Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  Ruth kept her own counsel here.

  ‘I just let them get on with it. It was water off a duck’s back, jus rolled right off and ignored it. And why? Because I was so sure that what we were doing was going to work, and they’d all come round eventually, when their kids or whatever were getting amazing Scandinavian education and we had an oil fund underpinning a citizen’s income and we were tackling poverty properly and putting money into green energy programmes and all those beautiful things we were going to do. That they’d see then.’

  She’d slumped forward on to the table, was talking from between her arms. Ruth set the mug of tea down beside her face.

  ‘But they won’t. They were never going to. Because they knew this country. They knew that most of the country was just fearty little boys like them, making snidey jokes because they’re afraid to believe in anything. That’s what it is. It’s why anyone from here goes away and does well, we start laughing at them when they come back again. It’s why we’ll never actually manage to do anything positive that could actually make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, is it? There’s always some wee Scottish gremlin sitting there on yer shoulder, whispering its mantra. Naw. Naw. Naw.’

  She slid slowly down to the floor, looked up at Ruth with huge eyes, terrified.

  ‘I mean, what is this world, pal? Why do these fuckers keep on winning? I need – I need – I need to keep believing that at some point it will stop, and they’ll listen, and we’ll make everything all right. But every time – every time—’

  Ruth had tucked her up in her own bed, the bedside cabinet turned rescue stop, its surface covered with a pint glass of water, a couple of paracetamol, a packet of crisps and a plastic bag for vomit.

  Out in the street, everything did look the same, but shot through a slightly different lens. Maybe it had all been shifted a couple of millimetres over? Ruth found her seat on a train where no one spoke, leaned her head against the window and, sure enough, burst into tears, big noisy sobs, her whole body shaking. Sure, she’d cheered and booed at elections as one set of politicians lost and another won, but none of it had ever come quite so close, meant quite so much. She’d never felt the possibility of change for good quite so keenly, never before been quite so partisan that she’d managed to block out dissenting voices if their arguments bothered her.

  There was a tap on her shoulder. The conductor was standing there. She fumbled for her ticket and he shook his head, handed her a crumpled fist of toilet paper. He squeezed her arm, a message passed on, and moved slowly up the carriage.

  She’d left the office after three hours. Hadn’t had the energy for it. Clio was still in her bed when she got back, and Ruth climbed in beside her, fully dressed. Clio passed her the almost-empty bottle of whisky, turned back to her phone, her hands flying over its surface.

  ‘I’m gonna take them down, Ruth. Each and every single fucker who comes at me. This is the best possible response I could have to today, isn’t it. Don’t say anything. I’m going to end each one of them individually today.’

  Glasgow, 25 January 2018

  ‘Why would you do a thing, keep doing it, when it gave you no joy and instead put such a strain on you?’ Ruth had tried to ask Alison one night, just after Brexit, having ventured a look at Clio’s Twitter stream and almost physically recoiling from the frenzy, the fur flying. Alison had only looked at her knowingly, and Ruth sensed another lecture about standing up for herself, not letting Clio use her, changed the subject loudly and forcefully.

  On the third day after she’d found the body, her second day of occupation of Alison’s sofa, watching the Disney movies of her childhood under blankets, Ruth decided that she’d had enough. Alison’s house was always too hot, and Ruth had no idea how to work the glowing remote-control thermostat that mocked her with a blinking, brazen display of all twenty-two degrees from the centre of the coffee table. ‘Try and stay offline,’ Alison had warned her this morning. ‘It’ll all blow over soon.’ There had been pictures of the outside of her cottage, neighbours from the village interviewed by a couple of the papers. Her boss had texted, saying that he understood she couldn’t really go home or come in, but asked her to maybe think about working remotely tomorrow, if she felt up to it.

