Fishnet

by Kirstin Innes

  He’s unzipped and still not quite hard in my fist now, so I’m forcing my hand up and down, pinning his arms above his head.

  ‘Come on. Come on you bastard. Yeah. Yeah,’ I can hear myself muttering.

  There is no erection. There is even less erection.

  ‘Look. Fiona. Look. Can we stop? Can we just –’

  These things my hands are doing. These things my mouth is doing.

  We lie there for a while. He says comforting things about it probably being the drink, and I realise that my skirt has ridden up around my waist in front of Graeme from my work and hustle to pull it down.

  ‘God. Sorry. Sorry. M’drunk, eh. I should go. Sorry.’

  He puts an arm over me, reaches round and tucks some hair behind my ear. He kisses my face, Graeme-from-my-work does.

  ‘Hey. Hey. It’s okay, Fiona. It’s okay. You’re just upset. It’s been a hard week for you. Listen. Listen. Why don’t I do something nice for you, mm? Let me.’

  He kisses my neck and gently tugs my skirt up again, fumbles over my new-bought knickers and struggles a little to untie them at the sides. There is very little hair there any more – I’ve been experimenting with my razor. This is Anya’s – Sonja’s – look, and my favourite so far: everything gone bar a small dark triangle, its point blunted just above my slit. He runs a thumb over it clumsily, gasps, lunges.

  Then the sudden wetness of tongue, spreading over me, broken uncomfortably by his cold sharp breath. A feeble lapping around all the wrong bits; the sharp sting of the booze from his mouth on the thinner skin. Graeme has absolutely no idea what he’s doing here, but I’m touched. He’s trying to make me feel better.

  I wind fingers into his hair and begin to rock and stiffen against his mouth. I moan a little, just to encourage him, feeling absolutely nothing. The ceiling has been artificially lowered, has crusty Artex sworls and tufts all over. Why did anyone ever think that was attractive?

  ‘Mmm. Mmm. Oh god Graeme. That’s so good.’

  I raise my voice a bit, and through the wall ‘the boys’ whoop and laugh. Graeme, encouraged, laps harder.

  I shuffle sexy images. Anya, her clitoral piercing exposed. Those two men in that hotel, their hands and mouths on me. Holly on all fours, looking back over her shoulder, mouthing fuckyoulookinat. I imagine getting my own photoshoot done, revealing myself slowly to a cameraman, showing more and more, and I find I’m rubbing myself, my neck and breasts, through my top. I imagine going to a hotel room with a stranger, that it just becomes about a cock, about a fuck, that it’s anonymous. Behind the camera, the man has taken his cock out and is stroking it because I’m so fucking hot –

  The pillow is between my teeth. From the living room, the sound of cheering. Perhaps I did that out loud. Graeme is sitting up, looking pleased with himself.

  The sort of man who wants to make a recently-fired woman come. The sort of man who will pull his co-worker out from under fallen bricks. All that time I’d idly dismissed him as nothing much, and there was all this depth and goodness in him. I want to do more for him. I sit up and kiss my own taste off his mouth.

  ‘Right,’ I tell him. I cup his face. ‘I want you to tell me exactly what you’d like me to do for you.’

  Remembering his emails, I let my hand slap him, just a little this time.

  ‘Bad boy. What do you like? Tell me. We’re going to do what you want. My little pervert.’ It’s a command, whispered, but with affection and through a smile, and he responds. This. This is how you do it, I think.

  I wake up as dawn is beginning to prickle through his curtains. His cheeks are pink and fat, and one of his thumbs is lodged in his mouth. There’s a decision to be made here. I can either curl into his arms, ride the hangover out when we wake together, let him see me lurching and ill, and make arrangements to go to the cinema some time, maybe get a pizza. He’s nice. He’s caring. You could do a lot worse, girl.

  But. But but but.

  People fuck for lots of different reasons: the taking or providing of comfort is just one. Out of gratefulness can be another. It doesn’t all have to stem from actual lust: sometimes the simulation of it will do just as well. I might have been pretending half of that last night, but it doesn’t change the connection we made, or the things we trusted each other to do.

  Gently, so as not to wake him, I unknot the plain work-tie still attaching his other wrist to the bed frame before I leave.

