Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  The café was too busy for her to give the group her full attention, but it seemed to be a pretty official meeting, not just a gathering of friends. Clio, Mark and Fran all took their turns to talk and, as she dipped in to drop off plates, she picked up phrases like ‘creating a visible, public show of force’ and ‘direct action’. At one point Mark, scoffing and interrupting Fran, said, ‘I think this calls for something bigger than a letter-writing campaign’; led the table in laughter against her. Clio had been talking passionately for some time – Sammi had heard ‘poll tax’ and ‘getting our point across in a public display that properly involves the community’, and Utti had stood up and applauded whatever it was she’d been saying while the others cringed, Englishly, looked at the floor. But by the time the lunchtime rush had ebbed back down and Sammi was due a break, the meeting, whatever it was, seemed to have broken up. Mark still sat there, smiling at her. She flopped down beside him.

  ‘That seemed well intense.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Making plans. Big plans.’

  ‘Big plans that you didn’t think to mention to me?’

  ‘Hey, hey gorgeous. It’s not like that. Just didn’t think it was something you’d be into.’

  ‘Could’ve bloody tried me, mate. What was it – not the animal rights again? I know Clio,’ she tried too hard to keep her voice neutral as she said the name, ‘don’t give two craps about all that.’

  ‘Something bigger, I hope. Something with the potential to get really involved.’

  ‘Well, I got five minutes and no more patience for your mysteries. Seriously, what’s the score here? You deliberately trying to keep me out of the stuff you’re planning?’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. No, no, no. We just – I just thought – it could get risky, this one. I don’t want you getting hurt. Or picked up by the police.’

  She heard that ‘we’ – the realization that the whole thing had probably been planned post-coitally after a little rooftop shag sesh – like a cold dash of water down her back.

  ‘Aight. This is coming across pretty disrespectful if you ask me. If I’m old enough for you to fuck, I’m old enough to get involved. Spill. Now.’

  The plan was to target the building site on the high street, already decorated with McDonald’s vinyl branding, with an ongoing series of posters, leading up to direct action which would hopefully get the local community on side. Sammi was less sure about that.

  ‘Lot of the young ones love their Maccy D’s, mate. Dunno how many bods you’ll get on side round these streets.’ She was reminded of the riots last year, of the way the panic had risen inside the squat even though they’d all initially supported the rioters against the police. The overflowing currents of whiteness and poshness cutting her off from the rest of them as the noise and violence in the streets had got louder. She was cynical about any of them being able to engage ‘the community’, even Spider. Mark, who showed no interest whatsoever in the wider world of Brixton, had merely shrugged when she’d raised this point.

  Once she’d been allowed to attend the follow-up meeting, Sammi could see why Mark had assembled the team he had: Fran and her friends obviously objected to the company on animal rights grounds; Utti stood against all and any big global corporations and Giancarlo, Sammi suspected, just liked a fight; Spider and Clio were riled up by the pushing out and knocking down of three local businesses to make way for the new development, by the soul of Brixton being taken over, by the reports they’d heard of unfair wages for staff. Mark himself, though – she wasn’t sure. Just as she’d never quite been able to see what motivated him to get involved with the animal rights stuff. He seemed alive with it, though, his eyes sparking about like they hadn’t done in a while, his hands never done pulling her into the sleeping space, his thrusting faster and more urgent. Much like Giancarlo, he seemed to be energized by the fight, but she was sure there was something else going on there, something that she couldn’t place.

  ‘So, who was you going to get to do your posters, then? Need someone with a bit of skill to do that, dontcha?’

  Clio looked shamefaced, Sammi was pleased to note. She wasn’t in a mood to let them off with it.

  ‘Should’ve come to me earlier, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Of course! We got a proper artist right here, int we? Can’t believe you was all thinking about just doing it with some marker pens. Sammi, you actually got time to get on board with this? Make it look right for us?’ She loved Spider in that moment, could’ve kissed his stinking dreads, flashed the room a big cheeky smile.

