Scabby Queen

by Kirstin Innes

  The Knave of Cups, a reversed Queen of Pentacles, and the bound female figure of the Eight of Swords.

  Like clockwork, her fingers began flicking the pages, already knowing roughly where in the book each one would be found. These were all cards that Carrie had drawn before, too – and then there was orange, in the corner of her eye – a flash of red hair on a woman going round the corner, out of the window.

  Sam felt as though she’d just been plunged into ice. Acute physical shock as the realization finally sank in, hours after she’d heard it. It wasn’t Clio. Clio Campbell was dead. She’d stopped being in the world, removed herself from it. Clio Campbell no longer existed.

  She found herself sinking low over the table in the café, as though someone was pressing gently down on her back. There was too much to think about. On her screen, Carrie’s message was still flashing, agitated, awaiting instruction. She flicked past it, her fingers reaching out to call him before she’d even thought through what she was doing.

  Dale answered on the second ring.

  ‘Sam, Sam – everything all right, love? Has something happened to Elliot?’

  ‘What? No, no, he’s fine. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I just thought. Because he’s at his football. Maybe an injury or something. That’s good.’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Yeah. So. What can I do for you?’

  She took a second. Why was she calling again? Why was she doing this?

  ‘Dale, she died. That woman. Clio.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, love. I heard it a few months ago.’

  ‘I’ve just found out.’

  ‘Oh, right. I didn’t want to mention it to you just in case – well, you might have been dealing with it in some way. I didn’t know— Anyway. How you doing? How you taking it?’

  ‘Doing a lot of thinking, Dale. Suddenly seeing everything kind of – kind of clearly for the first time but kind of, kind of like I’m really really far out from it all now. Does that make sense? That doesn’t even make sense, does it. Fucking hell.’

  ‘Nah, you’re making sense just fine, Sam. You are.’

  ‘Anyway. I think I might want to change some things. I think I need to take a serious look at some things. In a good way. Definitely in a good way. Listen – would you be up for coming round for dinner tonight? Elliot would love to see you. A treat. Know what I’m saying? I could do with it too.’

  She could hear something unspoken in his silence. After what seemed like an hour and was probably only a few seconds, he coughed, made words.

  ‘Ah. Yeah. No, tonight – tonight won’t work, Sam. Sorry. Me and Melissa was going to have a special dinner.’

  Of course. Of course Melissa. She tried to breeze over it, cover herself.

  ‘No worries. No worries at all. Short notice, innit.’

  She felt him pulsing, conflicted, down the line. Was she imagining it? Was she?

  ‘But maybe, maybe next week? I could come round one night next week, have dinner with the boy, see you both?’

  ‘Sure! Sure. Great. Yeah. Just send me a text with a couple of good times.’

  ‘Listen. Listen, love. You look after yourself now. Aight? You hearing me? We’ll talk, OK? Next week. Soon.’

  As the call ended, her phone buzzed anxiously. Three more messages from Carrie.

  What do u mean??

  Aare you there?!!!

  Samatha?!?!

  She breathed in. She turned to the screen, her thumbs blurring as she typed. So many of the words came almost automatically. She was regurgitating platitudes that had been served up to her in years of therapy, counselling and survivors’ groups. They were words that hadn’t ever quite touched her.

  Carrie, what I’m seeing here is the cards sending you the same signals over and over again. I think you need to listen to them, to what they’re saying. They’re saying that you’re using them as a crutch and you need to stop relying on them. You have to live for you, in your moment. You need to be able to make your own decisions without spending hundreds of pounds on an online psychic service, but, much bigger than that, you need to let go of your own issues first. You’re holding on to a lot of anger, Carrie, and it’s poisoning your every interaction with the outside world. It’s stopping you from seeing the whole picture. It’s time to work towards something else, Carrie. I don’t want to see you on here again after today – all this money could be used much better in getting you some counselling. At least look into anger management. But you’re free, Carrie. I free you.

