Scabby Queen
This time, though, the house had filled with song as Clio came downstairs each morning. Gaelic lullabies and old pop songs echoing through the hall as she sat on the toilet. This time it had all seemed to be fixing itself.
Ruth leaned on a tree in the gloom, puckering her lips at no one, making that kissy, squeaky noise that the cat seemed to like when Clio did it. The wet bark was cold on her hand. She thought back three nights. Clio had been smiling when Ruth got home, had ushered her into a kitchen full of fresh vegetables and fancy-looking bread and explained that she’d caught the tiny bus to the next town, to the supermarket.
‘And let’s go out tonight, Ruth. Just to the pub. John was telling me there’s going to be a little gathering, with the instruments. We should go.’
Ruth was always more popular when Clio was in the village. The glamour of having been someone still hanging off her, she’d walk into the pub differently. ‘Aye, Clio,’ they’d say now, all the old regulars. If they saw Ruth in the street later, by herself, they’d stop her only to ask ‘Our Clio not with you the now, then?’
Clio could usually be persuaded to sing, too. It didn’t take much. They’d pull her into the circle by the fire, men her age or older buying the drinks ‘for you too, lass. There you go,’ as Ruth was made part of something.
She would always give them folk songs. Usually a bit of Burns, possibly some ancient ballad about a fiery lass who went her own way and ran off with a canny chiel. Usually, Ruth loved to hear Clio do the traditional stuff; that rough husk at the edges of the notes so different from the forced, trilling sopranos Ruth’s teachers had affected at school. Over the years and depending on her mood, Clio had said she’d learned to sing from old women in the Western Isles, from traveller folk who went round the villages, from the vogue in folk song in the 1970s, or from her father. She put spit and soul into her song, and the old regulars would bump their glasses on the tables in appreciation, keeping time for her to weave against.
That last night, though, she’d been pushing herself, forcing out one last song and another last song even though the attention had started to wander, though the regulars wanted back to their pints and the young barman was itching around by the CD player. Her voice had strained, her eyes had gone flinty, intent on pushing a party, but eventually she’d crashed back down onto the bench beside Ruth and John, who drove the buses, seeming drunker than she could possibly be. Something about the way her limbs flew about, almost knocking things over, about the way she showed her teeth to gnash out a laugh at John’s little jokes, the feral baring of them, reminded Ruth of her two tiny nieces, the way they went half-savage as they frayed and needed to be steered to bed.
‘Come on, lovey. It’s been a late one, and we should get going.’
Clio was tucked under John’s meaty arm at this point, his moustache beaming down at her.
‘No, I think I’m going to stay on for a bit. You go, though.’
Ruth should probably have recognized this as a danger sign, but she was tired and drunk, unaccustomed to beer. And for God’s sake, she was not Clio’s keeper! They’d woken her as they crashed in, a couple of hours later, an indecent hooting and old wheezing from the living room, muddy footprints crushed into the carpet the next morning. She’d worried that this would be too much, but the singing had continued over the next few days.
Oh, you suspected something, she told herself now. There had been some small alert trying to flicker on in the back of her brain, and she’d dampened it down, thrown a cloth over it, carried on with her life around the big sad fact of Clio at the kitchen table. Be honest with yourself, she muttered, into the trees. You were getting sick of her. You were. You wanted her gone. So you decided not to care.
She had been going through the motions a bit. She had. There would still be toast and tea but only if she was making it for herself too. Well, it had been almost a month. Longer than before. And Clio wasn’t really giving anything back. It was all right, she told herself, to feel a little bit of resentment, surely?
The cat wasn’t out here. She could tell. The cat hated rain; it would have sucked up to someone warm and dry, someone who didn’t have death in their house. Ruth felt so tired. Maybe, she thought, maybe I should just sit down for a while. There was moss and it looked comfy, and through the trees she could still see her kitchen light.
