Fishnet

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Fishnet Page 17

by Kirstin Innes


  The Jackson Group is a Scottish-run company, who have been operating for fifteen years, and have made a large number of charitable contributions to the city.

  A spokesman for Strathallan University, said ‘The University has no comment on this matter at this time.’

  Page 4: Prostitute protests leave local man fighting for life

  Page 7: City’s vice girl shame: is immigration to blame?

  The second photograph was captioned, rather unnecessarily:

  PIERCED: Polish vice girl Sobtka.

  ‘It’s like a poem, isn’t it? Like blank verse,’ Anya says, from Suzanne’s kitchen table.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Sure. Sure. There were maybe ten people waiting outside my door this morning, with cameras, and the head of my department has suddenly taken a personal interest in my career, as we have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. But physically, no scars! At least I got a good look at the little fuck, huh?’

  ‘They won’t – they won’t throw you off your course?’

  ‘I don’t think they can. I haven’t actually broken any law or done anything illegal, and I do not think they want to lose my nice big foreign student tuition fees.’ Her smile. ‘But it will not be pleasant, no. I imagine I will be told I have brought the department into disrepute. Certainly, there will be no job for me, no nice reference, now. I expect they will, ah, restrict my student contact time, too. This is not a loss. My students are mostly assholes. Luckily, they did not get a picture of Dan, so his job is safe.’

  I must be staring blankly.

  ‘My boyfriend who looks after the incalls? Although I wonder if we may have to have an uncomfortable conversation with his parents some time.’

  ‘I’m amazed you’re being so, eh, strong about it.’

  ‘It is like I told you,’ she says, shrugging. ‘I have had a feeling that this was coming. I am an immigrant and I am a working girl, and I am not quiet and I do not let them pretend I do not exist, so they will punish me. They do not like it when you stick your head above the, ah…’

  ‘The parapet,’ says Suzanne.

  ‘So. It is not as though I am a celebrity. It is not Britney Spears who charges £500 a night. This will be gone by next week. For now, Suzanne is being very lovely and Dan and I can sleep on her sofa.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got a spare room! You can come and stay with me,’ I say, the words spilling out too quickly.

  She looks at me for a fraction of a second longer than is easy.

  ‘No, it’s okay. You have your daughter.’

  ‘She won’t mind!’

  ‘Fiona. You have not seen the scrum outside my flat. These people are animals. You do not want them to know your face, or your daughter’s face. Trust me. You are safer staying out of it. Although, thank you for your offer.’

  ‘It’s nice you’ve come, really,’ says Suzanne, ‘but I think you might need to be careful. You could lose your job if you’re pictured with us, think.’

  They are managing me as though prearranged, encoded meaning flickering between the two of them. I can feel it.

  ‘Well. Not really much of a job, is it. Working for them.’

  Suzanne’s face sets, because she hasn’t caught the sarcasm.

  ‘Everybody needs a job. Especially with that lovely wee girl.’

  The judgement in that nips the air for a couple of seconds.

  ‘Right. So, what you’re saying is, I shouldn’t have jeopardised my livelihood to help your campaign out with some inside information? Because right now, I’m feeling exactly the same way.’

  Anya has turned away, so she doesn’t see that I’m saying this right at her.

  ‘You volunteered to help us,’ she says, with a shrug. ‘And it was the right thing to do, dear.’ Suzanne has switched back to mothering.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. Because what seems to me to have happened is that I gave you information which you have used to cause structural damage – maliciously – to the building once you’d conceded defeat. That damage has left a man who I have worked beside for three years hospitalised and possibly unable to work again. As you can imagine, I’m not feeling very good about this.’

  ‘You think we did that? You’re swallowing the line those murderous bastards at Jackson Group have fed the press, huh? This is what you think of us? We are not the ones who disregard human lives, Fiona.’

