‘So. Why did you ask me to come?’
She clears her throat and stares around her for a bit.
‘Well, I wanted to offer you a job, actually.’
‘Oh. I didn’t think I was your type.’
That’s too far for her, and I should have known it – she can take some teasing these days, but she always backs down when confronted with it.
‘Not – don’t. No. A prop – a different kind of job. I wondered if you would consider coming to work on a new project with me. As a liaison officer. Liaison co-ordinator, in fact. Between the women and, well, and us. I think you know about the new steering group I’m heading. Mentioned it a bit in the last email? I’ve been taking on board what you said, about not being able to help people if we aren’t, well, in conversation with them. I know you don’t agree with – with what we’re trying to do, but there’s a discussion to be had that we’re not having. And you’re the right person to start it.’
When we began this, we were stilted by professionalism, and by the disconnect of our first encounters. Claire was heading up a group who were lobbying parliament to have the Ways Out scheme enforced across the country, and trying to build support for criminalising the purchase of sex, criminalising our clients. She is a Big Deal now, is Claire. She writes op eds in the local paper; she has a byline photo. She is the enemy, and I am fraternising with her.
Ways Out isn’t working, though. They’ve kept it quiet, but we know. Any of the girls still in the Drag prefer to go to the needle exchange or one of the homeless shelters for their mid-shift cup of tea. Most of them have retreated indoors, online, and with no bond of trust between them and the Ways Out team, it’s very difficult to reach them, check that everything’s alright.
My blog about Ways Out – basically an interview with Suzanne – got a lot of hits, and the Scottish Union of Sex Workers asked if I would write a press release for them. Claire figured out my identity pretty quickly, which meant I had to change my working name, re-do my website. I’d only just started out then, and hating Claire for her bustle and the hassle that came with her was a sturdy, familiar totem to take with me as I crossed over into the djinn world.
Then we met, at Heather and Ross’s housewarming; were forced face to face with each other at the buffet. It’s easier to rage and storm at an idea of a person; when your eyes meet over a sausage roll platter, sustaining that anger becomes near impossible. A philosophy I was still learning three years ago, when this happened; I live by it now. Maybe not specifically the bit about the sausage rolls.
Because this is the other part of what I do, now. I agitate. I write press releases and tip off journalists, from behind yet another pseudonym. I organise protests and petitions and online campaigns, curled up round my daughter, in front of our new fire, as she blips and bleeps at her friends and the cat shunts his head at our legs. My blogs are being read, not just by potential clients and online pervs after a wank.
Thanks to social networking, we are a collective stretching around the world – we don’t work alone any more. We have a voice and we’re not going to be silenced. Your local government wants to raid the brothels it winked at last year, to make itself look active? We’ll make sure you have a quote from the women who work there, about how this affects them. A tabloid newspaper outs an escort? We’re condemning it. Loudly. Vocally. The internet has given us the space to talk and the ability to be heard, without outing ourselves. Sex workers’ voices, and the things they have to say, gradually, eventually being taken seriously. I thought if I could study it, study the way that laws are made and council policies are decided, I’d be much better placed to help. This, I think, is what I want to do, in the long term. Sex work has got me there.
And yet, if you pushed me on it, pushed me not that hard at all, I’d admit that I’m doing penance for Anya. I’m trying to make things right with her, wanting her, somewhere, wherever she is, to see all the good I’m doing without my having to tell her, thank you, and I’m so sorry. Trying to deserve it.
I think about Anya quite a lot. The strength of her, over that lunch we had. Her absolute conviction that this job was just like any other. That you could stay sane and whole and still do this. I wonder how much of that was bravado, a front for a nosy stranger. I think about that whenever I wrap my legs round a client who hasn’t engaged with me as a person, as I’m tuning my brain off while they’re pumping away into their whore fantasy. But that’s the trade I’ve made. And let’s be honest: I wasn’t really whole to begin with.
