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.

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’.

‘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.

‘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 contributing.’ 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.

‘Keep your fucking hands to yourself, you bloody fairy. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, because I do. I always have.’

Donald was backing away, stumbling on knees in the dark.

‘Malcolm, man—’

Malcolm stayed lying down, but the force of his voice hit like a punch thrown. The words were suddenly crisp and clear, no slurring any more.

‘What are you doing here, eh? Why are you still here, Donald Bain? There’s me and my wife and my child, and there’s you. There always seems to be you.’

‘Eh. It’s just the way it’s happened, Malcolm. This is what we do.’

‘We. We. How about you just worry about you from now on? How about you just stay out of my business, always hanging about, always there, from when we were boys, just mooning about, aren’t you. What is it you want, exactly? You want to fuck my wife? Is that it? You want that sharp-tongued bitch in your bed instead? You want my little girl calling you Daddy? Or do you want to be the woman, Donald Bain? You just going to hope that some day all this sheer persistence will pay off and I’ll turn to you instead? Just get away from me, you disgusting fucking fairy. Just get away and I’ll not call the police.’

Donald closed the van door, turned and ran down the street, Malcolm’s muffled swearing still ringing out, lights in the flats around flicking on. They didn’t talk for a month. Donald went to work, went back to the boarding house, tried to find new routes to and fro that avoided Malcolm and Eileen’s street, until their next gig, a wedding, both of them just turning up at the venue and avoiding each other’s eyes through the sound check. They stood at opposite ends of the bar while they waited for the party to come in from the church, until Malcolm broke it, walked over.

‘Last time. I spoke out of turn. Pals?’

Donald took the proffered hand, shook it, said ‘Aye’ and nothing more, because it seemed right.

The woman, when she came, was an American. Of course she was. She called the flat in Inverness, long distance at nine in the morning, got Eileen. Fraser would chuckle when he heard, said Malcolm was getting sloppy, but Donald suspected it had all been meticulously planned.

Malcolm arrived at Donald’s boarding house with a black eye and a cut cheek from where Eileen had thrown shards of smashed plate at him, peeled a red-eyed Cliodhna in only her vest and tights off his shoulder and handed her to Donald.

‘I’m going back there to talk sense into that idiot woman. She’ll not take my girl away from me, especially not right now. She’s not fit to be a mother right now. A child shouldn’t have to see that,’ he concluded, self-righteous and tall. ‘You keep her here, Donald. Don’t let anyone take her.’

Cliodhna sat up on the kitchen counter as Mrs McKenzie, Donald’s landlady, made soup for the tenants’ lunch. He watched the girl watching the action – knives flicking through onions, water sluicing dry lentils, the lid over the huge pot of bones clacking at the boil. She hadn’t said a word or moved herself since her father left, and he’d had to carry her downstairs.

‘She’ll need to go back to her mother, Donald. There’s nowhere for her to sleep here tonight.’

‘I thought maybe she could bunk in with you?’

‘No, I don’t see that happening. Do I, lamb?’ Gentle and final, handing Cliodhna a slice of cooked potato that she took and held.

‘Eat it, lamb. You need to eat.’

‘What if I just bed down in the van for the night?’

‘And leave an unsupervised child in my house? No, that won’t do either.’

Cliodhna sleeping in the same room as her ‘Uncle’ Donald was not even an option to be considered, so neither of them mentioned it. Donald left her with Mrs McKenzie while he went upstairs to get his things, came back down to find her curled on the floor and howling out a single low note.

‘This won’t do, Mr Bain. This won’t do at all.’

Donald picked the girl up; she folded herself into his chest like her father had done when he was drunk, and the howl bubbled down to a whimper. In the hallway, he threaded her skinny form through the neck and arms of his good green jumper; it came down to her feet like a big wool dress.

‘That’s a pretty colour on you, little bird. Shall we go for a walk then, eh?’

He carried her down the street under his coat. She was much heavier than she had been the last time he’d held her, some months ago, but any time he tried to put her down her legs would buckle and she’d crumple onto the flagstones. He tried not to think about what she must have seen. He had no shoes for her, anyway, so eventually they worked out a silent compromise: the girl on his back, her arms locked around his neck almost tight enough to choke him, her breath funnelling hot down his spine. He walked through the town towards the river, at a loss so simply pointing out what they could see – a car, a dog – and then he started to sing. Just humming at first, ‘Green Grow the Rashes O’, the vibrations moving through his back to her, and slowly she pulled her head out of his shoulders. When he got to the chorus

Green grow the rashes o

Green grow the rashes o

The sweetest hours that e’er I spend

Are spent among the lasses o

she began tickling the words into his ear, not much more than a whisper at first. By the time they’d reached the river, though, she was belting out the top notes of Malcolm’s harmony with him. He found them a bench, and she curled in under his armpit to watch the river, flowing fast, swollen after a week of rain. He thought about singing her through a set list – Malcolm always liked to start with ‘These Are My Mountains’, get the crowd warmed up – but decided against it; Cliodhna didn’t need to think about her parents just then. So he started at the beginning, Robert Burns, ‘A Red, Red Rose’, his own mother’s favourite. Malcolm was the singer, of course, but Donald could hold a tune, form a useful bassline. When he concluded, they sat in silence for a second, and then Cliodhna whispered, ‘Again please, Uncle Donald.’ This time she joined in, a sweet note of wordless birdsong, from the third line.

Almost two hours they sat there on that bench, repeating the song over and over. By the time her stomach started rumbling its own rhythm, and he realized they should go back and get some of Mrs McKenzie’s soup, she had it by heart.

Guardian Weekend magazine, August 2010
The Song I Love …
… by Jennifer Hayman, Labour MP for Hoxsmith

One song I’d want to have played at my funeral is ‘Rise Up’ by Clio Campbell. I think it’s absolutely genius – a bouncy pop number underpinned by real bite and anger. It hasn’t necessarily aged well in that it’s got those big synthy chords which were very typical of the late Eighties and early Nineties, but it’s actually a really complex piece of music underneath the bubblegum sound. I sometimes can’t quite believe she was only in her early twenties when she wrote it!

The lyrics are about the poll tax riots and the idea of communities coming together to resist a specific injustice; however, unfortunately, given the world we live in they ring just as true today and could be applied to any number of contemporary international events.

I remember being a little girl and watching her on Top of the Pops [Campbell famously refused to mime the lyrics of her song, instead shouting an anti-poll tax slogan over the backing track until the producers cut her segment] and being blown away, as my dad tutted about her ‘uppity behaviour’. What was amazing about that moment for me was that there was this young, pretty woman, absolutely refusing to behave like all the other young, pretty women on Top of the Pops. I’m fairly sure she started something in me!

SAMMI
Brixton, 2018

Spider was the only one who even thought to stay in Brixton after it all fell apart, and the only one Sam even sees occasionally now (if she didn’t count Fran’s byline picture popping up above a column on trans politics in the Guardian every now and then). Usually she avoided his eye. Here he was, leading a three-crusty protest outside the arches where the squat had been. She had to pass the arches to take Elliot to football practice on the days she didn’t have the car, and usually she kept her head down, eyes on the pavement, and walked quickly past. If you see a thing every day, sometimes you can render it nothing, force it into the background by sheer overexposure.

Elliot, who was refusing to hold her hand, slowed down to watch the protest, a small sneer forming round his mouth. Spider’s dreads were frazzled and grey now, his face a worn little nut cracked with years of hard living, and he was waving a sign. RESIST GENTRIFICATION, it said, in splotchy neon lettering. KEEP BRIXTON WEIRD.

Brixton was never weird, mate, she thought to herself. Brixton thinks you’re weird.

‘Ha! Freaks!’ muttered Elliot.

‘What did you say, mister?’

The boy looked back at her, his face weighing up the options. He doubled down. Poor choice, kid.

‘I said – FREAKS.’

His little defiant chin. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him across the road towards the protest, as he squirmed and shouted trying to get out of her grip. She kept him with her as they approached Spider.

‘Hello, Spider.’

Spider’s face creased in and in on itself in the smile.

‘Bloody hell! Sammi! Hello yourself, matey.’

The placard hit the ground as he came in for a hug. Elliot winced.

‘Elliot, this is my old friend. You’ve met him before but you were very little.’

‘Gah, this is the baby, eh? Number two? Where does all that time go? Where does it go?’

Elliot scowled. ‘Is your name really Spider?’

‘It sure is, buddy boy. It sure is.’ Spider was apparently one of those people so uncomfortable around children he had to affect an American accent. Still, she felt surprisingly warm to him. Although she had seen him around, the last time they’d met had been in the corridor of that lawyer’s office, Spider coming out having given his testimony as she was ushered in. He’d given her elbow a squeeze as he passed, whispered ‘Go on, gal’ in her ear. She was aware that the others had met up occasionally afterwards but she wanted no part of it, or them.

But Spider was a good soul. She’d always liked Spider. He was smoothing out a crumpled flyer – still hand-drawn and photocopied, in 2018.

‘Social and cultural preservation, Sammi. Taking one more stand against the wankers in suits. They’ve got the whole bit earmarked for demolition and another block of luxury fucking flats.’

He looked down at Elliot’s suddenly thrilled grin, caught himself, hacked out a cough in confusion.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Tell ya what, tough guy, they’ve got history, them arches. You should ask your mum sometime. There was a whole subculture living in them back in the day. Parties all night, an great big debates in the daytime. We was making the world a better place, eh? Wasn’t we, Sammi?’

Knock it down, she thought. Burn the whole fucking lot to the ground. Cover the ashes with your smooth-fronted residential developments that block out the skyline and drive up the property prices, just so I never have to think about it again.

She snapped back to herself. Elliot’s eyes were pinballing between the two of them.

‘This all true, Mum?’

