Hiya!: Jodie. We’re here in the beautiful home that you share with long-term partner Stuart, and it’s clear the two of you are madly in love. What’s the secret to everlasting happiness?
JM: Two and a half litres of water a day, not taking The X Factor seriously and 300 pairs of shoes, of course! (At this point she throws back her head and guffaws as Stuart pats her appreciatively on the knee.) But seriously, it’s about finding your soulmate. The one. Call it what you like, but I guess I’m just really lucky. I’m going out with my best friend. Isn’t that right, Stupot?
SM: Affirmative to that, Captain!
Hiya!: We can see you both share a zany sense of humour. Is that important, do you think?
JM: Who was it said, ‘If you don’t laugh you’ll cry’? I think that’s so true.
SM: Except for the times when you’re not laughing or crying, I guess.
(And again the pair of them laugh their adorable heads off. They are so cute together, aw!)
JM: Yes. Though can I point out to the readers that I don’t spend too much time crying in real life. I do enough of that at work!
SM: Tell me about it.
JM: I just did!
(And again, that infectious laughter.)
Hiya!: Yes, if we could talk about Sister Agatha for a bit. She does do her fair share of crying, doesn’t she?
JM: I’ve been really lucky to get some great stories this year. Big, meaty, dramatic stuff requiring the whole gamut of emotions. I love the way Acacia Avenue treads such a joyous line between tragedy and comedy. In a split second you can be bawling your eyes out, then wetting yourself with laughter.
SM: Why d’you think we had to get a leather sofa?
(Hilarity ensues in the McGee/Moses household.)
Hiya!: What first drew you to the role?
JM: Look. I’ve got to be honest. I didn’t get too much work when I left drama school, so I’d’ve played the invisible man on Acacia Avenue if they’d paid me. But getting the part was such a surprise, a joy. I never in a million years expected to get it, because Sister Agatha and I are so dissimilar.
SM: She’s not actually a nun.
(They clutch each other’s hands and have a no-holds-barred laughathon.)
JM: I thought I’d be more suited to tarty, brassy parts, so it’s lovely doing the kind of job that stretches me as a performer.
Hiya!: Did you think your recent storyline with Father Parr was far-fetched?
JM: Not really. Look, it’s a soap. I think a lot of the time the writers see some chemistry on screen and think, What if?
Hiya!: There were several complaints to Ofcom. How did that make you feel?
JM: Look, priests and nuns fall in love every day of the week, it’s just that nobody talks about it. I thought it was a privilege to be able to present the Roman Catholic church in a non-stuffy way. They get such bad press sometimes, what with paedophilia and the like, I thought it was interesting to show a different side to them.
Hiya!: How did you feel seeing Jodie kissing another man, Stuart? Was that hard?
(Stuart shifts a bit in his seat before placing his hand on Jodie’s knee again.)
SM: At the end of the day, Jodie’s an actress. Of course I don’t particularly enjoy seeing her doing a tongue sandwich with another man, but if I can’t cope with it, then I chose the wrong girlfriend.
JM: And the love-making scenes were very tastefully shot. Considering there was S&M involved.
Hiya!: Yes. Very risqué for a pre-watershed audience.
JM: What amazed me was the number of people who stopped me in the street and said, ‘I too love to be chained to the hostess trolley of a Friday night while my husband tickles me with a feather duster.’ It was a real eye-opener.
(Jodie and Stuart look at each other and nod. Their chemistry is almost telepathic.)
Hiya!: Can we talk about the abortion?
JM: Of course. Talk about what you like, I’m an open book.
Hiya!: Do you think it was a step too far?
JM: At the end of the day I’m not just playing a nun, I’m playing a woman. And I strongly believe that abortion is a women’s issue and it’s a woman’s right to choose.
Hiya!: But a nun would be dead against abortion, wouldn’t she?
JM: Which is why she tried to kill herself. I think it was all very sensitively handled.
Hiya!: They were quite shocking scenes.
JM: Thank you. I did a few takes where I tried to find some comedy in it, but in the end me and our wonderful director Kunz said, ‘You know what? This is going to be so much better if we play it for real.’
Hiya!: While we’re talking about the show, we hear that a serial killer is going to be stalking the avenue sometime soon. Can you give us any inside info on that?
