Fishnet Read online

  Imagine my sister, aged nineteen, walking down this street back from the supermarket. Waving at a neighbour. Having a drink in one of these pubs. Six, nearly seven years ago.

  We assumed she would have come back here, afterwards. This was the first place we looked, just because it was the last place she’d been. She’d had a job in a glamorous Edinburgh bar for a while after leaving school, surprised us all one day with an email saying she’d moved north. She lived here for about seven months; settled, we assumed. As much as Rona could settle.

  In her low-ceilinged kitchen, Christina had disabused us of that one.

  Christina had been at school with Rona, was her only real reason for having come up here in the first place and was our only real lead afterwards. Christina was a ski instructor: it made sense for her to live here. Rona had never really been that interested in outdoor sports.

  ‘She just turned up one day, said she’d had it with Edinburgh, was looking to start over somewhere else. It was a surprise, sure: we’d not kept in touch that well since leaving school. I asked her why she didn’t go home to youse and she said she wanted to do things her own way. I could understand that, I suppose. The rent was – the rent was handy.’

  She was clipped, formal with us, uncomfortable in our distress.

  When we’d asked, Christina had shown us the room my sister had slept in, which was just a room, mauve, uplighter shade over the bulb. Bed. Mirrored wardrobe covering one wall. We sat in the kitchen she must have cooked her dinner in, on mock-pine plasticky chairs. We drank tea. The mugs had cats on them.

  ‘I don’t know that she had any other friends, as such. There were girls she w-worked with, but they were all transients.’

  We’d looked at her, me and Dad and Mum.

  ‘Transients,’ she said again. ‘Temporary bar staff. Up for the season. People pass through this place. It’s just a stop.’

  ‘What about boyfriends?’ we’d asked. We were especially keen to find out about boyfriends.

  Christina took a breath in, and something crossed her face.

  ‘There were a couple of guys she saw. A couple of guys she. Brought home. But nobody, really. Not recently.’

  Another breath.

  ‘What you have to understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how much Rona told you-’

  ‘Let’s just assume nothing,’ Mum said. ‘Anything you can tell us, Christina. Anything at all.’

  ‘Well. We fell out. We had a fight.’

  She looked away, looked anywhere but us.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Mum said again, her voice gentler than I’d heard in years. ‘We all know Rona can be, ah. Difficult. We don’t blame you, Christina.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her for about five months,’ she said. ‘She moved out. She lived in other people’s spare rooms, I guess. I never found out who she was staying with. I mean, I would see her around town. We saw each other, and we’d just ignore each other. But I haven’t even seen her. Not for a few months.’

  I leaned forward.

  ‘When you saw her. How did she look?’

  Christina paused again.

  ‘The police have already been here,’ she said, through a tight mouth. ‘They didn’t think I had anything to tell them that they didn’t know.’

  ‘We know,’ Mum said. ‘We know. We just wanted to hear it from you ourselves.’

  ‘Well. It was difficult not to notice. And she didn’t look happy. She was always distracted, the last few times. Didn’t even register me enough to give me a filthy look, you know.’

  She laughed and we didn’t, and she looked terrified again.

  We sat in this bar right here, afterwards. The Ochil. The three of us. We got cokes and pub meals, picking at scampi and chips, cottage pie, not really eating as the speaker above our table blared songs about patriotism and hearing the call of the old country, going back to Caledonia. Sentiment welling up in the damp patches on the ceiling.

  ‘What’s the point,’ Dad was muttering into his beard. ‘What is the point of even being here? Tell me that. Nobody’s got a thing to give us.’

  ‘I know,’ Mum was saying, in this strange soothing voice. ‘I know darling.’

  She patted his hand a couple of times.

  ‘It might help,’ I said. ‘Later on. It might help us understand, just from being here.’

  ‘You’re maybe right,’ Mum said, not meaning it, not really.

  All the spark dreeping slowly out of her, out of all of us, evaporating into that smell of smoke and frying. A month later they were living together in the old house again. Two months after that, Beth and I had moved into the vacant flat upstairs. The official reason is that we all want to be in the place she’s most likely to come back to. Really, it’s because with all of us mostly absent, together we approximate a whole person.

