Fishnet (21 page)

Elaine. Why is Elaine here? Because it's correct, I suppose, the company represented correctly at every work social gathering. Elaine talks mostly to Moira, sometimes to me. Sometimes she talks to the table, and when she talks to the table she is mostly addressing Graeme, and her voice is lacquered.

‘So, what do you think you're going to do now, Fiona?'

Elaine has no problems with me any more. There is patronage in her voice. I am no longer a problem in the work place, a discredit to the company. I've become a formality, and Elaine understands formalities.

‘Well, I don't know Elaine. Think of all the possibilities, eh! Four months' salary and the whole world spread out in front of me. Certainly no need to go back to the old nine-to-five right off – it's not as though I've got any ties, now, is it? I think the first thing I'll do is buy myself a really nice handbag. Maybe get my nails done. Where do you go? Who does yours?'

Her face shuts down. She understands that something isn't correct here.

I am bright. I fizz with the drink in me, talking too loudly and laughing hard, brittle at everyone's jokes. I am made of exclamation marks. I'm dazzling.

I'm playing Rona, shellac-glossed. I am too good for these people, that job, this bar.

‘Anyway,' Elaine's saying. ‘Anyway. I'm going to have to get going. Moira, you wanting to share a taxi? George? Any takers?'

She's done her duty, has Elaine. She doesn't have to stay here any longer.

‘Aw, come on!' I'm shouting. ‘It's my leaving night! Who's up for staying out? Graeme? Ian, you going to stay out and see me off?'

‘I think I'll go with Elaine, hen,' Moira's saying. ‘It's just making me. You know. Norman would have loved this, all his colleagues out tonight.'

Norman would have hated this, I think. Too much frivolity. Too much me.

She hugs me again, kisses my cheek.

‘Bye love. Thanks for everything, eh.'

‘I'll just get these girls home, I think, Fiona,' Ian says, a hand on the small of Elaine's back to usher her away from the table, the shameful sight of me.

She leans in to him with surprising familiarity. I wait until
Moira and big George are out of earshot at the door.

‘Are you two sleeping together, then?' I say, cheerily. ‘Gosh! Just think of the blackmail opportunities there! If only I'd known, eh?'

‘What?' Elaine turns round on me. ‘You watch your –'

‘Just leave her, Elaine. Just.' Ian holds onto his dignity. ‘Fiona, I know you're upset but that's a very wild accusation. I suggest you go home and get some sleep.'

‘Right, Graeme,' I'm saying, volume up as we watch their backs leaving, their stupid boring coats, their self-righteousness. ‘Right Graeme. Looks like it's just you and me, kiddo.'

Graeme just looks at me with his stupid face, giggling.

‘I can't believe you said that to Ian and Elaine! Did I laugh? Shit, you don't think I'll get into trouble for it? Hah! They totally are, aren't they! Can't believe you said that, eh!'

There's an approximation of a smile, and the weight of alcohol swimming behind his eyes. Doesn't matter. I've made my decision for the evening. Mortal fucked, we used to say at school, meaning drunk, that crazy drunk where you've no responsibilities. I am getting mortal fucked tonight.

Last orders comes and goes. I ask him a couple of times how he's feeling, and he shrugs, says the bruises are healing, says he doesn't want to talk about it. We talk instead about films we've seen, lurch out of the pub with our arms round each other like a cartoon of drunks. We stand there for a bit and there's that long moment that seems to go on forever, his head and his smile hovering over mine. The bit before it happens, where men look down on you.

He puts a hand on my cheek. I stroke a finger down his neck and he shivers, and I wonder who touches Graeme, really, with his acne scars and his mumbling. Who lays hands on the single people? Why shouldn't we have touch too, if we can, take pleasure in this closeness? I think of the cold-bodied quick hugs I've had from friends and parents, a perfunctory rub of arms through jumpers or coats as greeting.

‘We need this,' I'm maybe whispering, and he nods and kisses me.

Who touches the ugly people, the shy people? Who touches the ill people, the disabled, the ones who don't win? I think of Anya, imagine her performing this sort of service with the professionalism of a nurse. Graeme's cold hand flutters around my waistband, timidly reaching down.

‘God, you've got the most gorgeous arse,' he says, heavy boozy breath. ‘I've always thought that.'

Something in me freezes there, turns off, just for a second. Cover it, cover it.

‘Want to share a taxi, then?' I'm saying, gesturing to the empty road.

He's laughing. He's holding me with a revolving grip, like it's a dance, like we're at school, and I turn under his arm too hard, and we stumble, and we begin to sing.

Step we gaily, on we go. Heel for heel and toe for toe.

Old songs.

Arm in arm and row on row, all for Mairi's wedding! Graeme's rented flat in a new-build block, just on the edge of the drag. He shares with other boys. Tiny hallway clogged with nothing but bin bags, air full of the crackle of electrical static. The noise of computer game guns and male competition coming from behind a door.

‘Zat you, Gayboy?' someone's shouting.

Graeme opens a door for me and ushers me in.

‘I'll just be a second,' he whispers.

He bends in for another kiss and misses my mouth before leaving me in the dark.

From next door, deep voices muttering. I put the light on and look at the very featurelessness of what must be Graeme's room. Hard blue carpet, the same sort of thing we have in the office. Cream walls. No posters. Piles of clothes on the floor, double bed shoved in one corner, telly in the other and a tiny strip of floor space between that and the mirrored fitted wardrobe
taking up one wall. I sit on the bed, on its plasticky-feeling sheets, rumpled. There is nothing to say about this room at all. There are no books, no CDs, nothing. Through the wall come grunts and cheers, and someone shouts Get in there, my son! Go on yourself, Gayboy!

The boys. Always with the boys.

Graeme's feet coming back down the hall. Too late to run for it. Not that I was going to run for it. The light is too bright, dead, so I fumble for an anglepoise, check myself out in shade in the mirror, all the gravity of the drink in me.

Graeme, it seems, has had a very different idea about how this evening is going to go. He comes towards me all eager clumsy hands and muttered gasps into my neck.

‘You're so sexy,' he's saying, and I'm thinking yeah, actually. Yes, I am. I am sexy. For tonight, anyway. Not like Graeme, who isn't sexy at all. Graeme with his wet boozy mouth. I'm leading.

‘Hey, hey,' he's saying. ‘Take it easy, eh? We've got all night.'

I push him down on the bed and rub my hand over his crotch, thin Topman smarts left over from work. I probably say things like I know what you want. You bad, bad man, maybe. I straddle him, conscious of the weight of me pressing his legs apart and down. Crushing him, feeling him get hard underneath me. Gripping his wrists in my hand and doing violence with my mouth on his, just because I can. Because this is the sort of thing he likes, this bland man I've shared an office with for two years.

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 –