JM: I could, but then I’d have to kill you! Seriously, I know very little about it. I hear it’s a bit of a way off yet, and as actors we only really learn what’s going on when we get our scripts. But believe me, I’m nervous! Everybody’s nervous! Who knows what the future holds? But I can tell it’s going to be another exciting chapter in the life of Acacia Avenue.
Hiya!: Now, moving on to more personal matters. Sister Agatha doesn’t have much luck with men.
JM: She doesn’t have much luck full stop. Did you see what those horrible yobs did to the church last week? I’m still in shock!
Hiya!: Oh yes, they set fire to it.
JM: I couldn’t watch. It made me so sad. That church feels like it’s actually mine!
Hiya!: Getting back to you, Jodie, for one minute. You certainly have more luck with men. You and Stuart are so blissfully happy . . .
JM: We are.
Hiya!: He’s adorable. How did you guys meet?
I couldn’t read any more. I folded up the magazine and stuffed it in my bag as my cab pulled up outside the greenhouse. Godfavour was reading Hiya! on reception, her head bowed, her tortoise-head tongue peeking out in a study of concentration. She didn’t even look up, though as I reached the lifts I heard her call, ‘It’s a good job they did not come when you were having one of your ding-dongs.’
I went to press the button to my floor, but had second thoughts. I marched back to reception, letting the doors shut behind me.
‘Er, excuse me, Godfavour, but you’re paid to stop intruders coming in, not voice opinions on the state of my love life, OK?’ I knew it was harsh, but she’d pissed me off. She didn’t look the slightest bit bothered.
‘You also have a cleaner. Your cleaner is called Sandra. Sandra I like,’ she commented, looking confused more than anything. I half expected her to bang her fists on the counter and cry, ‘None of it makes any sense!’
‘Godfavour. Sandra’s my mum and . . . the press, they twist things.’
She nodded. I turned on my Uggs and left.
As I slipped the key in the door of the flat I called out to Stu to be on the safe side, but I knew he wouldn’t be there.
The living room and kitchen were just as we’d left them that morning, breakfast dishes piled in the sink, a bit of water run on them to stop the Weetabix from moulding to the plate like cement, an open magazine on the couch, DVDs scattered on the floor by the telly. I checked the big brass nautical clock on the wall. Half past six. Stu was out tonight, going on a pub crawl with some blokes from work. Even if he came home at eleven that gave me four and a half hours of peace. Four and a half hours to catch up on my emails. Or four and a half hours to be naughty. I chucked my breeze block of scripts on the breakfast bar – learning lines was for wimps – and sprinted into the bedroom.
I threw myself onto the bed, powered up my iPad and watched the screen flicker to life. I ignored my email and went straight to my Facebook page. I chewed my lip and felt my heart beating faster. Would I have a message from him? I looked at the top of the screen and caught my breath: I had three messages. I opened my inbox. Message number one was something dreary about keeping Bangladesh afloat. The second was from a girl asking if I was the Jodie
she went to school with. I felt like replying, ‘Yes I am, but I couldn’t stand you at school, so I don’t see why, fifteen years later, I’m gonna suddenly think the sun shines out of your arse,’ but instead I deleted it. And message number three was from him. I felt my breath become shallow as I read it. What was happening to me, for God’s sake?
From: Matthew Martin Maxwell (France)
To: Jodie McFee (Liverpool)
Subject: LAST NIGHT. WOW!
Hey Baby Girl,
The weather’s scorching here today. Just been lazy and sat in the sun. Jealous? Keep thinking about last night. Hope you’re not embarrassed. I’m not. It was intense, it was fun and it felt good. I swear I’ve never done that before. But I hope we can do it again. No one else need ever know, so who are we hurting? I might go to the pictures later. There’s an arthouse cinema in Juan Les Pins which shows everything with English subtitles. Hope you’ve had a good day. Sending good vibes.
Matthew x
I blushed at the memory of what we’d got up to last night. Stu had gone to bed early and I’d cracked open a bottle of red and chatted online to Matthew. He’d cracked open a bottle of red, too, and one thing had led to another until I’d sampled my first taste of cyber sex. He’d said what he’d like to do to me, I’d said what I’d like to do to him, and suddenly I was in a fantasy land, sharing my innermost sexual thoughts with a guy I’d not even met! God, I was mortified. I clicked reply.
