Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  The red hair. Xanthe could see it through the window of the van as it pulled into the driveway. Was it darker? Henna over the grey these days? Still the slash of lipstick, too. As the guests unfolded themselves from the back, she was amused to note that Clio fitted in with them very well. Just another slightly flustered forty-something, flyaway hair and trailing scarves. Xanthe pulled herself straight and tall and strode out to meet them, calling out a general welcome before turning to Clio, arms open but fixed beside her at the elbow.

  ‘And welcome to you, old friend.’

  Clio had broadened, fattened up around the haunches. At first, Xanthe wondered whether she’d allowed the beginnings of middle age to subsume her, but watching Clio warily from a distance at that first communal lunch, she realized that old electricity was still there, asserting itself. Their guests, almost all well-to-do women with grown children, spoke a shared language of Spanish holidays and vineyard breaks, upmarket brand names and daughters’ gap years that she’d assumed would exclude Clio, but at least two of them seemed to have recognized her from her pop-star days, and she grew bigger and brighter under their attention.

  ‘She’ll be tricky in class, my love. Difficult to teach.’

  ‘So suspicious about this one,’ Nikolas said, catching her round the waist. ‘You may be right, but it’s just as important to allow her the space to learn and take what she can from our little sanctuary here.’

  ‘I will be right. But OK.’

  Clio finally got her after the first evening’s gentle flow session, in which Xanthe usually assisted, acting as interpreter in case any of the guests struggled with Nikolas’s accent initially. A hand on her arm, both slightly sweaty. All warmth, all sunshine.

  ‘You. You look amazing. But you know that. It clearly suits you, being here. And what a place. What a view! Ach, I hope you don’t mind me being here, Xanth. It just seemed like such a perfect coincidence, that you had a place left. I’ve been meaning to get into yoga, for a couple of years now – I think it’s something I could really benefit from, you know? And I was out here –’ she spread a casual arm, indicating, presumably, the whole of Greece ‘– working with the anti-austerity folk in Athens, helping the potato farmers – some bloody amazing stuff happening there, but you’ll know all about that of course. It’s been a rough couple of years, and I just thought, why not be good to myself.’

  Xanthe had begun questioning herself, under the sunlamp rush of words and smiles – why did she assume that everyone from her past was out to get her?

  ‘I needed to get away. Bad break-up, some health problems, and the stress of that court case. My God. I needed to be here and talk to someone who really knows. Went through it too. The whole thing with Mark.’

  And there it was, thought Xanthe.

  Clio was beaming at her.

  ‘It just seemed perfect,’ she repeated.

  ‘Well, everyone who comes here is trying to heal something.’

  Nikolas was being irritatingly reasonable again.

  ‘I just – I’ve made my peace with it, love. I don’t want to be poring over it endlessly. This thing that happened; it’s still not the worst thing that has happened to me.’

  ‘But your friend, she hasn’t managed to achieve this peace. She’s looking to you for help to do that. And that’s what we do here, do we not? We help people find their peace. Just as we have.’

  ‘We’re a yoga retreat, not a therapist’s office. She needs to do some of the work herself.’

  ‘It is a long time since I’ve seen you this tense,’ he said, curling his limbs around her, nuzzling and rubbing at her shoulders. ‘Perhaps it is good for you too, to open up again to someone from your past, someone who knows that part of you? It suddenly seems as though you’re holding on to too much to be truly at peace – it must be buried somewhere there, no?’

  She flinched away from him.

  ‘You’re being very patronizing, Niko. How would you like it if one of your junkie friends came here, expecting you to still be the same person you were then, wanting and wanting from you? Trying to pull it all back again?’

  He moved off the bed, walked out of the room.

  ‘Most of my “junkie” friends are dead,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  A low blow. Not like him; not like them. And Xanthe knew who she blamed for it.

  The next night, after evening asanas and the closing of the circle, Clio put her head round the door. ‘Knock knock,’ she said, in that sheepish, ingratiating way British women always had which felt increasingly foreign to Xanthe now. She was holding a bottle of wine that she must have brought with her and two paper cups from the water fountain in the studio.