‘The thing is,’ I say to Claire, ‘I have a job. I know you don’t understand this and you probably won’t, ever, but it’s a job I actually enjoy. It’s not something I’m going to do forever, but right now it suits me. It supports my study and allows me to spend proper time with my daughter. I appreciate the offer, but –’
‘What I’m offering is a good job, Fi.’
She doesn’t even notice that her emphasis makes me wince.
‘It’s full time, though?’
‘Yes. I mean, I’m sure you could job-share, if you’d rather.’
‘I have college. I’d have to. On a pro-rata salary of?’
‘Entry at this level is £20,000 full time.’
‘Claire. I make almost twice that a year for far fewer hours.’
And she touched my arm again.
‘I know we’ve had our fights, Fiona, but I’ve come to care a lot about you. And I know what you’ll say, but it terrifies me that you put yourself in danger like this, all the time.’
And there we are, back at the entry point, this thing she’s said so many times to me and thought about even more. This is why we can’t be friends, Claire, I want to say. Because you’ll never, ever get past the things you think you know.
I understand the pain that the people who love me are in when they think about my life. I can’t give them the same sort of assurances of my security that they’d have if I still worked in an office, and I know that’s selfish.
‘You can’t promise me that,’ my mum said, shrill, after I’d told her, after I’d said ‘I’m safe’. We were unpacking boxes in the sunny kitchen of my new little house, just the two of us. Dad had taken Bethan down to the loch, to stop her getting underfoot. I’d been deliberately trying not to spend time with Mum by myself, and six months’ worth of unspoken questions – about my ‘management consultancy’ job, about how I was really affording the rent – filled the room as we moved around in silence.
There are various schools of thought about coming out to loved ones. I didn’t sit her down, prepare the ground, suggest she read certain books; I didn’t know I was going to say it at all until it came out, in a rush.
‘Mum, I’m working as an escort.’
She nodded, slowly. ‘I wondered. I did wonder.’
She didn’t cry, although I could tell she was close. We sat down in the garden, in the autumn sunlight. I’d poured us both a whisky, with a half smile, trying to make a joke she didn’t want to get. The things I had to say, over and over, were:
Nobody is forcing me.
I’m not on drugs.
I always take precautions.
It’s temporary: it’s just to make enough money while I’m studying, to give us a good foundation for whatever comes next.
I’m safe. I’m safe.
‘We shouldn’t tell your father,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t think we should.’
For the rest of the afternoon, once they’d come back, she was jumpy and sharp with Dad, too fussy with Beth, didn’t really look at me and made him leave early.
She worries about me. All the time. I know she does. But a few weeks later, she sent me this.
I don’t know whether this is a generational thing. We thought of prostitution as something that fundamentally harms all women, darling. I marched for equality with you in a sling, in the Eighties. I don’t see how I reconcile that with this, and maybe I never will. But then maybe I gave up the right to sit in moral judgement on an
yone else some time ago.
I know you, though. I know that you think things through; I know that you’re practical and responsible, and I know you will have thought about this. I know your commitment to Beth, too, and that you wouldn’t ever take on anything you thought would offer a risk to her.
And maybe, to be honest, I can see how you got here. I’ve felt trapped by childcare and terrible jobs. With me, it led to an explosion that I still regret – you saw that, and you’ve made this choice, as an adult, to deal with it differently. I have to respect that.
Please stay safe, my darling. Please.
Oh, I don’t know. I wish it wasn’t this way and there are some things I can’t ever be totally easy with.
But I will always be your
Mum
Heather, of course, had already been thinking the worst for some time. There was no fight there. I saw her in town one day, long after she’d given up trying to call me, stopped sending emails. I was coming straight from a client, on my way to a class. She was on a lunch break, walking down the street crying, unaware of the thousand gossipy eyes on her. I’d got her in my arms before she’d really even taken me in, and over lumpy coffee in the lounge of an old man’s bar, it all came spilling out.