From: Jodie McFee (Liverpool)
To: Matthew Martin Maxwell (France)
Subject: SAYONARA CYBER LOVER
Me? Embarrassed? No way. I do that sort of thing all the time.
I was about to add ‘only joking!’ when I heard a key in the door. I panicked and clicked send instead, and the message vanished from the screen.
‘Jodes?!’ I heard Stu calling from the hallway. I shoved the iPad under a pillow and jumped up to put the telly on.
‘In the bedroom, babe!’
Shit! Now Matthew was going to think I was a cyber slut. ‘I do that sort of thing all the time’?! I was shaking when Stu walked in with a pizza in a box. God I hated these close shaves. I was convinced I must have gone the colour of ketchup and look like a walking advert for high blood pressure. Get high blood pressure and you can look like THIS!
‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing to the pizza box, my voice three octaves higher than usual. It was a stupid question, it looked like a pizza and smelled like a pizza so the options were limited. He didn’t seem to notice, though, and grinned mischievously.
‘Sloppy Giuseppe, extra cheese.’
‘Lovely I thought you were out tonight, drinkswise?’
Had I really just said drinkswise? Was that normal? Jeez, Louise. How much more blatant could I be?!
‘We’re not meeting till eight,’ he said, disappearing off to the kitchen.
‘Eight. Great.’
I was a poet and I didn’t know it.
I’d joined Facebook a few months earlier. Everyone in the green room had been talking about it for ages, bandying about phrases like ‘writing on walls’, ‘poking’ and ‘tagging’ with the conspiratorial excitement of members of a religious cult. Trudy showed me how to use the website, although she herself paid someone to manage her page and write (and presumably spell correctly) her updates. She seemed to use it primarily to look at photographs of her exes or people she hated from school, and spent most of her time slagging off their taste in soft furnishings as displayed in photo albums called things like ‘Randoms!’. I sat home one night and explored the site with her, telling her to enter the names of Debs and Hayls, and within seconds I was reading all the banal things they’d been up to. I even told her to look up Greg, claiming he was an old mate. At the push of a button I saw crystal-clear images of him at various parties and clubs. It totally appealed to the nosey side of my nature, and once she’d gone, I set up my own page. I wanted to be incognito on the site. I wanted to snoop rather than be snooped on, so I gave myself a false name – Jodie McFee – uploaded a photo of me from a few years back, which made me look carefree and reckless, and so the snooping began. I added a few friends from the show – some of them also used noms de plume – and before I knew it I was being inundated with friend requests as people on their friends lists realized who I really was. I ignored most of them, but soon couldn’t wait to get home of a night to delve into other people’s lives. Or other people’s lives as they wanted to present themselves on the internet. I could start clicking through pictures of strangers’ holidays and, before I knew it, hours had slipped by and I’d not even noticed. Hayls and Debs seemed to be compulsive posters, bantering with each other on their walls, posting photos of themselves doing everything from cleaning the bathroom to visiting Magaluf. And because they had no privacy settings, any fool – and in particular, this fool – could follow their every move without them knowing.
The other good thing about the whole set-up was that Stuart was a Luddite as far as technology was concerned. He had no interest in social networking and its relative merits, so Facebook became something that was mine alone, my hobby, my waste of time, and he had nothing to do with it. No idea who I was looking at, who I might be chatting to, or what I was saying about myself on there. It was my private world.
He therefore had no idea that I was spying on the lifestyles of the non rich and famous who had once been a part of my life but who I’d long since consigned to the status of ‘used-to-be friends’.
Most of the friend requests I got on a daily basis were from fans saying, ‘Are you really Jodie McGee? What’s with the false name? I think you rock as Sister Agatha.’ Or words to that effect. I was occasionally approached by people I actually knew – some I accepted, some I didn’t – but I never accepted people I hadn’t met.
After using the site for a month I had uploaded half a dozen photographs (all incredibly flattering – you’d have thought I was Gwyneth Paltrow on some of them. If you squinted or were pissed) and wrote generic updates that gave nothing away about my work. I called the studios ‘the office’, so it was usually ‘another long day in the office’ etc. Honestly, I bored even myself with my uncatchy one-liners.
