Fishnet (25 page)

You

Camilla passes me a napkin as I choke on nothing.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘My goddaughter. Bethan Camilla Leonard. I mean, we didn't ever bother with a christening, but you can see the intention's there. Left in your custody, I believe. How is she? Must be…just turned seven. Oh. I see.'

She smiles, and it's sweet, almost caring. Of all the things I don't understand, in that second the sweetness seems most important.

‘First off, darling; let's not assume that Mr Ally McKay is the greatest authority on either my life, or your sister's. Secondly, can we
not
come over all Spanish Inquisition about this, yeah? Won't be any fun for either of us.'

I take a huge gulp of wine.

‘And thirdly, shall we order a bottle? Might help?'

‘You need to explain things to me. Now. You saw my sister
after
she left Beth with me?'

‘That does appear to be what I'm saying, yeah.'

It takes a huge effort not to claw at her face, jump over the table and snap her skinny bones. Fists around the metal poles of my chair, the new fingernails gouging skin. She does that laugh again.

‘I'm sorry, lovely. Really. This isn't fair of me at all, and you must be feeling the shock.'

‘Are you still in touch with her? Is she still alive?'

‘Ah, you see, your information is partially correct. We did have a bit of a falling out in the end. Five years ago. Haven't heard from her since. Sorry – that rather facks with the whole ‘legally dead' thing, doesn't it? May we have a bottle of this, please? Thank you so much.'

Again, she doesn't break breath, turning her head and entire manner to the waiter, then shifting back to me again.

‘Your sister left Edinburgh because everything, and I very
much include your Mr Ally McKay in that, had got a bit too heavy for her. She needed a change of scene, one where she wasn't being facking stalked by a chippy little Glaswegian.'

‘Ally is from Edinburgh.'

‘Really? Gosh, doesn't sound like it. Anyway, he was, like, obsessed with her. Weirdly. Always turning up at her work, and when she left the job, he started coming round to her flat. I moved her in with me, but even then, he'd always be there at the clubs, you know, mooning about. Always trying to take her to the side for a
private chat
, bit playground, I thought? He seemed to think she was some helpless little innocent being corrupted by the big bad yadda yadda – I mean, it was her own fault, partly. She'd encouraged him at first, you know? And she would keep on falling into bed with him. I rather think she did it to annoy me, at first, but he did get all these ridiculous ideas that it was true love. Like they do. Anyway, it had gone beyond boring into, like, stabby psycho territory. He was just always, always there. So, we came up with a plan where she'd run off for a bit – hide out with the old school chum, you know, suss out a new market for us. Then I was going to go and rescue her, and we'd go travelling for a while. Of course, we hadn't planned for her to get preggers, little idiot. And she didn't even bloody notice it until she was five months gone! I mean, I thought she was putting on a bit of weight, but I assumed it was, you know, country air or whatevs.'

She talks so, so fast it's almost too much for me. I'm grabbing at syllables, trying to worry meaning out of them, not quite able to take it all in.

‘So, you were visiting her when she was up north? Christina was fairly sure she hadn't had any other friends.'

‘Christina's the drabby school chum, yeah? Oh, fack her, darling. By all accounts – well, by your sister's – she had not a clue. Besides, I wasn't about to spend the night at the Mansion du Drab when there was a perfectly okay hotel nearby. Your sister had a particular genius for finding us work – you mentioned you
knew what we were up to, lovely, yeah? Well, that was mostly her. Oh look, you're empty again. Anyway, one thing to, ah, help out the boys in the band, as I'm sure your Mr McKay told you; quite another to move to a new place and suss out a market, in less than a month. It would never have occurred to me to advertise in the local rag, darling, and then once she'd built up a client base, well, some of them were interested in seeing me as well, you know. She was phenom at it, honestly. Yes, I'm finished, but I think my friend might like a little longer.'

And I realise there's a fork in my hand and two small incursions in my lasagne, that we're three quarters of a bottle of wine down, and that the plate of salad Camilla has been shuffling is being removed practically untouched, and she's saying ‘Need a break, lovely? I must just pop to the loo, anyway,' and my head is very full of the wine and her chatter.

