Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  ‘It’s Cliodhna,’ she said. ‘It was always Cliodhna. Clio, at school. She couldn’t make me change my own name.’

  ‘She would be your mother, there.’

  ‘Yes, her.’

  ‘Have the two of you had an argument, is that what this is?’

  ‘Aye, you could say that. I don’t want to talk about it, Uncle Donald. I can’t go back, and I didn’t know where else to go.’

  Her eyes filled up, and he got worried. He was never quite sure what to do with women when they cried, and while this might be the same child he had picked up out of muddy puddles and hugged when she dropped an ice cream, she now had the added complication of a woman’s body, a body he had registered and put immediately, guiltily, to the back of his mind. He patted her a couple of times on the shoulder.

  ‘Come on now, love. Come on. It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Can I stay with you here?’

  He looked around. He had the two chairs, a bed through in the other room. There was a sink that he washed at, topless, in the mornings; the chemical toilet he’d put in last year.

  ‘I honestly haven’t got the room, Cliodhna. Look at this place. It’s just about big enough for one.’

  She started crying harder. He thought back to that last fight with Malcolm, when he’d been angry with him for giving up, for cowardice. Was he just the same, once you scratched the skin?

  ‘All right, all right. There, lass. I can sleep in the chair for a few days, and we’ll sort something out. Don’t worry. Fash na. Everything will be all right now.’

  Had she still been the child he’d last seen, he would have pulled her in, clasped her head close by, wound those curls round his fingers.

  He left her tucked up in his bed, tramped the half-mile up the hill to the phone box. Eileen answered on the first ring, like she’d been sitting there.

  ‘It’s Donald, Eileen. She’s here. She’s with me.’

  Eileen let out a tiny moan. ‘I wondered. I did wonder.’

  ‘I can put her up for a couple of nights at least—’

  ‘She can’t come home, Donald. She can’t come back.’ She said it in exactly the same way as her daughter had.

  ‘Eileen, she’s seventeen. She still needs her mammy. She was terrified.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but she can’t. There’s no way.’ Eileen sounded like she’d been crying, could start again soon.

  And that was that. Neither of them would tell him what had happened, only that there was no solving it. He found out the next morning that Cliodhna had been in the middle of her exams, and immediately wanted to make arrangements to get her in at the nearest high school. But she’d been adamant.

  ‘I’m done with school,’ she’d said. ‘It’s all part of my old life. I need to grow up now.’

  He fried them eggs for breakfast, then they walked out around the bay that the bothy sat on, looking out across the Summer Isles, the sea, beyond.

  ‘It’s so beautiful here,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere this beautiful. It feels like a good place to be.’

  ‘Aye, it does me well enough,’ he said, trying to dodge the implication he thought he detected. ‘Do you not remember the Isle of Skye, though, Cliodhna? The time we spent there, every summer? No, you were just a baby really.’

  ‘I remember being on a beach like this one, with you and my dad. I remember the sea being big. But that could be Girvan, couldn’t it? When I was a kid?’

  ‘It could. But you don’t see as much of the sea in Girvan. Not like this. Do you remember any of the songs we used to sing to you?’

  He started out, hesitantly.

  ‘There’s nought but care on every hand

  In every hour that passes, o –

  ‘Like this one?

  ‘What signifies the worth o’ man

  And ’twas na for the lasses, o.’

  Donald had never been the singer, really. He knew fine his voice wasn’t the strongest, couldn’t sustain the longer notes, worried too much about where to take the breaths. He hid his face from the girl, sank his eyes on the horizon, moved plainly through the tune.

  Her voice was husky, like she hadn’t used it much in a while, but she came in on the fourth verse, note perfect, both of them gradually growing louder.

  Q Magazine, September 2007

  The Northern Lass

  Clio Campbell

  VEY RECORDS

  Things the world was not waiting for: an album of obscure Scottish folk songs by a washed-up Nineties pop star, replete with guest appearances by various nonentities and hangers-on scraped from the very edges of the grime scene. As weirdly jarring as it is deeply uncool, this cross-genre experiment by one-time ‘Rise Up’ popstrel Clio Campbell, getting back in touch with her Scottish roots, crashes and burns painfully.

