Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  ‘I can go in that, yeah? I mean, there ain’t sharks or nothing?’

  ‘No sharks. Not this close to the shore. But take it easy, eh? You’ve had a big glass of wine on a hot day. Don’t go too far out. Make sure your feet can touch the bottom.’

  Sam grunted, as though Xanthe were a nagging schoolteacher issuing orders, discarded her wrap and strode out into the water in the pregnancy swimming costume she still fitted, almost three years on. It wasn’t cold. She’d been expecting cold. The ocean floor was pebbled, uneven; she must look to Xanthe on the shore like a foal trying to walk, a complete novice. Little city girl in the big sea. She stopped for a second, swore out loud at its uninterrupted hugeness, its cunty beauty, the cheek of it, pressed on shakily. Once she got to waist-height she squatted down, let it all pool about her, not cold but still a shock on the overheated skin of her back. She tried swimming strokes, just with her arms at first, then pushed off with her feet, knees bumping along the rocks below. It was nothing like swimming at the Brockwell Lido. She was aware all the time of everything being much bigger and wilder than herself, the floor untiled, the force of waves and currents. There was nothing and nothing in front of her, and it was blue. The waves blew up, slapped her face, salt water up her nose making her cough and lose her footing. There was nothing underneath and she panicked, choked, wondered if she would sink. It would matter. It would matter if she did.

  Turning herself around in the water, she realized she hadn’t come very far at all. She could still make out Xanthe’s face, a friendly arm extended and waving gently at her. She doggy-paddled her way back to where she could feel rocks under foot again and told herself she was a fucking idiot.

  She was surprised at how quickly her skin dried off. Xanthe received her back to their picnic with smiling silence. There were vine leaves and flatbread unwrapped from waxy wrappers waiting for her, and she filled her mouth gratefully.

  ‘Listen, mate. I went too far there. You must be wondering what sort of psychopath you’ve given houseroom to. Honestly, I’m not – I’m not a risk.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were, Sam. I’d be more worried if you seemed absolutely fine about the whole thing.’

  ‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to go about rebuilding myself now. What does a person do?’

  Xanthe breathed out, reached into her bag and lit a cigarette.

  ‘It takes time, and it takes a lot of strength. You just need to be sure enough of yourself to have something to hold on to.’

  Sam hadn’t smoked since she’d had Debbie, but something about the smell, out here in the sunshine, was making her reconsider. She motioned to the packet and Xanthe nodded, exhaled, continued.

  ‘Talking from personal experience, the main thing I found was not to let it bury you. Keeping a good hold of your self, your selfhood. If you’ve got that you can fight for it.’

  ‘Oh God. I don’t know if I have any more.’

  ‘Well, you’re here. You did this. I think you still do, Sammi. Honestly. And treat yourself like a pressure valve. You’ve got to, got to let it out. Got to have some sort of release. Someone to talk to, something to punch. There has to be something. Remember how angry I was in my twenties? I felt all the time like a coiled spring, one wrong touch away from … boom. No pressure valve.’

  They stared at the sea for a second and then Xanthe steered them away.

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised; what you’re saying about Clio. She was always a bit of a forceful one. Took no prisoners. I was following the case through the English papers here and I did wonder why there was so much focus on her. I mean, I get it, she’s sort of famous, and the rest of you were staying anonymous, but – well, her and Mark—’

  ‘Ha! They didn’t like each other. Too fucking similar. Other people were just fucking collateral damage. For both of them.’

  ‘Well. She certainly liked us to be an attentive audience.’

  ‘What does it take, though? To be that focused on one thing, your political ideal, or your fucking undercover mission or whatever, that you just roll over actual other humans? Know what I’m saying?’

  ‘Bearing in mind I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, she did always seem a bit, well … There was always so much going on, but I don’t know if she actually had anyone properly close to her. Did she? She would come and go from us as she pleased, and I envied her freedom at the time, but I don’t think she was returning anywhere. I rather got the impression that we were the home she was coming back to. And none of us were really that tight-knit. Not really.’

