Scabby Queen Read online

  ‘Morning, lad. There’s a bit of a hold-up, eh – Donald and Danny had to go and take the little bus to the bus hospital,’ he said, still cheery. ‘I’d go get yourself a cuppa if I was you – if you’re going over could you grab me a Bloody Mary, too?’

  Neil smiled. ‘I’m all right just now, pal, but thanks for the concern.’

  Lee beamed at him. ‘God loves a trier, mate. Actually, it’s good you’re here. With four of us we can get a proper game going.’ He shoved the pile of ripped-up Rizlas to one side and pulled a grubby deck of cards from the pocket of his cagoule.

  ‘Card games,’ said Clio, from behind the shades.

  ‘Very well observed, that woman. What does everyone fancy? Quick round of rummy?’ Lee’s skinny fingers rippled and shanked the cards.

  ‘Watch him. He’s a shark,’ muttered Sean.

  ‘Texas poker? Scabby Queen? Blackjack?’

  Clio pulled her shades off, turned to face him.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Blackjack?’

  ‘Before that.’

  ‘Scabby Queen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You never played it? It’s a good one, that. You play with an almost full deck, except there’s only one queen in it, and she’s hidden in there somewhere. Everyone gets a full hand – that’s why you need at least four, see, otherwise there’s too many cards – and you take it in turns in drawing from each person’s pile. Every time you get a pair, they’re coupled off and taken out of play. The queen goes round and round, and the object is to get rid of her – pass her on to the next one as quickly as you can. Person left with the queenie at the end loses, you see. Poor girl, int she. And the guy left holding her – he gets hit over the knuckles with the full deck. Papercuts and all. Can get a bit scabby, like.’

  Clio laughed. It sounded a bit forced.

  ‘I’m from a mining town, hon. That means something pretty different back home, that does. Or maybe not.’ She breathed out. ‘Anyway, I hate to spoil your bridge party, but me and Mr Munro here are going to use this time to conduct our all-star celebrity interview. Away from your nosy face.’

  She pinged one of Lee’s ears with affection.

  ‘Fancy holing up in the bar, Neilio? I’m sure the sun’s over the yard arm somewhere. All that talk of Bloody Mary has me thirsty. Bloody Clio time.’

  She stood up, offered Neil her hand and turned that megawatt smile on him. He felt warm again.

  Daily Mail, October 2016

  AND FINALLY, Nineties has-been poll tax one-hit wonder Clio Campbell took to Twitter yesterday for a spectacularly unhinged rant about Brexit. The ageing former star, who has in recent years made more noise with her outspoken political rantings than her music, condemned all Leave voters as ‘ignorant racists’ and sent a string of offensive messages to UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

  The once sexy redhead should perhaps pay more attention to her own lyrics – people gotta rise up indeed!

  JOHN BIDDIE

  HAMZA

  London, 24 January 2018

  All he had was flashes. Six years and he don’t know how he spent it. They were off their tits a lot, being fair. But this felt bigger than comedown-smashed brain cells, like he’d deliberately blanked it out.

  ‘It’s weird, right,’ he said to Calvin, ‘like you live through something then your brain just tidies it away, like na mate, you don’t need to see that again, I’ll just drop that into the charity shop for you. Know what I mean?’

  Calvin knew.

  ‘I mean, here’s this woman who I fucking grew up with basically. She was there all through me coming into myself. Becoming a man. Yeah? And she had a lot to do with that. I’m not saying she made me who I am but it can’t have been far off, right? I mean, we got together when I was twenty-fucking-two. I was nothing. But see, because it ended so fucking terrible I can’t remember anything but what a pain in the arse she was then. An it’s pissing me off, mate. It’s like it’s poisoned the whole rest of the experience, so I can’t remember any of the good stuff. And there must have been good stuff, yeah? We was together for a long time. Know what I’m saying?’

