Fishnet (5 page)

Computers are wise, though. Computers learn things about you and use that information, and after a few days in each office, each new machine started to offer me solutions, clusters of one-line-one-link adverts sprouting around my search, her name filled in by automemory after I'd put in Ro-. Clean, bold typeface.

Trying to trace family members?
Missing persons found!
Track your genealogy!
Families reunited
Looking for someone?

I followed every link. I paid for trial membership on every single scamming site. There was one that looked properly genuine, though.
Findastranger.com
. A well-designed webpage laden with testimonials that had email addresses attached. I decided to go for the deluxe package.

‘I've found a way to trace Rona,' I told Mum. ‘I'll need your credit card. It's just a payment of about £200 a year, in dollars.'

She looked at me.

‘Don't you want to find her?' I said.

Mum feels the most guilt, about all of this. She's sat up nights
weeping into a bottle of wine and blaming herself for having left us. She's the easiest touch.

I had to create a profile for her. Not just name, age, sex, last known location, but interests and favourite movies, favourite songs, subjects taken at school, names of childhood friends, childhood pets. Favourite actors. Favourite curse words. Favourite musicians. Teenage crushes on celebrities.

They would use this, they told me, when the confirmation email came through, to source her. They had technology, they told me, that would track through hundreds of message board users and bloggers, people commenting on other people's web pages, look for people who declared interests in these things, who quoted from these films, who adopted usernames and passwords with similar configurations of letters.

I scanned in every photograph I had of her, from childhood up: dressed as a tiger on the bench in our old front garden, scowling at the camera on a beach somewhere. I zoomed in on school pictures where all the girls in the front row had their hands crossed nicely, one on top of the other. A couple from her high school yearbook: cheeks sucked in, arms round boys in nightclubs, pouting. I eased my mouse around the wild fuzz of hair sticking out from a paper hat on the last Christmas before she left, when she drank about three quarters of a bottle of Dad's crap wine even though she must have been – god, it still makes me angry sometimes. I uploaded them in the box on the secure link. Facial recognition software, the confirmation email said. If there are pictures on any of our online sources featuring subjects with similar features, we will send them to you for review. If you have samples of your loved one's writing style, or feel that you are able to approximate their speech patterns, please use the form provided to attach examples in Word document format.

At first I was just putting in stories, things I remembered that I thought were significant, but then I started actually trying to write
her
. That last year, I thought, when she was living away from home. Try that, try reconstructing that, out of the little clues
she'd given, accidentally: four bar jobs, three changes of address, the last after she fought with Christina, the boyfriends she mentioned. Jez? Cammy? The crappy presents she bought that Christmas, the long, long interviews we'd done with Christina and her last boss, both of them sleekit at the eye, worried we might be trying to blame them, might be suspecting them.

She haunted me. The way she'd started saying ‘god' and ‘like' as though they were punctuation. The way I could hear her laugh chiming in my own, tainting the things that made me happy. My palms had permanent nail-marks from clenching, because I was coursing with anger at her, all the time. In my dreams, she lost her face; I couldn't see it. Only the idea of her, height and hair, present again in the corner of my eye, just out of reach.

Rona on a computer somewhere. Working, doing something, typing her own name in, again and again until her own adverts bloomed. Want to be found?

We didn't hear anything from Findastranger. Mum had to cancel the card, and I began to wonder whether I'd given them enough to create a fake her, out there, for money. And slowly, when my searches and searches threw up nothing new, I managed to numb that part of me off, and let her drift away.

This was where my head was at when I got Heather's email. We've got the hen weekend booked! it said, and gave the name of the village my sister had lived in, six years earlier.

Village

I was pretty sure that was her door, two down from the Ochil Bar. It took me a couple of seconds to get the nerve up to press the bell. A single note, and the sound of footsteps.

People don't just turn up unannounced on doorsteps anymore. Visits are arranged on Facebook, confirmed by text message; you pick and choose who you open your door to. That's why the young man in the socks and boxers holding a coffee mug with cats on it looks confused.

