‘I’d let you, an’ all.’ She groaned. ‘It’s Jimmy I feel for. First he loses his dad and now he’s going to lose his mum.’
‘It’s not a done deal, surely? There must be some treatment they can try?’
‘Simon came round first thing,’ she said. ‘He’d have been here last night instead of relying on a voicemail, only one of his patients was dying and he needed to be there.’ She sighed. ‘It’s inoperable. I’m riddled with it, Steph. It’s in my liver, my pancreas, my colon, my spine, my lungs. I’m a fucking walking cancer. They can give me chemo, but that’s not going to give me more than a few months, and it’ll be a few months of feeling like shit. You remember how it was before.’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘No chemo. Just pain relief. That way, at least I get a bit of time with Jimmy where I’m not throwing up or feeling too tired to be arsed with him. And I don’t have to be in hospital either. I can stay here in my own home till the end. Simon’s promised me that. I’ll have to go into the clinic for check-ups a couple of times, but that’s all.’ She made it sound as insignificant as a trip to the supermarket. Her stoicism amazed me.
‘If that’s what you want,’ I said.
She tilted her head back, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘None of it’s what I want,’ she shouted. ‘I want a life. I want to see my boy grow up. I don’t want to die.’ Her voice cracked and so did her fortitude. Tears trickled out from her clenched eyelids and her lips curled back in a rictus of anguish. I put my hand on her head and pulled her into my arms. I could feel myself choking up, and before long I was crying silently with her.
We stayed in the sauna for a while, sobbing and sweating and generally being maudlin and miserable. With good reason, it must be said. ‘Where’s Marina?’ I eventually asked.
‘I told her to take Jimmy off somewhere for a few days. Euro Disney or something. Just till the fuss dies down a bit. I need to get myself together. I don’t want him to see me in bits. Or to have those fuckers outside snapping him every time he goes out the gate.’ She shook her head. ‘How the fuck did they find out so fast? They must have hacked my voicemail, it’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘You think? Surely it’s more likely that someone from the clinic leaked it.’
‘They’d have known a lot more, though,’ Scarlett said. It was a good point, one that I hadn’t considered. ‘I hate that I don’t even have control over my own terminal bloody illness. I wanted to have a little bit of dignity about the whole thing.
Not this bloody circus. I can’t help thinking those fuckers created the stress that made me ill in the first place. Vultures. Can’t wait to cash in.’ She managed another tired smile. ‘If anybody’s going to make a bob or two out of me dying, it should be me, not some bloody hack or some Judas that works for Simon.’
It might sound strange that Scarlett was thinking about the cash implications of her announcement. But at that point, I thought I understood where she was coming from. Scarlett’s working capital was her fame. Now it had a strictly limited shelf life. The swimathon might outlive her. But her fragrances and her endorsements would likely die with her. Unlike authors and musicians whose work carries on earning after their death, a celebrity’s earning power dies with them. And Scarlett had a child she needed to provide for, as well as a charitable foundation whose work she presumably wanted to maintain. Of course she had half an eye on the bottom line.
She leaned into me. ‘Are you up for another book? The last will and testament? The diary of a dignified death? It would be a bit classier than another pile of celebrity bollocks. Every - body’s talking about going to Switzerland to that Dignitas place, whether we should be allowed to choose how we die. We could do a book about how I manage it.’ Her enthusiasm might have seemed bizarre to an outsider. But to us it made perfect sense.
‘Why not? If Biba wants it, we’ll give it to her.’
When we couldn’t stand the heat any longer, we moved to the pool. Scarlett lowered herself gingerly into the water. Already I could see the changes in the way she moved – normally she launched herself at the water in a running dive and broke the surface with a powerful overarm stroke. But today, a slow breast stroke was all she was up for. She seemed to be ageing in front of my eyes.
And that was only the start of it. Her decline was frightening. The weight seemed to fall off her. By the time Jimmy and Marina came back a few days later, I reckoned she’d already lost half a stone. She had no interest in food. ‘It all tastes grey,’ she said. And when she could bring herself to eat, she couldn’t keep it down for long.
Leanne turned up the day after the news broke. I looked at her with new eyes thanks to Scarlett’s revelations, but there seemed to be nothing artificial about her grief. That first night, after Scarlett had gone to bed, we sat up late in the kitchen, drinking brandy and railing against the injustice of it all. When we ran out of rant, I asked her how it was going in Spain. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘The weather’s lovely and the people are friendly. It’s quite nice to go to a place where nobody’s made their mind up about you before you get there. It’s like a clean slate.’
‘I think we all fancy that sometimes. Ditch the past and start from scratch.’
‘What? Even you, Steph? With your lovely life?’
I stuck my tongue out at her. ‘Even me. It’s not all loveliness. Remember all that hassle with Pete?’
‘Yeah, but that’s history now.’
I thought back to Joshu’s funeral. ‘I think so. I hope so. And business? How’s that working out?’
Her smile was so open I couldn’t believe it was anything other than the whole truth. ‘Pretty good, actually. I’m starting to build up a nice little clientele. There wasn’t any real competition. Before I set up, you had to go down Fuengirola or Benalmadena to get your nails done by somebody English. And let’s face it, they all prefer somebody English. Bunch of racists, most of them. They act like the Spanish are trained monkeys.’ She chuckled. ‘Mind you, there’s a lot of the Spanish play up to that. They’ve got the Manuel act off to a T.’
I was glad to see Leanne back at the hacienda. She had a sense of fun and she lightened the atmosphere. And if I’m honest, I was glad to have someone to share Scarlett’s final journey with. It would have been a heavy burden to carry alone.
Leanne wasn’t the only one picking up a share of the weight. The only doctor Scarlett wanted near her was Simon Graham. She trusted him, she said. And she needed someone medical that she could trust now the end was getting near. She insisted he take a leave of absence from the clinic, and he more or less went along with her demands. He generally went in to the clinic for a couple of hours in the late morning two or three times a week. But other than that, he was at the hacienda. He moved a single bed into her dressing room and spent the nights there, in case she needed help. She didn’t want a stranger nursing her either. So Marina added nurse to her list of household jobs whenever Simon needed a hand.
Simon and Marina became part of the late-night kitchen set. It was an odd group, brought together for the saddest of reasons. We started playing poker to pass the time and often we’d play for hours, trying to take our minds off the dying woman and the sleeping child upstairs. Simon bought a set of proper poker chips and we sat around the table trying to figure each other out. I’d learned to play poker with Pete and his musician buddies, and I’d found it an interesting way to gain an insight into people’s personalities. Simon always took his time, weighing the odds (he claimed), before finally betting conservatively. Of all of us, he made the best decisions about when to fold. A man who would always cut his losses and come out even.