‘This is a smart lad you’ve got here, Sammi. A smart lad. Anyway, how are you? Still at the old social work?’

‘Nah, mate. Not for years now. I – I had to take a bit of time out. After. Wasn’t doing so good for a while there. And we had the settlement, so I – yeah. You know.’

He knew. He knew too many things, understood too much, in that kindly crumpled face. She was thinking about how to make a quick exit, with Elliot already pulling at her hand, when Spider stopped her.

‘Here. Bad business about Clio, eh?’

‘Clio?’

‘Yeah. The, you know, kkkch,’ he drew a finger across his throat. ‘You know?’

‘Is she dead?’

Spider tried to turn his face away from Elliot, who was still following everything very intently. He mouthed ‘Su-i-cide.’

‘No!’

‘A couple of months ago. It was in the press an that, her being famous an stuff. They mentioned all the –’ he squinted at Elliot again and Sam tried to give him the tiniest shake of her head ‘– well, all that shit again. In passing. Would have thought you’d have seen it because of that.’

Brixton, 1995

It was the first time they’d held a formal party in the squat, and the faultlines peeled open. Gaz and Spider were against the idea that any cleaning whatsoever should be done to prepare the space.

‘They take us as they find us,’ Gaz said. ‘We’re not putting on a show of respectability when we ain’t.’

Xanthe countered that this was another manifestation of patriarchal individualism over the communal identity they were attempting to foster.

‘It doesn’t seem to matter what you say your politics are – in here, you’re quite happy to have women skivvy for you.’

Fran said she’d never seen any of the men so much as washing a dish while she lived here, and she was sick of dealing with a sink full of dirt. Spider took a can of lager out of the fridge and pointedly sat down on the new armchair they’d pulled out of a skip last week, the one they’d all been fighting over, smacked his lips loudly as the ring pull cracked and fizzed.

‘Right! That’s me ready for the party, maties. Let the games begin.’

Sammi had been involved at first, but now she was hanging back in the doorway, Mark’s thin arm round her waist keeping the two of them apart from it all. His lips moved up her neck, breathing lightly and deliberately, teasing her.

‘Wanna fuck?’ he whispered, close to her ear.

She tried not to move her mouth too much in reply.

‘Not really the time for it, mate.’

‘Seems like the perfect time for it to me. Just a quick little fuck, that’s all …’

Xanthe was holding forth again, her gestures growing ever-bigger with anger, eyes flashing. Gaz burped showily and she wheeled on him. Mark snorted, grabbed Sammi’s wrist and ran down the corridor with her to the sleeping area, where their zipped-together sleeping bags were crumpled in a heap on the one double mattress. Sammi had begun to paint faces on the wall around their space – not in a way that would denote ownership, just so that she’d have something to look at in the long mornings while everyone else slept and the sunlight filtered in. Across the way were the beginnings of her mural, its letters already sketched out. Over Mark’s shoulder, as he mouthed wet on her nipple, pulled her knickers down, as Xanthe’s scrawny baby whimpered in its sleep, she read it to herself again:

FORM TRIBES. TAKE LAND. LIVE FREE.

They lay there for a few minutes after, warmed in a ray of sun from the skylight, tangled up in each other. She could smell woodsmoke on his skin, and earth, something dark and real.

‘This is well nice,’ she said.

‘I agree,’ he said, kissing the top of her head.

‘We should get back, though.’

‘You’re a perfect worker bee, you.’

‘Yeah well, maybe I am. Come and help me stop this, yeah.’

In the living space, it was still going on. Fran was on her knees, huffily scrubbing the floor with a rag, while Gaz and Spider tried to occupy the maximum amount of space with their bodies, Xanthe shouting into each of their faces in turn. Sammi pushed Mark, in the small of his back, and he grinned at her. There was something cruel about his smile, sometimes.

He walked into the centre of the room with his limbs long and loose, movements easy, arms out, flat palms at angry face-height.

‘Now look here. We need to resolve this.’

The reason she’d wanted him to sort this out was because, when he spoke, people listened. She’d known schoolteachers to have that effect; never one of her peers. The stern confidence of him, like it had been bred in somewhere along the way. They all responded to it; the room stilled, settled itself quietly around that lean, golden centrepoint.

Mark shook his hair out of his eyes and reached out to each of them in turn. He looked like Jesus, Sammi realized, one of those blond master-race Jesuses from the Sunday School books.

‘Spider, mate,’ he said, his accent blunting. ‘Let’s look at this rationally, eh? We’re not just trying to recreate the old systems here – we all came to this place because we’re committed to making a new way of living, yeah? And we’re not going to do that if we fall into these easy traps where the women end up doing all the housework.’

He was careful not to use any of Xanthe’s buzzwords, Sammi noted. No ‘patriarchy’. Clever. He was clever, that man-not-hers. Every word measured out and perfectly placed.

‘And, Xanth, it’s important to be mindful that men like Spider bear the scars of their upbringing. Spider wants to overcome his conditioning, don’t you, mate? But he needs our support as he goes through that process. I’m not asking you to do his dishes for him; I’m asking you to understand why he leaves them out.’

Had anyone else said this, Xanthe would have ripped them apart. Dizzied by the full beam of Mark’s enthusiasm, though, she looked almost pacified.

‘So here’s the thing, guys. We invited people tonight because we want to show them this new way of being we’re creating. The ecology of what we’re trying to do here – the free shop, the drop-in centre, the zine – it all depends on the support we can generate on evenings like this. We need to build on the community we’ve got here and not take anything for granted just because we’ve made the first step and found this place. And that means all of us, working hard and being continually mindful as we bond this, the first tribe, together. If, for now, that means letting go of an argument, getting on, pulling together to create a space that we know will work for the interests of the greater good, then that is what we need to do in this moment.’

As they unclenched, as the tension hissed slowly out of the room, Mark turned around and winked at her, a split-second shaking off of his sincerity. And Sammi, who had been nodding along, letting his words carry her into visions of their sunlit community growing stronger together, felt sick in her belly. She looked back again; his face was at peace, the mask back on. Maybe she’d been imagining it.

The party was huge. Gaz had got his mates to help him set up a sound system, crackling as it soaked up almost everything in their generator. Bulky cider bottles and towers of paper cups lined the kitchen unit and floor, and the air was fat with weed. Almost too heavy. The fairy lights Spider had nicked from the discount shop flashed off if the bass got too loud. Xanthe held court in the free shop, her baby rolling about on cushions, and a group of young women sitting cross-legged as she explained the exchange system. ‘It’ll be good for nappies, baby stuff, all of that. We need to support each other on this, you know? Old toys; when they grow out of their shoes, we’ll get the local women here and they can drop off their stuff and take what they need. It’s not like those bastards are going to do it. You know the saying “It takes a village to raise a child”? Well, this is gonna be Dido’s village, isn’t it, darling?’

The baby chuckled at the attention and the women smiled at it, through the haze of a shared joint. This had been a tactical move that she, Fran and Xanthe had worked out earlier in the day: keep the free shop as female a space as possible, so that the worst of Gaz’s mates would be scared off, wouldn’t trash it.

Sammi stumbled about between the rooms, just taking it all in. It was happening. Just like they’d hoped.

Mark was sitting in the middle of the sofa, playing that brilliant trick he always had of being the centre of the conversation whilst not leading it. It flowed through him – he was the joining point, the connector, but he was mostly listening, mediating, making sure everyone was heard. Those teenage girls Sammi had stopped with a flyer in the street had come along – probably more after free weed than having their consciousnesses raised, but the important thing, as she knew from her own experience, was that they were here. That they were exposed to a way of doing things different from their mothers, their school social order. They were sitting around Mark’s feet, half-following the chat (a couple of crusty guys from Greenpeace and Mandy from the ALF were in a gentle argument), giggling occasionally and rolling their eyes at each other when it got earnest, passing a joint between themselves and making faces if it had been left wet with saliva. One of them was leaning up against Mark’s legs. He caught Sammi’s eye and shrugged, stuck out his tongue, absolving himself. Sammi grinned, to let him know it was all right. They were working towards non-monogamous harmony. Jealousy had been hard for both of them at first, but Sammi was pretty sure it was a hang-up from a social order they’d been conditioned to and were rejecting. If that was how it was tonight then that was how it was.

She felt everything loosen as the party opened up for her, began to move her legs with purpose. It was a very white crowd, natch. One of Gaz’s dealer mates picked up on what she was sending out, began vibing her. He wasn’t bad looking – bigger than Mark – broad chest, hefty arms. The sort of bloke her sister would have brought home. What would it be like to have a man like that in your bed, she wondered, throwing you around? He seemed to read her thoughts. Something flicked on behind his sleepy eyes, and he made his way through the tangle of legs on the floor, the lone crusty dancing wildly to some blurred, fuzzy dub, a slow, easy swagger she’d seen before, hanging around outside the tube station.

‘Well then, little sister,’ he said, as he reached her. ‘What you doing here, baby? With all these lily-white fools?’

‘I live here,’ she told him. She was bored of him already. Sure, he looked good; sure, she could take him into the sleeping space and fuck him now; but she knew he’d just give her the same attitude as the boys at school had in the same fake patois. Same attitude her brother had had, when she’d been spotted with a white boyfriend.

‘You live in this shithole? Nah. This ain’t no place for a sister.’

‘Yeah? It’s the place for this sister, mate.’ She walked away from him, down the corridor, where the thump of the bass evened out a bit. Her head was spinning, and she wished for a second everyone would just fuck off and leave her alone with Mark, with his skin on hers. But that wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the purpose of this party, or of the way they were trying to live. She needed to get better at this, at suppressing these urges for solitude, for chocolate biscuits and a telly that worked, a sofa that hadn’t come out of a skip, and a proper bed, a mum to cook her breakfast.