  Outside, the Saturday morning streets are sleepy. In the distance, industrial drones from the motorised road cleaners scooping up payday-Friday debris; the abandoned fish suppers, the condoms. Not my job anymore. I smile up at the sunrise and feel like something’s changed in me.

  Mind

  Beth had been building something on the floor, her back straight up against the sofa, her hair streaming over my knee. I was making tiny plaits in it, stroking her furzy curls smooth as TV flowed over us.

  This calm, after school, before dinner, time just to enjoy my girl. Space where we’re quiet together, resting easily against each other. It happens in time that previously belonged to the office, had been held for me by afterschool minders. I’d been quiet around the house during the day while she was at school. I’d cleaned, shopped, organised games and surprises, bought treats, new books, new toys, waited for her coming home like a moony new lover. The computer, that hard little portal connecting me to the outside world, to all the mess and fuss I’d created for myself, stayed closed. If you don’t allow yourself to think about any of it, don’t allow it in, it can’t touch you. That was a revelation, actually, that if you just pull away, opt out, the world will carry on quite happily without you. Graeme called me, once. I let it go to voicemail, and didn’t listen to the message, and then I didn’t have to think about that, either.

  Beth had been opening out under this new sun-lamp of attention I could give her, telling me more about her day, creating jokes with me. She’s louder, laughs more, asks more questions. I don’t – the other thing I was trying not to think of is that it would have to stop, and soon. My redundancy money would only last us so long, especially at the rate I was spending, and Mum and Dad can’t support the two of us. There will have to be another job, chosen as arbitrarily as the last one and as dull as the last one, because what else can I do, now? I’m twenty-nine years old with a limp CV of low-order admin jobs and temping, and four months as an intern at a publishing company before all of this. I have no particular talents or transferable skills, or if I do I’ve never had a chance to discover them –

  – Beth wheeled her head round, hissing ‘Ow! You’re hurting me.’ I’d been pulling her hair too tightly without realising. Now, I’ve played this scene back in my head, over and over, and I think it started here, meaning the fault was ultimately mine: her scornful mouth and the knit of her eyebrows channelled Rona, again. This had been happening more and more. The resemblance has always been there, yes, but it was just the markings of the tribe, denoting her as ours, of our family. Now, as her features shift out of babyhood, Rona’s there, almost all of the time. It smarts, if I think about it. That’s the hardest one not to think about.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky,’ I’d said, irritated with all three of us.

  ‘It’s not being cheeky to say you’re hurting me.’

  ‘Bethan Cam– Bethan Leonard. What have I told you about answering back?’

  ‘What have I told you about answering back?’

  And she was so exactly Rona then, right down to the high-pitched sneery voice that used to drive me impotently angry when the tired old repetition trick was played on me as an older sibling. So exactly Rona that I struggled for breath. Bethan shrunk small again, and neither of us really knew what to say.

  ‘Apologise for that. Now.’

  The dance across her face, as she decided to push it further. This was new ground for us, so her ‘no’ didn’t really have the courage of its convictions. It was enough, though. Had I been spoiling her, these last couple of weeks? Had she stopped resp
ecting me? Was that it?

  ‘You go to your room. You go to your room immediately. And you sit there, and you don’t even think about playing with anything, any of your toys. You will sit on the chair and you won’t come out until you can tell me why that was wrong and that you’re sorry.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Did you hear me? I said now.’

  Her arms and legs flounced, the strop exaggerated, but she turned and left the room. There was something still to come, though.

  ‘Fine. Fine. You’re not my real mum, anyway.’

  – oh, you’d known this was coming, hadn’t you? Admit it. Always somewhere there, at the back of your head, the anticipation of this moment. No matter how needily I court her affection, you knew she’d always really known the truth, was just waiting to grow into it. I’m not her real mum. You are –

  I’d tuned in to myself screaming at her back.

  ‘What did you say? What did you say? What did you say?’

  Then I was sitting on the floor, pulling my knees in on myself. Then I’d started shouting, through her closed door.

  ‘Maybe you’d better go off and live with your real mum then, Bethan. I’m sure she’d love that. On you go. She really wants you to. That’s why you’re here, with me.’