  ‘Nah, she’s strictly short-term, mate. And it’s warped her, I reckon. She’s, like, physically unable to see that other people might make deeper connections. Might want to put down roots. Belong to something other than a cause.’

  Sam left the island four days later, the same route that she’d come. She wasn’t cured, she knew that. But she could feel the sea lurch and spin beneath her on the boat. She’d held an aum, chanting at the sun with Dido, Xanthe and Xanthe’s gentle boyfriend Nico, found something in that strange harsh sound reverberating through her throat, her chest, her body that had made her feel a bit more like one person, body and mind, one being even, again. For a couple of days there, she’d become the sort of person she would have laughed at at home. The sort of person she hoped she would laugh at again.

  Using the Wi-Fi at the airport, she booked herself into a hotel not far from Avril’s house. Streets she’d know, but not her house. Just as the cabin crew were doing their safety check, she tapped out a message to her mother, that she’d be back tomorrow, she wouldn’t be staying at the house, and she’d like to see Debbie as soon as she could.

  ‘You know what, Xanthe,’ she’d said, sitting at the kitchen table the night before as Xanthe sliced fruit. ‘I don’t think it’s that I’m jealous of you exactly. I mean, it’s stunning and calm here and everything, but I don’t think I could do it, out here all the time. I need a bit of bustle, me. I need a bit of ugly in my day-to-day. That sea would just piss me off, if I had to look at it every morning. What you got with Dido, though. That. I don’t know if I’m ever going to have that again, with either of my kids. Specially not with Debbie. Not now.’

  Xanthe turned and hugged her from behind, long brown arms looped over the chair and round her shoulders. This was a lot of physical contact for Sam, but she relaxed into it. Her friend smelled of sun cream and oil.

  ‘You just need to let her back in, I reckon. Does she know? About all the … stuff?’

  ‘She knows I was involved in a court case. That’s all.’

  ‘How old is she now? Sixteen?’

  ‘Fifteen. Near enough sixteen.’

  ‘They know more than you give them credit for at that age. Do you reckon she could take it?’

  ‘I reckon she probably could.’

  ‘That’s what you have to do, then.’

  In the years that followed, it would be gently suggested to Samantha Burke and Samantha Smith, by psychologists, during marriage counselling sessions, and at various survivors’ groups, that she was too focused on Clio Campbell, that she was perhaps using her anger at Clio as a distraction from probing the real issues and how they had affected her.

  ‘You’re distancing yourself,’ said one of them, one of their voices, and Sam had wanted to say, actually, no, you’re wrong. This is when I’m closest to myself. But she nodded and swallowed it and tried to show them progress and healing.

  It was easy to avoid her, avoid hearing of her. The anonymity Clio herself had ensured was built into Sam’s interactions with the journalists and lawyers made it easy for her to drop back out of sight. Clio, she understood from occasional swipes up onto her Facebook page, at night, when the feelings were strongest, had moved home to Scotland, was involved in some other political campaign up there, posted links to articles with increasingly hysterical capital letters.

  Dale woke up one night, glanced over at the glowing screen and sighed.

  ‘Babe. Again?
This woman again. You need to stop it. Everyone’s said.’

  It was one of the last nights they’d spend together, the relationship already broken beyond fixing. Dale said no, and he kept on saying no – for better or worse, he said, crying, holding onto her hand – but Sam couldn’t stand the nights spent red-eyed and scanning his face, the secret compulsion to check his phone all the time, the very double fact of him in her – that she knew with her conscious brain he was as loyal and honest a man as you could find, but there would always be a second voice whispering secrets and doubts whenever he was in her line of vision.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to be with anyone again, love. I think this is it for me. You need to be with someone with a brain that works right. You’re too nice a man for all this.’ Get out, get out, get out. Eventually she had had to physically shove him out of the door, both of them in tears. And she sat down on her sofa, no longer anybody’s love, anybody’s body, just a mother, a daughter, a woman on her own. Debbie came downstairs, sleepy in her big T-shirt.

