Scabby Queen

‘Still drunk!’ said Clio, smiling that way at Neil again to include him in the joke, bind the two of them back together, as she served him egg and tough bread, lumpen with cold butter.

Gogsy stood behind him as he ate, rubbing his shoulders. Gogsy was always this familiar, liked to touch everyone. Nobody minded; it was just Gogsy. It was just his way, they said. He never forgot a name, either; had started talking to Neil when he’d noticed him standing on the touchline of the pub league Saturday football game with a notepad, then called him over in the street one day.

‘It’s the reporter boy, isn’t it? Neil, aye? Good to see you, pal, good to see you. Listen, got a wee story for you as it happens. Me and the boys here are doing a wee bit of leafleting, all furra good cause, right now. We’re trying to raise awareness of whit the housin association are trying to get past on their tenants – it’s another rent increase, basically, while the lifts in they high flats have been stuck for almost six months now. There’s poor wee old ladies in there can’t get their shopping in because they cannae manage with the stairs. I mean, I’ve got my pals here trying to do messages for them when they can, but do you not think it’s a scandal? Thought mibbe a wee article in the local paper might do right by them, light a wee fire under certain backsides if you know what I’m saying?’

Neil, who was new to the job and the beat, had just moved back in with his mum after a couple of years away, assumed at first that Gogsy was a wannabe gangster, trying to make a name for himself. He suspected protection rackets, worried what those old ladies were expected to give back out of their shopping in return for one of Gogsy’s ‘boys’ collecting it for them. He thought this might be the making of him, imagined smashing a profiteering ring, an exclusive, a press award, job invites in Glasgow or even London. His imagination roamed so fast and far that he was almost disappointed when the story revealed itself to be exactly what Gogsy had said it was: the housing association on the make. The photographer got shots of the old ladies, Gogsy grinning with them by their fireplaces. The local council elections were over a year away, but Gogsy was playing the long game.

He’d pulled Neil into his circle; at first, some of the men had been suspicious of him, but Gogsy’s word was like a passport. These were factory workers and union men, most of whom had worked at the car factory until it had been closed down. There was no work for anyone in this town any more, and Gogsy had been clear with them; their anger would only serve them if they used it productively. It was the poll tax had given him purpose, though; a clear enemy, a line of fire. He organized one of the earliest Anti-Poll Tax Unions in the country and started reading groups to discuss basic Marxist texts. He got his ‘boys’ out blockading houses marked for warrant sales so the sheriff’s officers had to get back into their car, drive slowly away past jeering immovable walls of people. Then he turned his eye to the estate, to the work the council weren’t doing. The hardware store donated a couple of tins of paint, after the owner was mown down by Gogsy’s lightning-fast patter, so that the team could get to work tidying up ‘they clatty fences along the Glasgow Road’. Grievances were addressed, civic issues put to rights, and the day Gogsy’s boys filled in the pothole on the high street that had been left there for years went down in local history. There was never any doubt, when the election came around, that even lifelong Tory voters were going to put their crosses in the box by the local boy. And Neil had been there – a useful tool at first, sure, but very quickly a friend and even a believer – reporting on it all. The Daily Duke, some of the boys had started calling the local paper, as Neil’s editor didn’t really seem to notice the number of times his one reporter came to the same source for quotes. So Gogsy’s hands were on his shoulders? It was allowed. And it felt good.

‘My man Neil here is the local hotshot reporter, babe. Maybe he could make you a star. Actually, couple of wee geniuses here the both of you. Clio went to the college like you. She was doing music, though. Neily the boy wonder’s got a proper diploma in journalism, haven’t you, pal? He can do all that shorthand stuff. He knows it.’

Gogsy himself had gone to Glasgow University, but he didn’t like people to mention it.

‘I never got my diploma,’ Clio said. ‘Well impressed with you, like. My daddy’s a folk singer, and I found out they couldn’t teach me anything at the college I didn’t already know, so I ended up skiving off to do my own gigs. Bit different when you’re actually learning a trade, now.’

The baton was passed back to Neil with a smile he got lost in, and he found he didn’t know what to say.

