Free The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride by A.J. Crofts Page B

admit that Luke was ‘cool’. Pete didn’t rate that many people, especially singers, and certainly not singers with boy bands.
    It was the best evening of my life. We’d both switched our phones off and we talked and talked – mostly about music, although I think I may have told him things about my childhood that I had never told anyone before. He was so easy to talk to. He seemed so interested in everything aboutme. We drank almost a bottle of wine each and did some coke and when we slid into bed together at the end of the evening it seemed like the moment I’d been waiting for ever since I was given their first album on my twelfth birthday. I’d fantasised about it so often it should have been an anticlimax, but it wasn’t.
    For the first time ever I turned up late for work the next day, in a taxi, straight from his place, not having learned my lines. Dora had drummed it into me a thousand times that it was the worst sin possible to be late, even for a wardrobe fitting, because one late actor could hold up a whole day’s shooting and cost the production company thousands. That day, thank God, no one seemed to be too bothered because I was able to catch up on the lines in time for the first take, but it shocked me. I felt like I’d lost a little bit of control of things. It was an exciting feeling, but scary at the same time.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about him all day – and feeling really guilty about Pete. I decided that at the end of filming I would go round to the squat and I would tell Pete that it was time for both of us to move on. I really wanted to keep him as a friend, and I was paranoid that he would think I was dumping him because now I was the big TV star and my old friends weren’t good enough for me any more. I wanted to think that I would still be able to go round on Sunday afternoons and chill out; I just didn’t think the relationship was going anywhere. It was actually his mother I was most sorry about disappointing. She’d always been so sweet to me, telling me I was the only decent thing in her son’s life. I don’t want to sound up myself, but if I was her I would havethought the same. Pete seemed to have given up any ambition he might ever have had for his music. Doing a bit of dealing, just to give him some pocket money, seemed to be all he cared about, apart from getting high and shagging. I mean, I’m all for getting high and shagging, obviously, but it can’t be your main goal in life, can it?
    I had every intention of going straight there and doing the decent thing, but then Luke turned up at the studio with armfuls of flowers and whisked me off to dinner at some fancy Mayfair restaurant where the toilets were shaped like eggs and God alone knows what else.
    ‘You didn’t have to bring me to a place like this,’ I said when I saw the size of the bill. ‘I would have been just as happy with a pizza somewhere.’
    ‘Pizza?’ He looked puzzled, as if I’d suggested we ate his loafers. ‘I like it here because people don’t keep bothering you for pictures and autographs. Not that I mind doing all that stuff, but I wanted to have you all to myself.’
    I know those sorts of lines are corny, but they get me every time. He’d started to open up a bit about his career and why he had agreed to take part in the singing contest.
    ‘The problem was, we didn’t write our own material,’ he explained. ‘We might have been selling millions of records, but we didn’t own anything. They were flying us around the world, hiring limousines and private planes and hotel suites for God knows how many people, and that all had to come out of our money in the end – not to mention the costs of making the videos. I mean, we did make some money, don’t get me wrong, but nothing like as much as anyone wouldhave thought from looking at our lifestyles during those years. Now I’m pretty much living off what I can earn for gigs like this competition.’
    ‘It’s still more than most