The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride Read Free Page A

row. ‘I probably wouldn’t have got it anyway.’
    ‘Oh, that is so unfair,’ Jenny squeaked. She was always the bravest at speaking up when Dad was in a mood – for some reason she got away with more than the rest of us. ‘I wish someone would ask me to be in
The Towers.
You’ll be a celebrity and everything.’
    ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Dad bellowed, making even Jenny cower. ‘We are a respectable family and we don’t want to have anything to do with that sort of thing.’
    I didn’t intend to make a big fight of it – not yet, not when there was still a chance I wouldn’t get the job anyway – but  I didn’t intend to miss the opportunity to go to the studios either. It was like an invitation to step into my own magic kingdom, instead of just having my nose pressed to the screen, so to speak; I would actually be able to walk among my heroesand heroines – just thinking about it had made me come over all Shakespearean.

    Dora, being the wily old bird again, had realised I didn’t have the faintest idea how to get to the studios, since they were right over the other side of London in some suburb I’d never heard of, and she had offered to drive me there. It was kind of her, don’t get me wrong, but I knew she really wanted to be there herself because she got as much buzz out of the thought of hanging out with the stars as I did. She might put on this act of having seen it all and done it all, but if they had offered her the part of an old bag lady she would have been down on all fours kissing their feet. I knew that and she knew I knew. We had a bit of an unspoken understanding, Dora and me.
    When I got to her flat the next day I hardly recognised her. She’d even washed her hair instead of just piling it on top of her head and sticking it together with pins, and she was wearing make-up, which actually looked a bit spooky, like a small child had painted a woman’s face on her. Her car was a pretty good disaster. I doubt if she had ever removed a single piece of rubbish from it in all the years she’d owned it and it reeked of old fag butts, which upset me a bit since I’d spent about an hour in the bathroom that morning, before anyone else was awake, trying to make myself smell like a meadow in springtime.
    ‘Just be yourself,’ she kept saying as we drove, which seemed pretty rich coming from someone who looked totally unlike her usual self. ‘They’ll love you.’
    ‘OK.’
    Funnily enough, I wasn’t nervous about the actual audition, but I was excited at the thought of maybe meeting some of the cast and seeing what things were like inside a real television studio.
    ‘I feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass,’ I told her, ‘about to step through the screen into a world of make-believe.’
    ‘You’ve read Lewis Carroll?’ she asked, obviously surprised.
    ‘Nah,’ I laughed, ‘I saw it on telly one Christmas. Did he write it, then?’
    Dora laughed and nodded. I made a mental note to see if I could get a copy. I always tried to do that. If I heard someone talking about a book I would go into a bookshop and ask for it. I never read around the house, that was asking for trouble, but I liked to have a book in my bag for travelling on the bus and for my breaks at work. Everyone at home, apart from Mum, thought reading books was a sign of weirdness. She’d given up trying to persuade them different. Maybe some of the others were doing it on the quiet too, like me. Dave had been useful for recommending stuff. He used to lend me things he’d read and liked as well.
    The reception area at the television studios lived up to all my fantasies, with giant blow-ups on the walls from all my favourite programmes and a gigantic glass reception desk with beautiful women in immaculate suits dealing with the visitors. As Dora and I waited to be fetched I scanned every passing face in the hope of spotting someone famous. I was sure I recognised some of them, but it was hard to