The Welly, a Thursday maybe. Everyone pulling notes out of their giro envelopes, getting rounds, slapping backs. The boys from the Militant were over in one corner, some of their wives and girlfriends sitting bored nearby, sharing a packet of crisps and lighting fags for each other. Clio was amongst them, thinner and taller, her clothes and make-up brighter, her long fingers flexing around a half-pint glass. The jukebox had broken, so that auld wife off the Glenbrae had started singing – ‘Ohhh, Danny Boy’ – and the older ones across the room were clapping or thumping the bar in time, slurring along. And Clio was suddenly up and over there, as the final chorus ended, quick, small movements, kneeling at the side of the auld wife from the Glenbrae, holding her hand. They did ‘These Are My Mountains’ together, Clio’s voice pulling against and high above the old woman’s burr, taking the whole room with her. Neil had never heard the Welly so quiet before, never seen such an explosion of applause afterwards. Gogsy was looking on, pleased; he pulled her in to him as she went back to the table and planted a wet, showy kiss of ownership on her neck, called out, ‘That’s ma girl! That’s ma girl!’

Once you were Gogsy’s, you were Gogsy’s. Neil watched Clio walk down by the shops, afterwards, the heads turning like she was Madonna let loose on a housing scheme. Perhaps they would have done anyway; Clio didn’t look like anyone else round here. She went into the butcher’s and he decided his mum could probably do with some bacon.

‘Aye, well, it’s for Gogsy, intit?’ The butcher was winking at her as he went in, shaking his head at the proffered purse. ‘At boy sorted my brother out with a wee problem recently.’

‘He’s like the Godfather, isn’t he?’ Clio said, as they had a cup of tea together in the chippy. ‘I’ve hitched my wagon to a Mafia don. Go on, Neil, you can tell me.’

Say something, he told himself. You need to actually talk to her.

‘Honestly? I thought so too when I first met him. But then I looked into it, and I realized, he’s just a very, very community-minded good guy.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

Neil grinned at the sacrilege, began to relax a little.

‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. He’s got his eye on the prize, likes –’

She puffed her cheeks, blew out a gust, warm on his face. ‘Tell me about it. He’ll be Councillor Duke before the ballot’s even counted. Right now I reckon the only problem he’s going to have is that nobody will be looking for the name Gordon on the paper …’

‘Do you mind me asking how you met him? It’s just, you seem so—’

He didn’t know, in that second, what she seemed. She waited a grace note to see if he would finish.

‘Politics, politics. What else would it be? With this one? I went along to a poll tax meeting in Glasgow. He was one of the speakers, and of course, being Gogsy, he blew the rest of them away. I asked him a question afterwards; he asked me for a drink, course he did. I was dropping out of college, staying in a crappy hostel at the time, and he suggested I move in with him after something like two dates. So it goes.’

‘So, you’re into all this stuff? All the Marxist theory, all the left-wing – it’s not … you know.’

She did a laugh like something out of the movies. ‘You saying that because I’m a girl? Honey, I was born to this stuff. I was singing “The Red Flag” while you were still stumbling over “Baa Baa Black Sheep”.’

‘That’s not – not what I meant.’ It had been what he’d meant. She tapped her CAN’T PAY, WON’T PAY badge.

‘It’s all important, this. And Gogs, he knows why. I wasn’t just a wee runaway in need of a home, you know. Well, I was, but still. I could tell Gogs was trying to do something here. He spoke about what he’d been trying to do with all the unemployed men in this community, and I thought, that sounds like the sort of place I could be. He’s gonny be a great man, is Gordon Duke. Save a lot of lives. I mean it.’

Warrant-sale protest. The third one they’d known about; the first one Neil’s editor had actually suggested he cover. Over the opening of the new bingo hall, too. Clio, formidable, stood in a phalanx of women, all of them smoking and staring, faces hard-set. Clio’s fingers were wrapped around those of Neil’s own mother, which was as big a shock as he’d ever had. Clio’s bright T-shirt and Doc Martens, his mum’s good coat.

‘We’re the first line of defence,’ Clio said, brisk and formal into his tape recorder. ‘Our theory is that none of these, ah, gentlemen, are going to be able to touch a woman. We reckon their bosses might take it a bit more seriously than if one of the boys back there got hit “accidentally”, eh?’ She nodded to Gogsy’s ring of muscle, massed in front of the front door.

