RUTH

Glasgow, 2014

Watching Clio in arguments on Twitter possessed Ruth like a drawn-out panic attack during the independence referendum. The relentlessness of it, the piranhas swarming for attack at her every statement. Her profile was high enough to attract them; her public statements sufficiently unmodest to keep them fuelled and ready. The debate had racked up nearly two years of increasingly fraught coverage in the time since Clio had moved back to Scotland needing friends and a place in the world; she had found it as an outspoken advocate for Scottish self-determination. The Scottish media had very much enjoyed the spectacle she’d made for them, and Ruth, like the rest of the country, couldn’t look away. She’d saved Clio’s name as a search, tapped it in automatically every time she clicked on to the app, lost herself in scrolling and scrolling as the second-hand stress began to bubble through her veins. It seemed as though the world, or the very worst subsects of it, was rising up to show Clio her place, each opinion met with a barrage of blokey disdain, an obscene-seeming wet-eyed emoji of laughter. To be fair to her, Clio didn’t moderate her behaviour. She didn’t tone it down or attempt to pacify them. But she would argue with them relentlessly, into the night, sometimes five or six at a time, lost in long trails of oblique replies and misunderstanding, refusing to let any of her anonymous sparring partners have the last word.

‘I’m fit for them, doll. Don’t worry.’

Ruth worried. Of course she worried.

On the morning after the independence referendum, Clio had turned up unannounced, leaning down hard on the buzzer to Ruth’s old flat in the Southside. She’d entered in an unwashed, boozy cloud, dishevelled, squinting at Ruth already dressed and washed.

‘You’re not going to work today, are you?’

‘I thought I’d try. Not sure I’m not going to burst into tears on the train, though.’

‘Fuck that, doll. Let’s stay in and drink.’

‘I need to go, Clio. I need to get out there and do something. At least just see what it’s like.’

‘I’ve been out there. I’ve been.’ The words smeared together on the roof of her mouth. ‘I’ll save you the bother: s’shite out there. S’a dreich bloody day in a country full of fearful idiots who’ve jus condemned ussall. It’s exactly the bloody same. Everything out there is exactly bloody the same as it ever was.’

As she stepped over the threshold and into the light, Ruth could see her eyes were red, swollen from a night of it.

‘Clio, have you even been to bed?’

‘Yes. I went to bed. I was supposed to be playing a gig an they were screening the live results on the telly in between acts. Then they went to fucking – fucking Clackanmannannanshire. Fucking mining country, babe. I’m from mining country. I’ll tell you this, they’ve got a warped bloody idea of solidarity, is what they do. Turn on their own in a heartbeat if thass what the bloody Labour Party tells them to do, I’ll tell you. And he was all over there with his big face, fucking voice of doom, wassn’ he? Gordon Brown. Bomp bomp bomp – thass his theme song. Big sad tuba or something. Bomp bomp bomp—’