Film Star (15 page)

I pushed my chair back and went and stood behind Mum. I leaned over her and put my arms around her neck, resting my chin on her shoulder.

“I was just being stupid, Mum,” I said after a while. “I'm not an expert in child psychology, but I promise you I'm not going off the rails and it's not because of you and Dad. You don't have to force me to stop acting or anything like that!” Mum gave me a sharp look over her shoulder but didn't say anything. “It was just me being stupid. And I won't ever do that to you again, I promise you.”

Mum put her arms up and gave me a sort of upside-down hug.

“I can't do anything right,” I said, going back to my chair and sitting down. “Nydia's fallen out with me because she's angry with me for getting the part in the film.”

“That doesn't sound like Nydia,” Mum said, sipping her tea. “She's usually so supportive. Especially when she's just got that TV part; she doesn't have to be jealous of you.” I picked up a pot of jam and tried to open the lid. It was stuck fast. I knew how it felt.

“I know,” I said. “But she's not like Nydia; she's
completely different. It's like I'm not even talking to her but to her angry twin instead.”

“You'll work things out with Nydia,” Mum said confidently. “You two have been friends for too long not to.”

I sighed; I wish I felt as confident as she did. Nydia and I seemed to have gone from being almost exactly the same as each other to totally and completely different people almost overnight.

“Maybe,” I said, unconvinced. “But even if we did, Danny still wouldn't want to be my boyfriend any more.”

“What?” Mum exclaimed. “
Why?
”

“He thinks I fancy Sean,” I said. “And after he's read that stuff in the paper, well then…”

“You did tell him that you don't fancy Sean, didn't you?” Mum asked me.

“I did,” I said, picking up the paper and opening it at the photo again, “but he didn't believe me and now he's never going to, is he?”

Mum took the paper from me, folded it, took it to the paper recycling bin under the sink and dropped it in.

“If he's more likely to believe in that than you,” Mum said, nodding at the bin, “then he's not worth worrying about, Ruby. Don't give the silly boy a second thought.”

“I know,” I said miserably. But there was a problem
about not worrying over Danny or giving him a second thought, despite his foolish jealous behaviour. Quite a big problem.

I was still in love with him, of course.

Imogene Grant, double Oscar-winning actress, was making me a cheese and salad sandwich in her Winnebago. She'd caught up with me as I had been going back to my trailer and lightly dropping an arm around my shoulders asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her. I asked Mum, who said it was fine as she had a lot to do anyway. I didn't know what lot of things she could have to do on a film set when her main job was looking after me, but I didn't ask her. She seemed in a good mood again and I didn't want to spoil that.

And as I watched Imogene wash and chop some salad I wondered how on earth I, Ruby Parker, had got to be here. And I wondered how different my life would have been if I had never been chosen at the age of six to play the part of Angel MacFarley in
Kensington Heights.

I would never have known Nydia I supposed, or Danny—but seeing as neither one of them was talking to me any more I wondered if that mattered. Then again,
I told myself, I would never have made friends with Sean, acted with Jeremy Fort or had Imogene Grant make me a cheese and salad sandwich, and all before the age of fourteen.

Imogene put the sandwich on a plate and set it down on the table before me. She slid opposite me with her own sandwich and looked at me.

“So,” she said. “How are you doing?”

I looked into her world-famous velvet-brown eyes.

“I was just thinking, what if none of this had happened to me?” I said, gesturing around me at the interior of the Winnebago but really meaning my whole, strange life. “I was wondering if I would have a different life, a normal life, parents who were still married, a best friend who still liked me, a boyfriend who didn't get jealous over nothing. I was wondering if I would be normal.”

Imogene smiled and took a sip of her water.

“Ruby,” she said, “the life that you just described isn't normal. Real friends always fall out one time or another. Adult relationships have difficult times, sometimes so difficult that they can't be mended. And sometimes when you really love someone it's very hard not to be jealous, even if you know it's wrong.
That's
normal life, the kind of life that happens to a lot of girls
your age all around the world. The only difference is that most of those girls will never get arrested by armed police and find their photo in the national press the next day!” Imogene smiled and watched me as she took a dainty bite of her sandwich. Vaguely, I wondered if there was a school somewhere that taught movie stars how to eat without getting mayonnaise down their tops.

“You know what?” she told me. “You should feel lucky.” I gave a dry bark of a laugh, but Imogene persisted. “You should! A lot of kids in show business don't have what you have. They don't have a normal school where they can make friends good enough to fall out with, or have the chance to get to know a boy long enough to date him. And as for parents—well, look at Sean. He never sees his mom, which let me tell you breaks her heart. And as for his father, well, he's just a…” Imogene seemed to stop herself from using the word she wanted to. “He's a very
difficult
man.”