Clio Campbell
Folk singer, activist
SUDDENLY, at a friend’s home, 22/01/2018. Best known for her 1991 single ‘Rise Up’, which reached number four in the singles chart during the height of the poll tax protests, Cliodhna Jean Campbell lived a life of political integrity. Despite her undoubted beauty in her younger years the Ayrshire-born musician was never a comfortable fit with the pop-music establishment, which perhaps fed into her famously acrimonious divorce from music mogul and Big Rock Festival founder Danny Mansfield in the late 1990s. Notably outspoken on a number of causes, Campbell claimed in interviews she was ‘married to the fight’. In 2011 she was a high-profile witness for the prosecution in the case against undercover police officer Michael Carrington, accused of infiltrating a group of anti-globalization activists. Campbell claimed to be one of the women he had slept with and deceived under the guise of an environmental activist.
In later life, shunning her initial success as a pop musician, she began travelling Europe and became a regular on the folk-music circuit performing invigorated takes on folk and traditional standards, and was acclaimed for her 2007 album of the songs of Robert Burns, The Northern Lass, although many traditionalists complained about the hip-hop, blues and grime influences in the instrumentation.
Campbell was public on her Twitter account and in interviews about her struggles with depression and regularly played concerts to raise awareness around mental health issues. She had no children and is not survived by family.
NEIL MUNRO
See story, page 8.
NEIL
Glasgow, 22–23 January 2018
Neil sat there in the office, the near-empty vastness of it like a shock blanket around him. He’d tried calling her immediately but the email had been sent almost three hours earlier while he’d been on deadline, and now her phone slipped straight to voicemail. Her dirty laugh and a ‘go on then, leave us a message.’
Neil,
Goodbye.
Remember me well. Please.
Clio x
What else could it be?
What did you do, with something like this? He looked around the office, where the skeleton crew of kids were packing up, heading out, yapping insults at each other as they went. Tell any one of them and they’d jump on it as an easy story, expect him to do the same.
He realized that seven minutes had gone by since he’d put down the phone. Those seven minutes could have made all the difference, and he’d just been staring at his screen. He called 999.
‘Police. I think I want police. Or maybe ambulance. Yes, ambulance.’
‘Can you tell me the nature of your inquiry, sir?’
‘I’ve just – an old friend has emailed me. She emailed me a few hours ago – I’ve just seen it. And it’s a suicide note, I think. And I don’t know what to do. She’s not answering her phone. I don’t know what to do.’
‘All right, sir. Can you give me your friend’s address?’
‘I – she had a flat in the East End. I can’t think of it now. Wait, I’ll look for it.’
He struggled to think of the last time he’d spent any proper time with her. Her birthday party – before that? Passing her in the foyer of a concert hall, a quick hug and a promise to catch up.
‘Sir? We’ll need a name and address.’
‘Clio Campbell. Her name is Clio Campbell. And I don’t know her address. I’m sorry. You’ll know her, though. She’ll be on your books, surely. She’s somewhere in Glasgow, I think, or she was the last time I saw her.’
‘And you believe she’s sent you a suicide note? How long have you known Clio Campbell for?’
‘I know. I know. I wasn’t expecting this – well, you wouldn’t, would you. But can you find her? You must have people’s addresses registered or something – the electoral register. I’m sure she’ll be on that. Please find her. I’ve tried – she’s not answering her phone. That’s all I’ve got.’
The late squad had come on, over in the far corner, were laughing and typing and taking calls, but this barn of a place, with its seventy unoccupied post-redundancy desks, ate up their sound.
Then he was swiping his pass through the security gates, stretching his hands out into the cracked pockets of his brown leather jacket. He hadn’t worn this for ages, he realized, rubbing rotted-off lint in between his fingers. Years, even. And he’d picked it up today.
He shoved the pass into his pocket and headed down the hill, over the self-consciously shiny pink flagstones the paper had put in seven years ago, just before they announced the first round of redundancies. It was wet out; he felt it soaking through his jeans.
Clio.
She’d been wearing her red lipstick, that time he’d seen her recently, in the crowd after the Patti Smith gig, had smelled of rotting flowers, gin and something sickly as he’d bent in to kiss her and she’d placed a hand on his shoulder to guide him. She’d been with people. There hadn’t been time to talk long, but she’d held his hand and swung it, squeezed it tightly even as she moved on.
He’d done all he could, really. He didn’t know where she was. He’d phoned her. He’d phoned the police.
