Fishnet (9 page)

‘You've got a child?'

‘Aye. It does happen.'

‘I didn't realise. Of course. I do recognise you now.'

‘Yeah, well. You forget you recognised me. I'm a good mum. I'm doing this for him. Okay?'

‘How does it… Sorry. Do you mind if I ask: how does it work?'

She sighs, she nods. She breathes in.

‘Ann through there,' she jerks a thumb back at the kitchen, ‘comes round when I'm taking him to school, lets herself in and gets the place cleaned up. My first punter comes in at ten, leaves at eleven. Half an hour to tidy before the second,' she snorts, looks back at me, ‘usually. Final one's out by four unless I've driven out to see one of my disabled clients, and Ann gets the last of it tidied while I go and pick him up from afterschool, get back to my flat. I don't work weekends or evenings and I'm trying not to do school holidays unless he's in playscheme.'

She's been looking over my shoulder, at the mantelpiece, at nothing, while she says this. Now she stops, fixes on me straight.

‘I was a cleaner, doll, when he was a baby. Manky minimum wage work – getting up at four every morning, living with my mum so there was someone to watch him, knackered by ten am. Scum under your fingernails that doesn't come out. But there areny that many cleaning jobs that only take up school hours, you know? And when they cut the benefits –'

She recovers, something in her face pulling back, returning to a place where she doesn't have to justify what she does. Not to me.

‘They don't know about him, he definitely doesn't know about them, and nor do the teachers at that school. And I want it to stay that way, alright?'

She bares tiny, pointed cat's teeth at me again.

‘As for having seen your sister about, I really wouldn't know. It's no like there's a working girls' social club or anything, eh. The street girls probably know each other, but I'm just a mum who does a job from a flat, that's all. The only non-punter I see in my working life is Ann here, and she's just my next door neighbour.'

‘She's not your, ehm, pimp, then?' The word sounds stupid and prissy in my mouth.

‘Fucksake, no! She's been round the block enough to suss the timewasters out at the door for me –
most of the time
– she's a
help with the cleaning, she's handy to have around in case any of them get funny, and she'll sometimes sit in and watch for a wee bit extra.'

‘Watch?'

‘Aye, watch. Some of them like that. Doesn't bother Ann. She's seen everything before.'

Surely this is all a dream. Surely. The room is still too hot, and I need air.

‘Look. I really should go. I'm sorry to have mucked you about like this and wasted your time.'

‘Okay. Did you say to Ann you'd brought the money, but?' She laughs at my face. Probably I was looking confused. ‘No point pussyfooting about, is there?'

I nod, reach for my handbag.

‘Just make it fifty, eh. You've only been here half an hour. That's the quickie rate.'

I count notes. The numbers, the famous Scottish faces and the smell of money are reassuringly familiar things.

She takes it and her face gets younger again, eyes bigger.

‘And I've got your word you'll not let on? Imagine if it was your kid, if the other parents knew that about you. They're fucking snooty enough as it is, some of them. I'd have to move him schools, the teachers would probably get the social work involved. I'm a good mum, eh. And what I do – it's legal. I even pay my bloody taxes, for chrissake. Okay?'

‘I promise,' I say, feeling the strange bend and flex of power between us. ‘It's none of my business, anyway. Really.'

She sighs.

‘Look, there's a group of them. Scottish Union of Sex Workers. They got in touch a wee while ago, looking for new, eh, recruits. The sort that want to get rights and that. Campaign, eh. Just attracting a load of trouble for themselves if you ask me – anyway, they've got a website. I'll write it down for you. They have meetings every couple of months.'

At the door, Ann hovering in the background, she puts a
hand briefly on my shoulder.

‘I hope you find her, eh.'

It closes, and I run down the stairs, out of the main door, trying to get to the air. I lean over the gutter for a second, wondering if I'm going to retch, but nothing comes and in the end, after a couple of deep breaths, I just make my way back home again and the world goes spinning on.

Later that afternoon I see her at the school gates. Jeans, glasses and a ponytail, face scrubbed, hugging a little boy in a green coat close. We make eye contact, and she flinches for a second. I nod, smile a bit to reassure her, then walk inside to pick up Beth.

