Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  ‘Aren’t you checking your mentions, pal? Blowing up. Absolutely blowing up. And I mean, yeah, that’s great, but it’s not a very good look, is it? Not for the paper. You know what these girls are like now, don’t you? I get where you’re coming from. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have thought twice about a few years ago myself. You know. You know, mate. But, given the current climate –’ he sucked the air back over his teeth again ‘– bit of contrition probably wouldn’t go amiss. We’re going to walk back a bit on that feature for the weekend, too – I think we probably need to get a girl in to write a bit of it. But let’s see, shall we? Anyway, just keep up with your mentions this afternoon, eh?’

  Neil was dizzy from the man’s scent, found himself gazing into the tiny pores and clean skin of the nose up at his face.

  ‘On Twitter, pal. On Twitter. Hear me? Have a look, maybe draft a little mea culpa, let me have a squizz before you post? Sorted.’

  A few little @s on his Twitter feed bubbled and snapped with righteous anger. He’d no idea how writing that simple, truthful, pared-down version of Clio’s life – just the bare bones, in two hundred and fifty words – had caused so much consternation.

  WTF is this? ‘Despite her undoubted beauty in her younger years’ Seriously, @NeilMunroWrites @ScottishStandard, what the hell is THAT?

  a woman: is amazing and accomplished, dies.

  @NeilMunroWrites, a man: well, she’s not as hot as she used to be

  Never mind the f**king beauty stuff in this @NeilMunroWrites wank. Why the need to mention that she didn’t have kids? Would you even think to mention it if she was a man?

  Good old @ScottishStandard. An extraordinary woman dies tragically and your journalist @NeilMunroWrites reduces her down to her attractiveness, her ex-husband and her childlessness.

  There were about fifteen of them altogether, plus the retweets. A couple more just addressed to the newspaper alone. Not the massive storm Craig had hyped him for. For fuck’s sake. He missed the days before the Internet, when only the angriest old men could be bothered to reply, in green ink, a week after the fact. Well, the fact was that she wasn’t as beautiful as she had been, and surely even none of these outraged keyboard warriors would deny that her beauty had been an important part in the signing of that record deal. He was proud to call himself a feminist, but that was just how the industry worked. She had been breathtaking in her twenties, but thirty years of smoking and drinking had cost her and there was no pretending around that. He remembered the amount of make-up he’d noticed on her face, when he’d moved in for that rejected kiss at the end of her fiftieth birthday party, peach emulsion rucked up in each crease, as he’d swung dizzily away into the Argyle Street night. Mentioning children, or the lack of them, in the final line was standard obituary format, and it was definitely in the public interest to raise a musician’s former marriage to a well-known industry figure. He should not have to apologize for any of this, and he said as much to Craig when the boss buzzed back over to him half an hour later. What he didn’t say was that the idea of being forced to apologize by a man who just yesterday had been salivating over a possible celebrity lesbian suicide was making him want to punch something.

  ‘Mate. I hear you. I hear you. Believe me. Let’s maybe backtrack a bit – perhaps a little public statement about your friendship with her? You’re grieving, aren’t you –’ Craig began a rhythmic patting of his shoulder and Neil’s pulse began beating in time, obediently ‘– just let them know you need a little space. You would never dream of disrespecting such a dear friend and just wanted to celebrate her life; you hope to make amends in the Saturday magazine special edition. Nice wee trailer. That sort of thing. Brilliant.’

  What would be the future if he just walked out? He’d worked here for so long he couldn’t imagine himself being anywhere else. It had come to define him, this building, the regular push to hit a deadline, the eight-year-old byline picture with a still-full head of hair that he used online everywhere. Well, he would stay until this thing was put to bed, anyway. He would do his duty and remember her well.

  Clio Campbell was a very close friend of mine, someone I’d known for more than thirty years. I was still in shock when I wrote her obituary yesterday. Please look out for my article as part of @ScottishStandard’s Weekend Magazine tribute to this extraordinary woman, this Saturday.

  Post.

