the table, finishing off the wine, Pete suggested going out to a gig the following evening. Some indie band he’d mixed a couple of tracks for were playing down the road in Hoxton and he’d been invited.
‘As long as it’s not too early,’ I said. ‘I promised I’d pop in tomorrow at evening visiting to see Scarlett and Jimmy.’
Pete groaned. ‘Oh Christ, Stephanie. Is this how it’s going to be from now on? You running around after Scarlett and her bloody sprog? You need to back off.’
‘Pete, she had a really rough time giving birth. It’s going to take her a while to recover, so yes, I’ll be helping out for a few weeks. That’s all. Once she’s back on her feet, things will go back to normal.’
He tipped the last of his wine down his throat. ‘You’re being taken for a mug, Stephanie. And I don’t like it one little bit.’
‘It’s not like that, Pete. I keep telling you. We’re friends. Mates. We get along.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘You do things for your mates all the time. And that’s a good thing.’
‘Yeah, and they do me favours in return. It’s not a one-way street like you and Scarlett.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘No? Well, what’s she done for you lately?’
‘Friendship’s not a balance sheet, Pete. It’s not about keeping score. Scarlett’s my mate. You ask what she’s done for me lately? She’s brightened my day more times than anybody else I know. And she’s asked me to be Jimmy’s godmother.’
He spluttered with laughter. ‘You think that’s her doing something for you? You don’t even like kids. Stephanie, that’s just another way of getting her claws into you.’
I felt sad for him that he couldn’t understand the compliment. ‘No, Pete. It’s a gift. Inviting someone into your child’s life is a gift.’
‘Yeah, and you’ll be giving gifts for life in return,’ he said cynically. ‘I’ll meet you at the gig, then. If you get back in time.’
‘You could come with me?’ I cleared the plates and glasses from the table.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said, his derision obvious.
And that was how it went on. Pete expected me to be available when his irregular hours gave him free time. He’d always grumbled when my work took me away, but when I wasn’t actually doing interviews, I managed to be fairly flexible to suit him. But it wasn’t always easy to accommodate the timetable of a new mother and a young baby, and Pete grew increasingly irritable if I was too busy with Scarlett and Jimmy to devote myself wholly to him. To be honest, it began to feel quite stifling. It was as if he was jealous of the time I spent with Scarlett and Jimmy.
As with all bullies, his constant niggling was at its most effective when it echoed my own misgivings. Because it was true that Scarlett needed a lot of support after Jimmy’s birth. When she came out of hospital, she wasn’t in great shape. A C-section is major abdominal surgery and that means taking things easy. She didn’t like the restrictions on her movements and activities, but she had no choice. It’s hard enough to get over major surgery; it’s an even bigger ask when your life’s been transformed by the arrival of a baby. Nothing runs the way it used to. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d had a supportive husband or family members around to pile in and give her a hand. But Joshu gave a whole new meaning to part-time parenthood. He would breeze in with flowers and soft toys, cuddle his son for ten minutes, then phone for a takeaway. He’d stick around long enough to share his food with Scarlett, then he’d be off again, working or clubbing. His life hadn’t changed at all. Drugs, drinking, DJing were still at the heart of his agenda. Women too, I suspected.
I dropped in almost every other day, running the gauntlet of media hacks who seemed to be practically living outside the gates. I began to understand how oppressed Scarlett felt by their constant presence. She certainly wasn’t in any mood to feed their hunger.
That brought its own problems. After she’d been home for four or five days, I called George. ‘You’re going to have to sort out some live-in help for Scarlett,’ I said. ‘She’s not coping. The house is a tip, the washing’s piling up and somebody needs to do a major shop.’
‘Can’t you give her a hand, Stephanie?’
Posh men. They pretend to be feminists, but really, they don’t have a bloody clue. To my horror, I found myself echoing Pete. ‘I’m her ghost, Georgie, not her mother. Sort it, would you?’
And so Marina turned up. A buxom brunette in her late twenties, Marina was from Romania but she spoke better English than most of the bimbos Scarlett hung out with when she was in her public persona. She had a sardonic sense of humour but in spite of a figure like a fifties Hollywood starlet and a face to match, she was a grafter. I liked her; more importantly, so did Scarlett. And best of all, she was entirely immune to Joshu’s charms. She made it plain that she thought he was a tosser, without ever saying or doing anything that crossed the line.
She was very clear where she drew the lines, was Marina. She was there to work, not to be Scarlett’s confidante. Whenever we tried to draw her into our circle, she’d always withdraw politely. She kept the house clean and tidy, she did the shopping and cooked the meals, she took care of Jimmy for two hours in the afternoon and that was that. In the evenings, she retreated to her room where she had a TV and a cheap laptop, or else she got on her bike and cycled to the nearest village where there was a pub and, apparently, a couple of other Romanian workers.
After that little drama, Scarlett and I fell into a more regular pattern. We would do a bit of work on magazine profiles when Marina had Jimmy in the afternoons. We generally spent our evenings with a bottle of wine and a DVD of
Just as I was getting grief from Pete about the time I spent with her, she was getting a hard time from Joshu. Whenever our paths crossed, he was always trying to enlist me in his cause. His complaints cycled round the same basic poles. He wasn’t getting enough sex and Scarlett never wanted to go out on the town with him any more.
I couldn’t do anything about the sex, but I did try to encourage her to go out with him, if only to keep the peace. I offered to babysit, to stay over if need be. But she wasn’t keen. ‘I can’t be arsed,’ she’d say. ‘There’s no fun in it. I don’t want to get off my face and stagger around a dance floor with a bunch of airheads and dickheads. I don’t want to be where the music’s too loud to think, never mind talk. Plus I’m up half the night with Jimmy more often than not. Why would I want to be up half the night from choice? I tell you, Steph, these days my idea of a good time would be eight straight hours of sleep.’
Scarlett’s attitude didn’t help Joshu’s relationship with his son either. He ascribed the change in Scarlett’s behaviour to motherhood, not understanding that motherhood was her excuse to cover the fact that she was finally behaving as the woman she was, not the woman he believed her to be. I can see how it must have been confusing for him; emotional intelligence wasn’t his strong suit. Not that he was any better when it came to the other varieties.
And even if he’d had the nous to suspect the truth, it wouldn’t have been that easy to figure it out. Because the public Scarlett was still very much in evidence. And I have to take my share of responsibility for that. I was the only writer she could trust, so I was the one who got all the assignments from the slag mags and the red- tops.
Despite George having made it clear that the only authorised interviews would be written by me, and the only photographs would be supplied by a snapper employed by his agency, the media camp at the gates never seemed to diminish. There was a hardcore of half a dozen who were there every day. Scarlett couldn’t take the baby out for a walk; the long lenses could pick her up two fields away.
Out of sheer frustration – and, probably, a nagging picture desk – one of the notorious paps, a favourite of the red-tops, actually climbed over the wall and got inside the compound. Scarlett raised her head at the end of a length of the pool to see him banging off a clutch of shots through the window. She had the good sense not to attack him, calling the local police instead, followed in short order by a local contractor who spent the next week
