Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  That’s the final word of St Clio the martyr. Just pre-empting the jokes there. There are worse things to die for, and I’m going out happy. You’re all winding each other up into a senseless tangle and it’s making this world unliveable. I’m looking forward to the noise stopping. By the time you read this it already will have. I bet it’s peaceful over here.

  Clio Campbell

  Neil came back to himself and saw Craig’s face, still there, hovering over the monitor, bathed in seraphimic light.

  ‘Well. Well well, eh!’

  ‘You’re not thinking about printing this?’

  ‘Got it in one, mate. And as soon as we possibly can. Need you to signal-boost the tweet and obviously give us some analysis, seeing as you’re our expert in the field here.’

  Neil scrabbled about in the workings of his brain to make the words come.

  ‘Craig, there are press guidelines for reporting suicides. The first one, right up there, is that you never disclose whether there was a suicide note, much less report its contents.’

  ‘The lady said it herself, Neil. We don’t know who else will be printing this. We’ve already put it on the website and I want your analysis in half an hour max. You’re not letting me down on this one. This is tomorrow’s editorial. It changes everything. I mean, think about it – we could really lead the way with some sensitive reporting; I’d be surprised if she doesn’t tap into a real public mood. I mean, we could be looking at a wave. Brexit suicides. Copycatting.’

  ‘That’s exactly why they tell you not to print the notes. Craig, come on.’

  Craig moved so quickly Neil wasn’t quite sure what had happened. Suddenly there was no one leaning over the back of his desk chair, and his boss stood in front of him, seemingly a foot taller than normal, staring him down with tiny cold eyes.

  ‘Let’s have a deal, going forward, mate. You get on with your job and I get on with mine. My job is selling papers. Your job, right now, is writing whatever the fuck I need you to write to sell those papers. All right? Good.’

  Carol did not meet his eye this time as that upright spine retreated across the newsroom, and he was grateful for it. He tried to turn his attention back to the mass of words on his screen. The only phrase he could think of for it was political suicide, but that wasn’t right, was it? Political suicide was when MPs were caught with hookers, called old ladies bigots, or murmured that Hitler had really been quite a promising artist. It didn’t mean actually killing yourself because of politics. Actually killing yourself to try and change people’s politics.

  Neil couldn’t for a second imagine what it would take to be that person. To decide to take that sort of action. Not so much the suicide; that had been understandable when she’d just been a depressed fifty-year-old woman with a failed career. He’d been able to empathize then. He’d thought he’d got it. But this. This whole – stunt. Planning your death out as a public event, intended to impact beyond your immediate circle.

  Jesus Christ, the woman had balls. Great big balls, and an ego to match.

  So, what did this mean for him? He checked his email; no, he hadn’t been copied into the mass suicide note. She had decided to communicate with him privately. Send one thing out to the world, and a last, tiny hope, stretched out to him and him alone.

  Remember me well. Please.

  It was as though he heard music swelling behind him.

  The Pool, February 2018

  The Long Read:

  Clio Campbell, Brexit and the Genoa G8 | 7min

  In the wake of Clio Campbell’s shocking suicide, novelist and cultural commentator Jess Blake-Hewson looks back at her old comrade-in-arms

  We took the children to Genoa last summer. A family holiday used to heal old wounds; in part a pilgrimage. We meandered around ice-cream-coloured clusters of houses, watched girls in off-the-shoulder ruffles direct their boyfriends to Instagram them outside the cathedral and on the Porto Antico rocks at sunset, stuffed our faces with pizza from the street carts and sat on the harbour front with our legs dangling into the water, tanned and happy.

  It didn’t seem to be the same place. I didn’t remember it at all. Was that saffron-coloured wall up an alley the one we were corralled against for hours, maybe a hundred of us hemmed in by police dogs and guns at either end, barely able to move from the pressure of terrified bodies all around? Or was it just another cute little lane with some overpriced tourist shops?