She could hear singing, through and over the bassline. Wild, strange singing, in a language she didn’t recognize. She followed it, down the concrete stairs that still smelled of men’s piss from when this was a dosshouse, into the room they were going to make into the magazine office, although just now it only contained a big table for layout, and they hadn’t rewired it for electricity yet. There was a circle of older crusty types in there, but it was difficult to make out their faces. Two of them had guitars, there was a little fire crackling away in one of the tin bins, and there was a woman singing, using the persistent heartbeat boom from the sound system upstairs to mark her time. Sammi leaned in the doorframe, closed her eyes for a second, and just listened. The woman’s voice rasped against the low notes then rose, pure, clear, somewhere above all of their heads. Sammi had never heard anyone sing like that before. The girls at her school who’d thought they had good voices were always trying to do Whitney or Mariah; self-indulgent screeching that took you out of the tune. This woman wasn’t showing off – it was like she’d found the melody in the air, was turning it over for them. Sammi gazed at the fire, thought that it seemed so old, full of secrets. The way it danced. Man, she was well stoned.

The song stopped and the air in the room was perfect for a second, before all the old hippies started clapping. Conn, who washed dishes at her work, beckoned Sammi in and murmured her name to the circle – they all raised gentle hands in greeting. She’d be safe in here. The woman who’d been singing patted a spot on the blanket beside her and, as she got closer, Sammi could make out curly hair burning red in the firelight glow, a wide smile.

‘How you doing, Sammi? Nice earrings,’ she said, her voice weird and soft, lilty.

‘What – what language was that you was singing in?’ It just came out of her, before she’d had time to remember her manners.

‘That was Gaelic. It’s the language of the Highlands and island communities in Scotland. It was a traditional folk song. A lullaby. For getting the babies to sleep?’

Sammi must have been gawking at her. She closed her jaw for a second.

‘You Scottish, then?’

‘I am.’

‘Long way from here, innit?’

‘It is. I’m here visiting some friends. I ran into Spider on the street and he invited me. I ran away.’ The woman looked delighted with herself, looked like she was sharing a massive, brilliant secret.

The hippies continued to sing their old protest songs, sawing away at their guitars. Usually Sammi found them embarrassing, but she didn’t mind tonight. The woman, who she could see now she was up close was actually a lot younger than the rest, kept her involved, sharing a silent joke with her when someone sang off key. And she looked familiar.

Sammi nudged her. ‘Mate, do I know you from somewhere?’

Her new friend smiled. ‘I’ll tell you later. Listen, do you wanna get some air?’

‘I really do. Have they shown you the roof, yet?’

And they were running, giggling, up the stairs, climbing the shonky metal ladder at the end of the hall, and Sammi led her friend whose name was Clio by the hand, over the slates to the flat bit, and they were talking, and Sammi got out her pouch and rolled a joint, a big one, five-skinner, and smiled at the woman with a bit of a tease, like, oh, you think you can handle it? And then they were sitting together on the woman’s coat on the slates, looking down over the city, its smoke, its car horns, its shouts and its lights going out.

‘I mean it,’ Clio was saying. ‘I want to know how you got into this.’

‘You mean, what’s a little black girl from Brixton doing living in a squat with a bunch of posh crusties?’

‘No. Well, yeah. I mean, where did your politics come from? What drove you into this life? I think we’ve got similar backgrounds, you and me. I’m always interested to hear from people who made the same journey. Because there’s always something, or someone, that starts you off, that fires you up and makes it impossible for you to live any other way. You know?’

‘It’s a long story, mate.’

‘They always are. That’s what’s good about them.’

‘You sure? Really? Your funeral.’

‘I’ll take that risk. Talk.’

It was a command, from a queen, suddenly serious. Sammi sucked long and hard on the joint and passed it over. She wasn’t usually a talker, but she wanted Clio to know her, know her politics, be impressed.

‘All right. I was coming out of school one day and this woman, a bit older than me, short dreads, wax-backed skirt, like proper in touch with the heritage, like the sort of thing my mum would be ashamed of, she was standing there trying to hand out this magazine to the girls as we were leaving. The white girls were giving her the eye, like, brushing her off, but she looked straight at me and said, “There’s something in here for you, little sister.” An it was called that. SisterHood, it was called. The main photo was of this girl a bit older than me, hair wrap like woah and some really awesome lipstick. I’d never seen a magazine with a black woman on the cover before. I was all suspicious, like, what, is it free then, and she just smiled at me. She was like, “We had extra on the print run. I wanted to get it to people who need to read it. No charge for you, little one.” And then she turned it over, pulled up the back page and pointed to an address, in tiny print. She told me if I liked what I read, they was just round the corner, and that I could drop in any time. Then she said, “We could do with smart young voices,” and that appealed to me, right, cos I was a cocky-as-fuck teenager, but no one ever wanted to listen to my smart young voice, huh? So maybe I was already predisposed to like it, I dunno. That was Constance. She became more like a mum to me than my real mum. Anyway, I took the magazine, didn’t I. And it was like nothing I’d read before. I mean, it was mad. It had, like, hair tips and articles on feminism and racism and interviews with a feminist rapper and, like, some really shitty poetry about wombs. But it was speaking to me, you know, like nobody really does. Nobody really speaks to little black girls as themselves. The school, when they talk to you, they talk to you like you’re an old rich white guy. The telly, when it talks to you, and the teenie magazines, they’re saying you should be white and blonde and skinny. So I spent the whole night reading this magazine, like, three times, even the crazy poems – I could probably still recite them for you, yeah! The ink rubbing off on my thumbs; couldn’t get my hands proper clean the next day. And then after school, I found myself knocking on their door. Fourteen years old, still in my uniform and clutching my copy of SisterHood under my arm, all, like, hellooo – and it was like a world I’d never been to before. Five women in this big sunny upstairs room, and a couple of them looked well cool, like, cool hoops and trainers. Natural hair, no weaves. Lot of wraps. It was basically my mum’s nightmare – she was well into us trying to look as white as possible, and she always turned her face away from anyone who looked like that if she saw them in the street. Muslims and loo-na-tics, she’d call ’em. We’re Jamaican, she’d say; we’re Jamaican and we’re Christian and we’re British. But I was into it. If this was where they made SisterHood, then this was where I wanted to be. Sorry, mate. God, I’m running right off at the mouth, ain’t I?’

Clio took a final drag of the joint and handed it back to her. The roof thumped with bass beneath them.

‘Nah. Go on. This is what I’m into. I wanna hear how people got radicalized.’ The way she spoke, the ‘r’ came out like a purr. ‘Women especially, eh. How we found it. You’re doing magic.’

It seemed to Sammi like a weird thing to say, but her voice was foreign honey; not like the flat London vowels that dragged out of everyone else’s mouth. And she was pretty, and Sammi liked her, so she took a drag, held it in for a second, felt the burn, and started talking again.

‘Right, well. You sure, yeah? So, I just hung around there at first, and I think a couple of them were like, what is this kid doing here, you know? But Constance, she was always trying to include me. At first I was just, like, making the coffee, putting the copies in the envelopes for subscribers, and then, if any of them had tapes of interviews they wanted typed up, they’d get me to do it. I was better than them as I was doing typing at school, see. And I was superkeen. I did not make a single mistake. I’d spend hours after school listening and re-listening to these interviews – with poets, with politicians, with campaigners. Almost all of them black women. Local women. I’d sit in the office, and there was always someone in there, something happening. It was volunteer-run, obviously, so them usually brought they kids in with them – it was always one person’s job to look after the kids in the room next door. And sometimes other women in the area would come in, and have a cup of coffee, and moan about their men, or them not able to pay rent, or something. And I was just sitting there, taking it all in. I got ideas above my station, mate. I went to the careers adviser and told her I wanted to be a painter and, failing that, a journalist.’

‘What did she say to that?’

‘She said I’d been getting really good scores on my typing, had I thought about secretarial work? Pfff. I told this to Constance and she was, like, fuming. Next day, they’re giving me my own column in the magazine. “Little SisterHood”. They told me to write about it, and I did, and then I would write about everything like that, every month. The pressures that teenage girls feel, that sort of thing. People loved it.

‘It weren’t long before I was going on protests with them. Anti-fascist marches. At first they’d just take me to be the photographer, because all of them was getting so swept up they kept forgetting to get pics for the magazine. But I got into it, heavy. Started my own group of the Anti-Fascist League at school; couldn’t get that many of the thick fucks I hung around with interested. SisterHood, and those women, and like just waking up, it changed me for the rest of the world, you know? I got my GCSEs, but school just didn’t seem that important. School looked at me and said, oh, people like you drop out at sixteen, end of, so I did that. My mum was shocked that I wasn’t going to take a job, that I was going to sign on and write full time for SisterHood. We had a row, and I went to live with Constance for a bit. It spoiled me for boys, too, yeah. All the boys my age, they’re just nothing, man. Just into tits, not ideas. That’s why I’ve started seeing older men. That’s why Mark and me work.’

‘Who’s Mark, then?’

‘You not met him? We moved in here together. He’s the posh guy with the blond hair. Mark’s my fella – not “mine” in the possessive sense, innit.’

‘Open relationship? I take it that was Mark’s idea?’ Clio looked amused, laughed two notes of smoke out.

‘Nah, I know what you’re thinking, but it was honestly a mutual decision. I’m not even sure I believe in monogamy. I fancy other blokes sometimes, and I can go off with them for fun if I want. It works for us, mate. Trust me.’

Clio smiled at her, and she didn’t think she was being mocked, or maybe only in a good way. ‘And where did you meet the lovely Mark?’

‘He came into my work. I wait tables and sometimes do the cooking at the café in the 121 Centre up the road – Constance got me it, she knows Antoine, who I guess is my boss? Mark kept on coming in every day for a week cos he was new to the area, didn’t know many folk, and we got talking, and then we got fucking, and we never really stopped. He’s all right, is Mark.’ Sammi thought again about that smile on his face today, that split second of unease, and brushed over it.

