Fishnet (16 page)

‘A scavenger.'

‘Aye.'

She and Rona were well suited then, I don't say.

‘But the thing about Camilla was, eh… For a start, she tended to supply all the drugs to that lot. And there was no way this little flower was a full-time dealer, so I presume she was employed by somebody, somewhere, some, eh, Mr Big. Camilla was the contact, ken? But she also did, eh, favours. She was also the, eh, the entertainment. Sorry. But, eh, you know what I mean?'

‘Less technical terms?'

‘It was – you'd hear jokes about it. Jez and that lot. If they had a big guest, or a DJ or something, and they really wanted to impress him, like. Camilla would, eh. Well. She would keep him company that night. And as I understand it, she would –'

‘Receive money for her services?'

‘No always. Sometimes, like,
shoes
or something – one time, when I was working for Jez, he sent me out to pick up like this £500 pair ay heels from one of they proper snobby boutiques, eh. That was the expenses code,
entertainment
, and I saw him handing them over to Camilla that night. Or coke. But she – eh – she didny do freebies.'

‘And Rona?'

‘Well, at first they were just pally, eh, couple of girls who liked
to party. Good dancers, pretty, welcome everywhere they went. But after a while, I'd eh – I'd see Rona heading off, with Camilla and, eh, whatever visiting dignitary they were – Just in the taxi, and that. And then she just stopped turning up for her shifts at the bar. I'd go in to see her and the manager would say she hadn't turned up, she hadn't turned up, and then she was fired. But. Eh. She still had enough money to keep going out, to keep buying pretty dresses, eh. Shoes.'

We drink. The lights flash for last orders and I almost run to get there. Just to be doing something else, concentrating on something else. But he's there, now, still going when I come back.

‘I'd tried to talk to her about it, but she just seemed so happy, man. She said she was fine, could handle herself. And, to be honest, she
didny
look – no like Camilla. That lassie, you could see her shrivelling up. But Rona. Eh, they hung about together for maybe four months, five months, something like that, and then, one day, Rona just wasn't there anymore. I was a bit freaked out about it, like. Well, you would be. I got hold of that Camilla at a club one night and I was just like, look, where the hell is she? And I swear to god, it was like the first time she'd ever actually lowered herself to acknowledge me, eh? And she just sort of bleated something about Rona having run away up north, couldn't handle it, something. Called her a silly little cow, so I had to, eh, remove myself from the area, man. But I just thought – I thought she'd be alright. Eh. Was that it, then?'

‘Was what?'

Oh, I'm so, so drunk.

‘Was that, it, the last – no. Wait. The baby. Fuckin hell.'

‘She did go up north. She went to Aviemore. Stayed with a school friend who's a skiing instructor up there. Same story: got fired from a bar, made up the rent deficit by, ah… Taking payment. For sex. It's just, it seems like she was advertising, this time.'

‘Advertising. Mate.'

‘She turned up here when I hadn't seen her for six months, dumped a baby I certainly hadn't heard of before on me, and ran away in the middle of the night. And that's it.'

He puts a damp hand over mine. It's the least sexual gesture I've ever felt.

‘Last time I saw Camilla, it was about three years ago, eh. I'd been back, visiting the folks – I moved through here for my job. Ach. She was sitting up at the bar where I was meeting my brother. I recognised the voice, first, eh. She kept laughing too loudly and planting her hand on the knee of this old, fat dude. She looked fucked man, eh, snappable. Nothing left of her, inside. About to crumble into dust. Like a – like an Egyptian mummy or something. Death mask.'

And we drink, and we drink.

‘Fucking hell. Tell me something good, eh. What about you, man. What do you do.'

‘I do nothing. I just work in an office.'

‘You're raising – her – kid, though. As your own. That's fuckin something, Fiona man. That's pure amazing-style, right there.'

For that, he gets a smile. Hear that, Samira?

‘And you. Ally McKay. What about you, now?'

‘Eh. I work with kids – I run a youth club out in the housing schemes in the east. Teaching them all how to be wee DJs! They like some pure terrible hardcore stuff, man.'

‘Seriously? You're actually almost too good, aren't you?'

And it is as close as we get to a joke.

When our bodies eventually flop together, you couldn't call it a seduction. The boozy inevitability of it all. We stand, across the table, as if accepting that it's now the time for it, and we press damp, sour mouths on each other. In the toilets I check that I'm wearing passable underwear, buy condoms from a rusty machine, half-worried he'll have run off while I'm in there, but
he hasn't. He's there, acknowledging it. We kiss again and again on the fifteen-minute walk to my flat, as though we're trying to convince ourselves we're really into it.

