One
Village
There was one other hen party in the only nightclub in town – The Fusion, it was called. A couple of boys at the bar, a few lone men prowling the circumference, scanning for the weakest ones in the herd, and that was all. A solitary puff of smoke leaking out of one corner to camouflage the mostly empty dancefloor.
‘And that was the luverly a-Destiny’s a-Child with a-Boooootylicious!’
It was one of those places where they talk over the music, where the DJ croons in sleazy, transatlantic Scots. We dispersed variously to find seats, to check makeup in the mirror, to hit the bar and line up two rows of fourteen shots of lurid liquid, whooping, coughing as it caught the backs of our throats, chemical on our tongues. We were wearing the sashes over our regulation pink tonight, like beauty queens, HEATHERZ HENZ. Down the hatch, girls, someone might say if they were feeling particularly enthusiastic, and they were, and it was Samira this time.
Claire trailed behind us, features submerged under layers of powder and foundation that the other henz had forced on her after a few drinks at the cottage.
‘C’mon honey, you’d look so much better with a wee bit lippy. We’ll give you a makeover.’
She’d clucked out a protest, but they’d closed in round her wielding the old lanolin smell of their makeup bags.
The borrowed pink and silver vest top was stretched to bursting over Claire’s wide, flat torso, tucked into her own black school-style trousers and hiking boots. Claire had a dodgy knee, sometimes, from years of athletics. She’d taken the makeup but refused to wear heels. My aching idiot feet admired her for that.
‘And now it’s time for Brenda’s hens to get on the dance floor for The Slosh! Come on girls. Let. Me. See. You. Moooove.’
That last a throaty purr, so close to the microphone that you could hear the catarrh in his gullet. The other hen party squealed and roared and clattered on strappy sandals to the dance floor. It’s always older women who do the Slosh. Sort of thing I can imagine my Mum getting up to at a wedding or something, red faced, kicking off her shoes and clutching on to my aunty Linda. They looked genuinely happy, all of them beaming with it, helping each other into lines, folding each other’s outhanging bra straps back into their huge sparkly tops.
‘Alright ladieeeez, get ready to Slosh it up!’
They were counting, faces stern with concentration as the country tune wheedled its way out, and you could see them all mouthing the way they’d been taught it, years back: one-two-three-kick-back-two-three-clap-right-two-three-heel!-back-two-three-under-TURN-TURN-TURN-and-one-two-three-
I finished my chaser quickly and made a decision to get very drunk indeed. Someone tapped my arm, pressed gently, two fingers. I tried to shake it off, as you do in nightclubs, but it continued. I turned round; it was one of the older men, the prowlers.
He raised a glance at me.
‘How you doing, darlin. Missed seeing you around the while, eh?’
His hot nicotine breath on my face.
I shook myself free and moved quickly back to where women were.
Heather came tottering over. We’d dressed her in a white basque and pink fishnet stockings tonight, veil, tiara and a pink garter to hang her L-plates off. The men were watching her from their corners, watching her wobble and shake. She grabbed Samira and me, one under each arm. The bitter smell of her perfume and sweat.
‘Mah oldest friends, and I love yis!’ she screamed, her accent thickening, as Samira kissed her back. ‘And listen Fiona, listen,ˆAh know we’re not seeing that much of you these days, but it’s always the fuckin three of us, isn’t it? Three whatsit, muskahounds!’
She leaned heavy on my shoulder to take the weight off her heels, curled a lip at the Sloshers.
‘God, would you look at the state of them.’
‘Come on, Hedge,’ Samira said. ‘They’re loving it.’
‘I hope when I’m that age I’ve got the decency to stay out of nightclubs, eh!’
Two younger guys, pressed into dun-coloured shirts, had come in and a couple of the henz had already begun the signalling process: smile, look away, giggle to each other, look back, stomachs sucked right in.
Kelly, the one with the darkest tan and the French-polished nails, the skinniest, tapped Heather on the shoulder, took a breath in as she prepared to shout. ‘We’re gonny do a showcase of our own, wee wifey. No point in paying for dancing classes if we can’t show off, eh?’
The Slosh hugged and clapped itself off the floor as music began to warp into something darker, squelchier, doomy hip hop pending and henz in heelz took over, three of them dragging a protesting Heather to her place at the centre. Kelly led the way with a prefect’s wagging finger, assembling us in two loose rows, just like Cherry, the ‘seduction tutor’ with the tight smile, had taught us earlier. The bassline began to seep into our hips as the DJ slurred something over the intro. We all held two hands out at arm’s length, gripped invisible poles, thrust our feet apart and ground like we were born to it. Some of the girls were giggling and snorting and checking each other – Heather kept turning her head and smirking at anyone who would look at her – but on the whole we were deadly serious, Claire most of all, her mouth ticking over the beat count as it went, as the song bent and raunched away and we splayed our legs wider, stuck our bums out-out-right-out and hip, and hip. Certainly, ladies, we had the room. The Sloshers tutted and turned their heads away across the generation gap, easy smiles gone.
Hip hip, thrust thrust, shimmy-six-seven-eight, titty-titty pump-left, pump-right thrust thrust hip hip.
I could feel it coming through the music, the fat electronic fart of the music, its meaty beeps. It began to make sense to my body, to bend my knees and rock my pelvis on the beat, to stick my arse out back on a count of four and shake, and thrust, and titty-titty. All of us, moving as one. Like a tribe. The girls grew cockier, a couple of the ones with hair extensions flicking them from side to side – Andrea’s hair got caught in my lip-gloss and I didn’t care, I blew her a kiss – carving movements out of the stale air, all for the two, only two acceptable boys at the bar. Hiphip thrust-thrust titty-titty. Body on autopilot.
Then I tuned into the words the DJ was grunting along with the rapper.
‘Take it, take take it, baby. You’re my ho, you’re my ho, and I’ll pimp you real good. Oh yeah, real good.’
You’re my ho.
I was mid-thrust when my stomach went. I made it off the dance floor in time, so none of them saw me, but most of it still ended up on the toilet corridor carpet, silky, bile-green coils that glowed faintly in the strip lighting.
‘You’re my ho, you’re my ho, take it ho, take it ho. Real good. Real good.’