‘That’s right, hen,’ muttered a couple of the women around her. Neil’s mum nodded with her chin once, although she looked scared.

Clio followed his eye.

‘And I’ll look after your mum, Neil. Don’t worry. Throw my body in front of her if I have to, isn’t that right, Mrs Munro?’

‘Ach, it’s oor Carol, Neil. She cannae even walk. She isnae trying to make a point of not paying or anything, son – she just cannae get oot the hoose. I’m no lettin those bastards in there.’ His mother pulled herself up to her full five foot, smiled at Clio with fire in her face.

The blue sedan everyone now recognized as belonging to the sheriff’s officers pulled into the street. Clio nodded and the women linked their arms, began hissing, their spit and smoke thickening the air.

She was the only woman on Gogsy’s canvassing team, and she preferred to go it alone. Gogsy was standing as the Socialist candidate, and had somehow enlisted what seemed like every resource the national party had to his cause.

‘It’s because he’s the only one with a chance of winning,’ Clio had snorted, when Neil mentioned it. He’d made the excuse that he was writing a piece, to come out with her; she had no intention of walking the beat with any of Gogsy’s monkeys, she’d whispered. He was trotting alongside her, trying to keep pace; in her high heels she was much taller than him.

‘Och, they’d be fine. They’d be fine, but it’d only be because I’m Gogsy’s girl. They’d say, “Oh, I’ll get this, sweetheart, you just smile,” at every door. They’d talk over me if I tried to speak, and they’d maybe pat my bum on the way down a garden path. Just for fun. I know these boys. Every time I go to a meeting I’m supposed to take the notes, and should one of them need a cuppa he flags me down like I’m a waitress. Naw, I’m good on my own, pal.’

She’d picked that up from Gogsy, he’d noticed, the harder edges of the local accent swirling into the fluting hybrid she spoke with. He almost believed her, too, until she chapped on Chae Macfarlane’s door, and the Grand Master of the local chapter of the Masons, imperious in socks and moustache, told her that Gogsy was a charlatan, she was a daft wee lassie, and he’d be voting, as he always did, for Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative candidate.

‘For a party that has completely decimated your local community and continues to hold you in contempt? Really? There are boys hanging around the streets here who will never have another chance at work now that car plant’s gone! Your precious Thatcher has used this country, your people, as a testing ground for some of the harshest policies in living memory – your neighbours will be thrown in jail through no fault of their own! She has no love for you, you know!’

It wasn’t that her points were wrong, but she had utterly failed to read her audience. As her voice grew shriller his granite slab of a face closed down completely, until he simply shut the door on them.

Still, almost everyone else met them with smiles. Clio had the right name on her rosette, and most of the community had already made up their minds. She wore a black dress, her one pair of high heels and a very bright lipstick at the count, threw her arms around Gogsy who had only begun to relax in his suit over the last couple of days, and Neil’s photographer pal rushed forward to get a picture of them, handsome and young and victorious.

DONALD

Achiltibuie, 24 January 2018

It was Morna told him. She came in the kitchen door with the washing basket on her hip, the newspaper rolled in beside the clean sheets, smell of cold on her cheeks. What had he been doing? Ach, it didn’t matter.

‘Donald,’ she’d said, and just with the tone of her voice he’d known something was wrong. Soft voice, lower note, pulling out the second syllable. ‘Donald, love.’

‘What is it?’ His first thought was one of the grandchildren, but then their roles would be reversed. She wouldn’t be coming to him, consoling and soft, if one of her Ishbel’s kids had—

‘Donald, it’s that lassie. Malcolm’s girl. Cliodhna.’

The main picture the paper had used was an old one, how he liked to think of her. Young, red, on fire. She never smiled in pictures back then. In an inset, the lassie’s face older, grey flecking at her hair, tired. DEPRESSION it said underneath. Campbell had battled the illness for years.

There was a strange, low noise in the air, like an animal, and it was himself making it. He pushed the paper away from him along the table. Then he reached his arms up and wrapped himself round Morna’s waist, resting his head on her big, warm stomach. What would she have been? Forty-five? Fifty, the paper said. A year older than Morna had been when they’d married. A grown woman. A woman with half her life behind her.