  He’d felt dirty, taken a long lunch break at the Albannach, chewing and chewing a big white-bread cheese sandwich that had come out of the beer fridge wrapped in cling film. He hadn’t really worked out what to say yet, in this piece, this big piece to heal all ills, this properly fitting tribute.

  The fly was still buzzing about his desk when he got back in.

  ‘Neil! Mate. Mate. Where you been? Breaking news on the Clio Campbell story – need to get your take on it right away, online. Pronto. As our arts man. Our music guy.’

  Back at his desk, her name typed into the search bar via autocomplete, he let the updates spill over him. Some rapper in London had announced he’d been in a six-year relationship with Clio. He was young, handsome and Indian-looking – it took Neil’s whisky-smirred brain a few minutes to realize it was that guy who’d been up for the Mercury Prize a few years ago. In fact, he even had the album.

  ‘So. So. Mate. What do we reckon, eh?’ Neil wondered whether Craig was actually doing any work on any other sections of the paper this week. ‘Need a quick story up there right now with your reaction – his music, in context. I mean, he’s a big name, right? This is going to blow it wide open. I’m thinking for the Saturday feature, maybe a page on “The Many Loves of Clio Campbell”, eh? I mean, this guy, the MP guy, the music-festival guy, wasn’t there a sleazy-cop thing too?’

  ‘I think the women you made— I apologized to this morning might have something to say about that, Craig? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on who she was as a person, after all? Current climate?’

  Craig swatted the very idea of it away, hand slicing through the feeble air con.

  ‘Like you said, mate. Public interest. So, quick three hundred or whatever just now, then let’s see if we can get a quote from this-guy-what’s-his-name in Saturday’s. Good lad. Let’s get to it – next half hour, yeah?’

  Carol, Neil’s neighbour across the desk, who kept her head down on the local council beat for the evening paper, had looked round her monitor to smile sympathetically.

  ‘Wouldn’t be happening if the powers that be hadn’t thought the role of Features Editor was dispensable, would it now. You need a coffee, pet?’

  She’d made it strong and it felt like a lifeline, a small gesture of solidarity from an old comrade. As though the paper itself, the institution of it all, still had his back.

  Hamza Hassan, or Za Flow, as it pleased him to call himself, had been Clio’s ‘secret lover’ from 2005, it seemed. Not long after Neil and Clio had had their one, drunken night, she had taken this much, much younger man, all muscle tone and eyes and hip-hop fashion, into her bed on the regular. Neil thought of himself at almost forty; he’d been in far better shape than he was now, but he was no 22-year-old rapper. Za Flow at thirty-six was in better shape than Neil had been at twenty-two. A quick search of the reviews of his latest album seemed to suggest he mattered, too; serious music magazines, big-name journalists that Neil had always respected, praising him for melding political sensibilities with humour and intelligence, for well-constructed basslines, an ability to marry a catchy party hook with hard-hitting lyrical content. A young beautiful boyfriend with a brain, who’d shared her two passions. Who she’d actually been able to make music with. Neil should have noticed the Northern Lass collaboration himself. This should have been his story to break.

  Gogsy Duke. Danny Mansfield. Now this. She had a type. Let’s just admit it. Pal. Mate. Clio Campbell wanted alpha males. She hunted them down, their swagger and their pull. Their money. All this time, you’ve been dreaming you were locked in a love story for the ages, that one day she�
��d finally down tools and commit. To you? You were a drunken mistake. A puny little accidental shag, a chancer who got lucky one night when she was down. Weren’t you?

  Remember me well.

  None of them made her happy, though, did they? She was too restless, too wild for Gogsy or Mansfield. Who knows what happened with this one, but Neil had a funny feeling it wouldn’t have been a fairy tale. Of course, nothing had made her happy, in the end. That was sort of the point, wasn’t it?

