Star Struck (3 page)

‘What?’ Claire asked, intrigued before evidently her
conscience
got the better of her and she pretended that she had been beginning a sentence. ‘What … ever that is put it back now. This is Catherine’s room.’

‘She’s at the
Star Maker
auditions,’ Jo said. She couldn’t quite believe it. Her sister, the quiet one, the reliable one, the not-exactly-Leona-Lewis one was at the
Star Maker
auditions?

‘Catherine? What for?’ Claire asked, seemingly as amazed as Jo by this revelation.

‘Well … she does have a good voice,’ Jo said tentatively.

‘When was the last time you heard her sing?’ Claire asked. ‘Ten years ago in choir. She could sound like a strangled cat now for all we know.’ Claire paused for a moment and looked seriously at Jo, ‘They’ll annihilate her,’ she said gravely.

‘Come on now, that’s a bit harsh.’ Jo replied.

‘She’s hardly Kylie, is she?’

‘You are so tight!’ Jo said, shaking her head.

‘I’m not tight, I’m right.’

‘Nice saying.’ Jo said, impressed. She turned her attention back to the piece of paper. ‘She still writes songs,’ Jo said, staring at the audition acceptance form. ‘Dad told me.’

‘Really?’ Claire looked shocked. ‘I’m surprised he even noticed.’

Jo knew what she meant. Since his wife left him, their dad had become more and more insular, moping around for years until he was finally diagnosed with clinical depression. Their mother, Karen, when told of Mick’s illness had said, ‘Depression? He’s depressed himself with the sound of his own voice.’ The milk of human kindness didn’t
exactly
run over where their mother was concerned. Jo didn’t care what her mother thought, or at least she didn’t want to care what her mother thought.

‘We’ve got to stop her,’ Claire said, jumping up.

‘Why?’

‘Because the last thing Catherine needs is Richard Forster telling her she’s useless,’ Claire said.

Richard Forster was the Svengali judge who had created
Star Maker
. He had achieved fame and fortune on both sides of the Atlantic creating pop stars and dashing the dreams of hopefuls during televised auditions. He was nearing retirement age but due to a team of cosmetic surgeons and great make-up artists he looked somewhere in his late forties or early fifties.

‘We could just go and cheer her on,’ Jo said, looking at Claire hopefully. Anything for a day out, she thought.

‘Get dressed,’ Claire said. ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there.’

And this was how Jo had come to break one of her most important rules. No one else had a car. Maria’s ex-fiancé Gavin had taken theirs as part of their break-up settlement. He got the car, she got the ten-foot-high, Posh and Becks-style professional picture of the two of them entwined and kissing. Jo couldn’t help thinking that Gavin had come out of the deal far better off than Maria, especially as they all had to look at it every day sitting at the top of the stairs. Maria was very sensitive about the picture and when Jo teased her about it she bit her head off and told her that someone had bought it from eBay and she was waiting for them to pick it up. Jo couldn’t wait to clap eyes on the nutter that would part
with
their hard-earned cash for that pictorial monstrosity. So Jo couldn’t drive, Maria had no car and Mick was everything-phobic, including driving. That left Claire to chauffeur them all unsafely to the venue of the
Star Maker
auditions.

Mick looked out of the window at the Manchester skyline and sighed, ‘I can’t believe she didn’t tell us.’

Her dad loved sighing, Jo thought. He would often string a load of sighs together so they sounded like one big ongoing outtake of breath. Jo once told an ex-boyfriend that there was no point in coming round to her house to meet anyone because her dad just sat in the corner sounding like a pressure cooker and they wouldn’t be able to hear themselves think.

‘I wonder what she’s going to sing?’ Jo pondered.

‘They’ll crucify her,’ Maria said matter-of-factly.

‘No they won’t,’ Jo snapped. Jo didn’t want to enter into one of Maria’s bitch-fests. Maria got off on other people’s misery – or so it seemed to Jo. What Jo couldn’t work out about Maria was how so many other people actually seemed to like her. People from work were always ringing up, she had at least one billion friends on Facebook and when it was her birthday she didn’t just go out for a drink or a bite to eat – no; it was a five-day, Liz Hurley’s weddingesque affair, with different themes and venues. Last year she’d had a night out in Manchester, a night out in Black-pool and a weekend in Magaluf. Jo thought that she’d rather stab herself in the eye than spend a weekend in Shag a Muff with her sister and her so-called mates but she’d kept quiet and bought her an iTunes voucher.