  We’d sat there for a bit, staring out the window at the paint peeling off the ski shop, the people. Most of them seemed to be aged sixteen to twenty-two, marking time up here, making money then leaving again. The smell, the music. The empty fourth chair at the table we were at. The uneaten food.

  They’ve got the same tartan carpet as they had six years ago in the Ochil, and the frying smell’s stronger since the smoking ban came in. The same sort of music, playing loud for hypothetical tourists who are the same nationality as the staff. A man at the bar, older, the sort of stubble that looks painful, caught my eye as I stood in the door, started, then recovered himself and winked. There were no other customers, just a girl behind the bar who couldn’t be more than twenty. She had pretty skin, her hair pulled back with a ribbon. Transient. Another transient.

  City

  This is where I work. The International Financial District. The Call Centre Capital. The Graveyard of Graduate Dreams. And after dark, The Notorious Drag. The Red Light Zone. An awful lot of names for an uninhabitable slant of tarmac so steep it’ll give you a stitch if you can make it up in one go. There’s not a single growing thing in the whole grid, not by design anyway. Weeds, maybe, between the cracks in the paving, between the designated areas of ownership, because nobody cares enough to root them out. Lots of pickings for rats, between the sandwich crumbs of office workers and the detritus of night time activity, in this proud new area intended to attract free enterprise and the glories of capitalism to a former industrial city.

  Nobody lives here. They work here; they drink here, some of them fuck here, but they don’t live here. That makes it perfect. Eight, fourteen, twenty storeys of hard new architecture behind which there’s probably no sky; buildings designed to suck in the sun, channel it into money.

  The shift happens at around seven, later in the summer months, if you’re working evenings. The girls emerge from wherever they spend their daytimes just as the last of the suits disappear. They must just be ants from the seventeenth floor, ants on the march out of the zone, before the concrete is reclaimed by slaters scuttling in and out of the corners. When the cuts started, we had an email from head office: could female employees stop taking on overtime after dark, because the company can’t afford the taxis.

  One of my jobs every morning is to check the car park gutters for used condoms.

  ‘Did you see that bloody carry on outside?’

  Norman doesn’t bother with hello Fiona, how was the hen weekend because Norman is furious, his already pouchy eyes distending even further. He mutters in headlines: no respect and shameless hussies and it’s just gone too far. Too far! and his hair crackles with static indignation.

  Over at the window, Moira is closing the blinds.

  ‘Ach, it’s just a protest,’ she says with her soft voice. ‘Just a couple of daft buggers. You’ll not have seen them, Fiona – they look like they’ve been camped out in the car park since cock crow. We’ll just pull these shut and get on with our day, eh? How about you put the kettle on, darlin?’

  ‘One of them called me a traitor, do you know?’

  Norman is incensed.

  ‘Me! Me, who served fourtee
n year in the Territorials!’

  ‘Norman’ll have a cuppa as well, hen,’ Moira says.

  Here is how Moira and Norman work together, how they’d got on sharing the same corner space of RDJ Construction’s Surveying Office for fourteen years: if you make the tea for the two of them, you always pour the water over the teabag in Moira’s special oversized teacup with the flowers on it, then pull it out immediately and add it to Norman’s mug (bright blue, says World’s Best Dad! in red), which already has one bag in it. You let Norman’s tea stew for the time it takes to go to the fridge and get the milk, pull the sugar down from the cupboard with the anonymous notice that we all know is Elaine’s work on it:

  Would Everyone wash up there own Dishes and Cup’s please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Three sugars for Norman and a splash of milk. The tip of a spoon in the sugar for Moira. Then, and only then, you take the two teabags out of Norman’s mug. This is how Norman told me to make the tea, exactly this way, when I was settling in on my first day.

  ‘Moira doesn’t like it strong. Not at all. Me, I’m the opposite, see. I like brickie tea! Tea to put hairs on your chest! But Moira, it’s just delicate for her.’

  His voice softer, more reverent, as he told me this than I’ve ever heard it since.