  I’d last been there sixteen years earlier, twenty-one years old, unsure about how to maintain my still-new dreadlocks, with a week’s worth of clothing stuffed into a lightweight rucksack. Someone from a group at uni had heard there were places going on a bus; we couldn’t fly because they’d be watching for us at the gates, the bastards, he said, and we all nodded. We were there to protest the presence of the G8, who had chosen that pleasant old tourist town for their conference. We were anti-globalization, devoted to Naomi Klein. Us and 200,000 others. That protest is now legendary – it was the first time the world media really paid attention to the anti-globalization movement, because the images of police brutality against protesters were so extreme that they couldn’t be ignored, and because of the death of 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani, shot in the street then reversed over by a police Land Rover, just to make sure.

  On the second night we were there, before the marches began, before our muscles learned to tense for flight at the smallest noise, we attended a gig at the Genoa Social Forum, the centre of the protest for those of us in the Red and Pink Blocks, who advocated peaceful, non-violent resistance. It was a warm evening; the air was still. I was pushing back through the crowd, pockets loaded with cans of cheap Italian lager from a stall, when a new act came on to the stage. It caught my attention because it was the first song in English I’d heard all evening; I then realized I dimly remembered it from my childhood. She was young, red-headed and her voice soared out across the crowd.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked my friend Simon.

  He gave me that look that said God, Jess, you know nothing about music as he popped the tab on his beer. ‘It’s Clio Campbell. Clio Campbell. Don’t you remember?’

  Two days later, walking with the Pink Block in formation along the Corso Italia, we noticed the crowds swearing at us. Nobody in Genoa seemed to be very pleased to see us. I’m still to this day not sure what it was that flicked, whether the police were waiting for a signal, whether they had something planned. Later, we’d hear rumours that they had undercover agents posing as Black Block agents provocateurs, starting trouble to give them an excuse for a show of force and power to impress the visiting world leaders, exactly as Silvio Berlusconi had intended. From nowhere, there were batons, raining down on us, shouts in Italian from both the riot police and the protesters.

  ‘Non violenta! Non violenta!’ I shouted, as we’d been taught in the non-violent direct action workshop the day before. I tried to make my body go limp. Remember, the Pink Block believed in non-violent resistance. We were absolutely the least likely people to fight back. That’s why we made such a good target, I suppose.

  There were limbs all around me. I had no idea which of them belonged to my friends. I was twenty-one, I was far away from home, and a baton had slammed into my shoulder, sending a dull, weird ache juddering through my arm. This was nothing like the demonstrations I’d been on in England, where we’d waved banners and sung songs and had a laugh in a public park then caught the bus back home again with a bag of chips. I’m pretty sure I was crying at this point, but I don’t remember. I felt very very young and very afraid.

  Then someone grabbed my hand and pulled me towards them. ‘Non violenta,’ I muttered. Someone was holding me, had their arms around me, was pulling me out of the scrum and away from the main fight, up an alleyway. They were whispering something in my ear, in English.

  ‘It’s OK. Come on now, little darlin. It’s OK. Come on now.’

  I leaned against the sunny yellow wall, caught my breath, let this woman give me sips of water
from a bottle.

  ‘Hey there. You OK now? Can you tell me your name? Sta bene? Come ti chiami?’

  I held on to her and smiled up at her and I never wanted to let her go again.

  As you’ve all probably guessed now, that was my first proper meeting with Clio Campbell, when she saw a young girl about to fall under the feet of a state-sponsored riot and pulled me out, got me to safety. That yellow alleyway we had hidden ourselves in would later become a site for kettling, a procedure used on the Iraq War demonstrators two years later by a clearly impressed UK Home Office, but one which we weren’t familiar with at the time. I was ready to collapse, but had to stay on my feet as more and more bodies were hounded into our space – to sit would have been to be crushed. This tall Scottish stranger held me up for three hours, fed me water and kept me conscious and talking, muttering jokes and funny commentary, when she could have been attending to her own needs. I think you really learn the truth about people’s characters in these sorts of extreme situations. And this was someone I didn’t want to let out of my life.

