Daylight, the grey beginnings of it on the backs of my eyelids. The body beside me easing up by centimetres, small calculated movements of limb. The shufflings for clothes, the agonising hushed noise of a zip done slowly. Then the nearness of warmth, then a hand on the side of my face, stroking my hair away from the temple, gently. A small, dry kiss on my forehead, then the door opening, closing. I’m pretending to sleep, so I don’t see any of this, but the smell of sadness left in the room is almost overwhelming.
XXX
There’s always a kid skiting about the dancefloor on its knees at a wedding. If its parents are too pissed by the time the dancing starts it runs the risk of being mown down, or being hit by a flying shoe, because there’s always women kicking their high heels to the side and dancing on in their stocking soles at a wedding.
There’s always country dancing at a wedding, too, so of course there’s country dancing at Heather’s, the bride first up, pulled by her kilted nothing of a husband in her strapless floor-length white number, same thing every bride’s been wearing for at least the last ten years, since sleeves went out. It’s on a figure like Heather’s that you really see the limitations of this style, because her tits are too big to stay in easily, are already bulging and rushing out the sides, under her arms. That bride could have your eye out in a Strip the Willow, I’m wanting to whisper to someone. But hey. It’s her Big Day; her chance to be a princess, and how will people know you’re a princess if you don’t dress exactly like all the other princesses.
The band play a loud chord to get everyone’s attention. It takes me a second to realise that it’s actually my daughter on the floor, and I need to rush up and grab her off, two great dirty marks on her white lacy knees.
‘Look at you, poppet. Look at what you’ve done to your pretty tights. You’re all over dust! Mummy’s goingty havety wash them for you! Come away and sit down for a bit or you’ll get hit by the dancing.’
‘You’re speaking funny,’ she says, and she’s right, I am. I’m talking clucky and my accent’s got stronger, manhandling her off the floor in big, plump mother hen movements.
The other mothers we used to meet at Tumble Tots, the first-time mothers, would always stop themselves at something like that. Oh god, I sound like my mu-um, they’d moan. Tonight I appear to be acting the part of a mother. Like a pantomime dame, I find I’ve muttered out loud.
‘Mummy, I think you’re drunk,’ Beth’s saying, solemnly.
I mean, the thing is, I look good tonight. I know I do. I’ve done everything that could possibly be required of me. I had a hairdresser iron down my frizz so it hangs sleek, and my dress is new and blue, dark blue, and I’ve borrowed Mum’s pearls.
It works well.
That fuzz sinking in already, the bit when you feel the welch and warp of the booze around the limits of your vision; that’s happening. I noticed it beginning about half an hour ago and decided to go with it, not to counter the acid sharps of my cheap white wine saliva; another glass, another.
That guy is looking over again. Everyone else is staring at Samira, the sharp green of her dress and the brown of her skin snapping your eyes to attention in a sea of whey-faced bores in pastels; she’s been snapped up for the first dance by one of the two anxious-looking friends of Ross’s who flitted about her during the buffet. But that guy is looking at me, peeking out from under his weird baseball cap, which actually looks pretty good with a suit, shy, turning away, looking back again.
All the girlz from the hen-night are getting up, Claire’s big face turning, nodding at the man beside her, just as dull and awful-looking as she is. I have to say, I think it’s a bit off of Heather to have put me and Samira at different tables, I really do. It’s not like either of us know anybody here, although Samira’s clearly not bothered by that. I had one of them and her boyfriend beside me, and it was a bit embarrassing because I was sure she was the one called Kelly, but she wasn’t, she was the one called Andrea, and it even said it on a card in front of her, although I didn’t notice that until I’d called her Kelly twice and Bethan’s right, I am drunk.
I’d had a chat with Heather’s dad, Beth straining and twisting at my arm because she was only interested in staring at the bride as hard as possible, trying to absorb those fake Swarovski crystals by osmosis. Beth hadn’t quite got over the hug Heather had given her earlier, bearing down on her, cooing.
‘You look great, Heather.’
