Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  ‘Our first ever family day,’ he’d said as they set off, kissed her hand. She’d made a small, soft noise and curled up in her seat, slept for almost the whole journey. He’d stopped the car at one point, very gently, and tucked his scarf in between her belly and the seatbelt, just to be sure.

  Sure enough, heads turned as he shepherded her past a sad-looking Christmas tree and across to a table by the fire, but the two of them were always going to stand out in a place like this, a pub full of sensible hiking gear and a wall-mounted newspaper rack stuffed with copies of the Daily Mail.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘there. Is that – wait, are you going to be too warm sitting right beside it? Tell you what – you get warmed up and then we’ll swap places when it gets too hot for you. Make sure you let me know, OK? Right. I’ll get menus. I bet you’re starving. What do you fancy? Lasagne? Burger? Something with iron in. Not much choice here, but you know – can’t beat pub grub.’

  ‘I’ll just have chips.’

  ‘Just chips? You should eat more. Go on. My treat.’

  ‘It’s always your treat, isn’t it?’

  Oh God, was she going to be like this again? Since the royalties from her song had all but dried up, at more or less the same time as the bookings, Clio had been snappy about money. She never really listened when he explained that they were married now, a unit, that it made him happy to spend his money on his wife; anyway, it wasn’t like she was doing anything about it either. She hadn’t even picked up a guitar since their wedding. He’d gone out of his way to get her session work at first, pressured those bands who owed him favours from the early days to bring her in as a backing singer, but that only made her more miserable. And he understood that. It was an artist thing – she didn’t like taking second place. He knew the feeling all too well himself. If she wasn’t going to be making music, though, he was sure she needed something else in her life. He’d been amazed when she’d agreed, further amazed that it had happened so quickly, jumped from an idea to a blue line on a stick in only a month. So today he swallowed down the same old argument they’d always had, moved round to sit on the bench beside her, pulled her in to him and kissed her head.

  ‘Just think of it as my way of saying thank you. For all the work you’re doing. I never want you to feel unappreciated.’ He intoned the words into her hair, breathing in the high floral pulse of her shampoo.

  She just flopped into him, and he let her, held her there in silence for a while. He felt huge, muscled and male wrapped around her. His cock throbbed. This was what he was supposed to be doing. It all felt right.

  The barmaid ambled over. She smiled at the two of them, put a hand on her heart.

  ‘So cute! What can I get you, then?’

  ‘I think I’ll go cottage pie actually. Did you decide, babe? What are you having?’

  He liked the way the girl smiled at his accent.

  Clio muttered, ‘Chips,’ into his shoulder, didn’t look up.

  ‘She’s not feeling too well,’ he mouthed, to cover for her. ‘Maybe a burger and chips? Cheeseburger? Make sure it’s cooked all the way through, though – please tell the chef that my lovely wife here is pregnant, so to take whatever precautions he normally would with the food. And nothing with eggs, like mayonnaise or anything.’

  Clio’s body tensed beneath him.

  ‘Oh congratulations! That is going to be one good-looking baby, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘No, we don’t mind that at all, my darling! So, cottage pie and cheeseburger.’

  Clio wrenched herself out from under his arm, wheeled round to face him, still ignoring the waitress.

  ‘I said I just want chips.’

  ‘You’ll change your mind, though. When you see mine. Tell you what – I’ll eat the burger if you can’t face it, all right?’ He winked at the barmaid. ‘Lucky she brought her back-up stomach, eh?’

  The girl retreated.

  ‘Come on, babe. I know you’re not quite right today. But let’s not spoil it, eh? That was a wee bit – well, the girl was just being nice.’

  She sat for a few seconds, turning her hands over, picking at a fingernail.

  ‘I know. Sorry. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK, honey. You must be exhausted. And hungry. Come here.’

  This time the hug only went on a few seconds, before she broke away.

  ‘Why did you tell her?’

  He could feel the smile pulling at his cheeks.

  ‘Well. It’s nice to be able to tell someone. She doesn’t know us. I want to tell people! I want people to know.’