My muscles creak out, remembering this sensation. I am not quite wet enough for entry, so there is some fumbling, some spit, a couple of sweet, whispered assurances that yes, I do want this. Because I really, really do, despite it all. Then the good, warm, filling, much missed. Then the gentle sound of something falling repeatedly onto wet sand. He doesn't come. I don't come. We just warm each other for a while, though, skin on anonymous skin. The being beside another person. Touching base for a while.

When I wake up again, it's fully light. Proper daytime. I can still feel that small kiss on my forehead. There's a note on the bedside table, beside the scribbled-on napkin and the torn condom wrapper.

She's still downstairs. Thought it best she didn't see you like this.
Please come and get her when you wake up
.
Hope you had fun
.
Mum
.

I cried for five minutes. Just to get the gin out. Then I got in the shower, picked up a still-resentful Beth, smelling of clean wet hair. It was that night that I emailed Anya. Sonja. Whoever she is.

Split Personalities

We are exceptionally good at duplicity, we persons in the hussying trade. And I don't mean that we're more likely to double-cross or betray you, despite the number of movies I can think of which imply call-girls are not to be trusted (almost as many as those where we're killed in the first act, to alert the town to the presence of a murderer on the loose. The canaries-down-a-mine-shaft of the serial killer world, us). Actually, I've met few people as honest as ladies of negotiable virtue. It's all out there, you see. In one way.

What I mean, though, is that the vast majority of escorts are, at any given time, keeping up a complex series of appearances. We're all suffering from split personalities.

Try and think of those casual acquaintances of yours. The friends-of-friends. People you were at school with, maybe, but don't keep regularly up to date with. Your neighbours. The sort of people you'd wave to in the street or wish happy birthday to on Facebook, but don't trust enough to share the intimate parts of your life with. It's not that
they're
not to be trusted, either, it's just that you don't know them well enough.

Now, imagine every single one of those people in your life knew that you did a job like mine. A job everyone has an opinion on, without usually knowing very much about it. A job that many people presume you have to be damaged in some way to do; a job that the very doing of means people make serious, deep assumptions about you in ways they certainly don't do with dentists. Exactly. So that's your basic, entry-level secrecy right
there: you need a convincing backstory to explain, as boringly as possible, your income, just in case these people take an interest. Now, perhaps certain members of your family and friends aren't as enlightened as you'd like them to be about the business. You either force all manner of uncomfortable discussions on them, or you up the secrecy even further. This amount of disclosure varies from person to person, depending on a whole host of variables conditioning your relationships with each one.

Even with those people who know, there's often something kept back. Perhaps you've reached a tacit understanding with them where they know, but don't want to be reminded of it, because in spite of you, they've never really got over their hang-ups about the profession, in which case you find a way round it, find a way to be more than half a person when you're with them. I know women who've been in relationships whilst playing this old game, with some exceptionally tolerant, loving men, and they've nearly always mentioned a keeping back of the details, as a way of making a distinction between work and non-work sex.

So, there's private face and there's hussy face, for starters. Then you get to the clients. Now, I'm fairly expensive, in this city and in this field, and as you'll know if you've read my FAQs, I'm also completely unrepentant about that. I'm worth it, and I know I am. And two of the reasons I'm worth it are I'll commit completely to your fantasy, and I'm as discreet as they get.

I'm not sure a lot of people understand discretion. It's not just a matter of not obviously looking like
an escort when I turn up to an outcall. When I say discretion, I mean I've taken my own version of the Hippocratic Oath. Client–hussy confidentiality is important. I hold a lot of very important secrets in my head, and most of them are not my own. I've often said MI6 should recruit former escorts to its staff. Not only can we keep track of multiple identities, we're experts in psychology; in gauging reactions, working out what people like, helping them connect. Providing a listening, counselling service is often as much a part of this job as the physical stuff. And clients can only feel free to be themselves with me if they know I'm not going to betray them.

Then there's the me I am with you, my little online perverts, and with my clients face to face. And I'm not going to pretend for one second that this is the ‘real me' you're getting. This way I have of writing to you, this is just another personality. This voice comes from your fantasy girl, speaks from your fantasy body. I take her out of the cupboard and put her on when I'm going to work: I get into costume. And slowly, curling my eyelashes, painting my face, smoothing my skin and pulling up my stockings, I become her, for you.

And we both know that's what you'd rather have. You don't want a person who moans, farts and goes to the supermarket. You want arch and playful, with a great bottom. And you know you do.

