Film Star (14 page)

“You looked like you enjoyed it,” Danny started. And it was then that I really lost my temper.

“Oh, Danny!” I raised my voice in frustration. “It was a stupid five-second kiss, it's not a big deal! This is so silly! It's like, it's like a stupid scene from
Kensington Heights!
”

Danny's face clouded over dangerously.

“Oh, so now you're a movie star you think
Kensington Heights
is stupid, do you?” he said sulkily.

“Danny!” I said in exasperation. “
You
think
Kensington Heights
is stupid—you've said it enough times! And anyway—you
know
what I mean.”

“I thought I did,” Danny said. “But you're not you any more, Rube. You've changed.”

“Can't I change?” I asked him. “
You've
changed. You've changed a lot since you started on
Kensington Heights,
topping readers' polls in magazines—and I'm not getting all freaked out.”

“You freaked out about my fan letters,” Danny reminded me.

“For about five seconds,” I admitted. “And then I realised I was being a total moron, like someone else I could mention is being right now.” I challenged Danny with a stare, but as I watched him his shoulders relaxed and all of the tense lines seemed to drain out of his body.

“I'm sorry,” he said with a small smile. “I'm so stupid sometimes.”

“Oh, Danny,” I said, venturing a smile back.

But before I could run up to him and hug him he added, “Just as long as that Sean bloke knows that you belong to me.”

I felt the heat in my cheeks sharply against the cold air as I suddenly grew tired of everyone being angry with me, and got angry myself.

“Danny, I don't
belong
to anyone!” I found myself shouting at him.

Danny and I stared at each other for a long moment.

“Right,” Danny said stiffly. “So what are you saying then? That you don't want to go out with me any more too, now that I'm not good enough for you?”

And what I wanted to say was, “Of course I want to go out with you, you idiot, just as long as you stop being so silly and jealous and we can go back to having fun again.” But I was so tired, so angry and annoyed at Danny for somehow managing to create this whole drama out of nothing at all, and at myself for not being able to make him see sense, that I hesitated. I wondered if I really did want to be with him, if being with him meant going through all of this.

First one second, and then two, three, four, five slipped by. It was about four seconds too long for Danny to wait.

“Fine,” he said, starting back towards the house. “Fine. Bye then.”

“Danny!” I called after him. “You didn't let me speak!”

Danny stopped at the patio doors and looked round at me.

“You didn't have to,” he said. “It's obvious how you feel.”

“But, Danny, I was just…” Danny swung the door shut behind him and left me shivering in the garden for
a moment. I was furious with him for acting like an idiot, but I couldn't believe that we had ended. Over nothing.

I couldn't leave it that way, I just couldn't.

I ran into the house leaving the patio door swinging open behind me. I ran into the hallway where the door had just slammed shut as Danny left, and I ran out of the front door. And I would have caught up with Danny, and maybe would have been able to make him see what he was doing, and maybe might have made everything all right again.

Except that was when I got arrested.

“But none of that is true!” I looked at the morning paper in dismay. Mum clattered a plate of toast on to the table and sat opposite me, thudding into her chair. “Hardly any of it,” I added nervously. Mum had jumped right to the front of the long queue of people who weren't very happy with me.

I had hoped I could have got away with it. Last night when Mum first saw me after we got back, all she did was cry and laugh at the same time. She ran up to me and grabbed me and kissed me all over my face and hugged me so tightly I thought my ribs would break. Even Dad was there too and the three of us hugged each other for a long time, and I did think to myself that actually maybe accidentally stealing all those diamonds wasn't such a bad thing—it made us a family again, if only for a little while.

Mum had said she wanted to be at home—not at our flat but at our real home—and so did I, so Dad drove us
back to our house, while Mum and I sat in the back of his car holding hands. When we got in, Everest was there sitting in the hallway as if he knew we were coming. As we opened the door he even hauled himself off his fat belly and lurched towards us meowing a greeting.

“I think next door are feeding him too much,” Mum said.

“Yes, but which next door?” Dad joked. “He's got the whole street thinking he's malnourished.” I lugged Everest up into a cuddle which he put up with for as long as he could bear before twisting out of my arms and lolloping towards the kitchen, hopeful of a midnight feast. It had felt so nice to have everyone at home again. Everyone happy. I had forgotten what it used to be like, and I felt this twist in my tummy as I remembered.

Just before Dad had moved out it hadn't been like this, I reminded myself. It wasn't happy and relaxed or natural. But remembering that my family had once been so happy made me feel sad. Perhaps it was because I was tired and stressed by what had happened at Nydia's house, perhaps it was the excitement and drama of being arrested, but as I watched Mum and Dad talking in the kitchen just as they used to when I was little, I
found myself wishing that all three of us were still properly together and that those difficult angry years had not happened at all.

But it might as well have been a wish made on some birthday candles because along with the swimming pool and motorbike I'd hoped for from the age of seven, it was another wish that would never come true.

