Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  No, she hadn’t. She hadn’t heard anything at all.

  They were planning Elliot’s second birthday when the offer came in. Well, Dale was planning it. Sam was lying in bed in Debbie’s old room with her phone in her hand and Dale was sitting outside the door calling options through to her.

  ‘A bouncy castle, love. I know a bloke who can get us one for thirty quid, for the whole afternoon. And if we’re doing it in your mum’s church? Well, more to spend on the boy, int there?’

  Beautiful Dale. It’s not you, he had kept telling her. This is just a thing you’re going through. Because of the bad stuff that’s been done to you. It will pass, love. For better and worse, eh? He’d still say that even as she packed her suitcase, even as the taxi pulled up.

  But on this day, she was lying on Debbie’s sweat-stained bed, having refused to change the sheets in the five months since Debbie had gone to stay with her grandmother. The phone in her hand rang, loudly, and she looked at it for a few seconds, in surprise, before pressing the button.

  ‘Samantha,’ said Alex the lawyer. ‘They’ve offered a settlement.’

  ‘What is all this supposed to be about? Settling? Settling?’

  Clio dispensed with all pleasantries, any preamble, and marched past her into the house. Sam stood there on the doorstep, tea-splashed dressing gown to the world, muttering to the street, ‘No, please do come inside won’t you?’

  ‘You can’t settle, Sammi. What are you doing to us?’

  Clio stood in the living room, poised and incongruous between the pile of Duplo and the overflowing ironing basket, hair on fire in the blind-slatted sunlight. The angel of death, the angel of something awful, anyway, always returning to toss her out of any crappy little Eden she managed to scrape together.

  ‘Kitchen, please,’ she found the strength to say, gesturing to Elliot, his round eyes popping at the visitor from another planet. On her way out of the room she pushed the volume control on the remote hard.

  In the kitchen, she put the kettle on, a reflex that came as naturally to her as breathing, found herself thankful for the few seconds of time it had bought her.

  ‘I’m not going to ask how you got my address. But I am going to say that I’ve already made it perfectly clear that I do not like these kind of surprise visits.’

  ‘Well, if you won’t respond to my messages, what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘I don’t have to reply to you, Clio. You are not my bank, my kid’s school, the emergency services or my mother.’

  ‘No. I’m just the co-defendant in a case you’ve decided to throw. A case we had agreed was one of the most important political actions of the day, probably the most important thing we’d ever do.’

  ‘I don’t remember agreeing to that. Don’t go putting even more words in my mouth, woman. I’m bout having enough of it already.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The interviews. The speaking over me in meetings, and with the lawyers. You you you all over the papers.’

  ‘We talked about that. As a group. I went public to get us noticed and to protect you. Draw the heat.’

  ‘Protect me?’ Sam wheeled round on her, holding onto the worktop to stop herself from flying across the lino, claws outstretched. ‘Protect me. Well, a right bloody good job you’ve done there, Clio Campbell. Gold fucking star to you. Do you even see me? Look at me. Really, really look at me. I can’t work because I have a nervous fucking breakdown half the time I leave this house. I ain’t got dressed in about a week, I don’t reckon. That little boy through there – him’s two year old and this is all the mamma he’s ever known, this fucking useless husk of a thing who sits around crying and shaking, because this fucking carry-on of yours has been going on for longer than he’s even been alive – and my little girl won’t even talk to me, don’t even live here no more, because she don’t understand why her mum just emotionally fucking disappeared on her and can’t look her in the eye. I got trauma flashbacks every night, my marriage has fallen to pieces and ain’t going back together any way that I can see, and every morning I have to force myself to go downstairs, make a cup of tea and not just open my fucking wrists in a bath. So yes. Nice protection you gave me there.’

  The kettle screamed, that tinny electronic whistle Dale had thought was classy, and she turned away to sort it out.

  ‘Sammi. Sammi.’ There was a hand on her back, the accent thick, glossy Scottish honey. ‘I had no idea. That’s so shit. That’s so, so shit. What he’s done to you. What they’ve done to you. But this is exactly why we’ve got to keep fighting. They destroyed your life; you’re clearly suffering PTSD and they fart out that insulting wee offer to wash their hands of you – we can get psychological evidence, really shame them—’

  ‘NO.’ It was the biggest, loudest word she’d ever put into the air. It reverberated. They were both silent, as a new episode of Teletubbies cued itself up on the DVD player, all birdsong and sweetness.