  Alison had been dead against Ruth making the trip to Ayr, to Clio’s never-talked-about mother, but Ruth had been resolute. The nursing-home staff needed warned, if nothing else, she’d said. She didn’t want some unscrupulous bastard journalist sneaking in and breaking it to her, taking pictures, getting quotes on the sly. Alison had taken the day off and insisted on waiting in the car outside Glendale Retirement Home. Inside, Ruth sat there with this shrivelled person, this Eileen Johnstone who looked nothing like Clio, patted the proffered hand awkwardly while the old woman’s sentences roamed out of the corners of her mouth, lapsing in and out of years in a single breath. Finally, Ruth had almost snapped at her.

  ‘She’s dead, though. You understand that, don’t you? Your daughter Clio. She’s dead.’

  Alison had wrapped her shaken girlfriend up in her own coat in the passenger seat and driven her home again.

  Ruth had never been any good at sitting still. She was a nurse, not a patient. Alison’s perpetual need to fuss over her had always been her least favourite part of their relationship and it grew more and more intense the longer she stayed in that stuffy little house, blankets and blankets tucked around her. She broke her phone out of its jail cell in her bag, on top of the wardrobe. ‘Try and stay offline,’ she said to the empty house, doing Clio’s impression of Alison’s nasal tones, feeling bad immediately.

  Clio’s name was still trending on Twitter. Still! Three days after her death! I mean, my God, she said to the house again, she wasn’t that famous.

  Clio Campbell: suicide was over Brexit

  Political suicide: Explosive Clio Campbell Suicide Note Reveals Singer’s ‘Martyrdom’

  Clio Campbell blames Brexit in suicide note

  Clio Campbell: THAT suicide note in full!

  But there wasn’t a suicide note, Ruth thought. She had looked, and Alison had looked, just before they left Ruth’s cottage. There had been nothing left for Ruth, just the body, that grimace, the way it changed the air.

  And she clicked, and she clicked again.

  I’m looking forward to the noise stopping.

  That was the first bit she took in. That bit made sense. That had been written by the listless, strained Clio whose unwashed hair had hung down the back of Gran’s old armchair. It was the rest of the letter Ruth had a problem with

  I’m gambling on the chance that that same woman dead just might be.

  Ruth had to read that through a few times. She had to read the whole letter through a few times, hearing Clio’s most self-righteous voice, her perpetual inability to ever have a sense of humour at her own expense, bell-clear. Her eyes would have been brimming, Ruth thought, as she wrote this. She would have been extremely moved by her own plight, the way she was crafting it for others.

  Gambling.

  Gambling.

  So, this was all part of a plan, then? Part of a long-drawn-out plan. Ruth thought of Clio’s fiftieth birthday party last year and all the work she hadn’t minded doing, to help her get set up. It seemed like such a good thing for her to do. But Clio had been driven by a weird desperation as they planned the party; the same mood as she’d been in in the pub the other night. The party to end all parties. Got to be, she’d said.

  So had she already planned it then? More than a year ago? The party, the strange staginess of her last depressed period that Ruth had noticed but filed away, the trips she’d mentioned making last autumn to see long-lost friends. The intent of it all. And the intent was what? Always to have Ruth discover her body, report her as depressed, then rise like a ginger lipsticked Jesus three days later with a fucking press release to the national media?

  But not even to leave a little scrap of paper. Not even to put something down in writing for the friend of more
than a decade who would have to deal with her dead body. Not even a tiny, private acknowledgement. Sorry I left my corpse for you to find! Thanks for everything! Love you!

  Ruth felt exposed. Her small, tightly held schoolgirl crush turned into a resource, knowingly exploited over years. The blood rushed to her big already red cheeks, to her head, and she wasn’t sure whether it was shame or anger pulsing there, tick tick tick in her temple.

  When Alison came home, there were fresh flowers in a jug on the table, and Ruth called to her from the kitchen, sank her face into her neck, poured her a glass of wine. After dinner, with candles flickering, she reached for her girlfriend’s hand over the table.

  ‘Ali. You are the one person in my life who has consistently and openly been there for me. I want you to know how much I appreciate you. And I wanted to ask you whether you’d consider marrying me. I want to spend the rest of our lives together.’

