Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  It was the first dead body she’d seen, now she thought of it. It didn’t seem to be formed of the same matter as the living Clio, the one who had hunched over a cup of tea and pushed away her toast this morning (those plates had been washed up, though, she noticed, walking into the kitchen). Just something left behind.

  People. She should probably tell people. How did you do that, these days? Make phone calls? Post on Facebook? She imagined the cat out there, spooked and jerky, running away from the strange new smell of the house.

  It did seem to have taken over, that smell. Like something gone bad in the fridge. She should get out. Look for the cat. Leave by the back door, so there would be no craned necks, no amateur detectives trying to get the story behind the stretcher. She couldn’t find the key, so she didn’t lock the door behind her, walked straight up the garden, over the little fence and into the woods behind the house. Wet grass already soaking through her slippers, but that didn’t matter. Far, far better to be out here.

  Clio had arrived at the platform with a battered wheeled suitcase, two tote bags and a sports holdall slung messily across her body. Her hair was frizzing out from a rubber band and her hands weren’t still: they twitched and clenched as she glanced about herself.

  ‘Here you are,’ Ruth had said, walking towards her with her arms outstretched. ‘Hello, my lovely. Let’s get you into the car.’

  When they got to the cottage, its rough white walls seemed to wrap themselves around Clio, swaddle her down. Ruth had lit a fire in the stove before driving up to the station, and Clio settled herself in the big patchy armchair beside it, pulled out a small embroidered quilt from one of her many bags and arranged it over her knees. The cat had jumped on, straight away. The cat loved Clio.

  ‘There we are,’ Ruth said, handing her a cup of herbal tea. ‘There we are.’

  Ruth had seen this before, more than once. The first sign was always the fluttering, the anxiety of her fingers, followed by an inability to choke a full sentence through her teeth without becoming distracted or rising into a panic. In fact, it tended to be this Clio that she saw, these days. It had become a bad-times-only friendship, somewhere as the years passed. The role she filled in Clio’s life now was occasional care-giver and calm-bringer, and she wasn’t sure when that had happened. Ruth had always enjoyed being capable; something about her sturdiness put people at ease and she liked it. Clio had reacted to that early on in their professional relationship, when she’d been futzing over lost receipts in the old office, and Ruth had poured her some water, ushered her into a seat and sorted the problem out. It had set the tone for the friendship to come.

  The gifts usually came afterwards. A mix CD or a hand-picked bunch of flowers (probably stolen from a council display box) sent to the office. These days, colourful cushions, junk-shop vases and books with fulsome handwritten dedications on the flyleaf would arrive at the cottage the following week, after Clio had taken and recovered from one of her turns. And then she wouldn’t be in touch for a while, maybe two, three months. Ruth used to think this was out of embarrassment; these days she recognized the terms of their friendship for what it was.

  ‘Upstairs is all ready for you. How tired are you feeling?’

  ‘Just sore. In my bones.’

  ‘Are you hungry? There’s some soup in the fridge, or we could grab a curry from up the road if you wanted.’

  ‘No. I’m all right.’

  Clio had her rituals while she was at the cottage, and Ruth would tick them off as the signs of recovery. After a few days, while Ruth was at work, she would lift the creaky oilskin that had belonged to Ruth’s gran down from its peg, pull on Ruth’s wellies, which were two sizes too big for her, and venture out into the woods behind the garden. Not far at first. Ruth would come in and rub her hand over the oilskin as she hung up her own coat, every day, to check whether its stiffness had been disturbed, whether there was any wetness still on it. She never asked Clio about this; old Frank, who lived next door and had courted Ruth’s gran for years, would let her know.

  ‘She just stands there,’ he said. ‘She’s right still, keeping the house in her eyeline, not quite on the path. Sometimes for about an hour. No one but us would be able to see her.’

