The actual famous people never complained.
As Keera knew, they all understood that any complaint got them labelled ‘difficult’ or full of themselves. This was more fatal than a meltdown on TV.
So Keera and the other singers and actors just smiled at the oddballs and pretended they were delighted that some idiot was watching them with his mouth open as he drank free gin/vodka/whatever was on offer.
‘Let Taniqua fix your hair before we go in,’ instructs Dr Bobbi now, as Charlie says: ‘We’re here, ladies and gentlemen,’ as the minivan arrives at the studio.
Dr Bobbi has been on the phone for the entire trip, flipping through messages and emails, flicking them into delete with ultra-long, coffin-tipped gel nails. This week’s colour is Undead Red, a deep plum, a name which made her shriek with delight when she saw it.
‘Undead Red and me are perfect! I’m channelling the Morticia look!’
Dr Bobbi’s hair, the same pale mouse as Keera’s natural colour, is shoulder-length, dead straight and now coloured inky black.
She’d dyed it that colour when she’d first arrived in LosAngeles from Ireland back in the Triassic Period before Keera was born.
Dr Bobbi’s personal fight for stardom as a singer/actor had given her the tools to make her daughter succeed where she hadn’t.
The night before Keera’s first audition for a commercial, when she’d been nine years old, Dr Bobbi had looked at her daughter’s glowing little face with its freckles.
Keera had huge eyes the colour of smoky-green quartz, a hypnotic colour that could make her look infinitely sad or wonderfully inquiring or anything else that Bobbi told her to look when reading a line for a part.
To Bobbi’s critical gaze, Keera’s nondescript mousey plaits took away from the glittering eyes that stood out even in her adorable little pixie face with its snub nose and pointed chin.
Everything she’d done for Keera – and this Keera had written down in her journal because it all seemed pivotal – had been for this moment. Keera’s very name had been Americanised so that the Irish ‘Ciara’ had been translated into the far more easy-to-say ‘Keera’.
The legend was born that Dr Bobbi had found a ‘wash-in’ black colour because she didn’t want to hurt her precious daughter’s little head and had applied it.
Nine-year-old Keera had felt the adult dye sting her delicate scalp but by the time it was growing out, Keera was on her way.
The next day, newly black-haired Keera got the job. Got the television sitcom role, got the chocolate advertisement, the tween lip gloss deal, got the career.
The story about using gentle wash-in dye was the stuff of the Keera-and-her-mom legend: fantasy as fact in the career-building world.
She was a child star and child stars were not like ordinary kids. If they needed nose jobs, they got them. Needing professional hair dye when they were nine? No problemo.
‘Gimme a look at you.’ In the back of the minivan, Dr Bobbi now scans her daughter with a laser eye. Keera puts her head sideways and adopts the cute expression that had won her so many fans on her second sitcom,The Keera and Cat Party House.
It had been fun making the series at first, Keera thinks suddenly, remembering. She’d been thirteen when it started, sixteen when it ended and, by then, it was just her.
Cat had been a wonderful friend, her first and closest best friend: very quirky, e-boy-ish, almost, with her blue sparkly eyeliner habit, genuine fondness for boy’s trousers, button-down shirts, and her nerdy but expertly cut short haircut.
They’d been so close and had so much fun.
Nothing was fun any more.
Was it normal to be twenty-seven and feel burned out?
Keera gets out of the minivan and says thanks to Charlie, but her head is swirling.
What had happened to Cat? She’d left LA when she was written out of the series. Keera had meant to stay in touch and they’d messaged all the time, but then Cat had sort of disappeared from view. She’d stopped returning messages.
‘She’s probably busy and you remind her of how badly her career worked out,’ Mom had said at the time. ‘Who has time for friendship when you’ve got a career? And never forget, jealousy is a real thing in this business.’
Cat would never be jealous, Keera thinks.
Mom was rarely wrong but perhaps she had been in this case?
She and Cat had sworn to be friends for ever. Cat had never had her head turned by the Hollywood machine, never stopped being the funny girl from New Mexico who loved showbiz but loved her family more.