‘Aw, thanks. And doesn’t Beth look cute, eh? Who’s this beautiful girl, then? What a pretty dress!’
Heather is transformed, in Beth’s eyes, at least, into a sparkling, scented celebrity. A brief, paranoid flash, from nowhere: did it seem like she’d made the fuss over Beth so she wouldn’t have to talk to me? No, no. Probably just drunk.
Beth’s in a foul mood, too. She’s decided to start whining.
‘I want to da-ance. Mu-um. I want to da-ance!’
I smile at the older couple sitting it out on our table, one of those mother smiles. I pick her up on my lap and crush my arms in round her.
‘I want to da-ance with Aunty Sameeeera!’
‘What we’re going to do is we’re going to watch Aunty Heather and Aunty Samira just now, and see how the dance goes. These dances can get very rough, and I’m not wanting you getting hurt in there. Can you see Aunty Heather and Aunty Samira? See where they are? What we’ll do is, we’ll go and dance alongside them if it’s not too fast. We’ll go in and dance at the sides.’
He’s not dancing, just looking over again, the guy in the cap. The idea that people are still attracted to me. One person, but still. I could kiss him, later. I could pull him away, find a quiet corner of the hotel, a corridor somewhere, push him up against a wall, take him home –
A tug on my bodice.
‘Mu-um! You’re not watching!’
The immense rustling that fights with the music as everyone turns, a mass rotation. Like a machine in Dorothy Perkins formalwear. The spinning is the best bit, actually, all those skirts, all that hair birling round, the men hemmed in at the centre with their arms raised like cranes. Heather’s got her free hand jammed across the top of her bodice, her flesh spilling, bouncing; but Samira is just flowing, the loose, bright green material of her skirt like conical water, her fanned hair rippling. She’s spinning so quickly you can’t see her face.
‘Look at Aunty Samira,’ I whisper to Beth, and she does, she’s silent.
Something suddenly clicks between her and her partner as she lands back into him, and he pulls her out from the filed shuffling circle and into the centre, where they dance a faster polka all the way round the circumference. You can do that, in a Gay Gordons, you can break out of the circle if you’re both clever, if you can feel it in the music. They take turns about, leading. Her forward, two three. Him back, two three. I sit Beth up on the table so she can still see, tiny Samira in danger of disappearing behind all these anonymous bodies. She gets up on her knees, and I perch up there beside her.
‘Aunty Samira’s like a fairy princess, isn’t she,’ I whisper. She nods.
‘Your breath smells of being drunk.’
Flat disapproving tones just like my dad’s – actually, no. It’s exactly the sort of putdown Rona would have used.
The older woman at the table gives me a funny look and I smile another mother smile at her.
‘Would you mind watching this one for a second? I just have to go to the loo!’
Private
There are days when I feel like I’ve stepped through the looking glass. That the days before that hen weekend – before that conversation in the ski slope cafeteria, before the smell of tea on Christina’s breath – that they were part of some other life, other world. A world where I was aware of prostitution, course I was, but only in the same way that I was aware of, say, accountancy.
Now it’s everywhere. It’s like being given goggles that allow you to see another dimension sitting on top of the one you live your normal life in. Rona used to love this
story when she was a kid, in a book of world fairytales one of Mum’s friends brought her back from somewhere, about the djinns. Indian spirits, living their own spirit world, one that lies on top of our own. There were connections between the worlds – at certain points in time and space you could feel the djinns’ presence, and most people, fearful, would call them ghosts and run. There were those who could see the second world for what it was, though, and now I’m one of them.
I turn on the telly and a former teen pop star in expensive lingerie, playing at being a high class call-girl, fellates a lollipop and flirts with a handsome man who just happens to want to pay her. Old school friends on Facebook post links to furious online debates, where angry voices claim that all prostitution is violence against women. Shopping on Saturday, I pass a face that I know on the high street, and my mouth smiles, says hello, before my brain kicks in and it’s Holly, the young one, the Audrey Hepburn wannabe who shows her face. Her thickly-linered eyes crease in panic as she realises I can only know her from one place, is turning, scuttling off into a thicket of sale racks. I watch her go, delicate moves, bad posture, and she turns a hardened stare back over her shoulder, gives me the full fuckyoulookinat.