I’d vomited so hard that I’d made myself cry great fat smudges of mascara, dripping down onto the cheap burnished metal trough that deputised for sinks here. The toilets were designed for female friendship in 1999; two pans to a cubicle, no lids. I suppose that made it harder to do drugs on. I heard three songs morph into different sets of beats while I was in there, carefully washing my face, scouring off every streak, squinting at myself in the crappy tin mirror, and starting again. None of my group came in to check I was okay, although I did get a motherly hug off a Slosher, gin on her breath and a smothering floral scent as she pulled my face in to her big soft bosom, rocked me, told me aw, darlin, it’ll be alright. You’ll be alright. We’ve all been there, eh?
I don’t think we have.
Three henz and Heather were still on the floor when I resurfaced, repeating the invisible pole dance endlessly for a room that had moved on, to a song where a robot’s voice had an orgasm: ooh-ooh-ooh-OOHYEAH. The others were clustered around the bar, around those boys in boxy shirts who seemed to have bred four more boxy friends. Samira was there, holding herself apart, stately, and of course attracting far more attention than the rest of the pack together.
The man who’d caught my sleeve materialised out of the darkness in front of me again.
‘So, you not remember your old friends, eh doll? You too good for us now, eh?’
I made for the bar.
He followed.
‘Aye, well we remember you, though, darlin. We all remember you round here.’
He laughed. It wasn’t an unpleasant laugh, but it ended in the long slow hack of a life-and-death smoker.
‘There’s precious few as talented as you around these days.’
I turned round. He wasn’t so old, really, quite possibly still in his forties, although the drink had taken its toll, etched its years into his face.
‘Oh aye. No forgetting you, hen.’
I looked straight at him.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, over the music. ‘I really think you must have confused me with someone else.’
XXX
That morning. Before.
Claire had done the dishes. Her martyrdom vibrated through the cottage, nipped heads, interfered with hangovers.
‘Sit down petal, you did them yesterday,’ someone muttered with no concern at all.
She’d done them yesterday, after she’d marshalled us back to the cottage from the pub, handed Samira a notepad and had her count up the orders.
‘Right. Fifteen fish suppers. Now, can everyone give me six pounds fifty? I’m not going all the way down there without the correct money. Not when I’ve paid for petrol.’
Being the only driver made her important. After she’d gone, we’d sat quietly.
‘Claire’s very organised,’ we said, not wanting to offend Heather.
‘Efficient. She’s very efficient.’
‘Yes. She’s a do-er.’
We hate her. We hate her. We hate her. It pulsed beneath the weekend, the only thing uniting a disparate assortment of colleagues, sisters, college and school friends, stronger glue than the perkily-fonted regalia we’d all had to pay twenty quid for. The HEATHERZ bit had dripped off the t-shirts into the loch after the canoeing session on Friday, when we’d also discovered that they went see-through when wet. We all squealed and tried to cover our breasts with our arms, as the fat-necked teenagers who were supposed to be instructing us leered.
Canoeing. Cocktail-making. A screeching platoon of accountants forcing garters up the legs of an L-plate-draped someone I used to know. The pink furry handcuffs from a pound shop, the chocolate penises, these two people I went to school with and now email every few months.
Heather was brassy at school, shouting, rolling about. She attracted attention. It made her a target, because she wouldn’t just settle down and accept her place in the grand scheme of things. Samira and I, neither of us having to learn to keep our heads down as we’d never put them up in the first place, would watch her careen about with anxious eyes, till the knocks came. She came out the other side quieter, took the first place at the first university that would accept her, and continued to settle. When she got engaged to Ross, who is nice, but nothing, we wondered again, Samira, me, if she was just settling. It seemed very young to be settling. Maybe this is really all she wants, Heather. A hen weekend in a Highland village, cycling in the rain. A strapless white dress, two bridesmaids, a chance to get on the property ladder. First kid before she’s thirty.
Heather will have invited Claire to her hen party because it’s what you do, it’s how you behave to your fiancé’s sister, because she’s basically decent, good, and doesn’t hate people just because they’re efficient. Do-ers. Heather will have invited me to her hen party out of long-fused loyalty. Because I held her hair back in pub toilets, because I dumped Andy Oliver for her when we were fifteen. Because we’ve kept in touch, just. Because these tiny past connections mean things to her.
Claire clanked china.
‘I’m going to go for a walk,’ I said.
‘Don’t be too long,’ she buzzed, from the sink. ‘The bike ride’s booked at half eleven: twelve miles, which will probably take us up until two seeing as some people are feeling a little dozy this morning! We have to get the bikes back at half past, so.’
The terrifying cheer of a Brownie leader.
‘It’s going to be FUN,’ she said.
It was Claire’s idea to come to this village, this grey-brown holiday camp for outdoors enthusiasts, pivoting on one small street of theme bars and sports equipment hire shops. Heather had been dithering. Prague? Paris? and Claire had said, look, my friend has a house that she rents out up there. It sleeps ten. I’ll book it. In doing so, the organisation for the whole weekend became hers. She quickmarched us round the supermarket, and set up a production line for cocktails. She supervised.
It was Claire’s idea to come here. She didn’t know.
I phoned home, and Dad picked up. The nerves of him, still, after six years, on answering. Just in case. Just in case. Always twice.
‘Hello, hello?’
‘Me. Is she there?’
‘Fiona. Yes, yes. Yes. I’ll just get her. Yes.’
The noise of that house in the background. The noise of absence not even blocked out by the blaring colours of cartoons.
‘Bethan? BETH! It’s your. It’s the phone. It’s. Mummy.’
She came to the phone and breathed into it for a second. She’s always shy with phones at first.
‘Hi Mummy,’ almost whispered.
Flash and fanfare, for my girl.
‘Hello, my darling! How are you feeling this morning? How’s your tummy?’
‘It’s fine today. Well, there was a little bit of it that was sore when I woke up but then I had some cornflakes and it all went away and Granddad said it was probably just hunger, so I was being silly!’
‘So it isn’t bothering you? It isn’t hurting? Are you able to run around and play?’
‘Yes! I’ve got Barbie today and we’re watching the princess film and then we’re going to make boiled eggs for lunch and dip the shoulgers!’
‘That’s good. That’s good darling. Do you know what Mummy did yesterday? Mummy was on a boat, on a little canoe all by herself in the loch! And then she fell in the water! Silly Mummy, eh?’
‘Silly Mummy.’