We'd only been in a little while when I said I wanted to go to bed. I wasn't tired, but as I went up Mum was making Dad another cup of tea and I wanted to give them time alone to see if they felt the same way I did when they remembered what it used to be like to be in our family.

Plus I wanted to eavesdrop on what they were talking about.

So I went up the stairs as loudly and as heavily as I could and then crept down as quietly and as lightly as possible, skipping over the stair with a creak and settling on the second from bottom step. As I listened, the draft from under the front door crept around my ankles making my toes numb with cold.

“I don't know what to think, Frank,” Mum had said
wearily. “This sort of behaviour—running off like that—it's not like our Ruby.”

“Yes,” Dad had said, “but this sort of life, mixing with film stars and going to premieres isn't like our Ruby either. Maybe we are pushing her too far; maybe she's not ready for this kind of pressure yet. You hear about it all the time—about child stars going off the rails. And I don't like the look of that Sean either; he looks like trouble to me.”

“Actually,” Mum said, “I don't think it's Sean that's the problem as much as his father. The gossip is that the man only looks at his son as a cash machine. I don't think he cares how the boy feels as long as he can make money out of him. Do you know the poor boy hasn't had a holiday in two years!” I thought of Sean, his head bowed, standing in the corridor just before we left the party. It was funny how almost every girl in the world could know so much about him, including the name of his first pet (Bunny) and his favourite colour (green) and not know how unhappy he was, how much he hated living the life so many children dream about having.

“We haven't pushed her like that, Frank,” Mum said. “We supported her with what she wants to do, encouraged and helped her, but we've never forced her.”
Dad said nothing for a moment or two, but I could hear the sound of a teaspoon chiming against the rim of a mug.

“Perhaps,” Dad said cautiously, “what she wants isn't good for her. Perhaps we should think about stopping her from acting until she's old enough to handle it properly.”

I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying out. You accidentally steal a few diamonds while secretly leaving a party and suddenly everybody thinks you've gone to pieces.
Personally,
I thought to myself,
considering my boyfriend's dumped me over nothing and my best friend hates me for, well, being me, I was surprisingly together and well behaved.

“Do you think,” Mum said, without ruling the forcing-me-to-stop-acting option immediately out, “that it's everything that's happened in the last few months? To us as a family, I mean. Maybe that's what all this ‘acting out' is about. Maybe she is attention-seeking.”

I dropped my head into my hands and shut my eyes in despair. OK, so I'd left a party without telling anyone where I was going and had gone round to Nydia's, but factor out the diamonds and the film star I took with me and then really it wasn't
especially
bad behaviour. Why couldn't anybody else see that?

Maybe Mum and Dad splitting up was still there at the bottom of everything I felt and did, because although I tried not to think about it too much, and I tried to do my best to be fine with it, perhaps I didn't realise exactly how it had changed me and everything around me. It was only then, in those last few minutes of that strange and difficult day, that I had allowed myself to think and feel anything about what had happened to their marriage at all. Most of the time I kept the reality of their impending divorce locked up inside me. But sometimes, like now, the hurt and the pain would seep out and I knew that things would never be the same.

My parents would never be the same parents I grew up with, the wise, invincible people who were always right and who always made everything all right. As much as I loved them I just didn't believe in them in the same way any more, and if I was really honest I didn't completely trust them the way I used to before they pulled my world to pieces around me. And because of that, I would never completely be the same daughter; I couldn't be. Because now I knew that sometimes, even if it was the last thing they wanted to do, they would inevitably let me down.

But still, that wasn't why I had left the party and got into trouble, not really, and it would be wrong to blame
it on my parents getting divorced. And it had nothing to do with the pressure of shooting a movie, which even though it had its stressful moments was still the best and most brilliant thing I could ever do.

I had done that because I had been seriously stupid. Even more stupid than usual. And I had not thought through the consequences of my actions at all. I considered running into the kitchen and clearing it up straight away, but before I could Dad was speaking again.

“I don't know, Janice,” I heard him say, his voice slow and tired.

“What should we do?” Mum asked him.

“When things have settled down a bit,” Dad said, “we'll have a talk with her. Find out what she's really thinking. Talk about her future.”

“Both of us together, you mean?” My mum said.

“Yes,” Dad said. “Both of us, of course. I'm still her father.” Then I heard Dad's chair scrape back and I bolted up the stairs and crouched around the corner on the landing as I watched him go. After Mum had shut the front door on him she stood with her back to it, her head hanging for a moment.

“I don't know,” she said to Everest, who was asleep, perched seriously precariously on the telephone shelf over the radiator. “I just don't know.”

Join the club,
I thought to myself as I huddled under my duvet that night. I thought about when I was a little girl and how everything had seemed so simple and easy. That night I had this dream—it was as if I was walking through a maze, and every day, with every step I took, I got older and the maze got more difficult and more complicated. I kept on taking wrong turnings and running into dead ends. The further I went the more difficult it became to go the right way. That's what my dream felt like.

