than twice a week. Some, like Danny Harvey (who always smells of apples), wash it every day. And you’d notice that they’re all what my mum calls “natural extroverts”. You might think that all boys are always shouting and mucking about, but the boys at my school do it with excellent projection and perfect enunciation.
That’s because I go to a stage school. I go to Silvia Lighthouse’s Academy for the Performing Arts. Every single one of the kids who was standing outside my classroom waiting to go in for maths on the last day of term wants to be an actor, a singer or a TV presenter. Or all three usually.
We have all our normal lessons in the morning, and then after lunch we have dance, acting and music until four, which might sound like a laugh – and it is – but it’s hard too. Especially when your speech and drama coach is a raving lunatic, hung up about the fact that she never made it big and ended up teaching a load of snotty stuck-up posh kids instead (except for me and Nydia) which might be why she hates me more than anyone else on account of the fact that I’m on telly. But even though I don’t have that many friends, at least I have Nydia. And although sometimes it feels like I’m always working and never have time to just relax, I love the school.
School is the only place where I feel like I am actually me. The person I feel like inside and not the person everyone else sees, I mean. When I’m dancing or acting or singing it doesn’t matter that I’m not popular or very thin or don’t have a boyfriend. And although the teachers make you work twice as hard as other school kids and remind you that not everyone will make it, they do believe that sometimes dreams do come true. I don’t know many adults who do that.
I’ve been going to the academy since I was eight, but it was only when Nydia arrived on a scholarship last year that I made a real friend for the first time, because Nydia and I come from the same sort of background, the same sort of terraced house and normal mum and dad’s life. Everyone else here is super rich with parents that frequently feature in Hello!.
Nydia and I are only at the academy because she got the scholarship and I got famous by mistake, which pays fairly well as it turns out. Not that I see a penny. I have a trust fund where most of my money goes to keep it safe until I’m twenty-one. Twenty-one! That’s practically my whole life so far again before I get to see any of it! And despite the fact that I think I have quite a lot of money we have a very normal life. Mum says it’s important that I keep my feet on the ground so I don’t get into drugs and alcohol like some child stars. So I still have to ask her for stuff and she mostly still says no.
Nydia is quite an unusual girl. She’s got the loudest voice in our year and the loudest laugh you’ve ever heard, which she says is because she always has to shout to get heard over her four brothers, but I think she’s just got inbuilt “theatrical projection”. Nydia’s family originally came from Nigeria, but Nydia was born in the same hospital as me, only two months later than I was. I was on the fifteenth and she was on the eighteenth. So like we say, apart from the fact she’s black and I’m white, and the fact that we have different parents and everything, we could practically be twins. It feels like we are twins sometimes, because sometimes we just start thinking the same thing at the same time, like a joke or something, and we start laughing for no reason. Then everyone looks at us, but we both know why we’re laughing and it makes us laugh even more. It makes me feel safe and sort of warm inside to have a friend like Nydia. While everything keeps changing, Nydia and me will always be the same, because we’re like twins.
Nydia’s mum and dad aren’t rich like most of the parents of the kids that go to this school. She won her place, beating over four thousand other applicants through the Sylvia Lighthouse scholarship programme, which makes her better than probably anyone else in our year. But that doesn’t stop the other girls picking on her, calling her fat and stupid. Anne-Marie even said no wonder so many people are starving in Africa, because obviously Nydia ate all the food; but she said that in front of Miss Greenstreet and then we got lectured for over an hour about the Third World debt, so she hasn’t made that crack twice. And she’s a moron anyway, because Nydia grew up in Hackney just like I did and has never even been to Africa. But that’s Anne-Marie for you: the brains of a pile of damp pants.
And besides, Nydia is a very good actress, better than any of them. She wants to be a character actress, which Anne-Marie says means an ugly, fat actress, but if you ask me it’s better than being a characterless actress like Anne-Marie, because she looks just the same as everyone else: tall, thin and blonde, which means she’s bound to get a part on Hollyoaks. (When the current cast get too old and ugly and get sacked.) But at least they will be old, like twenty-five or something. Not only thirteen, like me.
The thing that happened to me that other girls just dream about? I got famous. Not just a little bit famous like Anne-Marie, whose dad is a film producer and who was once in the EuroDisney advert on TV.
Not just famous because my dad used to be a rock star and my mum was an ex-supermodel, like Jade Caruso’s parents.
Not famous for modelling in the Kay’s Autumn/Winter catalogue like Danny Harvey. (Who looked nice, by the way, even if he didn’t exactly smile. According to Menakshi – who obviously fancies him, as she fancies more or less ALL boys – he thinks he’s too good for everyone else at the academy, even the popular kids. She’s probably right. He used to be quite a laugh, then about a year ago he seemed to change over night.)
Anyway, I am famous in my own right. I’m famous because every year since I was six I’ve appeared in Britain’s most popular serialised soap Kensington Heights. Unless you come from outer space or something you’ll have heard of it. It’s set in the cut-and-thrust world of an auction house and it’s all about very rich, glamorous people buying antiques (and having sex with each other’s husbands, usually). Every year from mid-August to February, Kensington Heights runs once a week at eight o’clock on Wednesdays and I’m in nearly every episode, playing Angel MacFarley.
That’s how I got to be famous and not just in Britain, either. I’m famous in eastern Europe, Pakistan and Japan, and even a bit famous in America. I don’t know this for sure, but Kensington Heights runs on the BBC America channel and I read in Heat magazine the week before last that Brad Pitt watches it and is a big fan! Imagine that! Brad Pitt has seen me on TV! Which is why it’s a shame that Angel MacFarley is about as glamorous as Tesco’s-own trainers. But it’s only to be expected because, of course, I’m not even slightly glamorous. Even last year when I went to the British Soap Awards all the other girls from the show wore backless and strapless dresses and glitter and heels. I had on my black trouser suit and a blue velvet top and no real make-up, just foundation and lip gloss. Mum said I had to look my age. I said, “I don’t want to look my age, I hate my age!” And she said that the only way to get round that was to grow up, which I clearly wasn’t ready to do if I was going to make a fuss about it. Like I said, she’s pretty keen on me being normal – even when being normal makes me look stupid.
Everyone else in the soap is super gorgeous, of course, except my family, the MacFarleys, because we’re what the producers call “social realism”, although Angel’s mum, played by former model Brett Summers, is still pretty attractive – even in an M&S top. And anyhow, I don’t know that it was very realistic when it turned out that Angel’s dad had a long-lost identical twin brother who came back whilst he was away nursing his sick mother and tried to trick Angel’s mum into going to bed with him when normally she’d never cheat, because we are the only family in the soap that doesn’t do stuff like that.
In the end Angel found out about him and stopped it just in time. I got a lot of letters after that episode. You’d be amazed how many kids actually do find out that one of their parents is cheating on the other one (although only two letters concerned actual identical twins). And they get all stressed and upset and don’t know if they should say anything and it’s all horrible. I don’t know why they write to me as if I actually know anything about anything in real life, but I always write back and put in some leaflets and the number for ChildLine and suggest they talk to a teacher if they are worried. The other teenagers on the show get letters from people telling them how much they love them, especially Justin de Souza (who I’m madly in love with, by the way). All