Donald blamed Malcolm, but Donald had been blaming Malcolm for over forty years, silently. Malcolm never knew while he was alive, and blaming him hadn’t done any good then, had it?

He’d not been there when Malcolm had met Eileen Johnstone. His father had insisted he help out on the boats, never mind that the band had been taking off, so they’d headed off down south without him, picking up some greasy fool from Inverness who’d said he could play but couldn’t. Maybe if he’d been there, he would have been a steadier influence, got them to take it a wee bit more slowly. Ach, maybe not.

Malcolm had stepped off the ferry with this small, strange woman, her hair a grabby colour of blue-black Donald had never seen in nature, her mouth a grim slit in a hard face, and introduced her as his wife. All red-gold and glowing, Malcolm was, bending down a whole foot to listen to his tiny bride, and folk nodded, gave them two weeks’ grace as a pair of lovesick fools. Malcolm was keen to push that story as he felt it suited him: being in love, marrying in a flight of passion, marrying to do the right and honourable thing by his woman. That was the way he’d always been – working out the story that showed him in the best light, then sticking to it until it became his history, until he’d convinced himself of it.

‘It’s a good thing for a man to be married,’ Malcolm had said in the pub that first night, new wife safely stowed with his sister-in-law. ‘It’s about bringing the right balance to life. You need to do it, Donald. And she’s smart, this one. Thinks about things. She’ll be the one to find a living for us.’

But Eileen started showing too quickly, and the scandal began clanking. A number of women, including Malcolm’s own sister, suddenly refused to talk to her, not that she’d ever had that much to say to them. As though no one on the island had ever married for a baby before. Eileen seemed to fold their silent anger in on herself; when she was four months gone, they caught the last ferry on a Friday night off the island, didn’t come back. Everyone shrugged, because they expected nothing better of Malcolm Campbell, sure they didn’t. Donald received the summons three weeks later, a postcard with an Inverness address and the unsigned sentence: Could use a better fiddle player …

In Inverness, Eileen talked. She talked as she moved around Donald’s bed on the floor of their one-room flat, while she got ready for work and Malcolm snored through in the press. She talked while she served up their dinners in the evenings before they went off to play. She talked about how important it was that she got all of the girls on her factory floor to join the union before she left to have the baby. She talked about whatever book she was reading – one of the first things she’d done, after they’d found this place, was become a member of the library – explaining the plot of a whodunnit or a Labour Party pamphlet with the same serious tone and weight. She talked about how dull it had been on the island where no one read anything. Her voice was a harsh caw, nothing musical about it, and even as Donald grew to like her, like their conversations, he wondered again what had attracted Malcolm to her. She talked only to Donald, even when Malcolm was awake; at night, though, waking up, he’d seen them wrapped around each other, a tangle of limbs, faces pressed together and Malcolm’s hands strapped over her stomach, as though their sleeping selves were stuck deep in a secret love affair they couldn’t let the conscious bodies know about. It calmed him to watch them, sometimes for hours, till dawn broke. One morning he didn’t move to feign sleep quickly enough. ‘Getting a good eyeful, are you?’ she said, but her voice was peaceful.

The length of that pregnancy. The long wait of it. It sometimes seemed more real to him now than the years that came after it, because each day notched itself off on Eileen. Her eyes and neck swallowed in a fatty ball, the hairs sprouting out of her face, those blue-veined and swollen feet that needed to be soaked the second she came in, the stink of her wind. She insisted on ‘keeping herself good’, though: religious application of pan and lipstick in the tiny glass that hung above his feet; touching up the colourless roots of her hair with that noxious inky liquid, the stained towel draped around her shoulders. It was a blessing, Donald thought, that there were no full-size mirrors in the building.

Malcolm was quiet in that flat, a curious and down-hearted version of himself, as though some spell had been cast: a transaction exchanging Eileen’s new-found voice for his own. Really, Donald knew, this was all part of the work: Malcolm’s body preparing itself for a night onstage, for its nightly rebirth in the spotlight. While Eileen had found them a flat and a factory job for steady work, Malcolm had charmed his way on to the books of a series of bars and hotels, had organized a programme of regular gigs for what he was then grandly calling the Malcolm Campbell Three (the third was a bodhrán player, Fraser MacAllistair, who they’d toured with a couple of summers ago). Onstage, Malcolm roared and glinted, drew easy laughs from the working men and women in the harder bars, played douce and fluttered at the bus parties of older ladies in the hotels – it was always people that were his talent, more than the music.