  She looked down.

  ‘Got to pee. Back in a sec.’

  Almost as an afterthought she turned back, picked up his hand and kissed it.

  She’d taken her bag with her, he noticed, so he settled in for the long haul; grabbed a tabloid from the bar. It was progress, he thought, that he could challenge her on behaviour like that and it hadn’t flared up into a row. They were learning each other, gradually, learning how to live together. Nobody said marriage was easy, after all, and perhaps they’d been naive when they got together, assuming that trying to blend their separate lives would come as naturally to them as shagging had. But then maybe this was the pregnancy working on her, just as it had on him. Perhaps it was natural that her hormones would compel her to get on with him, to agree with him even, to keep her protector close. Biology, that sort of thing.

  She was in there for at least ten minutes. He buried himself in the paper to deflect the awkward glances from the other punters, tuned in to the Christmas pop songs blaring away on the bad PA system. The barmaid leaned over at one point and said, ‘Is she all right? Do you want me to pop in and check on her?’

  Danny sucked back a smile at the thought of Clio’s reaction to that invasion of privacy.

  ‘No, no, she’ll be fine. Don’t worry. It happens a lot at the moment. She just needs a bit of space sometimes. She’ll be doing her make-up, you know. Putting her face back on. And thank you, doll. Eh?’

  And suddenly, there she was, sitting in front of him, her face freshly painted into sharp lines and her head up high. Her hands were tensed, fretting and clawing at the air above the tabletop.

  ‘Are you feeling OK, love? Do you want a wee sip of my beer? Little treat?’

  She took a long, controlled breath in through her nose and closed her eyes for a second.

  ‘Right. Right. Look. There are two ways this story goes, darling. Danny-boy my love. Let’s talk them through – here’s the deal, right – let me tell you two stories, give me space, and if you don’t agree with me then you tell me your story. So. Here it goes. I have this baby. You probably stop fancying me the second the weight piles on, but eh, you know, I’m young. Ish. It’ll come off again soon, nah?’

  Her fingers twitched, twitched, twitched.

  ‘So I’m fat, and I don’t want to have sex even after it’s out because I’m all cut up and sore with it. That’s what they do, you know. That’s OK, though, because you’ve got this baby. It’s probably a boy, he’s your son, and you think he looks just like you, apart from when he looks like me. And for a wee while, that’ll do us. Even though he’s screaming all the time and we’re not getting any sleep, and the house – oh, your mum has helped us get a house, by the way, because even though she still doesny like me – no, sssh – she’s no having her grandchild, grandson, the heir, grow up in some damp wee tenement just cos you want to carry on playing bohemian with your muck-common ginger singer wife. It’s a nice one in the Grange, near hers; she’s not cheap, your mum. It’s got a back garden with grass and flowers and everything. Anyway, it’s a shithole because I don’t clean it, because I’m spending all my days looking after the baby and crying. But when you come back from tour, and you roll a joint and toke up in the garden before coming in and sitting on the stairs – cos this isn’t none of your basement flats, this house, it’s got an upstairs – and you sit there on the stairs and you listen to me singing your son to slee
p, singing Gaelic lullabies, you think it’s beautiful and we’ll work through it. You think that because you’re an optimist, but every day you stay in that lovely shithole, with those great high ceilings, big windows letting in all that light so you can see the dust piling up on the mantelpiece, you start to feel trapped. Maybe there’s a stain on the sofa where I pissed myself because giving birth to the son, the boy, ripped my fanny open and now I can’t feel the muscles down there, and you notice it every time you walk into the living room, remember how you just noticed it dripping down out of my leggings as I sat there feeding the baby, how I burst out crying (again) and swore at you when you pointed it out, how you had to scrub your own wife’s pee out of that lovely sofa your mum bought. That happens. I’ve heard that from more than one person. No. Stop. I’m talking. I’m talking. Anyway, you think about that piss stain every time you go into work and see Sadie or Francesca sitting there behind the desk; she’s not your secretary, pal, I’ll give you credit for originality, but she works in admin or something. Let’s be frank, you’re not making the whole shagging-an-artist mistake again, are ye? She was maybe in first year at your school the year you were leaving. She remembers you playing guitar in the final-year assembly and is disappointed that you aren’t still making music, but she totally gets that you’re doing what makes money, and my God, Danny, she really admires you for it. Or maybe she’s a Home Counties girl, fresh out of uni and just sometimes it crosses your mind that she probably wouldn’t be swearing at your mum or refusing to come to family parties, which we both know is what I will have dissolved into by that point, eh? When you’re in the house, and those gig nights are getting later and later, but when you’re finally there, and you’re trying to help, what you don’t realize is I’m swearing at you behind your back. Seriously, you go downstairs to our scummy-as-fuck designer kitchen and you’re thinking that you’re helping, you’re actually telling yourself, what a great guy I am for helping, and if you turned back for one second you’d be terrified. You’d turn round to the woman holding your baby, your son, the heir to the Mansfield fortune, and you’d see her face creased into this ugly thing, all spite and hate and fire. You’d see the words she mouths at you, you cunt, you fuck, you useless shit. It would scare you. Your bones would be properly chilled, pal, especially as you’d watch your baby pat her face and laugh at first at the funny shapes it makes, while she pushes all those hard words out. But he’d learn them after a while. Your baby would learn that these words were normal, that they were how human beings communicate. He’d make those faces himself, going through life, to the other boys and girls in the class, to his teenage girlfriend, to whichever luckless cow he manages to convince to marry him. You fuck. You useless shitty cunt.’