  Sam tucked five pounds under her saucer and got up. She left the book on the table, and on her way out of the door she deleted the app the tarot service used. She passed Spider and his buddies again as she walked under the arches and raised her fist in solidarity from her side of the road but didn’t cross. She looked up, at the old warehouse, where it had all happened to another, younger person she could barely touch. And for a second she felt all the selves she’d been settling around her shoulders. Then she began to run, down the street and round the corner to the park where Elliot was still huffing his pudgy little body about after a ball he’d never catch.

  ‘Come on, my darling!’ she yelled, leaning over the fence and waving, half to embarrass him and half because she just wanted him to know that she was there, have someone acknowledge her. ‘You can do it!’

  NEIL

  Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 2019

  ‘The thing about “Rise Up”, I’ve realized, was that it was brilliant because it was so cheerily vague about its message. A twenty-year-old’s idea of politics; people gotta rise up, and then they do, and that will solve everything, ba ba doo doo dum.’

  He chuckled; the audience chuckled back, a polite ripple under the canopy.

  ‘Had Clio been less scrupulous or more savvy it would have been a perfect soundtrack for advertising jeans, or Pepsi. For all the explosive value her Top of the Pops appearance had at the time, the song itself contains nothing that will really challenge anyone’s cosily held values.’

  ‘Well, you know – maybe that’s what makes it so evergreen,’ said the moderator, a youngish, female music journalist he hadn’t heard of before today, all red lips and big dark sexy spectacle frames. ‘It meets a need for a protest song and people can put their own energy behind it.’

  Neil grinned, waved a hand to skim over her seriousness, before it spoiled his punchline. ‘Absolutely. So we can stick it to the man by downloading it again from iTunes.’

  Again, that gently tickled chuckle across the tent, which was pleasingly full for the size of it. Later on, he knew, he would bring them to the verge of tears. His well-heeled, middle-aged audience, mostly comfortable former lefties, had all paid their £17.50 plus booking fee for his own unique insights into Clio’s life. At least half of them would shortly also pay their £19.99 for the hardback with its lovely black and white shot of Clio’s young face, only the lipstick coloured in red, his name embossed in gold across her shoulders. They’d happily queue for up to twenty minutes for his signature and their own tiny bit of time with him. This was his third book festival and seventh public reading on the tour. He knew the way it worked now. The sections that went down best as performances were always the ones drawn from his own experience; literary audiences tittered, thrilled at Deek’s colourful language, and nodded knowingly at mentions of ‘Gogsy’ Duke and the poll tax protests. He heard his own voice slipping in and out of accents, a thickening in his throat as he described life on the scheme or imitated Danny Mansfield’s bodyguard. It was a stark contrast to the assured, still-new cadence he used for answering questions, a version of his mother’s phone voice from back in the day, although its confidence flowed from his absolute mastery of the topic rather than a sense of inferiority hastily covered.

  His agent had got him a surprisingly good deal (‘Given that you don’t work for a national paper, this is pretty generous, yeah? I mean, they need it in four months max to cash in; publication on the anniversary of her death
or the whole thing’s off, so they’re paying you to get writing now’) and he’d been able to walk out of the newsroom having delivered his resignation right into Craig’s close-shaven face, tight with the satisfaction of it. Perhaps there wasn’t a lifelong career to be had in just being the world’s foremost Clio Campbell expert, but it was certainly opening doors – he’d been asked back onto Radio 4 three times since the launch.

  As he’d hoped when he’d taken that leap and made his audacious, brilliant pitch, a big-name publisher and the lunches they could buy had proved a far better passport than his previous, half-mumbled calling card. Shiv West, Justine Frischmann, Danny Mansfield, Edwyn Collins and both of the Proclaimers answered his emails personally, perhaps impressed, perhaps afraid of being misrepresented on a grand scale if they didn’t reply. Even Za Flow, who had refused to make any other comment, gave his one and only interview to Clio’s official biographer. Neil had spent time carefully courting him, met twice with him, touting his old-friend credentials, bringing photographs and mementos to prove himself.