  He filed his word count on the ‘hunky grime star’ to the online ed like a dutiful little typewriter, then muttered to Carol he was off to finish the Saturday feature at home, left her to deal with Craig’s bluster and babble about presenteeism alone. Even back in his flat there was no escaping Clio. The door she’d hovered in all those years ago. That space near the bed where her weird cowboy boots had sat. The CD case for The Northern Lass was still sitting out; he scanned the liner notes quickly, and there it was, tacked on at the end – ‘For H, always’.

  The Twitter notification, turned back on on his phone at Craig’s insistence, started chiming again, and he wondered when all this would stop. Three days now, of nothing but Clio, grinding away in his head.

  Write the piece. Just write the piece. Neil had never had too much of a problem meeting a word count before; he’d accepted long ago that nobody cared how beautifully constructed your prose was when you were working to a deadline and your primary focus was the conveyance of information. He plonked them out now, words, usually didn’t stop to analyse his process as they appeared on the screen, three or four small articles a day, filling the space, creating content. But none of them had mattered. He would usually start a story knowing exactly where he needed the words to take him to get to the end; telling Clio’s story, suddenly, he had no idea where it could possibly go. There was so much of her, spilling out in all directions, even after she’d drawn her own full stop. How did you do it? How did you use words, black on white with a finite limit, slotting into a pre-designed space on a page, to describe what a person’s life had been? He’d tried sticking to the very bare facts as he saw them, the way he’d usually build a story, and been told he was wrong. All he’d managed to write was her name, and now he wasn’t even sure what that meant; the four letters peeling apart from each other, just scratches, lines and dots, a circle.

  He was just going to have to get really, really drunk for this one. It proved harder than he’d expected; the ballast of whisky he’d kept topping up over the past three days tilting the scale unfairly. But eventually he felt it. A click, a flow. It came. Clio. Clio Clio Clio.

  When had he got to sleep? Three? Four? There had not been enough of it, for sure. Not enough to allow him to deal with the morning lights of the office, with Craig, already advancing. Neil tried to hide behind the sausage roll he’d grabbed from the Greggs round the corner, realized immediately how foolish a plan that was.

  ‘Mate. Maaaate. Have you seen it? Have you? Did she send it to you as well? I’m going to forward it to you just in case, all right? This is going to change everything.’

  The email had been sent using software that let organizations hurl out pre-designed communications to mailing lists. There was a corporate logo at the top right-hand corner, incongruous, a little cartoon of a monkey’s face. Her name in the Sender file.

  Subject: Clio Campbell Suicide Note.

  Hello

  My name is Clio Campbell and I’m dead.

  You probably know this by now, as it happened three days ago. I hope you appreciate the timing of this letter. By now, I imagine, obituaries will have been written, tweets will have been posted by enemies old and new, expressing regret and moving on, and life will have settled back to normal again. I’m under no illusions about what I meant to the world, a shouty former pop singer who never knew her place. I’m not Bowie, or Prince. Nowhere near. You might have shed a tear and watched a video of me in my young and toothy prime on Tuesday, maybe played one of my songs on the radio. One more day and you’ll be over it. But today, I suspect, you’ll still be listening.

  If I know the way you work, oh free press of this noble and just country, certain easy-to-reach-for narratives will have attached themselves to my ageing womanly corpse by now. So let’s clear some things up, while we’ve got the time.

  – Despite being female and over fifty, I haven’t killed myself because I’m lonely and never found the right man. I found the right man many times, thank you.

  – Nor am I dead of heartache over never having had children. I would have been a terrible mother and unlike some had the good sense to realize it early on. Being child-free has enabled me to live the sort of life I wanted.

  – I can’t claim that the decision I’ve made is entirely unrelated to the ongoing mental health issues I’ve experienced throughout the years. Would I still be doing this if I hadn’t suffered depression? Who knows. But is this action that I’m taking – killing myself – motivated by that? No, not entirely. Not even mostly.