  Who told her? Did she overhear some conversation between Mum and Dad? Was it someone from the school – ideas flicking, a flash-fast shuffle, all the ways they could have found out. Someone with a grudge against me, someone in on it, like Samira? Was it something I’d said? Had she found something? Who told her?

  And she shouted back, through the door.

  ‘My real mum’s a princess! My real mum is a Barbie Princess!’

  I think the silence scared her, in the end. The door clicked open, anyway, and even from the place on the floor I’d curled up on, even with my eyes closed I could feel the soft flutter of her panicky movements.

  ‘Mum. Mummy. I’m sorry. Mum, wake up. Mum. I was being bad. I didn’t mean it. You are my real mum. Mummy. Mummy!’

  Eventually, she’d lain down beside me on the floor, pulled my arm over her, sobbed in time with me, and I’d scooped her in and held her tight.

  Body

  The skirt is tight and short and bright and she’s right, it fits beautifully. I just stare and stare, fascinated by the curve and shape of my own backside reflected back to me across three mirrored cubicle walls. It’s a betrayal, though, and I know it. It’s a betrayal of principles I’d held to myself for some time.

  Her hair smooth and her makeup thick and lovely, the assistant calls through the curtain, coaxing me in the faux-intimate language of girly bonding.

  ‘Well, come on out and let me see you, then! Aw, that is so totally you! You’ve got such a great figure! You need to show it off a bit more, eh? Look at your bum in this! Here, hang on.’

  I can smell her perfume and hairspray as she pulls a scarf from the rack in the Personal Shopping Boudoir and knots it round my neck; more of the strange closeness of strange women that I’m getting used to this week. The last time I felt it was in the beautification scrum at Heather’s hen party, the cottage with its four mirrors to fifteen women, cans and tubs and tubes and sprays and pots rammed onto every flat surface, the chemical-sweet air hanging heavy on us. Heather’s friend Kelly was the furthest gone, up an hour before the rest of us and setting about her own face with the precision of a surgeon, twice a day, swabbing, plucking, squeezing, a different lotion to be applied to every contour. I’d watched her from my sleeping bag on the first day, woken by the faint hum of her straightening irons. The fascinating foreign ritual, smooth, practised movements as she bent to open and then close each tub in turn. The silliness of it all.

  Heather had bullied and pouted Samira and me into a sad semblance of glamour at school, coaxed us into keeping watch in Boots while she slipped kohl and bruise-purple lipstick up her sleeves for us, although really our places in the social order had already been allotted and neither Samira’s natural beauty nor my enthusiastic use of blusher would bust us out of that. Our jobs were to get good exam results, which we both did.

  Two years after we’d all left school, Samira sent word up from Durham that she had no intention of being a doctor and had decided to move into public relations. She’d hit some sort of restart button whilst down there, discovered the uses of being appreciated only on the surface level, just as a pretty face. Or that’s how I saw it, entrenching myself further in a self-righteous belief in my cleverness, even though I was struggling with my courses. Samira, from the centre of a bubbling, popping social life, began to resent her wasted teens, and the way I still personified them. We would sit together, grouped around a table at occasional Christmasses when we were all home, privately disapproving of each other, Heather (ever constant Heather, unchanged in her small vanity) our only conduit to conversation, and a decade’s worth of rot set itself about us from then.

  So it became a deliberate choice for me, not to dolly up. It became one of the only things I was really sure of: that I could see through the beauty myths fed to other women, that I had no need to waste my money and time on these rituals and potions. Back at home for the holidays, I’d cultivated it as a way to annoy my sister, my preternaturally wise sister, her breasts stretching the word b a b e on her t-shirt.

  ‘God. Don’t you ever pluck your eyebrows? You look like a yeti.’

  ‘I’d rather look like a yeti than a vapid tart.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘No, fuck you.’

  In my final year of university, I found a boyfriend who agreed with me. Brian was a member of the Socialist Party, and the first man I’d ever met who called himself a feminist. He felt things far more intensely than me; while I had always been content to understand the theory, Brian liked practical elements: he organised demonstrations and was earnestly committed to the principles of the female orgasm. He encouraged me to throw away the few sops I’d made to ‘conventional femininity’: my razors, face powder, mascara, deodorant. There was nothing wrong with my smell, or the way my hair sat naturally, he said. The girl in his politics class he dumped me for had beautifully sculpted eyebrows, and wore L’Air du Temps.

