Linda Nolan grasps a clump of her light blonde hair and yanks it out swiftly with a tug. She shows me the feathery strands, as fine as a baby’s, then rolls them in her palms, staring with both sadness and fascination.
“I’m losing my hair for the fourth time. It’s weird,” she says, bluntly.
“People say ‘Oh you have lovely wigs now’, but I go ‘I’m still traumatised though, and I don’t want to be bald again!’”
She laughs – it’s her default to laugh – yet adds firmly: “But I’ll take anything, I’ll try anything, to stay alive.”
Six weeks ago Linda, 64, received a terrifying diagnosis: cancerous tumours had been found in her brain; two sizable masses on the MRI image, surrounded by smaller ones, she describes quietly in her first full interview since the news.
This comes at the end of a long road. It is close to 20 years since the singer, the so-called “naughty Nolan”, the sixth of eight Nolan siblings, was diagnosed with cancer for the first time.
Back in 2005 it was breast cancer. She had a mastectomy and 18 rounds of chemo.
Since then she has lost her husband Brian and younger sister Bernie to the disease, and watched eldest sister Anne successfully fight it. Then she had to face her own returning, first in her hip in 2017 and, in 2020, her liver.
She has just finished 11 radiotherapy sessions, and is on steroids awaiting the results of a second MRI scan to see if the brain tumours have shrunk.
Then she will start taking new chemotherapy drug Tucatinib, to “give me more time” she hopes.
She grasps hope fiercely – the pink glitter polish on her toes and her bright pink eyeshadow scream this. But she admits: “I think it’s a one-way trip now.”
Linda does not want to know how long she has left, but for the first time she is confronting death. “I am positive, but I have my moments when I slide down the wall in a heap,” she says.
“What happens? Is it dark, are you on your own? I’m frightened of the unknown and being on my own, I have always been with people.”
She reveals: “I’m frightened to cry in case I don’t stop sometimes.”
Yet she is beginning to make plans. “Brian organised his funeral and it was amazing,” she says.
“Bernie arranged hers. It’s easier for people left behind. I’ve gone into it a little bit. A Neil Sedaka song, Our Last Song Together. And I know the funeral people I’m going to use.
“Brian’s coffin was like a flight case, with ‘This way up’, ‘Fragile’ on it.
“Our auntie had a beautiful coffin with pictures of us around it.
“Then Maureen said ‘Look at this coffin, it was made for you, it’s pink glitter’.” So she may go for that one?
“Absolutely,” she smiles. “I am the blingy Nolan.” She has even considered making memory boxes for her family.
“It would mean leaving about 30!” she says, laughing again. “It would become like a little production line. You can imagine them all lined up, how morbid, and working out what to give them –them saying ‘She got a bloody silver bracelet, she got a bronze ring!’” Linda’s diagnosis came after three falls prompted a scan. The tumour on the left side of her brain is impacting her right side, causing balance loss.
She cried after leaving the consultant’s room. “I said ‘How do you live with that?’,” she recalls.
The development is all the more devastating because sister Bernie had cancer in her brain when she died 10 years ago this July, aged 52.
“They keep telling me not to compare my illness with Bernie’s, everyone is different,” she shrugs. “I remember with Bernie, she phoned me and said ‘It’s gone to my brain, ‘I’m f***ed’. At the time there was only radiotherapy, and then it didn’t work. But for me there is a new drug, and hope.”
Two days after Linda’s diagnosis, it was Bernie who helped her find some peace. She dreamt they were discussing who Linda should leave her jewellery to.
“I was going ‘I want them to have that’ and she was saying ‘No, that, leave that with them’ and I got so much comfort out of it because she was there,” Linda recalls. “It was very practical, and we laughed. My fear has subsided a bit now.
“Whatever happens, someone’s going to be there.” Her other sisters and brothers are her “cavalry”, she says.
Linda now walks with a stick – a silvery one – and a walking frame. She often needs a wheelchair outside.
She has moved in with sister Denise close by in Blackpool, and her other sister Maureen visits daily.
“My right foot is practically paralysed, I have to lift it up,” Linda says. Before I arrived, she was in agony with cramp, unusually crying with pain.
“They said ‘You can’t live on your own’,” she explains. “I wonder if I will ever go back.” She is having a stairlift installed at home just in case, but will have one at Denise’s, too.
“Denise cooks, does my washing, makes the bed,” she says. “I can shower on my own, that’s a massive thing, we have a seat in the shower.
“The thought of someone taking me to the toilet…” she grimaces.
She’s talked to her sisters about them becoming her carers. “They’ve all said they would do it,” she says.
But she’d prefer not. “I’d rather they just brought chocolate and gin. I was very loath to get in the wheelchair,” she adds. “I don’t want to be pressure for other people. And you appreciate what being disabled is - it’s hard to get your chair into the table, people talk across your head without even realising, the girls did it.”
But Linda is still a woman bent on living. “I’m looking to book a big house for us in the Lake District so we can just make memories, it’s all about using precious time,” she says.
All her siblings, nieces, nephews, great nieces and nephews and her step-children are up for that. Well, mostly, she laughs. “Coleen said ‘Can I just ask what the occasion is?’ And I said ‘I’m dying’. And she said ‘Oh that old thing. Yeah, count me in’.”
Two weeks ago Denise held a karaoke party. Linda loved it but needed a break for a lie-down.
She explained: “It’s fatigue, but also, sometimes when you are all together, they’re the times you look around the room and go ‘Oh God, I want to be here forever’, you know?
“So maybe I need a little tear on my own. I love them all so much.”
* If you or a loved one is living with cancer, watch Linda’s advice for keeping positive at mirror.co.uk.