They’ve been here all this time, walking amongst the city, running their businesses, doing their things, completely unseen. This other world, off-grid, and Rona a secret corner of it. I heard implications in every stranger’s conversation on the street, every wisp of the radio from the office next door.
‘No darling, don’t touch yourself there. Only dirty girls do that...’
‘A third prostitute was discovered dead in Suffolk last night...’
‘No better than a common hoor, so you are…’
‘Of course, Jonathan thinks I’m prostituting my art.’
‘Patricia Arquette plays the tart-with-a-heart…’
‘MP’s £500-a-night romp with vice girl…’
The late-evening gloom of having worked too long means I catch a taxi back from work. I use my own money.
‘D’ye read in the paper? They’re knocking down the old Sanctuary Base down the road from here,’ says the taxi driver. White hair, moustache. Grandfatherly. ‘Crying shame that, if ye ask me. Crying shame. Used to work this area, back in the nineties, ye know. I wis in the polis, for a time.’
‘Were you in the vice squad?’ I ask, thinking of grim-faced cop dramas from the telly.
‘No, no. And I don’t know that they would call it a vice squad, the ones whose job it wis to charge the girls. Mibbe now, right enough. Aye, they might well now. No, we were just a unit working the area. The girls trusted us cos they knew we wereny goingty book them; they’d tell us things, not the others. Some of those others, they just treated they lassies like they were scum.’
‘The, ehm. The punters?’
‘Naw. The other polis. Shovin them about, screaming abuse at them, you dirty slag this – aw, sorry, mind ma language, pal. Ye just needed to treat them wi respect and they’d gie it back to you. They’d tell us about any dodgy punters they’d had, help us out catching the odd dealer; in return we could sometimes fix it so if the lassie went down an alley wi a punter, we could turn up just after he’d handed the money over, but before she had to do onything for it, chase him aff.’
This whole other world. I take my daughter to school, go to work, sit at a computer for eight hours, pick my daughter up, go home, eat dinner in my comfortable flat, watch television, pick over celebrity gossip on websites that make me feel bad about myself, sleep.
‘At the end of the day, ye know, it’s somebody’s job. It’s always goingty be somebody’s job. And you’ve got tae respect that. This is how some of them support their weans, make their money, and there are laws set up that dinnae even treat them like they’re part of society?’ He pulls up at my flat. ‘Sorry, pal. Here’s me been talking all that time. Ye have things that just get you up on that soapbox, eh?’
‘No, not at all,’ I say. ‘Thank you. Really.’
‘Anywey, that’s how I came to leave the polis.’
It’s like the world won’t let me stop thinking about it. The next morning the condoms in the car park drains seem terrifyingly important.
XXX
I’d started spending a lot of time on ‘Swedish Sonja’s’ site; the one who I thought was almost definitely that blonde, foreign girl from the protest, Anya. Her blog was updated daily at the moment, short, righteous bursts of anger directed at the council, at the demolition of the Sanctuary; longer musings about what this meant, about why street girls were such easy targets for the sort of disgust that underpinned this kind of action. We think of them as victims, not real humans – disposable people, she’d say. She talked a lot about stigma. About the way sex workers were regarded in society. ‘Sex workers’ was what she said. Not ‘prostitutes’. Sometimes, she’d call herself a ‘hussy’ or a ‘whore’.
It confused me, this website. The force and blast of her intelligence shining through, the fact that it was designed on clean lines, no jiggling gifs of sexy silhouettes, no garish fonts, no adverts; that the photographs in her ‘private gallery’, the one you had to hand over your credit card details and pay for a week’s access to, were beautifully shot and lit, framed in unusual ways, felt more like art portraits than pornography, even as she spread her legs, displaying the sharp titanium bar through her clitoris, head thrown back in apparent ecstasy so you couldn’t make out her face.
