Fishnet Read online

  Malcy Lamont was coming down the hill to the shelter now. Soft flop of cock at the crotch of his tracky bottoms, sour smell coming off him downwind. Malcy Lamont was only physical. The times before, when we’d made the bus, hulking Jenna Anderson and her brother had been there, the two of them like a barrier, soaking up some of Malcy. Not today. And he was coming over. I curled into the wall of the shelter, carried on staring out of the window frame, ready to flinch, wondering after what neverending length of time the bus would come.

  He didn’t come into the shelter, though. I turned around, and saw him standing in the grass, him and Rona facing each other. Her hood was down, the coat open and slipping off her shoulders, her hair blown back from her face. Just staring right back at him, eyeballing, keeping his sightline level with hers. Her jaw was set; not the way it would be when she was going to start a fight.

  I didn’t understand what I was seeing, really. I’m not sure I do now. No idea what their two bodies were saying to each other, what sort of silent conversation happened there. Malcy Lamont didn’t move. I didn’t move. The bus came and Rona broke it, stepped past me and told me to come on, commanding, making her point. Schoolies spilled and burst all over us, jeering across the aisle, warmth and the fart stink on my skin. Somebody’s tinny transistor playing that Robert Miles song, ‘Children’, scratching and fuzzy at the strings. Rona was three paces ahead of me, cutting briskly through the tangled limbs of the aisle. She got a seat beside a smaller girl in her year, turned to her and started chatting.

  ‘Are ye getting on, then, son?’ the driver was asking.

  Malcy Lamont walked quickly down to the back seat, where his mates were whistling at him. Head down. Didn’t stop to brush his groin up against any outstretched knees, didn’t look at Rona. I looked at her instead, through the seat behind. Her and thin, lank Donna Bruce nattering away, the same age except one of them was a child and the other one wasn’t.

  Next time I got a chance to talk to her was after lunch, passing her on the way to French.

  ‘What was all that about this morning?’

  ‘All what? You just need,’ patronising voice, full height ‘to remember that I’m not actually a baby, Fiona.’

  ‘You know what I mean. With him. With Malcy.’ I whispered that bit, didn’t want to get caught saying his name out loud.

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ she said, peeling off and away from me, her hair whipping out behind her.

  I wasn’t even surprised when the knock on the door came that night. Dad was out at the shops and Rona was in the toilet, so I went, already half-knowing who it would be.

  ‘Eh. Is your sister in?’

  He was wet through – it had just stopped raining – huddled up under a man’s coat too big for him. I looked down on him from our steps and thought it was maybe the first time I’d ever heard him speak. I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I just closed the door on him, softly, and went back into the living room, turned the telly up louder.

  That was it, for Rona, though. I heard her new laugh in the corridors and on the bus, bright and healthy. From nowhere, she had boy friends and then boyfriends, mostly third years but once, for two terrifying, glorious weeks until the slaggings from his friends got too much for him, Chris Wood in fifth year, captain of the football team, lead actor in the school plays. Never Malcy Lamont, although I’d sometimes catch him staring at her cheek on the bus, immobilised. She was untouchable for the likes of him now. She walked taller than me, bunched her school skirt into her belt, stretched her legs out at break times to pull her socks down into thick rolls over each ankle. She started staying out late, crashing home at one and three and four. Her clothes and makeup got much, much cooler than mine, quickly. I’d pass her in the playground, screeching and flirting and petting with an entirely different set of friends from the ones she’d had before. I just stood back and watched her, got my grades, told no tales to either parent. They were busy finalising the divorce then, anyway, didn’t notice, didn’t want to.

  Forth

  I am beginning to know this world, I think. It’s like a soap opera. I tune into them every day, when I get home, when Beth’s fed and the telly is on. There they are, listed, all the women working in my city, reports on them, their own blogs, their new pictures.