Jo often wondered why Maria was so popular without
coming
up with much of an answer. As far as Jo could see it was as if the nastier and more cutting Maria was with people, the more they wanted to be her friend. It was classic school-bully behaviour and Jo saw it as her civic duty to pull her sister up at any given opportunity, seeing as no one else had the bottle to. ‘I wonder what she’s going to sing?’ Jo asked again.

‘R. Kelly, “Flying without Wings”,’ Maria said.

Jo burst out laughing. ‘More like that’s what you’d sing, you wrong ’un. I can just see you up there, all moony-eyed at the judges, thinking you were the dog’s bollocks.’ Jo shut her eyes and began crooning in a high-pitched voice.

Maria punched her in the arm. ‘Piss-taker.’

Mick tutted his disapproval at the language.

Jo shoved her back. ‘Deluded R. Kelly lover!’

‘Will you two give up!’ Claire shouted from the driver’s seat. Jo and Maria piped down as Claire began slapping the satnav angrily. ‘No, I do not want Peter Street in Abergavenny; I want Peter Street in bloody Manchester.’

Jo bit her lip. She wanted to laugh but knew that she would be shouted at and in making Claire shout would distract her even further and they’d no doubt end up under the wheels of a tram. They all sat in barely held silence as Claire pulled up to a red light by Piccadilly train station and waited impatiently as if the whole traffic system was designed to be against her.

Jo’s thoughts turned to how this was all going to play out when they got where they were going. What exactly did they think they were doing? What were they going to do when they got there – run in and put a hood over
Catherine’s
head and kidnap her, IRA-style? Catherine wasn’t answering her phone and Jo wasn’t sure she would take too kindly to her family turning up and demanding that she not put herself through a public audition. Maybe they should just support her, Jo thought. But then Jo didn’t really get a vote where family decisions were concerned – as the youngest she was always treated as the baby without any of the usual perks. She wasn’t even allowed the odd teenage strop without someone pulling her up and telling her how hard it had been for them when they were younger – like her three sisters had grown up in a Dickens’ novel or something. They’re not that much older than me, for God’s sake! she thought. Catherine was twenty-four, Maria was twenty-eight and Claire – first in line to the Reilly throne – was thirty-three. As much as Jo tried to put her point across and make the others see that she did sometimes know what she was talking about, she felt that her opinion was never really taken on board by her older sisters. Today would be no exception. She knew what would happen as soon as they arrived at the auditions: Claire would take charge and everyone else would fall into line. It was just the way things were.

Claire rounded a corner in fifth gear and Jo lurched to the side, squashing poor Rosie who had been sitting quietly minding her own business all the way into town. ‘Sorry, Rosie,’ Jo said, putting a protective arm around her niece.

‘That’s it! There!’ Claire said, screeching to a halt outside a five-star hotel.

‘You can’t just drop us off here,’ Maria said. They had stopped on double yellow lines and were being waved at by an angry-looking man in a high-visibility jacket.

‘Right, you lot go in and I’ll park up. I’ll be one minute.’

Jo jumped out and helped Rosie out of the car. She looked across at the sea of people who were packed inside the building. ‘We’ll never find her in there,’ she said to Maria.

‘We bloody well will,’ Mick countered defiantly.

Jo looked at her father’s disgruntled expression. She had a feeling that daddy dearest didn’t want Catherine – his carer – going anywhere anytime soon.

Andy Short wasn’t short. He was six foot two and his skinny frame and shock of black hair made him look even taller. He heard the line ‘You’re not very short are you?’ nearly every time he was introduced to someone. He had grown to think this odd; like saying ‘You’re not very black are you?’ to Jack Black.

Andy worked in TV. ‘Our Andy works in telly,’ he would often hear his mum say proudly. Then she would pause for effect and add the killer punch, the one that got even the most hardened and snobby of her I-don’t-care-that-your-son-works-in-TV friends staring at him with admiration. ‘He’s working on
Star Maker
.’

Once this bit of juicy information was out of the bag everyone always asked the same question, ‘What’s Richard Forster like?’ The real answer to that was that he had a penchant for young girls and many of the hopefuls who came through the doors found themselves being promised the earth and invited back to his palatial hotel suite in whichever city they were auditioning that week. But Andy never told anyone this. Neither did any other crew member, not just because it was unprofessional and
sounded
like sour grapes, but more importantly because Cherie Forster – Richard’s wife and one of the other judges – was such a formidable character that everyone assumed she’d find out who’d snitched on her husband and they’d never work anywhere in the world again, ever.