I nodded, that was true and, I thought miserably, even
more
true than Imogene knew. Everybody knew that Pat Rivers was a difficult man to deal with, but did they know exactly how miserable he made his own son in private?

That morning Sean had not been his usual happy-go-lucky self at all. Oh, he had switched on his
starriness for his scenes, but it had blinked out again the moment the cameras stopped rolling and he saw his father at the edge of the set waiting for him, tapping his crocodile-skin shoes impatiently. And I noticed that some of the dark and vivid bruises on Sean's arms and legs were not applied by the make-up department.

“How did you get those?” I asked Sean as soon as I got a chance.

He shrugged but didn't look me in the eye.

“I don't know,” he said. “Messing around I guess. I went out on my skateboard yesterday.” I was fairly certain he was lying.

As I watched Sean go without saying goodbye, his head down and his shoulders slumped, I thought of how Sean had been in the corridor just before we left the premiere party, and I had a horrible feeling that maybe this Sean, this down, hurt and sad Sean
was
his usual self. And that maybe the happy, adventurous, spontaneous Sean I thought I had got to know was just another act, a brave front.

“Poor Sean,” I said, more to myself than to Imogene.

“And look at
me,
” Imogene continued.

“What about you?” I asked her. “You're perfect.”

Imogene grinned and shook her head.

“Nobody is perfect,” she said. “Least of all me.”

“Yes, you are!” I protested. “I bet you were born perfect. I bet you were never lumpy or spotty or greasy, were you?” I shrugged and smiled at her. “It doesn't matter; I'm not holding it against you or anything. It's just that some people in the world are perfectly perfect and some, like me, are not and never will be. I'm learning to accept it.” I sighed; that wasn't exactly true. I was still hoping for a late surge that might get me from average-if-not-ugly ducking to drop-dead-gorgeous swan before I turned eighteen, but I had to face it, time was running out.

Imogene nipped at her lips as she thought for a moment about what I'd said and then she said, “Wait there a minute, I want to show you something.”

She slid out from her seat opposite and went into her bedroom. She returned a few moments later with a photo album and sat down again, but this time next to me.

She rested the red leather album on the table top and patted it fondly.

“I take this with me wherever I go,” she told me as she opened the thick pages. “To remind me of who I am. Look, I want to show you a photo.”

She thumbed through the stiff pages until she found the one she was looking for. It was an image of her from
her first breakthrough role as a Vegas street kid in a thriller called
Boiling Point.
She only had a small part but every critic said she acted the other well-known stars off the screen.

I looked carefully at the photo of Imogene; she was just a bit older than me when it was taken. Shot against the hot red of a setting desert sun she looked incredible, almost alight, so fragile and delicate that you thought you might be able to see through her. But I still didn't know why she was showing me the photo.

“Were you forced into acting too?” I asked her, frowning. Imogene shook her head.

“No.” She studied the photo for a second longer and ran her thumb down the edge of her slight thirteen-year-old figure. “I didn't know it then, but when this photo was taken I was actually dying.”

“
Dying!
” I stared at her and then the photo in horror. “What of?”

Imogene thought for a moment and then uncovered the left-hand page of the album that her forearm had been resting on. “Here, let me show you another photo,” she said.

This time the photo was of an awkward and unhappy-looking girl posing in a very frilly and far too tight pink dress. She looked as if the smile she was giving the
camera had been hammered on with nails. It took me a few seconds to realise that the girl was Imogene too.

“But you're…” I stopped myself from finishing the sentence by biting my lip.

“Fat?” Imogene finished for me.

I nodded.

“No one forced me into acting, or into film,” Imogene told me. “I wanted it; it was
all
that I wanted. And being in school shows or the local drama group wasn't enough for me. I wanted all of
this
…” This time she gestured around her at the Winnebago and I knew she meant her movie-star life. “And the cold truth of the matter in this shallow business, Ruby, is that fat kids, no matter how talented they are, hardly ever get it.” Imogene smiled with a kind of fond sadness at the pink-dress photo. “So without telling anyone I put myself on a diet. First of all I just watched what I ate, cut out candy and cakes, but when that didn't work fast enough I ate less and less unil I actually couldn't bear the sight of food. The thought of it in my mouth made me want to be sick. I made excuses not to eat with my family, and if I couldn't get out of it I'd leave whatever my mom gave me, saying I'd eaten earlier, or that I just wasn't hungry. If I did have to eat in front of them, I forced down a few mouthfuls and as soon as I could I'd make myself sick.