  Yeah. Take that, Clio. Take that, take that.

  DONALD

  Achiltibuie, 24 January 2018

  When was the last time he had seen her? Four years? Five? They’d been booked on the bill of the same gig in Perth, a Scottish independence thing he’d found himself doing. It had been a surprise to turn up there and see her name on the list, have her run up to him and bury her head in his shoulder like the years hadn’t gone by and she was that wee girl again. Their connection wasn’t one he thought of often, any more – after the failure of that album she’d drifted away from him, spun out into space, and Morna’s family, with a new baby every couple of years or so and a vacant space where a grandfather should be, had reached out to anchor him. This, here, was where he belonged, looking out of the window to the islands beyond as he washed the dishes from the guests’ breakfasts, keeping himself active, still playing the fiddle on Sunday nights in the big hotel up the way every couple of months.

  There had been a line-up reshuffle at her request, her childlike insistence hanging awkwardly in the air, at odds with the older woman it came from, while the young event organizer looked at his feet. They’d sung together – a couple of their old Burns rejigs, ‘A Man’s a Man’ – him knocking time on his fiddle while her voice cut the air, the audience rising to its feet at the end, but she’d been loud and vocal in the bar area afterwards, surrounded by a crowd, while he hung about awkwardly, eventually drifted back to his B&B.

  And then nothing at all until last year, November. Just a few months ago. He’d driven back from a St Andrew’s Day gig in Garve in the night – he liked driving at night, liked the blackness, even though Morna wished he wouldn’t do it, not at his age – and Morna had still been waiting up for him in the kitchen when he fumbled the latch in the dark.

  ‘You had a visitor. Malcolm’s girl. Cliodhna.’

  ‘I – what?’

  ‘She came up with the school bus from Ullapool. I told her you weren’t like to be home till now, and so she walked up the road to the hotel, presumably sat in the pub for three hours till the bus came back.’

  ‘You didn’t ask her to stay? We’ve room.’

  ‘Well, of course I did, Donald Bain. No matter what I think of her I’m not going to turn away a visitor, am I now? She wouldn’t. She said no, she had somewhere else to be. I told her if she’d just phoned ahead – but she said she wanted to surprise you.’

  Donald didn’t know what to say. Time had folded in on itself and a teenage girl in bright red stilettos was clacking down the stairs to his old bothy.

  ‘I mean really, though. Who just turns up at someone’s house, miles away from anywhere? We’re not in the city now. Just that expectation, too, that you would be here, waiting for her.’

  She had been crackling with indignation. Donald had imagined the welcome Cliodhna would have received at the guest house, was unsurprised she had decided not to stay.

  Now, looking at the newspaper, knowing her gone, he wondered whether that had been a last chance. He’d heard of dying people doing a farewell tour – had she already decided what she was going to do then? Could he have changed her mind, if he’d just been there, if Morna had been a bit more hospitable? If she’d stayed, just for the night. Could he have made her breakfast, reminded her gently of the girl she used to be? Brought her back?

  Well, you didn’t manage it with her father, did you now, Donald Bain? You would have shat it. Shuffled away. Shiter.

  SAMMI

  Brixton, 3 April 2018

  It must have been well over three years since Sam had checked in on any of Clio’s intense, shouty social-media feeds. A while since she’d thought about her, even. She sat there, hunched over her phone in the corner of the café near Elliot’s football practice, frying smell in her nose, letting it all pour back in. Obituaries and despairing tweets from fans, articles and discussions, video clips with the sound turned down. She thought about the reality of Clio. That thin, frenzied woman, in her bedsit with beanbags, turning up unannounced to disrupt a working day, pungent, unwashed and urgent, trailing chaos. She looked at the way two months of death had crafted her into something else, a statue of her, built out of words and pictures, a statue that didn’t need to be anything like the reality. That wasn’t the point.