  The singing would come back next. Just a faint humming under her breath at first, notes pitched into nowhere as she moved, or a slight drone floating over from the couch where she was reading. If all was going well, in a couple of days this would turn into murmured words, then two or three lines, then the sound; Clio’s lungs waking up as they remembered what they could do. The singing stage was a delicate one, though. She was more vulnerable then than when she slumped in chairs without washing for days, fretting her knuckles together. At this point, Ruth would become solicitous, always made sure the cupboards were well-stocked when she left for work. Once, early on, she’d come home to find that Clio had cut her finger and dripped slashes of blood all over the kitchen trying to make soup. Discarded onion skins littered the counter, the saucepan had burned dry, and Clio was back in bed, her hand wrapped in the sheets, soaking through.

  This time, though, the house had filled with song as Clio came downstairs each morning. Gaelic lullabies and old pop songs echoing through the hall as she sat on the toilet. This time it had all seemed to be fixing itself.

  Ruth leaned on a tree in the gloom, puckering her lips at no one, making that kissy, squeaky noise that the cat seemed to like when Clio did it. The wet bark was cold on her hand. She thought back three nights. Clio had been smiling when Ruth got home, had ushered her into a kitchen full of fresh vegetables and fancy-looking bread and explained that she’d caught the tiny bus to the next town, to the supermarket.

  ‘And let’s go out tonight, Ruth. Just to the pub. John was telling me there’s going to be a little gathering, with the instruments. We should go.’

  Ruth was always more popular when Clio was in the village. The glamour of having been someone still hanging off her, she’d walk into the pub differently. ‘Aye, Clio,’ they’d say now, all the old regulars. If they saw Ruth in the street later, by herself, they’d stop her only to ask ‘Our Clio not with you the now, then?’

  Clio could usually be persuaded to sing, too. It didn’t take much. They’d pull her into the circle by the fire, men her age or older buying the drinks ‘for you too, lass. There you go,’ as Ruth was made part of something.

  She would always give them folk songs. Usually a bit of Burns, possibly some ancient ballad about a fiery lass who went her own way and ran off with a canny chiel. Usually, Ruth loved to hear Clio do the traditional stuff; that rough husk at the edges of the notes so different from the forced, trilling sopranos Ruth’s teachers had affected at school. Over the years and depending on her mood, Clio had said she’d learned to sing from old women in the Western Isles, from traveller folk who went round the villages, from the vogue in folk song in the 1970s, or from her father. She put spit and soul into her song, and the old regulars would bump their glasses on the tables in appreciation, keeping time for her to weave against.

  That last night, though, she’d been pushing herself, forcing out one last song and another last song even though the attention had started to wander, though the regulars wanted back to their pints and the young barman was itching around by the CD player. Her voice had strained, her eyes had gone flinty, intent on pushing a party, but eventually she’d crashed back down onto the bench beside Ruth and John, who drove the buses, seeming drunker than she could possibly be. Something about the way her limbs flew about, almost knocking things over, about the way she showed her teeth to gnash out a laugh at John’s little jokes, the feral baring of them, reminded Ruth of her two tiny nieces, the way they went half-savage as they frayed and needed to be steered to bed.

  ‘Come on, lovey. It’s been a late one, and we should get going.’

  Clio was tucked under John’s meaty arm at this point, his moustache beaming down at her.

  ‘No, I think I’m going to stay on for a bit
. You go, though.’

  Ruth should probably have recognized this as a danger sign, but she was tired and drunk, unaccustomed to beer. And for God’s sake, she was not Clio’s keeper! They’d woken her as they crashed in, a couple of hours later, an indecent hooting and old wheezing from the living room, muddy footprints crushed into the carpet the next morning. She’d worried that this would be too much, but the singing had continued over the next few days.

  Oh, you suspected something, she told herself now. There had been some small alert trying to flicker on in the back of her brain, and she’d dampened it down, thrown a cloth over it, carried on with her life around the big sad fact of Clio at the kitchen table. Be honest with yourself, she muttered, into the trees. You were getting sick of her. You were. You wanted her gone. So you decided not to care.

