Fishnet (20 page)

‘Fiona, you need to remember that you weren't there,' says Suzanne, in a purposefully reasonable voice. ‘We spent most of the time in our own main space, absolutely not touching the walls or beams. We didn't want to give them an excuse to arrest or sue us. '

‘We made a film of us in there, to put up on the campaign page,' Anya says. ‘We will be able to prove this if it ever comes
up. You know what I think? I think your good friends Jackson Group maybe wanted out of this altogether, hey? Maybe they discover the investment won't work, set this up, have it pulled down for scrap, save their fingers from being dirty, huh? Maybe your Norman Black is just collateral damage for them. For them, not for us.'

‘We've no proof of that,' Suzanne says, quickly. ‘They're a corporation; of course they will have a PR team who move fast. Who knows what they do. Don't get paranoid.'

The meetings I take minutes at with the Jackson Group representatives, their expensive aftershaves choking the air conditioning. Norman nodding seriously along with everything they say.

‘Whatever has happened, they are capitalising on it pretty nicely, hey?'

‘Anyway, it's been a rough one, Fiona. I think both Anya and I could do with a nap. Remember, we've had it pretty hard today too. Anya especially.'

As I wonder whether Suzanne knows she's being quite so patronising, the secret understanding between the two of them crystallises in the air around me, begins to escort me out. I just need to check.

‘Do you know who it was, the person who tipped the paper off about you, Anya?'

‘Oh, we've got ideas.' Suzanne's lips are set tight.

‘This information, I think, could have come from someone at Jackson Group,' Anya says, ‘or maybe from our lovely friend on the council, Ms Claire Buchanan: she certainly was not happy with me the other day, was she?'

‘Oh no: Claire is an idiot, but she's not –' I'm saying before I've thought it through. Shut up, I'm urging myself. Why are you standing up for
her
?

‘So you do know her. We thought so.' Anya is staring me down, one eyebrow raised, her nostrils flared again.

‘We just met at a hen party. She's not a friend. We don't get on.'

‘What is she, an old girlfriend? You are angry with her so you try to help us, make up some story about a missing sister to get in? Then, maybe she takes you back, or you make up after you see each other at our meeting, after your eyes meet, and suddenly you want to help her again? So you tell a journalist who I am? Is that how it worked?'

‘Anya,' Suzanne says, flashing a warning. ‘You maybe just need some sleep now.'

It's rising in me.

‘Sure. Sure. That's what you think of me? Sure.'

‘Well, you know that I am at the university, don't you? You seem to have worked out my real name somehow although I have only ever referred to myself as Sonja around you. And it would not have been difficult for you to contact a journalist – I would bet many of them are calling your office at the moment, hey?'

Her face is red with it, red and sharp with scorn for me, scorn that I realise has always been there. Anya thinks I'm a weed, something flimsy and disposable, and she's right. I don't stay and stand up for myself. I run mimsily out, take my anger out in tuts and forceful elbows on other bodies in the bus queue. I grip Bethan's hand too tightly pulling her up the hill away from afterschool, and when we get in I put a bowl of cereal and a carton of milk in front of the television for her, then go straight to the computer and spend three hours composing a long and nasty email to Anya. In it, I point out that

Because that is how we do things, we cowards. By stealth, behind backs.

I have a look at the copy of the paper, after I've hit send, after I've fizzed, after I've noticed that Bethan has fallen asleep on the
sofa and felt, again, like a terrible mother. Norman and Anya, Anya and Norman. The two people I'd been most angry at, on pages one and four.

I scoop Bethan up in a move I've practised over the years, so gently that she doesn't wake. I tuck her in and decide to curl myself around her, as though tonight she needs an extra layer of protection.

Anger

Alright. It's going to get political. And angry. I am very, very angry. So those of you who just come here for the pictures of my bum, be warned there's going to be precious little in this one for you.

On Tuesday I was on my way to a booking with a new client. I sat in the back of the taxi, checking my phone, idling away the time, when the news filtered through, as it does. A woman who I knew, as we all know each other, by her pseudonym Ravishing Rosa, was dead.

I never met Rosa, but we'd been in touch online, and I knew her work. I admired her for her keen anger, her sense of justice, her humanity. She was a mother, a great writer, a passionate campaigner and a sex worker, and she was murdered. Not, as you've immediately assumed, by a client or a pimp. Like the vast majority of murder victims the world over, Rosa was murdered by someone she knew very well indeed.