  I check the forum to see if anyone has posted a new field report any of the ones I follow, the ones who seem sort of famous with the men, the personalities. Sabrina. Tiffany. Casey. Shiny American names. Bubblegum exotica. I think I’ve found the blonde girl, the one with the piercings, from the protest. Anya. She calls herself ‘Sonja’. Her website says she’s Swedish, and specialises in fetish work. Her face is blurred out, of course, but you can still see the piercings. She has another one through her nipple, little silver bolt, the skin all bruised and puckered around it. Not for the first time I think how strange it is that most of these women will show every little part of themselves but hide their faces.

  Holly has a new blog up; it’s short and boring, complaining about women in the game who lie about their age. Holly is nineteen, and she doesn’t understand why anyone would ever want to lie. What’s the point, she says. When I’m thirty-five, I’m going to tell everyone I’m thirty-five. I’m going to be proud of it.

  Holly is one of the ones who is either far too trusting or knows exactly what’s she’s doing; I haven’t worked it out yet. There’s nothing blurred out here – there are only a few who do this, and they’re mostly young, very young, late-teens-grew-up-on-Facebook young. Holly also pours out her soul, though. Where the others blog about irritations with clients who don’t read their websites properly before calling, or use their sites to draw attention to political rallies, pulling for sex workers’ rights, she writes about her hatred for her mother; her college courses, her compulsions.

  If there’s one thing I just can not stand it’s bad hygiene. I am OCD and proud of it! If you want to play with me, gentlemen, I’m always always going to insist that you shower first.

  Her father. She writes about her father, sits it all up there alongside the pictures of her, modelling dresses and lingerie, spreading herself wide for the camera. With just two clicks I could book an appointment with her, this fragile bird-thing who I know far too much about.

  Its Fathers day so I wanted to write something about my favourite man in the world, my Daddy!!! Its no secret that me and my mum don’t get on coz she’s an abusive bitch who ruined my childhood with her selfish behaviour. My dad couldn’t stand to live with her, she drove him away just like she drove me away by the time I was sixteen. I went to look for him and we had the most amazing reunion ever, it was like getting a second chance to be a little girl. After years of a jealous woman on a campaign to brake down my confidence, it was amazing to have someone tell me that I was actually beautiful and that I was his princess.

  I imagine the men who come to her, having read this, spent time inside her bruised head, and I hope it’s a ploy, that she’s cleverer than this. Her face is not quite pretty – she missed being pretty by a hair’s width, a blink; everything individually is, but not together. She’s trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the eyeliner, the plastic tiara and underfed bones. The other one who goes without pixels is young and posh and beautiful, a student, through in Edinburgh. She calls herself Felicity and for all I know it’s probably her real name. Edinburgh’s not her home town. Why should she care what they think of her up here?

  All this I know, because it’s right there in front of me. Click, click. Felicity charges three times as much as Holly, and is less upfront about the services she provides, although both make it clear that anal sex is not a problem. I look at their skinny bums, Felicity’s beribboned, in satin, Holly’s naked, her hands pulling the cheeks apart, blue-polished fingernails digging into scrappy flesh.

  I am not even ten years older than either of them, but their display, their lack of shame, their sex makes me feel like I’m from another time. You see, Rona? People
like to be visible these days. Completely visible. Everything on display for the whole world to see. You’re doing it all wrong.

  I worry about Holly. I worry about her like I worry about the eighteen-year-old girl who lives near me and advertises on the site, doesn’t blog, only hosts two grainy pictures, one of her breasts, one of her shaved crotch, both taken on a mobile phone, and says she does ‘bareback’. No condoms. I want to write to her and warn her.

  I forget that they don’t know me, no matter how much I can read up about them. I wonder if their clients, prospective clients, faceless men at computers, feel the same.

  They are exciting, these lives, though. They are. That they can list, on a site, the things they will do, and men will pay to do those things with them. I find it exciting in spite of myself. In spite of the bits of me that are repulsed.

