Fishnet (11 page)

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 understand 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.

‘I'm fine. Just trying to cool down. Hot up there, eh?'

She nods, moves past me to the toilets, uneasy. After a couple of beats I follow her in, lock myself in a cubicle, listening to the stream of her forthright piss and a hearty, unabashed fart. She rustles. She flushes. The lock clanks open and the tap water runs as she scrubs, thoroughly. Oh Claire, you're so healthy. So clean. So good.

‘Claire! Hi! Well done up there, by the way!' Samira is here, suddenly, outside.

‘Oh, thanks. Thanks. Lovely to see you. Nice dress.'

‘You too. Well-bridesmaided.'

Weak laughs all round and the door slams. I flush, come out. Samira is patting her shine away with powder, the contents of her makeup bag strewn between the sinks.

‘Has she gone?' I pull a comedy face round the side of the toilet door.

‘Oh. Hiya.'

‘Oof. Hot. You looked bloody gorgeous up there by the way, Meer. Loving that frock.'

‘Mm. Thanks. Bethan looks adorable. Anyway, I'm off back up –' and she's trying to scrabble her various powders and liners back into the bag.

‘I mean it. Gorgeous. A cut above that buncha boring fuckers up there! I mean, a bit predictable, trotting out the same old
dances, but it's a by-the-book wedding, eh. And you were making it work for you.'

Her face in the mirror freezes for a second, and her rich voice is clipped-off at the ends when she speaks.

‘It's tradition, Fiona.'

‘Yeah, but you know what I mean. It's just so safe. Exactly what you'd expect at this sort of wedding. I'm not getting at Heath– '

‘I've been having fun.
I've
been having a great time. Maybe you should get up there and dance yourself instead of just leering away at everyone else. Even your six-year-old is having a better time than you.'

I'm not sure what's going on here. My brain sloshes, cheapwinely. I try to make a joke.

‘S'one of the pleasures of a wedding, though, the bitching about people's outfits!'

She whips round, not talking to me in the mirror any more.

‘Could you just say something nice? Just one thing?'

‘Eh?'

‘D'you know, I'd actually been meaning to meet you and talk about this after the hen weekend. But I thought, nah, just leave it. You probably wouldn't even show, anyway.'

‘Meer, what –'

‘I was going to ask you to apologise to Heather. You ruined that weekend for her.'

‘I – what?'

‘Okay, I know, I know the choice of place was a bad one for you, but you didn't make much of an effort to get on with it. Couldn't hide your contempt, could you? And you were downright rude to poor Claire –'

‘Poor Claire? Everyone hated her, Samira.'

‘
You
hated her. And you made sure we all knew it. You made such a big point of not going on that fucking bike ride, too, and then you just disappeared, turned up an hour late to the pole dancing class and wouldn't look at anyone! I mean, why come
at all, eh? Why come at all. Me just left there, all of Heather's workmates staring at me, wondering what kind of freaks she called her oldest friends. Why come?'

‘For the same reason you did. For Heather. Loyalty… the past.'

‘Loyalty? You've been staring at Heather's dress with this horrid little sneer on your face all day. I know it doesn't fit her, hey, but what if she'd caught you? How would you feel, seeing someone looking at you like that on your wedding day? Just couldny be bothered to hide it, could you? Don't think I'd want your sort of loyalty at my wedding.'

‘Did Heather – did Heather say this to you? Did she send you?'

‘Of course she didn't. Heather? Come on. I saw it with my own eyes well enough. My own eyes saw quite enough to get this angry, on my friend's behalf.'

Samira's face, this redness, this spite. I don't know it.

‘Listen, I had a lot of stuff going on that weekend that I have no intention of apologising for. Bethan was ill, for a start, and as you said, the place isn't exactly good for me. As you don't have kids you won't understand…'

‘I won't understand how hard it is for you, as a single parent, yeah yeah. Know what? Heather and I have done nothing but understand. For six fucking years. We've offered you solid gold support whenever you've needed it, and we've done that without expecting anything,
precisely
because we know how hard it is for you. We've reminded ourselves of it every time you've turned down invitations, cancelled on us at the last minute, or been fuck all use when we've had problems of our own. But after that hen weekend, I think we both realised we're gonny have to admit to ourselves that you just don't actually like us that much. In fact, you don't like anything, do you?'