Heather’s fertility problems offered me a chance to put things right. For the past three years, I’ve been able to reinvent myself as a friend – a real friend, not just so-called on Facebook – and finally pay back her years of devoted service, caretaking our relationship while I was all but absent. This bridge was still unburned, somehow, no thanks to me. I’ve researched acupuncture and alternative diets for her, gone on yoga retreats and spa weekends with her, held her after each failed round of IVF. I’ve listened: it’s a skill I had to learn, in this line of work. I began to appreciate all the things about her I’d found so easy to shrug off, from her sense of drama to her dogged loyalty. The very basic, good, Heatherness of her. That moment when I sat down at a café table, and she said nothing, just slid a sonogram picture across to me with the most beautiful smile and I knocked the salt and pepper onto the floor flying round to get to her: the sharp beauty of it still makes me breathless. What a thing it is to love someone that much.
I do like to be needed. I’ve realised that now.
By the time she could focus on anything else, she’d got used to the solid fact of me. That I was there, that I was not damaged, not coerced. She had strange, clear moments of fatalism during her lowest points, totally uncharacteristic, that I still think about.
‘It’s all very well and good trying to be the ideal, innit Fi? Yeah. You get married, you go to work every day, you don’t break the law. You do all the things they tell you. Bullshit bullshit. Maybe you lose your job. Maybe your body doesn’t work like it should. Maybe your sister runs off and leaves you with her kid. Life just keeps bloody happening in all the ways it’s not supposed to, and we’re supposed to stick to the plan? Fuck that. Fuck that, hon.’
And then there’s Claire. I will say this for her: she means well. She means so well. Claire genuinely just wants to look after people. She’s honest; no matter how officious the delivery, I can’t work up to fury at her. Sometimes I turn it round, patronise her right back, and she bristles at it, writes me off as another made-up airhead looking down on her. But yet we keep coming back to each other.
‘I’ll think about the job,’ I say, finally. ‘Send me the details. And let’s talk about something else. Anything else.’
This morning’s man. His fat, jabbing fingers and his lazy assumptions about the world, his place in it, and me. I will think about it.
The sun has begun to come out, burning the cloud cover away, and cut out against a very bright blue, the granite towers and crumbling red sandstone blocks of the International Financial District look almost beautiful. I tuck my arm into Claire’s: she starts at the contact, then her tendons relax around me, and we walk.
Future
The next morning, she’s laid out on the pillow beside you. Sunlight pouring through the white sheet you’ve hung in the window, singing off the turquoises and pinks of your summer clothes, hung up on the wall and draped over the one white chair that does you for bedroom furniture. The blankets smell yeasty. She moans a single note, tries to pull you back in, and it’s as though your body retches. Everything is light and warm and pleasantly coloured, and you’ve just realised it’s repulsing you.
You sit on the floor in the corner, stretching your back at the wall and keeping a wary eye on the bed, in case she moves. You’re running the split ends of your hair between your fingers – so much easier out here, to let it go – and it occurs that this may all be byproduct. There has not been enough sleep, lately. Your world is fast and wild and chemical and its nights turn daylight all too quickly. It’s possible you’ve only been asleep for a couple of hours, but the alarm clock is on Camilla’s side of the bed and you don’t want to risk waking her.
Last night, her face up in yours, purple and screaming, the spit flying. She’d pushed you up against a fence, on the way home. You’d refused to get on the tram with her in that mood, because she would embarrass you. This is the thing with the very posh, you’d said. Nobody ever taught you manners for being out in public, did they? Because you don’t truly believe the great unwashed are people, so it doesn’t matter what you do in front of them. That was when she pushed you up against the fence, and you remembered your own parents in that sort of position. And probably you knew then, but there was too much static in your head to figure it out.
