There was that voice now, on the telly, as Dougie watched and Adele didn’t snap at him to switch that shit off. That voice, talking about how Scotland had always voted differently from England, how there was a democratic deficit. Saying that this was a fresh chance, a new start – an opportunity to make the kind of country they wanted. Then, she said, we could rescue the NHS. Adele found herself staying, leaning in the doorway, taking it in.
‘I went to school with her. She’s from the village,’ she said.
‘Aye?’ Dougie muttered, eyes on the box.
The man sitting opposite Clio had a particularly irritating smug chuckle. It farted out of his mouth whenever Clio spoke, announcing that an interjection was coming. ‘Jesus,’ Adele found herself hissing. ‘Just let the lassie get a sentence out.’
Dougie had begun to chuckle right along with the man. ‘Aye, he’s right enough there. Tell you something, your school pal’s talking a fair bit of pish.’
The man on the telly swept a palm through thick silvery hair, spread his arms and legs wide in his chair, leaned forward to the camera and began a monologue. He reminded Adele of that consultant prick she’d had to argue with last month, the way he’d dismissed her with a pat on the shoulder.
‘Who is he, that guy?’ she asked Dougie.
‘Godsake, Adele, you just never know any of the politicians, do you? That’s Gordon Duke. An MP. He was the housing minister or something. Naw – he was health! You ought to know that! Pals with Brown and Blair, that lot. He’s always on the telly.’
Cliodhna was trying to talk, turn it back into conversation, but the man allowed her no space, using practised tricks to keep ploughing on. As the camera cut back to her face she got more and more agitated, and Adele could understand why. The moderator sitting in between them seemed to have no interest in letting her speak either. Suddenly she jumped up, wheeled round at the man, pointed a beautifully painted green fingernail at him. The cameras followed her quickly.
‘What an utter Judas you are, Gordon Duke. You used to actually stand up for the people. You used to actually stand for something. What are you now? An empty suit? Talking over a woman with your practised lines because your friends in Parliament have taught you that you can? Whose interests are you representing here today, Gordon? The people in your constituency? Or your posh pals down in Westminster?’
She was tall and angry and commanding, that girl on the stage at school assemblies again. The man stayed seated. The smirk spread.
‘Now now, let’s not lose our tempers, Clio.’ He was talking to her like she was a child, Adele thought, found her own face getting hot. Dougie wriggled his bum into the sofa cushions in pleasure.
A week or so later, in the break room, Ash had sidled up to Adele holding her phone.
‘I was wondering – don’t take this the wrong way or anything, and tell me to piss off if you want – but where are you on the whole Scottish independence thing?’
‘Eh. I haven’t really given it much thought, to be honest. It’s more Dougie’s thing, politics.’
‘Well, I was wondering if you fancied coming along to a meeting in the town hall with me tonight. After we’re done here. It’ll just be an hour or two. It’s for women only, and they’re going to talk about the NHS, education, childcare. That sort of thing. How we might be able to change them, with independence. There’s some good people talking at it.’
Adele was making her mouth into the shape of a no when Ash handed her phone screen over. Cliodhna’s face, spliced into a picture with three other women Adele didn’t recognize.
At the town hall, the applause had been loudest for Cliodhna, introduced as ‘the woman who got us dancing in our teens and had us cheering last week when she faced down the mansplainers on Question Time’. Ash, sitting beside Adele, had actually gone ‘Wooooo!’
‘I went to school with her, you know,’ Adele had said, nudging Ash.
And Cliodhna had spoken. She talked about the ways that men in power had tried to squash the politics out of her, all her life; she talked about the ways that women could do politics differently, by sitting down and talking to each other. She talked about the things a country with women’s interests at its heart would prioritize. Then she began to mention the little town she grew up in, how it had been pulled apart by Thatcher, by the contempt – less than that, Cliodhna said – by a deliberate refusal to acknowledge poor working people as human.
‘I’ve seen strike action fail. I’ve seen governments ride roughshod over the will of the people, from the miners to the anti-Iraq War protesters. And it seemed like we’d all just given up, didn’t it? Until recently. Maybe until this. In a smaller country, one that never votes Tory, that will always vote at least a centre-left government in,’ she said, ‘we could look our politicians in the eye and hold them accountable. Make them do the jobs they promised to do when campaigning.’
Adele thought about the scandal, about how some of the old men back home would feel hearing ‘that wee Johnstone hoor’ casting up their struggle. And then she thought about all the mistakes she herself had made at sixteen, and the very different person she was at forty-six.
Cliodhna’s voice had the same timbre as it had at school, but there were so many other notes in there – at times Adele thought she sounded like she was off EastEnders; at times she sounded drawly and foreign. But when she began to speak about the village Adele recognized Eileen Johnstone’s tones in her daughter’s throat, remembered Eileen hectoring them all in the church hall to keep making sandwiches, keep slopping mayonnaise from that big industrial tub onto endless slices of bread. Eileen had pretty much run the strike, but couldn’t seem to make her own daughter turn up for duty.
