Fishnet

by Kirstin Innes

  A shovel. One good crack.

  I hurl the nearest heavy thing – the mug on my desk – at the door Norman’s just left through, and I scream sounds, wordless angry sounds as it breaks. Fuck them all. Really. The phone rings – I assume it’s Elaine, the nosy bitch, fidgeting around any sort of deviation, wanting to know what on earth that noise was, Fiona – but the light is beeping for an outside line. I take three breaths in and pick it up, and I try to remember what I’m supposed to tell any journalists, muckrakers.

  ‘Good morning RDJ Construction surveying department how can I help you.’

  My mouth just spills it out, like I’ve been bent this way now. And I haven’t.

  ‘Hello darling. It’s Malcolm from the Express here. Just wanted to ask you a couple of questions…’

  His voice is supplicant, wheedling. I take a deep breath in and realise I already know what I’m about to do.

  On

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  Beth’s school had been closed due to a problem in the kitchens. Exasperated parents were clustering at the gates when we got there.

  ‘Well, what the bloody hell do you expect me to do with him, then?’ A man in a suit was shouting at one of the teachers, nodding down at an inconvenient piece of luggage in a Spider-Man coat.

  ‘Your dad just swore.’

  Over the heads I’d seen the other “Fiona”, staring at her son, worried eyes, before nodding, decisive, turning, pulling him down the road.

  I had taken the day off specially. Okay, I’d called in sick, doing pathetic tones down the line, thankful it was credulous Moira I’d got.

  ‘Aw darlin. You just tuck yourself right up in bed, okay, and get lots of rest. I’ll get Elaine to cover the phones today. It’ll be fine.’

  I was going to go through to Edinburgh and follow up every name, every half-remembered bar and manager that Ally McKay had been able to scrawl drunkenly down for me. I was going to take some action for myself, stop bothering with other people’s business. The point was to find Rona, that’s what, and I intended to re-trace her steps until I did. Or found something. This girl Camilla, maybe, or their pimp or whatever he was, Jez. I just needed to be there, in the city, keep feeling her around me. It would be the key. I knew it.

  ‘Your mother and I have both got jobs to go to, Fiona. We are not a twenty-four hour babysitting service and we’re getting tired of you treating us as such. You already have a day off.’

  ‘I have things to do today. A lot of walking about. She’d slow me down.’

  Mum pats my hand.

  ‘Be good for the two of you to spend some proper time together, love.’

  And they’re gone.

  There are two schoolgirls draped over the sinks at the bus station toilets when we come in. They can’t be more than fourteen; in fact, they’re probably younger, but my synapses have snapped back fifteen years, recognised the hard kids and prepared for flight. They peer up at us for a second through faces toughened by layers of makeup, then decide I’m not worth the bother.

  ‘The lighting is barry in here. Come on, take a couple pictures of me.’

  I usher Beth into the mother-and-baby cubicle, the one with more room. She cranes her head back over her neck to look at them, in love again. Their conversation filters over the sound of her pee.

  ‘Awright. You ready? Naw, naw, you need to look way sexier than that. Right, I’m gonny take it from above, and you should look up at me.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Aye, that’s good.’

  ‘Let’s see – ohmigod that’s minging. I look so fat. Take another wan.’

  ‘Mibbe if you showed your tits a bit more. Think ae that picture ae Jemma whatsherface from the fourth year that did the rounds. Okay. Cheese!’

  ‘I wisnay rea-dy – oh here, actually that’s quite nice...’

  ‘Sex-ay. Okay, pull your shirt down a bit more.’

  Beth has been silent throughout the procedure, eyes fixed on the door, alert to every sound and nuance. We come out, and one of them is standing on the sinks, training the lens of a pink mobile phone down. The other, sucking her cheeks to the pouted bone, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, is manhandling the lace-trimmed puppy fat where her breasts will be in a couple of years into a make-believe cleavage.

  ‘Aye aye aye! Like that! Bet you could get it on that Jailbait site. Make a fortune.’

  I wash Beth’s hands for her, as she’s fascinated, unmoving. I pull her out through the turnstile, and she’s still silent.