  ‘I thought we could have a little catch-up …?’ she said. Nikolas stood at the end of the hall, nodding and smiling – evidently they’d planned this together. The pricks.

  ‘I don’t like to be ganged up on. I’ve told you that,’ Xanthe muttered to Nikolas when she went to retrieve her wrap, not really caring whether Clio heard her or not. He did that loose little dip of the shoulders he always did when he was retreating from a fight, his arms gone stringy. Weed, she thought, a weed come to life, as she always did when he retreated from her. It would pass. It always did.

  As they started down the path to the beach, Clio reached for her arm and Xanthe let her grope for a second, awkwardly, before they made a loose link. She had linked arms with friends before, in her schooldays, and remembered that there was a right and a wrong way to do it. The right way, your bodies locked together like you were originally built as one; the wrong way there was just the sore jostling of elbow bone.

  Clio began to talk. ‘I’m glad we got the chance to do this. I just thought it would be a wee shame if I’d come all this way and we didn’t get a little bit of time just us. You must be so busy, too. I mean, an operation like this doesn’t run itself, does it? No matter how relaxed Nikolas might be as the public face of it all. We all see the work you put in, by the way,’ and here she grabbed over for Xanthe’s other hand, patted it.

  Does this woman want both of my hands, Xanthe thought. Let go. Let go now.

  ‘All the cooking, all the admin; it’s you taking all the bookings and doing the website and stuff, isn’t it? Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes, eh?’

  ‘That’s not quite the way it works, with Nikolas and I,’ Xanthe said.

  ‘Do you get lonely?’ Clio asked, seemingly out of nowhere, as though the previous intrusion was merely conversational preamble for the real meat. ‘Just the two of you now, with Dido away. I mean, sure, you have these customers—’

  ‘We never think of our guests as customers, Clio.’

  ‘No, but there they are, paying you for a service nonetheless. So, you cater to these guests for about half the year, but then the rest of the time, you’re just here? Away from the world?’

  She gestured to a space on the sand, smoothed it with a hand. Xanthe, who had somehow ended up holding the bottle and the cups, sat down and began to pour.

  ‘There is always something to be done. We are booking the guests, we are deepening our own practice, we are finding new ways just to be in the world. Just being is enough sometimes. It was a great discovery, that. Here. Cheers.’

  ‘Slàinte. I suppose I wouldn’t really understand that. It’s not how I work. I’ve got to say, I’m fascinated by you. I mean, here we are, the same age –

  It would be unfeminist, thought Xanthe, to point out how much younger I am.

  ‘– and we’ve come from the same position, the same sort of place – I don’t mean originally, obviously, but the same point of activism, the same engagement with the way the world is ordered. We’ve lived in the same squat, fucked the same undercover police officer—’

  Here it comes, thought Xanthe.

  ‘How do you just go back on that? How do you wake up, look at the world, the way it is, and not be angry?’

  ‘Did you come here to accuse me, Clio? Did you buy me a bottle of
wine and take me away from my evening plans just to tell me my failings? Did you get on a ferry and pay for four days practising a discipline you’re not very interested in just to have it all out with me?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant. You know what? I might be jealous, pal. I’m seeing you here, in a place where you’re so obviously meant to be. Seeing the peace inside you. I’ve never had that. I’ve never had a time in my life where I’ve felt as much part of something as you seem to be, just looking at you against this landscape right here.’

  And for a while, their conversation wound itself around the island – around the day-to-day beat of Xanthe’s life, around Dido’s studies in Athens and Xanthe’s hopes and fears for her; around Clio’s recent heartbreak, a younger man who had left her to be a pop star, or so it seemed. The usual ways a conversation between old acquaintances would flow. But the hidden odour kept drifting to the surface. Clio wanted to talk about the case. Of course she did.

