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.
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.
Chapter Eighteen
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 o
n 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?
Film Star Page 15