  Clio Campbell was, for a time, one of my closest friends, despite our twelve-year age difference. I watched as the aftermath of Genoa (we crushed souls up the alleyway escaped relatively lightly) and its implications set her alight, burning for truth; I watched as the aftermath of the Iraq War demonstrations squashed her into a depressed apathy, only to rise again and again. She got involved with land rights movements in the Scottish Highlands; led a campaign against corrupt undercover cops; I was eventually pulled into a life of baby sensory classes and school postcode lotteries while she kept on doggedly fighting for what she believed in – always justice, always for the oppressed. Those paths intersected less and less; as I grew further away from the person I’d been at twenty-one, there was something almost childlike about Clio that allowed her to keep believing.

  Suddenly ten years have passed since Clio brought the congregation to tears singing Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ at my wedding, and my husband is waking me with terrible news shining through his phone. Clio’s suicide, reported last week, made minor headlines – never a tabloid-friendly celebrity, the impact she had had always been on the fringes. Clio’s suicide note, released three days later, however, seems to have split the country wide open. I’m aware that even by writing about that note I’m contravening all the suggested ethics rules around reporting suicides, but the details have been so widely circulated by now that it’s impossible not to write about Clio without discussing it.

  Clio’s note suggested that, after a lifetime of activism, actually killing herself was the only way a woman, especially an older woman, would actually be listened to in this public arena of jeering and opprobrium that exists now instead of civil discourse. It’s manifestly not true – one has only to look at the ages of female MPs, mostly Clio’s peers, or the happily increasing number of female political journalists making good and salient points about our current political crisis on a daily basis – but that anybody could come to feel that, and actually go forward with their action, suggests a serious crisis in the ways we communicate with each other these days. It’s one of the main reasons why I feel that, in this case, the causes Clio claimed for her suicide should be examined. We need to be looking at this.

  Then there were the cynics who scoffed at her even in death. To them, I can only say that the person who pulled an injured stranger out of a tangle of bodies and chaos and protected her for five hours is exactly the person who would think to lay down herself as a final protest against what she described as ‘a country sleepwalking into fascism’. No, of course you shouldn’t kill yourself over Brexit, or the treatment of asylum seekers. Stay alive and keep fighting if it means that much to you. But Clio felt things more intensely and keenly than the rest of us seem to; and that intensity motivated her actions. She managed to hold on to her moral code while all around were losing theirs; never filtered anything through a layer of irony in order to block life out.

  We used to talk a lot about ‘the movement’ as student revolutionaries. A single body of people marching with one aim. I’m not sure there can be such a thing any more; the causes that anger the left seem to be so diverse they create rifts rather than solidarity. It’s difficult to imagine a united left-wing movement defeating something like the poll tax, which Clio always referred to as ‘the cause that made me’, these days. But then perhaps, as a middle-class, commuter-belt soi-disant yummy mummy, I’m just not hearing its songs.

  In Genoa last year my children skipped along the beachfront Corso Italia. It’s a very beautiful street and they were fascinated by its fairy-tale pavement mosaics, leaned over the railings to gaze at the azure sea below. It was so far removed from that dusty scene of overturned cars, gassed air and broken glass I dimly remembered from my youth that it seemed I must have dreamed that second image. But then, I had the luxury of being able to tell myself that.

  RUTH

  Glasgow, 2014

  Watching Clio in arguments on Twitter possessed Ruth like a drawn-out panic attack during the independence referendum. The relentlessness of it, the piranhas swarming for attack at her every statement. Her profile was high enough to attract them; her public statements sufficiently unmodest to keep them fuelled and ready. The debate had racked up nearly two years of increasingly fraught coverage in the time since Clio had moved back to Scotland needing friends and a place in the world; she had found it as an outspoken advocate for Scottish self-determination. The Scottish media had very much enjoyed the spectacle she’d made for them, and Ruth, like the rest of the country, couldn’t look away. She’d saved Clio’s name as a search, tapped it in automatically every time she clicked on to the app, lost herself in scrolling and scrolling as the second-hand stress began to bubble through her veins. It seemed as though the world, or the very worst subsects of it, was rising up to show Clio her place, each opinion met with a barrage of blokey disdain, an obscene-seeming wet-eyed emoji of laughter. To be fair to her, Clio didn’t moderate her behaviour. She didn’t tone it down or attempt to pacify them. But she would argue with them relentlessly, into the night, sometimes five or six at a time, lost in long trails of oblique replies and misunderstanding, refusing to let any of her anonymous sparring partners have the last word.