‘Are you fidgeting there? Okay darling. Go and watch the princess film, and put Granddad back on.’
‘Bye Mummy.’
‘Bye sweetheart. Mummy loves you, remember. Very much. Very much.’
Some breathy scuffling, then Dad again.
‘Hello.’
‘Hi. Can you make sure and tell Mum to give her another spoon of Calpol before bed? And she says you’re having boiled eggs for lunch? Has she had some vegetables? It’s important when she’s got a sore tummy, to make sure she’s getting a balanced diet. The doctor said.’
‘All right, no problem.’
‘Okay. I’ll phone again tomorrow, but make sure and call me if it gets any worse.’
‘Right. I’ll let you get back to it then.’
‘Right. Bye.’
All the things that we don’t say to each other any more.
I noticed one of the girls, one of the henz – Jenni? Andrea? – slouching against a wall, smoking. Has she been watching me? I was just talking to my daughter. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
She nods, gestures to her cigarette, also guilty.
‘I was supposed to have quit,’ she said, with a half-smile.
There’s one main strip in this town. Glass-fronted family-friendly bars and the sign to the ice rink. I came once on a school trip, when I was fourteen, because it is a place you go to on school trips. On hen weekends. Not a place you live in, surely.
Imagine my sister, aged nineteen, walking down this street back from the supermarket. Waving at a neighbour. Having a drink in one of these pubs. Six, nearly seven years ago.
We assumed she would have come back here, afterwards. This was the first place we looked, just because it was the last place she’d been. She’d had a job in a glamorous Edinburgh bar for a while after leaving school, surprised us all one day with an email saying she’d moved north. She lived here for about seven months; settled, we assumed. As much as Rona could settle.
In her low-ceilinged kitchen, Christina had disabused us of that one.
Christina had been at school with Rona, was her only real reason for having come up here in the first place and was our only real lead afterwards. Christina was a ski instructor: it made sense for her to live here. Rona had never really been that interested in outdoor sports.
‘She just turned up one day, said she’d had it with Edinburgh, was looking to start over somewhere else. It was a surprise, sure: we’d not kept in touch that well since leaving school. I asked her why she didn’t go home to youse and she said she wanted to do things her own way. I could understand that, I suppose. The rent was – the rent was handy.’
She was clipped, formal with us, uncomfortable in our distress.
When we’d asked, Christina had shown us the room my sister had slept in, which was just a room, mauve, uplighter shade over the bulb. Bed. Mirrored wardrobe covering one wall. We sat in the kitchen she must have cooked her dinner in, on mock-pine plasticky chairs. We drank tea. The mugs had cats on them.
‘I don’t know that she had any other friends, as such. There were girls she w-worked with, but they were all transients.’
We’d looked at her, me and Dad and Mum.
‘Transients,’ she said again. ‘Temporary bar staff. Up for the season. People pass through this place. It’s just a stop.’
‘What about boyfriends?’ we’d asked. We were especially keen to find out about boyfriends.
Christina took a breath in, and something crossed her face.
‘There were a couple of guys she saw. A couple of guys she. Brought home. But nobody, really. Not recently.’
Another breath.
‘What you have to understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how much Rona told you-’
‘Let’s just assume nothing,’ Mum said. ‘Anything you can tell us, Christina. Anything at all.’
‘Well. We fell out. We had a fight.’
She looked away, looked anywhere but us.
‘It’s okay,’ Mum said again, her voice gentler than I’d heard in years. ‘We all know Rona can be, ah. Difficult. We don’t blame you, Christina.’
‘I haven’t spoken to her for about five months,’ she said. ‘She moved out. She lived in other people’s spare rooms, I guess. I never found out who she was staying with. I mean, I would see her around town. We saw each other, and we’d just ignore each other. But I haven’t even seen her. Not for a few months.’
I leaned forward.
‘When you saw her. How did she look?’
Christina paused again.
‘The police have already been here,’ she said, through a tight mouth. ‘They didn’t think I had anything to tell them that they didn’t know.’
‘We know,’ Mum said. ‘We know. We just wanted to hear it from you ourselves.’
‘Well. It was difficult not to notice. And she didn’t look happy. She was always distracted, the last few times. Didn’t even register me enough to give me a filthy look, you know.’
She laughed and we didn’t, and she looked terrified again.
We sat in this bar right here, afterwards. The Ochil. The three of us. We got cokes and pub meals, picking at scampi and chips, cottage pie, not really eating as the speaker above our table blared songs about patriotism and hearing the call of the old country, going back to Caledonia. Sentiment welling up in the damp patches on the ceiling.
‘What’s the point,’ Dad was muttering into his beard. ‘What is the point of even being here? Tell me that. Nobody’s got a thing to give us.’
‘I know,’ Mum was saying, in this strange soothing voice. ‘I know darling.’
She patted his hand a couple of times.
‘It might help,’ I said. ‘Later on. It might help us understand, just from being here.’
‘You’re maybe right,’ Mum said, not meaning it, not really.
All the spark dreeping slowly out of her, out of all of us, evaporating into that smell of smoke and frying. A month later they were living together in the old house again. Two months after that, Beth and I had moved into the vacant flat upstairs. The official reason is that we all want to be in the place she’s most likely to come back to. Really, it’s because with all of us mostly absent, together we approximate a whole person.
We’d sat there for a bit, staring out the window at the paint peeling off the ski shop, the people. Most of them seemed to be aged sixteen to twenty-two, marking time up here, making money then leaving again. The smell, the music. The empty fourth chair at the table we were at. The uneaten food.
They’ve got the same tartan carpet as they had six years ago in the Ochil, and the frying smell’s stronger since the smoking ban came in. The same sort of music, playing loud for hypothetical tourists who are the same nationality as the staff. A man at the bar, older, the sort of stubble that looks painful, caught my eye as I stood in the door, started, then recovered himself and winked. There were no other customers, just a girl behind the bar who couldn’t be more than twenty. She had pretty skin, her hair pulled back with a ribbon. Transient. Another transient.
City
This is where I work. The International Financial District. The Call Centre Capital. The Graveyard of Graduate Dreams. And after dark, The Notorious Drag. The Red Light Zone. An awful lot of names for an uninhabitable slant of tarmac so steep it’ll give you a stitch if you can make it up in one go. There’s not a single growing thing in the whole grid, not by design anyway. Weeds, maybe, between the cracks in the paving, between the designated areas of ownership, because nobody cares enough to root them out. Lots of pickings for rats, between the sandwich crumbs of office workers and the detritus of night time activity, in this proud new area intended to attract free enterprise and the glories of capitalism to a former industrial city.