  It’s a shame because, unlike other female singers from the past, who tend to drop a few octaves after they’ve passed forty, Campbell’s voice still demonstrates that clear, soaring beauty that thrilled those of us who loved her guest vocals with the likes of Primal Scream and Belle and Sebastian back in the day. The stripped-down power of the almost a cappella ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, the randy Scottish bard’s love poem, becomes a powerfully sexy lesbian torch song in Campbell’s throat, lust and regret conveyed in each beautiful nuance. Perhaps her record company should have steered her towards a straightforward folk album – at the very least it would have saved this rock reviewer from having to wade through all those kitschy screeching Scottish fiddles.

  PETE MOSS

  RUTH

  Glasgow, 23 January 2018

  It was like skiving, like playing hooky. A whole day snatched out of time.

  As soon as she’d thought this, Ruth felt foolish. Which would you rather have – a day off work, or your friend alive?

  Don’t answer that.

  Alison had been great, really she had. Ruth had misjudged her. She’d appeared there, in the woods, gently pulled Ruth back inside and wrapped a towel around her wet hair. She’d said the cat would come home when she was hungry. She’d refused to let Ruth sleep in her house that night, packing her up and folding her softly into the front seat of her car. The next morning, Ruth woke to hear Alison on the phone, forceful like she’d never been.

  ‘Well, her best friend just killed herself. In her house. No, Ruth’s house. She’s the one who found the body. You’ll give her the week off work, Greg.’

  Before she’d left for work, which had happened under extreme protest, Alison had suggested, in this new weak-tea voice she was using, that Ruth would need to let people know.

  ‘Her family. Friends. That sort of thing. People should know. And she was famous, a bit, wasn’t she? What happens when famous people die? Anyway, just when you feel up to it, obviously.’

  The taxi fare from Alison’s to Clio’s flat in Glasgow was twenty-six pounds, and Ruth paid it with a giggle, because the numbers suddenly meant nothing. The stairwell smelled of cheap disinfectant, underneath it something sharp and noxious like man’s pee. The older women in the close all took their turns to clean it; the mop and bucket would be left, pointedly, outside Clio’s door once a month.

  Ruth should go in, really. She should open Clio’s garish turquoise door, its slapdash home paint-job still streaky, with blobs on the skirting and facing walls. When Alison had suggested she use today to make contact with Clio’s friends and family, she’d probably imagined her doing that from the freshly laundered sheets of her own bed. But Ruth had scrolled through her phone and come up with very few people who knew Clio, and she didn’t think it was appropriate that any of them were the first to hear about it. She needed to go through family if she could.

  Alison had not been able to find Clio’s phone last night. It was almost as though she didn’t want them to find it, she’d said, refusing to let Ruth go back into the house to look. The most sensible course of action would have been to go back and look herself, but Ruth was here in the city instead. It’s like I’m drunk,
she thought, and grinned, wide and loony. I’m making the decisions a drunk person would make. Actually, she felt a little bit drunk. Her senses were all a bit off. ‘A bit skew-whiff!’ she said out loud, calling it up the flight of stairs to Clio’s neighbour. ‘Ha!’

  The door, the door. She fumbled for the key (thinking momentarily that it would be hilarious if she’d come all this way, paid all that money and not brought the key) and opened it. She pushed it with the palm of her hand, had it bounce back on her twice, before she stepped into the dark hallway.

  Her nose adjusted before her eyes did – something was sweet and rotten in here. It would be fruit, bought before the trip to Ruth’s house, or mould growing in a coffee cup somewhere. It occurred to Ruth that she was probably the person whose job it was to clean this all up, now.