Back

Okay.

We had opened the window the night before because we were drunk and the room stank, and we thought it was a good idea. The skin on my arm was pricking, cold, and the binmen had got me up two hours early. Trying to prise my numb hand out from under Simon's vicious cheekbone, I woke him up. He rubbed his erection into my hipbone twice, then wandered off to the bog to try and piss rid of it.

I was twenty-two years old, working in the most junior position there was at a publishing company. I took minutes in meetings. I got coffees. They were starting to remember my name. My nights were spent in a fusty flat in the West End with a privately-educated final-year medical student. Simon had sublet me his spare room until one night, two bored, horny young people who hadn't been touched in a long time, we fell into bed. We read books on the sofa at night, and sometimes went out to watch rock bands in sticky-floored pubs. We had a favourite café we got scrambled eggs in on Saturdays. We'd tried to have sex in the shower once, but the smell from the mouldy grouting put us off.

That was my life. Not a grand romance, not a great job. But both of them had potential. I'd liked them, and I'd liked who I was beginning to be in them. Maybe if I'd had longer, one or both of them would have survived it all.

Beth and I eat cheese on toast for tea and then she reaches for the kitchen roll and, finicky, wipes every crumb away from her mouth before sending her tongue out – one, two – into the corners. She washes her hands a lot, too, doesn't like being dirty. I don't know where that comes from. What will you say when she asks about her father? my friends said, my parents said. I didn't know. I still don't, because she hasn't asked, ever. Maybe she hasn't worked out that she has one yet.

None of them ever ask what I'll say if she wants to know
about her mother.

You're a
good
girl, Gran used to say, pressing a twenty-pound note into my hands like she used to do with coppers from her pension when I was younger. My mother's helpless, fluttering grip on me, her deliberate, teary glances. My father turned off, tuned out.

Okay.

The phone rang. I was at work and the phone rang, and it was my sister. I didn't answer it, my boss did. I was told it was an emergency.

‘I'm at the station,' she said. ‘I'm at the station and I need your help, Fi.'

I told her not to worry, I told her I'd be there in twenty minutes. I took my lunch-break early, not realising that I wouldn't be back to work for weeks, and then just to collect my stuff. I ran almost all of the way.

I had lived away from home for five years by then. In that time, Rona had phoned me three times, only ever looking to enlist my support in her ongoing war with our parents. She hadn't come to my graduation. She was not particularly attached to ideas of family, my sister, and she'd only turned up at Dad and Jackie's Christmas dinner under particularly heavy duress.

She'd put on weight. Big smudgy makeup eyes. Cheeks pink with the cold. Layers of textures and wraps all over her.

‘Fi. Thank you. Thank fuck. Make it stop.'

As I went to hug her, I realised there was something in the way, something warm. And she thrust this something at me and it started to cry and so did she.

That evening. Simon was stunned, quiet, decamped to a friend's house, more because he didn't want to deal with the situation than because he needed space. I don't remember what we said to each other, or even if she could say anything, or if I could say anything worth saying, anything more than oh hon. Oh hon, it's
going to be okay, which was a lie, one of those little lies you just tell people.

Because we had got to sleep that night at around ten, nothing asked, nothing revealed, just hugging and stroking and crying. I'd pulled out all the blankets we had and wrapped her with them. I'd heated milk and formula in separate pans, as though this was something I always did, trying to keep the panic out of my movements. I'd held both of them, separately, till they stopped crying, rubbing my thumb back and forth across their temples.

The baby started crying at about five, before the sun was up. I padded through after a couple of minutes. The shape on the bed didn't stir, so I picked the basket up off the floor, and said something comforting and instant like shhh, shhh, let's let mummy sleep, and then I thought about what I'd just said, and who I'd just used the word ‘mummy' to mean, and I wrapped myself in Simon's smelly dressing gown and carried her through to the kitchen.