‘Hello?'

She's moved, of course she's moved, everything does.

‘Hi. Sorry - I might have the wrong address. I was looking for someone who lived here a long time ago. Christina?'

His face breaks, relaxes.

‘Aw, she's up at the slopes just now.'

‘She still lives here, then? Are you her boyfriend?'

The smile gets bigger, a whole headful of happiness.

‘Husband. As of two months. I'm Craig. Do you want me to let her know you called, eh…?'

‘Fiona. I'm an old friend – well, we were at school together. Sort of. There was actually something I wanted to ask her, and I'm leaving the town tomorrow. Do you know what time she finishes?'

‘Not till six today, and then, well. We have plans this evening.' He's just smiling to himself, now. ‘Actually, hang on. We've got the schedule pinned up–'

He disappears back down the hall again, and I can see that Christina has decorated the place since last time I was here. I'm thinking, Christina is the same age as Rona, and that age is still ridiculously young to have a husband. Craig returns, head bent over a sheet with official-looking crests and a terrifyingly organised grid.

‘She's doing early learners today - the eight-to-tens, then under fives after that, but they don't start till twelve. You'll
probably be able to catch her on a shift break if you hurry.'

‘Right. Where's that, exactly?'

He wrote it down for me, the ski slope, and pointed across the street to the bus stop, described meticulously where I needed to get off. He was nice. A nice boy. He and Christina were probably very happy together.

She'd clocked me right off, when I'd scrambled off the chairlift, stared and then nodded curtly in my direction. I had been thinking, wow, her memory must be good, we only met a few times, but of course, her husband would have texted her, warning her of the unannounced intruder. I also remembered that, from a distance, I look quite a lot like Rona. From a distance. She flashed a hand up: ten minutes, pointed all the way back down the hill at the cafeteria and mimed drinking a cup, then turned a far less irritated face back to the padded children strapped to boards she was helping down the bristle slope.

I stood there for a while, watching the faces of those people on the brink, about to take the plunge. Christina's kids were certain, set, determined, under their too many layers. It was the older ones who showed fear, those few flashy adults who were on this slope this morning, designer sportswear more suited for a resort in the Alps than a wee Scottish mountain town. Their eyes going extra white against their fake tans just for that point-nothing of a second before they went over, stuck in that tiny hesitation between still and slope, a moment where they didn't definitely trust what they knew would happen.

Beats me why anyone would want to do this at all, this ungainly freefall, all your faith in two planks of wood that could snap your legs apart. For the rush? Surely it can't be that good.

I called Samira from the cafeteria.

‘Hey hon. Listen, something's come up and I'm not going to make the bike ride.'

‘Yeah, we'd figured that one out, actually. Where are you?'

‘I'm just – look, I'll tell you later.'

‘Ok. Can you get back to the cottage for four, though? Kelly and Andrea have paid specially for a surprise for Heather. Pole dancing. They've paid for
all
of us. '

She hung up.

Christina shook her hair out from the imprint of her hat, making huffy theatre of throwing it and her gloves down on the table, not sitting down at once, going straight to the queue for her cup of tea. Staring at me.

‘So. Long time.'

‘I know. I'm so sorry to barge in on you at work, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I'm just- I came up here on a hen weekend, and it's brought a lot of memories back, and I just wanted to check a couple of things with you, like–'

‘Right. So I take it she hasn't turned up, then?'

It took me by surprise, that. That some people wouldn't know. Of course she hasn't turned up.

‘No. No, she hasn't. Not a word in six years.'

‘Ah.'

‘Anyway. Sorry – you're married, aren't you. Congratulations! He seems very, ehm. Nice.'

‘He is. He's moral.'

I remember thinking, that's a strange thing to say about your husband, these days anyway.

‘I thought you might have moved. I'm amazed you're still in that flat. Stroke of luck for me, eh?'

