Scabby Queen
SCABBY QUEEN
Kirstin Innes
Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020
Due to the correction of an error in the publishing process, this updated edition of the text differs from the original hardback printing.
Copyright © Kirstin Innes 2020
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Kirstin Innes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The writer acknowledges support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland towards the writing of this title.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008342296
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008342319
Version: 2020-07-15
Dedication
This one is for Bis, and will always be for Bis
Epigraph
Though cruel Fate should bid us part
Far as the Pole and Line,
Her dear idea around my heart
Should tenderly entwine:
Though mountains rise and desarts howl
And oceans roar between;
Yet dearer than my deathless soul
I still would love my Jean.
ROBERT BURNS, ‘The Northern Lass’
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Some People
Ruth: Kilbarchan, 22 January 2018
Neil: Glasgow, 22–23 January 2018
Donald: Achiltibuie, 24 January 2018
Sammi: Brixton, 2018
Simon: Bristol, 2008
Neil: Glasgow, 23 January 2018
Hamza: London, 24 January 2018
Xanthe: Santorini, 2012
Donald: 1974–84
Ruth: Glasgow, 23 January 2018
Danny: Cumbria, 1993
Sammi: Brixton, 2009
Neil: Glasgow, 23 January 2018
Donald: Edinburgh, 1993
Malcolm: Edinburgh, 2003
Sammi: Brixton, 2009
Shiv: Glasgow, 4 February 2017
Ida: Euston–Oxenholme, 2011
Donald: Glasgow and Achiltibuie, 2004
Hamza: London, 24 January 2018
Sammi: 2009–11
Adele: Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, 2015
Neil: Glasgow, 25 January 2018
Ruth: Glasgow, 2014
Donald: Achiltibuie, 24 January 2018
Eileen: Glendale Retirement Home, Ayr, 2018
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
SOME PEOPLE
Adele Roberts – a nurse
Danny Mansfield – a tour manager, a husband
Donald Bain – a godfather (unofficial)
Eileen Johnstone – a mother
Hamza Hassan – a boyfriend
Ida Edwards – a woman on a train
Jess Blake – a comrade
Malcolm Campbell – a father
Neil Munro – a journalist
Ruth Jones – a friend
Sammi Smith – a girl who lives in a squat
Shiv West – a popular musician
Simon Carruthers – a man at a wedding
Xanthe Christos – a former comrade
Q Magazine, June 1990
Ginger Nut
Pete Moss sets to with pop’s newest It Girl
Teatime telly was changed for ever one Thursday evening in March this year. Dads all over the country froze, forkfuls of egg and chips halfway to their mouths. Mothers tutted and turned their heads away, scraped plates jealously. And the kids, pressed up against the screens? Well, they’d never seen anything like it – a young woman defying those stodgy Top of the Pops conventions, unbuttoning her waistcoat to display a curve-stretched anti-poll tax slogan T-shirt underneath.
Clio Campbell has an … effect on people.
Everyone pauses to look at her as she walks into this bog-standard London boozer at lunchtime, in her lipstick, short skirt and casually scuffed Doc Marten boots. Their eyes are drawn by that shock of red hair and held by the fierce, piercing beauty in her gaze. They know her. They recognize her. They point. And she smiles at them, gently, accepting this new-found level of fame. Her eyes meet mine and she poses the question, unspoken. Are you? I nod; it’s me. She folds her legs delicately into the chair opposite me and flashes me a big, bold grin. ‘Fancy a pint?’ she asks.
Campbell is, demonstrably, Scottish. With her head of scorched curls, her milky skin and her honeyed, lilting accent, she seems to have walked straight off the set of Highlander. She likes to keep her origins a mystery (‘Och, I grew up in a tiny wee place. You’d never have heard of it,’ she says, when I press her), but she will admit to a musical apprenticeship around the folk-music clubs and dance halls of the Scottish Highlands.
When she entered the pop pantheon earlier this year with the insanely catchy anti-poll tax stomp ‘Rise Up’, there were those questioning whether a 23-year-old girl could possibly have written so musically complex a song herself (answer: yes, she could and did). Her father, she tells me, is a well-known front man on the folk-music scene and it’s clear that she must have inherited from him that swaggering charisma that borders on magnetic; her godfather is the session musician Donald Bain, a trusty pair of hands on any album and the man she credits with her musical education. But Clio Campbell belongs firmly in the here and now, not hidden amid the beards and jumpers at the back of a dusty old folk-music club. ‘Rise Up’ caught the mood of a nation, charting at number two and dancing angrily in and out of the top forty ever since, but Campbell’s rise to stardom was not the conventional one. She had written the song to be sung by the masses at anti-poll tax meetings in Glasgow; she began to perform it onstage at rallies, and as her stages got ever bigger she was spotted and brought down to the big smoke.