Then one night I found a message in my inbox from someone I didn’t know called Matthew Martin Maxwell. It said, ‘Hey You don’t know me and I don’t know you. But can I just say you look pretty damn hot in that photo with the snake.’
I had recently been to a fancy dress party as Britney Spears in the ‘Slave 4 U’ video. I didn’t look half bad in the picture; I didn’t look half bad in any of the pictures. In fact, all the pictures in the entire world in which I felt I didn’t look half bad were on Facebook, which explained why there were only six. In this particular shot, in an attempt to look like Ms Spears, I was wearing a curly peroxide-blonde wig, bra, miniskirt, shiny body glitter and an inflatable snake.
I was about to delete the message – I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me, as he’d pointed out – when suddenly it struck me that this was the first Facebook message I’d received from a complete stranger. I clicked on his name in the message and a second later I was on his page. Why didn’t he know who I was? Was he taking the piss? Did he not have a television? I wasn’t being big-headed – well, maybe just a little bit – but most people recognized me now, I’d been on that many magazine covers. At the top of his page I saw that his location was France. Ah, that explained it. He really was an Acacia Avenue ignoramus. And, judging by his profile pic, an undeniably cute one. I clicked on the picture and the page changed so that I was confronted by twenty different pictures, all of him looking undeniably cute. The first thing that struck me was that on every picture he was laughing. I found myself smiling in response. The chiselled jaw, with varying amounts of stubble, dimpled chin, shiny Malteser eyes and floppy Merchant Ivory locks were always punctuated by a flash of pearly whites as he guffawed and grinned – without so much as a hint of gurning – at whoever was taking the pictures. The other thing that struck me was th
at he was an outdoorsy type. He was dressed in a variety of wetsuits and sports gear, sometimes holding a surfboard, often on a beach, sometimes topless (I lingered on those shots possibly a bit too long). He wasn’t so much sunkissed as sunsnogged. He was fit, active and probably ate his five a day. In summary, he was the complete opposite of me. I replied to his message with a brief, ‘Not so bad yourself in some of those pics, Mr Speedo.’
The next day he requested to be my friend. For the subsequent fortnight we had messaged each other sporadically with the odd sarcastic, ‘Have you got that wetsuit in nipple pink?’ (I said that, natch.) Or, ‘Worried about your snake. Is it still alive?’ (Him to me. For now.) His messages always made me smile but, truth be told, I didn’t give him too much thought. Until one night he popped up in the chat section of the site and we got . . . well, chatting. He’d write a sentence in the little chat box and I’d write one back – instant communication. It was like being on the phone, only you had to write everything down. It was silly banter at first, but through it I discovered that he was a Yorkshireman by birth, but was now living the life of Riley in the South of France, working in a beach club by day as a waiter and partying by night. When he asked what I did for a living, I told him I had a very boring job in an office. I enjoyed the pretence. I had been playing Sister Agatha for two years now, and it was an adventure, an escape, to play Jodie McFee, administrative assistant at Crystal Plastics. I just hoped he never asked me anything about plastics. I basically had the same personality, though I started writing the rather irritating LOL to show I was joking sometimes – it’s hard to be ironic on the internet – and soon we’d built up a cosy intimacy. All through the written word.
I was upfront about being in a relationship. That didn’t faze him. But as our chats got longer and our messages more detailed I found myself, even in the guise of Ms McFee, becoming more and more honest. If I read our messages back I realized that for some inexplicable reason, Matthew was the only person in the world I was being completely honest with. The anonymous contact and lines in a chat box sometimes felt like I was talking to myself, his responses like voices in my head. At times he felt like a counsellor, someone I was able to open up to without fear of being judged. And if he was going to judge me, simple. I’d just stop talking to him and delete him as a friend. And because of my honesty I soon started to find this contact incredibly important. It was like a drug. I began craving it, but at the same time tried to exert some form of control over it. I wouldn’t chat with him at work, despite being able to get Facebook on my phone, but I would find myself becoming increasingly excited about finishing for the day, getting home and getting on the iPad. Rationally I knew it was ridiculous. Matthew didn’t know who I really was – Jodie McGee, television actress – but somehow it felt like he knew the real me – Jodie McGee, mess.
All She Wants Page 34