Nobody lives here. They work here; they drink here, some of them fuck here, but they don’t live here. That makes it perfect. Eight, fourteen, twenty storeys of hard new architecture behind which there’s probably no sky; buildings designed to suck in the sun, channel it into money.
The shift happens at around seven, later in the summer months, if you’re working evenings. The girls emerge from wherever they spend their daytimes just as the last of the suits disappear. They must just be ants from the seventeenth floor, ants on the march out of the zone, before the concrete is reclaimed by slaters scuttling in and out of the corners. When the cuts started, we had an email from head office: could female employees stop taking on overtime after dark, because the company can’t afford the taxis.
One of my jobs every morning is to check the car park gutters for used condoms.
‘Did you see that bloody carry on outside?’
Norman doesn’t bother with hello Fiona, how was the hen weekend because Norman is furious, his already pouchy eyes distending even further. He mutters in headlines: no respect and shameless hussies and it’s just gone too far. Too far! and his hair crackles with static indignation.
Over at the window, Moira is closing the blinds.
‘Ach, it’s just a protest,’ she says with her soft voice. ‘Just a couple of daft buggers. You’ll not have seen them, Fiona – they look like they’ve been camped out in the car park since cock crow. We’ll just pull these shut and get on with our day, eh? How about you put the kettle on, darlin?’
‘One of them called me a traitor, do you know?’
Norman is incensed.
‘Me! Me, who served fourteen year in the Territorials!’
‘Norman’ll have a cuppa as well, hen,’ Moira says.
Here is how Moira and Norman work together, how they’d got on sharing the same corner space of RDJ Construction’s Surveying Office for fourteen years: if you make the tea for the two of them, you always pour the water over the teabag in Moira’s special oversized teacup with the flowers on it, then pull it out immediately and add it to Norman’s mug (bright blue, says World’s Best Dad! in red), which already has one bag in it. You let Norman’s tea stew for the time it takes to go to the fridge and get the milk, pull the sugar down from the cupboard with the anonymous notice that we all know is Elaine’s work on it:
Would Everyone wash up there own Dishes and Cup’s please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Three sugars for Norman and a splash of milk. The tip of a spoon in the sugar for Moira. Then, and only then, you take the two teabags out of Norman’s mug. This is how Norman told me to make the tea, exactly this way, when I was settling in on my first day.
‘Moira doesn’t like it strong. Not at all. Me, I’m the opposite, see. I like brickie tea! Tea to put hairs on your chest! But Moira, it’s just delicate for her.’
His voice softer, more reverent, as he told me this than I’ve ever heard it since.
Moira and Norman are both married to other people, have been for years. Only when they go home, though. All that time they spend together in the day, looking after each other, smiling affectionately at each other, checking that the other one gets their tea right. And it would never occur to either of them.
Graeme is already in the staff kitchen, on his knees in front of the fridge, trying to find the perfect spot for his sandwiches.
‘It’s because of the new development,’ he’s saying. ‘They announced that we’d won the contract to do it last night, and it was all over the papers this morning. They gave the full address and everything, but the protesters still didn’t work out which entrance was ours till Elaine arrived.’
‘What’s the new development?’
‘Oh yeah. We were keeping the bid a secret, and Ian mentioned it to the office on Friday, but you were away at your hen weekend. I’ve had my sister on the phone this morning giving me a total earful of it, and she’s never usually up before twelve.’ He’s still smirking.
‘What’s their objection to it? Ach, is it the Christians again? We’re not knocking through another church for those bloody style bars?’
He passes me a tabloid, folded open, the ink of it grainy on my fingers. I read and flinch.
JACKSON GROUP BUY OUT VICE GIRL BASE
‘The new development is on the site of a brothel?’
‘Heh, heh. No, I think it’s like a shelter, actually. Just down the road, that’s hows we got the contract. You know, where all the, heh, eh, prossies go and hang out. On the night shift, eh?’
Chuckle, chuckle. He’s blooming under the idea of it now, the fur coat and nae knickers of it, lads-mag innuendo nudging away at his little boy smile.
‘The Sanctuary Base? So presumably, that mob outside are the people who work there?’
‘Well,’ He lowers his voice, leans into me so I can get a better smell of his Lynx. ‘I heard Elaine saying that actually, some of them are the hookers!’
The word has me before I realise. That dirty hooker. Three days ago I wouldn’t even have paused.
It takes Graeme a couple of seconds to realise that I’m not sharing the joke, by which time I’m working on an encouraging half-smile so as not to hurt his feelings.
Graeme and I are the only people under thirty in this company. I know that because I’ve got access to his files. He turns twenty-six next month. There’s not much to him, not to look at, but I think about having sex with Graeme, some day, just because he’s here. Maybe in the stationery cupboard, when the office is empty. I won’t. His desk is across the way from mine, and if he’s on the phone, concentrating, I look at his crotch sometimes, trying to see what’s outlined under the folds of Topman smarts. I rub myself, guilty, frantically, in the toilets, under cheap hard lighting. I wash all trace of it off my fingers with the rose-smelling liquid soap Moira buys in bulk and stores in the cupboard in the kitchen. Sometimes I look at him and think, surely we are too young, we are both too young to have given up like this, to settle our bones in this halogen-lit tower. On Mondays he grins and sits on the edge of my desk, tells me about nights out he’s had ‘with the boys’, always ‘with the boys’.
‘Not got a girlfriend yet, eh?’ Moira says, listening in, playing matchmaker.
I don’t think of Graeme at all when I’m not there. Graeme, going out for drinks with the boys, playing computer games with the boys, wouldn’t really understand my world. The spaces, the silences, the waiting. The child care.
I’m not sure why I’m angry at him now, though.
‘Where are they going to go, Graeme? The, eh. The prostitutes? If we knock down their sanctuary?’
He’s doing that thing with his face again. He looks like he’s laughing, but it’s actually nerves. Or wind.
‘Eh, well. Not really our thing, eh, problem. It’s the council sold the place. They should be taking it up with them, those women outside. We’re just doing our job. Eh. And it’s not just like we’re knocking them down. It’s the whole block. Leisure complex. Possibilities for multiplex, eight bars or restaurants, bowling, casino —’
‘And you’re okay with that?’
