had a taste of it now: the applause of the crowd, the flash of a hundred cameras. She knew how easy it was to win the slavish adoration of the public and her fellow housemates (apart from Marie, and Marie could just go and fuck herself). But just one taste was never going to be enough.
No, Becky intended to gorge on it all: fame, power, success, as if she was standing in Nando’s with a tapeworm and a black card.
By the time she was done, everyone was going to remember her name.
But first she had to stand down stage, take her place with the other former housemates and watch Amelia be crowned the winner, then fluff and weep her way through her exit interview.
The only gratifying part was when she said, ‘The best bit of my Big Brother experience was meeting Becky, because I know I have a friend for life. More than a friend. She’s my sister from another mister.’
After the cameras stopped rolling Becky and the other losers were herded like cattle into a people carrier to be ferried to an Elstree hotel, while Amelia was whisked off in a limo, as befitted her winner’s status. She was the best of them all and Becky was left to mill about the after party nursing a lukewarm white wine that was all the production budget would stretch to.
Her fellow housemates were surrounded by their families. Not that Becky felt even one pang on that score, having lost her mother when she was eight and her father seven years later.
Poor Becky. Not only had she come from the most broken of homes, but at fifteen she was an actual bona fide orphan, like some poor creature from a Victorian novel waiting to be sent either to the workhouse or to live with a kindly guardian and benefactor.
In the end, her father’s old Soho drinking buddy, Barbara Pinkerton, agent to the stars of stage and screen, had fallen somewhere between the two, and even now was bearing down on her in the same hotel bar they’d waited in before Becky had entered the Big Brother house.
‘Becky!’ Babs boomed once she was within booming distance. ‘My little Becky Sharp.’
She descended in a cloud of Opium to place lips slick with shocking-pink lipstick in the vicinity of Becky’s cheek.
‘I’m surprised a devious little cow like you didn’t go all the way,’ she murmured as she sat down on the leather-look banquette next to Becky. ‘You played a blinder, even had my stony-cold heart stirring when you gave that insipid little debutante your phone call home. But turns out insipid little debutantes trump sparky orphans. Who knew?’
‘I couldn’t be happier for Emmy,’ Becky said, as she’d been saying at regular intervals to whoever drifted into her orbit. ‘It really couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person.’
‘Bet she has a trust fund the size of the Guatemalan national debt. What does she need the prize money for?’ Barbara wondered. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed.’
‘Too fucking right.’
Their eyes met. Pupil and master, though for the first time Babs Pinkerton couldn’t tell which was which.
‘I promised your poor, dear old Pa that I’d look after you like you were my own,’ she’d said when she’d shown up at the council-run children’s home in Tower Hamlets where Becky had been assigned a bed and a case worker, after six different foster placements had returned her to sender.
Compared to the horrors of the home, Babs Pinkerton was definitely the lesser of two evils, but she was still fairly evil. Becky had known Babs all her life. The Sharp family had lived in a series of rooms in Soho, usually reached through a street door with a tatty handmade sign – ‘Model 2nd floor’ – invariably pinned to it. Her father didn’t have far to stagger to The Coach and Horses, and when that shut, on to The Colony Rooms, where he’d often take a snifter with Babs.
Sometimes he’d think it amusing to bring Becky along so she could mimic the regulars. More often she’d be sent by her mother to bring her father home or ask for five quid to feed the meter and buy a can of beans. Babs Pinkerton was like an honorary aunt, or so she claimed as she sat with Frank Sharp, a large gin and tonic always within reach, and always dressed in pink because that was her thing, as if she was a frilly, feminine, frivolous little thing when actually she was a shark in lipstick. In a show of affection, she’d pinch Becky’s cheek, her fingers hard and unforgiving, and it was a point of pride to Becky never to make a sound.
So when Babs turned up in Tower Hamlets, Becky didn’t hope for the best. Just expected the worst.
For the first two weeks or so, the worst wasn’t that bad. Despite spending so long in The Colony Rooms each night that the next day she seeped noxious gin fumes through her pores, Babs did have a roster of clients in work, albeit strictly D-list. Comedians still hankering after their glory days in the seventies when they could get a primetime slot on Saturday-night TV telling mother-in-law jokes and making racist jibes. Superannuated dollybirds hoping to resurrect their careers with a slot on Celebrity Masterchef or in a gritty TV drama on Channel 4. More recently, Babs had started to mine a lucrative seam of reality-TV contestants determined to cling on to their fifteen minutes of fame like it was the last lifebelt on the Titanic.
Babs had done well enough for herself that she had a house in a little mews in Paddington where she installed Becky in a spare room along with boxes of glossy ten-by-fours of former clients and left her alone every day with ten quid to buy herself snacks and a big TV with all the satellite channels.
Becky knew it couldn’t last because nothing ever did.
The worst, when it came, was far worse than Becky had ever imagined: Babs shipped her off to Bournemouth to act as a companion to her ageing aunt, Jemima Pinkerton, once the queen of British soaps, and now a septuagenarian with atrial defibrillation, two artificial hips and a recent dementia diagnosis.
‘I’ve been so worried about poor Auntie Jemima,’ Babs told Becky as they travelled down to poor Auntie Jemima’s well-appointed bungalow in the exclusive enclave of Southbourne, under the guise of a little daytrip to the seaside. ‘She hasn’t got a soul in the world – fame is a fickle, heartless bitch. And then I thought, well, poor, dear Becky doesn’t have a soul in the world either. You’ll be the granddaughter she never had.’
‘You want me to spend my days wiping the shitty arse of some senile old has-been?’ Becky had spluttered.
‘She’s not senile. Not yet. Just a bit forgetful, and the years might not have been kind – neither was her third husband, an absolute brute – but Jemima’s a sweetheart …’
‘I don’t care if she’s the queen of fucking everything,’ Becky had interrupted. ‘I’m not doing it.’
Then Babs had taken Becky’s cheek between thumb and forefinger as she’d used to do, and this time when she finally let go, she’d left a bruise. ‘Listen to me, you ungrateful little wretch, you’ll do this or we’ll turn round and I’ll take you to the nearest police station so I can turn you in for stealing three pieces out of my jewellery box and four blank cheques.’
‘They’re not worth anything. Just glass and paste,’ Becky muttered, but she subsided.
‘Also, once you’re sixteen you can claim a carer’s allowance, which