  ‘Might be too busy with all my other high-art commissions now. I’ll speak to my people, see what we can do for you.’

  They were getting dinner ready – Gaz and Xanthe chopping and stirring what smelled like a curry while everyone else sat about, helped when told, Sammi rolling a ball to little Dido sitting on the floor. An unusually full house that evening, which she always enjoyed – it made it easier to feel that sense of community she thought they’d all been looking for when they came up with the idea in the first place. Clio was kneeling, meticulously applying her make-up for a night out with some musician friends or other, the small green bag spilling products out across the seat of the big armchair in front of her. Fran bent down and scooped up the bag, squinted in at it.

  ‘Clio, you know that most of these products are tested on animals, right?’

  Clio rolled her eyes for the effect, before looking up.

  ‘Yeah, and they’re mostly factory seconds, charity shop or leftovers, pal. I cannae afford to buy them new, so nobody’s getting the profits, all right?’

  ‘I still wouldn’t be able to put those products on my face, knowing the conditions they’d been created in. I mean, this stuff –’ Fran waved a tiny tube of something pink and shimmery ‘– they poured that into rabbits’ eye sockets to check that it wasn’t going to hurt humans.’

  ‘I just wouldn’t put any of it on my face,’ Xanthe called, over her shoulder from the kitchen space. ‘You don’t need it, Clio. You’re beautiful enough. I’ve told you this before. You’re modifying your face to please the masters; conforming to patriarchal beauty standards motivated by insecurities programmed into us by capitalism.’

  Clio looked riled. Xanthe had often called her out for her make-up use, it was true – the way other women looked was her current bugbear and she was also always on at Sammi to let her Afro out of its braids – but never on quite such a public stage as this, with seven other people in the room. Rising to her feet, finding her spotlight, Clio turned, took a breath in, addressed her audience.

  ‘Listen, let me tell youse something. In the town where I grew up, the women were glamorous. I’d watch my mum getting ready for a night out at the Labour Club, the same place she went to every Saturday night, sat in the same seats in the lounge, drank the same gin out of the same glass, probably. And she treated it like, I don’t know, the Oscars or something, mate. I’d watch her piling blue eyeshadow up to her brows, doing that Liz Taylor sweep with a pencil all the way round. She’d have the rollers in for four hours before she went out, she’d spot-clean her best suit or her old dress and have it hanging up in the kitchen by the kettle. She made her face up like it was an art, and my stepdad, he’d put his suit on, and a fresh tie, offer her his arm, and they’d step out into the street with all the neighbours they saw every day for work or at the shops, all of them done. All of them with that Saturday-night sparkle on, like it would be a dishonour to step out without it, like it was church or something. And the Labour Club, that same old building with its tired walls and the haze of fag smoke, that would become somewhere else, just with one wee tinsel curtain hanging over the stage, the sparkly bow tie on the old boy who sang Sinatra well into his seventies.

  ‘I’d be allowed to go along and stay up too late, bag of crisps and a bottle of ginger, forming a gang who crawled under the tables with all the other weans. I’d sit there, watching the women’s faces, the laughs they put on, the shimmering rainbows aroun
d their eyes, mysterious streaks of dark stuff cutting through their round cheeks, and I’d understand they were all casting a spell. They were all, by the power of these potions, by mutual agreement, transforming this place, where people worked hard jobs for never enough money, where every choice was difficult, where everything was functional and ugly, into Hollywood, or Las Vegas, some projection of what they’d seen in the movies. Where the same old spouse you woke to every morning was suddenly Lee Majors or Farrah Fawcett, where you lived next door to Burton and Taylor, where auld Archie from up the loan really was a member of the Rat Pack; where money didnae have to matter, just this once. And it could only be sustained if everyone kept buying into it together. Oh my God, when there was a wedding! Doreen who did the hair was booked out from six a.m., and there was always some fancy ones who’d get the train through to Ayr for it, make the journey back with these beehives and sculptures poking out over the tops of their coats.’