That's what it is, chatter. She's recounting these things as though they're weightless. As though she's catching me up on the latest gossip, as though her words aren't hitting like rocks. There's some sort of disconnect, somewhere in the middle of this table, a barrier between the method of delivery and the way it's being received.

She leaves me for what seems like a very long time. I finish the wine and wave away the plate the next time the waiter comes, filleting dizzily through her story. For all the talking she's done, very little of it is actually new – beyond the crucial revelation that Rona was still alive five years ago, she has filled the air with empty calories. As the shock passes and the lunchtime bustle begins to empty out, it occurs that she may have run out on me. I'm steeling myself to deal with that when there's a light touch on my back, a thumb passed softly over my shoulder blade.

‘Hello darling. Sorry about that. Now, where were we?'

Her face is fresh with new makeup and she's sniffing ostentatiously, almost as though she wants me to ask.

‘Have you been taking drugs?'

She pulls a face.

‘Oh no, not
drugs
! Honestly, lovely, how do you expect me to get through this otherwise? Ta–Rona's sister comes to town and suddenly I have to deal with an awful lot of heavy stuff I've been very merrily burying away for years. I'm not off my face or anything. Just keeping it together. Sorry darling. I must seem utterly callous to you, mm? I promise, I'm just dealing. Just like you, in a way.'

Her voice has got louder, and our waiter, embarrassed, brings the bill unasked.

‘Oops. I expect that's a hint then,' she's saying, provoking a harder blush as I hand him my card. ‘Nice little cocktail bar two doors down, lovely. Shall we? Why don't you tell me about the kid just now, mm?'

Her arm tucked into mine, steering me.

Me

FROM: scandi_sonja@hot…

Wednesday June 30th, 20:40

Dear Fiona,

I have wanted to write to you for a while now, or get in touch with you in some way. Firstly, and mainly, because I wanted to say sorry for the way I behaved to you. While I am sure that you understand that I was under a lot of pressure on that day, it was not in any way fair of me to place the blame for what happened to me on you. If I am late in getting this apology to you, it is only because after my outing to the newspapers I have had to hide for a while, and I was not at first sure my email was not being monitored. I am now almost entirely sure that I know the person who has done this to me, and I am very ashamed that I have accused you.

I also wanted to wait until I had something I could give you, in return, to say thank you for the very valuable information you were able to give us. As I am sure you know now, we lost that fight. However, as Suzanne made me realise, you took a very great risk in helping us. It is easy to be cavalier about someone else's life, I think, if you are not really living it.

I was very sad to hear that you had lost your job: I had wanted to give you this apology in person, and I visited your office (please do not worry – I was dressed like a very polite politics student and they did not recognise me!). A kind older woman said that you had left three weeks ago, and she was perhaps a
little worried about you as you had not been in touch with your friends there. I can only hope this was not because of what you did for us, and if it was, well, I am even more apologetic for this. Because I suspected that this might be the case, I have worked very hard to get this for you, in the hope you may feel better for your involvement with us.

I have been asking about your sister's friend Camilla. I have asked every one of my contacts who have been based in Edinburgh, and I have told them it is a matter of urgency: we do not usually break our silences on the other girls like this. The first possibility, I have attached the contact details of – she is an English girl living there and I have her name from a mutual client. She may be too young though, to have been your sister's friend – I do not know if she was working seven years ago. Clients never really know our ages, they only guess. Below this one, you see an email from a woman who is working for a very exclusive agency in Edinburgh. I hope you do not mind that I have removed her email address and name from the message – this was her request. She is a friend of a friend and I do not know her directly. Anyway, she was booked recently for a session with a fellow escort who I think fits your bill too. It is her personal number we have managed to get for you, and the woman has specifically asked that you do not say, at all, how you got hold of it.

This is so far all I have found. However, I have sent out many little contacts to let people know I am looking, and should there be anything else for you I will of course let you know.

I hope that, despite your recent trouble, your life will be a happy one.

My apologies again.