Speaking of great bottoms…

It's a lot of balls to keep up in the air (baddoom tsch!), a lot of switches to be flicked on or off at any time, sure. But until the whole of society shifts on its axis to accommodate us a little more, or at least accept us, that we have always been here, that's how it's going to be. And although the obvious way for it to work would be for us all to come out at once and say, here we are, this is what we do, deal with it, this is an independent business by its very definition. Dunno about you, but the stakes are too high for me to be the first.

This week I went to see a talk by The Fallen Woman herself, our great nation's most famous former-prostitute-turned-writer. A huge hall-full of people there to see her for one reason and one reason only, and she knew it, had played up the descriptions and her fame to get a bigger audience for a presentation of the research project she's been working on. She was working on a book about identity, about the way we can hide online; and she read from it, clicked through a presentation of statistics, brisk, witty. She tricked us, and she refused to be cowed by it, to allow anything to touch her; controlling the crowd and setting the agenda for the night so masterfully that no-one dared ask her about
it
, not the pervs nor the anti-prostitution campaigners (and I recognised a few of both in the crowd)…

Whole, she is. Whole and brainy and likeable and bloody admirable. She wears great shoes. She makes jokes about her great shoes. She makes
jokes
. Saying, look at me. No, really. Look at
me
.

Tags:
celebrity
stigma
activism
the
business
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Four

Off

Once you've made that shift, interrupted the smooth line of dayto-day living with some sort of dissent, it's hard to go back. RDJ Construction had moved into sharp focus and I saw it all, its cold walls, hard carpets and the stale instant coffee on its breath, Elaine's old tattered magazines in the break room, the listless chatter about last night's telly. This grey place where we had to go, every day, none of us liking it, none of us able to change. I look around at Moira, Norman and Graeme, faces illuminated by their separate monitors but blank, all three powered-down humans at half-capacity.

This office had been just a thing that was, a condition of existence. Now everything about it, everything it asked of us enraged me. All the time and effort I'd taken to insure myself against feeling anything, all the careful barriers put up to avoid comparison with other possible worlds, all gone.

What if we all just said no? What would happen to RDJ Construction if Moira realised that the way they'd smiled and let her put Team Leader on her email signature after eleven years of service was appallingly patronising to any loyal worker, let alone one nearing fifty? Or if Norman worked out that his scrupulous insistence on double-checking the minute details of every task he was given, above and beyond his paid hours, meant the company got twice as much work out of him? What if Graeme just wanted to live a young person's life?

What if I did?

A soft metallic noise, and my 9.30 reminder list pops up.

Order sandwiches x13 for weekly review
Last week's minutes photocopy x14
Ian to call John McKenzie @ 11.15
File invoices

I stared and stared at the screen and couldn't find the energy to reach for the phone anywhere in me. The sandwiches were a matter of urgency: the order had to be in with the caterers by 10. The sandwiches were a matter of urgency. The sandwiches were a matter of urgency.

What if I just stood up and started walking. They wouldn't notice at first. I could be over in another department. They wouldn't notice unless a phone call came through and they realised I'd left Ian's desk unattended – Moira would reroute the calls through to her phone for a while, because it is assumed that that is what women do in this office. Questions would be asked at 11.25 when John McKenzie's PA called and Ian realised he hadn't been reminded. They would try my mobile number and I wouldn't answer it because I would be walking, because maybe I hadn't even taken my phone with me. There would be no sandwiches or copies of last week's minutes at the meeting, and big George would file a complaint because he's diabetic and the decision to keep everyone in over lunch for the weekly review was not taken lightly, and I would keep on walking, until I got to the edge of the city. Perhaps I could walk to Manchester. Perhaps I could walk to a village or a small town where the buildings didn't advance above two storeys. By the time I got there, the sandwich problem would have resolved itself somehow and I wouldn't be needed again until 5pm, when afterschool care would notice I hadn't come to pick up Beth. Again, though, they would phone Mum, and she'd cluck and fluster, but she and Dad would take Beth in, just like they'd always wanted to. It's not a rupture, a second daughter going missing. Not like the first. We're so numb now my absence would cause nothing more than an irritation of scar tissue. And Beth, and Beth, wouldn't her life be better with someone competent,
someone experienced in parenting? Someone who didn't sometimes resent her presence? The invoices would be filed by a temp girl from the same agency I'd been with originally, who would gradually mould this chair to her back as her contract was extended due to her extreme adequacy.

That the sandwiches were once not got, that would be my legacy.

