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Chapter 2
The Present Day

‘I know you’re aiming for Scarlett-O’Hara-on-her-deathbed, darling, but with those earrings, you’re landing closer to Pat Butcher leaving the Queen Vic in a black cab.’

Lewis is perched on the end of the bed, trying to ignore the machines and the wires and the dreaded drip stand. He’s feeling a little queasy because of the smell. That unmistakable hospital smell: that hideous combination of death and disinfectant.

He can hear the nurses outside, chatting away about their night out at the weekend, and has a deeply uncivilised urge to run through the door and clang their heads together. He realises it’s unfair – God knows, if anybody is entitled to a life-affirming booze-up, it’s people who care for the dying. But still. A little decorum wouldn’t go amiss.

Andrea manages to kick him, though it barely registers – she is very weak, and his behind is very well padded. It’s like a gnat biting a T. Rex. He pats her foot beneath the green blanket, and gives her a smile.

‘I hate you,’ she says, ‘with an absolute passion.’

‘Careful, my sweet,’ he replies, noticing that she is removing the gaudy drop earrings with shaking hands. ‘You could pop your clogs at any moment. Would you really want those to be your last words?’

‘No,’ she answers, throwing the jewellery down, ignoring the fact that the fake ruby drops skitter across the floor, one disappearing beneath the bed and another taking up residence under the cabinet.

‘If they’re going to be my last words, I’d make it “an absolute fucking passion”. Now, are you ready? How’s the lighting? Honestly, you’d think they’d spare more thought, wouldn’t you? A few gentle spots instead of all this … fluorescence?’

‘Spare more thought to lighting? In hospital? I suppose they’re concentrating on more important things.’

‘Ha! I’ve reached the stage where there is no more important thing. Lighting makes all the difference, you know. There was this time, on set, with John Nettles …’

‘Oh lord!’ Lewis exclaims, standing to his size-12 feet and throwing his arms in the air in a gesture that is half pleading, half surrender, ‘if you tell me another story about bloody Bergerac, I swear to God you won’t get the chance to die naturally – I will take that pillow and smother you with it!’

She manages a smile, but it is a sad thing. Like her skin doesn’t have enough life left in it to give it any conviction. She’s always been slim, as long as he’s known her, but now there is barely anything left.

Within the space of six weeks, the disease and the drugs have ravaged her like a Viking horde, leaving this grey, skinny streak of a human being behind. He’d do anything to pass on some of his solid bulk, but apparently the boffins haven’t yet come up with a way to transplant the health and vitality of a 68-year-old man to his dying friend.

He feels like crying, and gives himself a stern talking to. There will be time for self-pity later – right now needs to be all about her.

‘Maybe you should, Lewis,’ she says, rooting around in the make-up bag that sits on her lap. ‘And I can’t say that I’d mind. I’d much rather say my farewells to this cruel world with a handsome man in my bed …’

‘Well,’ he replies, fussing around with the camera, ‘I’ll pop out later and see if I can find you one, then. What do you fancy, Daniel Craig? Or something a bit more old-school with a lot of chest hair, like Burt Reynolds?’

She’s not listening now, he can tell. She has her little compact mirror out, and is inspecting her reflection. The grimace on her face implies she’s not entirely delighted with what she sees. With a shaking hand, she tries to grip a brush, dip it in powder, touch herself up for her final scene. It is pitiful to watch, and he can’t bear it.

He puts the camera down, lumbers towards her, and sits at her side. There is, sadly, plenty of room for both of them. He takes the brush and the powder, and goes to work. He adds some blush, and a touch of colour to her lips. They are cracked and thin, dehydrated. Like her body is rejecting anything that will sustain it.

Patiently, she endures his fussing without a single word of abuse. She must be feeling bad, he knows, to miss an opportunity to mock him for his make-up skills. All those years in the village amateur dramatics have not been wasted.

‘Are you done, Max Factor?’ she says, her head lolling back on to the pillow, as though holding it up has drained her of all energy. ‘How do I look?’

He reaches out, and smooths down her hair. It is a dazzling shade of silver-grey, closely cropped to her skull in one of those boyish styles that only the very beautiful can carry off. And Andrea is beautiful – or at least she had been. Now, the once-stylish cheekbones – the type his mother always said ‘aged well’ – are poking out like wires, and her skin is stretched taut, like the world’s worst facelift.

Her eyes are clouded by pain – she’s refused to take any medication this morning, saying she needs her wits about her – but are still the same striking shade he will always remember. Such a deep blue they are almost violet. Elizabeth Taylor eyes.

He’s seen Andrea in many of her TV roles, from back in her heyday, and she was what they would have called a ‘stunner’ back then. She was never a star, and hasn’t appeared on screen in anything new since 2005, but she still occasionally gets fan mail, or an invitation to appear at a convention. A lot of people would recognise her – those eyes. That face. All the roles she played in the 1970s and 1980s, usually as someone’s love interest, or a feisty barmaid, or what she called Posh Totty.

Never quite the leading lady – but then again, interesting roles for women were sadly lacking then, and she had two kids to look after as well. These days, she’d have smashed it, he thinks – been a Keeley Hawes or a Rachel Weisz or a Kate Winslet. Still, even when she was playing the Tart with a Heart on The Sweeney or a Sexy Alien Sidekick in Doctor Who, she was always good. Always stupendously glamorous. Always unforgettable.

In fact, the only people who seemed to have been able to forget Andrea are the two people she loves the most. The two people she’s about to record her final message for, after weeks of preparation. Of field trips for him. Of rooting through photo albums, making cassette tapes, emptying out bin bags, setting up video-sharing accounts, drawing on maps with red pen, pilfering from scrapbooks. Pillaging their past, in the determined hope that she can change their future.

He has no idea if it will work. He has no idea if he even cares – they’re not real to him, Rosehip and Popcorn. He’s never met them, and has no real desire to. She banned him from contacting them to explain that she really is ill this time (from that, he deduces that Andrea may have tried to scam them with dramatic hospital visits before now, just to get their attention), and that suits him just fine. He’s been friends with Andrea for more than ten years and never been introduced to them, which says it all.

Partly, he thinks, looking on as she sucks in breath, eyes closed, fingers weakly clinging on to the blanket with her coral-painted nails, she didn’t want them to see her like this. Reduced to skin and bones held together with sheer force of will. Partly, she is so focused on this crazy plan of hers that it has now become more real to her than anything else, clinging to it and pinning all her hopes on it.

She is convinced that this is her legacy. That this will work. That she will be able to achieve in her death the one thing she was never able to achieve in life – bringing her daughters back together again.