Scabby Queen

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.’