Fishnet

by Kirstin Innes

  Ian disappears off to the toilets, then sticks his head back round again.

  ‘And all personnel visiting the site should ensure they’ve got protective headgear with them. There’s another party of this lot down there, more of them, and because the site’s not been handed over properly yet, we don’t have the power to have them removed.’

  Norman, jaw set like he’s going into battle, is pulling out all his official RDJ Construction-branded equipment, grimly folding his reflective jacket and setting his hard hat on top, just so.

  A whole afternoon. A whole afternoon with the office to myself. I’m weighing up Elaine’s dislike of having nobody to talk to over her hatred of me, and betting on a succession of crabbit phone calls but no actual state visit.

  I’m not going to let myself think about my sister, though. No. No. For distraction, I walk under the flickering light in the corner, feel the bad harsh crackle of it beam down on me. I slip my finger inside my bra and rub my nipple till it hardens, just because it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t ever do here. This movement usually happens constricted, under covers, in toilet cubicles. I pace. I notice the light still on standby on Graeme’s computer, and I move behind his desk, just intending to switch it off. The mouse is greasy to the touch, layers of pastry flakes and three-pm-biscuit in the gaps between the buttons. I move it gently and there’s that half-second of high fuzz before the screen lights up again.

  Internet Explorer. Hotmail. Personal use of online privileges on company time? Bad boy, I tell him, in my head. Bad, bad boy. And he hadn’t even thought to hide it.

  Two unread, presumably from his sister as they shared the same last name.

  Sender Subject

  Carly Bain FW:SAVE THE SANCTUARY BASE

  Carly Bain graeme you are a wanker.

  Eight notifications from three different social networking sites, all of them read, even the one that came in an hour ago. Naughty. I click to the next page, and there it is, right at the top.

  Sender Subject

  Dominant

  Your picture of the day!

  Femmes

  Subscribermail

  He’d read it. Which meant it probably wasn’t spam. Click.

  A thin woman in a black leather jumpsuit which cut away just under her breasts was standing over a supine, guilty-looking man. One long elegant leg was extended over his face, the spiked point of a heel in his mouth.

  Graeme. Vague, timid Graeme.

  My phone rings, on my desk on the other side of the room, and I almost knock Graeme’s chair over trying to catch it in time.

  Elaine, tinny, disapproving.

  ‘Fiona. Ian’s just been on the phone. He said you’re supposed to have called the police about those, eh, people downstairs, and as far as I can see they’re still there.’

  ‘I was just about to do that. Ian did actually give me a long list of items to be taken care of this afternoon and he has only been out of the office twenty–’

  ‘Well, I’m fairly sure this is his top priority.’

  ‘I’m Ian’s assistant, Elaine. It’s my workload to manage. Calling the police is the next item on my list as it happens.’

  ‘Well, it had better be done. If they’re still there in fifteen I’m making the call myself.’

  ‘All right, Elaine. I’m on it right now.’

  I don’t think I convinced either of us with that performance. Norman has the numbers for all local amenities, including the police station, taped to his desk, because of course he does.

  Getting the tray with six mugs downstairs and out the heavy fire door is tricky, but I manage. They see me coming through the glass, and a couple of them tense up. I indicate that they’ve all got to keep their distance before I fob open the security door, and they do. The tray and I go out quickly, let it slam behind.

  ‘Thought you might like some tea.’

  This isn’t what I imagined prostitutes to look like, I’m thinking. These faces. Their jeans. But until last weekend, I hadn’t really thought about them much at all.

  It’s the fierce, bleached, pierced girl who speaks. She’s got an accent – Scandinavian? Polish. It’ll be Polish.

  ‘You haven’t poisoned it?’ She’s smiling, though, which is more than can be said for a couple of them.

  ‘I haven’t poisoned it. I have had to call the police, though. Mr Henderson, our chief surveyor, who was the, ehm, the. You hit him with the eggs. So. I’ve just come down to give you fair warning, really. You’ve got about ten minutes.’

  ‘We appreciate it,’ says the girl.

  There’s something stark and intense and beautiful about her face.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re staying put, though,’ says one of the other women, the one I’ll find out is Suzanne the former ‘masseuse’. She’s nice about it. Motherly.

  ‘Look, everyone’s gone. There’s nobody on our floor but me, the maintenance team and the other PA. Everyone else left by the back entrance for a site visit about half an hour ago, and they’ll be gone all day. And Elaine can’t even hear you from where she’s sitting, so it’s just me, really. You could make a run for it? You could make a run for it and go down to the main site? To the, eh, Sanctuary? Lots of action there.’

  ‘We appreciate what you’re doing,’ says the blonde girl again. ‘We’re going to stay where we are, though. Thank you. And maybe you might want to go back upstairs? So you are not caught fraternising with us?’

  Her voice slow over the longer word, sounding out each syllable. Frat. Ter. Nis. Ing. Ting. Ting. Ting.

  ‘So sorry to have interrupted your workday,’ says the older woman. ‘Really. And thanks for the tea.’

  I convince myself I can feel the heat of the pierced girl’s eyes on the small of my back through the glass, till I turn up the corridor. I take a detour past the Ladies, push myself up against the cubicle wall and slide a hand inside my knickers again, concocting flash fantasies that she’s in there with me, that it’s her hand and it’s forceful, that she’s baring her breasts through black leather. I think about her nipple between my teeth. I think about the two of us masturbating each other with a foot each on Graeme, who’s lying there, hard. I come. I come. I scrub with Moira’s rose scented soap.

  By the time the police get there, of course, they’ve all handcuffed themselves to the drainpipes and have to be cut away and formally arrested. Elaine officiates, buzzing around the policemen while I watch through the blinds. She calls my phone as soon as they’ve gone and I let it ring out, realising too late I’ve left the mugs down there, and realising I don’t really care. After a few seconds the voicemail button begins flashing angrily. I move a notepad over the top of it and go back to my computer, with no Norman looking over my screen, his wet accusing eyes. Finally letting it all back in. Personal use of internet privileges on company time indeed.

  In the years after Rona left, I padded out every dull temping job typing variations of her name into search engines. Flickr-tagged pictures. Blogs. Myspace pages. More recently, reading down the friends lists of everyone I could remember she knew at school who was on Facebook, going back to her year group’s Friends Reunited page for fresh names and starting all over again. Nothing nothing nothing. If you want to disappear these days, disappear completely, then the first thing you need to shake off is your name. Why be Rona Leonard when you could be xxcutiexx, or Asriel1983, or Glitzfrau, or Kittylover, or MsStiletto?

  It’s supposed to be easy now. It frightens people, how easy it is. You can find the girl whose house you played at when you visited your gran, that guy you sort of fancied from the bar you worked in for five months during your second year of university, a man you met through friends one night, three years back. You can bind all these people to you for as long as the internet lasts, on a page that exists nowhere tangible, look at who their friends are, watch their lives. And this small, small country we live in. Graeme-at-my-work used to go out with Heather-from-myschool’s cousin. Beth’s best friend’s mum was a former pupil of
my Dad’s. I went to university with a guy whose brother was my gran’s home help. Blips on a radar, spreading out across the country, across the world. I’m here. I’m here. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, and yet my sister has found a way of removing herself completely from this matrix of nosiness, has wiped her fingerprints off the world.

  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.