  On the bus, after staring determinedly at her hands for a while, she turns a small face up to mine.

  ‘Mummy, what were those big girls doing?’

  ‘The ones in the toilets?’

  ‘Those ones. The ones with the pink phone.’

  ‘Well.’ Fuck. ‘They were playing, sweetheart. They were just playing dressing. Up. Dressing up. They were very bad girls, honey.’

  Very bad girls. I wonder if this is where it comes from. That early. The understanding of all the things that good girls don’t do. I think about the stigma that Anya and the others talk about and I wonder if I’ve just infected my daughter with it.

  She nods, seriously, and I look at her, how very, very small she is, toggled up in her little red coat.

  ‘Well. They weren’t actually bad girls, darling. It was wrong of Mummy to say that. They were just a wee bit confused, and they were trying out things. But those things that they were trying out could hurt them.’

  Was that even worse? The enormity of it all, the responsibility for filtering and probably warping this child’s idea of the world is hitting me, fast as grey towns rush past the window.

  ‘Were they playing Sexy Ladies?’

  ‘What? Where did you get that one from?’

  ‘Sexy Ladies. It’s a game we do in the playground.’

  ‘Okay. How does Sexy Ladies go, sweetheart?’

  She wriggles up onto her knees, and I reach to keep the seatbelt round her.

  ‘You go: duh duh duh duh de neh deh! Sexy! Ladies!’

  Her little bum waggles aimlessly and she flails her arms into a child’s approximation of a cheesecake pose, wheeling round to me at the last minute with the same dull fish pout the girl in the toilets had done. Across the aisle a grey-haired man begins giggling, innocently enough, but I stare him out for a second.

  ‘Sometimes we get the boys to pretend to take photos, but they get bored quite quickly and they just want to run about. Sometimes they want to blow us up.’

  ‘I don’t know how happy I am about you pretending to be a, eh, a sexy lady.’

  ‘It’s nice to be a sexy lady! They’re pretty, and everyone looks at them!’

  ‘Hoo! She’s got a point there!’ the man across the aisle says, snorting out coffee. I ignore him.

  ‘Bethan. What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I know what the answer will be. We’ve asked her this over and over, since she was old enough to understand what it meant, giggled each time at the answer, Mum, Dad and me.

  ‘A princess.’ She lowers her gaze a bit, flicks out a glance, a little smirk wrestling at her lips. ‘Or a Sexy Lady.’ She’s giggling, but not sure if she’s going to get away with this.

  All this time. I come home from work, and it’s late, and I put her in front of the television or a DVD and the stories tell her the same things. And because she was little, the point at which it stopped being colours and fairy stories and started being something tangible as concrete, the foundation she builds the world on, has slipped by me.

  ‘Mmhm. Do you know that ladies can be other things, as well as sexy?’

  Her face suspects a lesson coming.

  ‘They can be teachers –’

  ‘Like Miss Armstrong.’

  ‘Just like Miss Armstrong. And they can be, ehm. Doctors. And – and bus drivers, like Granny.’

  And administration and data entry officers. She’s picking quietly at the buckle of her shoe, as bored as if I’d actually said
that.

  The day I’d planned ahead of us. Walking around a city, in and out of beer-soaked rooms, asking coded questions of hungover staff who aren’t old enough to have been there seven years ago. Beth straining my wrist, whining, pulling us into toyshops. Me snapping, taking her home early or buying her some pink tat to shut her up. The bus coughing its way into the city by increments, the route it takes to get there. The five photos of teenaged Rona in my bag, sneering, pouting. The route the bus takes.

  ‘Do you know what else ladies can be?’ She’s not even pretending to listen any more. ‘Beth. They can be zookeepers. Do you remember that time Granddad took you to the zoo? To see all the animals? You were quite little. You were only four.’

  ‘Four! That’s tiny!’ She is very amused, animated again, giggling.

  ‘Do you remember seeing the animals, honey? Granddad said you liked the stripy tigers.’

  Her face furrows.

  ‘I had strawberry ice cream.’

  ‘Probably. Probably you did.’