  He doesn’t even remember, like, stuff she said, so much. He thinks of Clio and he just remembers wanting out, how needy she got by the end, how she kept on slumping and crashing and trying to bring him down with her. The smell of her unwashed body after he’d been on tour for a week. He remembers that. Her flat full of snotty crumpled toilet paper and the seep of old alcohol coming out of her pores. The tears, caused by nothing, just existing to make him angry. These things he’d told Gemma about over and over, so he’d made them a bit more concrete, maybe. He couldn’t tell Gemma the good stuff, because you didn’t do that, and because he definitely wasn’t feeling it when they first got together, so maybe it had all just evaporated. What was the point of having good times, then, if they just pissed off?

  It was fucking toxic at the end was what it was, he says to Calvin, and Calvin, who wasn’t there and never met her, says, ‘Yeah. Sounds it, mate, yeah.’

  Flash. The massive fight they’d had in a B&B before some wedding. No idea what it was about, just Clio’s face screaming up at him, her fingernails near his eyes. They’d needed half the coke they’d brought with them to get through that one; he remembers twitching in his seat, the only non-white face in the whole congregation with all these rich old fuckers edging away from him, not knowing anyone, her stood up at the altar or whatever it was called and her voice ringing out, her trying to meet his eyes, singing the words just for him. Some Joni Mitchell thing he’d never heard before she started practising it. By unspoken mutual agreement, they’d kept themselves drunk and high all day, even dancing and snogging, not talking about it. Their first real break-up had happened the week after and that song had followed him about for two months, on the radio, on telly, people singing it in the fucking street until he’d found himself shitfaced and ringing her doorbell well after midnight.

  Two days after Clio died, Gemma came back from work early and sat him down on the sofa, held both his hands.

  ‘I think you’re struggling with this more than you’re letting on, aren’t you?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. I think you need time and space to grieve, and I’m sorry if I haven’t really acknowledged that.’

  She was doing that thing again where she talked like a self-help book, and he knew she’d been workshopping these lines with her mates on group chat.

  ‘It’s hard for me, because of my role in it all, to be objective. But here’s someone who was hugely important to you, and you’re dealing with the knowledge that she wasn’t at peace when she died. That’s huge. I’m sorry if I’ve been, like, flippant about it or whatever.’

  ‘Na, na. Gem, come here. You’re solid. Don’t worry. You’ve been fine.’

  ‘But, we should talk about it. We should talk about Clio and what she meant to you. I mean, otherwise you’re just bottling all that up – it’s not like you can tell anyone else, is it?’

  ‘I’m good, babe. I’m dealing with it in my own way. I’m gonna be honest, I’m not really remembering much. You know? Like those years happened to someone else, or it was a dream I had a while ago. It’s not – this is my life, now. This house and you and the dog. All right?’

  She flopped into him and he stroked her hair a bit. He and Gemma very rarely talked about Clio now. At first, there had been a lot of talking, because they’d been trying to justify their behaviour. (‘What a strain for you! I mean, you were basically her carer. While trying to make your own work. That’s too much for anyone to bear.’ Vindicated, he’d nuzzled his face back into her naked stomach.) But when it stopped, it stopped dead. He’d overheard her once, backstage at a festival. ‘You know what? Za’s ex-girlfriend is a folk singer. They collaborated on some cross-genre stuff really early on in his career; you should totally look it up.’ The words had shocked him into some other life, just for a second, then he’d
shaken it off and got on with the tech prep for his set.

  Flash. Clio in a bar, holding forth, red mouth a blur and her hands jabbing the air as she dominated the conversation, the other people with them gasping, laughing, nodding in respectful silence. He remembers being proud of her then, proud of his woman and her brain. There, that’s a good one.

  It had got under Gemma’s skin, though. Next morning she was itching into it again. Woman could never let something just lie.

  ‘I’m sorry, hon, I can’t not talk to you about this. I’m feeling my own role in this, like, really strongly; I mean, did we basically push a woman to her death? I know it was years ago, but these things have a knock-on effect, don’t they? I mean, there’s no mention of any other relationships in any of the stuff online.’

  He wasn’t awake enough to deal with this yet and told her so.

  ‘I just don’t understand how this isn’t affecting you. I mean, it’s making me think, what if I died. Is this how you’d react to me, all these years later?’