This is further than we’ve gone in conversation before, and he’s reddening, shifting to the door, glancing back over his shoulder.
‘Do you not need to take the bag out. Moira’s cup.’
Then he turns around properly, in the door frame.
‘I’ve seen the blueprints. It’s going to be an exciting project for us, you know? For, ehm, for me. Good opportunity. Big one. We’ll make a really beautiful building out of it.’
Glass, crap techno, cut-price cocktails on Thursdays, I’m thinking to myself. He’s running off. Moira’s teabag is bleeding scorches of tannin into the cup. I’ll need to start over.
XXX
‘They’ve got stamina, I’ll say that for them. Well, they’d have to, eh, in their line of work.’
Norman has kept up a muttered commentary all day. There’s a judgemental wind shaking the building, and even the diehard smokers like Elaine and big George from Maintenance haven’t made it all the way down to the car park today. The protesters are still going, though, hours on, their faces whipped scarlet under cagoules, and we can still hear the chanting over the weather and the air con and the wheeze of Moira’s old computer.
‘SHAME ON THE COUNCIL!’
‘SAVE OUR SANCTUARY!’
I had a look at them earlier, peeking through the blinds like a spy in an old movie. They must have been waiting for any sort of motion at all from our floor, because they all pivoted on the spot to face me, turned their heads up to the window, synchronised, eerie. Five women and a man, earnest looking middle class types for the most part. Tomorrow’s paper will tell me that they aren’t all prostitutes, that one of them was a well-known independent local councillor whose outspoken views on women’s issues had made her a target for that paper for a while, that the man was a noted Socialist Worker agitator, that one of them was Suzanne Phillips, the former ‘masseuse’ who runs the Sanctuary Base. The paper will take pleasure in those quotation marks. The rest will just be given names and ages. Anya Sobtka, 27. Michelle McKay, 24. Carla Forlorni, 32.
A fierce-faced girl had made eye contact with me, mouthing some words I couldn’t have caught, white-bleached hair and a little bolt glistening between her nostrils. The rest just glared up, damning me by association.
‘Oh my god they’ve been on the phone all morning,’ Elaine, the office manager, is saying as she comes in to bring files and get Moira’s sympathy. ‘My ears were ringing! And I just told them, a hundred times if I told them once, I told them, the boss isn’t in today. We are not available for comment. I do not know what all the fuss about it is, I swear. It’s what this area needs, a big new development in there. It’s crying out for a bit of a smartening up. And property prices will rocket! Maybe bring a few decent folk into the area for once. These people. These people, eh.’
I want to shut her up, shut her ignorant mouth up, but all I manage to say is, ‘What about the, eh, women, though, Elaine?’
I’d borrowed Moira’s soft voice for cowards, but she heard me anyway, turned the full force of her thick lipstick on me, the minty fug of her nicotine gum breath. You could look at Elaine, strip twenty years off her and know exactly what she was like at school.
‘We’ve not got a wee red in here have we?’ There’s an intense little catch in her voice, like she’s laughing. She’s not laughing.
‘Just leave her Elaine,’ Moira’s saying. Elaine is a straight-talking gal from her own private movie. She courts applause in her head.
‘Listen, missy, you’d better work out where your sympathies lie on this one, and fast. This is the biggest contract we’ve had in years. We need it. Are you going to get hung up over a few old bricks? A few bloody hoors?’
‘Elaine!’ Moira’s saying. ‘There’s no need for language.’
‘You’ve got a wean, Fiona. Keeping hold of your job should be your first priority. And in order to do that, you might wanty show a bit of company loyalty, all right? I’m just saying. And I’m not the first to say it, eh.’
‘She’s had a stressful day, hen,’ Moira says as the door slams, Graeme and Norman looking straight into their computer screens and nowhere else.
Ian, our department head, arrives at two, brings storm clouds in. The protesters had mistaken him in his big sleek car for the boss, had obviously been holding eggs very carefully in their cagoule pockets all day.
‘Fiona. Get my clean suit immediately and call the police. I’m disappointed that you’ve indulged these idiots even this long. Norman, Moira. I’m going to want you in my office for briefing. We’ll all be spending the rest of the afternoon on the new site. We need to get moving fast. Graeme, if you could begin bringing Norman and Moira up to speed while I get changed. Fiona. Call George and have him bring the people carrier round the back entrance. The back entrance. You and Elaine will be holding the fort here for the rest of the day, and I want these people gone by the time I come back at six. Understand?’
Ian disappears off to the toilets, then sticks his head back round again.
‘And all personnel visiting the site should ensure they’ve got protective headgear with them. There’s another party of this lot down there, more of them, and because the site’s not been handed over properly yet, we don’t have the power to have them removed.’
Norman, jaw set like he’s going into battle, is pulling out all his official RDJ Construction-branded equipment, grimly folding his reflective jacket and setting his hard hat on top, just so.
A whole afternoon. A whole afternoon with the office to myself. I’m weighing up Elaine’s dislike of having nobody to talk to over her hatred of me, and betting on a succession of crabbit phone calls but no actual state visit.
I’m not going to let myself think about my sister, though. No. No. For distraction, I walk under the flickering light in the corner, feel the bad harsh crackle of it beam down on me. I slip my finger inside my bra and rub my nipple till it hardens, just because it’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t ever do here. This movement usually happens constricted, under covers, in toilet cubicles. I pace. I notice the light still on standby on Graeme’s computer, and I move behind his desk, just intending to switch it off. The mouse is greasy to the touch, layers of pastry flakes and three-pm-biscuit in the gaps between the buttons. I move it gently and there’s that half-second of high fuzz before the screen lights up again.
Internet Explorer. Hotmail. Personal use of online privileges on company time? Bad boy, I tell him, in my head. Bad, bad boy. And he hadn’t even thought to hide it.
Two unread, presumably from his sister as they shared the same last name.
| Sender | Subject |
| Carly Bain | FW:SAVE THE SANCTUARY BASE |
| Carly Bain | graeme you are a wanker. |
Eight notifications from three different social networking sites, all of them read, even the one that came in an hour ago. Naughty. I click to the next page, and there it is, right at the top.
| Sender | Subject |
Dominant | Your picture of the day! |
| Femmes | |
| Subscribermail |
He’d read it. Which meant it probably wasn’t spam. Click.