“Ew,” I said, wrinkling up my nose. I looked at beautiful, graceful Ms Grant. I just couldn't imagine her doing anything so…ugly.

“It was gross,” Imogene said. “It made my breath stink and my teeth started to rot, but I didn't think about that. All I thought about was being thin.” She tapped her prefect white teeth. “These are ceramic overlays. Anyway, I got thinner and thinner until I looked exactly like this.” She tapped the
Boiling Point
photo with her fingernail. “And I knew I was right to be doing what I was doing because I started getting jobs. And the people who counted started noticing me, so I kept going because I thought the thinner I was the more they would want me, and it seemed to be true.” Imogene shook her head.

“But whatever talent or ability Hollywood saw in me they still didn't see the one thing that I saw.” She pointed at the pink-dress girl again. “Even when I was at my thinnest, whenever I looked in the mirror I'd see her, that dumb fat girl looking back at me. I wasn't ever happy. I was never thin enough.”

There was a moment's silence as Imogene and I stared from photo to photo and I thought about Nydia and her secret diet. I felt a sharp twist of fear knot in my tummy as I worried that she could go too far just like Imogene had.

“But you didn't die,” I said in a small voice. “Dieting can't really make you die, can it?”

Imogene shrugged. “It can; if you let it take over you like I did it can become a serious disease,” she said. “I was shooting my next film after
Boiling Point.
It was a much bigger, more important part so I was literally eating nothing at all so I could look good in front of the camera.” Imogene sighed wistfully.

“I'd only been on set a couple of days when I collapsed. I got rushed into hospital. They put all sorts of tubes into me. I had to have my heart monitored in case it failed. I got fed through a tube in my nose.” I wrinkled up my nose and rubbed it at the thought of having a tube inserted in it. “After a few days when I was stable again the doctor told me if I carried on as I was I'd be dead within a year. That scared me,” Imogene said with a little smile.

“That would scare me too,” I said.

“But if I'm really honest, I think what scared me even more was that I got dropped from the film. I was told I couldn't work again until I was healthy and under control. That was what really woke me up: I was more afraid of giving up my dream than I was of dying. I think that was what made me accept the treatment and the counselling. And when it was out in the open,
when my parents knew at last, it felt as if a sort of tent had been lifted from above me, and I could breathe and feel the sun on my face again. It took me a long time to get it under control, years to teach myself to eat properly again. I didn't make another movie until I was nineteen.” Imogene seemed to look inwards for a moment as if she were watching those memories play inside her head.

“
New York Angel,
” I said, remembering the title of her second film. “Your first Oscar.”

Imogene nodded and shut the album, resting both of her forearms on it as if she were afraid something—the past maybe—might try and escape.

“Why did you tell me all this?” I asked her. She shrugged.

“Because I trust you and because you remind me a lot of myself when I was your age…”

“Do I?” I said, and must have sounded a bit worried because Imogene put her arm around me and hugged me. “Don't worry,” she said. “I don't mean I think you're going to do something crazy like I did. It's just that now is an important time for you, Ruby. You have a lot of talent—everybody thinks so. If this film does well things could go crazy for you—you could suddenly find yourself being pulled in all sorts of directions. If that
happens I want you to think very carefully about what you are doing. Pause and take a breath. Don't worry about being perfect. No one in this business is perfect. All we are is very good at hiding our imperfections, and sometimes we get so obsessed with it we start to destroy ourselves. It's a real danger, Ruby. The best thing you can do is to just be you, otherwise this industry will burn you out before you've even begun.”

“Like Sean,” I said quietly.

“It would seem so,” Imogene said with a tiny smile. “It's easy to let this life get on top of you when you are your age, especially if you haven't got the right guidance. And it's easy to let things get out of perspective and lose sight of who you are. just remember the best thing you have going for you right now is your school, your friends, and most of all your parents. Keep those steady and they will keep you steady. And never forget how lucky you are.”

I thought for a moment.

“I am lucky,” I said, sounding quite surprised. “I had forgotten how lucky I am.”

“I thought so,” Imogene said.

I thought about Nydia and Danny, Mum and Dad, and even Sean, and all the things I thought were so terrible in my life. When I thought about it none of them
were things I couldn't make better somehow. It was Just knowing where and how to start.

Suddenly I remembered something that Imogene had said earlier.

“You said that Sean's mum's heart was broken because of not seeing him,” I said. Imogene nodded and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Do you know her?”

“I used to,” Imogene said. “We worked together once a long time ago. This is the first time I've worked with Sean. It's horrible that the rumours about his father could be true.”