  There are no new field reports on any of my girls. I go back to the search page.

  Search by Lady’s name:

  Search by Location:

  Search by Services [tick]

  Outcalls Incalls Fetish/Specialist

  This computer is wise to me too, fills in the o and the n and the a after I type the R, and although I’ve broadened it out to search the whole of the UK, it only returns the one in Manchester.

  Manchester, I’d thought, when I’d first found her, my skin prickling, Manchester was the last place we had any sort of sighting. But it isn’t her. Wrong skin colour, wrong age. I could tell from the first reports.

  Not that she would be using her own name anyway. What does she go by, now, I wonder again. And then, back on the search page, without knowing why, I delete the R and put in an F and an i, my own name.

  Field Report 15/03/08

  On: ‘Fiona’

  In: West End

  Her place: Clean new flat in West End. Nothing much to say about it.

  The punt: Went well. She immediately put me at my ease. A stunning girl in her mid-20s. I would say about 25. Curly dark hair. Looked like a young Raquel Welsh. Needless to say I was delighted. Started off with amazing blowjob. Let me come all over her beautiful tits. Then some petting until the half hour was up. Perfect lunchtime treat. I will be back for a longer session!!

  There was a link to a website. West End Girls, it was called. Listing the finest independent escorts in your local area, it said. There was faceless ‘Fiona’, all thin shoulders, big breasts, fake tan, blue French knickers and a head full of smoothed brown curls. It was definitely our hair.

  Back

  A peace of sorts, damp-smelling and resigned, has settled about our family these days. In the evenings we usually group together downstairs, in Mum and Dad’s tenement living room, let the dramas of made-up families wash over us. They sit on the sofa, together but not touching, I sit in the single matching chair, Beth scuttles about the floor. One two three four.

  The room could do with redecorating, to be honest. It’s looked like this for well over a decade now, ever since Mags Leonard, thirty-five and with two teenage daughters, married to a man almost ten years older, walked into it with her hair all different one day and screamed that she was feeling stuck, that she’d never asked to be a mother. Soon after that, the walls were painted in pale, inoffensive colours for the tenants who would come in, while the two teenage daughters and the floundering confused husband moved out to a chewed-up suburb. The room we shared in Dad’s rented house had Care Bears on the walls and was never repapered. Every second weekend we’d share the sofa bed at Mum’s new flat and make formal conversation with her young-looking boyfriends about our school subjects over dinner. When we moved back in, first Mum, then Dad, then me, with Beth, in the flat upstairs, which had been on the market for months, we didn’t talk about doing the place up. The agreement we didn’t need to voice was that we were only here temporarily, so Mum’s strange wall-hangings and ornaments collated from her travels, Dad’s stodgy watercolours of Scottish island landscapes, and the cheap cotton throws and cushions of my student life have stayed in their boxes in the cellar space. We put up Bethan’s nursery and then school pictures, though, in their free cardboard mounts. Not on the walls: she ages along the mantelpiece, from two to six, the face thinning and the eyes widening and the teeth disappearing.

  Mum was seeing that Andrew guy; Dad and Jackie had been awkwardly coupled for a couple of years. Two sets of lives beginning to be lived together, neither bond strong enough to absorb the gap Rona left. Their grief not only pulled them back together again, it finally gave them something in common, beyond having been a pair of idiotic romantics who worked in the same café together that summer when she left school and he was trying to finish his first play and I was conceived. They’ve never said anything out loud, not to me, and perhaps they only had the conversation telepathically with each other, but we are all aware of their sticky puddles of shared guilt. His selfishness, preferring to write plays than earn money for his bloody kids, the ongoing affair with that woman. Her martyrdom, taking on three jobs and bullying him for his inadequacies, making him feel small and bloody stupid all the bloody time. Those things they shouted at each other in this room, their faces purple and ugly, while I flinched and Rona, blank-faced, turned up the volume on the TV.

