Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  ‘Keep your fucking hands to yourself, you bloody fairy. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, because I do. I always have.’

  Donald was backing away, stumbling on knees in the dark.

  ‘Malcolm, man—’

  Malcolm stayed lying down, but the force of his voice hit like a punch thrown. The words were suddenly crisp and clear, no slurring any more.

  ‘What are you doing here, eh? Why are you still here, Donald Bain? There’s me and my wife and my child, and there’s you. There always seems to be you.’

  ‘Eh. It’s just the way it’s happened, Malcolm. This is what we do.’

  ‘We. We. How about you just worry about you from now on? How about you just stay out of my business, always hanging about, always there, from when we were boys, just mooning about, aren’t you. What is it you want, exactly? You want to fuck my wife? Is that it? You want that sharp-tongued bitch in your bed instead? You want my little girl calling you Daddy? Or do you want to be the woman, Donald Bain? You just going to hope that some day all this sheer persistence will pay off and I’ll turn to you instead? Just get away from me, you disgusting fucking fairy. Just get away and I’ll not call the police.’

  Donald closed the van door, turned and ran down the street, Malcolm’s muffled swearing still ringing out, lights in the flats around flicking on. They didn’t talk for a month. Donald went to work, went back to the boarding house, tried to find new routes to and fro that avoided Malcolm and Eileen’s street, until their next gig, a wedding, both of them just turning up at the venue and avoiding each other’s eyes through the sound check. They stood at opposite ends of the bar while they waited for the party to come in from the church, until Malcolm broke it, walked over.

  ‘Last time. I spoke out of turn. Pals?’

  Donald took the proffered hand, shook it, said ‘Aye’ and nothing more, because it seemed right.

  The woman, when she came, was an American. Of course she was. She called the flat in Inverness, long distance at nine in the morning, got Eileen. Fraser would chuckle when he heard, said Malcolm was getting sloppy, but Donald suspected it had all been meticulously planned.

  Malcolm arrived at Donald’s boarding house with a black eye and a cut cheek from where Eileen had thrown shards of smashed plate at him, peeled a red-eyed Cliodhna in only her vest and tights off his shoulder and handed her to Donald.

  ‘I’m going back there to talk sense into that idiot woman. She’ll not take my girl away from me, especially not right now. She’s not fit to be a mother right now. A child shouldn’t have to see that,’ he concluded, self-righteous and tall. ‘You keep her here, Donald. Don’t let anyone take her.’

  Cliodhna sat up on the kitchen counter as Mrs McKenzie, Donald’s landlady, made soup for the tenants’ lunch. He watched the girl watching the action – knives flicking through onions, water sluicing dry lentils, the lid over the huge pot of bones clacking at the boil. She hadn’t said a word or moved herself since her father left, and he’d had to carry her downstairs.

  ‘She’ll need to go back to her mother, Donald. There’s nowhere for her to sleep here tonight.’

  ‘I thought maybe she could bunk in with you?’

  ‘No, I don’t see that happening. Do I, lamb?’ Gentle and final, handing Cliodhna a slice of cooked potato that she took and held.

  ‘Eat it, lamb. You need to eat.’

  ‘What if I just bed down in the van for the night?’

  ‘And leave an unsupervised child in my house? No, that won’t do either.’

  Cliodhna sleeping in the same room as her ‘Uncle’ Donald was not even an option to be considered, so neither of them mentioned it. Donald left her with Mrs McKenzie while he went upstairs to get his things, came back down to find her curled on the floor and howling out a single low note.

  ‘This won’t do, Mr Bain. This won’t do at all.’

  Donald picked the girl up; she folded herself into his chest like her father had done when he was drunk, and the howl bubbled down to a whimper. In the hallway, he threaded her skinny form through the neck and arms of his good green jumper; it came down to her feet like a big wool dress.

  ‘That’s a pretty colour on you, little bird. Shall we go for a walk then, eh?’