Andy lived in south Manchester in the suburb of Withington with his parents, something he had vowed to change this year. He was definitely going to get his own place. He loved his mum and dad dearly but his mum had a habit of vacuuming at least three times a day and other people’s legs had less rights than the vacuum in her domain. As a result Andy always had bruises on his ankles where his mother had feverishly gone at them with the Dyson. He wanted his own flat and the right to never vacuum again if he so wished. Withington was populated with students and young professionals and, although Andy had left school at seventeen, coming from an area like this made him feel that he had to do something exciting with his life. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life pulling pints in the bar where he had worked for the past four years, listening to students rattling on about how drunk they had got the previous evening and pretending they didn’t revise.

Andy had always wanted to be a cameraman. And when his uncle Norman had said that he knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who’d once worked on
Coronation Street
, Andy had taken his number and made enough enquiries – and sat through enough interviews that led to nothing – to get himself a job as a runner on the new series of
Star Maker
. A runner was – as the title suggested – someone who did most of the running
around
that was required behind the scenes on a TV show. The job of a runner wasn’t suited to anyone with prima donna tendencies. You had to be prepared to do anything, Andy had quickly learnt. He had heard some horror stories from other runners – one girl had told him that she had to organise a different prostitute every night for a ‘happily married’ star she had worked with. But until this week Andy hadn’t really had to deal with any egos. He had just got on with his job and had been responsible for shepherding the weird and the wonderful as they came in their droves to audition for
Star Maker
. He loved the opportunity he was being given and couldn’t believe that he was paid – albeit a pittance – to go to work every day and do something he enjoyed. But in the past few days that feeling had changed, ever since he had been given the role of general dogsbody to Jason P. Longford.

Jason P. Longford was thirty-six, good-looking – if a little David Dickinson on the colour chart, gay but pretending to be straight for his housewife audience, and ruthlessly clawing his way to the top of the TV tree. He had landed the roll of
Star Maker
presenter, ousting Bramble Bergdorf, the pretty but ineffectual daughter of a rock star, who had hosted the show the previous year. This was Jason’s ticket into the big time and he was constantly looking for his next opportunity to upstage all around him but for some reason, one which was lost on Andy, he was a huge hit with the public. Yesterday and today Andy had found himself obeying an exhausting list of demands from Jason. He rattled off conflicting orders like machine-gun fire: ‘Get me a latte.’ ‘I didn’t order a latte, I ordered a cappuccino.’ ‘Where is the running list
for
today?’ ‘I didn’t ask for a running list, I know exactly what we’re meant to be doing.’ ‘Wear green tomorrow, it’s my lucky colour.’ ‘Why are you wearing green? You look like an elf.’

Today, as the audition room had filled with people, Jason had scoured it from behind a screen so that no one could see they were being observed, like a velociraptor hunting its prey. He had already pounced on a few people who in his opinion would make good TV: a man who had an industrial weed spray pack on his back and had been singing the theme from
Ghostbusters
and a girl who had brought her own dry ice machine. Now he was grabbing Andy by the elbow and dragging him towards a poor girl who had just fainted.

‘Plain Jane alert!’ Jason said, beckoning his crew to follow him.

Jason had a theory that normal-looking people tried harder for the cameras, if they were pug ugly then even better. The girl who had fainted was now being harmonised to death by some Justin Timberlake wannabes. Andy thought momentarily that she wasn’t anything like a plain Jane, she was quite pretty, even if she did look like a little washed out.

Then Jason snapped, ‘Camera on me.’ And they were off: Jason turned on the charm and was performing for his public. He actually said ‘my public’ without a trace of irony. Andy was sure that even Maria Carey would be less of a diva than Jason. When Jason asked the girl what song she was going to sing, Andy was surprised to hear her say ‘Martha’s Harbour’, a song that his mum used to listen to when he was younger. Jason obviously hadn’t a clue what
she
was talking about – if it wasn’t a Barbara Streisand number he always looked a bit lost – but Andy was excited. It made a change from ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. When Jason turned round and hissed at him, demanding to know who had sung this song, Andy told him – All About Eve. And as Jason looked at Andy as if he was as much of a freak for knowing the song as the fainting girl for wanting to sing it, Andy caught her eye momentarily. It was the first time in the short while he’d worked on
Star Maker
that he’d seen someone who didn’t have a hunger for fame in their eyes. She just looked terrified.