  ‘Mumma?’ yelled Elliot.

  ‘You stay here,’ Sam muttered, clenched fists at Clio as she pushed past her.

  Elliot was standing near the kitchen door, tiny and lost. She picked him up and took him back through to the calm, glowing telly, held him tight on the sofa for a second, his little face warm and wet in her neck.

  ‘Mumma crying.’

  ‘Yes, darlin. Yes, my baby love. Mumma’s always crying, int she? Just being silly. Do you want to watch Teletubbies? Just for a little minute more? Look, here’s your blankie, and here’s Boss Teddy. Yeah? Mumma be back soon, eh?’

  Clio was stirring a spoon around a mug. Even the clinking of it made Sam want to break something.

  ‘You are going to go now. You are too much. You’ve been too much in my life. We was fine. We was proper and honest happy before you turned up, tipped everything in the air and dragged me off on your fucking stupid crusade.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘My crusade? Sammi, this was a thing done to you. A giant, terrible wrong. We have been working to right it. Don’t blame me for the corrupt, horrendous actions of the state. We’re taking action for every woman in the country – for every citizen of this country – to stop them living in fear of surveillance culture …’

  She’ll say ‘state-sanctioned rape’ next, thought Sam.

  ‘… of state-sanctioned rape. Listen, my sister. My girl. I canny pretend to know what this has been like for you, just like I canny take this burden from you, much as I want to. But I can be here with you, eh? I can walk beside you. I can hold your hand. It’s you and me, Sammi. We’ve got to stick together. We’ve got to stand up, working-class girls, to this obscenity being done to us by this upper-class, patriarchal—’

  ‘Oh stop. Stop trying to say we’re the same. You’ve always gone on about this and I’ve always secretly been, like, what – because, babe, we blatantly ain’t the same. Just because we both grew up poor don’t mean a thing. Don’t mean that we both had the same life experience. Don’t mean that you ain’t been able to disappear into a crowd, or put some different clothes on and blend in with power. I’m a black woman in a poor fucking neighbourhood I’ve almost never left. I always got to be working eight times as hard to prove myself worthy of a job, that I got even half a brain, that I know and understand theory or might have read a book once in a while. You? You fucking float above it, don’t you? Poor, sure. But beautiful, white, famous, talking your good fight and singing your lovely folk songs all round the world. This, for you, this is a publicity campaign. This is a hobby you doing just now. Your latest thing. Because that’s how you stitched yourself together a life out a bunch of floaty fucking scarves or something. None of them touch the ground. It’s my life, Clio. My. Fucking. Life. My home, my babies, my husband, my job, the day-to-day boring fucking reality of living in the one place trying to keep the kids fed and watching the telly on the same sofa every night. You got to pick not to do that. And then you try and speak for me. You get the spotlight on you
and you use it to put your own words round my story, take more away from me on top of what those police cunts already got. For why? Because you was bored? Lonely? I don’t know. But last week I got a phone call offering me money and an end. I’m taking that. I’m getting off. This stops now. And you can go. Out here –’ She gestured to the back door, which opened on to the echoey concrete alley that led to the street. ‘I don’t want him seeing you again. I don’t want me seeing you again.’

  ‘Sammi. I – OK. OK, I’m going. But I did this out of principle. I couldn’t let you go on living without knowing this. I couldn’t. You had to find this out, and it had to be stopped. For the world.’

  Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Not that much for a life. Not really. Alex wanted to push for more, and she knew through him that Clio and Fran did too, but she couldn’t take another second of this. It didn’t stop, though. Even knowing the money was coming, even after more months, once her bank statement was swollen with zeros, didn’t make anything stop. Dale set up counselling appointments for her and she watched the minutes ticking up to them, unable to leave Debbie’s old bed. One day she found herself, each muscle shot through with sheer red anger, picking up a stropping, flailing Elliot and throwing him down onto the sofa. He giggled a little, looked up at her as though the game was going to continue, then he stopped, stared at her face. She locked herself in the bathroom, away from him, texted Avril to come round and get him.