  He buried his face in the pillow and a noise came out. It was loud and angry and he could tell she’d flinched. Fucking good. He felt for a second like the wolf man again. He rolled over to see her looking at him with those big eyes, sheets tucked under her armpits like some girl in a movie hiding her tits.

  ‘Fucking HELL. It’s affecting me. I don’t know how and I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s affecting me. OK?’

  It was too warm in the bathroom with the door locked. He climbed into the empty tub and reached round the trailing plants to open the window, let the London morning in, horns and voices. Then he just sat there, in the bath, one toe under the tap catching the drips, looking at nothing.

  Gemma was dressed by the time he came out, hair scraped back on a hard face, forcing mascara round her red eyes. He stepped behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist and she tensed up.

  ‘Cummere, babe. I’m sorry I shouted. This is – this is really fucking hard for me. I ain’t worked out what I think yet, but I promise you if I need to talk about it I’m gonna come to you. All right?’

  She relaxed a little.

  ‘And I need you to know this ain’t got nothing to do with you, right? Clio was sad. She had problems way before I met her. You and me’s been together for a long time, now. There were loads of other stuff going on with Clio. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ She was going to say something else. He could see it coming.

  ‘Listen, hon. I wonder if maybe you should go public about this. Like, everyone is paying tribute to her. Maybe you should do, like, an Instagram story or something. Announce it all – just say that, like, your record company didn’t want anyone to know you had a much older girlfriend or something. Can’t possibly hurt you – it’s like everyone’s discovering her for the first time, her politics and stuff. Poor cow. She’s suddenly well cool but she had to die to get there.’

  ‘Na, dunno, babe. That’s not me. I don’t even like people knowing about us; why’m I going to put something that personal out there like that?’

  ‘See, I also thought it might help you with whatever you’re going through. Try and put it into words, sharing it with people. Could become a new track, maybe?’

  She was good, Gemma, he had to give her that. While he’d been switched off in the empty tub she’d come up with a whole plan to get him to deal with his feelings, boost his profile and maybe shake him out of the creative block he’d been stuck in. He wondered again whether he would have even had a career if they hadn’t met. Not like this one.

  ‘I don’t – she fucking killed herself, Gem. I don’t want to be, like, profiting out of that.’

  ‘I’m not saying that at all. Is that what you think of me? God. I’m talking about paying tribute to someone you loved. You did love her, Za. You knew her in ways nobody else did, maybe better than anybody else. You should do this. Right, I’m off. Gimme a kiss. You call me if you need me, OK?’

  Hamza lay back on the bed, flicking at his phone. The Gram; couple of private messages from that little babe at the Bristol gig last month to delete. He typed in her name as a hashtag: #cliocampbell. The search function suggested #cliocampbellrip.

  There she was. Her face in tiny squares, mostly much younger than he’d ever known her. Holding her guitar. Onstage at a rally, with her fist in the air. Videos of what he knew was her stoned grin as she flashed her T-shirt on Top of the Pops, those five seconds before the camera cut repeating for ever. A drunken candid shot posted by some indiscreet cunt, jaw squint, blurry hair and a cigarette falling out of her hand. There was one they were using a lot – Clio at a microphone, in close-up, black and white. Her eyes were shut and lined in black, her mouth was open and dark. She was singing and she was lost in it. It was impossible to tell how old she was, whether that was before or after him. Or during. Sometimes these anonymous people, out there on Instagram, put washes or filters over it, or graphics with their own comments: #peoplegottariseup, over and over again.

  He scrolled into the cloud, began zooming through the years of pictures stored there – him and Gemma in Ibiza, him and Gemma the day they got Snoop, taking selfies with the puppy. He wasn’t even sure he’d migrated all his photos over from the old laptop. Even the earliest ones were all of Gemma, started in 2013.

  Had he known Clio better than anyone else? For a time, maybe. To be that person, though, that was a big responsibility, and here he was having fucked it. A nice fucking send-off, he thought, if the person who knew you best in the world, for a time, couldn’t remember you properly.