  Of course, the barmaid chose that moment to bring their food over, realizing too late what she’d walked into.

  ‘The, uh, cottage pie?’

  ‘That was me, my darling. Thanks. Thank you so much.’ He felt he had to be extra smooth to make up for it all.

  ‘And the cheeseburger. Well done. No mayo. With chips.’

  Clio grunted. The girl looked at the floor.

  ‘OK, can I get you anything else now?’

  ‘No, we’re fine thanks, angel. Thank you.’ He slapped on a smile till she’d edged out of sight, then leaned over his plate and held his wife’s hand.

  ‘Listen, babe, I know you’re scared. I know you are. I’m scared too. I know it’s not going to be a walk in the park. But you’re going to be an amazing mum, and we’ll get through all the tough times. We’re a team, hey? It’s you and me.’

  Her hand wriggled out from his, grabbed at the air again.

  ‘You are not hearing a thing I’m saying, are you? It’s not – God, Danny. Just, just shut up for a few minutes, would you?’

  She pushed the plate with the burger across the table, away from her.

  ‘Here’s what I’m trying to get at, right. Do you remember that conversation we had, my boyo, my love? When we decided to have a baby in the first place? I mean, I don’t want to say you got me at a low point, but we both know that you did. You talked to me about being twenty-six and time ticking on, and it not being the end of my career, just the right time to take stock. It’s not a failure, you said, it’s maybe just the world letting you know you need to make a change. Just do something differently, just for a while. And it’s like my mum always told me: never be beholden to a man for money or it’ll work on you. I didn’t listen because I never listened to my mum, but she was right, and it’s worked on me. I can’t deny either of those things. But that’s not the point. Imagine me, right. I take the kid out to local mums and tots groups or whatsit to try and make pals, but the other mums all look down on me right away, because we live in a posh area and I give my baby crisps or I’m doing something wrong that seemed perfectly normal to me where I came from like, fucksake, putting whisky on its dummy to make it sleep or whatever, I don’t know. And it’s just me and this kid all day, and I love it, of course I do because it’s my kid and that’s what you do, but I don’t know, maybe I hate it too because I’m thinking where’s me, or whatever. You hear that, don’t you? Women just dying for a wee bit of adult conversation. Oh, you probably don’t, babe. Where would you hear that? You don’t talk to women who aren’t your wife, or lovely young musicians, or Francesca in the office with the perky tits.’