  ‘At least tell me where you’re going. Please, babe. Please, my love.’

  ‘You don’t need me around right now, darlin.’

  ‘Yes I do. We all need you. That boy there needs his mummy, don’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. I got to go and see if I can get her back.’

  She had left the country by air three times before: twice as little Sammi Smith, flying to Jamaica to see her cousins, fighting with her brother till her mother separated them; once as Samantha Burke, a married woman with her new husband and old daughter, off to a resort in Turkey, sitting squashed up on a charter flight twitchy with casual racists. She’d never been this alone. Get the bus to the ferry port, or a taxi if you’d rather (it’ll cost way more!), her instructions said. She needed that taxi, though, the air-conditioned space and plush headrest, tinted windows to watch the tower blocks and balcony washing lines of a foreign country through.

  Samantha Burke had never been on a ferry before. She’d never been on a boat of any sort, she realized. Not even the paddle boats on the park pond because Avril had always been terrified of them. She watched her fellow travellers vomiting over the railings, the violence and force the waves slapped the boat’s sides with as the sun beat down hard, and couldn’t feel anything physical at all.

  Xanthe was there, at the shabby little port, a tall column of sense in a yellow sundress and two firm hands on her shoulders.

  ‘You do not need to talk to me at all tonight. You don’t even need to talk to me in the car. I am going to get you to your room, show you how to work the shower, then let you lie in some nice clean sheets for as long as you need to. You got me, sis?’

  The car smelled of patchouli, of Fran burning oils around the squat to try and ward off the damp, of so many of the things she was trying to get away from that Sam, slumped in the back seat, dug her fingernails deep into her palms and wondered if she was making a huge mistake.

  She woke to sunlight, white cotton, the white ceiling of her cave room, light purple drapes floating, green leaves peeping round the sides and a great mounting pressure of dread in her chest. Xanthe found her curled on the floor around her suitcase an hour or so later when she looked in to let her know lunch was ready.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Xanthe. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come. I can’t cope with it, or with anything, and instead of just removing myself from the whole situation I’ve gone and landed you with a big bloody problem instead, int I? Maybe – I’m thinking I could go to a hotel or something and just leave you be if you could just get me a taxi or the like I dunno.’

  Xanthe said nothing, hugged her.

  That first day, she only made it to the terrace outside the house, walked around the circumference, staring down the hill at the road and the cliffs and sea just beyond it.

  The air was so clear and warm, the sea a more real colour than anything Sam could think of back home. The stonework had all been painted white, the land was scrubby khaki, disrupted by extraordinary flashes of magenta flowers sprouting from far-off buildings. There was nobody else around, nothing making a noise. Nobody at all here but herself. No one she loved had any idea where she was. She knew this was what she’d wanted, but now, faced with it, she felt everything was wrong.

  She was sitting under the trellis, in the shade of what she supposed were vine leaves, her feet tracing the pattern of a mosaic in the stone. The paperback she’d picked up from the tiny shelf in the house sat splayed on her lap. An Agatha Christie, the only book there that didn’t have ‘mindfulness’ in its title. She watched a tall brown figure, sunglasses and shorts, make her way across the road, a big clay pot held across her hip. As she came further up the stairs, Sam realized it wasn’t Xanthe.

  ‘Mum thought you might like some of this. Fava beans. She said to tell you that it’s got to be made with love. Brought you some bread too, and a pot of olives.’

  ‘Bloody hell. You’re never Dido? I ain’t seen you since you was a baby! Like, I mean, just learning to walk and stuff. You took your first steps into my hands!’

  She heard the words come spilling out of her like the embarrassing old auntie she’d always known she’d turn into, her accent meeting the girl’s faint cockney and growing broader in its light.

  Dido smiled, awkward, didn’t know where to look.

  Sam watched her walk back down, crossing the road with all the confidence of someone who knew no cars were ever going to hit her. She must be coming up eighteen years old, Dido, those long legs a physical manifestation of the time passed. An entire adult’s worth of space between Sammi Smith and Samantha Burke.