‘Anyway, yeah, SisterHood, was that what I was saying? It folded, mate, about a year ago. I was gutted. We was all gutted. But they just didn’t have the funds to keep affording their rent. They tried to keep doing it from people’s houses, but it didn’t work. So that’s what I thought, when we found the squat, there was a room big enough to start doing this all over again. You see? Me and Xanthe are starting up a new freesheet, a zine. We’ll work from here, lay it out, photocopy on the sly at the copy shop and leave piles of it in all the little caffs and community centres and stuff. I’m going to paint the front cover, every time, a different face of someone in the community. It’s going to be feminist, political, no effin poetry, yeah? That’s the plan, anyway.’ Sammi ended quietly, aware she’d been shouting, that the Scottish woman was smiling wide again. ‘You’re laughing at me.’

‘Naw. Well, aye, but it’s only because I think you’re fucking brilliant, Sammi.’

‘You what?’

‘I do. You’re brilliant. It’s been amazing to meet you and just hear you talk. I want to know you better.’

‘Really? You mean that?’

Clio had reached an arm out and pulled Sammi along the slates and in to her. She’d stroked her face and kissed her on the lips in a way that was and wasn’t sexual all at once, and then they’d cuddled up together, under the street light, sharing the last of the joint and a little silver hip flask of something much, much stronger than cider. Sammi had told her all about the squat, what they planned to do, about her ideas for the mural, about Xanthe’s free shop. She talked and talked; the words just kept coming from her, and all the while she felt warmth rising up between their two bodies, side by side, keeping each other from the cold. And Clio turned and smiled at her, and suddenly Sammi had it.

‘I do know you! You’re proper famous, intya? You had that song, when I was a kid. Rise up! People got to rise up!’

‘Aye, that’s me. But that was a long time ago now. Not so famous any more. One-hit wonder, eh?’

She grinned and blew a smoke ring, and Sammi gazed at its perfect circle for a second until it broke, drifted.

‘Well, what about you, then?’

‘What about me?’

‘Yeah. You know. You’re like a pop star and that. You was in Smash Hits. An now you’re in a party in a filthy dirty squat. How did you get –’ and here she started giggling, because it was fucking funny, everything was fucking funny ‘– rrrrrradicalized?’

‘I’ll tell you a story about my daddy, Sammi, some day. My daddy was a great revolutionary. A freedom fighter. He travelled the world helping the oppressed wherever he could. When you’ve got someone like that in your life, someone who’s a constant beacon of what’s right, you know; it all just comes naturally. I had no choice in this, in a way. I couldny just settle down and live a normal life when there’s fights to be fought for folk who canny do it themselves. You know? You know.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘But really, babe, I’m like you. I left home and school at sixteen too. Never looked back. We teach ourselves, you and me, right? We know we’re smart enough, so fuck their fancy university degrees and all that shit. People like us, we live by our moral codes, eh? A finely honed sense of what’s right.’

‘Yeah,’ Sammi said, and she shouted across the rooftops, across the city: ‘Fuck your degrees!’ They held each other tightly again, laughing as the sun started to rise.

SIMON
Bristol, 2008

It was not a wedding Simon had really expected to find himself at. It wasn’t that he’d ever really thought Jess and Greg were going to break up, it was just that the idea of marriage could have any interest for them. And yet, here they were, in a scuffed church hall decorated with paper flowers made by friends, drinking from a bar composed entirely of bottles the guests had brought, but married under the law all the same. At the end of the day, they were still a nice middle-class heterosexual couple, he supposed, raising his glass to the uneasy gathering of well-dressed friends-of-their-parents clustered in the corner of the hall, flecked by the sweat of a dance floor moshing to Chumbawamba.

It came to them all, though. All the straight couples from his little group had parked the sculptural prams bought by their well-off parents far away from the crackling speaker set up by Greg’s friend who organized raves; wheeled them home after an hour or two. Their places had been filled by the second-tier guests, colleagues and comrades in their twenties, invited in after 7 p.m. to make the dance floor look busy. No matter how ostentatiously they’d skimped on the trappings of what he remembered Jess once calling ‘the self-policing patriarchy of the matrimonial industrial complex’, they had observed the protocols. She even wore white, although the back had been cut out to show her tattoos. Within six months, there would be a pregnancy announcement. There always was – the way the marriage certificate seemed to give all these radical feminists permission to ditch their contraception had made him laugh at first. Now it just seemed grimly inevitable.

Oh, it was easy to be mean. He looked about and realized he was pretty much friendless. He recognized a few people from the service earlier, but didn’t know them well enough to go and plonk himself down beside them. He wished he’d brought someone. He’d considered Luke, but worried that the pressures of being seen as a couple in that context might trough up all the issues they’d ignored on their last go-around. He’d also thought that Luke’s clean-fingernailed perspective on what he’d always jokingly called ‘Si’s crusty crew’ might leave a sour taste in his mouth – and yet here he was, providing the acid-tongued commentary for himself.

Maybe it was time to go home.

Soft heat and a gentle sweat smell, as a woman threw herself down at the table. He recognized Clio Campbell right away – she’d sung ‘A Case of You’ at the service, as they were signing their names, after he’d rolled his well-taught enunciation around a straight recital of the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s ‘Wedding Song’, but he would have known her anyway. The gorgeous young Asian guy she’d been snogging in the middle of the mosh pit leaned over her for a final kiss, but she was already reaching for the discarded bottle of wine in the middle of the table. He made a toking gesture at her, and she laughed, slapped his bum and sent him on his way. She poured more from the bottle into the nearest glass (Simon thought it had maybe been his at dinner), drained it noisily and smacked her lips at him.

‘Oof. That’s me done dancing for another year, eh! You not getting up there?’

Had he known she was Scottish? He wondered whether he’d ever actually heard her talk. He remembered seeing her on Top of the Pops when he was a kid – she must be at least ten years older than him by that reckoning.

‘You’re Scottish.’ He’d said it out loud – he must be drunker than he’d thought.

‘You’re not.’

‘No, I’m not.’

They smiled at each other, and he realized she was probably as drunk as him. She filled up her glass again.

‘Nothing like a warm white wine to really not slake a thirst! I’m Clio.’

‘I know. I’m a huge fan.’ Huge? It was what you said, wasn’t it? He qualified, hastily. ‘I mean, your song today. “A Case of You”. I’ve loved it for years and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it done so gorgeously. Maybe not even by Joni herself.’

Too much? Too much.

She waved a hand.

‘You know what? I’ve never worked out what I’m supposed to say to that sort of thing. The polite thing to do, it seems, would be to blush all dainty-like and apologize for my presence. Unless I was a bloke. Then I should just nod, like of course, take what is probably just you being a nice polite guy as my due, graciously allow you into my presence. But a woman doing that, you think, ooh, she’s up herself, don’t you? So instead I get all flustered and self-deprecating when what I really want to do is say yeah, today I fucking nailed that, didn’t I?’ She beamed at him. ‘Thank you! Thank you is what I should say. Jesus, manners, you silly bint. It’s Simon, isn’t it. Si?’

His head was swimming with her.

‘So, how do you know the happy couple?’

‘Oh God, just uni. We were all in the Green Party student chapter at Bristol. Went to dance parties. Bit more hardcore than this.’

He smirked, being Luke again, tried to tell her about the thrum of bassline, bloated cartoon characters done in UV paint shining on the walls, the smell of Jess’s sweat, her cropped top and massive frayed army trousers, a keffir scarf wound round her head; running his hands over Greg’s flat teenage stomach and under the waistband hanging off his hips that once. Simon had been a handy sounding board for all those enlightened little straight boys feeling a bit curious, had wrapped palms round each of their cocks at some point or another, received precious little back. A tick-off along the way, a thing to do before you were thirty, before you got the girl.

‘And nine years on, here we are. Wearing suits, signing marriage certificates –’

Jess, in the centre of the hall, spun in a circle and rolled herself into Greg’s waiting arm, a pastiche of old-time dance-hall moves.

‘– watching all your old pals committed and settled down, feeling lost and wondering where your youth went?’

‘It’s like you’re in my head.’

She poured the last of the wine into two glasses, then reached over and grabbed another half-empty bottle from a different table, topped them up red-into-white. He winced, involuntarily, imagining his father’s thoughts on the subject, and she caught him at it.

‘Sorry. Call it a cocktail. I don’t think I’m spoiling any particular vintage, eh no.’

He grinned and she clinked his glass.

‘Anyway, here’s an unasked-for life lesson from yer Auntie Clio, as she’s had a bit to drink and feels like spreading her wisdom. I was you for years, sitting at weddings as the people my age paired off and had their babies and stopped being fun. I realized after a while you just need to find the people who are still at your level. The kids and the gays, basically. No offence, pal. Obviously. Because I don’t know about you, but I’m not really interested in the conversation of parents, and I don’t think they’re interested in me. No matter what they believed in before those wee darlings popped out, no matter how radical they thought they were, there’s something that changes about them. All they really want to do is sit on some comfy seats with other parents, comparing notes on exhaustion and bleeding nipples and laughing at cute little flubbed sentences, maybe get competitive about which one walked first. It’s evolution, isn’t it? Mama Nature ensuring that parents can’t think beyond their babies for more than five minutes at a time means those babies don’t get eaten by wolves. Good parents make shitty friends, hon, as I’m sure you’re finding out.’

‘You’ve never fancied it yourself?’

‘A big fat no to that. I’m one of the ones who’d make a shitty parent – fortunately I realized it in time.’

‘Maybe you’re just too good a friend,’ he said, toasting her. Her face wasn’t quite readable.