  They all watched her as she paused for breath, no one jumping in. Clio never spoke about her family, so this flood of words, the silty Scottish accent she usually toned down around them – it was something else.

  ‘What my mother taught me was that you always looked your best. It was a matter of honour with her – you let it all go you might as well shout to the world that things are sliding, that you’re not coping; it lets the rest of the team down, when they’re dealing with things just as hard and worse. She never let anyone outside of me and my stepdad see her in her housecoat; I hardly ever saw her without her make-up the whole time I was growing up with her.

  ‘It’s a working-class thing, this. Youse don’t get to tell a working-class woman that her lipstick isny feminist, because it’s a signal of solidarity. This is a great big slash of solidarity I’m wearing across my face right now. And you can leave Sammi alone about her hair, too. I bet your mum was something like this, am I right, darlin?’

  Sammi grinned shyly, embarrassed to have the spotlight back on her, and not sure how she felt about siding with Clio at the moment anyway. ‘Yeah, my mum never let us leave the house looking less than perfect. They put this in you when you’re young. I mean, it leaves you judging other women who ain’t made the effort pretty heavy, you know—’

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m saying,’ Xanthe said. ‘It’s another example of conditioning used to divide and conquer. Another tool for the patriarchy to use to have us tear each other apart, enforce a code which we use to contain each other.’

  ‘Nah, you’re not hearing me,’ Clio said, no trace of the patient voice they were supposed to use when conflict occurred, like Fran’s book had suggested. ‘You ask a working-class woman who was brought up in a certain way at a certain time to ditch her make-up in order to raise her consciousness, you’re asking her to break a bond she’s made with her working-class sisters. No offence, doll, but going make-up free is a luxury for bougie women because they can always afford to buy more; it can be just a temporary state, a bit of play-acting between times. You don’t need it to convince the world you’re more than it thinks you are. You’re asking them to take away the one wee bit of sparkle, of glamour, in what are, let me assure you, some fucking appalling lives. Black women, poor white women – we need to look good when we face out into the world, because the odds in life are already stacked so hard against us and people are already prejudging us on sight.’

  ‘Yes, so we need to dismantle that system, get everything on an even playing field—’

  ‘Aye, aye, sure, sure. But you’re not going to do that by turning your own judgement on the women stuck in it – which you do, every time you suggest to Sammi she should let her Afro grow out natural, or me that I’d be better off without my lipstick. You’re setting up one of your false di-whatjamies there, doll.’

  Sammi looked about her. Over at the kitchenette, keeping his head down, Gaz was crumbling something into a frying pan of vegetables and lentils, flooding the air with spices. The room felt cosy even though they were all wearing extra jumpers, the fairy lights keeping the cold night outside at bay even though they still didn’t have any curtains. Spider was rummaging through a pile of tapes by the cassette player, tickling Dido under her chin as she wandered over to him. Xanthe and Clio were all warm colours and anger, and they might be disagreeing but they were disagreeing about the way to make the world a better place. This was important stuff they were doing, she thought, in their own little corner, and she felt again so sure she was in the right place, was glad for it. It was maybe the last time she felt that connection between them all in a positive light.

  Her posters, which Spider and Mark snuck out to pin up on the site after dark, were methodically ripped down every morning, meaning only late-night bodies wandering outside the Ritzy would see them. Sammi began using the copy room they’d never quite managed to get the magazine going in to crank out smaller versions, then leaflets, the text dictated by Fran and Mark, both leaning over her as she stencilled. The revised plan was to stand outside the site in daytime, directly engaging the people. Sammi took a walk down there on the third day, after work, stood at the other side of the road and watched Fran and her friend being sneered at and ignored in their earnestness.

  ‘Fran mate, you gonna need to let me do this,’ she said casually over dinner duties that night. ‘You ain’t from here – you ain’t able to reach people. It’s just a matter of knowing how to talk to them, know what I’m saying? Let me do the flyers tomorrow.’

  ‘We were getting along just fine, thanks,’ Fran said, shutting down like she always did. ‘We had a lot of good conversations with people actually.’