I poured out the last of the bottle.
If you were that smart, that conscious of the world; possessed of that much taste and dignity. Women who had these sorts of choices, whose brains gave them that, they didn’t have to do this. Didn’t have to sink this low. Rona didn’t have to, for fuck’s sake.
Shot from behind, her pale-bleached crop rumpled, the shiny black corset nipped in on her waist. Bare arse, bare legs, long, sturdy platform boots. The white-golden length of her, from raised fingertips to heels.
Close up on a breast, the nipple pierced through, sturdily obedient to the bolt.
Short black nails paused mid-air, flicking powerfully over her genitals. There’s nothing crude about this show; none of those stretched holes, not the smallest wisp of exploitation about it. She’s just very, very beautiful, and aroused, and she wants to share that with me –
‘Mummy?’
Bethan, nightmare-mauled, at the door. I swipe the screen away in time, rush to zip my jeans back up, stand, confused. The room is thick with sex and guilt and I hope she’s too young to detect either. I curl round her, warm her back to bed, stroke her damp temples till she drops off. I shake myself; I think, what the hell are you doing?
I need to bring this under control. This new world; it all exists in my head. I find out more and more every day, and I don’t talk to people about it. It’s going to become too big for me. Maybe it already is.
There’s a contact email address on her site.
Dear Sonja,
Really, really sorry for the out-of-the-blue email, and a hundred apologies if I’m wrong. But were you one of the protestors outside the RDJ Construction office last week?
If not, I’m so, so sorry for the intrusion. Please ignore me. If I’m right, though, we met there. I was the employee who brought you all tea.
You have no reason to trust me, I know – especially not me – and I appreciate that you probably won’t respond to me.
But, the reason I’m writing to you: the weekend before your protest, I discovered that my sister, who has been missing for six years, was a sex worker before her disappearance. It’s taken me some time to come to terms with this. I’m not sure I have, still. Anyway, I found that out, then I came to work and saw your protest, then I read your blog. And I think I’m on the wrong side. I’d like to not be.
I would very much like to buy you lunch at a convenient time, and talk some things through with you. I understand that you are a very busy person, but I think, given my job, I could be of some use to your campaign.
I will under
stand absolutely and utterly if that isn’t possible. I just need to help in some way. I need to talk to other people in this world. I need to understand.
Yours,
Fiona Leonard
At the end, hitting send before I could sober up and take it back, I was gasping. I opened it up again immediately, read, re-read. You fucking idiot, I rail against myself through wine-blacked lips in the bathroom mirror. Of course she’s not going to respond. She can’t confirm what her real name is. You’ve fucked it. You’ve fucked it, I’m muttering.
But oh. Actually writing it down and sending it away for someone else to read through me. Seeing the words take clean black shape.
I woke up on the sofa, soaked through with sweat. High electric fuzz in the room. Beth had come through, switched her morning cartoons on.
There was a new email, sent at four in the morning:
Fiona,
You are right. I wouldn’t usually answer this sort of email. It goes against all of my better instincts. But you were kind to us, and you didn’t have to be, and so I’m going to take a risk and trust you. Please, please be deserving of my trust.
She was quite happy to meet me for lunch. She suggested a restaurant about fifteen minutes from my office, expensive enough that nobody from my office would be there. I couldn’t really afford it, but I’d manage, somehow. How does Tuesday afternoon, 1pm, suit you, she said.
The world throwing a rope out, letting me grab it. A pull. A connection with something, anything.
She’d signed it Sonja. I’d need to remember that.
Public
It’s cool down here, refreshing. I rest my hot forehead against the marble wall between the Ladies and Gents doors, just for a second. The wedding party creaks and thumps into the next song upstairs, louder as someone opens the door. Footsteps.
‘Oh. Are you alright?’
Claire. Nosy bossy Claire, makeup already melted off her scarlet face, although to be fair she does look alright in the plain blue bridesmaid dress. Nothing fancy, but alright. She sees it’s me as I turn round and the concerned smile ossifies.
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