‘Kids chain you down. That’s not really a new observation, but it’s something I saw happening from quite a young age to my pals, and realized I couldny take it myself. Maybe I’m just too selfish, ha. Anyway, I come to the weddings of people I’ve loved through their twenties and sometimes they ask me to sing, and it’s all very nice, but what they don’t realize is that in my head, as I’m raising a glass, I’m saying a silent goodbye. I mean, what do you give it before these two are letting us all know about the little bundle of joy on the way?’

‘Six months. You are inside my head.’

Clink.

‘Exactly so. So, you read them your toast, you give them a wee present that you’ve made yourself and put some love into, and you’ll send them something nice again when the first baby’s born, if you’re not too fucked off that they not only didn’t come to your birthday night out but forgot it completely, but you know that really that’s all that’s left. When they come out the other side, blinking in the light when the kid’s about ten or something, you might meet them in the street by chance, and it’ll be so friendly; you’ll hug, you’ll swap numbers, you’ll make promises to go for coffee, but you know they’re secretly hoping you don’t call. You’ve lived on different planets for too long by that point.’

Simon slumped even further into his seat. ‘Shit. I was hoping you’d tell me it was just a phase, and we’d get through it.’

‘Babe, I’m forty years old. Loads of people my age have teenagers now. I’ve had it happen time and time again. They’re gone, they just haven’t realized it yet.’

‘Biology.’

‘Biology. See, as a woman and a feminist I’m not supposed to admit that, but it totally, totally is.’

‘You really don’t look forty, by the way. I’d never have thought—’

‘That’s very sweet, but I do look forty. This is what forty looks like when you still get eight hours’ sleep a night, all your pals are twenty-four, and you don’t really have anyone else to worry about beside yourself. See, at – what age are you?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Yeah. When thirty still feels like a big scary monster on the horizon, forty seems like death. But you take all that biology out of the equation and it’s pretty fucking great, actually. I’m not in a race to procreate before my body trips me up; I’ve been around long enough to know what sort of clothes, drink and pals do and don’t suit me; I don’t feel the need to apologize for who I am any more. So, you have to say your farewells to the people who got you through the first bit of growing up, and that’s the toughest hurdle to face. But if you have a look around, you’re actually in the perfect place to meet your next set of friends. Look at all these babbies still dancing away because they don’t have anything more pressing to do on a weekend evening. Imagine how wise you’ll seem to them, hon! Ten years’ time and you’ll be looking this fucking fabulous, sitting someone else down to talk their face off just like this. You find your team, your new tribe, in the leftovers after the ceremony’s done. The ones hanging on to the bitter end.’

‘I just – I really hope you’re right.’

Clio’s young boyfriend was weaving between the tables, his beautiful amber eyes stoned and shining for her. She rose, put her arms around his neck and he dipped her backwards for a kiss. She winked at Simon over his shoulder as she rose again.

‘Hamza, my love, this is Simon with the lovely speaking voice. We’re hanging out with Simon for the rest of the night. He’s sad, and he shouldn’t be. Have you got a little present for us?’

‘You know I have. Come and get it.’

She fished inside his suit jacket and extracted a little polybag of white powder, magician-quick, tucking it into her sleeve, then grabbed at Simon’s wrist gently but firmly. Her hand found its way into his, her fingernails painted shiny iridescent purple, glittering in the party lights.

‘Come on, babe. Let’s go celebrate the momentous occasion of your rebirth, like people with fuck all responsibility should.’

NEIL
Glasgow, 23 January 2018

Gogsy had answered his phone the same way for decades now. Crisp, irritated intonation, ‘Gordon Duke.’ Every time. Even after he got a mobile phone that showed him the name of the caller on the screen.

‘Hi, Gogs. How are you, man?’

‘Is that you, Neil?’

Oh, you know fine well it’s me, Neil thought. Stop this.

‘A wee bit early, is it not? What can I do for you today?’

There was something sad about Gogsy these days. He’d lost his seat in the SNP general election putsch two years ago, to a woman, of all things. He’d been far too easy a target for the vitriol aimed at the Labour Party post-referendum, because he’d bought into the party mindset far too much by this time. Neil saw him on television not long after his defeat talking about the ‘post-truth’ age the electorate were living in, where truth meant Labour, meant Gordon Duke.

Like Clio, Gogsy would only contact Neil when he wanted a story placed, so they hadn’t seen much of each other in the last two years. The suit was as sleek as ever, the hair as thick and silvery, the sovereign rings as prominent, but he’d deflated, somehow, no longer commanded a room just by entering it. Faces did turn, eventually – he was still a former cabinet minister, had been regularly on television for ten years – but once they registered him, turned back.

‘Nobody from the paper come here any more, then?’

‘There’s nobody from the paper left, Gogs.’

‘Christ.’

It was ten in the morning. They drank.

‘Off the record, Neil, the now. But what a stupid, stupid lassie. To do a thing like that.’

‘Aye.’

‘Stupid waste.’

‘Aye.’

‘Tell you about the last time I saw her? We were on this BBC panel discussion up at the university. Run-up to the independence referendum, you know, passions were high – but she just lost it, eh. Fell to pieces right there in front of all these students, just because I’d challenged her on something – oil or who knows what. The rage, this incoherent emotional nonsense she was talking, making it all about me, about my “moral failings”. She stood up and she screamed “Judas” at me. Actually screamed it. I’d not seen her like that, the whole time we were together, but then it takes its toll on women, doesn’t it? At that age. The hormones. I mean, you could see something wasn’t right. And all these students laughing. I wanted to stop the whole thing, right away, just wrap my coat round her and take her offstage, you know? Make it stop. But I didn’t, because it meant we were winning.’

He exhaled noisily, went back to his drink.

‘That was always Clio’s problem, though, was it not? Never knew when to keep her mouth shut.’

Neil just nodded.

‘Do you know what I think it was with that one – and I’m still off the record here, Neil. I’ll let you know when we go on, eh. What it was, I think, was she never could just settle down. She had to keep itching away at the next thing and the next, she never really grew up, you know what I’m saying. I mean, when we were together – I actually asked her to marry me, can you imagine. What a close escape that was, eh. She wouldn’t have made a politician’s wife, would our Clio. She broke my heart at the time, right enough, but when I think of taking her along to, say, dinner with the Prime Minister, or even officiating at a constituents’ evening? Oof. I mean, at the time she turned me down, she said, “I’m not the marrying kind, Gogs,” and I thought she was being cool, you know, that this was her feminist principles or whatever. Something to admire about it, even. A younger man then, Neil. A younger man. But then she went and married that music guy and I’ll admit it, even though I was very happy with Sharon by that point, there was a part of me that took that as a punch to the stomach. You know what I’m saying, pal. That didn’t last, though, did it? I met him, you know, some sort of council bash or something. He was looking at moving his festival to East Ren at the time. I did say to him, after a couple, “I understand we have an old flame in common, pal,” you know, and I regret that. You don’t refer to a man’s wife as an old flame, ex-wife even. There are lines, Neil. There are lines.’

‘There are lines, Gogs.’

‘Always struck me as a bit of a Flash Harry type, that one. She probably thought she was going up in the world with him. No conscience, do anything for a buck. I mind I thought at the time that they wouldn’t have that much in common. You know. You know, pal.’

Neil knew.

Last night, in the pub, he’d spun a vision of himself, one of those legendary Rolling Stone journalists matching the band drink for drink, putting everything on expenses, turning in definitive interviews down the line to the copy desk from truck stops and neon-blasted motels, and round the table everyone had nodded, believed him.

Squinting through the hangover now, digging his hands into the disintegrating foam of the Skoda’s seat as his stomach lurched with each swerve, he felt embarrassed for himself. Beside him, Deek clenched the wheel, his pink head bumping the car’s ceiling. Neil could have been sitting on a nice calm train now, reading the papers, gazing at the scenery; however, both his editor and Danny the tour manager had been keen for this, the much cheaper option.

‘Deek’ll get you there,’ the tour manager had told him yesterday, cocky and smooth through the warped line from some Highland payphone somewhere. ‘He’s a good boy.’

As the car strained and whined under the bald giant’s foot, Neil imagined his own obituary, a tiny paragraph in the back of the paper he had not been working at long enough to merit much more in.

The scheme Neil grew up on had been full of Deeks, lumpy boulders of self-satisfaction, utterly impermeable to reason. Until this point, Neil’s tried and tested method of dealing with them had been to keep his head down and duck away: it was perhaps the only great benefit of being small. Nowhere to duck to today, though. Deek fumbled in the tiny glove compartment with fingers the size of sausages, the old ink of a faded eagle seeping into the skin of his wrist, chucked out a road atlas greying and tatty, not quite held together with ring binders and Sellotape.

‘Here. We get lost, it’s on you, eh.’

‘So. Are you working on this tour then?’

‘What tour?’

‘The singer. Clio Campbell. Touring the Highlands. Are you a roadie on it or something?’

‘Fuck naw. I know the boy Danny cos I’ve done security at a couple of his club nights, eh. He asked me if I’d drive a wee journalist up somewhere. Probably could’ve charged him more if I’d known you’d keep me waiting around, eh?’

‘Aye. Ha ha. So, is that what you do, then? You’re a bouncer?’

‘Only in the evenings, pal. I do removals. House moves. Ken?’

‘Oh aye. So, have you got a van?’

‘We can get a van.’

This was painful, Neil thought. Painful and due to continue for another four and a half hours. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, trying to discourage Deek from turning his head to engage him.

‘So, you said you knew Danny, aye? What’s he like?’

Deek smirked. ‘Danny’s a good boy.’

‘Funny, he said that about you.’

‘Did he, aye? Cheeky cunt.’

‘Known him long?’

‘Bout five year. He keeps the work coming, aye. Good about paying cash in hand, ken. We could aw do with a bit of that.’

‘But you’ve not heard of Clio?’

‘Who?’

