Fishnet

by Kirstin Innes

  Beth seemed to pick up that I wanted her out of the way, too; she whinged and put on baby voices when I tried to rush her through her bath.

  ‘Me want to stay in, Mama!’

  She began to punch the water and a torrent slopped up and hit me in the face, lukewarm, stinging my eyes and giving me the excuse I needed.

  ‘Bethan Camilla Leonard. If you don’t get out of this bath and go to bed right now, I will skelp you till you’re raw, so I will, you little madam. And stop speaking in that stupid voice. You’re a big girl now. Act like it.’

  She went tiny and silent then, shrunk away from my hands as I tried to wrap the towel round her. But she went to bed.

  In the living room I pushed cushions from the sofa into the crack from the door, and took the corner furthest away from her room. I thought she was probably awake still, lying there, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

  It always rang seven times before the voicemail clicked in, her phone. I had the little recorder held right there at the mouthpiece, as she garbled her message.

  ‘Hello, my name is Graeme Bain,’ said Graeme’s voice, flustered under this morning’s tits and perfume. ‘I’d like to make an appointment with you at half past eleven next Friday, for an hour. Thank you.’

  He has a nice voice, Graeme. Polite. Middle-class middle-management. Well-trained by his mammy. You’d never guess he liked it kinky.

  I held the phone close to me for the rest of the night, like I was waiting for a message from a new lover. At one point, Beth coughed and I went through to check on her. There were tear stains dried on her face, but they were old ones. She looked sleepily at me through one eye.

  ‘I’m sorry Mummy,’ she said.

  I sat on the bed and her warm legs curled around my haunches.

  ‘Here, here sweetheart.’ I leaned in and stroked her hair. ‘Mummy’s sorry too. She shouldn’t have shouted at you like that. Bad Mummy, okay? We’ll get ice cream on Saturday to make it up to you. Would you like that, darling?’

  She burrowed her face into the pillow a little more, affected apparently neither one way or the other by ice cream, which is a new state of affairs.

  ‘Mummy, who was the man?’

  ‘What man, baby?’

  ‘The man who was talking in the room.’

  ‘Oh. I don’t think any man was talking. Did you maybe have a dream about a man? There are no men here, baby. Just Beth and Mummy.’

  I moved my thumb back and forth above her hairline, like my mum used to do for us when we were kids. It gets her every time, eyelids battling heroically as her face settles back into sleep – and my phone beeped. She stirred back up.

  ‘Come on, lovey. Go to sleep now.’

  I moved myself as gently as possible up from the bed, but it still disturbed her back up, eyes open. I whispered one more sleep at the door, but three quarters of my body was already in the living room.

  XXX

  An appointment. An address. I’ve walked to it three times over the weekend just to be sure, but there it is, every time, number 28, the numbers on the buzzer going up to the fourth floor. A five minute walk from Beth’s school and less than ten from my flat.

  Good view. You could probably see Beth’s school playground from up there.

  It couldn’t, couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Has she been here, right here all this time? Moving around the same routes to the supermarket, the bank machine and the train station, feeling her muscles relax in the way that meant almost home when she saw the rail bridge and the church? Watching me take Beth to school every day, leave her there in the playground?

  I know the people who live in this neighbourhood. Sure, there’s probably thousands of them in the tenements, but you learn to recognise familiar shapes as you live here. I know the woman who walks her dandruffy spaniel to the bottom of the road and back, three times a day with her feet encased in blue plastic bags; I know the skinny businessman whose suit is always in the checkout queue just before mine; the polite boy at the deli, the broken veins in the old men who smoke outside the Victoria Arms, the melancholy woman who runs the corner shop and each angry commuter on the 8.15 to Airdrie. I would have recognised her, on a street somewhere; I would have seen her back, her walk, and chased after her. You can’t spend six years looking out for just one person only to have them living under your nose the whole time. You just can’t.

  But it makes sense. The flat looking over Beth’s school. It made sense that she would expect me to fuck up, would be checking in, poised to intervene. God, what if she’d been planning to take Beth from the school playground one day? I spoke to the worried-looking splinter of a woman who ran the after school project.