  The bus drops us off just across the road. I use my body to shield her a bit from the velocity and force of the cars going by, grip her hand tight. We wait for a quiet moment, run across. The sign is huge and she stares up at it, impressed into silence again.

  This time round, she likes the red pandas, and the poisonous tree frogs, and the way the penguins swim, and the rainbow-winged parrots that flock to you if you have bird seed, perch on your shoulders, and I’m so proud of her for not flinching or crying like the few tourist kids there.

  ‘Look! There’s one, Beth. A zookeeper who’s a lady.’

  A girl in a polo shirt, pleasant face, wearing gloves, throwing fish to the seals.

  ‘Is there a dance for that, do you think? Duh duh duh duh de neh deh! Zookeeper! Ladies!’

  ‘No. Duh.’

  She says it with such scorn, full force of her Rona-face, that I feel winded for a second.

  ‘That one goes like this. Der der, duh DAH! Zookeeper! Ladies!’

  It’s exactly the same dance, but I don’t point that out. Instead, I pick her up and swing her round, there on the path, till her shoes brush the foliage and we’re both laughing.

  Off

  One lovely day’s respite, then back to it. Screaming protests over brushing her hair. Gritting my teeth as the train just stalled, stayed stalled, vibrating, overheating. Everyone inside, their frustration mounting with the driver and the signals and each other. Didn’t even manage to get a copy of the paper, either; the last one swiped by the woman ahead of me who fumbled for an age in her purse for change while I tensed and tensed and tensed my fists. I decide to tell Ian there seems to have been an accident in the motorway tunnel. In fact, I could come into the office asking about it. Has anyone else heard about it on the news this morning? I imagine Moira shaking her head and worrying about smashes and the people trapped inside them all day, checking the news websites, holding out for the afternoon paper to come round. I imagine that the seriousness of it would put Ian off from having to have the time management talk with me again.

  The office is empty. Particles of old skin and paper dust dancing, tiny, in the blind-slatted sunbeams. None of the computers seem to be on. I cough, and Ian opens his door.

  ‘Ah. Fiona. Could you come in here a minute, please?’

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry, Ian,’ I’m saying before I even get through the door, but he’s just holding up a hand. Sitting back in his chair, holding up a hand and looking older than I’d ever seen him before.

  ‘Fiona. Graeme and Norman were called down to the Jackson site yesterday evening. After the, ah, public demonstration at the site yesterday afternoon, once we’d finally got them out of there, our partners in the Jackson Group asked me to make sure that the protestors hadn’t, ah, caused any structural damage.’

  My brain flickers over it. He’s telling me this because someone left my notes down there. Anya. Anya did it. Maybe she did it deliberately, maybe she just didn’t think, or care, what it meant for me. She just didn’t care. Shit. Shit.

  Ian is still talking.

  ‘While they were at the site there was, there was an incident, Fiona. One of the ceilings of the hall collapsed, and they were underneath it.’

  ‘Oh. Oh god.’ Words are coming out of my mouth. ‘What, where. Are they –’

  ‘Graeme was relatively unscathed. He’s been treated for shock and a few minor cuts and bruises. He acted with considerable bravery and foresight at the time, you know. It was Graeme who contacted the emergency services. It was Graeme who managed to pull Norman out.’

  ‘Ian,’ I say. ‘Ian, how’s Norman.’

  It’s taking him a gigantic effort of will even to make his mouth shape the words.

  ‘Norman was caught underneath a great deal of falling masonry. His legs were trapped. It’s not certain he’ll ever have the use of them again. He, ah, he hasn’t yet regained consciousness, but his family are with him, and the doctors have described his condition as stable.’

  ‘Stable,’ I repeat. Stupidly.

  ‘Fiona, I had to tell Moira this morning. Myself. As you know, they’re, ah, very close, and she is – naturally – very upset. She hasn’t really been herself today.’

  ‘Surely you sent her home, though,’ I say.

  ‘Moira, ah, Moira may be in shock too. I believe she’s still in the building – she seems to have, ah, locked herself in a stall in the ladies’ bathroom. I didn’t feel it was appropriate – I’ve been waiting for another female member of staff to come in.’

  ‘Of course.’ I say. ‘Of course.’