  ‘I want to let people understand the real Clio. The one we knew. The woman behind the headlines. There’s something meaningful that needs to be said here – about mental health, about the place of women in the music business, about the amount that she suffered. And I want to do it before the bastards of the world get to have the final say on her. Know what I mean, man?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, totally,’ the rapper had replied, nodding, taking a sip of his drink. ‘Nah, I feel you, man. I got a good feeling. I can trust you, innit. OK. I’m in. I’ll do it.’

  There had been whispers of other books being written, but Neil had already been there and spoken to everyone. He’d cared enough to put in the work, and he’d won the race. The publisher had insisted he call it Rise Up: Clio Campbell in Public and Private; his own suggested title (The Northern Lass) was far too provincial, they said. He’d felt aggrieved at the time (though in no position to argue with them), but as the book went into its second print run and continued to sell, he had to admit that they knew what they were doing.

  His signing queues were often largely men like him. His people, the red lips on that cover summoning half-forgotten youthful lust. Then the women, the forties to sixties, Clio’s contemporaries, still seeing themselves in her. Then a smattering of late teens and early twenty-somethings inspired by the tragic story they’d heard last year, by a newly discovered icon for their walls, their martyr, their rebel girl.

  ‘I saw her onstage at the Iraq War protest.’

  ‘Watching her on Top of the Pops changed my life.’

  ‘I used to live round the corner from her. We never spoke, though.’

  At each he’d smile sadly, check the spelling of their name, nod till they were done. Occasionally, if they were going on too long and the queue was getting restless, he’d cut them off by misting up, pat a hand, say, ‘It really means so much to me, you know, to see how much she’s still remembered. That what she did meant something to so many. Thank you for telling me this.’

  Heard, validated, given her place in Clio Campbell’s life story, the woman bustled off, hugging her copy of the book at chest height, beaming. He was aware of the next body shuffling into the space, reached out for the book, pen at the ready. There was no book. He looked up. A large young black woman, dressed too brightly to blend into the shabbily elegant festival crowd, was glaring at him.

  ‘Hello. Don’t you want me to sign anything?’

  ‘No I do not, thank you. You not remember me then, Mr Munro?’

  He was drawing a blank, and her voice was loud.

  ‘Nancy. Nancy Okonkwo. We met at Clio’s once, one of her dinners. You was drunk, though.’

  He hadn’t been to dinner more than twice at Clio’s, but really had no memory of this woman at all.

  ‘Nancy! Of course. Sorry – it’s been a long day.’

  ‘So I’m not going to hold these nice people up. But I wanted to come here and tell you myself that I think you should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Oh, you heard me. You know, when I first hear that someone was writing a book about Clio I thought yes. That’s the right thing. Someone needs to tell the world about my girl, her whole life story. I heard you on the radio, I thought, well, he was a friend of hers. Not a very good friend, mind you, but he knows our Clio. Better than a stranger do it. He will tell it right. And then I read this nonsense –’ she paused for a second to flick an impatient hand at the beautiful pyramid of books the shop assistant had created on his signing table ‘– and it make me so angry I almost ripped up a library book. What you thinking you doing here? With this? Really? You take a kind, honest woman who never did nothing in the world if it wasn’t to fight for people in a worse situation than herself, and you make her a laughing stock? You hold her up on a stage, all the little private human things every person got going on with them, and you show them to the world? That’s when you not making her whole life all about you, you know. Where’s all the mention of her work – her real work? All those years of looking out for the little guy, trying to make a difference? No, you just write about all her ex-boyfriends and laugh at her politics with your rich friends.’

  Neil was very, very aware of the eyes of the queue on them. He coughed slightly, to buy himself time, thought fast.