  She had been going through the motions a bit. She had. There would still be toast and tea but only if she was making it for herself too. Well, it had been almost a month. Longer than before. And Clio wasn’t really giving anything back. It was all right, she told herself, to feel a little bit of resentment, surely?

  The cat wasn’t out here. She could tell. The cat hated rain; it would have sucked up to someone warm and dry, someone who didn’t have death in their house. Ruth felt so tired. Maybe, she thought, maybe I should just sit down for a while. There was moss and it looked comfy, and through the trees she could still see her kitchen light.

  Clio Campbell

  Folk singer, activist

  SUDDENLY, at a friend’s home, 22/01/2018. Best known for her 1991 single ‘Rise Up’, which reached number four in the singles chart during the height of the poll tax protests, Cliodhna Jean Campbell lived a life of political integrity. Despite her undoubted beauty in her younger years the Ayrshire-born musician was never a comfortable fit with the pop-music establishment, which perhaps fed into her famously acrimonious divorce from music mogul and Big Rock Festival founder Danny Mansfield in the late 1990s. Notably outspoken on a number of causes, Campbell claimed in interviews she was ‘married to the fight’. In 2011 she was a high-profile witness for the prosecution in the case against undercover police officer Michael Carrington, accused of infiltrating a group of anti-globalization activists. Campbell claimed to be one of the women he had slept with and deceived under the guise of an environmental activist.

  In later life, shunning her initial success as a pop musician, she began travelling Europe and became a regular on the folk-music circuit performing invigorated takes on folk and traditional standards, and was acclaimed for her 2007 album of the songs of Robert Burns, The Northern Lass, although many traditionalists complained about the hip-hop, blues and grime influences in the instrumentation.

  Campbell was public on her Twitter account and in interviews about her struggles with depression and regularly played concerts to raise awareness around mental health issues. She had no children and is not survived by family.

  NEIL MUNRO

  See story, page 8.

  NEIL

  Glasgow, 22–23 January 2018

  Neil sat there in the office, the near-empty vastness of it like a shock blanket around him. He’d tried calling her immediately but the email had been sent almost three hours earlier while he’d been on deadline, and now her phone slipped straight to voicemail. Her dirty laugh and a ‘go on then, leave us a message.’

  Neil,

  Goodbye.

  Remember me well. Please.

  Clio x

  What else could it be?

  What did you do, with something like this? He looked around the office, where the skeleton crew of kids were packing up, heading out, yapping insults at each other as they went. Tell any one of them and they’d jump on it as an easy story, expect him to do the same.

  He realized that seven minutes had gone by since he’d put down the phone. Those seven minutes could have made all the difference, and he’d just been staring at his screen. He called 999.

  ‘Police. I think I want police. Or maybe ambulance. Yes, ambulance.’

  ‘Can you tell me the nature of your inquiry, sir?’

  ‘I’ve just – an old friend has emailed me. She emailed me a few hours ago – I’ve just seen it. And it’s a suicide note, I think. And I don’t know what to do. She’s not answering her phone. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘All right, sir. Can you give me your friend’s address?’

  ‘I – she had a flat in the East End. I can’t think of it now. Wait, I’ll look for it.’

  He struggled to think of the last time he’d spent any proper time with her. Her birthday party – before that? Passing her in the foyer of a concert hall, a quick hug and a promise to catch up.

  ‘Sir? We’ll need a name and address.’

  ‘Clio Campbell. Her name is Clio Campbell. And I don’t know her address. I’m sorry. You’ll know her, though. She’ll be on your books, surely. She’s somewhere in Glasgow, I think, or she was the last time I saw her.’

  ‘And you believe she’s sent you a suicide note? How long have you known Clio Campbell for?’

  ‘I know. I know. I wasn’t expecting this – well, you wouldn’t, would you. But can you find her? You must have people’s addresses registered or something – the electoral register. I’m sure she’ll be on that. Please find her. I’ve tried – she’s not answering her phone. That’s all I’ve got.’