‘The artist. The singer on the tour he’s promoting.’ The reason we’re trapped together in this rusting deathmobile. ‘She had a big hit a few years back. “Rise up … everybody rise up …”?’

‘Oh aye, rings a wee bell.’

‘Red hair. Lipstick.’

‘Bint, aye? Well, Danny’ll be getting stuck into it.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Aye. He’ll be right up in about that. Proper fanny-magnet, Danny boy.’

They arrived in Ullapool two hours after they were supposed to, with the gig due to start in forty minutes. Neil had tried calling the number Danny had given him from a payphone at a service station, but the receptionist had said she was sorry, the rooms in the bunkhouse didn’t have phones, so she wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone. Another great sign.

Deek pulled in across from the hotel. ‘Right. That’s where you are. Now I’m going to get something to eat, then I’m away down the road.’

‘You not coming to the gig?’

‘What? Naw. No into that lassie music pish.’

Neil felt like kissing the pavement. He pulled the holdall out and didn’t look back, hearing Deek clanking and banging the car into reverse as he crossed the road. The hotel looked nice; cosy. He imagined sleeping in crisp sheets.

‘Sorry, love; we’re all full tonight, I’m afraid.’

The receptionist, a warm lady in her fifties, smiled at him.

‘No, no, there should be a reservation for me? Neil Munro.’

‘I’ve nothing in that name, I’m afraid.’

Neil looked around himself. The street was empty – Deek had driven off.

‘I’m with the Clio Campbell tour party. Danny Mansfield was my contact name – he’s maybe booked the room himself?’

‘Oh, of course. Sorry, son, I must have given you a wee fright there. They’ve already got the room key. You’re over the road in the bunkhouse. Have you brought your own sleeping bag?’

‘Eh, what? Nobody told me …’

‘OK. Well, you can hire a sheet sleeping bag – we need to take a five-pound deposit, I’m afraid. Been losing a few of them this season.’

The sheet didn’t fit into his already stuffed holdall, so he draped it through the straps. One corner kept falling loose and dragging along the ground, picking up dirt that would probably count against his deposit. As he walked along the street – mostly chippies, tartan-hemmed pubs and mountaineering-gear shops – he reflected again that it was a strange place for a gig.

‘That’s the point, though,’ Clio had said when she’d phoned, out of the blue, a month ago. ‘Thirty dates, none of them in cities. That’s what makes it revolutionary. We’re challenging the hegemony of the cities; we’re bringing the music to the real people of Scotland. Don’t you think there’s a story in that?’

Admit it, he thought to himself. Admit why you’re here. He hadn’t seen her in years, not seen seen her. Television didn’t count, nor did the posters that went up everywhere when the single started to sell, Clio’s wild hair smoothed out by some potion or other, her slash of lipstick a red flag, single point of colour against the monochrome. The closest he’d got was at a poll tax rally in George Square, before the song had been signed, when she was welcomed on the stage by Tommy Sheridan, hand at the small of her back, as ‘a very talented young lady with a song I think you’ll like’, but he’d been one in a thousand that day, couldn’t even fool himself that she was looking at him. Her voice had been hesitant at first, but she’d found herself quickly, the whole rally joining her on a chorus they’d only just learned.

‘Rise Up’ had become the anthem of the anti-poll tax movement, Clio standing on stages in Liverpool and Edinburgh and Manchester and London, her hair in a scarf and her denim jacket studded with badges. People began to cheer for her in advance if they knew she was on the bill. Cli-o! Cli-o!

Some opportunist A&R man had seen the potential and snapped her up, and Neil had eaten dinner to the incongruous sight of Gogsy Duke’s ex on Top of the Pops, refusing to mime along, and stripping off a paisley waistcoat to reveal a CAN’T PAY, WON’T PAY T-shirt, just standing there in front of the soundless mike, staring into the camera, while the recording played out around her and the rent-a-crowd bopped confusedly. There was a fade and cut back to the grim-faced DJ, who tried to smooth it out with blandishments, but you could hear Clio chanting ‘We’re not gonna pay your …’ in the background. He had loved her all over again in that minute.

The single had charted at number two, and wobbled in and out of the top twenty for a few weeks before heading back down again. Clio’s antics had earned her a bit of rock and roll credibility, though – there were a couple of oozy, swoony interviews with male journalists in music magazines, lovingly documenting every pint of snakebite she ordered, every swear word her red lips formed. The sense Clio was trying to talk, and the cause itself, was in danger of being drowned out by her glamour, so Neil found himself strangely relieved when ‘Rise Up’ left the top forty and Clio’s face stopped following him. She had apparently toured as a warm-up for the Housemartins; her guest vocal soared over the grinding guitars on a Teenage Fanclub B-side, and he’d switched on the Hogmanay programme a year later, after his mum had fallen asleep with her one and only whisky in hand, to see Clio and Eddi Reader singing back-up for the Proclaimers. There had been no follow-up single, though, no album; nothing for at least two years and now this tour, of village halls and pubs, run by a local promoter. Neil suspected the record company had had enough of their anarchist pop star – all very well having a pretty face, but if the words that came out of it weren’t the right ones – well, there were plenty more pretty faces out there.

And then the call had come through the switchboard to his desk at the paper. ‘Hello, Neil,’ and then that husky, gorgeous laugh. ‘Remember me?’

Remember her.

He’d sat there listening to her, feeling like he was bathing in sunshine. She remembered him; remembered him enough to have tracked his byline, know where he worked. Perhaps she’d been reading his articles at the same time he’d been poring over her profiles, thinking of him and smiling.

That wasn’t the reason he was here, though, squinting into the cold light of this tiny Highland town, salt in its air. He was here because he’d heard something else in her voice, something she’d tried to cover up with the in-jokes and the purring. Clio Campbell needed him. All right, she needed him for the column inches he could provide, but that was still something, wasn’t it? The more he’d thought about it, this profile she’d basically begged him to write, his tour diary of the first week, could be her last roll of the dice. The thought of her beholden to him … well, he wasn’t proud of it, but it was a good feeling, a strong one.

The hall had been banged together with cardboard in the Seventies and then just left to rot in the weather. Three sandwich boards outside bore Clio’s face, photocopied into pixels, with 8 P.M. TONIGHT slashed over them in marker pen. Neil walked up a dingy corridor to where a teenage boy sat behind a cash tin.

‘Neil Munro – my name should be down?’

‘Ah, nope – sorry, buddy.’ Americanisms forced out of a plukey Highland mouth.

Again. Had anyone on this tour even remembered he was coming?

‘Don’t worry, Duncan. This gent’s with me.’

The well-oiled Edinburgh public-school tones he recognized as belonging to Danny Mansfield. Neil’s first impression was of a satyr. Something about the goatee and the grin, the staccato tap from his Cuban-heeled boots. The hair sprouting from the open shirt-neck. Danny Mansfield wrapped an arm around his shoulders and ushered him into the venue space.

‘You finally made it, then! Been waiting around for you for ages. We had to just assume you’d turn up here eventually.’

Neil pushed down the urge to point out that this was because of the motorway maniac Danny himself had assigned him.

‘Yeah. Sorry. Deek – well, we got a bit lost on the road.’

‘You met big Deek, then? What a character, eh? Top notch. Anyway, here we are. We’ll get your stuff back to the room after, if that’s OK.’

A few rows of plastic chairs in a dingy room. The stage was just the area of the floor they’d erected a couple of microphones, amps and a drum kit in, old patterned rugs under each of the mikes the only thing drawing the eye. There were about ten people already sitting in there, clutching plastic glasses; a table was set up at the back with cans of beer and jugs of squash, a plate of home baking. Danny Mansfield caught his gaze.

‘Provincial entertaining, eh? But that’s how she wants it. It’s important to Clio that we’re reaching people on their own terms.’

‘Can I pop, er, backstage? Say hi to her before the gig starts? We’re old friends.’

Too eager, he realized, even as he said it. Gave Danny Mansfield too much information to play with.

‘Don’t think so, fella. She needs a bit of space before she goes on. Just getting her head together, you know. Why don’t we sit you down here just now – can I get you a beer? Yeah? Irene! A beer for my good friend over here … thanks, my darling. Right, Neil, I’d better get back to it. Enjoy the show and we’ll see you after, yeah?’

His hairy hand with its glaringly manicured fingernails patted Neil on the shoulder twice, and then he was off. Click click click.

The hall filled up a bit. Neil counted thirty-four people in total, and himself, and the woman standing behind the drinks table. At two pounds a ticket, that probably wouldn’t even pay for their accommodation for the evening (although, he reminded himself, he hadn’t actually seen this ‘bunkhouse’ yet). He slurped warm Tennent’s from a can so old it still had a rusting bathing beauty splayed across it, tuned in to the gentle swoops of pre-gig chatter. It was a mixed crowd – a few kids in their late teens up the back, a couple of grey heads scattered about, the rest looking like young parents, dolled up for a rare night off.

Plukey Duncan flicked the light switch in the hall off, and the kids up the back moaned like ghosts. Danny Mansfield stepped into the spotlight, created, Neil saw, by three large anglepoise lamps craned at the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to the McCandlish Hall in beautiful Ullapool! This evening’s show will be just over an hour long, and the bar will be open for half an hour after that. Can we ask those of you who’ve brought cameras not to use the flash, please? Gets very distracting. Anyway, I think that’s quite enough from me. Please join me in giving a very warm McCandlish Hall welcome, for An Evening With … the beautiful, the passionate, the effervescent … CLIO CAMPBELL!’

The McCandlish Hall welcome was self-conscious, a couple of notches up from tepid. The stage stayed empty for a few seconds, then suddenly she was there, purring into the mic.

‘Oooh, hello there. Good evening, Ullapool! My name’s Clio … and I’m going to sing a few wee songs for you.’ She turned to the side to tune up her guitar, suddenly shy, as two wan boys and a large bearded man filed onstage behind her and picked up their instruments.