  ‘I’m fit for them, doll. Don’t worry.’

  Ruth worried. Of course she worried.

  On the morning after the independence referendum, Clio had turned up unannounced, leaning down hard on the buzzer to Ruth’s old flat in the Southside. She’d entered in an unwashed, boozy cloud, dishevelled, squinting at Ruth already dressed and washed.

  ‘You’re not going to work today, are you?’

  ‘I thought I’d try. Not sure I’m not going to burst into tears on the train, though.’

  ‘Fuck that, doll. Let’s stay in and drink.’

  ‘I need to go, Clio. I need to get out there and do something. At least just see what it’s like.’

  ‘I’ve been out there. I’ve been.’ The words smeared together on the roof of her mouth. ‘I’ll save you the bother: s’shite out there. S’a dreich bloody day in a country full of fearful idiots who’ve jus condemned ussall. It’s exactly the bloody same. Everything out there is exactly bloody the same as it ever was.’

  As she stepped over the threshold and into the light, Ruth could see her eyes were red, swollen from a night of it.

  ‘Clio, have you even been to bed?’

  ‘Yes. I went to bed. I was supposed to be playing a gig an they were screening the live results on the telly in between acts. Then they went to fucking – fucking Clackanmannannanshire. Fucking mining country, babe. I’m from mining country. I’ll tell you this, they’ve got a warped bloody idea of solidarity, is what they do. Turn on their own in a heartbeat if thass what the bloody Labour Party tells them to do, I’ll tell you. And he was all over there with his big face, fucking voice of doom, wassn’ he? Gordon Brown. Bomp bomp bomp – thass his theme song. Big sad tuba or something. Bomp bomp bom
p—’

  She began marching around Ruth’s hallway, playing an imaginary trombone.

  ‘Clio. Clio, come on. Let’s get you sitting down.’

  Ruth steered her into the kitchen.

  ‘Anyway, I was supposed to be playing this big big triumphant set, right, all the hits, ending up with “Rise Up” backed by a fucking choir – I mean, a community choir, but still. An I just sat there thinking how did we not see this. Because I knew. We all knew. Whole fucking auditorium knew just because of that one wee Fife village. It got quiet, and people started to leave. How did we not see this? How did we fucking dare to hope that this wee shithole country could just – for once – for once, zat was all I’d asked, eh, overcome its inner fucking nyaff and actually try for something good and pure and positive? I mean, we planned a fucking choir. How fucking stupid are we? And see them all, all these men, all these men men men who’ve been dragging me through their shitey newspapers since I dared to come back to Scotland and be a woman with an opinion, they’ll all just be so smug. They’ll be sitting there, taking their celebratory dumps on their mahogany toilet seats someone cut down a rainforest and sent to B&Q to warm their arses with, tweeting each other their congratulations after they all write their one article again.’

  Ruth put the kettle on.

  ‘How much have you had to drink?’

  Clio flapped away an imaginary fly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Tell you why it doesn’t matter? Because nothing matters. Nothing I do or you do will ever make the slightest bit of fucking difference. So why not have a drink.’

  With some difficulty, she fumbled in the pocket of her coat for her phone.

  ‘Lookit. Lookit. Started already. The tweeting. The relentless little nip-nip-nip away from men men men. I’ve taken it hard from them for a year. I’ve let that bloated sack of tatties at the Scotland on Sunday and the weirdo at the Daily Mail and all their crowing cronies in their mums’ fucking sheds on Twitter rip me to shreds and I’ve taken it, babe. I have not flinched. I have turned the other cheek.’