  Suicide as political statement, eh? Well, it was on-brand. She could say that much. She’d read Clio’s last letter and was surprised at how un-Clio-like it sounded, how thoughtful. Measured, almost. In her wake, the commentary: analysis, long think pieces. Even Fran had contributed one. Sammi began to zone out the screeds of comments underneath each article, analysing, criticizing, shouting their partisan slogans, cracking jokes. Thousands of pseudonyms, all across the Internet, all round the world, all of them the same. It was exhausting. This was why she couldn’t take on politics any more.

  People had been shocked, she could see that. The right had chucked scorn from a respectful distance, while a left-wing MP had tried to start a debate in Parliament. But then all the news hits stopped, she noticed, just trailed away about four or five weeks ago. The world had created something huge, enthused and grieved it, debated what it meant, and then moved on, busy, to the next thing.

  Sam wondered if there had been anyone inclined to rethink themselves as a result. Had a woman actually killing herself made anyone, anyone real, who wasn’t paid to have opinions, stop and say, hold on, she’s got a point. I am sleepwalking into fascism. I need to be better, to stop, to be more aware, more active. It was the sort of thing that the Internet wouldn’t ever be able to tell her.

  At least she’d been true to herself, had Clio. She’d gone out in a great big political blaze of publicity.

  Sam’s work notification pinged and, although she welcomed the distraction, she flinched, like she always did now. The message was from a woman who called herself Carrie and she was properly addicted. She needed a reading every two or three days, to help her think through the most minor of problems, had probably spent upwards of a thousand pounds in the last month alone, money that Sam was not sure she had. Sam’s doing. ‘Build relationships with them’ had been the major directive when she’d got the job. ‘Keep them coming back, keep them spending.’

  ‘I mean, of course, you’re all here because you’ve got the gift,’ the spivvy young guy who’d done their training had said, smoothing over the nervous wobble that moved the room with an oversized wink, like a Butlin’s comedian. ‘But here are some tricks of the trade to, well, to help your readings really flow.’

  Well, she needed the money, and she needed to avoid any obligation to look people in the eye. That was how she justified it. It was easier doing it online, not having to be on the end of a phone, hearing accents, inflection. There didn’t always have to be a person behind the words if you just read them as written. She called herself Psychic Samantha. It wasn’t a very original name – they had all been encouraged to create new personas for themselves, in the single half-day training workshop in an empty office space above a shop in Fulham – but it worked well enough for her purposes. It meant that she couldn’t disassociate
herself, wasn’t hiding away behind anyone else’s identity. That’s what she said, to herself. She hadn’t told anyone else, anyone in her real life, what she was doing.

  ‘Clio’, it occurred to her now, would have been a much better name for a fraudulent psychic.

  Well, Carrie was probably a cow, anyway. Her daughter didn’t talk to her; she seemed to be in a perpetual chaotic storm, always churning something else up. There was always a next enemy and a next one: the neighbour, the woman at work, the ex-husband’s new wife, the local shopkeeper, all of them picking on Carrie, poor Carrie. Poor Carrie who clearly bulldozed her way through life, starting fights, emotionally deaf and blind or just not caring enough to bother reading people. Today its the bloody pig next door again Samatha and I just can’t with my nerves any more she won’t stop. Sorry cant handle it meant to say. Those bloody children screaming in the garden every afternoon when they come home, running about quite wild and she had the cheek to actually shout at me this time when I dared to work up the courage to say something if you know what I mean. Anyway please tell me what the cards say I’m not sure how much longer I can bear this!!!

  Her messages almost always started this way, right in the middle of a thought, like they were just carrying on a conversation and she was shouting through from another room. Carrie had clicked on the cards already, and Sam scrolled back over their message history to check her last few readings. She kept the book in a pocket of her bag at all times. It had cost thirty-five pounds and had to be bought as part of the training package – she’d been assured it would normally retail at fifty pounds, though. ‘Impossible to do the job without it. Pays for itself within a week.’ Somehow it was both ‘the foremost reference source for tarot cards by the world’s leading authority’ and ‘not available in shops’.