  If I really believed any of this, of course, that wouldn’t have been a turning point. Eight years on, I would have become Claire, sensible and defiantly hairy while henz around me clucked and pouted. Instead, I wear enough makeup to pass in the world, at work, even out dancing at a hen night; just enough to be ignored, overlooked as neither beautiful nor freakishly insubordinate. Last place in the pecking order round the mirror, but still being seen to do it. I shave my legs for nobody in the shower every day, and I have done since I was fourteen, hacking chunks of accidental skin with my father’s razor.

  As the woman in the beautician’s rips the strip off my face (and I notice a couple of the pores above my eye prick with blood before the tears start, and she coos to comfort me, don’t worry darlin, it only really stings the first time) it occurs that at least I’m feeling something.

  For some reason, this needs more justification than the underwear, than shaving my pubes. The haircut; the free session with the personal shopper; the makeover at the beauty counter, me grown and freakish in a line of teenagers. Perhaps it’s because I’m finally altering the outside of me, and it feels like a declaration to the world, not just a secret to hold close to my skin. I have allotted a certain amount of my redundancy pay to it.

  Perhaps it’s because, when I walk into my parents’ kitchen that evening, my dad scalds himself with the pasta-water and my mother bites her lip, hard, before they tell me how lovely I look.

  I know what I look like. I also know what I’m doing.

  There’s not really that much to all this, Rona, not really. Is this what you did? You just drew the person you wanted to be on top and then became it?

  Mind

  ‘Oh wow, I totally didn’t know you were there! Hi! Can I speak to Dad?’

  ‘No, you can’t. He’s out.’
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  ‘…’

  ‘You didn’t come to my graduation.’

  ‘No… I got your messages though. Couldn’t get the time off work, yeah?’

  ‘Jesus, Rona, I could really have done with the support. Dad was being…Dad, Mum was carrying on as though he wasn’t, and it was fucking awful.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry Fi. I’m sorry.’

  Sigh. Pause.

  ‘How are you, anyway?’

  ‘Oh great, great. Working, like, all the time, but great. This city’s amazing, and the social life after hours is intense! Amazing clubbing. I love it here, yeah? So beautiful. Nothing like a fresh start, right! Amazing, seriously.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Great. How’s. How’s – the boyfriend?’

  ‘We split up.’

  ‘Right. Sorry. Oh well, plenty –’

  ‘Look, Rona, I’m going to have to go. Please give Dad a phone sometime. I think he’d really appreciate it. He’s not so well at the moment.’

  Pause. Sigh.

  ‘And he misses you. She does too, you know that.’

  ‘Yeah, I will. Totally. Couple of days or so. It’s just been so busy. You know. New place, you want to live it to the full.’

  ‘Rona? I’m moving back home properly next month. Got a flatshare in the West End, it’s nice. Nice. You’ll have to come through and see me? Or maybe I could. To you. Show me all the good bars. We can have a wee drink, talk properly? If that’s ok. I’d like that.’

  ‘Me too. Totally. Yeah, that’d be good. Great. I’ll be back for Christmas so maybe then, yeah? Anyway, gotta go! Running late!’

  Body

  Our clanging non-connection echoes off the past and the haughty architecture of this place that Rona once lived in and I could not. Basslines and saccharine-high vocals thumping, screeching from doorways tonight, the street pulsing with wealth. Gorgeous bodies spotlit through windows, clinking glasses, laughing, and I realise I am always looking for my sister on these sorts of streets: streets commandeered for pleasure, for the loosening of ties, the booze-buzz, the suggestion of sex. Whether you’re in a winter-sports hub or a capital city, the motivation’s still the same. I watch a blonde woman in a black dress let a fake laugh warp her face, throwing back her head, patting a suited forearm. She’s creased, skeletal, aristocratic cheekbones then a hollow. The stupid spark of a thought that I might have found the mysterious Camilla, first time, dissolves as my arm is bumped, gently, by a near identical blonde being escorted along the pavement.