  The sun began to set, like no sunset she’d ever encountered in London. The whole dome of sky glowing other-worldly, alien pink. Out on what she’d assumed was a clifftop car parking space by Xanthe’s house, three figures unrolled mats, saluted the sea. Xanthe and her daughter were the same height, Sam noted – she couldn’t tell which was which at this distance. The third was shorter, long hair, but still recognizably male – must be the boyfriend.

  Fran had done yoga occasionally in the squat, had tried to get the rest of them into it. Sam remembered having to contort her legs (sometimes forcibly, using her hands to place them where they wouldn’t go), the stiff strain on Fran’s face, Spider farting and the whole thing dissolving into giggles. This was something else, something very beautiful to see, the three silhouettes engaged in some sort of primal dance, fluid, worked in harmony with the sky and the water, gradually bringing their bodies lower and lower to the ground as the sun sank behind the sea and the moon got brighter.

  There are other ways of being in the world, aren’t there, she thought. There is space, standing still for a while, taking it all in. Of course, having the money to buy that space helped.

  She watched the two women particularly, noting how closely together they stood, their movements in mirror image. The harmony. On their way back into the house, one of them – she assumed Dido – looped her arm round the other’s neck. Sam ached for Debbie.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it at all?’

  They were sitting on a beach, just twenty minutes’ sweaty, sun-rocked road-walk away from the house. Red cliffs enclosed them from the road and anyone else; their little woven rug was spread on dark red sand, surprisingly soft. Old blood, flowing into that shockingly turquoise sea. It was too much, was what it was.

  ‘Do you know what I can’t get over, Xanth? The colours. Colours here are, like, colours with the brightness turned all the way up. Why don’t we have colours this bright in the city? We’re good at faking shit,
ain’t we?’

  Xanthe nodded, poured them both a glass of wine from the bottle in her shoulder bag, replaced the stopper.

  Sam took a sip. ‘That wasn’t a no, by the way. I just don’t know how to start. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not sure I would.’

  ‘Thing is, I need to start talking about it, don’t I? Otherwise it’s going to eat me up. I can’t just be this silent thing in the house, sitting about crying while my husband looks after the little one, saving it all up to scream in Clio Campbell’s face every two years. It’s going to kill me, innit?’

  ‘Clio? You screamed at Clio?’

  ‘Mate. You have no idea.’

  And it unlocked, the resentment spewing out of her throat into the air around them. Words and words and words.

  ‘Steamrollered, Xanthe. I feel like she steamrollered me,’ Sam found herself saying in conclusion. ‘She took it all down – my life, everything I thought I knew about myself, particularly my relationship with Debbie. It’s all gone. I’m just here, sitting on a beach with someone I haven’t seen in years, wondering if there’s even any point in my going back. I used to think at least I’m good for people, you know? My life might not have been the most wonderful –’ she flapped a dismissive hand at that sea, its obscenity of hue ‘– but I was doing the best with it. I was a good mum to Debbie. I helped kids in my job. I could actually hold down a job. I was in love and could love back. And it broke me, the case, the knowledge. I exist in a house with a man of infinite fucking patience who says he loves me and shows it every day and I wake up terrified and sometimes wondering if I should kill him before it’s all revealed a second time. I’m poison in that house, now. I’m poison to my kids. I can’t separate that from her, and that she didn’t even stop to consider for one second what knowing all – this – would do to me.’

  She stopped. This was too far. Something about being able to say this to a face from the past that had made her relax more than she ought to have done. That face; Xanthe’s, familiar, but older, motherly, calm and absent of the thousand quick frustrations Sam realized she’d expected to find there. It occurred to her she didn’t know that she could trust it. In fact, given what she’d already found out about her old comrades, why would the one who was hiding out in Greece, the one who’d refused to testify or get involved, but had replied immediately when a post-settlement Sam had asked her if she could come and stay at her retreat, not be in on it? What if Xanthe had bought this place with a payout from the police? What if this was an extended experiment on her, to see how she was reacting psychologically? What if they were watching her in that little sunny room in the house? Sam thought all of these things at lightning speed, registered each one in the time it took Xanthe to open her mouth for a reply, and stood up, dusted the sand from her legs, gestured towards the sea.