‘Like a tractor beam pulling me here. Like I’m an astronaut – travelling so far from my native habitat I don’t know if I’ll be the same again when I go back. Maybe I’ll just stay here, floating in space, eh?’
She is here for good now, it seems. EMI signed her up for a three-album deal and she’s spent the months since Rising Up working on new material. Her next single, ‘Can’t, Won’t’, nods towards the still-brewing political debate that made her name, but its lyrics are tamer. Dare I say, I ask, that it lacks ‘Rise Up’s bite?
‘Aye, the record company asked me to slow down a bit! Not my choice, right enough. They said they wanted me to focus on the music for this one. If I keep making the tunes, I’ll still have chances like this to make sure the issues I care about are getting heard, anyway.’
She sets down her pint of snakebite, the glass rimmed with red lip-prints, and fixes those eyes on mine. Then, in that chiming, soaring voice, she lists off a series of things that worry her about the way the country is being run – the government chief amongst them – with the truly earnest passion only a young, beautiful woman can get away with. I could listen to her all day. Clio Campbell, it seems, is ready to fight.
‘Can’t, Won’t’ by Clio Campbell is out on 1 June.
RUTH
Kilbarchan, 22 January 2018
On her fiftieth birthday, Clio had asked guests – if they insisted on presents – to bring her something they’d made themselves. Her friends, she was always fond of saying, were creative people, and mostly they rose to the challenge. Clay pots, hand-knitted scarves, specially bound books containing photographs, earrings, poems. Clio courted her admirers from drama students and young revolutionaries; earnest kids, basically. And then there were the crumpled faces and puffy stomachs of her original fans, the lonely souls who’d loved her at concerts in tiny bars and who still couldn’t really talk to her now they were friends with her on Facebook. Creative people. People who were not ordinary.
Twelve days before Clio’s fifty-first birthday, Ruth walked into the guest room and found her dead, surrounded by those gifts. Clay pots jammed with now empty tea-light cases, all their wax burned away. Scarves tied between the bedposts like bunting. A mix CD made for her by one of her lovely twenty-something boys ticking in the portable player. The empty packets of painkillers had been neatly stacked, the vodka decanted into a porcelain jug Ruth had inherited from her grandmother. Her kitchen pestle and mortar, a thirtieth birthday present, sat to one side, with a white residue in it. The scene had been stage-managed, set not just for Clio, but for whoever would find her. And she must have known that would be Ruth. Who else would it have been.
‘Oh,’ Ruth said. ‘Clio. Sorry.’
Clio’s voice, in her head, ‘Oh fucksake, Ruth! You have to stop apologizing!’
When she made herself look at it, she saw that the body was contorted at a strange angle, one hand wrapped around her stomach. Some pale yellow foam had crusted around the left-hand side of her mouth and stuck to the pillow. Her face was wedged into an ugly scream – eyes screwed shut, mouth gaping open. She looked like a wax figure from a horror film, a shonky approximation of a human.
Ruth breathed in. The curtains were drawn and the room smelled sour. Then she steeled herself, placed two fingers on Clio’s neck. She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for; the skin was cold, didn’t feel like flesh although it had the same texture. She moved her hand around. There was no pulse. Of course there was no pulse.
‘Right,’ Ruth said, to Clio. ‘OK.’
She pushed past the bed, opened the window, scooped up the four empty boxes of supermarket own-brand paracetamol. There was one of those supermarkets round the corner from Clio’s flat in Glasgow. None near here. She put them down.
Ruth began to pull at a knitted pink scarf wrapped around the bedpost. Blood bulged in her fingers as the wool tightened on her hand. The scarf started fraying and she thought she might be disturbing a crime scene. She decided to leave the room.
On the line to the emergency services, she’d tried to be factual. ‘There’s a dead body in my home,’ she’d said, when asked which service she wanted to be connected to, because she wasn’t sure, suddenly, whether it was police or ambulance you asked for. ‘I know I don’t want the fire brigade, anyway.’ She might have chuckled there. It’s what you do when something’s awkward, isn’t it? You make a joke.
The woman on the other end of the line had a sharp Northern Irish accent. ‘OK, ma’am. Ma’am? Is the body someone you know?’
After that was done, she’d looked at the phone still in her hand, and called Alison.
‘Hi. What’s up? I’m at work—’
‘Hello. Clio is in the room upstairs, and she’s dead.’
She realized immediately that it had been a mistake, calling her.
‘She – what? Oh. Wow. Wow. What? What happened? Oh. Oh. Ruth, are – is everything all right? Well, no, of course everything’s not all right. Right. Oh. Wow. Um. Um. Do you – do you want me – I could come. I mean, there’s the marketing meeting at four, but I could – yeah, it’s not. Right, I’ll be there. I’m on my way. It’s OK.’