In all that time, the fifteen consecutive years we spent breathing the same stale air of the same house, I don't remember once having shown her how to put on makeup or insert a tampon. I was an inadequate big sister, a geeky gawky spotty thing who didn't speak and didn't ever help her out, not that she needed it. Ever. Rona always had the skill of mixing with people, but coming out whole and still herself. If I was ready to tell her the secrets of our flesh she'd have heard them, and heard them some years before I had even known. I hadn't ever fulfilled a need, so she had grown up not to need me. Until now.

After I'd fed her, the baby stirred and fretted for a while, then I felt her growing limp, watched her tiny eyelids flickering down, felt her nuzzle in to the softness of my chest and fall asleep on me. And I just sat there, overwhelmed, as still as I could. I was scared that if I moved, I'd spoil it, this huge, beautiful feeling. My breath slowed to match hers, and everything about us was
perfectly in unison.

Half past seven. I needed to have a shower and get ready. So we made two mugs of coffee and we went through to wake up mummy.

I know Rona, though. I know her. And so I don't know why I was surprised, as I pulled back that convincing-looking hump of duvet to find a faked body – blankets and couple of pillows. Like a bad joke from a bad film.

I wasn't that old, not really. I might have managed three more years on the planet, but I wasn't ready for this. I wonder if it even occurred to her whether I would be or not. And I needed to pee, and there was a baby beginning to cry again because I'd gripped her too tightly. We went through to the bathroom, and one-handed I pulled out towels enough to make a softish mat. I laid her down on the floor on top of them, and then turned her away so she couldn't see me. All this seemed very logical. I sat down on the toilet and breathed in and almost collapsed. When I was done I washed my hands for about two minutes so that she wouldn't pick up any germs. I looked at my palms, my fingertips, and imagined them encrusted with bacteria, so I scrubbed and scrubbed. And the baby started to cry again. And I said oh shit. Rona left my flat sometime between two-thirty and four in the morning, six years ago. She left behind the bag she'd brought, which only contained the baby's things. There was a possible sighting at the bus station at five thirty am, but the person wasn't sure. We had word that she might have been seen in Manchester four years ago, but it came to nothing. She hasn't used her bank account since that day, although she'd cleared it out three days before. Her phone was a pay-and-go, which hasn't been used; her passport hasn't left the country. I have no way of screaming at her, or slapping her, or telling her to take her fucking baby and give me my life back.

After that morning, Beth would only sleep on me. Not lying down. Not on anyone else. And I thought, fine. I'll take her. You've given her to me. But you don't ever get to have her back.

Things Nice Girls Don't Do

Difficult to know, really. When does it slide over? When do the walls rebuild themselves around you? The first time you have sex for money? It's not as clear-cut as that, though. Before the act, itself, you have to market yourself into the mindset. Before that, even, you must have sensed something flexing in yourself, a relaxing of the codes you were brought up with, the easing away of all those hard-drawn pencil lines around Things Nice Girls Don't Do.

Does it start to happen the first time you laugh at a dirty joke, because you mean it, not just because you're being polite? The first time you have a wank over a really dirty fantasy you've made up, kind of thrilling at the fact that you're getting off on things you couldn't talk about in any sort of company? The first time you watch porn? Bed a stranger? Because things have changed; they're supposed to have changed, right, but there are some things that women, nice girls, even liberated, modern women, still just aren't supposed to be into. And undercutting it all? It's still the assumption that we don't like sex, isn't it? That we don't like sex and men do, and male desire, as it concerns women, is shameful and oppressive.

Nobody ever talks about what nice boys do or don't do. We all know that men like sex. It's written into the laws of sex. A man who has sex and is paid for it is a lucky bastard. A woman is a victim. That's written into the laws of sex too. Because what underwrites these laws is a truth universally acknowledged: that every act of heterosexual sex (a thing, let us not forget, that happens to a woman, upon her) fundamentally
damages the female partner in some way. Is there a time, ladies, when you might have gone to bed with someone who, perhaps, you weren't particularly attracted to? A little act of mercy – you wanted to make him feel better, maybe, or you were just horny and didn't really mind who it was? Or has an act of sex happened upon you that you didn't really enjoy? It went on for a bit too long, maybe; your mind wandered. He seemed to be having a bit more fun than you. He just wasn't very good.