Rosa was murdered by her ex-husband, who had made a number of threats against her, but who she was forced into contact with three times a week by the legal system in her country in order to have access to her children. Rosa lived under a legislative system which has criminalised the purchasing of sex, leading to a rise in rapes and attacks on sex workers as they're forced into the shadows to carry on living, and which proclaims loudly that sex workers, or ‘people who have been prostituted', as it would rather have us called, are victims. Victims of the wicked male demand for sex on tap, and victims of their own bad choices. A legal system which looked at a woman who has fled an abusive
husband, and ordered him sole custody of the children because she, as a ‘person who had been prostituted', was suffering from ‘diminished responsibility'. They didn't conduct any sort of mental health assessment, the people who declared this (although they work for a state which sanctions sexual assault – in the form of forced genital swabs – on sex workers when collecting evidence to pursue their cases). They simply looked at her occupation and declared her not sane. Unable to care for her children. So, when she reported that her husband was making threats upon her life, these threats were not taken seriously. Rosa was told by the legal system that could have stopped this that sex work was a form of self-harm, and as she refused to accept this, she was mentally unstable. There are no other circumstances where a man with a conviction of violence could have been granted sole custody, and no other circumstances where a woman who claimed this man was making threats against her would be forced into continual contact with him.

Rosa was twenty-six years old.

And now.

This is the same system, the same way of looking at sex workers, that certain politicians are trying to introduce in this country today. This month. Despite it not having led to any convictions, in the ten years it's been part of legislation in Rosa's home nation. This is the way that a certain percentage of the population of our country – our friends, perhaps, our neighbours, the people we sit beside on the bus – think of us. As babies. Damaged children, incapable of making our own decisions.

They say they want to bring this legislation in because they want to send a clear message to the men who purchase sex. That message is ‘women are not for sale'. They say that they're doing this out of concern for us. That this is about equality. That this is about feminism.

What they've forgotten, in their excitement to spread their message, is the day-to-day lives of their poor little victims. Our right to safe working conditions and being treated like the adults we are. Our equality, with every other human being.

If there's one thing that Rosa's case shows, it's that sex workers need, above all else, to be able to trust and confide in the police. It's very difficult to do that when even just admitting what your job is makes you immediately an accessory and uncooperative witness to a crime; it's even harder to do that when it means immediate erosion of your basic rights as an adult.

The Scottish Union of Sex Workers will be taking part in worldwide protests this Saturday to remember Rosa and make it clear that her death, and the attitudes leading to it, will not be allowed to stand in this country. There's a complete list of the protest sites across the country here. We expect there to be some photographers there, so please do bring a wig and mask or some sort of disguise if you're attending. And a red umbrella. Bring a red umbrella.

Tags:
anger
activism
the business
rosa
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Five

Mind

We're snacking on small-person food tonight. Half-sized white and orange sandwiches with the crust cut off, squares of cheese and tomato pizza, dry slices of cake. The bland things that children are taught to like. Most of the decorations are down now, but the plain grownupness of the room is broken up by scraps of wrapping (pink) and shards of burst balloon (also pink). It's been a long, loud day – at one point all three of us winced as one at the volume of noise bouncing off the ceiling – but it's been good. The planned garden treasure-hunt was rained off, but we managed to keep them entertained even as they were caged up. Bethan and Amy, her current best friend, loaned out for the treat of a sleepover, have finally collapsed into sleep after performing speeded-up versions of all the songs from
Mary Poppins
for us in a state of near hysteria. We'd clapped, applauded, overseen toothbrushing and pyjamas together, like a three-headed parenting machine. Then we sank into companionship in the sofa, me, my dad, my mum. I hadn't felt as close to them for a long time.

Dad had gone downstairs for another bottle, and his bringing it back, uncorking and pouring me a glass seems to have been a prearranged signal between the two of them, because the air in the room tilts and they breathe in as one.

‘So, we've been thinking, lovey.'

‘It has occurred to your mother and me that this is a significant – a, well. Yes. Anniversary.'

Tripping over each other's sentences like they've rehearsed it.

‘Seven years, Fi. Beth's birthday means it's been seven years now.'

‘That's the time, you know. The period of time they need.'

‘Need for what?'

‘Well, do you remember that the policewoman told us that when we first reported her? No, no, maybe, no. Of course you wouldn't. None of us were really…'

I cough, cut through her.

‘Are we talking about Rona? Are we? Could you come out and say it if so? And then, could we just drop the subject again? We've had a great day today. It's been one of the first times I can think of that all three – four – of us have properly enjoyed ourselves. As a family. Let's not let her intrude. Just this once. Come on.'

Mum is backing down before I've finished, ever-conciliatory.

‘You're right, you're right. Of course, darling. Not today –'

‘Why not today?' says Dad, suddenly, my quiet befuddled dad, rubbing his eyes. ‘Why not, and for all the reasons you've just said, Fiona. It's been seven years, and your mother and I were discussing that that means we can have your sister declared legally dead. What do you think?'

‘What?'

It's not just what he's saying. It's the force of it.

