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Instead she surrounded herself with friends, even when she was in hospital. At her physical worst, she transformed her invalid’s existence into a party: she would have a film screen brought in so that she and her visitors could watch movies; they ate, drank, smoked discount cigarettes. She painted the plaster corsets she had to wear in bright colours. She turned her illness into performance art, having friends peer through a hole in the plaster to see how she was healing. She showed up to her one and only exhibition in an ambulance and was carried in on a stretcher to her four-poster bed, which had been carted in specially.

She refused to fade away, to keep her suffering out of sight, and she refused to let it get the better of her. She battled with suicidal thoughts but was full of life, a tonic to friends who would pour out their own troubles to her while she listened patiently, pleased to relieve the tedium of being bedridden. When drugs kept the pain at bearable levels, she painted for four or five hours a day, the canvas propped up on the hospital sheets.