He took the opportunity of her distraction to risk a proper glance at her. She looked good. Her hair was chucked up on top of her head, tiny curls escaping down her neck, behind a patterned scarf. Huge earrings in a sort of African tribal pattern, white sleeveless top of some sort of lacy material, pretty much melting into her pale skin. Ripped jeans, Doc Martens. She was thinner than he remembered; he could hardly make out the shape of her breasts as she turned back to the front, and the jeans hung off her hipbones. There was a briskness and competency to her movements that he didn’t recognize, as she plugged up the amp, checked the first few notes. It felt strange to be so close to her now, watching her, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to see him while the anglepoise shone in her eyes.

Her mouth was at the mic again, counting down. ‘A-one two three and—’

One of the wan boys screeched his guitar, and Danny ran forward, bent double, to fiddle with the settings.

‘Dearie me!’ Clio said, pulling a face, covering up. A couple of mild chuckles rose from the people around him. He wanted to let her know that they were with her, that they were on her side. ‘Shall we try that again, boys?’

She counted down again, and this time the guitar was fine, twangy but fine, sliding out chords that sounded faintly familiar to him, although he couldn’t work out from where. Then Clio began to sing, the slow rasping warmth of her starting somewhere near his stomach, flooding out and through him till his hair crackled with her, even on that crappy PA system.

‘O, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.’

Under her lashes, she glanced off to the side, where the tour manager was standing, winked for a fraction of a second, something like a smile working on her, dimpling the words. Her skin seemed to be beaming in the light.

Proper fanny-magnet, Danny-boy.

She played for the promised just-over-an-hour. Rocked-up versions of the auld songs, folk-tinged covers of some recent hits – ‘Joyride’, ‘Losing My Religion’ – and only three of her own tunes. Neither of the two new ones were particularly memorable; slow and acoustic, the other musicians stepping aside to stare at their feet or smoke. Her voice is like whisky, he jotted in shorthand, in the dark, reminding himself to follow up on that later. In between songs, she tried to engage the audience, anger them, as though they were a rally crowd, with lists of the Tory government’s crimes and how they themselves, the people of Ullapool and their children, were being affected. The audience was silent, impatient for her to start singing again, like sleepy junkies focused only on the delayed gratification of the next hit. She finished, of course, with ‘Rise Up’. The teenagers in the back row started whooping and singing along, and she even managed to get the more sedate audience members up the front clapping their hands for a final a cappella take on the chorus.

As soon as the music stopped, she seemed tiny, confused. She bowed twice, muttered ‘Thank you, Ullapool’ into the microphone, then ploughed offstage by the door to her right, as the applause died away. Duncan flicked the light back on, and the room emptied quickly.

Clio had been given the community hall’s kitchen as her dressing room. It was wincingly bright. Guitar cases were balanced on cabinets; a make-up bag spilled over the small electric hob. The band leaned around, cans in hand; Clio was perched on a flimsy-looking table, feet on the room’s sole plastic chair, swigging from a bottle of red wine.

‘No. It was shit, it was shit, it was shit,’ she was saying, pausing to top herself up. ‘Fucksake, what a bunch of fucking stiffs. Giving me nothing, so of course I fucking froze. Neil! Neil Neil Neil – Neil’s here!’

She stretched out her arms towards him and he mock-ran towards her, mugging.

‘Here you are, here you are. I was so worried when you didn’t show, but Danny said you’d be fine.’

The hug was tight and real, her arms over his, taking all of him in.

‘Argh! It’s been so long.’

‘Thank you for doing this, my darling. Really. I’m so sorry you had to see the show on such a terrible night. That audience, eh? My God. The other nights have been so much better – tell him, Donald.’

The big bear man with the beard who had played accordion and fiddle nodded towards him, silently, while the sallow drummer piped up, in a thick Scouse accent. ‘Yeah – the crowd in – what was that place? Durness? Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

‘I think they liked it,’ Neil said. ‘They were maybe just more naturally reserved – there’s a few of them still hanging out there, waiting to meet you.’

‘Ah, fuck ’em. Not tonight. Tonight I’m going to stay here in my strip-lit kitchen prison and drink wine with my old pal Neil.’ She had grabbed his hand and was swinging it, smiling hugely and slightly drunkly at him.

Danny stepped forward. He’d been so still until that point that Neil hadn’t really registered he was in the room.

‘Come on, Clio. That’s not the deal. That’s not what we agreed.’

‘Danny—’

‘No, you know the score. You made up the score, in fact. The point of this tour is that you get out there and you communicate with people. On their own level. You’ve got half an hour. Then we can go to the pub and you can catch up with Neil. I’m sure he understands.’

Neil found himself nodding, trying to please teacher.

Clio held up the hand that was not clutching the bottle.

‘All right. All right.’

Danny poured some of the wine – a polite amount – into a small paper cup. It had already left a thick purple crust over her lipstick. He ushered her out with a hand on the small of her back, left Neil alone in the kitchen with the band.

‘That really was a great show tonight, guys,’ he said, into the silence.

‘It weren’t our best,’ said the guitarist, also Scouse.

‘It weren’t bad, though,’ said the drummer. ‘She’s being hard on ’em is all.’

Of the three, the drummer had the most alert face. Big round eyes in a bouncing head, like a friendly children’s puppet. He took a couple of jerky steps over to Neil and held out a hand to shake. ‘Lee. Hiya. So, you’re a pal of Clio’s?’

‘This is the journalist,’ the other one, the guitarist, said. ‘This is the boy that’s coming on the road with us.’

‘Oh, right! That’s you, then. Pretty handy that, that you’re a mate of Clio’s an all, eh? Neil, is it? That’s Sean, there, and the big fella here is Donald. He don’t talk much, but he’s sound, aren’t you, mate?’

Neil just nodded. He honestly couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Anyway, you’re in with us tonight,’ Lee was saying, trying to invite him in. ‘Pretty cosy arrangement we’ve got! Donald here snores a bit – don’t you, big lad – but you get used to it.’

Neil thought about Clio out there with the straggling autograph hunters, wondered if she was talking to them about politics, or if they’d got bored and gone home. He thought about how small she’d seemed out there on the stage.

‘So. Lee – how did you meet her?’

‘Clio? Oh yeah, yeah. Me and Sean are in a band of our own, see, and she was on before us at this massive poll tax rally in Liverpool – that were the night she got signed, weren’t it, lad? A&R fella was there. We all went out to the pub after and, ah, a few ales were consumed, shall we say, and we’ve all been pals since. Amazing gel, int she? Proper, like. We played some more rallies together, and then when “Rise Up” went all massive she had us come and be her band a couple of times. Did you see Top of the Pops? That were us, eh.’

‘Closest we’ll ever get,’ muttered Sean.

‘Yeah, she looks after her own, that gel. So she said she wanted to do this tour and would we come; well, me and him were doing fuck all in Liverpool, like, and we’ve never been to Scotland before, have we? Sean’s looking forward to the Isle of Skye and Orkney, aren’t you?’

Sean nodded. ‘I’m into ancient monuments, like.’

At this, the older man, Donald, got up and left the room, nodding to them all.

‘Ah, don’t mind him, like,’ said Lee, with a conspiratorial smile, and Neil wondered what he’d done to attract the unswerving devotion of this puppy-dog. ‘He’s just a bit shy with new people is all. Man’s magic with a fiddle, like. You hear all those folk arrangements, on the R.E.M. song? That’s all Donald. Him and Clio go way back, far as I can make out. Like, she’s known him since she was a kid. That sort of thing.’

‘Hoi, soft lad,’ said Sean. ‘Don’t go sharing everyone’s life story when they’re at the bogs, eh?’

‘Sorry,’ said Lee, his smile getting even wider. ‘I love a gossip, me.’

Neil coughed, tried to make his face seem friendly, finally had the breathing space to say the thing he’d been bursting for.

‘I might head back through there – see how she’s getting on. You boys coming?’

Some of the plastic chairs from the auditorium had been rearranged into a loose circle that Clio somehow managed to be at the head of. As the door creaked she looked up and called to them.

‘Come in! Come in! Come and join the body of the kirk!’

The teenagers from the back row were sitting on either side of her, gazing in. An older couple, who had shyly put themselves at a distance, were gradually unfurling under Clio’s beam; the woman had kicked off her heels and tucked her feet up under herself. Irene from the bar table was there too; and little spotty Duncan, sitting admiringly by Danny, who had pulled himself slightly out from the group, was watching Clio with a tiny smile.

‘So,’ she said, beaming up at Neil as he and the Scousers fumbled for extra chairs. ‘We’re just discussing the first records we all bought. Siobhan here,’ she indicated the teenage girl, ‘actually says hers was “Rise Up”, can you believe it? Her taste in music has got way better since then, though, hasn’t it, Siobhan? What about you, Dorothy? It is Dorothy, isn’t it? I thought it was. Just wanted to make sure. What was the first record you ever bought?’

Round the circle she went, glitter in her smile, everyone blooming. He noticed that the lipstick situation had been sorted, and also that no one else got to talk for too long. Clio was the conductor. Donald moved silently around behind them, packing up the instruments, reeling in the wiring. At one point he ambled over and touched Danny on the shoulder, and the promoter got up to help him. Clio continued to talk, about nothing much, bursting into that peal of a laugh often, steering well clear of the brimstone of her stage chat, and the room danced.

Danny broke the spell. ‘Right, that’s us all packed, and we really need to be letting poor Irene here get locked up and away to her bed.’

Irene tried to protest (‘Och no, I don’t mind, son’), but Neil had a feeling that Danny Mansfield always got his own way.

‘Shall we head up to the Argylle Bar, Clio? And anyone who wants to can join us – provided they’re old enough, of course.’