‘Have her declared legally dead. And then we get on with our lives. Perhaps we move house. She doesn't seem to want to come back to us: why should we wait around for her for the rest of our lives? This isn't healthy for us, especially for you and for Bethan. The two of you need to live in a new place, away from here. Too many memories here: I'm sure you feel it every time you come downstairs: imagine how it feels for us living in it. You're still young. You should be able to have a proper life, not one your sister dumped on you. What do you think?'

The effort seems to have exhausted him. He doesn't like to speak for this long, with this sort of force. Mum is staring as though she's never really seen him before. She actually looks a little bit turned on.

‘She's not dead, though,' I say, finally.

‘Well, none of us know that really, lovey –'

‘Yeah, I think we do. She's not dead, she's just deliberately dragging it out. She wants us to do this. We're not giving her what she wants. Not again. We carry on, and when she comes back, we force all the pain she's given us back on her. Twenty times and much more if it makes us feel better. But that's what we do.'

I storm off to bed, shaking, leaving them to finish the bottle on my sofa. I put my head under the covers, and tried to work out why I'd said all that. Because really, it made sense. Kill her off. Finish her. Let it go. Perhaps it's just hearing my parents voice it, that they could cut her off. No, I really just don't want to let her get away with it.

She can't feel as present to them. She left me, not them. The wound's not as fresh. Not like the way she lives with me, seeping through into my life, sticking angry fingers into her curls, jabbing and fuzzing them higher till the light glows through them.

‘It says here that your hair should always have volume and lift in it, so that's what I'm doing. So shut up, flathead.'

And she closed the door to our mutual bedroom on me, pop static flaring out from her radio.

‘Will you both be quiet,' our father howled, from the room he insisted on calling a study. He only communicated in cries of pain and frustration over this period; it was a long time before we got sentences addressed to our individual selves, by name. He would be in there by the time we came home from school, typing, typing, swearing, moaning. At the weekends he would leave in the morning, switching on the telly for us, come home in the evening with shopping bags full of tins. In the period after our mother left him, during which point Rona and I shuttled between our old flat in the city and this wobbly-walled semi, he was Writing. If we'd listened, perhaps we would have heard him tell a story of child and wife and work-thwarted ambitions; but we were thrawn, hurt teenagers, so we mocked him for it.

‘Mr Shakespeare, is that you?'

‘Watch out Rona, there's Very Important Writing happening in here today.'

We were never closer, Rona and I, than when we were making our father feel small and bad about the breakdown of his marriage.

Back. Mum's red face, a head below his, screaming.

‘You arsehole, you weak, ineffectual little man, stabbing away at that self-indulgent crap while I raise the fucking children you foisted on me.'

We'd sat at the top of the stairs, just out of sight, scared to breathe in case they heard us, and Rona had curled her thin pyjamed limbs into me.

Forward. Mum, slightly boozy over the cot, on the second night, when we'd pulled our three shellshocked selves together in the same place, whispering.

‘Fiona, I should take her. It should be me. It's my fault, it's all my fault. I let her think this was acceptable. She's just copying what I did to you. Let me take the baby.'

No, I'd said. No. And I'd ushered her away from Beth's room, let the shame sit on her. This is just how we communicate, in a lazy slick of unsaid resentments, and I think it's suited us all, ever since, to live in our own guilt, stay mucky with it. Imagine we actually did it, declared her dead, drew a line under it and began to live again. The shock of such a psychologically healthy action could actually kill us.

The next day, I dropped in on them at breakfast: they'd promised to take Beth and Amy to the park. I held the girls in front of me, human shield against conversation.

‘Let me think about it, okay? Just give me some time.'

Body

Ask, and ye shall receive, right?

‘Thanks for coming in, Fiona. Have a seat.'

‘That's okay. I wasn't. I wasn't too busy or anything. Thanks. Thanks.'

There's something about his manner worrying me. He sighs.

‘As you might have heard, we lost the Jackson Group contract. The development won't be going ahead. In fact, there won't be any more contracts with them: they've decided to sever all ties with RDJ.'

Norman was still in hospital, a week afterwards. He probably wouldn't be able to walk again. The enquiry had already ‘discovered' that the site was certainly not suitable for the planned developments, meaning that the Jackson Group could whisk away from the investment. The office had been a silent terrible place where no-one met anyone else's eye. It wasn't just that we missed Norman's forced, terrible jokes against the aircon whirr: we all had a sense that when blame came, it would lie with the surveying department. Probably even with Norman himself: in the last few days something almost imperceptible had shifted, and it was only Moira who could bring herself to mention his name. Without being told, the staff had somehow picked up who the pariah would be.

All the many meticulous surveys Norman had completed, to the letter, always to the letter, the teeth-grinding irritation of his checks and double-checks. Anya's conspiracy theories about Jackson Group came right into focus there, in my boss's office.

Ian is frayed at the edges, one hand gripping his desk to make sure it was still there.