  She’s flicking through the paper, rustling it angrily. The story of Norman’s accident is thrust in my face, the word ‘HOOKER’ in the screaming headline accidentally right above his photograph, and I have to swallow an impulse to burst out laughing at Norman’s own personal hell. Anya’s furious face is up close, her spit on my cheek as she talks, her accent stronger than usual.

  ‘So, either your buddies in Jackson Group have this fantastic, sharp PR team, or they have perhaps been expecting something like this to happen?’

  A finger with chipped black polish directs me to the final paragraph.

  A spokeswoman for the Jackson Group said ‘We are deeply saddened by this incident, and our thoughts and prayers are with Mr Black and his family at this time. We are also working with our partners RDJ Construction to examine whether this might have been the result of deliberate structural damage occurring during yesterday’s protest. Mr Jackson urges parties involved with the ongoing campaign against the development who might have any information about this incident to come forward immediately.’

  ‘They got that into an edition of the newspaper that came out last night.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t you. Maybe you didn’t do it deliberately, but you still might have done something.’

  ‘Fiona, you need to remember that you weren’t there,’ says Suzanne, in a purposefully reasonable voice. ‘We spent most of the time in our own main space, absolutely not touching the walls or beams. We didn’t want to give them an excuse to arrest or sue us. ’

  ‘We made a film of us in there, to put up on the campaign page,’ Anya says. ‘We will be able to prove this if it ever comes up. You know what I think? I think your good friends Jackson Group maybe wanted out of this altogether, hey? Maybe they discover the investment won’t work, set this up, have it pulled down for scrap, save their fingers from being dirty, huh? Maybe your Norman Black is just collateral damage for them. For them, not for us.’

  ‘We’ve no proof of that,’ Suzanne says, quickly. ‘They’re a corporation; of course they will have a PR team who move fast. Who knows what they do. Don’t get paranoid.’

  The meetings I take minutes at with the Jackson Group representatives, their expensive aftershaves choking the air conditioning. Norman nodding seriously along with everything they say.

  ‘Whatever has happened, they are capitalising on it pretty nicely, hey?’

  ‘Anyway, it’s been a rough one, Fiona. I think both Anya and I could do with a nap. Remember, we’ve had it pretty hard today too. Anya especially.’

  As I wonder whether Suzanne knows she’s being quite so patronising, the secret understanding between the two of them crystallises in the air around me, begins to escort me out. I just need to check.

  ‘Do you know who it was, the person who tipped the paper off about you, Anya?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got ideas.’ Suzanne’s lips are set tight.

  ‘This information, I think, could have come from someone at Jackson Group,’ Anya says, ‘or maybe from our lovely friend on the council, Ms Claire Buchanan: she certainly was not happy with me the other day, was she?’

  ‘Oh no: Claire is an idiot, but she’s not –’ I’m saying before I’ve thought it through. Shut up, I’m urging myself. Why are you standing up for her?

  ‘So you do know her. We thought so.’ Anya is staring me down, one eyebrow raised, her nostrils flared again.

  ‘We just met at a hen party. She’s not a friend. We don’t get on.’

  ‘What is she, an old girlfriend? You are angry with her so you try to help us, make up some
story about a missing sister to get in? Then, maybe she takes you back, or you make up after you see each other at our meeting, after your eyes meet, and suddenly you want to help her again? So you tell a journalist who I am? Is that how it worked?’

  ‘Anya,’ Suzanne says, flashing a warning. ‘You maybe just need some sleep now.’

  It’s rising in me.

  ‘Sure. Sure. That’s what you think of me? Sure.’

  ‘Well, you know that I am at the university, don’t you? You seem to have worked out my real name somehow although I have only ever referred to myself as Sonja around you. And it would not have been difficult for you to contact a journalist – I would bet many of them are calling your office at the moment, hey?’