  ‘I’d like you to be very, very careful not to let Beth home with anyone claiming to be a relative,’ I said. ‘Nobody but me or her grandparents will pick her up from school from now on.’

  ‘Mrs Leonard,’ she said, insulted. ‘We never let the children go home with anyone other than their designated carers.’

  ‘Not even if they are visibly a relative,’ I said. ‘Not even anyone who looks like me. Especially not.’

  I read and read and reread those forum reports, what her clients have to say about her. Every nuance. They go back to 2007, so she’s only been here for a year, and there was no trace before that. I copied them into a Word document and emailed them to my work address so I could go over them in the office when Norman was out at the site, or in the toilet, or talking to Moira, while Graeme slunk around me, avoiding my company but burning holes in my back as avidly as though we had actually had sex in that cupboard, rather than just recorded a ten second message.

  That’s how I fill my days until Friday.

  I drop Beth off and stare up at what I think must be her window. There was someone up there, I was sure of it, a shadow. I bent in to kiss my daughter, hold her closer and harder than I usually do.

  ‘Ow, Mummy! Stop it!’

  My head is throbbing after the run back up the hill home, so I take a bath, and then, without knowing why, shave my legs and the stubble under my arms. A razor cut under my knee I hadn’t seen in the water begins bleeding as soon as I step out, great scarlet streams of it loose on my wet skin and dripping onto the tiles, and I swear at myself, realise my hands are shaking.

  An hour and a half later, I’m calmer. I’d spent a lot of time smoothing down my hair – it’s complicated, doing that, and I’d had to concentrate – and applying all the products in my little-used makeup bag, one after another.

  I put on my most expensive clothes; the red cashmere sweater, the pencil skirt, the leather boots. I put in the little gold earrings Gran had left me. I want her to see them.

  And I leave my flat. I walk down the stairs like I always do, and steady myself on the rail at the top of the hill. The noise of my heels clipping the macadam as I turn left, like I always do, for the station and the cash machine, where I withdraw £200, feel it in my hand for a while.

  Number 28 is a pale, new-build row meant to blend in with the Edwardian tenements, although its poky, plastic-bound windows will always give it away even after the too-clean sandstone succumbs to the grime of the main road, of life. Its squares and angles are too neat; its fronts too flat. I couldn’t live somewhere like that, somewhere with no history, although I imagine it would suit Rona just fine.

  The buzzer at 2/3 doesn’t have a name on, not like the others. I fumble in my handbag with one hand while pressing the button with the other.

  A pause.

  A click.

  A crackle.

  A scuffled, deep ‘Hello,’ and I hold my new voice recorder up to the intercom.

  ‘Hello, this is Graeme Bain,’ Graeme says.

  ‘Mon up,’ says the voice.

  She could be putting that accent on, too.

  The stair smells of new carpet, of showrooms and polythene, of summer holidays chasing each other round floor-mounted tiling samples while Mum hissed Dad’s name and he flushed. The door is cheap woo
d, varnished up. Gold bell. Brass knocker. There’s a joke in there, somewhere, surely.

  I ring.

  Footsteps, coming towards it.

  As it opens, I realise I haven’t thought for a second what I’m going to say.

  Back

  At first, the TV was just there to distract us from the billion questions and worries flickering back and forth in our heads. He had to go back to work first, then her, and we were no nearer to working out what was happening. I began to take up residence in this room when they weren’t here, and I was haunted.

  The Health Visitor said the baby was picking up on my anxiety, on theirs, that’s why she wouldn’t settle. That’s why she cried. I could be changing her, or playing with her, or out in the park with her held safe in front in the pram and she’d sense Rona coming into focus and me tensing up, and it would scare her.