  The Ladies is so quiet I wonder if Ian is mistaken. One of the two cubicle doors was bolted, though, and when I stand very still I can hear faint scrabblings of tissue from behind the door.

  ‘Moira?’ I’m using her own soft voice back to her. ‘Moira, it’s Fiona. Do you want to open the door to me?’

  Silence. I imagine Moira perched on the lid, staring at nothing, maybe not even hearing me. But then the lock clanks back, its noise a shock in the still.

  ‘Oh hen,’ Moira is saying. ‘Oh Fiona, hen. Oh.’

  I put my arms around her strange flat body. She still has her fleece jacket on, handbag strapped across her torso. She collapses onto me and I lean against the cubicle wall to hold the two of us up.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s get you out of here, just for now. Come on. We’ll get you home, Moira. I’ll call your husband, eh? Have him come and pick you up?’

  ‘Nobody told me, but,’ she says. ‘Nobody called me last night to tell me. Well why would they, really, eh? Why would they, hen? I’m not his family. I’m not his wife.’

  I take it all in again, their fourteen years of working at the same desks beside each other, the quiet ways they looked out for each other, the reverence in their voices. That it would never occur to them.

  You give people in shock sweet tea, usually, so I guide her through to the one decent armchair in the staff kitchen and fold her into it. I pull down her outsize teacup with its stupid wispily-sketched design and we wait, in silence, for the kettle to boil. Moira looks at the cup on the counter and moans, flops forward in her seat.

  It’s only after she’s come back round that I realise I’d automatically set out Norman’s World’s Best Dad! mug too. Stupid. Stupid.

  On

  Anya hadn’t answered her phone all day. I’d even risked calling from the work line after a while, in case she was deliberately avoiding my mobile. Nothing.

  Actually, she might not have even been at the Base, now I thought about it. It could have been any one of Suzanne’s volunteers who’d done it. It could have been Suzanne herself.

  Suzanne answers the third time I rang. ‘What? Oh yes, I heard about that, yes. Your colleague. The poor man.’

  ‘Suzanne, I’d like to come and talk to you about it. Today, please. Anya too.’

  ‘Today isn’t a very good day. Not for either of us really. What with everything. You know. I take it you
’ve seen the papers?’

  SLEAZY STUDENT’S DOUBLE LIFE

  AS £500-A-NIGHT VICE GIRL

  By day she’s a boffin... by night she’s a-bonkin’! Brainy blonde Anya Sobtka thought she’d found the perfect way of raising money for her PhD – by working as a vice girl.

  We can exclusively reveal that the Polish exchange student, 27, who has been living in Scotland for four years, has been buffing up her income as a high class hooker.

  By day, she works as a PhD researcher in Strathallan University’s Politics Department.

  By night, the only politics she studies are sexual.

  The sleazy swot’s actions in the recent disturbances against the Jackson Group’s new city-centre development brought her to public notice.

  A spokesperson for the police has confirmed that Sobtka has been twice cautioned in recent weeks for disturbance of the peace and making a public nuisance of herself.

  Our reporter endured the filthy language and obscene images on Sobtka’s website, where she poses as ‘Sonja, a sexy Swedish girl who’s up for anything’ and claims to ‘specialise’ in ‘fetish fun’.

  He arranged a ‘date’ with her in a luxury city centre pad– a far cry from the stories of starving student bedsits.

  On arrival, he was greeted by the blonde, who has several piercings, in a negligee.

  In our exclusive recording, which can be heard on our web-site, the curvy Pole asks our reporter ‘what do you like?’ before going on to list a range of sordid, kinky practices, and confirming that the minimum charge for the night is £500.

  At this point our brave reporter made his excuses and left, but not before obtaining a photograph of Sobtka in action at great personal risk to himself.

  We later confirmed that the flat is rented in the name of Anya Sobtka. A spokesperson for the letting agency said ‘We had absolutely no idea that the flat was being used for sordid purposes. We are absolutely shocked.’

  A spokeswoman for the Jackson Group said ‘It comes as no surprise to us that an individual who has been so outspoken about the restructuring of a base for prostitutes should turn out to have been acting from self-interest.’