  Her face is red with it, red and sharp with scorn for me, scorn that I realise has always been there. Anya thinks I’m a weed, something flimsy and disposable, and she’s right. I don’t stay and stand up for myself. I run mimsily out, take my anger out in tuts and forceful elbows on other bodies in the bus queue. I grip Bethan’s hand too tightly pulling her up the hill away from afterschool, and when we get in I put a bowl of cereal and a carton of milk in front of the television for her, then go straight to the computer and spend three hours composing a long and nasty email to Anya. In it, I point out that

  – my sister is very real

  – Claire is not my ex-girlfriend, and I am not a lesbian

  – her real name was in the paper after the first report on the protests and it couldn’t have just been me who made the connection

  – she is disgustingly ungrateful given that I risked my job to help her

  Because that is how we do things, we cowards. By stealth, behind backs.

  I have a look at the copy of the paper, after I’ve hit send, after I’ve fizzed, after I’ve noticed that Bethan has fallen asleep on the sofa and felt, again, like a terrible mother. Norman and Anya, Anya and Norman. The two people I’d been most angry at, on pages one and four.

  I scoop Bethan up in a move I’ve practised over the years, so gently that she doesn’t wake. I tuck her in and decide to curl myself around her, as though tonight she needs an extra layer of protection.

  Anger

  Alright. It’s going to get political. And angry. I am very, very angry. So those of you who just come here for the pictures of my bum, be warned there’s going to be precious little in this one for you.

  On Tuesday I was on my way to a booking with a new client. I sat in the back of the taxi, checking my phone, idling away the time, when the news filtered through, as it does. A woman who I knew, as we all know each other, by her pseudonym Ravishing Rosa, was dead.

  I never met Rosa, but we’d been in touch online, and I knew her work. I admired her for her keen anger, her sense of justice, her humanity. She was a mother, a great writer, a passionate campaigner and a sex worker, and she was murdered. Not, as you’ve immediately assumed, by a client or a pimp. Like the vast majority of murder victims the world over, Rosa was murdered by someone she knew very well indeed.

  Rosa was murdered by her ex-husband, who had made a number of threats against her, but who she was forced into contact with three times a week by the legal system in her country in order to have access to her children. Rosa lived under a legislative system which has criminalised the purchasing of sex, leading to a rise in rapes and attacks on sex workers as they’re forced into the shadows to carry on living, and which proclaims loudly that sex workers, or ‘people who have been prostituted’, as it would rather have us called, are victims. Victims of the wicked male demand for sex on tap, and victims of their own bad choices. A legal system which looked at a woman who has fled an abusive husband, and ordered him sole custody of the children because she, as a ‘person who had been prostituted’, was suffering from ‘diminished responsibility’. They didn’t conduct any sort of mental health assessment, the people who declared this (although they work for a state which sanctions sexual assault – in the form of forced genital swabs – on sex workers when collecting evidence to pursue their cases). They simply looked at her occupation and declared her not sane. Unable to care for her children. So, when she reported that her husband was making threats upon her life, these threats were not taken seriously. Rosa was told by the legal system that could have stopped this that sex work was a form of self-harm, and as she refused to accept this, she was mentally unstable. There are no other circumstances where a man with a conviction of violence could have been granted sole custody, and no other circumstances where a woman who claimed this man was making threats against her would be forced into continual contact with him.

  Rosa was twenty-six years old.

  And now.

  This is the same system, the same way of looking at sex workers, that certain politicians are trying to introduce in this country today. This month. Despite it not having led to any convictions, in the ten years it’s been part of legislation in Rosa’s home nation. This is the way that a certain percentage of the population of our country – our friends, perhaps, our neighbours, the people we sit beside on the bus – think of us. As babies. Damaged children, incapable of making our own decisions.

  They say they want to bring this legislation in because they want to send a clear message to the men who purchase sex. That message is ‘women are not for sale’. They say that they’re doing this out of concern for us. That this is about equality. That this is about feminism.

  What they’ve forgotten, in their excitement to spread their message, is the day-to-day lives of their poor little victims. Our right to safe working conditions and being treated like the adults we are. Our equality, with every other human being.