The four numbers in the corner of my screen advance towards 10:00, and Ian's face is there, above the monitor.

‘Fiona, Jackson Group have decided to send an extra representative to the meeting today. Can you make the sandwich order for fourteen? Thanks.'

And I pick up the phone because these are the things you do, because. And I begin to file the invoices, and I patch the phonecall through to Ian at 11.15, and then I go to the photocopier and I photocopy the minutes, and I take fulsome, competent notes in the weekly review meeting where we discuss the very precise plans for how to deal with the irritating anti-progress protesters who want to stop these two rich companies from getting even richer, type them up briskly and print out two more copies than I need to, and at 4.30 I leave the building carrying the extra-large handbag I'd specially brought that day, the one that can hold A4 documents without creasing them, every colleague I pass in the corridors charged with the exciting possibility of discovery.

On

A rapper is having sex on the sound system in the bar where Heather wants to meet. It's a Jackson Group bar, the biggest pub chain in the city. RDJ Construction's most valued, and valuable clients. Their bars spring up anywhere clusters of office workers or students can be found, called for babytalk, all of them. K-oko. Dada. BuU. Nuuba. Lol'lo. The same hard chairs on the floors, the same soft porn in the toilets. Straightening-ironed staff, squelchy RnB beats that bit too loud for conversation, that bit too rubbish to dance to.

I suppose it's handy – five minutes from both my breezeblock tower and the glass-fronted palace Heather works in – but it doesn't make you want to linger. The seats are primed to eject us, and the music's so loud, so doosh doosh pumping pumping that we're having to shout and it's only Tuesday evening.

‘Hi doll. Hiya. How's you? How's my girl?'

Her hug is paper thin: I hardly feel it on me. She's got a white shirt on today and her honeymoon-ruddied skin pops against it. This will be deliberate – Heather would always wear white vests to show off her sunburn on the first days of autumn term. She is a constant, Heather. This is always what she was going to be, this married lady tilting her anxious head, eyes big and loaded. I have a fair idea of what's coming, so I head her off.

‘Look at your tan! So. Tell me all about it. How was the honeymoon? Was it amazing?'

She relaxes, basks a little.

‘Oh and look at
that
! I'm firing questions at you and we haven't even got the drinks in yet. What you having?'

Her sense of purpose returns.

‘No, no hon. Let me. I'll get this. You don't have to.
You don't have to
. Wine? Glass of wine? My treat, hon.'

She swings up and off. Through the gloom a couple of nearby blokey necks swing to appraise her, the fleshy bounce of her, flick to me and then back to their pints. If Samira had been with
us it would have been different, but Heather and I, despite the tightness of our work skirts and the height of our heels, do not merit second glances. We never really have done, it occurs to me. I goggle at the lumpen male shapes, trying to make them feel my hostility. They're laughing about something that isn't to do with us, already forgotten.

Heather tilts back from the bar, shouts my name. I teeter over, conscious of the catwalk I'm on. Perhaps I'm exaggerating the wiggle a bit, wanting to be noticed again. I have begun buying flimsy, silky knickers recently, the sort of wispy things I see in pictures. The sort of thing I used to assume would fall apart in the wash or give me thrush. I run my thumb over the line of them, through my skirt. Outer lines of vision, but I think the men are looking.

There are posters all over the bar.

MIDWEEK SPECIAL: BUY TWO GLASSES, GET THE REST OF THE BOTTLE FREE.

‘They've got an offer on,' she explains.

‘Really, I'm fine with just a glass.'

The young barman who has been salesman-flirting her smiles, familiar with this squabble.

‘Ah, go on,' he says. ‘Can't hurt.'

It's red, glowing blackish in those huge goldfish bowl glasses, even though I'd fancied white.There is really not very much in the bottle after the two glasses have been poured. We walk back past the men again. Hip, hip. Yes, they're looking at us. Good. I try a small, coy smile and look back to my feet. A Rona move. Just because I could. Heather's staring at me.

‘Right. So. I want all the details. Talk me through every bit. Was the hotel wonderful? And you got lots of sunbathing in –?'

‘We did. It was good, yeah. It was really good. How are
you
, though, Fi? It's been all me-me-me-wedding-wedding for so long. Looking forward to getting back to normality. What's going on in
your
life?'