In the daytime, he took phone calls in the pub across the street, made things happen. Donald took casual labour in the port, delivered half his wages to Eileen each week until the fortnight before the baby was due, when he moved into a boarding house round the corner.

Although to his knowledge there was never a christening, of course they named him godfather. In the only picture he had of himself with Cliodhna Jean Campbell, she was three days old, balanced on a cushion in his lap and mouthing the rough wool of his jumper in her sleep. Malcolm had bought the Box Brownie especially, seemed always to be snapping her; it was lost or pawned sometime before her third birthday.

Her mother called her both names, Cliodhna Jean, emphasis on the second. Malcolm had a litany of pet names, each more ridiculous than the next and never used twice, and yet the wee girl always seemed to know who he meant, would fix her eyes on him like he was a gorgeous big plaything, gazing at the way his hair glowed as it soaked up the sunlight in the flat. She favoured Malcolm from the start – his easy, rangy limbs in miniature on her, his wide eyes, the wisp of gingery hair. Another blessing, that, Donald would think to himself, feeling disloyal to Eileen as he did. It was Malcolm who sang the baby to sleep, Malcolm who she seemed to cleave to, Malcolm who she’d take a bottle from and settle for more easily. Maybe it was just because he was calmer, Donald thought. Since the birth, on a night when they’d been playing out at the hotel in Garve, hadn’t made it back until 2 a.m., Eileen had been tighter, shorter with her praise, her movements brisk. She was retreating back into herself, as Malcolm blossomed in fatherhood. He wondered what she’d gone through in that hospital by herself, far away from her family. It was not a thing you asked a woman.

For the first few years of Cliodhna’s life, he had been there almost all the time. He and Malcolm travelled together, sometimes with Fraser, sometimes with another couple of boys, always with what Malcolm referred to proudly as his ‘womenfolk’. Musicians and instruments on blankets in the back of the rusty van Malcolm had bought for five bob and fixed up himself; Eileen holding the baby in the front. The years she was one, two, three and four they lived from April through to September in a run-down cottage at the edge of a farm on Skye. They played ceilidh sets every night in the big hotel packed with tourists, Malcolm a strutting rooster as he called the dances, affecting a Yankee twang and a bootlace tie pressed on him by a drunk old Texan over a malt. The baby chased chickens about in the mud, laughing at the splatch of her bare feet; they bathed her in the sink. Malcolm learned Gaelic songs from the old boys round the way and taught them to Cliodhna. Eileen walked out to the bed-and-breakfast a mile away to help them with the cleaning, and all of their faces freckled and toughened, being outside and out of the town again. In the daytime, once they’d woken, Malcolm would strap the baby to his chest in a sheet, or sling her, giggling, onto his shoulders, and they’d walk together across farmland, two men and a tiny girl, till they got to the sea, breathed it in, the salt air scouring their hangovers away. Malcolm searched the horizon for America, tried to orientate himself towards it. ‘Just out there, Cliodhna. Just out there. That’s where we’ll go, my girl.’ Then he’d set her down on the beach, strip all of his clothes off and run into the water, a fierce hooting coming off him as the cold hit.

Donald watched him from a distance, the red hair of his chin and crotch bouncing in time, his cock spinning, his pale skinny arse tensing as the waves reached it. His friend was beautiful, a tiny naked offering to the sky god, the sea god, the ancient shrugging mountains watching but not caring. The baby ate handfuls of wet sand, smeared it on her face, vomited down her jumper.

Donald loved Cliodhna’s teeth, when they came in. He loved it when she bared them, like a little savage, in her enjoyment of a wrestling match or when he made the fiddle screech and wail like a train, turned wild runaway tunes for her. He loved the elbows and knees of her, always moving if she could, that orange scribble of tight curls still twitching when she was compelled to be still. He loved her furies and rages against the unfairness of the world, because he couldn’t think of any adults with that much fire in them.