  I made a promise to my baby, one day, to stop her crying. I promised her that when she was around I wouldn’t allow myself to be haunted. So we improvised, the two of us, just like we always do, with the gleam of Mum’s old television. I didn’t have one of my own then, so at the first sign of trouble we’d lock the door and move smoothly down the concrete stairs to the living room, switch on and curl up, the small softness of her on me. She came to know it so well that just the noise of our door shutting behind us and the different smell of the stair would calm her.

  We looked out together, from this blank room, into the lightweight opinions and overwrought acting of daytime telly, and soon she was annotating my sarcastic commentary with her own babble, and I’d talk right back, and we were in perpetual nothingy conversation all day, Miss Bethan Leonard, me, the telly. The Health Visitor said I should be proud of the progress she’d made, how advanced her speech was, and I swelled with it. Keeping myself limited to one space and concentrating everything into her was working out well for both of us.

  They’d come home, first Dad, then Mum, and not ask why I was always there. He’d sit down beside us for an hour and when Beth grew able to she’d sometimes curl into him and he’d feel the same peace of her, I could tell. The telly stayed on, always, there for us, offering respite from having to think or talk to each other. The Leonards are a television family, now. We have our regular viewing schedule, agreed upon silently. In the first year, when a soap opera plotline would veer too closely to our lives – teenage runaways, missing girls, single mothers, violent divorce, abandoned children – one of us would cough, shift, press the remote. At some point we stopped doing that. We let them smart out, those stories, now. Just pressing the old bruises to check they still hurt.

  Eight o’clock is bedtime now. Probably it should be earlier, but the Health Visitor hasn’t been for years, and it seems to fit us all about right. At 7.45, in the last advert break, I tell her to pick up her toys and she does, usually without too much complaint, scoops them into a box behind the sofa. Most of her toys have found their way down here. Then there are kisses, for Granny, for Grandpa, and we climb the stairs, me and my girl. In the bad years I would only let Rona back in after Bethan was in bed, after I’d checked the sweet rhythms of her breathing twice, almost breaking with a love that worked as anaesthetic.

  Mum came home early one day, before Dad was there, and she switched the telly off, and the pudgy, napping toddler on my lap shifted and moaned in her sleep. She spoke smoothly and gently and didn’t raise her voice, and neither did I. It was time, she said.

  ‘I never wanted this for you, love, but you’re going to have to look for something. You know your dad and I don’t make enough to support all four of us and both flats. Not indefinitely. And Bethan needs to go to nursery and meet other children. She needs to play. It’s important for her.’

  The guilt that had kept them supporting me, prevented this sort of conversation, slowly losing its adherence, peeling off. I was to ease myself back in. Just take a part-time job. A few hours a week helping out behind a reception desk. Odd shifts in a call centre. The same sort of work she’d done when we were small.

  ‘But you have to come to me. You have to promise that. The second you start feeling any sort – any sort of resentment. Towards her. Or us, you know. Because it can come. The second, you talk to me about it.’

  Knowing I wouldn’t. Talk doesn’t happen between us. Not like that.

  Without the noise of the telly and a baby in my arms, Rona had insinuated her way back in. She found her way everywhere. Monthly dinner with the girls always started with cold pulsing dread through the smalltalk, knowing that just after the main courses arrived and the eye signals had been exchanged, one of them – usually Samira, with her well-bred tact – would tilt a cautious head to the side and say something with long, sympathetic vowels like So. Any news? How are you holding up?

  And what would I say? No, no there’s no fucking news and there probably never will be? Shut up, I don’t want to talk about this – in fact, I never want to talk about it again? Yeah she’s back; can’t you see her – she’s sitting right there?

  They were acting out of love and concern, those friends of mine; out of the perfectly logical deduction that anyone whose sister had gone missing would be frantic and worried and want to talk about it. She began to occupy the fourth place, the empty chair at any table when the three of us were out. So I stopped going out.

  Forth

  The woman behind the chain looks at me, and I look back at her. ‘Sorry pet,’ she says. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong door.’