  ‘What’s all this?’ Mark had pricked up his ears, moved across from the side of the room.

  ‘I was just saying maybe I should get involved with the action on the streets a bit more. People might listen if it was coming from someone from the area.’

  ‘Mm, not sure that’s such a good idea, sweetheart. You’re already doing so much designing the leaflets – don’t want to put too much on you.’

  ‘What? Come on. I want to get involved in this. Use me.’

  ‘I’ll do it with Sammi,’ said Clio. ‘We could bring a bit of common touch to this, nah?’

  Fran bristled at the sink, went silent. Sammi’s eyes went to Mark, who was sitting back on his heels, taking it all in.

  Clio and Sammi fared much better on the street outside the building site – people were at least taking their leaflets, and both of them managed a couple of conversations, even though Clio, emboldened, tried to get a group of young guys about Sammi’s age involved and had one of them yell at her to fuck off and leave Maccy D’s alone. Sammi tried hard to keep herself busy, so she wouldn’t have to talk to Clio – she could tell that Clio really wanted to get serious with her – could see the orange head always turned towards her out of the corner of her eye when there was nobody there, kept her face trained along the road towards the next passer-by.

  After a couple of hours, Clio said that that was quite enough for now and suggested they get some lunch. Sammi couldn’t think of an excuse quickly, and so they ended up opposite each other on hard chairs, unwrapping plastic off a pair of egg sandwiches, looking down at the table. Clio stirred three sugars into a Styrofoam cup and coughed, and coughed again, and Sammi couldn’t bear it any more.

  ‘Is there something you wanted to say to me, Clio?’

  She jumped, spilled her coffee. ‘Yes – no. Well. It’s just – it feels strange to me. And I suppose we should talk about it.’

  ‘You want to talk about you fucking my boyfriend a lot. That it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t really want to talk about it with you, so how about that?’

  ‘I don’t really know what to say anyway.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t like it. But it’s not like I got grounds for official complaint. Maybe I thought we was better friends than we are for you to be doing – that – this much. Maybe I’d like you to stop. But I can’t ask that. See?’


  ‘I see. I’ll stop, Sammi. It’ll stop.’

  ‘Whatever. I got leaflets to hand out. Shall we get back to it?’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Another Tuesday dinner, her first in three weeks. This one wasn’t so bad. Just her and Avril, alone for the first time in over a year, and her brother had obviously had a word with their mum. There wasn’t much conversation, but there was no confrontation, just a nice companionable silence. It was neither Sammi’s nor Avril’s way to pick at a scab unnecessarily. They watched telly for much longer than they normally would, and Sammi did the washing-up, and they did not mention their fight. In the bathroom, just before she got her coat, Sammi paused for a little ritual she’d always liked since leaving home – sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Avril’s fastidiously arranged bathroom cabinet, its rows of plastic-wrapped guest soaps shaped like roses, its clean stores of toothpaste, moisturizers and sanitary towels. Avril liked to plan ahead, never ran out of anything. Then Sammi looked again at the sanitary towels and realized she hadn’t had a period for about three months.

  She didn’t really notice herself getting back to the squat, she’d been so preoccupied. As soon as she’d allowed herself to think of the possibility, she knew it to be true. Yes, her body seemed to be saying. That’s right. Caught on at last, have you?

  She wondered what Mark would say, whether there was any point in telling him without a test to back herself up. She needed to share the weight of it, that was for sure. But the squat seemed empty when she got there – no lights on, no sign of Xanthe and Dido in the sleeping space. She braved it to take herself up to the roof, found Gaz sitting there by himself in a cloud of smoke, red-eyed.

  ‘You all right? This place is like a ghost town tonight.’

  ‘Aight, Sammi. They’ve all gone down to the Maccy D’s site, ain’t they. Giancarlo and Mark’s idea. They’re breaking in – Giancarlo getting all excited about destruction of something or other. I just told them I ain’t up for it, and him and Mark got right up in my face, pair of fucks.’