The Vanishing Point

28

Talking to my female friends about Pete, it was sometimes hard to get through to them how scary he’d become. When I talked about his constant messages and emails, the flowers he sent to Maggie’s office for me, the way he’d followed me in the street, one or two of them were incredulous. ‘And you keep knocking him back?’ one said. ‘I’d love to have a man that devoted to me.’

Because he never openly menaced me, it wasn’t easy to explain how threatening I found his behaviour. Scarlett totally got it, though. Because of her own experiences with the media, she understood my terror of being turned into what Leanne had jokingly called a ‘prisoner of love’. It made her shudder with horror, and it was one of the many reasons why living at the hacienda was a very easy option.

But I couldn’t stay there for ever. After a lot of thought, I’d decided to move to Brighton. I’d always liked the seaside, in spite of dispiriting childhood holidays in the teeth of easterly gales at Cleethorpes and Skegness. Parts of Brighton reminded me of the bits of Lincoln I’d liked – the narrow twisting streets of the Lanes, the less grand terraced streets, the green spaces at the heart of the town. There was a cultural life and easy access to London. But perhaps most importantly of all, I’d never mentioned Brighton to Pete. Not even casually, in passing. I’d never said, ‘I fancy a day out in Brighton,’ or ‘One of my favourite authors is doing the Brighton Festival, let’s go down and make a weekend of it.’ There was no reason on earth why he should come looking for me there.

I eventually found a sweet little Victorian terraced house ten minutes from the sea. There were local shops, a couple of bustling pubs where easy acquaintance seemed to be on offer, a neat little park where I could take the air when I needed to have a pause for thought. The house was tall and narrow, with a converted attic that served me well as an office. The master bedroom revealed a sliver of sea between the houses opposite, and the previous owners had installed a generous conservatory that caught the morning sun. It was perfect, tucked away in a quiet street with parking for residents only. I felt safe.

I didn’t see much of Scarlett while I was settling into the new house. I was painting walls and choosing curtain fabric, having sofas reupholstered and scouring the Lanes for bits and pieces to replace items that Pete had broken during his malicious spree. She came down a couple of times with Jimmy, who loved the beach. He could sit for ages sifting through the chunky pebbles, picking his favourites and building little piles around his chubby legs. But there was too much going on in her other life for Scarlett to have much free time.

Her reinvention was coming along apace. Her show focusing on reality TV stars had developed a cult following. It had become a favourite with the student audience, who apparently enjoyed it in a post-modern ironic way. It had also won an audience among the older viewers, the staple of daytime TV. Between the two groups, the show had earned significant ratings. Advertisers loved it and the punters loved Scarlett. Now she was in talks to front a late-night chat show on a popular digital channel. Every now and again I’d stumble on a piece in one of the broadsheets exploring her apparently inexorable rise with a slightly bemused air. But she hadn’t let go of her core fan base. There were still the features in Yes! magazine and the occasional Leanne appearance in the gossip columns. Scarlett even guest-presented a celebrity special of the reality makeover show Ladette to Lady. She was well on the way to becoming a cultural icon.

There was a downside to her success, however. I had a rare opportunity to see it at first hand when she persuaded me to come to a book signing in an Oxford Street department store. Of course, the person who’d actually written Jimmy’s Testament wouldn’t be the one doing the signing, but that was fine with me. I’ve never had a hankering for the limelight.

We were smuggled in via the delivery entrance to avoid the crowds I’d clocked as we’d crossed Oxford Street in the Mercedes with the tinted windows. The queue stretched out of the brass-bound double doors and round the corner. ‘Good turnout,’ I said as we swept past.

‘Yeah, they always do well for me here.’ Scarlett allowed herself to preen a little, then gave me a cheeky smile. ‘People love the book, Steph. You did a great job helping me knock it into shape.’

It was always good to hear a morsel of praise. And of course, a morsel was all I generally got from my clients. Scarlett was more generous than most, but even so, it felt like scant acknowledgement of the work.

Still, the champagne and canapés that were waiting for us were a welcome acknowledgement. The signing was a joint event between our publisher and the perfumier who produced Scarlett Smile. They’d provided special pens that would write on the high-gloss finish of the perfume’s packaging; the store had provided a handler who would make sure Scarlett always had the correct writing implement to hand. I would have grumbled at the condescension but she didn’t seem to mind being treated like an idiot.

Once she’d been coached in how to sign books and perfume boxes, we were led through to the event space, an area in the cosmetics department that had been cleared of product islands for the occasion. All the available space was crammed with fans – mostly young women – who broke out in whoops and cheers and screeches of delight when they caught sight of her. The store had tried to corral them into a queue via metal pillars and webbing, but the system broke down within minutes.

Cameras were flashing, punters shouting and bodies pressing forward against the table separating Scarlett from the hordes. To me, it seemed both terrifying and precarious, as if Scarlett could be overwhelmed at any moment by the sheer weight of numbers. The noise was insistent, beating against my ears in brutal waves. I wanted to turn and run. God knows what it was like for her.

Just when the hysteria approached the tipping point, the store security guards finally moved in. Firmly but gently, they moved the front line a few inches backwards, putting a little distance between Scarlett and her public. At least now there was some semblance of order at the front of the mob. And Scarlett was able to begin signing.

