Re-inventing Tara [Paperback]

London, July 2000

BEHIND-the-scenes at Early Bird TV, Tara MacDonald perched on a slippery leather sofa in the green room, sipping cranberry juice through a straw - to protect her lipstick - and anxiously gathering her thoughts. As the station's celebrity astrologer she was in the studio every morning for her Start-the-Day Predictions, and the windowless hospitality room - with its flowers, fruit bowl and newspapers - was a place she usually felt comfortable. But today was different. In a few minutes she'd be joining Rupert and Jilly on their live mid-morning chat show, Sofa Talk, to be interviewed about herself - her least favourite subject and one she usually avoided.
On the widescreen TV in the corner, Rupert and Jilly were interviewing Dolores from Bootle who'd been seduced by the world's first Internet priest. Father Blarney had wooed her through his confessional chatroom, she explained. Now she was pregnant he'd been sent to South America by the Church and she'd been sent to Coventry by her family. What should she tell her about-to-be-born child when it was old enough to ask about its dad?
I've no idea who my father was, thought Tara. What if Rupert and Jilly ask about that? I wish I hadn't said I'd do this...

Excerpt from CHAPTER TWO

Glasgow, 1986

'GET your head out of that magazine, Scarlett. Your mother needs a wee hand here.'
Scarlett sighed. The flat was too small to pretend she hadn't heard her mother shouting at her. As usual.
Outside on the long street of red sandstone tenements it was a summer evening in Glasgow, clammy with promise. The setting was far from romantic: gardens strewn with rubbish, closes covered with IRA and UVF graffiti. But hormones were in the air.
Girls from Scarlett's school were parading past in stretch-Lycra skirts and crop tops, shoulders red with sunburn, faces orange with bronzing powder. Smoking, swearing and giggling, they were playing Top of the Pops on their ghetto blaster and walking with the self-consciousness of adolescence. Although they were only going to the ice-cream van, they acted as though an audience were watching their every move.
They were right. On this street full of men who'd been laid off from the dying shipyards, and women who didn't care what time their children went to bed, nothing happened without other people seeing...
Scarlett's mother had always been proud of living 'at the right end of the street', where closes were scrubbed and net curtains kept white. At the other end there were boarded-up windows, broken furniture on the pavement, and the one family who kept their garden nice had to chain their wheelbarrow to the railings. With only one bedroom in their two-room flat, Scarlett slept on a sofabed in the living room. Only on nights like tonight, when Ma had people in, was she allowed to sprawl on the apricot satin-look bedspread in her mother's room, reading Elle. At the sound of Ma's voice, though, she obediently put down the magazine and went through to see what was needed.
The cramped front room was inappropriately fitted with deep shag-pile carpet, but also, this evening, with wall-to-wall cellulite. In a room the size of a couple of bus shelters, a dozen overweight women were squashed into the Dralon three-piece suite or perched on kitchen stools, their thighs billowing over the edges. Standing in the middle, and centre of their attention, was the only size-ten woman among them. From behind, in her tight white miniskirt, lilac off-the-shoulder top and high heels, her blonde peroxide hair fluffed up as big as it would go, she looked like a twenty-something Barbie doll. But from the front, with her smoker's prematurely lined face, Ma looked like Barbie's barfly mother...