eventually – if my number of episodes went up, and if Tony was offering him a job.

  ‘I can understand you not wanting to be here coz of Greg,’ he said. And that sealed it.

  ‘My past’s not gonna rule my life, Stuart.’

  ‘I just don’t know what to do for the best.’

  He sounded so helpless. I stepped closer and hugged him. He took his hands from his pockets and put them on my bum.

  ‘Best get to London and get packing then, kid,’ I whispered. I felt him chuckle.

  ‘I love you, babe,’ he said, which was nice, because usually it was me who said it first.

  I came back with his usual reply, ‘Affirmative from me, too, Captain.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first few months back in Liverpool, Stuart and I moved into my old bedroom at Sandalan and kept our stuff in storage in Our Joey’s old room. Mum said there was no likelihood of him paying a flying visit at the moment because he was working through the summer in some clubs in Ibiza. I warned her he’d probably be off his face on pills and injecting vodka into his eyeballs, she said I had a very narrow-minded view of DJs. No, I countered, just a very narrow view of my brother. Stuart started working for Maureen’s husband Tony’s building firm and I started to get more episodes of Acacia Avenue as my character eventually stopped being just an adjunct of Father Parr and started talking to other people outside of the church. Gradually I was needed at the studios three days a week, then four, and before I knew it it felt like I was there full time. Without access to Maureen’s car I took a taxi to the studios at a cost of five pounds eighty each way, much to Mum’s chagrin. She scoured the pages of the used-car section of the Merseymouth, desperate to be my driver again, but as I’d found out from Dad that she’d been bunking off work to drive me in I put my foot down and told her I insisted on getting a taxi in. She’d had a disciplinary hearing about it apparently and – if Maureen’s Tony was to believed – she’d actually said to her manager at the hearing, ‘Don’t you realize who my daughter is?’ The shame.

  One day I got a text from Mandy in the flat in London:

  Jodie. I have found a necklace of yours behind the bed. Shall I post it up or will you collect it next time your down?

  I texted back,

  The correct spelling is “you’re”.

  No, that was too bitchy.

  Jodie: Thanks, Mandy. Will pick up next time I’m down. Mandy: Cheers Jode. Loving your work.

  Contrary to popular belief an actress in her first few years on a soap does not earn gazillions for her efforts. I got about £400 for each episode I was in, and although the show was on five times a week, I wasn’t in each episode, so earned roughly the equivalent of an office manager in a medium-sized company. Of course, office managers didn’t have cameramen camping on their doorstep each morning, and neither did they run the risk of headlines in the papers such as, OFFICE MANAGER RUBY WAS CRAP IN BED, sold by former lovers, so a lot of the other actors felt we should be paid more because of this inconvenience. I appreciated that it came with the territory, and it was up to me not to roll out of nightclubs hammered at 4a.m. with my bits hanging out. Damage limitation was pretty much a ball in my court. Living rent-free meant me and Stu became cash rich, especially with the few extra quid coming in from Mandy’s rent on the London flat, so we were able to save up our pennies. So much so that very soon we had enough for a deposit on a small flat. We eventually moved into a new-build block overlooking the River Mersey on the outskirts of the city centre. It had pale wooden floors, bare white walls and – on one side at least – floor-to-ceiling glass windows that gave us a stunning view of the river but, on the downside, made you feel you were living in a greenhouse. The building had silver-doored lifts; thick, biscuit-coloured carpet in the communal areas and you used a key fob to let yourself in through the main door to the lobby. In said lobby was a full-time security guard, pretentiously known as our concierge. Usually it was a foghorn-voiced Nigerian woman called Godfavour, who said things like, ‘Oh look. It is you. That lady from the television.’ Or, ‘I watch you on the programme. You are not really a nun, correct?’ Or, ‘You have walked in the dog dirt. You need to wipe your shoe or you get it all over the biscuit-coloured carpet.’ (This is how I knew it was biscuit coloured. Otherwise I would have said it was beige.)

  I was advised by many to take on an agent, but as earning money was new to me and agents took at least 10 per cent of your earnings – sometimes 20 per cent – I didn’t really see the point. It’s not like I was looking for other work.

  Life was sweet for a while. I felt more at home and less of a fish out of water here than I did in London. It was great hanging out with Hayls and Debs again and being able to put my hand in my pocket to repay the kindness they’d shown to me during my povo student years. I had a night out with them every Friday, a night out with Stu every Saturday and a roast round at Sandalan every Sunday. Weekday nights I sat in and learned my lines for the next day while Stu prepared ready meals and opened the odd bottle of wine.