Except that when I woke up I still couldn't see how I was ever going to find my way out again.

Sitting at the breakfast table with Mum, I folded the paper shut so that I didn't have to look at the photo of me and Sean kissing. Captured like that it made it look as if it was the kind of kiss that went on for ever, not a peck that was over in a second. And where Sean had fleetingly put his hand on my waist—well, let's just say from the angle that this photo was taken it looks like I've got a very,
very
high waist. And worse still, next to the article about me there was a column by some old decrepit agony aunt about the dangers of underage sex!
Right next to mine and Sean's photo. It was mortifying.

A photo of a second-long kiss had somehow morphed into a scandal about illegal marriages and sparked a national debate on teenage sex, and I knew nothing about teenage sex; I had just got the hang of teenage kissing, and that was quite enough for me for at least another ten years. But now the whole country would think differently. And worst of all, Danny would be looking at that photo too this morning, and reading that article. And when he did he'd be even more cross and stupid and annoying and further away from being my Danny than ever. I didn't know if the thought made me upset or annoyed.

Danny
should
know me well enough to trust me. He should realise that everything in that paper, including the photo, was some kind of half-truth or implied lie. And he should try to remember that we were Danny and Ruby of London, not Romeo and Juliet of Verona. If we all calmed down a bit and thought things through then it didn't have to turn out to be a tragedy.

“It's not fair,” I told Mum, sounding like next-door's toddler and feeling a bit like him too. Mum raised her eyebrows at me and pressed her mouth into a very thin line. I wondered if I should tell her I'd heard her talking to Dad last night and that she didn't have to worry, I
wasn't going off the rails like a child star, I was just having a very small wobble like a thirteen-year-old girl. But one more look at her face convinced me that adding eavesdropping to my list of misdemeanours was not a good plan.

“I'm sorry, Mum,” I said, nodding at the tightly-closed paper. “I didn't mean for any of it to happen; it just did. I acted like an idiot.”

Mum rubbed her forehead with her fingers and then pushed them through her newly red hair. She still had gold nail varnish on. It looked funny with her usual Mum clothes.

“I'm not thrilled about seeing my daughter in the tabloid press kissing a boy,” she said evenly. “But I do know that there's nothing in that story. Or any of that other rubbish. I was there, Ruby, I saw the so-called kiss, and besides, I know how Sean is with you, he treats you like a kid sister. Maybe he should have thought about what he was doing, going along with your silly plan to just leave the premiere, especially as he is older than you.” Mum pursed her lips. “I would have words with him, only I'm sure the poor boy will get more than enough from his father.”

I thought about the last time I had seen Sean last night. As I had been caught up in the middle of a family
hug, I had just a glimpse of Sean out of the corner of my eye getting dragged by his father towards the lift. The look on his dad's face was one that I had never seen on my own father's: it was one of pure cold fury, and it made me feel sick inside. When I saw that look on his face I felt afraid for Sean, and I prayed that whatever his punishment would be, it could not be as bad as I imagined. It seemed so wrong that a newspaper could print all that rubbish about me, make up all those stories about Sean, when none of them, nobody in the world hardly, knew what his real life was like.

“This,” Mum patted the paper firmly, “comes with fame, Ruby, and if you are to continue along this path you'll have to learn to live with it. And at your age do your level best to stay out of the papers. Take a leaf out of Imogene's book—she never compromises herself. Never.”

“I will. I promise,” I said solemnly.

“It's not even the diamonds that are that much of a problem,” Mum said, a tiny smile breaking up her frown lines. “Everybody knows you didn't mean to go off in them. Even De Beers thought it was quite funny in the end. Once they had stopped panicking and demanding a swat team. I spoke to Lisa and she says they are actually quite pleased with the publicity.” I gave a little shrug.

“I really forgot I was wearing them,” I said. Mum's face fell again.

“What worries me, Ruby,” she said, “what upset me more than anything, was that you left, ran away from me without telling me where you were going or who with. I thought I could trust you. If I hadn't I would have never left your side. It would have been so easy to just tell me that you wanted to go to Nydia's. I would have taken you! Instead for quite a while there I was so terrified. Terrified that you'd been kidnapped, taken by someone who wanted the diamonds or…or…” Mum's face clouded over and she bit her lips hard, “someone who might want to hurt you, Ruby.”

“But I wasn't,” I said, smiling like an idiot and waggling jazz hands at her. “Look, I'm fine!”

“I didn't know that,” Mum said. “You didn't tell me. I was worried sick, Ruby.”

I tried to think of an excuse or reason for what I had done, but nothing came. Since I had started working on
The Lost Treasure of King Arthur,
the days had flown by so quickly that they had all jumbled up, and sometimes I felt like I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't—on and off the set. I was already almost halfway through the shoot, but it still felt like it had only just begun; just as I was getting used to it, it was already
finishing. I thought it was enough to make anyone a little bit erratic.