  ‘I mean, we all fucked him, didn’t we. You did. I know Fran did even though she likes girls. I mean, that’s why – I absolutely understand that the crime against Sammi was the greatest, but I still felt a real sense of violation, which is why I thought I’d really push that way. You know, I could do more, with my profile. I was able to protect Sammi a bit. Take the heat off her, if they all focused on me. That’s what I thought. But still, all of us, we need to process this, don’t we. I mean, the guys were betrayed too, don’t get me wrong, but he was only using them on the one level, know what I mean. It’s rape. We were all raped, because none of us consented to have sex with that man, and I wish we’d been smarter about it, you know – I wish we’d had a bit more something on our side. You know, one of those big amped-up lawyers. The expensive ones. We could have got him that way. It’s a shame – there was nobody with any real buying power on our side.’

  Oh whatever could you be getting at, thought Xanthe.

  ‘I would have thought one of the newspapers even, but no, they liked the sex-scandal aspect, but didn’t want to actually take sides against the establishment at the end of the day. Better one dirty copper than bring the whole fucking system crumbling down, eh. And it stays with you, doesn’t it? This violation? I mean, I’ve got to respect the way you chose to deal with it. I don’t think that every woman should have to confront their rapist and go through it all again. Me, for me that was the only way, right enough.’

  In her very early twenties, when Xanthe ran away for the first time, a succession of dreadlocked men-children had queued up to tell her of the failings of her upbringing, of her bourgeois programming, of her privilege; had tried to dismantle it by dismantling her. The cure they had all recommended, funnily enough, had been a good hard dose of proletarian cock. Xanthe had fucked them and blamed herself, her moneyed-bitch former self, each time the sex got too rough, the language accusatory. She began blunting her accent, her clarion foghorn accent, with a glottal stop, allowing only that her parents were ‘Greek immigrants’ if anyone asked. Mark Carr, Michael Carrington, whatever his name was, had been different. The more she read about him as the coverage of the case reached fever-pitch, she realized that difference was actually a similarity, one they’d both been trying to hide in the squat. He had nothing to take out on her body; he recognized her because they shared that world. He wasn’t a gentle fuck, but he’d been wonderfully disinterested, as though the whole thing had been an academic exercise. She supposed it was, really.

  Talking to Clio, now, she just said, ‘I think about it differently, but privately. It’s not something I want to go into. I worked through it all a long time ago, and it’s gone.’

  ‘Gone. This is it. This is why I’m here. Teach me how you do it, Xanthe. Teach me to stop feeling. I wake up every day with his betrayal, with the idea that the state sanctioned my rape, intruded upon everything I thought I knew.’

  Rape, rape, Xanthe thought. You fucked a few times, because he was the most beautiful boy in there and you wanted him, and then felt hideously guilty about the girlfriend you were supposedly so close to. Although maybe Mark had been different with Clio and with Fran – maybe there hadn’t been that recognition, maybe it had been a contemptuous thing. It is not feminist, she warned herself, to mock another woman’s experience as she speaks it.

  She really wanted a cigarette.

  ‘I’m just not angry any more, Clio. I cut it all off, walked away. I know, I know, I have the luxury of being able to do that, of finding a place where that behaviour makes sense and a partner who’ll help me to do it. I honestly don’t feel much connection with that time of my life, I really don’t. My whole time in London was misery. Things only started to make sense again when Dido and I landed here. All of it – the squat, all the activism we were doing, that whole communal-living thing. Then afterwards – the women’s groups, local politics, the anger. All that anger, all the time, Clio. I wasn’t meant to be there, in that scrubby, furious little country. Nor was my girl. It’s easier to be peaceful here.’

  ‘Peaceful! Your country is on the verge of socialist revolution. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the people I’ve been working with in Athens. A nationwide movement. They’re overthrowing capitalism from the ground up. It’s charged, here – like, like in Genoa in 2001. It’s an inspiring place, this, no? How can you exist here and not want to be a part of it?’

  ‘It doesn’t really touch us. We live on the side of a cliff, for heaven’s sake. The very point of this place is to provide people with an alternative to all of that.’

  ‘All of – of politics? The life of the world? It’s an escape, then. For people who can afford to look away? Living off the tourist dollar.’

  ‘That’s what’s usually meant by the word retreat, yes.’