  Forth

  All this week, I’ve been nipping downstairs in my lunch breaks, calling from the alley, scuffing the same shards of glass under my toe as I wait for the answerphone to kick in. She never answers her phone, it seems. Not during the lunch hour, anyway. A breathy Hi, leave a message in a voice that could be anyone’s; too quick to tell and she might be putting that accent on like I am. Muffling it through my coat, a bit of an Irish twang to keep her from guessing.

  ‘Hi, I’d still like to make an appointment to see you. Could you call me back on this number, please.’

  I imagine her playing back her voicemail, gruff requests from regulars, first timers full of nerves, and then me, bell clear, from nowhere. Maybe it would feel tight at her throat, my voice, or it might make her dizzy. I know why she isn’t answering.

  Fresh condoms in the car park today, I noticed. I’d need to make another call to street services, or Ian would be on me.

  I didn’t get out till six that night, those musky patches of no-light already waiting up the alleyways for the girls, and a text message on my phone, glowing there, waiting for me.

  Please stop calling i dont do women thx.

  ‘Graeme, would you be up for doing me a wee favour?’

  I lean over his desk a little and his eyes fidget over my cleavage for a second, coming back to my face then flicking down again. He’s going to make himself dizzy. I’ve dressed up for this; astonishing the amount of planning I put in, I’ll think later, hot with shame.

  ‘It’ll not take two minutes - I just need a – well. A man. Through in the store cupboard.’

  ‘Eh. Aye. No problem. Sure. Now? Right. Eh.’

  Moira’s face disappears into the wrinkles of a knowing smile above her computer as he follows me through and I feel suddenly mucky, like I’m deceiving her.

  Inside the cupboard, I let the door close behind us and he flinches at it, arranges each nodule of his back against one side of the wall.

  ‘Boxes, is it? Which ones?’

  He’s putting on more of an accent than usual, staring somewhere around my shoulder.

  ‘Boxes?’

  ‘Aye. Can’t you reach the boxes?’

  ‘Oh, no. Actually, it’s a little bit of a strange request, and I’d appreciate it if you could keep it from the others, just for just now.’ I’ve thickened my voice to match his.

  ‘Ehm.’

  I take a half step nearer to him, we both breathe in the three extra scooshes of perfume I’d put on, and something alien begins to speak with my lips.

  ‘Oof, it’s warm in here, isn’t it. Anyway, hon. I’m trying out a new system for arranging Ian’s meetings, using a programme I found online. If it works, I’ll buy it for the office and it could make everything a lot easier, but - you know what the
older ones can be like with changes – I’d rather present it to them as a working model, you know? I’ll not bore you – you need to get back to your work and I don’t want to hold you up.’

  I’m talking very, very quickly. His face says he’s scolding himself for every look he’s stealing down my top. Naughty boy. I know what’s in your inbox.

  ‘Basically, I just need to record a man saying a few things, so I can try out the answering system. It doesn’t seem to be working as well with my wee girly voice! So I’ve got this recorder here. You okay with this, yeah? You’ll be back at your desk in a second, I promise. Thanks hon. You’re such a pal.’

  The skin under his old acne scars reddens. I ease my weight forward again, stroke his shoulder, hold up the recorder. Later, I’ll be shocked at myself. I’ve known this man for three years and never been able to advance our relationship between the odd awkward shared joke. I don’t know if I’ve ever flirted in my life, for sex or any other reason. Not with him, not with anyone. Certainly not for years. Later, it will terrify me, what I can do when I want something.

  She didn’t answer her mobile in the evenings, either, I’d noticed; that was all to the good, though, as my plan would probably work better.

  I’d put a tenner into the new SIM card, and fiddled around changing them while Beth was doing her homework that evening. The card got stuck under my fingernail for a second while I was trying to shove it in; the metal edge pricked me and I worried that it would have come out, that I’d have to go and do all this again tomorrow. I needed it to happen now, this evening.