Remember My Name by Abbey Clancy Read Free Book Online Page A

of the Starmaker PR department, but the way she behaved, you’d think she was the Mayoress of London. Possibly the universe.
    As far as I could see, she spent the whole day tweeting on behalf of the company, drafting crap press releases, and schmoozing with tabloid journalists. Her idea of a scoop was getting a picture of Vogue on the celeb gossip pages as she bought sexy underwear, or did her weekly shop in Tesco, to show she was ‘just like the rest of us’. Half the time the pictures were a complete set up as well—something I’d not realised before I started my dream job.
    Patty called the paparazzi and told them what the day’s activities were for Starmaker’s biggest acts, and they did the rest, turning up ‘unexpectedly’ with their cameras. I suppose it was a deal that worked for everyone—the celebs had warning, so they could make sure they had their slap on and were wearing knickers (or not) as they climbed out of their limos, and the photographers got their ‘exclusive’ shots. And Patty? She just got more annoying every time she pulled it off.
    It was a whole new world—which, even as I thought it, I realised I was still singing in my head as the Disney song from
Aladdin.
This whole new world, though, was a lot less princess and a lot more pain in the arse.
    I’d been here for a month. A whole month of effort and hope and hard work—and I was still getting pens lobbed at my head and I was still making coffee for the PR team.
    I ambled off to the stationery cupboard to get Patty a new biro, then made my way to the break room to get her coffee. I fought the urge to spit in it, and looked around at my alleged work colleagues.
    There were a few of the other ladies from the PR team, all having high level meetings that seemed to involved sharing the crumbs of one chocolate croissant between three of them as they slagged off everyone else they worked with. There was Dale, the Starmaker dance teacher and choreographer—who did at least give me a smile and a cheery thumbs up as he pranced past in his tights, swigging a blue Powerade. There were a couple of suits from what was always mysteriously known as Legal. And there was Heidi, Jack Duncan’s assistant.
    She was the best of a bad bunch, and walked over to chat tome as I waited for the coffee to brew. Patty was very particular about her coffee. No instant. Nothing from the coffee pot. It had to be made with her very own cafétière, using her own poncy blend she paid a fortune for and tasted exactly the same as Nescafé.
    ‘Hey,’ said Heidi, staring at me from behind her trendy red-framed glasses. ‘You’ve got a bit of a smudge …’
    She pointed at my face, and I licked my thumb and rubbed at it. Ha. The pen
had
been working, after all.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘She threw a pen at me. Apparently, it was my fault it ran out.’
    Heidi pulled a sympathetic face and leaned back against the counter, her larger-than-average bottom spreading out over the cupboard doors.
    ‘Chin up, chuck,’ she said, in the fake Scouse voice she always threw into our conversations. I got that a lot—people telling me to ‘calm down, calm down’, making jokes about me stealing their hub caps, and generally behaving as though people from Liverpool were some exotic foreign animal they’d never encountered before. I’d never even been aware of how strong my accent was until I lived in London. Now, it seemed to be the only thing about me that people remembered. That and the fact that I made the coffee.
    Heidi, at least, didn’t mean any harm by it, so I just smiled. I was having to do that a lot lately. Just take a deep breath, and smile, and try not to swear or punch anyone. It didn’t come naturally.
    ‘Jack says are you okay with your schedule this week, by the way,’ she added, getting a packet of chocolate Hobnobs outof the cupboard. One of the few perks of working at Starmaker was the free snacks and drinks. Unfortunately, I’d already been told I had to