  Here’s why I’m doing this: Nobody shuts up a dead woman. Well, you do; you will, you’ll trample my memory back into the ground at some point, dust to dust and all that. But when a person is newly dead, let’s say three days or so, she’s interesting again. I thought this was probably my one chance to set the record straight. No voices butting in, no sarcastic commentary from the gentlemen of the fourth estate, no angry tweets from bitter, socially awkward forty-something boys in their mum’s sheds, calling me an overweight past-it old whore as they type one-handed.

  Are you going to speak ill of me, now I’ve gone? You could try, but nobody will really listen. Once I’m dead, I’ve ascended. You can’t touch me, and you can’t drown me out. I can’t be demoralized, dissuaded or patronized into irrelevance. And I suspect, as well, that your readers might want to hear from me just now. Even if they’ve just heard my one hit playing on the radio in memoriam this week, I think they might like to know why I Did It.

  And you would too, wouldn’t you?

  Keep reading.

  I’m killing myself to draw attention to the fact that you are all sleepwalking into fascism and chaos. I’m killing myself – a white woman, privileged enough to have this tiny posthumous platform – because we are failing. We are all failing each other. The codes that this modern world was built on are breaking down, allowing the worst bits of ourselves to rampage. We’re all hardening, dismissing other people’s humanity with a wink and a meme and a scroll-on-down. We’re too easily distracted, and we’re letting the bastards win. We’ve become desensitized to horrors committed against desperate souls who come here seeking asylum, to the routine demonization of anyone who isn’t white and rich and straight and male. I’m killing myself because the world is getting worse and all those rights we fought so hard for are being reversed. I’m killing myself because we are losing our moral compass. It is not moral, the way we exist together. I’m killing myself because the people we elect to govern us do not even pretend to morals, and are applauded for it. Something has gone badly, badly wrong. I’m killing myself because you, the media, are doing nothing to stop any of this; in fact, you’re fanning it, trying to prop up your own dwindling sales by outrage, mob war and dissatisfaction. I’m killing myself because I want to shout STOP to each and every one of you, and this is the only way to get you to listen.

  I’ve tried saying it. A middle-aged woman, especially if she used to be famous and beautiful and young, if her politics are anywhere left of centre, isn’t posh or anything even approaching middle class, and dares to be passionate about something, is too easily mocked to be worth listening to. I’m gambling on the chance that that same woman dead just might be.

  I’ve taken the decision to end my own life because it seems that only something as big and shocking as this could make this country come to attention. I’ve tried other methods. I spent years protesting; raising my voice with those of others, massing our bodies together. I wrote songs and wore slogan T-shirts on television. I tried to shout
in interviews. I got involved in debates and tried to influence voters. Violence seems like the only remaining option, and it’s only death that really stops you all in your tracks, isn’t it? I have no desire to murder anyone else, to strap bombs to myself and walk into town, or take a knife to the throat of a politician; I don’t have access to any other, more famous, people to kill for my cause (and it’s not like any of those acts get their various perpetrators’ views a more sympathetic hearing), and I don’t want to further the suffering of those poor animals at the Grand National by throwing myself under a racehorse. My tiny bit of fame, managed badly and drifting away after all these years but hopefully still worth something once I’m dead, is all the resources I have. So, pills, vodka and a strongly worded letter to every major media outlet in the country it is. If the forces of darkness, racism, hatred and capitalism have won, I don’t want to be around to see it. If there’s still a chance that any of you could be turned around, made to stop and think and reconsider how you’re treating the planet and other human beings, then this body is all the bargaining chips I’ve got left.

  No, it’s not subtle. But we’re not living in a subtle time. Today’s ‘best’ politicians, the ones who get the populist votes, don’t do subtle. They do big filthy slogans and instant gratification and slather their never-kept promises on the sides of buses. BREXIT MEANS BREXIT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. They make instant fleeting hits on people’s minds, rouse them up on hatred and other potent emotions. This feels like the only way of matching them.

  Shrug me off if you like. Most of you would, if you hadn’t already realized that this letter will make such a damn good story. And you don’t know which other publications will be running with it, do you? You don’t want to miss out. Edit it down if you like; the whole thing will go online anyway, and you know the sites that publish me uncut will get the most hits.