  ‘Clio. Babe. There’s nobody in my office called Francesca—’

  ‘Oh, there will be. And then it starts to nag away at me, the eight millionth time that I’ve got baby shit under my nails and haven’t put my lipstick on for weeks. Didn’t you used to be someone? Wasn’t that you, causing a storm on Top of the Pops? Didn’t music magazines queue up to interview you, all these geeky boys in band T-shirts basically Morse-coding I LOVE YOU into their notepads? Didn’t you used to care about things beyond the PTA or the baby’s shoe size or whatever mummy shit fucking mummies have to care about? Didn’t you used to fight things and stand up for folk and try and make something happen, some change in the world? See, cos I’ve got nobody else to think this through with. It’s just me in the house, all those days, all those nights. This is what I keep playing over and over and NO. SHUT— sssh. Let me talk. Please. While the walls are closing in on me, your world is going to be getting bigger and bigger. Because we both know you’re going places, aren’t you, my darling. Danny Mansfield is on the up. The famous people you’ll be meeting. The parties you’ll be going to. Sometimes the parties are at our house, by the way, because it’s nicer than everyone else’s, and our wee boy sits there at the top of the stairs listening to the basslines and the laughter floating up. You think to yourself when you catch him, scoop him up in his jammies and take him back to bed, this is great. Isn’t he lucky to have this sort of experience? You think that when you cuddle him for half an hour before bed, or pat him on the head before you go out to work in the morning. You think that when he clings to your legs when you come in the door every evening, not realizing that he’s trying to tell you Don’t leave me again, Daddy, don’t leave me with this woman, this wretched bitter witch who stares at me all day.’

  He decided to stop it all, all the words.

  ‘Babe. Babe. This is silly. This is just so you. We take some sort of step, any sort of step at all towards something new and you dig your heels in, the panic sets in, and you come up with a million different reasons why it’s not going to work straight away.’

  She sniffed. A big, deliberate sniff. The sort of sniff he knew too well.

  ‘Wait, what is this right now? Like a cokehead rant happening here. Are you on something? Are you seriously pregnant with my child and on something?’

  She leaned back.

  ‘No and yes.’

  ‘What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  He didn’t care who in this shitty little country pub could hear them now. She had a funny half-smile on her face, and she looked him straight in the eye as she unbuckled her belt, shoved a hand down her tr
ousers. What the hell? What the hell was she doing?

  She pulled her hand out, displayed a bloodstained finger to him, showed it round to the rest of the pub.

  ‘No, it doesn’t look like I’m pregnant with your child, does it? And yes, I’ve taken a little bit of speed. I had it in my bag for emergencies, and this seems like an emergency, this state of affairs.’ She waved her bloody hand about like royalty greeting the masses, laughed.

  She’s crazy, he thought. She’s actually crazy, and I married her. And on speed. On speed. There was a high, electrical note shrilling in his brain. The blood was very, very red. And then, suddenly, the dull thud of it hit him.

  ‘What, what is that? Is it – are you having a miscarriage?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might just be my period. I’ve been feeling it coming on all day.’

  ‘But – you were pregnant. The test.’

  ‘Well, now I’m not. And I’m – I can’t – I don’t want to be.’

  He sank back into the bench, stared down at his plate, still full of food, as the air left the room. Over. It was over.

  She came round the table to him, scooted her bum along the bench, stretched out towards him, stroked his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. My boy. I’m sorry. It’s just felt wrong, the whole time. I felt myself disappearing. I haven’t been able to breathe all week. Then I went to the toilet, and there it was, and the world suddenly made sense again. It’s not for me. This isn’t what I was supposed to be. And it is definitely what you were supposed to be, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve been – you’ve been the one fucking glowing, Danny.’

  Her arms were around him, and she was ferreting inside his jacket for his wallet. She pulled out a couple of notes and placed them down on the table between the burger and the pie, and then she guided him into a standing position, wrapped his scarf round his neck, surprising him with her tenderness.