Now he was in the Albannach, with a tired young girl staring at him from behind the bar. Yes, a drink.
‘I might be in shock,’ he heard himself saying, ‘so I think I need a whisky.’
‘Are you all right? Have you been hurt?’
‘No.’ He waved a hand, held it there in the air, looked at it. ‘Bad news. No.’
It was a double of the cheapest stuff. Rough on his throat. He coughed through it, sank down onto the bar stool.
The advantage of the Albannach now was that none of his colleagues would go there. This bar, practically pressed up against the office, would have been filled to bursting with reporters just off the beat (and on it) in the old days. Moustaches, shabby suits; later leather jackets, well-worn jeans just like his. All gone. The kids from the online team zoomed further into town, to Wi-Fi hotspots with craft beers, he assumed. The mobile reception in here wasn’t good enough for Twitter; there was no jukebox. In his youth he’d hated this place, called it out to other members of his own young guard as emblematic of everything that was wrong with journalism. The macho culture. The refusal to embrace new ideas. The cronyism.
Well, all those cronies had been edged or insulted out by the new regime, the pay cuts, the rounds of voluntary redundancies and the Internet, and now here he was, the old man at the end of the world. He took another sip, nodded at the white-hard auld jake at the other end of the bar and felt all fifty-two years of his age sink through him.
He’d brought Clio in here once. She’d helped herself to one of his cigarettes while he was at the bar.
‘Sorry, doll. I’ve been on rollies for so long that this just looked too good.’
Her accent had changed again, he noticed, a bit more of a lilt and whisper in it than before. That day, she’d wanted to talk to him about land reform. She’d been living up north, working on community buy-out projects, and she wanted him to write a feature.
‘I’m going back up in a week and I think you should come with me. We’re staying in bothies, because the absentee landlord is letting the tenancies go to ruin, foul feudal bastard he is. But the community there, darlin. You need to feel it. It’s proper. I’m in different folks’ houses every night for dinner – they’re just so happy we’re there and helping them. The bothy’s basic, but people give you a few logs for the fire, or an extra blanket, you know. Come with me. You could write the article that could become, like, the call to arms for the land reform movement, you know? You’d be the voice – the first person to voice what’s really going on to the self-satisfied Central Belt. You could become the expert; you could even write a book! Tell you, sometimes, Neil, sometimes I think I might settle up there. Permanently. There’s this initiative to encourage people to take up crofting. Tax relief. Keep a couple of pigs, grow vegetables. Does that appeal to you at all, ever? Be a good place to get on with your writing …’
She looked at him, full-on, that look she did. He was two pints down on an empty stomach, so it came out as a giggle. ‘You? Settle? You’re not going to settle down.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Sorry. I just meant – well, it doesn’t seem likely, given your … your history. We’re – well – I think if you’d wanted to settle you probably would have done. That’s all.’
‘What are you saying, Neil? If you’re not interested in the story, I’ll take it to someone else. Plenty of journalists with open minds and the vision to see where this could go.’
Brian McGuire, one of the old school, had chosen that moment to stotter past them to the toilet, the flaps of his grubby raincoat swinging about him.
‘A lovers’ tiff, eh?’ He stood behind Neil, drumming thick hands on his shoulders. ‘Just you come and have a chat with me, sweetheart. Just you come. And you will.’
Clio glared at him till he turned and left them to it, wheezing out an oh-ho-ho as he pinballed down the corridor.
‘You’ve been at this rag too long, Neil. It’s killing your spirit. What are you going to do – file stories on love-rat local councillors and keep cashing the cheques? I’m disappointed in you.’
She stood up, began gathering her many bags about her.
‘Clio. Come on. Look. Sorry. Hey. Where are you staying tonight?’
‘I’ll crash on someone’s sofa.’
‘Well, I’ve got to get back to it, but why don’t you take my keys, head back to the flat, have a bath? We can talk about this later.’
‘I’ll be fine, Neil. I’ve got plans.’
She always had plans.
By now, someone would have found her, surely. Four hours ago she was alive and sending emails, and he couldn’t have been the only person she’d contact. She wouldn’t still be living by herself; there would be flatmates, a man, maybe?
