Fishnet (22 page)

– 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 respecting 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.'

‘…'

‘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.

‘Oh my god, darling. Too funny. Too funny. And Tasha really believed him?'

The first woman clocks me staring, autopilot, curls a tiny lip and turns her back. On another street, in another city, I would have merited a fuck-you-looking-at warface. I check the outside of the bar. Yes, this is The Grand, the sort of name I imagine gentlemen would have given to their clubs in Edwardian London, formerly Dee-Lite and, for four months, workplace of my sister.

Were my mistake not already obvious from the curl of that woman's lip, it clicks in as I open the door. I simply do not do this often enough to understand how to be here. With no pack of henz to belong to I do not make sense. Also, I have come in on a Friday night, as the various brokers and lawyers I presume I'm seeing around me are releasing a week of work all over the fast-paced all-female bar staff, who flick and turn within their enclosure like a ballet. Big eyes, short skirts, pretty hair, skinny legs. Red, bloated faces flirt with them, earn dutiful
smiles. I add my body to the scrum, four-deep, press against other people's sweat and work, the rising rising noise of three hundred shouting voices. Rona's world, one of them. She knew this stuff like breathing.

I'd actually told my parents I had a date. I'd said it shyly. Asked it as a favour. Someone from my old job. Yes, he's very nice. I'd really appreciate it. There'd been so much genuine delight on Mum's face, as she teased me for answers, the recent makeover suddenly making sense to her in a world of logic that we all stopped operating within a long time ago. And was it the man from a couple of weeks ago? And how tall was he? And what was his position in the company?

I began to feel genuinely bad for lying.

It takes almost twenty minutes for me to work out how to get one of the girls' attention. They're lured by taller eyes, subtle gestures and the professional flick of banknotes. I have already missed chances – burrowing for the photos in my bag, pulling back in a crisis of confidence when I realised that none of the bar staff would have been old enough to have worked here seven years ago, simply not paying attention. The business of getting a drink is serious, competitive.