  Moira and Norman are both married to other people, have been for years. Only when they go home, though. All that time they spend together in the day, looking after each other, smiling affectionately at each other, checking that the other one gets their tea right. And it would never occur to either of them.

  Graeme is already in the staff kitchen, on his knees in front of the fridge, trying to find the perfect spot for his sandwiches.

  ‘It’s because of the new development,’ he’s saying. ‘They announced that we’d won the contract to do it last night, and it was all over the papers this morning. They gave the full address and everything, but the protesters still didn’t work out which entrance was ours till Elaine arrived.’

  ‘What’s the new development?’

  ‘Oh yeah. We were keeping the bid a secret, and Ian mentioned it to the office on Friday, but you were away at your hen weekend. I’ve had my sister on the phone this morning giving me a total earful of it, and she’s never usually up before twelve.’ He’s still smirking.

  ‘What’s their objection to it? Ach, is it the Christians again? We’re not knocking through another church for those bloody style bars?’

  He passes me a tabloid, folded open, the ink of it grainy on my fingers. I read and flinch.

  JACKSON GROUP BUY OUT VICE GIRL BASE

  ‘The new development is on the site of a brothel?’

  ‘Heh, heh. No, I think it’s like a shelter, actually. Just down the road, that’s hows we got the contract. You know, where all the, heh, eh, prossies go and hang out. On the night shift, eh?’

  Chuckle, chuckle. He’s blooming under the idea of it now, the fur coat and nae knickers of it, lads-mag innuendo nudging away at his little boy smile.

  ‘The Sanctuary Base? So presumably, that mob outside are the people who work there?’

  ‘Well,’ He lowers his voice, leans into me so I can get a better smell of his Lynx. ‘I heard Elaine saying that actually, some of them are the hookers!’

  The word has me before I realise. That dirty hooker. Three days ago I wouldn’t even have paused.

  It takes Graeme a couple of seconds to realise that I’m not sharing the joke, by which time I’m working on an encouraging half-smile so as not to hurt his feelings.

  Graeme and I are the only people under thirty in this company. I know that because I’ve got access to his files. He turns twenty-six next month. There’s not much to him, not to look at, but I think about having sex with Graeme, some day, just because he’s here. Maybe in the stationery cupboard, when the office is empty. I won’t. His desk is across the way from mine, and if he’s on the phone, concentrating, I look at his crotch sometimes, trying to see what’s outlined under the folds of Topman smarts. I rub myself, guilty, frantically, in the toilets, under cheap hard lighting. I wash all trace of it off my fingers with the rose-smelling liquid soap Moira buys in bulk and stores in the cupboard in the kitchen. Sometimes I look at him and think, surely we are too young, we are both too young to have given up like this, to settle our bones in this halogen-lit tower. On Mondays he grins and sits on the edge of my desk, tells me about nights out he’s had ‘with the boys’, always ‘with the boys’.

  ‘Not got a girlfriend yet, eh?’ Moira says, listening in, playing matchmaker.

  I don’t think of Graeme at all when I’m not there. Graeme, going out for drinks with the boys, playing computer games with the boys, wouldn’t really understand my world. The spaces, the silences, the waiting. The child care.

  I’m not sure why I’m angry at him now, though.

  ‘Where are they going to go, Graeme? The, eh. The prostitutes? If we knock down their sanctuary?’

  He’s doing that thing with his face again. He looks like he’s laughing, but it’s actually nerves. Or wind.

  ‘Eh, well. Not really our thing, eh, problem. It’s the council sold the place. They should be taking it up with them, those women outside. We’re just doing our job. Eh. And it’s not just like we’re knocking them down. It’s the whole block. Leisure complex. Possibilities for multiplex, eight bars or restaurants, bowling, casino —’

  ‘And you’re okay with that?’

  This is further than we’ve gone in conversation before, and he’s reddening, shifting to the door, glancing back over his shoulder.

  ‘Do you not need to take the bag out. Moira’s cup.’

  Then he turns around properly, in the door frame.

  ‘I’ve seen the blueprints. It’s going to be an exciting project for us, you know? For, ehm, for me. Good opportunity. Big one. We’ll make a really beautiful building out of it.’

