Scabby Queen Page 4

  ‘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.

  ‘You’re no lady, Cliodhna Jean Campbell,’ Eileen would say, pulling her off by the scruff of her jumper, a snarling kitten overexcited by rough play. ‘You apologize to Uncle Donald, and then you sit in there until you’ve simmered down.’ Cliodhna, still carried by the force of herself, would fret and push something, break a cup or kick a chair, and Eileen would calmly slap her on each calf, two loud and terrible cracks resounding through the room.

  ‘Don’t you hit the lass,’ Malcolm would mutter, sunk in a corner.

  ‘Don’t you tell me how to raise my daughter, Malcolm Campbell. Unless you’re interested in contribut
ing.’ Just a girl, Donald thought to himself now. Nothing but a girl really, Eileen was. Twenty-three? Eileen had never seemed young, though. She was one of those who’d never got to have a youth.

  Cliodhna would be locked in the cupboard, the broom looped through the handles, bangs and scuffs as she threw things eventually dying down. After an hour, she’d be retrieved, asleep, dried tear-stains on her cheeks.

  ‘Aye, it’s Eileen knows how to handle her really,’ Malcolm would say, as someone else put his daughter to bed.

  Eileen’s anger was cold and brisk and always there. She hated, but she hated with logic and organization. Donald couldn’t remember seeing her eat, those last two years; watched her changing shape again as she sloughed off the body her daughter had grown on her, painted her nails red to hide the yellowed tobacco stains on her skinny, pointed fingers. In Inverness, in the winter, Eileen subsisted entirely on tea, cigarettes and disdain. On Skye she was less sharp, her fingers didn’t flutter as much, but her sighs would rip round the cottage when she came in from work to see the mess they’d left. On more than one occasion, Donald had caught her staring at Malcolm’s back, hands clenched and eyes shooting poison.

  Malcolm’s rages were something else. They only ever happened when he was drunk, would ratchet up in volume and incoherence, seemed designed to turn heads in the pub or the street, before fizzling off. On Skye, in the summertime, he drank because someone would always buy him one. In Inverness, in the winter, he drank because the pub was not that flat full of Eileen’s curdled nicotine hate, or because he wanted to pass out at the place they’d played and have Donald carry him gently back to the van, tuck him up in there next to the kit and post a note through the door to his wife. He’d murmur, ‘Come on then, man. Come on,’ and heft his friend to his chest, Malcolm’s head cooried in to his clavicle. He’d ease him down like you would a baby, pull the blanket they insulated the instruments with over him. Sometimes he’d just look at him for a while. The sweep of long sandy lashes on his cheek, the perfect sheen of his skin in the spilled street light from the window. Once, just once, he reached out and stroked his face; and Malcolm grabbed his finger and pulled hard, eyes open and glaring.