She's been back four days. This is ample time for her to have
met up with Claire, crusading Claire, save-the-women Claire. I try and imagine it, a family dinner, perhaps, and at some point Claire catches Heather's arm, takes her into the kitchen on a pretext. Your friend, she'll say, Fiona. I'm afraid I've got some bad news. And Heather is shocked, of course she is. Perhaps she worries about it in bed that night, asks Ross for advice that he can't give. Perhaps he makes an inappropriate joke and they have a fight about it. This is my oldest friend that you're talking about here, she'll say. This is how their married life will be, now. The next day she'll phone Samira, who will be equally shocked, but less concerned because we are still not talking. I knew she was acting weirdly, Samira will say. Should we talk to her, Heather will ask, and Samira will find a way of getting Heather to do it without actually making Heather realise that we are not talking, because Samira is very clever like that. And that's why I get the text message.

Hi hon!!! Back from honeymoon and really want to have a catch-up with you!!! Hows 2moro? After work? Xxxx

‘Oh, everything's just the same with me. Had to buy Bethan a wedding dress, thanks to you! She's obsessed with brides now, makes a change from princesses!'

‘Where's Bethan tonight?'

‘My folks have got her.'

‘Right. They're quite good about that, aren't they? I mean, they must have to take her quite a lot–'

Heather was never good at subtlety. I think about that long chain of worry and whispered conversations, decide to enjoy myself.

‘Ha ha, yeah! All the overtime I'm having to do at work now, they're beginning to joke that I never see her! She practically doesn't recognise me. Still. Doing it for her future in the end, eh and it's nice to have the extra money. Means we don't have to worry too much. Lot of late nights, though. Whew!'

Something diamond-hard is glinting away in me tonight. I
laugh larger than usual, force it out, throw my head back and notice that we still have our audience. Heather has almost finished her first, huge glass, and tops herself up before speaking, her sympathy face on.

‘I didn't know – I hadn't realised money was such a problem for you, hon. You should have told me. You know. You can talk to me. I'm so sorry I got preoccupied with the wedding and everything, but I'm here for you now. Eh? Eh Fi.'

‘Aw, that's really sweet of you, honey. But I think we're doing fine.'

‘No, really. If there's anything you want to tell me. Anything at all you need to get off your chest. I'm your pal, eh. I'm listening.'

It's a high, a sudden, powerful high. I flick one of Rona's smiles at the two men, topnote, playing everyone in this bar like a virtuoso pianist. My glass is empty too. It always comes down to getting drunk, I think.

‘We drank those quickly, didn't we? There's the last of the bottle!'

‘Fi. Talk to me.'

I put my neck to the same angle as hers, meet her eyes for the first time all night.

‘What exactly do you want me to talk about, Heather.'

‘About – about –'

Here it comes.

‘Claire said she saw you. At a meeting. At a meeting of –'

‘Of?'

‘That meeting. You know what I'm talking about, Fiona. Stop pretending.'

She still can't bring herself to say it, though, the dirty word.

‘Are you working as a… As a.'

Right here and now, I could let it all out. Let Rona out. Heather, who I've known for more than half my life, would understand how to absorb her, help me soak her up. It's not just talking to a stranger at a wedding; it's actively taking control. Getting things back on track. I wouldn't have to bear the knowledge by myself
any more; letting the air in on this private obsession, curbing it. Stopping it. I'd become normal again, and Heather would support me. She's offering to, right here; she just doesn't know she is.

It's not me. Ohmigod, you thought it was
me
? I'd say. No, no. It's Rona. And I'd tell her about what Christina had told me, about what Ally McKay had said. It would explain my strange behaviour on her hen weekend and since, which would go some way to bonding us back together again, and I'd feel less alone. She'd talk it through with me, help me straighten out all the tortured kinks of thought I've had in my head this past month. I might end up crying on her, if we stretch the talk into another buy-two-glasses-get-the-bottle-free and another, the barman winking at our drunkenness as barmen in this sort of bar do with office girls. Tomorrow she'll tell Samira, and Samira and I will have a tearful exchange on the phone where we both apologise and make up, and we'll be reunited, three fuckin muskahounds, and they'll help me through this, this phase, and I'll be a better friend and mother for it. I can't believe you thought
I
was doing
that
, I'll say at the end of the night, and we'll laugh about it, one of those hearty, bittersweet shared laughs of friendship.

But I don't say anything.

What Heather thinks she's doing is bravely confronting a friend whose life has spiralled out of control, because we always seem to think that that sort of life must involve a spiral out of control. She might not have voiced it in these terms, but right now Heather thinks I'm a fallen woman, a desperate, shameful thing. Unclean. She's shocked and ashamed for me, of me, and she pities me. She keeps touching her wedding ring, worrying at it.