  ‘He’s gone then?’

  ‘He’s gone, baby.’

  ‘He was good, Mum. A good man.’

  ‘He’ll still be a good man, my love. And a good daddy to your little brother and a good stepdaddy to you if you want him. But I couldn’t ask him to stay. Not with this old broken thing your mum. It wasn’t fair. You see?’

  Debbie curled herself into her mother’s side. They didn’t touch often any more, and Debbie was a lithe giraffe of a girl, towering over Sam by a good head and a half. Sam marvelled at how small her grown daughter could make herself, how their soft selves still slotted together.

  ‘You ain’t that old, Mum. Not really.’

  She grinned, her lovely face nobody’s but her own in that second.

  ADELE

  Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, 2015

  Something about the way the lights flickered in the foyer of the building always seemed to activate a switch in Adele’s head. She’d noticed it over the years, a different way of existing and responding to things when on the ward, as though she processed emotion through a thick protective suit, a layer of blubber or something. The fact was, you needed to keep all the normal, instinctive human reactions at bay to be any good at this job. They had to be superseded by practicality, by logic, by process and knowledge. Years ago, when she was still new to this, a boy with the exact same date of birth as her Jamie had come in. Seventeen. Smashed up. Motorcycle crash. Never regained consciousness. She’d tried to blank out the older nurses muttering that he never would, but couldn’t quite hold the tears in, ended up shouting at Pat the charge nurse in the tea-break room. Pat had sat her down and calmly, kindly told her that they couldn’t afford to think this way.

  ‘Take ten minutes, my dear. It’s all I can give you, I’m afraid. Come back out ready to give that boy the care he needs till he breathes his last, or decide that you can’t do it, and look for another job.’

  Adele had shuddered, everything crashing over her, and Pat had reached for her shoulders.

  ‘Listen. Every single nurse who comes to ICU has one of these moments. Every single one. All of them out there, and a few who decided they couldn’t. I don’t judge them that can’t, you know. Better to find it out early. Not everyone can do this job. I think you can, though.’

  Adele had, in the end, been in the room when the consultant had broken it to the boy’s mother, had held her hand tight, tight as they switched the life support off. She’d pushed through three night shifts in a row, making the drive home with the radio on in the dim morning light, poured herself cereal then climbed into bed beside Dougie’s warm form, eye mask to block out the sun, wax earplugs to block out the noise of Dougie getting the boys up for school, woken at three, showered, prepared a lasagne for them all, eaten, taken five minutes to curl up with the cat in the silence of the living room before turning the car back on to the motorway, walked swiftly back through that foyer with the change of light on her eyes. Only after the third shift, when she awoke into a free space where nothing was expected of her for two whole days, did she allow it to come out. She took herself out of the house, walked down by the canal, past the bit of the path popular with joggers, and cried, for that boy and her boy and both of their mothers.

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to be a robot,’ Pat had said. ‘It’s just a matter of compartmentalizing, isn’t it? We just have to work through the things later. I’m not going to say it gets easier, just that you get better at it.’

  Eight years on, and she would say that yes, it probably had. And she had. To an extent. Three hours into her shift that day, and they got word of a new patient coming in from A&E.

  ‘Female, probably late forties/early fifties. Suicide attempt. As yet unidentified but they’re working on it.’

  ‘Yours, Adele,’ the charge nurse had said.

  2013–14

  Dougie had had on his politics show when she got home. She usually snapped at him to shut it off; her jangled nerves couldn’t take the shouting they all did, not after a twelve-hour shift. This time, though, there was a voice, one she hadn’t heard for decades, and the voice was in her living room.