  I must have, surely. Her big body blocks the gap, bulked out in a checked housecoat; the flat grey perm of hair that had given up at least two decades before curling round the door frame. A respectable wummin who probably had no idea that a house of ill-repute was being run from her building, or if she did, would probably hiss at the gentlemen callers as they made their way back down, blank her hussy neighbour if they met in the street – and yet, the enamel numbers on the door quite clearly said 2/3.

  Surely not. Okay, pictures could be faked, but the men’s drooling reviews had been unequivocal. A right tasty piece. Total wee darling. Wanked thinking about her all week.

  She’s still looking at me, but her eyes are darting occasionally over my shoulder, looking for something else in the stair. She’s looking for the man, for Graeme Bain.

  ‘Is this, ehm, Fiona’s house?’

  Her eyes narrow behind the thick specs.

  ‘It is. And I’m telling you, dear, you’ve got the wrong door.’

  ‘I don’t think I have. Look, I made the appointment. I’m the half eleven. I just wanted to – I’ve maybe made a mistake.’

  She looks at me again.

  ‘I’ll just go and have a word with her,’ she said, and the door closes in my face.

  A madam? I wonder. I think of glamorous older women in films, Dolly Parton’s cleavage wrapped in silks and feathers, welcoming in leery cowboys.

  The gatekeeper opens the door-crack again.

  ‘What is it you’re wanting?’

  ‘Just to. To talk to her. Nothing, ehm, else. I’ve brought the money. She’ll still get paid –’

  The door shuts. Behind it, female voices tango blurrily.

  What sort of prison was this? Even from the crack, I’d been able to see that she was big. Strong. Fifty years ago, the sort of woman who’d have been scrubbing stairwells and lugging her family’s washing back and forth from the steamie. Rona had always been delicate, small-made, bones like a bird. This woman could snap her neck under one meaty arm if she wanted.

  They were supposed to be men, the traffickers, the pimps. According to the headlines. Sleazy men, vice kings if they were British; monsters and immigrants if they were not. This was not a thing that women did to other women, this crime. It couldn’t be –

  The door opens all the way, and the auld monster stands there in her pinny in the hall, beckoning.

  ‘Okay. In you come. But I’ll warn you, she’s no happy about this.’

  I think for a second, I could take this woman right
now, do enough damage to keep her distracted, scream RUN – but what if she’s tied up, or if there’s someone else in there, some big bruiser paid by the pimp to keep her down–

  My feet tread fluffy carpet and I’m ushered into a small living room. Sunny. New sofa. Mirrors on the walls, china ladies on a stand in the corner. Uplighters. A woman’s face, suddenly, right in mine, its pointed teeth.

  ‘So are you the one that’s been phoning, then? For fuck’s sake. I’ll just tell you this one last time, doll, to your face, so you get the message. I am not a fucking lezzy. Okay?’

  She’s wearing a silky, bum-skimming dressing gown, sheer black, with something purple on underneath. Flipflops, dark blue toenails and a deep, even tan. Dark eye makeup. She’s the right height, right size, her hair has been straightened but was probably pretty similar to mine. I knew her from somewhere.

  She’s definitely not my sister, though.

  Of course she isn’t. Of course of course of course.

  The room smells too sweet in the heat, is beginning to lurch about me. The woman who is not my sister is still going, her voice getting louder, her face redder.

  ‘– absolutely wasted an hour of my fucking day. I mean, this might be a wee joke to you, hen, or it might be some great big moral crusade, but it’s my fucking job and you’ve just cost me a perfectly good paying client, do you get what I’m saying? Do you? Ho. Doll. Are you alright?’

  I come to on the sofa. There’s something cold and wet on my face and it’s being held by the older woman.

  ‘There she is. There you are, madarlin. Okay. Okay now.’

  The dressing gown material shushes against itself as the younger woman – Fiona – comes to sit beside me.

  ‘Alright. Come on, I’m not gonny shout at you. But want to tell me what all this is about?’

  ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ve made a huge mistake.’

  ‘Aye, you have. But you’re here now.’

  ‘I thought you were my sister,’ I said. ‘She’s been missing for years, and your – your pictures on the West End Girls site. You look like her, a bit.’