  He carried her down the street under his coat. She was much heavier than she had been the last time he’d held her, some months ago, but any time he tried to put her down her legs would buckle and she’d crumple onto the flagstones. He tried not to think about what she must have seen. He had no shoes for her, anyway, so eventually they worked out a silent compromise: the girl on his back, her arms locked around his neck almost tight enough to choke him, her breath funnelling hot down his spine. He walked through the town towards the river, at a loss so simply pointing out what they could see – a car, a dog – and then he started to sing. Just humming at first, ‘Green Grow the Rashes O’, the vibrations moving through his back to her, and slowly she pulled her head out of his shoulders. When he got to the chorus

  Green grow the rashes o

  Green grow the rashes o

  The sweetest hours that e’er I spend

  Are spent among the lasses o

  she began tickling the words into his ear, not much more than a whisper at first. By the time they’d reached the river, though, she was belting out the top notes of Malcolm’s harmony with him. He found them a bench, and she curled in under his armpit to watch the river, flowing fast, swollen after a week of rain. He thought about singing her through a set list – Malcolm always liked to start with ‘These Are My Mountains’, get the crowd warmed up – but decided against it; Cliodhna didn’t need to think about her parents just then. So he started at the beginning, Robert Burns, ‘A Red, Red Rose’, his own mother’s favourite. Malcolm was the singer, of course, but Donald could hold a tune, form a useful bassline. When he concluded, they sat in silence for a second, and then Cliodhna whispered, ‘Again please, Uncle Donald.’ This time she joined in, a sweet note of wordless birdsong, from the third line.

  Almost two hours they sat there on that bench, repeating the song over and over. By the time her stomach started rumbling its own rhythm, and he realized they should go back and get some of Mrs McKenzie’s soup, she had it by heart.

  Guardian Weekend magazine, August 2010

  The Song I Love …

  … by Jennifer Hayman, Labour MP for Hoxsmith

  One song I’d want to have played at my funeral is ‘Rise Up’ by Clio Campbell. I think it’s absolutely genius – a bouncy pop number underpinned by real bite and anger. It hasn’t necessarily aged well in that it’s got those big synthy chords which were very typical of the late Eighties and early Nineties, but it’s actually a really complex piece of music underneath the bubblegum sound. I sometimes can’t quite believe she was only in her early twenties when she wrote it!

  The lyrics are about the poll tax riots and the idea of communities coming together to resist a specific injustice; however, unfortunately, given the world we live in they ring just as true today and could be applied to any number of contemporary international events.

  I remember being a little girl and watching her on Top of the Pops [Campbell famously refused to mime the lyrics of her song, instead shouting an anti-poll tax slogan over the backing track until the producers cut her segment] and being blown away, as my dad tutted about her ‘uppity behaviour’. What was amazing about that moment for me was that there was this young, pretty woman, absolutely refusing to behave like all the other young, pretty women on Top of the Pops. I’m fairly sure she started something in me!

  SAMMI

  Brixton, 2018

  Spider was the only one who even thought to stay in Brixton after it all fell apart, and the only one Sam even sees occasionally now (if she didn’t count Fran’s byline picture popping up above a column on trans politics in the Guardian every now and then). Usually she avoided his eye. Here he was, leading a three-crusty protest outside the arches where the squat had been. She ha
d to pass the arches to take Elliot to football practice on the days she didn’t have the car, and usually she kept her head down, eyes on the pavement, and walked quickly past. If you see a thing every day, sometimes you can render it nothing, force it into the background by sheer overexposure.

  Elliot, who was refusing to hold her hand, slowed down to watch the protest, a small sneer forming round his mouth. Spider’s dreads were frazzled and grey now, his face a worn little nut cracked with years of hard living, and he was waving a sign. RESIST GENTRIFICATION, it said, in splotchy neon lettering. KEEP BRIXTON WEIRD.

  Brixton was never weird, mate, she thought to herself. Brixton thinks you’re weird.

  ‘Ha! Freaks!’ muttered Elliot.

  ‘What did you say, mister?’

  The boy looked back at her, his face weighing up the options. He doubled down. Poor choice, kid.