  The late squad had come on, over in the far corner, were laughing and typing and taking calls, but this barn of a place, with its seventy unoccupied post-redundancy desks, ate up their sound.

  Then he was swiping his pass through the security gates, stretching his hands out into the cracked pockets of his brown leather jacket. He hadn’t worn this for ages, he realized, rubbing rotted-off lint in between his fingers. Years, even. And he’d picked it up today.

  He shoved the pass into his pocket and headed down the hill, over the self-consciously shiny pink flagstones the paper had put in seven years ago, just before they announced the first round of redundancies. It was wet out; he felt it soaking through his jeans.

  Clio.

  She’d been wearing her red lipstick, that time he’d seen her recently, in the crowd after the Patti Smith gig, had smelled of rotting flowers, gin and something sickly as he’d bent in to kiss her and she’d placed a hand on his shoulder to guide him. She’d been with people. There hadn’t been time to talk long, but she’d held his hand and swung it, squeezed it tightly even as she moved on.

  He’d done all he could, really. He didn’t know where she was. He’d phoned her. He’d phoned the police.

  Now he was in the Albannach, with a tired young girl staring at him from behind the bar. Yes, a drink.

  ‘I might be in shock,’ he heard himself saying, ‘so I think I need a whisky.’

  ‘Are you all right? Have you been hurt?’

  ‘No.’ He waved a hand, held it there in the air, looked at it. ‘Bad news. No.’

  It was a double of the cheapest stuff. Rough on his throat. He coughed through it, sank down onto the bar stool.

  The advantage of the Albannach now was that none of his colleagues would go there. This bar, practically pressed up against the office, would have been filled to bursting with reporters just off the beat (and on it) in the old days. Moustaches, shabby suits; later leather jackets, well-worn jeans just like his. All gone. The kids from the online team zoomed further into town, to Wi-Fi hotspots with craft beers, he assumed. The mobile reception in here wasn’t good enough for Twitter; there was no jukebox. In his youth he’d hated this place, called it out to other members of his own young guard as emblematic of everything that was wrong with journalism. The macho culture. The refusal to embrace new ideas. The cronyism.

  Well, all those cronies had been edged or insulted out by the new regime, the pay cuts, the rounds of voluntary redundancies and the Internet, and now here he was, the old man at the end of the world. He took another sip, nodded at the white-hard auld jake at the other end of the bar and felt all f
ifty-two years of his age sink through him.

  He’d brought Clio in here once. She’d helped herself to one of his cigarettes while he was at the bar.

  ‘Sorry, doll. I’ve been on rollies for so long that this just looked too good.’

  Her accent had changed again, he noticed, a bit more of a lilt and whisper in it than before. That day, she’d wanted to talk to him about land reform. She’d been living up north, working on community buy-out projects, and she wanted him to write a feature.

  ‘I’m going back up in a week and I think you should come with me. We’re staying in bothies, because the absentee landlord is letting the tenancies go to ruin, foul feudal bastard he is. But the community there, darlin. You need to feel it. It’s proper. I’m in different folks’ houses every night for dinner – they’re just so happy we’re there and helping them. The bothy’s basic, but people give you a few logs for the fire, or an extra blanket, you know. Come with me. You could write the article that could become, like, the call to arms for the land reform movement, you know? You’d be the voice – the first person to voice what’s really going on to the self-satisfied Central Belt. You could become the expert; you could even write a book! Tell you, sometimes, Neil, sometimes I think I might settle up there. Permanently. There’s this initiative to encourage people to take up crofting. Tax relief. Keep a couple of pigs, grow vegetables. Does that appeal to you at all, ever? Be a good place to get on with your writing …’

  She looked at him, full-on, that look she did. He was two pints down on an empty stomach, so it came out as a giggle. ‘You? Settle? You’re not going to settle down.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Sorry. I just meant – well, it doesn’t seem likely, given your … your history. We’re – well – I think if you’d wanted to settle you probably would have done. That’s all.’