‘No, don’t worry. Stay where you are.’ The thought of Alison huffing about in the quiet of her living room. ‘I just needed to tell someone.’
‘Have you called an ambulance? Is she definitely dead? She’s not just – I mean, what’s she done? Er, yeah. Yeah. Suicide, I take it?’
Suicide, I take it. Clio would hate that Alison was the first person to hear about her death. Would have hated. Alison hadn’t slept over at all during Clio’s stay at the cottage this time, said that she didn’t like to think of Clio listening to them having sex. Really it was that Clio couldn’t hide her disdain for Ruth’s girlfriend. She thought Alison was possessive and stupid, and she’d told Ruth so. Often.
Alison was still sputtering down the phone.
‘It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I think that’s the police, now. Someone at the door. I’ll need to go. Don’t worry about me.’
The policewoman was young; thin with order and neatness, a delicate single diamond on a plain band on her left hand. Already. Like a bird, a well-behaved little bird. Ruth felt huge beside her, rangy and childless. The policewoman pecked at the tea and biscuit. Ruth had felt compelled to provide for them, although they’d told her to sit down. The man, the senior, stood at the back of the room, hands behind his back, letting the women get on with the business.
The ambulance men were having a lot of trouble getting the stretcher down the staircase. She heard it knocking against the walls, their gentle grunts and mutters to each other. Something thumped, one of them swore.
‘So, can you tell me the nature of your relationship with Mrs Campbell?’
Clio never, ever stood for being called ‘Mrs’. Ruth let it go. Let’s just get all this over with, she thought.
‘Your relationship?’
Why did she need to know that, this little bird? She was just being nosy. She saw two older women – well, Ruth was a bit older than her, at least – together and was poking around after scandal. That was what.
‘We were friends. She often came to stay with me when she was feeling depressed. She liked it here.’
‘And when was the last time you saw Mrs Campbell?’
Scrawny thing. Snuck snuck snuck; her little teeth on the biscuit. The male officer looked up at the ceiling.
‘The last time?’
‘This morning. I made us breakfast, and she came downstairs to eat it. I told her what I was doing today – I was in a hurry to leave. She seemed fine, but I wasn’t paying attention. She’d seemed fine for days. Fairly peaceful. I didn’t think she was having one of her episodes.’
‘One of her “episodes”?’
Yeah, that’s what I said, Ruth thought and didn’t say. Be nice. Be civil. Use sentences.
‘Mania. She suffered from periods of mania, which would then throw her into quite a hard depression. Undiagnosed, but I looked it up – she fitted all the symptoms. She’d been like that when she arrived, about three weeks ago, but I’d thought she was getting better. She’d been calmer. Talking about going home again, about getting back to work.’
The policewoman wrote with a translucent hand crossed by delicate blue veins, the pen fatter than her fingers.
‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Ruth said. These were half-truths – if that – and she wondered whether she was obstructing the course of justice by sort of lying to a police officer. Of course not. There was no justice to obstruct. It just meant they’d get out of her hair more quickly, if she told them these things.
‘And is there anything else you think we should know?’
‘I – yeah. The vodka.’
‘The vodka?’
‘I don’t like vodka, so I don’t buy it. And she couldn’t drive, so she must have picked it up somewhere in the village. You should ask. Maybe someone saw her today.’
All those bags she’d arrived with full of her trinkets and faff. Because she wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and see physical evidence that people loved her, she’d said. Easy enough to tuck a bottle and a few packets of pills in a side pocket somewhere.
Those pills.
The policewoman leaned forward.
‘Mrs Jones? Are you all right?’
Ruth realized what she was sitting on.
‘Would you mind getting off that table, please? It was my grandmother’s.’
It wasn’t; she’d picked it up for a fiver in a charity shop in town. She wondered why she’d said that even as she could still taste the words. The policewoman scuffled and jumped up, like she’d been caught defiling a relic.
If Clio had brought the pills with her, that would mean she’d known, wouldn’t it? That she’d chosen this death, in this place. Chosen Ruth.
Ruth didn’t tell the policewoman this. What would that add, to her report in her neat rounded schoolgirl handwriting? A wee bit of extra colour? The outcome was still the same. Ruth couldn’t have stopped this happening. And why, really, why would she?
A fairly open-and-shut case, the man police said as they were leaving, as the ambulance pulled out into the street. Seven o’clock now; those people walking up the street to get a chippy for dinner would have seen the stretcher tipped slightly as they cantilevered out of the door, would have hushed their conversation to stare. Goggling nosily at all of their futures, like people can’t help but do.
Ruth had always liked the space in her cottage created by people just leaving it, when she could slowly take each room back for herself, get used to where she fitted in amongst her own things again. Today, though, there was silence. Too much of a silence. She stopped still in the hallway and tried to listen. Nothing; there was a large scrape from the stretcher in the new plasterwork at the bottom of the stairs, though. Clio gouging a final proof of her existence onto the wall. The work it would take to cover that up.