Neil lay in the top bunk, under his sheet sleeping bag and big Donald’s long wool coat, with a bladder over-full of beer and no idea what to do about it. It had taken him a suitcase balanced on a table and a leg-up from a swaying, friendly Lee to get into the bed in the first place, as there were no ladders provided in this bunkhouse, apparently, and the bunks were not designed for short people. There were actually two bottom bunks free, but one had everyone’s luggage heaped on it, and the other one, he was told, was Danny’s. Well, he’d been in bed for almost three hours now, marking the passage of time by Donald’s gentle snoring and Lee’s occasional whimpers, and Danny had not decided to make use of his bunk yet.

Fuck it. He would go to the toilet, take that bottom bunk on his return, and if Danny came in he could get himself up into Neil’s bed somehow. He cantilevered himself off the side, his feet scrabbling air for the safety of the bunk below. For one horrendous second he thought he was going to fall, but then his toe caught the mattress, the strap of a rucksack.

The floor in the corridor was freezing, but it was too dark in the room to look for socks. He hadn’t thought to bring pyjamas, either, so faced the long walk in his T-shirt and pants, hoping it was late enough that no one would see. He passed Clio’s door, number 28. She was the only person on the tour to get a room to herself, it seemed. Tiny sounds from back there: a woman whispering, a man laughing, a soft moan.

Well, what were you expecting, he thought to himself, breathing in cheap, sharp disinfectant that didn’t mask the smell of someone else’s shit, as he clenched his bare feet in front of the urinal. You knew what she wanted you here for, and it wasn’t ever going to be that. She’s a beautiful woman. Beautiful women take lovers. He’d just never worked out why the lovers they took had to be such total arseholes.

In the bar earlier, Danny had oiled the conversation, buying rounds of drinks for everyone out of the tiny jar of takings from that night, kept everyone up, egged them on, determined, it seemed – he definitely wasn’t imagining it – to keep Neil from getting any sort of meaningful time with Clio. Was he jealous? A man like that, the satyr, the fanny-magnet, jealous of someone like Neil? Perhaps he sensed Neil’s connection with Clio – perhaps that was getting to him. He couldn’t imagine there was much going on between them besides shagging. Danny didn’t seem the socialist sort to him, didn’t seem like he had any convictions at all beyond the getting of money. Greasy prick. Oh, he’d do well in life, Neil had no doubt.

In his anger, Neil had forgotten to shake himself, had to climb the stairs and hobble his way back along the corridor with his hands cupped over the slow-blooming stain on his crotch. He was about to turn the corner, but a shaft of light cut through his vision and he froze against the wall. A female figure, silhouetted, some loose thin thing flowing over her upper body, doubling and pulling back. The pointed goatee. The hooves. Neil was sure he could see cloven feet. The small sound of a kiss, the click of a door as the light shut off. Danny was lying in the lower bunk by the time Neil got down the corridor, apparently asleep.

Their days on tour, in a beaten-up old minibus that had been the property of a community centre, had a particular rhythm. The two Scouse boys lolled along the back seat, lost together, talking their own codes, passing a joint back and forth. Between that and the sharp smell of last night’s whisky from everyone’s breath, the air in there was overbearing. Neil cracked a window whenever he could, but the wind was too much if they were on the motorway. The boys would get restless if they hadn’t had a drink by two, so pubs and off-licences needed to be sought out regularly. They raided garages for crisps and sweets, all of them eating like children let loose on a tuck shop.

As they drove, Clio consumed newsprint like food, stocking the bus with five papers every day, occasionally ripping out stories, tutting and exclaiming, fizzing with anger. Nobody really spoke. Neil and Clio had had a bit of a gossip, sure, the first time she was sitting in the back with him – she’d asked after Gogsy ‘or the Right Honourable Member, as I hear we’re now to call him. Labour Party, eh? Who’d have guessed?’ (wink) and his new wife – but they were both too conscious of the silence, the four other people right there, listening in, to say much.

For two days, whenever they arrived at their next location, Clio would take her musicians straight to the venue. Neil thought it would be interesting for his article to sit in there, but Danny had suggested it might make Clio nervous.

‘At some point,’ Neil told Danny, on the morning of the third day, ‘I’m going to need some time just the two of us. Me and her. This piece is nothing without the interview – I can’t just turn in an extended gig review, you know. And I’m only here till Sunday.’

Danny’s body language was big, expansive. His hands patted the air between them, soothed it.

‘It’s cool, it’s cool, amigo. I know that. Let me have a word with her and see what we can sort out, eh?’

Onstage, though. When she was onstage, he felt like he was working. It was the only time his mind could focus on the article, push ideas around. It was fascinating, watching her night after night, the way she tried to take the temperature of the audience and adjust herself around them; the way she didn’t always succeed.

The night after Ullapool had been Oban. The big upstairs function suite of a pub, bar and clientele both built in. Danny took the stage, asked for a very warm Ochil Bar welcome for An Evening With the beautiful, the mind-blowingly talented … and she stepped in front of the mic and just stood there. No shy smile, no hello Oban. The band around her totally still, and then Donald began knocking out a slow, sturdy heartbeat, bare knuckles on the wood of his fiddle.

Her voice, then. More ragged than usual – the after-effects of the long, slow toke she’d taken of the boys’ joint in the bus, maybe, her eyes daring Neil to comment.

‘Is there for honest Poverty

That hings his head, an’ a’ that;

The coward slave – we pass him by,

We dare be poor for a’ that!’

Sean joined her on the chorus, a honey tenor harmony.

‘For a’ that, an’ a’ that.

Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.’

A couple of bearded older blokes in the row in front of Neil picked up the beat and it spread slowly through the crowd, their feet moving as one. The room crackled. Lee met the thump with the bass drum, allowing Donald to raise his arms, draw single notes off the fiddle into the air.

‘For a’ that, and a’ that,

Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

Is king o’ men for a’ that.’

Donald sang the next verse with her, a husky bass rasp that echoed under Clio’s sweet-and-sour. From the back row came a wavering note of soprano, growing stronger as the people around her smiled encouragement. Clio stretched out an open hand. And then they were all singing together, the whole room, even those who didn’t know the words joining in at the refrain.

‘For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s comin yet for a’ that,

That man to man the warld o’er

Shall brithers be for a’ that.’

Neil would hear Burns, and that song in particular, performed many times over the years. In 1992, though, it was still unfashionable. Tartan tat, the stuff of shortbread tins and fat conservative men at Rotary Club suppers. He still thought the spirit in that room had never been equalled.

As the storm of applause didn’t seem to be dying down, Clio spoke over them.

‘Robert Burns, Oban. A true radical. A revolutionary. And born just half an hour up the road from where I grew up, in Ayrshire. Hello, Oban. I’m Clio Campbell. And I’ve got something to say.’

Back in the bed-and-breakfast, Neil put a pillow over his head to muffle the noise of Clio and Danny’s celebration in the room next door.

The next night, though, a working men’s club in Fort William, their hangovers still pulsing, the room cold from a draughty window and only a quarter full because the football was on, no one stamped, no one sang, and Clio drank and swore and tainted the air around them in the pub afterwards. The cut seemed all the deeper for what had gone before, and Neil eyed his travelling companions round the table unsure of how on earth they’d get her out of it.

‘Look,’ he said, eventually. ‘You’ve still got last night, right? It doesn’t matter that this one wasn’t your best. You’ll always have Oban!’ It was intended as a joke, but the reaction was seismic.

‘It wasn’t my best, was it. Oh God. I should have engaged them more – that sort of cold open is sometimes a mistake; I should have been able to see that they needed warming up. God, I call myself a professional at this, but I’m so fucking inexperienced really. Ah, man, why did I ever think this was possible? A month-long tour! A fucking month! I want to go home.’

The other men at the table were frowning, looking away from him. Lee had reached over to stroke her shoulder.

‘Hey, la. You listen up. You were bloody great tonight, all right? This is some shit you’re talking now. You had a small crowd freezing their bollocks off, and you gave them a show. You gave them a helluva show. Their own lookout if they couldn’t appreciate it, eh?’

‘This boy knows what he’s talking about,’ said Danny, thumping the table. ‘No more of this sort of chat, now. They’re lucky to have you.’

‘Aye, you were damn good tonight, sweetheart,’ said big Donald, mumbling through his beard.

At the bar, a little later, Danny tapped Neil on the elbow, smiled at him.

‘Listen, man, don’t worry about earlier. It’s just an artist thing, you know? When they come offstage they’re like great gaping wounds, basically – need to be treated very carefully. You know? Always better just to tell her she was wonderful, yeah?’

He was smiling. He was perfectly, totally reasonable. But Neil understood that he was being told off, that a flag had been raised.

‘Yeah, yeah. Got it. Sorry, man. Yeah.’

‘Good boy. Let me get this round, eh?’

All that night, back in his single room in the hotel, much nicer than anywhere else they’d stayed, Neil had fumed. They had begged him – begged him – to come on this tour. She had. She wanted this article. Made him wrangle with his editor, pitch harder than he’d ever pitched a piece before. Brought him here, away from work for the best part of a week. And what did she expect him to write, exactly? Two thousand glowing words about the landscape and the timbre of her voice? ‘Drinking Dens of Highland Towns: A Comparative Study’?

The next morning, he’d hung around in the breakfast room until Danny had come in, then taken a seat opposite him. Made his demands: interview. Now. Danny had patted the air again, looked genuinely worried, and Neil had climbed back upstairs to pack his holdall, feeling that the scale had finally been reset in his favour.

Clio and the boys were in the lobby, lounging about on sofas too well-upholstered for them when he came to check out, surrounded by their luggage and instruments. Her Doc Martens rested on a coffee table, and it was impossible to tell whether she was awake or not through her sunglasses; Sean was glaring at the world through a particularly greasy fringe, and Lee appeared to be skinning up on the back of a glossy magazine.

‘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

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