Upstairs, applause as another dance finished. Footsteps on the stairs outside.

‘Come on, Samira. Of course I like you. I like you fine. You've
maybe had a hard week. We've both had a lot to drink. This isn't you talking.'

‘How would you know this isn't me? How would you know? Because we send each other emails once a month, see each other what, three, four times a year? Because we went to school together a decade ago? People have kids all the time and they don't just
disappear
!'

‘Yeah. Nice choice of words there. Thanks.'

‘Oh, for- you know what? Let's just leave it, eh? Let's just go. I won't email you again, and you won't respond two weeks later saying sorry, you totally meant to get back to me sooner. This isn't a friendship. Let's just leave it.'

She scoops up the last of her makeup and storms out of the door, nudging past the person who's coming in, muttering a quick sorry.

‘Ah. There you are.'

It's the older woman from the table, the one I'd left Beth with.

‘Your daughter was wondering where you'd got to?'

My big flushed face, in the mirror.

Private

The café Sonja/Anya picked is written in a language I don't speak.

There's some sort of thrashing girly punk music on the stereo. It's awful. Really. And all the people in here are thin, and there's something strange about their clothes, their hair. Some sort of structured fashionableness that I just don't get. It's not like those places Samira likes, where even though the people are all thin, they're gelled and groomed and manicured. Sure, the, ah,
clientele
are still beautiful, but there's something just
off
about the cuts of their fringes, their shabby knitwear, their makeup.

Their spectacles, where they wear them, seem to have been cast-off by Deirdre Barlow from
Coronation Street
.

She is keeping me waiting.

The abrasive music stops, fades into something lisped in a Scottish accent. At least it's quiet. I look at the menu. There is no meat on the menu. Beside me, a boy with the raggedy beginnings of beard types into a silver Apple laptop, his face glowing with electronic purpose. Under masses of eyeliner and coiled, streaming black hair, a girl picks at her phone and a salad, intermittently.

‘Hi, what can I get you?'

A tired, skinny girl with a faint twang of something Australian, a stripy t-shirt, a pen behind her ear.

‘I'm waiting for someone,' I say. ‘Just a white coffee, please.'

‘No probs. Just to check – you know we only serve soy milk here?'

‘Oh this?' says a girl's voice. ‘Vintage. Fleamarket in Brooklyn.'

My lunch hour ticks away.

She is definitely keeping me waiting. Playing trust games.

Look at these people. Look at them closely. I'd assumed at first glance that they were all art students, loafers, killing time in their inoffensive vegan playrooms, their dressing up boxes, before having to come out, blinking, into the drag and assimilate,
join the rest of us at our imitation plywood desks, our wheezing black computers. But they're not. There are wrinkles here, grey streaks. And they aren't just here for pleasure. The woman with the salad takes a call.

‘God darling, if they won't move on the matched funding we're going to have to ask them to reduce the number of performers they're flying over. Could we ask a local choir to do the choral number?'

Across the way, there's a couple I'd assumed were out on a date, the boy with thick specs, sharply quiffed like he's Buddy Holly or something, the girl with fake eyelashes and a fur coat draped over her seat. But he's asking her questions and there's a digital tape recorder sitting between them. She's got a tiny blue sequin stuck on the end of each flick of her eyeliner. It's a Tuesday lunchtime.

I'm suddenly overwhelmed by the idea of other people my own age, getting out, experimenting, making things new for themselves. Not just surrendering to a box and a screen and the first steady income they're offered. A great long line of twentysomethings, thirtysomethings even, with their eyeliner and their strangely-cut pretensions and their vintage and their Brooklyn and their laptops and their busy, busy lives. The instinctive sneer and bristle in me melding into something else, and I'm ashamed of the thin, plasticky material of my supermarket-bought work trousers. That's what I'm aware of. The slight itch around my thighs and knees from it.