  If there’s one thing that Rosa’s case shows, it’s that sex workers need, above all else, to be able to trust and confide in the police. It’s very difficult to do that when even just admitting what your job is makes you immediately an accessory and uncooperative witness to a crime; it’s even harder to do that when it means immediate erosion of your basic rights as an adult.

  The Scottish Union of Sex Workers will be taking part in worldwide protests this Saturday to remember Rosa and make it clear that her death, and the attitudes leading to it, will not be allowed to stand in this country. There’s a complete list of the protest sites across the country here. We expect there to be some photographers there, so please do bring a wig and mask or some sort of disguise if you’re attending. And a red umbrella. Bring a red umbrella.

  Tags: anger activism the business rosa| Comments (279)

  Five

  Mind

  We’re snacking on small-person food tonight. Half-sized white and orange sandwiches with the crust cut off, squares of cheese and tomato pizza, dry slices of cake. The bland things that children are taught to like. Most of the decorations are down now, but the plain grownupness of the room is broken up by scraps of wrapping (pink) and shards of burst balloon (also pink). It’s been a long, loud day – at one point all three of us winced as one at the volume of noise bouncing off the ceiling – but it’s been good. The planned garden treasure-hunt was rained off, but we managed to keep them entertained even as they were caged up. Bethan and Amy, her current best friend, loaned out for the treat of a sleepover, have finally collapsed into sleep after performing speeded-up versions of all the songs from Mary Poppins for us in a state of near hysteria. We’d clapped, applauded, overseen toothbrushing and pyjamas together, like a three-headed parenting machine. Then we sank into companionship in the sofa, me, my dad, my mum. I hadn’t felt as close to them for a long time.

  Dad had gone downstairs for another bottle, and his bringing it back, uncorking and pouring me a glass seems to have been a prearranged signal between the two of them, because the air in the room tilts and they breathe in as one.

  ‘So, we’ve been thinking, lovey.’

  ‘It has occurred to your mother and me that this is a significant – a, well. Yes. Anniversary.’

  Tripping over each other’s sentences like they’ve rehearsed it.

/>   ‘Seven years, Fi. Beth’s birthday means it’s been seven years now.’

  ‘That’s the time, you know. The period of time they need.’

  ‘Need for what?’

  ‘Well, do you remember that the policewoman told us that when we first reported her? No, no, maybe, no. Of course you wouldn’t. None of us were really…’

  I cough, cut through her.

  ‘Are we talking about Rona? Are we? Could you come out and say it if so? And then, could we just drop the subject again? We’ve had a great day today. It’s been one of the first times I can think of that all three – four – of us have properly enjoyed ourselves. As a family. Let’s not let her intrude. Just this once. Come on.’

  Mum is backing down before I’ve finished, ever-conciliatory.

  ‘You’re right, you’re right. Of course, darling. Not today –’

  ‘Why not today?’ says Dad, suddenly, my quiet befuddled dad, rubbing his eyes. ‘Why not, and for all the reasons you’ve just said, Fiona. It’s been seven years, and your mother and I were discussing that that means we can have your sister declared legally dead. What do you think?’

  ‘What?’

  It’s not just what he’s saying. It’s the force of it.

  ‘Have her declared legally dead. And then we get on with our lives. Perhaps we move house. She doesn’t seem to want to come back to us: why should we wait around for her for the rest of our lives? This isn’t healthy for us, especially for you and for Bethan. The two of you need to live in a new place, away from here. Too many memories here: I’m sure you feel it every time you come downstairs: imagine how it feels for us living in it. You’re still young. You should be able to have a proper life, not one your sister dumped on you. What do you think?’

  The effort seems to have exhausted him. He doesn’t like to speak for this long, with this sort of force. Mum is staring as though she’s never really seen him before. She actually looks a little bit turned on.

 

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