  ‘I said – FREAKS.’

  His little defiant chin. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him across the road towards the protest, as he squirmed and shouted trying to get out of her grip. She kept him with her as they approached Spider.

  ‘Hello, Spider.’

  Spider’s face creased in and in on itself in the smile.

  ‘Bloody hell! Sammi! Hello yourself, matey.’

  The placard hit the ground as he came in for a hug. Elliot winced.

  ‘Elliot, this is my old friend. You’ve met him before but you were very little.’

  ‘Gah, this is the baby, eh? Number two? Where does all that time go? Where does it go?’

  Elliot scowled. ‘Is your name really Spider?’

  ‘It sure is, buddy boy. It sure is.’ Spider was apparently one of those people so uncomfortable around children he had to affect an American accent. Still, she felt surprisingly warm to him. Although she had seen him around, the last time they’d met had been in the corridor of that lawyer’s office, Spider coming out having given his testimony as she was ushered in. He’d given her elbow a squeeze as he passed, whispered ‘Go on, gal’ in her ear. She was aware that the others had met up occasionally afterwards but she wanted no part of it, or them.

  But Spider was a good soul. She’d always liked Spider. He was smoothing out a crumpled flyer – still hand-drawn and photocopied, in 2018.

  ‘Social and cultural preservation, Sammi. Taking one more stand against the wankers in suits. They’ve got the whole bit earmarked for demolition and another block of luxury fucking flats.’

  He looked down at Elliot’s suddenly thrilled grin, caught himself, hacked out a cough in confusion.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. Tell ya what, tough guy, they’ve got history, them arches. You should ask your mum sometime. There was a whole subculture living in them back in the day. Parties all night, an great big debates in the daytime. We was making the world a better place, eh? Wasn’t we, Sammi?’

  Knock it down, she thought. Burn the whole fucking lot to the ground. Cover the ashes with your smooth-fronted residential developments that block out the skyline and drive up the property prices, just so I never have to think about it again.

  She snapped back to herself. Elliot’s eyes were pinballing between the two of them.

  ‘This all true, Mum?’

  ‘This is a smart lad you’ve got here, Sammi. A smart lad. Anyway, how are you? Still at the old social work?’

  ‘Nah, mate. Not for years now. I – I had to take a bit of time out. After. Wasn’t doing so good for a while there. And we had the settlement, so I – yeah. You know.’

  He knew. He knew too many things, understood too much, in that kindly crumpled face. She was thinking about how to make a quick exit, with Elliot already pulling at her hand, when Spider stopped her.

  ‘Here. Bad business about Clio, eh?’

  ‘Clio?’

  ‘Yeah. The, you know, kkkch,’ he drew a finger across his throat. ‘You know?’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  Spider tried to turn his face away from Elliot, who was still following everything very intently. He mouthed ‘Su-i-cide.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘A couple of months ago. It was in the press an that, her being famous an stuff. They mentioned all the –’ he squinted at Elliot again and Sam tried to give him the tiniest shake of her head ‘– well, all that shit again. In passing. Would have thought you’d have seen it because of that.’

  Brixton, 1995

  It was the first time they’d held a formal party in the squat, and the faultlines peeled open. Gaz and Spider were against the idea that any cleaning whatsoever should be done to prepare the space.

  ‘They take us as they find us,’ Gaz said. ‘We’re not putting on a show of respectability when we ain’t.’

  Xanthe countered that this was another manifestation of patriarchal individualism over the communal identity they were attempting to foster.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to matter what you say your politics are – in here, you’re quite happy to have women skivvy for you.’

  Fran said she’d never seen any of the men so much as washing a dish while she lived here, and she was sick of dealing with a sink full of dirt. Spider took a can of lager out of the fridge and pointedly sat down on the new armchair they’d pulled out of a skip last week, the one they’d all been fighting over, smacked his lips loudly as the ring pull cracked and fizzed.

  ‘Right! That’s me ready for the party, maties. Let the games begin.’