  She’d never been sure where the light switch was. The cramped hall was dark and full of danger; shelves overflowing with books, mysterious stacked objects, what looked like a roll of carpet. There was an old glass lamp, mock art deco, perched on some sort of dresser, and she reached along its flex for a switch. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room swam into focus through their variously open doors. Tiny ornaments balanced precariously along each doorframe, against the dirty glass up there; little coloured bottles in coordinated rainbows, small carved figurines. The smell seemed to be coming from every room.

  What did you do with all these things? All the bits that a person had pulled around themself over the years? Things that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. Ruth didn’t want them in her house, that much she knew. Maybe there were people you could pay, who would come in and remove everything, and clean the place too? That seemed like a good use of money. She tripped over a stack of what turned out to be sheet music, which spilled and fanned itself over the rug. She swore out loud, filling the fetid air with it.

  People would want to come here, of course. All the people who had loved Clio would want to come and take a small thing, one of those little bottles, a lamp, a fusty cushion. She couldn’t just refer them to whichever charity shop she picked first from the phonebook.

  Although, if they were people who loved Clio, why weren’t they here right now, doing this, instead of her?

  All the curtains were drawn, she realized, which was a bit odd – Clio had presumably left here round about lunchtime, almost three weeks ago. She’d gone into the living room first, assuming that anything important would be at Clio’s desk in there. She’d never seen the place like this. It had always been cluttered, sure, but when Clio was entertaining – all those uncomfortable, badly cooked dinners where Ruth would be seated beside someone earnest, political and humourless and Clio would laugh too loudly and drain the last bottle – there had been a chicness about this old junk-shop stuff that Ruth had envied. Now it looked dusty and chaotic, the room taking on its owner’s state of mind, and Ruth wanted to be away from it all. A threadbare tartan blanket in the slumped easy chair still held the shape of the person who’d last wrapped it around herself. Perhaps she’d sat here as she’d made the phone call.

  ‘Can I come out and stay with you for a while, Ruth? I need to. There’s just crows here. I can see seventeen of them right now, on the aerial and chimney pot across the street. I need you to ground me, Ruth. Every time the wind blows they turn their heads and look at me and caw. Oh, they’re in the air now. Like a swarm of bloody – flies! I know I’m not being rational about this. I know I sound mad. I need help again, Ruth. I can’t be here.’

  Now, in the darkness of the living room, its walls painted a sloppy old blood colour, Ruth folded the blanket up in the chair, then pushed open the heavy curtains and threw the window sash up. The room badly needed air. There were no birds outside that she could see.

  Clio’s desk was an old bureau. Ruth had been with her when she’d bought it from a charity shop four years ago, the two of them heaving it up three flights of stairs. It was hanging open, papers spilling from the various slots. There were two of the expected fungal coffee cups; Ruth moved them gently over to the other side of the room – she was in no state to cope with whatever was in the kitchen just now. She stuffed her big body awkwardly into the chair by the desk, trying not to knock anything. Clio’s computer wasn’t here, but the papers, daunting as they looked, actually began to calm her. Most of them were invoices or receipts, sent from some of the organizations Clio worked with. Official noteheads, with phone numbers and names of contacts – colleagues of a sort, people who might have known Clio not intimately, but enough to miss her. People who could provide a good sturdy base from which the news could be spread; people who might take some of this work away from Ruth. There was nothing resembling an address book. Of course there wasn’t. The idea of Clio maintaining an address book was ridiculous.

  Who was supposed to do all this, Clio? The words sat around her head for a second, and Ruth realized she’d spoken them aloud, to the room, its mess, to the shed snakeskin. She carried on.

  Who was going to come in here and clean up after you? Who was supposed to do this? It wasn’t mad, she realized, to talk out loud to someone dead. Not just now. Not when you were clearly suffering from the sort of shock that made you feel drunk and there were things that needed to be said. She wheeled round and addressed the empty easy chair, the now-folded blanket.