The baby in the upstairs flat starts crying again, its weird high wail. It doesn’t sound like any baby you’ve ever heard: more like a ghost, or the wind hitting an old building. And she’s stirring – you stay absolutely still, every naked muscle frozen against the wall – and she’s grunting, pulling the pillow over her head. She’ll wake soon, though, and it will force everything wide open again. Neither of you can back down from these things any more. The lightness, the sneering at the world, the complicity that bonded you so tightly in the first place, rotted somewhere. Probably, if you’re honest, it had gone before you even got to Berlin.
You pull a faded cotton dress over your head. It was hers originally, but orange always makes her look sallow, so it came to you instead. All your clothes have merged together anyway, now that you’re the same skinny size, now that you have the same taste. No bra, no knickers. Time for those later. You move quickly and silently, stuffing roughly half the clothes into your old holdall. You take that blue necklace and the leather sandals. There’s enough left there for her, it’s fine. You stand in the doorway for just a second, then you turn and you go.
Out in the street without having even brushed your teeth, the breeze drifting lazily up your skirt, cold there. You don’t even pause, make your way straight to the main road and hop on a the first tram coming, because something in you has already decided you’re going to Rene’s studio in Kreuzberg. The seat bristles prick your bare thighs, but you quite like it. Perhaps Rene will still be in bed, and you can climb in with him for a couple of hours, the slack warmth of another body.
It had been the stretchmarks. The sly, laughing allusion to your stretchmarks. And you knew why she’d done it, too. She was out of her depth here, Miss Camilla of the air kissing and the impeccably U manners, the upper-class druggy. The lack of codes and castes amongst Berlin’s DJs and artists and hedonists baffled her; stripped of her connections she’d become scared and clingy while you’d bloomed with it. Last night, you’d sat at a table holding court – your German was getting better every day, too – and exciting, intelligent people had laughed at your jokes and you’d felt yourself flying and swooping and soaring, and she’d felt it too, and she’d grabbed for you.
‘Careful lovely,’ she’d said, ice-voiced as you were standing, gesticulating, warming to your point, ‘don’t want to bust those stretchmarks back open, mm?’
And in front of everyone, she’d patted your stomach.
That one true thing th
at bonded you and Camilla together now was your past, and her part in it. Was her silence on it, you realised now: once you’d got through the dark, screaming period you now knew was post-natal depression, she’d known what you wanted without you really having to ask, had adapted herself slickly around the new self you’d decided to be and given no indication she’d ever known different, even when you were alone together, wrapped up in the tenderness of a late-night love. She’d let you think you could trust her, for years, then last night ripped it all open, revealing that she would hold it over you whenever she needed to. Your body had moved quickly this morning because it already knew what your conscious self was still slowly working out. You couldn’t ever escape it if she was still in your life.
Rene’s studio is at the top of a graffiti-splashed block above a kebab shop, with bikes chained to the rusting bannisters all the way up. His door doesn’t lock properly, just takes one sturdy push to open, and you follow the smell of frying down the hall to the kitchen space, its basic Calor stove and ripped-out appliances. Rene is grooving on the spot to his own silent beat, spatula in hand and a pair of greying boxers on.
‘Tasha! And looking golden like the morning, eh?’
He reaches over and pulls you in for a long, hard kiss on the mouth.
Camilla hates Rene. It’s the dreadlocks, you think, the defiance of them, the scummy Kreuzberg squat and the oldhippie wisdom. This is a man who will never make enough money to afford your services, not even enough to pay you for the paintings you’ve posed for, and neither is he cool enough to be of use on the scene. But he’s attractive, even if he is old, and he can always make you laugh. It’s healthy to fuck people who aren’t paying, sometimes, just because you like them. You shouted that at her last night, too.
In his bed, the rough mattress on the floor, surrounded by the thin, high smell of turps, you map out the possibilities together on his fingers and your thighs. Lisbon, you think. You’ve heard amazing things about the clubs out there, and Rene has a number of friends who should be able to put you up, at least for the first couple of nights.
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