‘The thing is, Fiona, that relationship meant a great deal to this company, and especially this branch. An awful lot. Our
finances have not been, ah, excellent. Not for some time. There was a lot resting on this project, and I admit it was a big risk to take. We took that risk, and it hasn't paid off. And now we're going to have to look at ways of economising, ah.'

‘Starting with my job,' I finished for him.

He sighed again.

‘I'm sorry Fiona. I really, really am. This has come from above me – this “credit crunch” thing they're all talking about–'

He did quote fingers, not trusting the idiom to carry.

‘We'll try and give you at least a few months' salary, just to get you back on your feet. It's just, your position is the most – expendable. Elaine can do a few extra hours to manage my calendar, and I think we'll be putting the databasing project on hold for a few months, at least. It's not a priority any more. And there are people who've been here longer.'

‘Is this just because of the circumstances?'

Another pause, another sigh.

‘I have always been very happy with your work, Fiona. Very happy. I'll be giving you a satisfactory reference, certainly, and let there be no doubt that the only reason we're having to let any staff go at all is because of our current financial situation. But I'd be lying if I said that your, ah, two years here have been entirely without incident. There have been complaints, about your loyalty to the company, and about your use of computers.'

‘Elaine,' I say. Clenched jaw. No point hiding what I feel, I think. No point, now. At the same time, I've realised, they have not found me out.

‘And your efficiency. Look, I know you're a clever girl. I'm well aware that you've just been doing this job because you need the money, because you need to support your daughter. I know that organising my meetings, basic data entry and making sure Norman gets his tea in the mornings – I know you've always felt like this was a temporary stop, that it's not the sort of work you thought you'd end up doing. But management doesn't see it like that. Those employees to whom this company has meant a career,
has become their life. They don't necessarily see it like that.'

‘I've always worked hard here,' I say. One of those comforting little lies you tell people and yourself, sometimes.

‘Fiona. You were seen taking cups of tea – cups of tea made with
company teabags
– to those idiots who chained themselves to the railings last month. Those idiots who had, not half an hour before, committed criminal damage on my car. Those idiots whose actions contributed to RDJ Construction not only getting some very unwelcome publicity, but also losing one of the biggest contracts in our history. You made them tea, Fiona!'

Company teabags. Oh, he suspects. He does. But he can't prove it was me. Everyone at that meeting had access to those minutes, and he doesn't know for definite that they were leaked to the protesters. I decide to keep bluffing it out, keep angry and innocent. Keep my reference and my redundancy pay.

‘Look, I know Elaine's always had a problem with me, but to be quite honest she's not –'

‘It was Norman who showed me the footage,' Ian says. ‘The police wanted the CCTV tapes of the day of the protest, and I'd asked Norman to go over them for me. Tea. Cups of tea. On a tray.'

Norman, his checks and double-checks. The petty little jobsworth soul of him. I thought of the denouncement that would probably come to him, his prone body, and he'd be unable to deny it, build a defence as two big companies hung him out to dry. I don't know if that makes it better, to be me just now.

‘It was a cold day,' I said, helpless.

XXX

‘Can we take you out for a wee drink, hen?'

Moira, her hand smoothing the back of my shirt, perhaps not even aware it was there.

‘Just me and Graeme. Maybe Elaine? Maybe big George? After work on your last day? We can pop down the road to the pub, get a wee bit of food? Just thought you'd maybe like a wee
send off.'

‘Och no, Moira. I wouldn't want to put anyone out.'

‘Ah, go on,' she says. She smiles and her features dissolve in it. ‘We'll miss you here. You've been a good girl, and it's a shame, so it is. Go on. You deserve it. We'll put a kitty together. God knows we could do with a wee bit fun, eh?'

Features gone entirely now, just the smile. It's the first time I've seen her do that faceless smile since the accident. Even the news last week that Norman had come round, had gone through the first round of surgery successfully, would be able to have visitors, hadn't shaken the fat grey silence hanging over Moira's desk.

‘I'll lay a wee bit of a guilt trip on Ian, eh. Get him to pay for it.'

There's a bit of me that's looking forward to walking right out of RDJ Construction, wiping my feet, climbing the hill and never having to come back. That's not the bit of me that nods at Moira, says, okay, and gets on the phone to beg yet another favour from my mum. A good girl. No, Moira, I'm not. But out of everyone in that office, it's important to me that she thinks that.

Red velvet seats and framed adverts for cheap wine. Everyone buys me drinks. We sit round a table where conversation needs to be jump-started every ten minutes, Elaine and big George and Graeme and Moira and me. Ian had stopped off ‘just for twenty minutes' to put £50 behind the bar and kiss my cheek drily, awkwardly, wish me luck. He stayed, though, talking work and avoiding my eye, burying himself in conversations about the local council and the motorway works, about taxes rising, and big George saying I know, I know, you're right there man.