  ‘You know what? I haven’t cried yet. It’s been more than twelve hours since I found you and I haven’t cried yet. Oh, I’m sure I will at some point. There will be crying, because you’re my friend and you’re dead; because at some point it’ll hit me, this great big stupid waste you’ve committed. But I can’t cry because I’m so, so bloody angry at you. Why would you put all this on me? Why would you leave me here, in this room, with your mouldy fucking cups? And even if none of this occurred to you, you still chose my house to kill yourself in, didn’t you? You still knew it would be me that would have to find you.’

  The waxy face, the silent scream.

  ‘Are you still here? Are you, you … fucking … cow?’

  The room, its emptiness, made her feel foolish, and she wished she could take the last words back even though no one had heard them.

  The first number she dialled was underneath a triangular logo, stamped in cheap ink on a thin piece of paper. Glasgow Refugee Support Network. There was music playing in the background as a woman answered, laughing at something unheard.

  ‘Hello. I’m looking for Nancy Okonkwo.’

  ‘That’s me, my love. How can I help you?’ The new Scots vowels stretching over African timbre, the beginnings of a whole new accent growing in that voice.

  ‘I’m calling about Clio Campbell. I think you—’ You what? She couldn’t say ‘knew’, couldn’t give the game away right there with the past tense, could she?

  Start again. ‘I’m a friend. Clio was staying with me for a while. There’s a—’ She had no idea where these words were going; she really hadn’t expected this to be so hard. In her silence, the woman began to panic.

  ‘What’s – what’s happened to her? Is everything all right? What’s going on?’

  ‘She’s dead. I’m sorry – I’m sorry you’re hearing this from me. I found her yesterday evening. Dead.’

  And then it didn’t matter that Ruth couldn’t cry, because this woman was crying. This woman had enough grief in her for both of them.

  ‘No no no no. No no, don’t tell me. Don’t be saying that. No no. Oh Clio, oh don’t.’

  There was some scuffling, and someone else, another woman, was on the phone.

  ‘Hello, can you tell me what’s going on?’

  In the background Nancy was moaning. ‘No no no, Clio. My girl, my friend. No no no.’

  ‘I’m calling about Clio Campbell. I believe she did some work for you. She died yesterday. I’m her friend. I’m trying to let people know.’

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear that.’ This woman was formal, businesslike. Much easier to deal with. ‘Do you mind if I ask what happened?’

  ‘She killed herse
lf,’ Ruth said. Then she blurted out, ‘With pills. In my house – she was in my house.’

  ‘My friend, my friend,’ wailed Nancy, her sobs louder than the other woman’s voice, so Ruth assumed they were still sitting at the phone together.

  ‘I wanted to let people know – please could you tell anyone else she was close with? I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’

  ‘And I’m sorry for your loss,’ said the other woman. Someone else was comforting Nancy now; Ruth could hear yet another voice in there.

  ‘Look, please – don’t spread it about. About how she died. I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t think we’re intending to release that information. Not yet. You know?’

  Where that had come from she wasn’t sure. It seemed to be the sort of thing that people said. But really, who would care, if the manner of death got out there?

  It had been a stupid mistake to start with that one. Ruth had met a Nancy, now she thought about it, at a dinner in this very room about two years ago. She remembered a big woman with a mesmerizingly glossy weave, in her mid-twenties; Nancy who couldn’t stop laughing at Clio’s jokes, who followed her round the room adoringly, helped carry the plates in, helped clear the table; Nancy, who later whispered to Ruth that Clio had volunteered to take in her auntie, to help her asylum claim. Clio never mentioned it herself. Too shy, Nancy had said. She don’t want people to know all the good things she doing.

  Too shy. Ruth had covered a snigger with a cough when she realized Nancy wasn’t joking. She’d never really thought much about Clio’s refugee work – my Nigerian girls, she’d call them if she brought it up – but she knew she’d been running a music group for the women and kids living in soon-to-be-demolished schemes in North Glasgow while their asylum claims had been debated, and that occasionally she went to court with them. But Clio didn’t really talk about these things with Ruth. That wasn’t the point of Ruth, any more.