After an hour, it seemed she’d barely made a dent in the crowd. But when I peeled away from her minders and circled round the back of the mob, I could see it was beginning to ease up. On the fringes, I clocked three fans with cameras, relentlessly shooting pictures of Scarlett. They were obviously not paparazzi – neither their cameras nor their clothes were expensive enough. But they were not going anywhere. Towards the end of the signing, when only a few customers remained, all three – a woman and two men – made their way to the signing table and, instead of books, produced folders of glossy photographs downloaded from the Internet that they wanted Scarlett to autograph. None of them looked wholesome. I imagined them back in their lonely bedsits, printing out their photos, searching for the image that would make them feel they’d finally captured Scarlett.

I reckoned capture was what they wanted. It creeped me out to think of those strange obsessives following her round the country, convincing themselves they were her friends. The truly scary thing was that Scarlett knew them. She bestowed her smile on them, even though I could readily see it was a low-wattage version of the real thing. But you couldn’t fault its sincerity.

In one sense, her career was carefully choreographed by Scarlett herself. But it only worked because there was nothing cynical about what she was doing. The real Scarlett was the one she was gradually releasing into the wild, and at bottom, the person she was revealing was a good-hearted person. She was well aware of how far she had come and how lucky she had been to make her escape, and unlike so many who have made that journey, she was willing to reach out a helping hand to others who shared her determination to change their futures.

It was that willingness that opened the door for her greatest act of generosity. Back when Jimmy was nearly three, she was invited to take part in the Caring for Kids telethon. The initial idea was for an upbeat piece where Scarlett would visit Romania and reveal how the orphanages that had shocked the world after the downfall of the Ceaușescu regime had been transformed. And there was a lot of truth in that version of events. Money raised in the UK had helped to change the lives of thousands of children and disabled people who had been condemned to conditions that gave most of us nightmares to think of. The word coming out of Romania was that the hellhole institutions were a thing of the past, and that’s what Scarlett was supposed to go and celebrate. To show the viewers how their donations worked at ground level.

But then a BBC investigative journalist heard that things weren’t quite as hunky-dory as the Romanian authorities would have us believe. He went in undercover and found that although most of the worst cases had been closed down, there were still isolated pockets of the country where conditions would have had their bosses tried for crimes against humanity if they’d been in war zones.

Before his report was aired, Scarlett was invited to come in for a screening. She told me later it was the most harrowing thing she’d ever seen. ‘One room, there must have been twenty disabled teenagers tied to cots, lying in their own piss and shit, skinny as skeletons. It turned my stomach, Steph. And the little kids, playing in the snow with stones and sticks because they didn’t have a toy to their names. Their clothes in rags. Filthy dirty, some of them with open sores. All of them, abandoned by their parents. A lot of them with AIDS.’ She was welling up, talking about it.

‘And I thought about my dad, and how I could have been one of those babies born with AIDS. But I’ve got this lovely life, with Jimmy, and my nice house and my career, and money in the bank. And I thought, fuck it, Steph, I’ve got to do something about this.’

So she insisted that, instead of painting a rosy picture of how there had been a successful transformation in the lives of thousands, she would go back with the journalist and confront the terrible reality that hundreds of people continued to endure. Never mind what had been achieved – Scarlett wanted to ram home the message of how much more was left to be done. Somebody else could deliver the happy-clappy message. She was going straight to the sharp end.

It was an astonishing move. The woman who had been dismissed as a brainless bigot had undergone the ultimate makeover. She wasn’t just making caring noises. She was prepared to stand up and be counted. And so she went to Timonescu orphanage in the Transylvanian mountains and confronted the horrors head on. She spoke to camera with tears running down her face and swore that she was going to do everything in her power to make a difference. ‘I want my son to grow up proud of his mum. Not for being on the telly, but for helping to transform the lives of these children,’ she said, a catch in her voice.

When it was screened as part of the Caring for Kids telethon, it created a sensation. Because the shock value of having a segment like this presented by someone like Scarlett was almost as great as the footage itself. I was at the hacienda with her and Leanne that night, and she was so proud of herself. ‘I’m going to set up a charity to support Timonescu,’ she said. ‘I’ve been talking about it with George and he’s getting all the paperwork done. I’m going to donate a tenth of all my income, and I’m going to get somebody to organise fundraisers. All them women out there doing their exercise classes – I’m going to get them to donate a week’s exercise expenditure to making a difference in some kid’s life.’

Even I was gobsmacked, and I already knew Scarlett was a very different proposition from the person the world thought they knew. As for the media, they were reeling in shock. Scarlett’s stock had never been higher. There were profiles of her everywhere, her troubled past being recast as youthful misdemeanours. Amazingly, given the tendency of the British media to take delight in chopping down to size anyone who dares to rise above the herd, there wasn’t a single bit of dirt-digging from any of the red-tops.

I said as much to George as we sipped champagne and nibbled canapés at the launch of TOmorrow, the charitable trust Scarlett had founded to support Timonescu Orphanage. ‘It’s not for want of trying,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Scarlett’s made such a fine job of cutting herself off from her past that her mother and her sister really have no possible revelations. That part of her history they know about is what’s covered most thoroughly in your excellent book.’ He chinked his glass against mine. ‘You gave the world just enough sordidness to make it interesting, and also to declaw Scarlett’s family. The tabloids can’t go with the “heartless bitch” line because she bought them a perfectly decent house to live in. And she still pays the council tax and the utility bills. She’s covered herself very cleverly.’

‘There’s always Joshu,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t he worry you?’

George sniffed. ‘With his drug habit? I rather think Scarlett has enough insurance to keep Joshu quiet.’

I hoped so. It would be a cruel person who wished Scarlett ill now she was riding the crest of a wave for all the right reasons. But as things turned out, I’d been looking for disaster in all the wrong places.