‘Imagine that, though,’ Adele’s own mother would mutter, just afterwards, when her dad wasn’t around. ‘Imagine just turning your daughter out. No matter what she’d done. She’s still your blood.’ Adele’s mother had never really liked Eileen; it had always been known and never mentioned in the house.
In the town hall, the women sitting around Adele, maybe about sixty of them, all different ages, a lot of them seeming to be just middle-aged mums, like her, cheered and clapped as Cliodhna finished speaking. Some of them stood up. It was a nice feeling, to be amongst them. Afterwards there were drinks – glasses of wine and chocolate biscuits out on a table, poured by two women about Adele’s own age.
‘Go on,’ Ash said, pushing a glass into Adele’s hand. ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just have one after a long shift.’ The four speakers were brought off the stage and ushered to the back of the room by the woman who had introduced them, each of them given a glass, surrounded by a small crowd. Cliodhna particularly.
‘Are you going to say hi to her?’
‘Och, I don’t think I could. Not after all this time. Thirty years and we never really knew each other. It’s just nice – nice to see her, who she is now. You know?’
It was that distance, Adele thought. That cordoned-off space Cliodhna had always maintained from the people around her. It was fine for her to talk about the village really – it was something she’d seen first-hand, grown up with, but also something she’d made a point of never belonging to. Maybe even that tiny five-year-old could sense the way that town would have sucked her under if she’d let it, got its clumsy black thumbprints all over her face as it turned her into plain Jean Johnstone, married her off.
Adele watched Cliodhna move around the room, a room full of women who wanted to talk to her, smile at her, celebrate her, because she had always been able to stand up, resist the push to conform. The warm, sharp wine sloshed on her tongue and she walked over to the table where a woman stood with a clipboard and stickers, under a hand-drawn sign that read JOIN US!, wrote down her name, phone number and email address.
Later, she would wonder where she’d found all that extra energy from. The eighteen months after she attended a meeting just because of an old acquaintance’s face were the busiest she remembered since the boys were small. She found
herself listening to a variety of speakers at nearby village halls, nodding along in agreement at the sheer obviousness and sense they were talking. She who had a bone-chilling fear of drawing attention to herself in public, decorated her car with stickers – BAIRNS NOT BOMBS; SAVE OUR NHYES – until Dougie refused to ride in it any more. She went on marches, holding up banners with the Paisley Women for Independence group that Ash had helped to start. She and Jamie and Jamie’s girlfriend Sarah caught the train through to Edinburgh and climbed a hill, amongst thousands of others, for a huge rally overlooking that old city and its peaks. Cliodhna sang that day, one amongst a line-up of thirty; and Adele’s voice got lost in the crowd singing her chorus back to her. People gotta rise up. People gotta rise up.
‘Did I ever tell you I went to school with her?’ she shouted into Jamie’s ear, over the loud guitar noises.
‘No! No way, Mum! You should totally go and talk to her afterwards. Maybe you can get us all backstage.’
‘Och no. No, no. I don’t think so, son. She wouldn’t remember me.’
Looking back, Adele wonders who that person was, the one who overcame shyness and stress to knock on doors, handing flyers to strangers and trying to engage them in conversation. The one who drove back to her home town to host a ‘listening party’ coffee morning attended only by her mum and three of her cronies, who tried in vain to assuage their fears about their pensions. The one who stood on street corners under banners in the weeks running up to the referendum. That person who fitted it all in around her work, around walking the ward, around the deaths of four long-term patients. Where once she would have gone to the canal and cried in silence at the end of a shift, now she channelled the emotional impact into her fight. She’d been fond of saying, as she knocked on the doors, handing out flyers, that she’d never really been one for politics, but that this campaign had changed her mind. People listened to her; they did. She spoke quietly but confidently to them, channelling all those years of difficult conversations with patients and their families to get her messages across softly but well. The first time she changed someone’s mind from No to Yes in a ten-minute doorstep conversation she texted Ash in delight and the two of them scampered off down the pub to celebrate.
Dougie would have none of it. The harder into it Adele got, the harder he stood his ground, knuckled down, declared his loyalty to his football club and the Union Jack. Jamie stopped talking to him completely after a huge and heated argument over Sunday lunch; Adele just stopped talking to him about it. She would come in late, pat him on the shoulder as he sat watching television, go to her computer in the boys’ old room to check in, tell his warm body ‘night night, love’, as they faced their separate ways in the bed.
A large group of them had headed through to Glasgow on the day of the referendum, after casting their votes. Ash and Big Meg had walked up and down their carriage on the train painting tiny glittery blue Saltires on all the women’s cheeks so they felt like a team; they sang songs, grinned and waved at everyone else they saw wearing a Yes badge; all of them waved back. An old man at the station bent low on one knee and kissed Adele’s hand. The atmosphere in George Square – ‘Freedom Square! We’re crying it Freedom Square now!’ roared Ash – was like nothing Adele had ever seen before. Banners waving, more smiling faces than she’d ever seen in one space in Scotland, some earnest boys onstage playing guitar and a beautiful girl, surely no more than twenty, moving through the crowd handing out flowers. Adele put hers behind her ear, a fat pink daisy, felt young again.