Ruth knew without having to go and look that the cat had gone.
Alison had texted to say she’d be there soon. Ruth picked up the half-biscuit the policewoman had left, in a saucer, licked the bitten corner with the very tip of her tongue. She should go for a walk. She should think about food. She should try and look for the cat.
It was the first dead body she’d seen, now she thought of it. It didn’t seem to be formed of the same matter as the living Clio, the one who had hunched over a cup of tea and pushed away her toast this morning (those plates had been washed up, though, she noticed, walking into the kitchen). Just something left behind.
People. She should probably tell people. How did you do that, these days? Make phone calls? Post on Facebook? She imagined the cat out there, spooked and jerky, running away from the strange new smell of the house.
It did seem to have taken over, that smell. Like something gone bad in the fridge. She should get out. Look for the cat. Leave by the back door, so there would be no craned necks, no amateur detectives trying to get the story behind the stretcher. She couldn’t find the key, so she didn’t lock the door behind her, walked straight up the garden, over the little fence and into the woods behind the house. Wet grass already soaking through her slippers, but that didn’t matter. Far, far better to be out here.
Clio had arrived at the platform with a battered wheeled suitcase, two tote bags and a sports holdall slung messily across her body. Her hair was frizzing out from a rubber band and her hands weren’t still: they twitched and clenched as she glanced about herself.
‘Here you are,’ Ruth had said, walking towards her with her arms outstretched. ‘Hello, my lovely. Let’s get you into the car.’
When they got to the cottage, its rough white walls seemed to wrap themselves around Clio, swaddle her down. Ruth had lit a fire in the stove before driving up to the station, and Clio settled herself in the big patchy armchair beside it, pulled out a small embroidered quilt from one of her many bags and arranged it over her knees. The cat had jumped on, straight away. The cat loved Clio.
‘There we are,’ Ruth said, handing her a cup of herbal tea. ‘There we are.’
Ruth had seen this before, more than once. The first sign was always the fluttering, the anxiety of her fingers, followed by an inability to choke a full sentence through her teeth without becoming distracted or rising into a panic. In fact, it tended to be this Clio that she saw, these days. It had become a bad-times-only friendship, somewhere as the years passed. The role she filled in Clio’s life now was occasional care-giver and calm-bringer, and she wasn’t sure when that had happened. Ruth had always enjoyed being capable; something about her sturdiness put people at ease and she liked it. Clio had reacted to that early on in their professional relationship, when she’d been futzing over lost receipts in the old office, and Ruth had poured her some water, ushered her into a seat and sorted the problem out. It had set the tone for the friendship to come.
The gifts usually came afterwards. A mix CD or a hand-picked bunch of flowers (probably stolen from a council display box) sent to the office. These days, colourful cushions, junk-shop vases and books with fulsome handwritten dedications on the flyleaf would arrive at the cottage the following week, after Clio had taken and recovered from one of her turns. And then she wouldn’t be in touch for a while, maybe two, three months. Ruth used to think this was out of embarrassment; these days she recognized the terms of their friendship for what it was.
‘Upstairs is all ready for you. How tired are you feeling?’
‘Just sore. In my bones.’
‘Are you hungry? There’s some soup in the fridge, or we could grab a curry from up the road if you wanted.’
‘No. I’m all right.’
Clio had her rituals while she was at the cottage, and Ruth would tick them off as the signs of recovery. After a few days, while Ruth was at work, she would lift the creaky oilskin that had belonged to Ruth’s gran down from its peg, pull on Ruth’s wellies, which were two sizes too big for her, and venture out into the woods behind the garden. Not far at first. Ruth would come in and rub her hand over the oilskin as she hung up her own coat, every day, to check whether its stiffness had been disturbed, whether there was any wetness still on it. She never asked Clio about this; old Frank, who lived next door and had courted Ruth’s gran for years, would let her know.
‘She just stands there,’ he said. ‘She’s right still, keeping the house in her eyeline, not quite on the path. Sometimes for about an hour. No one but us would be able to see her.’
The singing would come back next. Just a faint humming under her breath at first, notes pitched into nowhere as she moved, or a slight drone floating over from the couch where she was reading. If all was going well, in a couple of days this would turn into murmured words, then two or three lines, then the sound; Clio’s lungs waking up as they remembered what they could do. The singing stage was a delicate one, though. She was more vulnerable then than when she slumped in chairs without washing for days, fretting her knuckles together. At this point, Ruth would become solicitous, always made sure the cupboards were well-stocked when she left for work. Once, early on, she’d come home to find that Clio had cut her finger and dripped slashes of blood all over the kitchen trying to make soup. Discarded onion skins littered the counter, the saucepan had burned dry, and Clio was back in bed, her hand wrapped in the sheets, soaking through.