A thin woman in a black leather jumpsuit which cut away just under her breasts was standing over a supine, guilty-looking man. One long elegant leg was extended over his face, the spiked point of a heel in his mouth.
Graeme. Vague, timid Graeme.
My phone rings, on my desk on the other side of the room, and I almost knock Graeme’s chair over trying to catch it in time.
Elaine, tinny, disapproving.
‘Fiona. Ian’s just been on the phone. He said you’re supposed to have called the police about those, eh, people downstairs, and as far as I can see they’re still there.’
‘I was just about to do that. Ian did actually give me a long list of items to be taken care of this afternoon and he has only been out of the office twenty–’
‘Well, I’m fairly sure this is his top priority.’
‘I’m Ian’s assistant, Elaine. It’s my workload to manage. Calling the police is the next item on my list as it happens.’
‘Well, it had better be done. If they’re still there in fifteen I’m making the call myself.’
‘All right, Elaine. I’m on it right now.’
I don’t think I convinced either of us with that performance. Norman has the numbers for all local amenities, including the police station, taped to his desk, because of course he does.
Getting the tray with six mugs downstairs and out the heavy fire door is tricky, but I manage. They see me coming through the glass, and a couple of them tense up. I indicate that they’ve all got to keep their distance before I fob open the security door, and they do. The tray and I go out quickly, let it slam behind.
‘Thought you might like some tea.’
This isn’t what I imagined prostitutes to look like, I’m thinking. These faces. Their jeans. But until last weekend, I hadn’t really thought about them much at all.
It’s the fierce, bleached, pierced girl who speaks. She’s got an accent – Scandinavian? Polish. It’ll be Polish.
‘You haven’t poisoned it?’ She’s smiling, though, which is more than can be said for a couple of them.
‘I haven’t poisoned it. I have had to call the police, though. Mr Henderson, our chief surveyor, who was the, ehm, the. You hit him with the eggs. So. I’ve just come down to give you fair warning, really. You’ve got about ten minutes.’
‘We appreciate it,’ says the girl.
There’s something stark and intense and beautiful about her face.
‘I’m afraid we’re staying put, though,’ says one of the other women, the one I’ll find out is Suzanne the former ‘masseuse’. She’s nice about it. Motherly.
‘Look, everyone’s gone. There’s nobody on our floor but me, the maintenance team and the other PA. Everyone else left by the back entrance for a site visit about half an hour ago, and they’ll be gone all day. And Elaine can’t even hear you from where she’s sitting, so it’s just me, really. You could make a run for it? You could make a run for it and go down to the main site? To the, eh, Sanctuary? Lots of action there.’
‘We appreciate what you’re doing,’ says the blonde girl again. ‘We’re going to stay where we are, though. Thank you. And maybe you might want to go back upstairs? So you are not caught fraternising with us?’
Her voice slow over the longer word, sounding out each syllable. Frat. Ter. Nis. Ing. Ting. Ting. Ting.
‘So sorry to have interrupted your workday,’ says the older woman. ‘Really. And thanks for the tea.’
I convince myself I can feel the heat of the pierced girl’s eyes on the small of my back through the glass, till I turn up the corridor. I take a detour past the Ladies, push myself up against the cubicle wall and slide a hand inside my knickers again, concocting flash fantasies that she’s in there with me, that it’s her hand and it’s forceful, that she’s baring her breasts through black leather. I think about her nipple between my teeth. I think about the two of us masturbating each other with a foot each on Graeme, who’s lying there, hard. I come. I come. I scrub with Moira’s rose scented soap.
By the time the police get there, of course, they’ve all handcuffed themselves to the drainpipes and have to be cut away and formally arrested. Elaine officiates, buzzing around the policemen while I watch through the blinds. She calls my phone as soon as they’ve gone and I let it ring out, realising too late I’ve left the mugs down there, and realising I don’t really care. After a few seconds the voicemail button begins flashing angrily. I move a notepad over the top of it and go back to my computer, with no Norman looking over my screen, his wet accusing eyes. Finally letting it all back in. Personal use of internet privileges on company time indeed.
In the years after Rona left, I padded out every dull temping job typing variations of her name into search engines. Flickr-tagged pictures. Blogs. Myspace pages. More recently, reading down the friends lists of everyone I could remember she knew at school who was on Facebook, going back to her year group’s Friends Reunited page for fresh names and starting all over again. Nothing nothing nothing. If you want to disappear these days, disappear completely, then the first thing you need to shake off is your name. Why be Rona Leonard when you could be xxcutiexx, or Asriel1983, or Glitzfrau, or Kittylover, or MsStiletto?
It’s supposed to be easy now. It frightens people, how easy it is. You can find the girl whose house you played at when you visited your gran, that guy you sort of fancied from the bar you worked in for five months during your second year of university, a man you met through friends one night, three years back. You can bind all these people to you for as long as the internet lasts, on a page that exists nowhere tangible, look at who their friends are, watch their lives. And this small, small country we live in. Graeme-at-my-work used to go out with Heather-from-myschool’s cousin. Beth’s best friend’s mum was a former pupil of my Dad’s. I went to university with a guy whose brother was my gran’s home help. Blips on a radar, spreading out across the country, across the world. I’m here. I’m here. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, and yet my sister has found a way of removing herself completely from this matrix of nosiness, has wiped her fingerprints off the world.
Computers are wise, though. Computers learn things about you and use that information, and after a few days in each office, each new machine started to offer me solutions, clusters of one-line-one-link adverts sprouting around my search, her name filled in by automemory after I’d put in Ro-. Clean, bold typeface.
Trying to trace family members?
Missing persons found!
Track your genealogy!
Families reunited
Looking for someone?
I followed every link. I paid for trial membership on every single scamming site. There was one that looked properly genuine, though. Findastranger.com. A well-designed webpage laden with testimonials that had email addresses attached. I decided to go for the deluxe package.
‘I’ve found a way to trace Rona,’ I told Mum. ‘I’ll need your credit card. It’s just a payment of about £200 a year, in dollars.’
She looked at me.
‘Don’t you want to find her?’ I said.
Mum feels the most guilt, about all of this. She’s sat up nights weeping into a bottle of wine and blaming herself for having left us. She’s the easiest touch.