Your friend,

Anya.

And all those small sparks in me seemed to be firing up again. The nearness of her, the fact that she had sought me out, her tone. Your friend. Your friend. The possibility of having her in my life, of making Anya my friend, learning the sex and confidence of her.

Not only am I a coward, though, I don't know that I could ever be anything else around her. I felt supplicant and dusty even just in electronic proximity. And no matter how bad she felt about having accused me now, I would always keep coming back to that look on her face, in the café, something closing down as she realised some of the truth of my feeling for her. There's no way out of something like that: a relationship can't be reset on an equal footing. The boredom in her eyes, disgust, even. Seeing it, realising it for what it was, I'd pitched into that white hot anger, had thrown things and screamed, had given her name to the first journalist who'd phoned the office. Anya Sobtka, I'd said. Look it up. Try cross-referencing Swedish Sonja. I'd hung up then, hating myself. But I'd done it. I'd earned that disgust, and I certainly hadn't earned the right to her friendship, her apology, or these women's names and numbers.

I'd use them, though.

You

Camilla knows what she's doing, of course, throwing out enough clues to take us on to the next round, and then the next. At some point I'm going to have to stop buying: her choice of both cocktails and bar are well out of my unemployed price range. I don't want to tell her that, though. I don't want to let anything else go. And in spite of the concentration it takes to play her game, in spite of subject matter and the fact I'm clearly being taken for a fool, I want to stay around her, just for a little longer.

Some of the things Camilla tells me:
‘So-o, by the time we realised she was up the spout, it was too bloody late. It was a client who asked about it, actually. We laughed it off, but I made her sit and actually pee on the facking stick in front of me later, and sure enough, bing. Idiot. She bleated something about her periods never having been that regular or something, but I think she'd known all along, been, like, in denial, yeah? I think it's why she left Edinburgh. Anyway, it put a stopper on our plans to go travelling. And she was just, you know, utterly panicky at first. All the docs telling her it was too late for an abo. Got to say, I was pretty worried about what she might try and do, so after the dull old school chum chucked her out I moved up to the bloody sticks for a while, rented us a cottage, and we saw out the rest of the preg like a splendid couple of bucolic facking dykes!'
‘Oh yeah, pretty sure the daddy was someone from Edinburgh. Honestly, sweets, it's better for the kid's sake that it is: some of the darts-playing chubbos we dealt with up north… There's even a slim chance it could be your Mr McKay, you know. Still got his number? Make the bastard stand you seven years of child support! Ha. Joking. You'd never get rid of him, even with a negative test, and I did say only a slim chance. Course, he probably would have tried to marry her anyway, yeah? The wanker.'

‘Oh, it was lovely, in our little cottage? Just taking time out. Of course, the natives were pretty shitty to me whenever I went on a grocery run and they caught the accent – and neither of us could bloody drive, so it was always taxis in and out of town, and the one taxi driver had picked up on our particular means of income a couple of months earlier. Seriously, awkward, darling. Mostly, we stayed put. She's good company, your sister. Was. Ha. That's not a clue, honestly. I mean it: haven't seen her for five years. Another one? Don't you love it here?'

 

‘Well, I'd said adoption, and honestly, I was convinced she was going to go through with it, you know. I mean, we were getting it organised and everything. But then the bloody thing – sorry, the kid. You know I didn't mean that, lovely? – was, like, three weeks prem. And that rather facked everything – by the time we'd got her out of the hospo, Ta–your sister had only gone and got bloody attached to her. And I was like, seriously darling, we were going travelling. This has been planned. And you are nineteen. And she was like, look, can we just give this a chance, just try it? And I said, okay, but bad for business, for a start. Anyway, we didn't quite last a fortnight. Babe was a bit of a whinger, mm? And your sister wasn't really coping, not with the crying thing, and I said, listen darling, what are we going to do? We are too young for this, and she was seriously getting worse, you know, the full post-natal, and I could see it wasn't doing the little darling any good, being stuck with two stressed-out fackers who couldn't look after her properly, and that's when we thought of you.'