That came out as one of those jokes that isn't a joke, all upward inflection and slapped on jollity. Christina did not take it as a joke.

‘Why would I move from the flat? It's my flat. We'll be paying off the wedding for a while yet, and then we're going to need to start saving for children. It's home. Listen, I've not got long, and you didn't come all the way to the top of a ski slope just to find out how I've been doing.'

‘Right. Sorry. Ehm. This is probably just paranoia on my part. Actually, of course it is. Sorry. But being back up here has
been strange. I just thought - and I don't want this to sound like an accusation – I just – thinking it over, was there, maybe, something you didn't tell us? At the time? Just maybe to save our feelings?'

She blew air out of her nostrils, stared straight at me. There was no trace of a thought process on her face; the thing she was about to tell me had been decided as soon as she saw me clambering off that chairlift. Maybe even sooner, when her husband had texted.

‘Okay,' she said. ‘I didn't want to say this in front of your Mum and Dad. I don't want to say this to you, actually, but I will cause you're here.'

A couple of seconds, then it came out in a harsh whisper.

‘Your sister was. Was, eh. She was turning tricks from my flat. That's why I threw her out.'

‘Turning –?'

‘Having sex with men. For money. You know.'

There was breath between us, hot breath. Slightly sour. She spoke the rest very quickly, looking into her tea.

‘I thought at first she was just having a lot of men back and I didn't like it but I didn't think it was my place to, ah, judge. Ha. Although I couldn't work out how she was managing to pay the rent after she got fired from the pub. But anyways, I didn't twig until I was sent home sick from work one day and there was a. A man in the sitting room. With his thing.'

Christina's tiny sitting room, its functional, cheap uplighters. How ordinary and dull a room it was, how unsexy.

I could still hear her talking, though.

‘Anyways, it turned out she was advertising. She'd been taking out adverts! It wasn't just something she'd done for tips with a couple of guys she'd met in the bar or anything, not that that would have been excusable – I don't know, maybes that's how it started – but by the time I caught her she was advertising in the local paper and on the internet! On web forums! High demand, cause she was the only one, eh,
servicing
the tourists,
but only working while I was out the house! It was my house, Fiona. My. House. I had to bleach everything. I got cleaners in, professional cleaners, and I moved in with a friend until it was done. Everything.'

‘Ah –'

You're in shock, I thought. This is shock. I actually put it in those terms to myself. While I was doing that, I asked the only question I could cope with.

‘Why didn't you tell this to the police, Christina? It could have helped us find her. They could've tracked her online. We could have got them to look at arrest records or something.'

‘Look, I understand that you want to find your sister, and that that's your main concern.' Her voice had been very tightly controlled, but suddenly she let it go, that tiny whisper pissing through the room.

‘She was using my flat as an- an
effing hoorhouse
. I thought they'd think it was me, too, that I was her – pimp. I mean, I own that flat. I own that flat and I took her in when she bloody rocked up on my doorstep in tears, and she- She put my entire livelihood in danger, that dirty –
hooker
! After we'd been friends for years- oh, god, sorry. I didn't mean it like that. Please don't – look. I'm sorry for you, for your family, Fiona. But I just couldn't. Still can't. Sorry. I'm really sorry.'

City

These were not the women I was looking for. These bosoms, matronly and welcoming, these round backsides, puckered flesh spilling out and around suspender belts. These knowing winks from eyes beginning to wrinkle at the corners, these bodies that weren't slim, or that young, or toned. These were vocal women, mainlining opinions and their own businesses through their blogs, on Twitter, organising themselves in unions, advising each other, protesting their rights.

They didn't tally with the story I had in my head. I went further, searched deeper into recommendations. I wanted younger women, women my sister's age or less, women looking frightened, coerced, or just gone. Women who were being wronged by the system. Girls. I wanted girls, who men were using, girls who were doing this out of desperate necessity.