Was she dead, then? All that hugeness, that person, that Clio, had it just stopped?
Nine hours later he woke up to an alarm he vaguely remembered setting, under what had been Alan the sports editor’s desk on the abandoned second floor. It wasn’t the first time: the cleaners only went in weekly now, so he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. He coughed, inhaled stale ethanol from his own breath and felt his gag reflex jerk. Early shift started in five minutes; he had time to stop by his desk and grab the toothbrush he hoped he still had in one of the drawers.
‘All right, mate? Need you in here.’
Craig, the new editor – Neil would always think of him as the new editor, even though he’d been there almost two years – spoke in scrubbed-up laddish clichés, an approximation of cheery workplace banter spread thinly over the top of his management style. His clean-skinned head shone out round the office, the faintest trace of sculpted stubble extending from ear to cheekbone. Even now, leading the early shift at 5 a.m., he radiated the smug certainty of someone who had already run a 5K and digested his macrobiotic porridge before coming to work. Neil, at least ten years older than him, was always his ‘mate’ – all the men in the office were – and never convinced. He’d been brought in by management after the fourth round of voluntary redundancies, after Patrick, who had run the paper for twelve years and worked at it for forty, had finally had enough and walked out. Craig was returned from London, from the red tops, to raise a family with his much younger wife; had met the new owners at a party, been lured back home by house prices and schools. Craig was not one of the team; mind you, now their union rep had gone, nor was anyone really.
Craig glad-handed the guy from ad sales who always sat in on editorial conferences now, as Neil took his seat in the circle, trying to keep a hand casually over his mouth.
‘Big news this morning. Z-list celeb suicide. Possible lesbian thing. You know the old pop singer, Clio Campbell?’ He puckered his lips, crooned. ‘“Rise up. People gotta rise up” – her? Yeah? Neil, mate, this is your beat? Arts. So I want you on it.’
‘There’s nothing out there about it yet, Craig,’ said one of the girls from the new intake, her phone lighting her face from below.
‘I’ve just had a pretty good tip, darling. This minute. Neil, here’s the address the body was found at – you’ll need the car, it’s a bit of a trek – her dyke girlfriend’s house, my source reckoned. Anyway, you’d probably want to talk to the girlfriend, maybe take Mike or whoever’s on today with you, be nice to get a teary shot. What else – yeah, Suz?’
‘Didn’t she used to be married to Danny Mansfield? I could pop down their offices and have a chat with him.’
Neil looked down. He was holding on to the faded fabric over the knees of his jeans with both hands.
‘I should do that. I know Danny. I also know Gordon Duke, back from when he and Clio were an item. I’m your man on this one, Craig.’
The boy two seats along was making a show of wincing at Neil’s breath, but Craig smiled, a thin baring of teeth.
‘Excellent, mate, excellent. Suz, you get out to this village, babes. You do the additional on this. Aidan, we’ll want pics from the archive – a couple from when she was young and sexy and the worst one you can find of her from nowadays, eh? I mean, it’s a tragic story. We should go big. Neil, mate, how do you feel about a tied-in obit? You’re probably pretty good on this one, right? Something appropriately sombre, you know the stuff. The lovers, the headlines, big beats: two hundred and fifty words. It’s not like she’s Kylie Minogue or anything.’
In the corridor, after, Neil grabbed at Suzanne’s shoulder. She glared at him.
‘Suzanne. Don’t do it like that. Don’t doorstep a grieving woman, for God’s sake. That’s not what we do.’
‘OK, thanks,’ she said, turning away from him.
‘Wait! Wait. Craig was giving you the wrong steer there. She’s not a lesbian. I know – knew – her. Have done for years. It’s not a dyke thing.’
‘OK,’ she said again, and walked off to the car park.
He wondered who the woman was – some friend of Clio’s, some paranoid, dreadlocked old protester with a kind heart and a spare room, probably. Poor cow. He thought of the name blipping across police radios, picked up by whichever old boy Craig was keeping in expensive whisky. It was comforting to know that some aspects of the fourth estate remained unchanged. The very worst aspects, right enough. The end of the world was coming and, even as the human-built institutions of the past two hundred years rotted away, their cancerous old bones still stood. Anything pure or graceful about this job was long gone, really, wasn’t it?