  I was starting to get semi-famous as well. I was lucky that I could leave the house without getting recognized by every single passer-by. That wimple was blooming handy to hide behind on screen, so as of yet no one knew what my hair looked like, or what shape I was in normal clothes as opposed to a grey A-line skirt and matching wrapover cardi (costume had liked my suggestion that Agatha was quite funky). I only ever got recognized by the people waiting at the gates as I arrived in the morning or left in the evening. I always made a point of telling the cab driver to stop while I wound down my window to sign autographs and pose for leaning-out-of-the-car-window photographs for the fans. I sometimes looked through the sea of faces to see if I could spot the fat specky guy who’d hung around the gates that day when I’d gone with Mum and Our Joey all those years earlier, but I never saw him. Maybe he’d died. Or worse, started watching Coronation Street.

  There would be more people at the gates if it was a sunny day or a school holiday. There would certainly be less, or none, it if was raining. Sometimes there would be paparazzi there, too, but they were never interested in me, which suited me fine. It didn’t, however, seem to suit my new best friend on the show, Trudy. Much as I loved Trudy – she was funny, hilariously indiscreet and could be very thoughtful – she was someone who measured her own self-worth by how many column inches she took up in the tabloids or celeb magazines. Most of us turned up to work in clothes that would make the average plasterer look skanky (And I should have known, I had a joint mortgage with one), because let’s face it, once you were in work you were hurried through to your dressing room and then spent the rest of the day in your costume. But Trudy usually turned up as if she was heading to the beach at Magaluf and was determined to get the sun on as many naughty bits as possible. One look was guaranteed to grab headlines: cut-off T-shirt with ‘SLUT’ written on it in pretend lipstick, tiny denim hotpants and saggy knitted Uggs. Her hair was up in a scrunchie and her lips were painted bright white. And she always made her taxi driver drop her on the street outside the entrance, so she had to walk through the autograph hunters and paps before hitting the security barrier. She would perform this little self-created catwalk strut with her mobile clamped to her ear, signing their books like she was swatting away flies, refusing to take her sunglasses off and scowling at the paps as if she was channelling Victoria Beckham on the toilet.

  One of the things I was less enamoured by was the nickname she gave to the autograph hunters at the gate. She called them the door knobs. I was fascinated by her attitude to them, she barely disguised her contempt for them, unlike the rest of the cast who would practically rub themselves off over them whenever they passed by. Yet the ruder she was, the more they seemed to like her. Possibly because the men wanted to shag her and the women wanted to be her. Disdain, it seemed, was a sure-fire way to be popular.

  She had a wee
kly column in the glossy magazine Hiya!, in which she wrote short paragraphs about which pop groups she liked, or what shoes she thought were cool. I first saw evidence of her propensity to be two-faced when she wrote stuff like, ‘Quick shout out to all the guys at the gate at Crystal. Sorry if I sometimes don’t say hi, but I’m like MAD busy right now. Kisses!’

  When I jokily challenged her about it she giggled, peered over her shades and said, ‘You really think I actually write my column, hun? I can just about write my own name.’ I asked her if she was dyslexic. She didn’t answer, but sat there chewing her bottom lip. The next week her column informed her admiring readers that it was ‘a little known fact that I actually suffer from dyslexia, and my heart goes out to anyone reading this who does, too. Take your time, read from left to right, you’ll get there in the end. Kisses!’

  I frequently got recognized on my girly nights out with Debs and Hayls, but that was only because they enjoyed showing off about who I was in the hope that it’d get us free drinks. Hayls had even started keeping a small pile of my publicity shots in the tote – yes tote – bag hanging off the back of her wheelchair – yes, wheelchair; she now claimed to have ME. Debs was prone, after too many WKDs, to aggressively accost passing fellas and say, ‘Oi, do you know who this is?’ pointing to me with the severity of Orla Guerin indicating a war-torn hot spot. Cue blank looks from the innocent bystander. ‘It’s Sister Agatha from Acacia Avenue, you knob!’ Cue polite nodding from said bystander, or a completely blank stare before she’d add, ‘She’s really thirsty and so are we.’ She’d then fold her arms and wait for them to offer to buy us a drink. Bizarrely, it often worked, if only so the poor guy could find an excuse to get away from us, in the same way that people give money to Big Issue vendors as a means of escaping them. When they’d return with the round of alcopops, Hayls would produce a postcard-sized picture of me from her bag, together with a marker pen, and get me to sign it for them. A similar ruse was played with doormen to get us into clubs for free, and security guards to get us into VIP areas.