They had tickets that evening for a concert, where they’d be able to watch the results come in. Clio Campbell and Friends. Adele had wanted so much to see her again on this day of all days, feel everything coming back full circle, that she’d hustled to organize tickets for a group of seventeen friends, take deposits, make sure the transport routes were sorted out. Onstage, introducing other musicians, talking to the crowd, Cliodhna seemed smooth and certain – what other result could there be? she said. You’ve seen it out there, on the streets. Glasgow is saying Yes! Adele whooped and clapped with the rest of them, amazed again that this poised, elegant woman could have grown up in the same sooty space as her. Had they, really? Adele tried to place the girl on the adult and only succeeded some of the time.
There was a big screen behind the stage and it would flicker into life every now and again, showing live BBC and STV coverage of the referendum, at a command from Cliodhna to what Adele presumed was her stage manager or something. The faces in the studio Adele had only learned recently, after years of their having been an irritation, one of Dougie’s things; the crowd whooped for their favourites and booed and hissed the Better Together spokespeople as though they were at a panto. Cliodhna’s set was full of in-jokes that the crowd were drunkenly, happily lapping up; at one point she came onstage eating a bowl of cereal, in reference to an infamous sexist campaign advert, and all the women in the audience burst out laughing and cheering, started calling her name. ‘Go on yourself, Clio!’
Ash had bought two little plastic bottles of Prosecco from the bar for the first result coming in. Adele agreed to drink one glass – she was on shift the next morning – and the two of them popped and poured, ready to toast. The first region to announce was Clackmannanshire, a former mining area in Fife. Working class. Exactly the sort of place, everyone had said, that would vote Yes by a landslide. Adele had thought back to her unsuccessful coffee mornings, the scowling faces in her own village, and hadn’t been so sure, but everyone else had told her no, no, the pollsters know what they’re doing.
The shock hit the room in a harsh vibration. Adele found herself actually shivering with it. On the stage, Cliodhna was frozen beside the screen with her own, much bigger, bottle of Prosecco, a half-daft smile stuck on her face. The stage-manager guy cut the sound from the screen and the room was silent, its lifeblood drained; everybody knowing right then, even though there were so many more results to come in. A wavering spotlight found Cliodhna; she stepped forward into it, her body apparently being sucked in on itself. There she was, Adele realized. There was the girl, the girl being dragged back to the small, sooty village she didn’t want to live in by a relentless, clanking old bus and the smell of mayonnaise sandwiches.
2015
The bed was wheeled in, the porter clipped it into place and the anaesthetist handed over the chart. Unidentified female. Suicide attempt: cuts on both wrists. Blood alcohol levels high. Found in a bath at a hotel after the water had leaked through the floorboards, two rounds of bystander CPR at the scene and a further two in A&E, currently unconscious but stable. Some blood loss, but a haemorrhage prevented. The hotel had been unable to confirm her identity as she’d checked in as ‘Jean Johnstone’ but the reservation had been made under a card with a different name. Adele walked up to the bed to begin her checks, and there she was. Bandage-bound wrists above the covers. Up close, she recognized that same face from the stage, the one scored by defeat. Up close, there were as many wrinkles as she herself had, counting their shared years on the planet. Up close, on the pillow, there were threads of grey running through the mass of red hair. Nobody had washed the smeared make-up off her face yet, grubby grey tear-stains marking her nose and cheeks.
‘I can identify this patient,’ she told the ward sister. ‘I went to school with her.’
‘Are you declaring a personal interest?’
‘No. Not at all. I haven’t spoken to her in decades. But I know exactly who she is.’
Once she was sure the woman was stable, once she’d checked the tubes and lines, hung a new blood bag, put in the catheter and drained her bladder, Adele took a seat by Cliodhna’s head, began gently wiping her face with cotton wool. And she whispered to her as she did, quietly, so as not to wake the other patients, so the charge nurse couldn’t hear her.
‘Well then, Cliodhna. Well then. This wasn’t your time, pal. Not this time. I know, I know what it feels like, but you – you’ve got so much more to do. So many more people waiting t
o hear from you. You’re going to do big things, my lady. Trust me. When it is your time, you’ll make it count. Much more than this.’
It might have been the night, the shadows, her imagination, but Adele was sure her patient’s face had changed, just slightly, as she spoke.
NEIL
Glasgow, 25 January 2018
‘Neil, pal. Mate. Mate.’
Neil really missed the days before Craig could remember his name. This new whirring and whining at his ear, the reek of aftershave making his head light, a feeling of being craned in on, his space invaded – this was what colleagues who worked on the politics and sports desks (the bits that still got clicks) had been bitching about all year. Craig was a manager with no ability to manage, would swoop down and intimidate to get his results, increasing pressure, making Neil feel as though he couldn’t walk across the office floor without issuing a progress report.
Yesterday, it had all started with the feminists. Someone out there on the Internet had taken umbrage at his meek little paragraph of an obituary. Craig had ambled over in that laid-back way he’d cultivated to disguise his excitement, somehow braying out another maaaate while simultaneously sucking air in through his teeth.
Scabby Queen Page 35