Two hundred and fifty words.
Linwood, 1989
Gogsy Duke’s kitchen. A thin open galley with its bare light bulb, rusty hob and a sink jammed with mucky crockery. He’d woken up on the sofa by the doorway, covered in a pink crochet blanket, with a strong baccy scent in his nostrils and very little idea how he’d got there. They’d been in the Welly up at the new community centre, couple of drinks, and Gogsy had called him over, locked him deep into conversation. He remembered a stumble, a realization that he’d left his keys and his mum would kill him; he remembered Gogsy’s voice, an arm wrapped round his neck, a whiff of sweat.
She was leaning on the kitchen unit, tapping a rollie into a mug, wrapped up in a rich green dressing gown; a streak of colour that shouldn’t have been there, in amongst the brown ordinariness of Gogsy’s house. All that red, red hair in a bundle on top of her head. He fumbled about for his glasses, and she swam into focus. Her skin was pink and he was struck by how very young she must be.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo yourself.’
‘Mind if I—?’
‘Go for it.’
He squeezed past her, careful not to brush up against the dressing gown, tried not to breathe. He was conscious of the sticky film of sleep on his skin, the raw smell of himself, the stain on the leg of the jeans he’d slept in. The tap sputtered and farted water all over his hands, his T-shirt, everywhere but into the mug he’d held underneath it.
‘Fuck!’
She laughed. Three notes, bell-clear.
‘That thing’s walloped. Don’t worry. I’ll get you a spare one of Gogsy’s.’
She was back in a minute with a faded Deacon Blue tour shirt. She smiled at him, revealing a single deep dimple in her left cheek, big enough to stick his finger into.
‘I’ll give you some privacy.’
She turned her back, faced the cooker, laughed again.
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you wanting some breakfast?’
He was battling with the T-shirt, trying to pull it over his head quickly, suck in his stomach.
‘Yeah … yeah, that would be great.’
She hunted around the cupboards, found two eggs and the few end slices of a loaf of Mother’s Pride in a waxy bag. He liked the way she moved: quick, certain motion under the classy drape of her dressing gown. The deep green chimed off her eyes. When she stretched up to the shelf he realized that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
‘So, bit of a late one last night, eh?’
‘Eh. You’re not wrong.’
‘Youse must have stoated in at about two in the morning!’
‘Uh. Really?’
Yeah, that’s a killer comeback, Neil. Killer.
The eggs hissed as she cracked them into the fat.
‘I’m Cliodhna, anyway. Clio.’
‘Neil. I’m Neil.’
‘Hi, Neil. Do you want to get that bread buttered?’
She gave him that smile again, all the way. A little curl was breaking loose from her topknot, slipping slowly down into her face as she wielded a spatula and the grease jumped and spat. He forced himself not to reach out and stroke it back in for her, concentrated instead on sawing chunks off a fridge-solid block of butter, a constellation of crumbs pushed into its surface.
‘So. Neil. Where did you come from?’
He’d wanted to ask her the same question, actually – her accent wasn’t local at all. Could be Borders, could be Highland, could be something else entirely. But he didn’t get to ask or answer, as the atmosphere changed sharply. Gogsy pushed his way into the kitchen, soft in vest and Y-fronts, crooning Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Angel Eyes’ with transatlantic soul, shoving past Neil to slip his arms round her waist from behind. His smell – Brut, sweat, stale booze – filled the tiny space. Neil retreated to the couch.
‘See you’ve met ma wee honey then, eh?’
He planted a big wet kiss on her neck. She was tall but thin; he was twice the size of her, his big arms. ‘Smart as a whip, this yin. Wee genius.’
‘There’s only two eggs, Gogs, so that’ll be breakfast for me and your guest.’
‘Aye, aye. No problem, hen.’ Gogsy bent down to the fridge, cracked open a can of beer.
‘Only one way I’m going to get through this, know what I mean?’ He burped, loud, nodded approvingly at the air around his mouth, then grooved over to the LP player and set the Clash spinning through the house, hooting along to the loose background sounds of ‘London Calling’.