  Sammi had been involved at first, but now she was hanging back in the doorway, Mark’s thin arm round her waist keeping the two of them apart from it all. His lips moved up her neck, breathing lightly and deliberately, teasing her.

  ‘Wanna fuck?’ he whispered, close to her ear.

  She tried not to move her mouth too much in reply.

  ‘Not really the time for it, mate.’

  ‘Seems like the perfect time for it to me. Just a quick little fuck, that’s all …’

  Xanthe was holding forth again, her gestures growing ever-bigger with anger, eyes flashing. Gaz burped showily and she wheeled on him. Mark snorted, grabbed Sammi’s wrist and ran down the corridor with her to the sleeping area, where their zipped-together sleeping bags were crumpled in a heap on the one double mattress. Sammi had begun to paint faces on the wall around their space – not in a way that would denote ownership, just so that she’d have something to look at in the long mornings while everyone else slept and the sunlight filtered in. Across the way were the beginnings of her mural, its letters already sketched out. Over Mark’s shoulder, as he mouthed wet on her nipple, pulled her knickers down, as Xanthe’s scrawny baby whimpered in its sleep, she read it to herself again:

  FORM TRIBES. TAKE LAND. LIVE FREE.

  They lay there for a few minutes after, warmed in a ray of sun from the skylight, tangled up in each other. She could smell woodsmoke on his skin, and earth, something dark and real.

  ‘This is well nice,’ she said.

  ‘I agree,’ he said, kissing the top of her head.

  ‘We should get back, though.’

  ‘You’re a perfect worker bee, you.’

  ‘Yeah well, maybe I am. Come and help me stop this, yeah.’

  In the living space, it was still going on. Fran was on her knees, huffily scrubbing the floor with a rag, while Gaz and Spider tried to occupy the maximum amount of space with their bodies, Xanthe shouting into each of their faces in turn. Sammi pushed Mark, in the small of his back, and he grinned at her. There was something cruel about his smile, sometimes.

  He walked into the centre of the room with his limbs long and loose, movements easy, arms out, flat palms at angry face-height.

  ‘Now look here. We need to resolve this.’

  The reason she’d wanted him to sort this out was because, when he spoke, people listened. She’d known schoolteachers to have that effect; never one of her peers. The stern confidence of him, like it had been bred in somewhere along the way. They all responded to it; the room stilled, settled itself quietly around that lean, golden centrepoint.


  Mark shook his hair out of his eyes and reached out to each of them in turn. He looked like Jesus, Sammi realized, one of those blond master-race Jesuses from the Sunday School books.

  ‘Spider, mate,’ he said, his accent blunting. ‘Let’s look at this rationally, eh? We’re not just trying to recreate the old systems here – we all came to this place because we’re committed to making a new way of living, yeah? And we’re not going to do that if we fall into these easy traps where the women end up doing all the housework.’

  He was careful not to use any of Xanthe’s buzzwords, Sammi noted. No ‘patriarchy’. Clever. He was clever, that man-not-hers. Every word measured out and perfectly placed.

  ‘And, Xanth, it’s important to be mindful that men like Spider bear the scars of their upbringing. Spider wants to overcome his conditioning, don’t you, mate? But he needs our support as he goes through that process. I’m not asking you to do his dishes for him; I’m asking you to understand why he leaves them out.’

  Had anyone else said this, Xanthe would have ripped them apart. Dizzied by the full beam of Mark’s enthusiasm, though, she looked almost pacified.

  ‘So here’s the thing, guys. We invited people tonight because we want to show them this new way of being we’re creating. The ecology of what we’re trying to do here – the free shop, the drop-in centre, the zine – it all depends on the support we can generate on evenings like this. We need to build on the community we’ve got here and not take anything for granted just because we’ve made the first step and found this place. And that means all of us, working hard and being continually mindful as we bond this, the first tribe, together. If, for now, that means letting go of an argument, getting on, pulling together to create a space that we know will work for the interests of the greater good, then that is what we need to do in this moment.’