  He mooched about in the garden with a joint for a bit, started wondering half-paranoid whether there was some conspiracy going on, if even the computer was in on it. What kind of man you think you is anyway, he asked himself, out loud, if you need pictures and videos and the fucking cloud to keep your memories for you? Of a relationship that ended less than ten years ago? Fucking machines are winning, he muttered to Gemma’s three-hundred-quid garden chair. Fucking machines are coming for us.

  Flash. Clio in the bath in the shared bathroom of the bedsit, knees pulled up in front of her chest, smiling at him, reaching out to wrap a wet hand round his neck. There were never any words, though. Her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear her voice.

  He hadn’t bothered to open the blinds in the office and the effect, when he stepped back, looked a bit serial killer, he had to admit. There were boxes all over the floor, tipped on their side and their contents emptied out, the drawers in the desk hanging open, the shelves bare and shoved around. It was like she’d been scrubbed out of his life. No letters, no mementos, nothing. Had he done this? Had Gemma?

  He’d found his old laptop finally at the back of a cupboard. It was dented and covered in stickers, and he couldn’t believe how heavy that thing was. It wheezed and whined and took ten full minutes to boot, during which time Hamza had rolled himself another joint and sparked up. You’re grieving, intcha, he told himself. It’s fine to have a puff in the day when you’re grieving. And if there was ever a time Gemma was going to let him off smoking in the house this was it. He chuckled to himself.

  Pictures. Finally. Only a few, from back before camera phones made decent pictures, but it was enough. He sat cross-legged on the floor, hunched himself over the screen, one finger clicking. Their holiday to Berlin. That weekend in Brighton, when the couple who’d run the bed-and-breakfast had been racist as fuck and Clio had screamed them out and thrown the fry-up on the floor. A picture that was of him but that he knew she’d taken – him doing a shaky thumbs-up just before he went onstage to support Tinie the first time. That Christmas Day when they’d gone for a Chinese and sat at the table by the window giving the finger to anyone who passed. One night at a club, their eyes red from the flash, peeking out from under all her hair as she snuggled into his shoulder. A grainy shot of them in bed, taken on the first phone he’d had with a camera, bare shoulders and mock-surprised faces. There were some nudes too, he could see, but he didn’t want to go in close.
It wouldn’t have been right. Not now. He kept clicking, and waiting, and there it was – his first time in a recording studio, the day he’d come in with her to lay down a track on her album.

  Flash. The dry-skin warmth of her hands on his eyelids and the gentle pressure of her at his back, pushing him along. Her usual smell – shampoo and face powder. She was on tiptoe to keep her arms up at his face and kept tripping. They rounded a corner and he heard some scuffling as she tried to open a door, then she nudged him into a room and the light flooded in as she moved her hands. It was a tiny space, a bit shabby, not really what he’d thought a studio would look like, but there was a mic in the corner, headphones hanging from a hook beside it and a huge yellow plastic bow tied round the stand. ‘Tah-dah!’ she’d said, laughing, jumping up to kiss his jaw as he’d hugged her tight just because she was so happy.

  The little egg timer froze as the pictures were loading to his mobile hard drive, and a window popped up to tell him there was only ten per cent of battery remaining. Shit. Shit. His ransacking session had not unearthed a charger and, now he thought about it, it was probably in that pile of wires they’d chucked out a couple of years ago. He knew what else he thought was on there – the rough-cut files from that studio session. He wanted to hear their voices singing together. He wanted to hear her talking, stopping takes, giving him instructions that he remembers being pissed off about at the time. Having made sure the photos were safe, he shoved the laptop in a bag and made for the door, chucking a hoody on over his pyjama bottoms as he went.

  Flash. Scrubbing lipstick off coffee cups every time it was his turn to do the dishes. Can’t you just wait till after breakfast before you put your slap on, he’d asked. Dinnae come between a woman and her lippy, darling, she’d said, getting all Scottish on him, and left the room. He only ever saw her without the make-up on last thing at night, during her meticulous cleansing and moisturising routine, as she was always up before him in the morning. That’s how he’d known when she was getting bad again, towards the end, her face blanched of all colour, blending in with that ratted ashy dressing gown. After a while he just left the pink tannins on and sipped around the stains. Nobody else really came to visit them anyway.