Fishnet (18 page)

But Sonja, I hear you saying. This is all very well but you've been talking about this Sanctuary for a while now. How does this affect you, as an independent escort, or me, as one of your clients/a fellow independent escort or parlour sex worker/an interested bystander?

Well, Ways Out will eventually affect all of us. It's the first stage in legislation to criminalise the purchasing of sex between consenting adults – which, as I don't have to remind anyone who reads this, is perfectly legal at the moment. It's also the first stage in a citywide scheme to infantilise and further stigmatise sex workers. I've written at length about this in the past: see
here
and
here.

Which is why I invite you to join me in occupational action. They can't knock down the Sanctuary and take that first step as long as there are people inside, demonstrating its use. We could use as many bodies as possible down here: there will be filming, so bring any sort of disguises you feel are necessary. Gathering point available if you leave your email address in a comment.

Comments (6)
PunterJohn
Go on yersel Sonja! If anyone can teach these bastards a lesson it's my favourite domme… er, Mistress. ;-p
19.06 on 03/07/08

Mr Enigma
I don't really see what business it is of the councils. This is persecution and its outrageous. I bet you girls could get together and mount a legal defence (I can think of some other things I'd like you to mount!!)
that this is an enfringement of basic human rights. Typical of the nanny state – surely there's a better use of council time than interfering in what goes on between two consenting adults???
21.45 on 03/07/08

JustAnotherClient
Sex workers perform an invaluable service in society that is not appreciated. Sex workers have been there for me at my lowest points, providing companionship when no-one else would help me. They are there for lonely and desperate people. They should be treated like queens. I salute you Sonja and the work you are doing.
02.28 on 04/07/08

Merry Marie
Well said love. Can't make it down today but with you in spirit. Solidarity with all my ladies down there. Sharing this on my blog. xxx
06.32 on 04/07/08

Albert
Can I enquire as to whether you have an upper and lower age limit for the clients you are willing to see?
07.11 on 04/07/08

Scandi Sonja
Hello Albert. I usually only see clients over the age of 21. No upper limit! Sx
09.36 on 04/07/08

Staring at the words on the screen was all I could manage. Cold heat pulsing. She'd shared the plans. The plans were on her blog. Bowling alley, three bars. Not that RDJ Construction
was the only place that information could have come from, but questions would be asked. So much for your fucking discretion. And then she just gets back to business as normal.

I ran possible scenarios for what was happening at the Sanctuary Base site. Strange that I could cause this sort of situation – well, okay, not cause, but I helped, I did – and not be part of it. My colleagues put into action their containment strategies, the management and sustaining of a project I have typed minutes, couriered files and organised meetings for but had no real involvement in. And Anya and Suzanne and their helpers and supporters, yes, they're using my information, but the protest would have happened anyway, the fight to save something that doesn't touch me, at all.

Anya's face, closed off, shutting me very deliberately out once I'd served my purpose. With distaste, almost, I began to think. Like she'd seen the shame of me, had worked out something in the heat of my body, my nervousness around her. Norman's officious kiss-off. Both sides letting me know exactly how little I count for. Again, it all comes back to Rona, her fault. Her selfish fault I'm in this job that I could be about to lose, in these cheap nothingy office clothes. Her fault I even began investigating escorting, her fault about Anya. Her fault I feel like this and her fault I'm still, now, doing what I always do, peering at the action from a distance, through a computer screen and other people's secondhand accounts.

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.'