I had to create a profile for her. Not just name, age, sex, last known location, but interests and favourite movies, favourite songs, subjects taken at school, names of childhood friends, childhood pets. Favourite actors. Favourite curse words. Favourite musicians. Teenage crushes on celebrities.
They would use this, they told me, when the confirmation email came through, to source her. They had technology, they told me, that would track through hundreds of message board users and bloggers, people commenting on other people’s web pages, look for people who declared interests in these things, who quoted from these films, who adopted usernames and passwords with similar configurations of letters.
I scanned in every photograph I had of her, from childhood up: dressed as a tiger on the bench in our old front garden, scowling at the camera on a beach somewhere. I zoomed in on school pictures where all the girls in the front row had their hands crossed nicely, one on top of the other. A couple from her high school yearbook: cheeks sucked in, arms round boys in nightclubs, pouting. I eased my mouse around the wild fuzz of hair sticking out from a paper hat on the last Christmas before she left, when she drank about three quarters of a bottle of Dad’s crap wine even though she must have been – god, it still makes me angry sometimes. I uploaded them in the box on the secure link. Facial recognition software, the confirmation email said. If there are pictures on any of our online sources featuring subjects with similar features, we will send them to you for review. If you have samples of your loved one’s writing style, or feel that you are able to approximate their speech patterns, please use the form provided to attach examples in Word document format.
At first I was just putting in stories, things I remembered that I thought were significant, but then I started actually trying to write her. That last year, I thought, when she was living away from home. Try that, try reconstructing that, out of the little clues she’d given, accidentally: four bar jobs, three changes of address, the last after she fought with Christina, the boyfriends she mentioned. Jez? Cammy? The crappy presents she bought that Christmas, the long, long interviews we’d done with Christina and her last boss, both of them sleekit at the eye, worried we might be trying to blame them, might be suspecting them.
She haunted me. The way she’d started saying ‘god’ and ‘like’ as though they were punctuation. The way I could hear her laugh chiming in my own, tainting the things that made me happy. My palms had permanent nail-marks from clenching, because I was coursing with anger at her, all the time. In my dreams, she lost her face; I couldn’t see it. Only the idea of her, height and hair, present again in the corner of my eye, just out of reach.
Rona on a computer somewhere. Working, doing something, typing her own name in, again and again until her own adverts bloomed. Want to be found?
We didn’t hear anything from Findastranger. Mum had to cancel the card, and I began to wonder whether I’d given them enough to create a fake her, out there, for money. And slowly, when my searches and searches threw up nothing new, I managed to numb that part of me off, and let her drift away.
This was where my head was at when I got Heather’s email. We’ve got the hen weekend booked! it said, and gave the name of the village my sister had lived in, six years earlier.
Village
I was pretty sure that was her door, two down from the Ochil Bar. It took me a couple of seconds to get the nerve up to press the bell. A single note, and the sound of footsteps.
People don’t just turn up unannounced on doorsteps anymore. Visits are arranged on Facebook, confirmed by text message; you pick and choose who you open your door to. That’s why the young man in the socks and boxers holding a coffee mug with cats on it looks confused.
‘Hello?’
She’s moved, of course she’s moved, everything does.
‘Hi. Sorry - I might have the wrong address. I was looking for someone who lived here a long time ago. Christina?’
His face breaks, relaxes.
‘Aw, she’s up at the slopes just now.’
‘She still lives here, then? Are you her boyfriend?’
The smile gets bigger, a whole headful of happiness.
‘Husband. As of two months. I’m Craig. Do you want me to let her know you called, eh…?’
‘Fiona. I’m an old friend – well, we were at school together. Sort of. There was actually something I wanted to ask her, and I’m leaving the town tomorrow. Do you know what time she finishes?’
‘Not till six today, and then, well. We have plans this evening.’ He’s just smiling to himself, now. ‘Actually, hang on. We’ve got the schedule pinned up–’
He disappears back down the hall again, and I can see that Christina has decorated the place since last time I was here. I’m thinking, Christina is the same age as Rona, and that age is still ridiculously young to have a husband. Craig returns, head bent over a sheet with official-looking crests and a terrifyingly organised grid.
‘She’s doing early learners today - the eight-to-tens, then under fives after that, but they don’t start till twelve. You’ll probably be able to catch her on a shift break if you hurry.’
‘Right. Where’s that, exactly?’
He wrote it down for me, the ski slope, and pointed across the street to the bus stop, described meticulously where I needed to get off. He was nice. A nice boy. He and Christina were probably very happy together.
She’d clocked me right off, when I’d scrambled off the chairlift, stared and then nodded curtly in my direction. I had been thinking, wow, her memory must be good, we only met a few times, but of course, her husband would have texted her, warning her of the unannounced intruder. I also remembered that, from a distance, I look quite a lot like Rona. From a distance. She flashed a hand up: ten minutes, pointed all the way back down the hill at the cafeteria and mimed drinking a cup, then turned a far less irritated face back to the padded children strapped to boards she was helping down the bristle slope.
I stood there for a while, watching the faces of those people on the brink, about to take the plunge. Christina’s kids were certain, set, determined, under their too many layers. It was the older ones who showed fear, those few flashy adults who were on this slope this morning, designer sportswear more suited for a resort in the Alps than a wee Scottish mountain town. Their eyes going extra white against their fake tans just for that point-nothing of a second before they went over, stuck in that tiny hesitation between still and slope, a moment where they didn’t definitely trust what they knew would happen.
Beats me why anyone would want to do this at all, this ungainly freefall, all your faith in two planks of wood that could snap your legs apart. For the rush? Surely it can’t be that good.
I called Samira from the cafeteria.
‘Hey hon. Listen, something’s come up and I’m not going to make the bike ride.’
‘Yeah, we’d figured that one out, actually. Where are you?’
‘I’m just – look, I’ll tell you later.’
‘Ok. Can you get back to the cottage for four, though? Kelly and Andrea have paid specially for a surprise for Heather. Pole dancing. They’ve paid for all of us. ’
She hung up.
Christina shook her hair out from the imprint of her hat, making huffy theatre of throwing it and her gloves down on the table, not sitting down at once, going straight to the queue for her cup of tea. Staring at me.