  Cliodhna Johnstone had always had that silky, twisty way of speaking, so that even when she was just raising her hand to give an answer in class the others would always hush to quiet. It made her a target, just as much as the big head of ginger frizz, the strange golden eyes always darting about, the way her singing rose above the others as they droned out the hymns and Burns in assembly. Just as much as her weird name – Jean, the teachers had called her, and she’d refuse to respond. Cliodhna, she’d said, when pressed. Clee-oh-nah, and it sounded like music. ‘Jean is my middle name.’

  That wee pointy chin, aimed at the ceiling to hide the wobbling. At first she’d been skelped for it. What a thing, Adele thought now, whacking tiny, five-year-old palms with a ruler just because their owner asked to be called something else. They got you submissive early in that place. Beat out anything that could maybe even begin to grow into cheek. Jean she became, until high school; until she revealed she’d been wearing that name under her clothes all this time, holding it tight to her. And Adele, sharing the bus with her and the other kids from the village all the way to the big school in the town, admired her for it from behind a magazine.

  On the bus, Cliodhna befriended that weird couple of older girls from up the hill, and Adele heard them call her Clio; she seemed to arrive at the big school a newly christened, fully formed person, sloughing off her former primary-school classmates and names. Adele would see her in the corridors sometimes, although they never shared a class, laughing and chatting and shoving into people, hiding cigarettes at break time with a new gang who all stood over on the opposite street corner and wore lots of make-up.

  Adele stayed close to the children she’d grown up with; they walked together in a pack around the school, were known as the ‘sooties from the village’, miners’ kids. They looked out for each other as the popular kids faked hacking coughs behind their backs, didn’t really mingle.

  She remembered sitting in the study hall near the music block once, listening in to the conversation behind her. The girls were all in her class, but they might as well have been a different species.

  ‘I mean it,’ Clio was saying. ‘Robert Burns was full-on sexy! Have you not seen the pictures? It’s right there in the back of the book they give us; just not in the bits they read out to us in class. He just got to go around getting all these girls pregnant – he had about thirty kids – and dropping them, and everyone would say oh, pal, och Rabbie, it’s fine because you’re so talented and handsome. Typical man thing.’

  ‘Men,’ said one of the other girls, knowledgeably.

  ‘So his love, the one like a rose?’

  ‘One of many,’ Clio said, wise. ‘He shagged about like nobody’s business. And I bet it’s dirty. I bet he’s talking about her nipples or something.’

  Clio did ‘A Red, Red Ro
se’ at the school Burns Night concert that year. She stepped into the wobbly spotlight, apparently shy and unsure of herself, plucked three frail notes from her school-issued acoustic guitar and cleared her throat before she began to sing. The assembly hall went silent like it never was.

  The Clio Johnstone who won the prizes for her singing each year, who was tall and beautiful and famous around the school, faded gradually away into a slump of shoulders during the half-hour bus trip back to the village each afternoon, while the ‘sooties’ grew back into themselves again as they got home. Clio didn’t come down the village cross with the others, never showed up at anyone’s house for the party if they had an empty. Adele would see her walking along the street with her two weird pals, or just by herself, would offer her a half-smile if there was nobody else around, would sometimes get one back.

  How strange, she thought now, to have grown up side by side with somebody, breathing the same bad air from the run-offs, singing the same songs at school, and not have anything to say to them. But at fourteen, fifteen, most of the village kids knew where their lives were going – the boys were really just kicking their heels, counting the hours till they would join their fathers down the pits; some of them already coupled up with the girls they would marry. Clio Johnstone looked at them, found them wanting, kept herself separate. And Adele resented and envied her for it in equal measure. Then there was the scandal, and Clio disappeared, and they talked about her in whispers for a while, but soon after that the strike failure and pit closure had forced Adele and most of her classmates to leave home anyway, scatter to the bigger towns around in search of apprenticeships, secretarial courses, in order to support suddenly unemployed parents. She’d completely forgotten about Clio Johnstone’s disgrace by 1990, the summer that Jamie was a newborn and that voice came drifting back through the radio every time she switched it on, it seemed. Rise up. People got to rise up.