  ‘I’m really sorry the book wasn’t to your liking. We all have our different memories of Clio, and these are mine, built up over thirty years of friendship – before you were even born, I suspect. Human beings are such multifaceted things, aren’t we – two people can have completely different pictures of the same woman very easily. Just because you don’t recognize the woman that I knew and loved, please don’t invalidate my memories of her. And how could something as small and flimsy as a book manage to encapsulate the whole of a person’s life, especially a life like Clio’s, lived so big and brightly?’

  She was still glaring, but she didn’t interrupt him again. He reached out the hand that didn’t hold the pen towards her, being careful not to touch.

  ‘We both miss her hugely, don’t we. I think that’s pretty clear. I do need to give a bit more time to these people now –’ he gesticulated at the queue, which had morphed into a goggling mob around her shoulders ‘– but I would really like it if you and I could meet up and chat about our memories of Clio later on – are you in town for long? Are you based in Glasgow? Here’s my number – I’d love to listen to everything you’ve got to say. I’ll take it on board, I promise; perhaps we could find some common ground about such a brilliant woman eventually?’

  He wrote down the numbers quickly on a receipt someone had left on the table, substituted a seven for the final eight at the last second. The bookshop assistants he had summoned with his frantic eye signals hovered nearby, walked her gently out without causing any more of a scene. Neil breathed, took a sip from the glass of wine the publicist had put on the table for him, looked up at the man in the leather jacket who was next in the queue.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘She was some woman, and she’s still got the power to make passions run high, eh?’ He reached for the book, already open at the title page, and the man in the leather jacket echoed his chuckle.

  HAMZA

  London, 2018–19

  He wished, many many times, he’d never told Gemma about the break-up with Clio.

  ‘A curse?’ Gemma had said. ‘She actually put a curse on you? With her period blood?’

  ‘Nah. Come on, man, I don’t believe in all that. It was just fucking weird was what it was.’

  ‘Mm. Dunno, babe. My grandma would believe in all that. S’a Congolese thing.’

  ‘Yeah well, Clio ain’t Congolese. She’s a pissed-off middle-aged woman from Scotland who just got dumped, that’s all.’

  He thought that was an end to it. He himself had completely forgotten it all. And then, seven years later, three days after Clio died, he’d been sleeping on Calvin’s couch when the phone tucked und
er the pillow blared at him, startling him into the morning light. It was difficult to make out what Gemma was saying at first, through the tears, the shuddering snotty breath. She’d taken Snoop out at six in the morning for his usual walk, the streets quiet, the same route they always took. Suddenly he’d broken his lead and run across the road (‘like he was possessed or something’) just at the point a speeding red sports car had rounded the corner.

  ‘And – and – and I was thinking, I was thinking, babe, what if this is Clio? What if it’s her curse? Finally happening, now that she’s dead?’

  He got an Uber straight back home, wrapped his arms round her, told her over and over, there’s no curse, there’s no such thing as curses. They mourned their dog together, their previous divisions evaporated, any confusion he was feeling over Clio lost under this more immediate, more pressing grief. Gemma had got pregnant almost immediately afterwards, through two different modes of contraception, as though the huge wave of emotion Snoop left behind him had demanded something to fill it. Two weeks after they’d done the test and before they’d been able to let him know, Hamza’s father had a sudden heart attack, just sitting there at the breakfast table, unable to get his last words out to his wife.

  Gemma kept herself small and quiet during this time, and Hamza tried, awkwardly, when he remembered, not to shutter himself off from her. She was paranoid about the baby from the start, wouldn’t let him fuck her even when all he needed was just to stretch out into his woman and roar and sublimate some of this loss into something physical. Nothing seemed calm any more, nothing he knew was the same. The dog’s basket still sat there in the hallway, its emptiness eyeing him sadly whenever he tried to leave the house.

  Eventually, Gemma broke. He came in from his mum’s one afternoon to find her in tears at the table, having just been made redundant.