  Glass, crap techno, cut-price cocktails on Thursdays, I’m thinking to myself. He’s running off. Moira’s teabag is bleeding scorches of tannin into the cup. I’ll need to start over.

  XXX

  ‘They’ve got stamina, I’ll say that for them. Well, they’d have to, eh, in their line of work.’

  Norman has kept up a muttered commentary all day. There’s a judgemental wind shaking the building, and even the diehard smokers like Elaine and big George from Maintenance haven’t made it all the way down to the car park today. The protesters are still going, though, hours on, their faces whipped scarlet under cagoules, and we can still hear the chanting over the weather and the air con and the wheeze of Moira’s old computer.

  ‘SHAME ON THE COUNCIL!’

  ‘SAVE OUR SANCTUARY!’

  I had a look at them earlier, peeking through the blinds like a spy in an old movie. They must have been waiting for any sort of motion at all from our floor, because they all pivoted on the spot to face me, turned their heads up to the window, synchronised, eerie. Five women and a man, earnest looking middle class types for the most part. Tomorrow’s paper will tell me that they aren’t all prostitutes, that one of them was a well-known independent local councillor whose outspoken views on women’s issues had made her a target for that paper for a while, that the man was a noted Socialist Worker agitator, that one of them was Suzanne Phillips, the former ‘masseuse’ who runs the Sanctuary Base. The paper will take pleasure in those quotation marks. The rest will just be given names and ages. Anya Sobtka, 27. Michelle McKay, 24. Carla Forlorni, 32.

  A fierce-faced girl had made eye contact with me, mouthing some words I couldn’t have caught, white-bleached hair and a little bolt glistening between her nostrils. The rest just glared up, damning me by association.

  ‘Oh my god they’ve been on the phone all morning,’ Elaine, the office manager, is saying as she comes in to bring files and get Moira’s sympathy. ‘My ears were ringing! And I just told them, a hundred times if I told them once, I told them, the boss isn’t in today. We are not available for comment. I do not know wha
t all the fuss about it is, I swear. It’s what this area needs, a big new development in there. It’s crying out for a bit of a smartening up. And property prices will rocket! Maybe bring a few decent folk into the area for once. These people. These people, eh.’

  I want to shut her up, shut her ignorant mouth up, but all I manage to say is, ‘What about the, eh, women, though, Elaine?’

  I’d borrowed Moira’s soft voice for cowards, but she heard me anyway, turned the full force of her thick lipstick on me, the minty fug of her nicotine gum breath. You could look at Elaine, strip twenty years off her and know exactly what she was like at school.

  ‘We’ve not got a wee red in here have we?’ There’s an intense little catch in her voice, like she’s laughing. She’s not laughing.

  ‘Just leave her Elaine,’ Moira’s saying. Elaine is a straight-talking gal from her own private movie. She courts applause in her head.

  ‘Listen, missy, you’d better work out where your sympathies lie on this one, and fast. This is the biggest contract we’ve had in years. We need it. Are you going to get hung up over a few old bricks? A few bloody hoors?’

  ‘Elaine!’ Moira’s saying. ‘There’s no need for language.’

  ‘You’ve got a wean, Fiona. Keeping hold of your job should be your first priority. And in order to do that, you might wanty show a bit of company loyalty, all right? I’m just saying. And I’m not the first to say it, eh.’

  ‘She’s had a stressful day, hen,’ Moira says as the door slams, Graeme and Norman looking straight into their computer screens and nowhere else.

  Ian, our department head, arrives at two, brings storm clouds in. The protesters had mistaken him in his big sleek car for the boss, had obviously been holding eggs very carefully in their cagoule pockets all day.

  ‘Fiona. Get my clean suit immediately and call the police. I’m disappointed that you’ve indulged these idiots even this long. Norman, Moira. I’m going to want you in my office for briefing. We’ll all be spending the rest of the afternoon on the new site. We need to get moving fast. Graeme, if you could begin bringing Norman and Moira up to speed while I get changed. Fiona. Call George and have him bring the people carrier round the back entrance. The back entrance. You and Elaine will be holding the fort here for the rest of the day, and I want these people gone by the time I come back at six. Understand?’