  ‘I just don’t see how it’s possible. When you’ve experienced what I’ve experienced – what you have. How do you stop being angry?’

  ‘Maybe you need to go home. That’s what I did. A place can help, the right environment. Find yourself.’

  ‘I don’t really know what home is, Xanthe, I’m not like you. I don’t have an identity like that.’

  ‘Scottish, aren’t you? So go there. They have good scenery, I hear. Go and sit in a misty glen or take the high road or something like that. Go and find yourself a big silent lumberjack in a kilt – someone your own age, someone who’s had their own share of it, to warm your bed. It doesn’t need to be the place you grew up in. I mean, there’s not much inner peace to be found in gated fucking communities full of millionaires in Athens!’

  Mistake, she realized as soon as she’d said it. Mistake to remind a comrade, any of them, what you came from. Clio had taken it in, she saw.

  ‘Yeah, I could do that. I could go to the Highlands or something, get a council house somewhere rural. I haven’t got the financial security to be able to do something like this, obviously. Buy a yoga retreat for my fancyman. My lumberjack.’

  The wine was moving in Xanthe now – they didn’t drink much, she and Nikolas, and certainly not during guest season.

  ‘Right, this is what I mean. This whole grudge thing you’ve got going with me because I had a more privileged upbringing. Don’t think I’m not aware of it. None of the old “comrades” ever let me forget it, darling, and you won’t ever either, will you now. You can’t ever look past that to see the person I am, you’re always thinking of me as a symbol. No getting over those bloody great chips on your shoulders that I’m not supposed to mention, am I? Know what? I know you’ve all had a much harder life than me. I know that. But it doesn’t diminish my ability to feel hurt, or pain, or to need to retreat from them in order to preserve my own sanity, that of my daughter—’

  Clio’s eyes went sly, cunning, sleek at the corners. She was very drunk, Xanthe realized, must have been drinking in her room before coming over.

  ‘Right. It doesn’t diminish your ability to feel your own pain. But other people, you’d just rather not think about their pain any more? Is that right?’ />
  ‘I did my battling. I put in my time. I just – it’s exhausting, Clio. What you’re describing, waking up angry every day at the state of the world, wanting to fight – nobody can go on and on doing that, indefinitely. Don’t you ever get tired of it? Don’t you ever think, right, that’s it, enough, I’m done now?’

  ‘No. Because if everyone did that, there wouldn’t be any point in keeping on going. The world would harden. The bastards would have won.’

  Clio stood up – she was clearly going to be the one who got to walk off. Let her, let her, Xanthe thought.

  ‘I see how you’ve done it, Xanthe. Thank you. You’ve taught me your ways and I don’t want them – couldn’t afford them even if I did. Those of us who were born in the fight can’t ever close our eyes to it, you know. You go on with yourself, my fine lady. Be unbothered. Be switched off. It’s not for the likes of me.’

  Xanthe watched her go, struggling across the sand, then picked herself up and went to bed, ignoring Nikolas. At 3 a.m., a quad bike from town roared down the road, stopping and growling outside the apartments, and someone made noisy theatre of stomping back up the stairs, slamming their door.

  At five, Nikolas woke to begin the preparations for sun salutation. Xanthe berated him from the bed.

  ‘Don’t ever do that to me again, Niko. Don’t take it upon yourself to decide that I need to engage with someone, to have a friendship. Ask me things. You don’t get to take decisions for me. If I want not to talk to someone from my past, you respect that and let me be, OK.’

  That wimpy shrug. She threw a sandal from the floor across the room and it hit the door as he closed it.

  She noticed Clio didn’t make it to morning asanas. The rest of the guests were waiting there in the driveway, dangling their feet over the wall down to the sea, catching a last tiny bit of sun before the drive to the ferry, and the pitch began to get restless, anxious, as time ticked on. Nikolas went off to bang on Clio’s door, and she stumbled down the stairs ten minutes later, avoiding all eyes. That cigarette, she thought, as the fat behind shoved itself into the van. That cigarette was coming soon.