‘So. Long time.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry to barge in on you at work, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I’m just- I came up here on a hen weekend, and it’s brought a lot of memories back, and I just wanted to check a couple of things with you, like–’
‘Right. So I take it she hasn’t turned up, then?’
It took me by surprise, that. That some people wouldn’t know. Of course she hasn’t turned up.
‘No. No, she hasn’t. Not a word in six years.’
‘Ah.’
‘Anyway. Sorry – you’re married, aren’t you. Congratulations! He seems very, ehm. Nice.’
‘He is. He’s moral.’
I remember thinking, that’s a strange thing to say about your husband, these days anyway.
‘I thought you might have moved. I’m amazed you’re still in that flat. Stroke of luck for me, eh?’
That came out as one of those jokes that isn’t a joke, all upward inflection and slapped on jollity. Christina did not take it as a joke.
‘Why would I move from the flat? It’s my flat. We’ll be paying off the wedding for a while yet, and then we’re going to need to start saving for children. It’s home. Listen, I’ve not got long, and you didn’t come all the way to the top of a ski slope just to find out how I’ve been doing.’
‘Right. Sorry. Ehm. This is probably just paranoia on my part. Actually, of course it is. Sorry. But being back up here has been strange. I just thought - and I don’t want this to sound like an accusation – I just – thinking it over, was there, maybe, something you didn’t tell us? At the time? Just maybe to save our feelings?’
She blew air out of her nostrils, stared straight at me. There was no trace of a thought process on her face; the thing she was about to tell me had been decided as soon as she saw me clambering off that chairlift. Maybe even sooner, when her husband had texted.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to say this in front of your Mum and Dad. I don’t want to say this to you, actually, but I will cause you’re here.’
A couple of seconds, then it came out in a harsh whisper.
‘Your sister was. Was, eh. She was turning tricks from my flat. That’s why I threw her out.’
‘Turning –?’
‘Having sex with men. For money. You know.’
There was breath between us, hot breath. Slightly sour. She spoke the rest very quickly, looking into her tea.
‘I thought at first she was just having a lot of men back and I didn’t like it but I didn’t think it was my place to, ah, judge. Ha. Although I couldn’t work out how she was managing to pay the rent after she got fired from the pub. But anyways, I didn’t twig until I was sent home sick from work one day and there was a. A man in the sitting room. With his thing.’
Christina’s tiny sitting room, its functional, cheap uplighters. How ordinary and dull a room it was, how unsexy.
I could still hear her talking, though.
‘Anyways, it turned out she was advertising. She’d been taking out adverts! It wasn’t just something she’d done for tips with a couple of guys she’d met in the bar or anything, not that that would have been excusable – I don’t know, maybes that’s how it started – but by the time I caught her she was advertising in the local paper and on the internet! On web forums! High demand, cause she was the only one, eh, servicing the tourists, but only working while I was out the house! It was my house, Fiona. My. House. I had to bleach everything. I got cleaners in, professional cleaners, and I moved in with a friend until it was done. Everything.’
‘Ah –’
You’re in shock, I thought. This is shock. I actually put it in those terms to myself. While I was doing that, I asked the only question I could cope with.
‘Why didn’t you tell this to the police, Christina? It could have helped us find her. They could’ve tracked her online. We could have got them to look at arrest records or something.’
‘Look, I understand that you want to find your sister, and that that’s your main concern.’ Her voice had been very tightly controlled, but suddenly she let it go, that tiny whisper pissing through the room.
‘She was using my flat as an- an effing hoorhouse. I thought they’d think it was me, too, that I was her – pimp. I mean, I own that flat. I own that flat and I took her in when she bloody rocked up on my doorstep in tears, and she- She put my entire livelihood in danger, that dirty – hooker! After we’d been friends for years- oh, god, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Please don’t – look. I’m sorry for you, for your family, Fiona. But I just couldn’t. Still can’t. Sorry. I’m really sorry.’
City
These were not the women I was looking for. These bosoms, matronly and welcoming, these round backsides, puckered flesh spilling out and around suspender belts. These knowing winks from eyes beginning to wrinkle at the corners, these bodies that weren’t slim, or that young, or toned. These were vocal women, mainlining opinions and their own businesses through their blogs, on Twitter, organising themselves in unions, advising each other, protesting their rights.
They didn’t tally with the story I had in my head. I went further, searched deeper into recommendations. I wanted younger women, women my sister’s age or less, women looking frightened, coerced, or just gone. Women who were being wronged by the system. Girls. I wanted girls, who men were using, girls who were doing this out of desperate necessity.
I can find all these things, of course. Anyone can find anything they want, instantly, any story they want to believe in, any pictures they need to see. It’s all there. Almost.
I’d had this picture in my head of Rona prowling round the streets, one of those ghosts dropping condoms outside my office, but that doesn’t seem to be how it happens these days. All you need is internet access and a picture with your face pixelated out.
Just a couple of clicks and I’m back in the right narrative again. I’ve found a forum where the girls and men both go, where the girls advertise themselves and the men critique them. Where be dragons. Where be young women photographed from behind, a lipsticked grimace and a splayed, waiting arsehole on every individual profile. Where be punters, and the opinions of punters. Field reports, they’re called.
Her tits were really disgusting. Once I got the bra off they just sagged all over the place. They were flopping in my face.
She’s back on the scene after a long break and I’m thinking she must have had a kid cos my god, the stretchmarks on her. Boobs not as pert as I remember either, and it was like a fucking tunnel up there.
She went down on me and it was alright, but not anything special, and her hand moved on my shaft just mechanically.
Holly is a real gem, who should only ever be treated like a lady.
Wow! What a technique! And that’s all I’ll say ha ha. Afterwards we cuddled for a nice long stretch. I certainly didn’t get the idea that she was a “clock watcher” or anything like that.
I eventually fucked her doggy while trying to ignore the disgusting smell coming from her fanny. But then the most repulsive thing hapened, my cock was suddenly covered in blood. It even ran all over my sheets!!!! She said she didnt know she was due well poor excuse if you ask me, how can you not know??? It was like something out of a horror movie!!!
She’s also a great conversationalist, can talk about any subject really well.
It says on her blog she likes to wear boots and so I was pleased to see she’d come dressed in them and her fishnet stockings, just like I’d asked. She has the most beautiful legs, too.
We did it twice: i was so anxious about pleasing her that I maybe finished a little bit quickly the first time, fortunately Angela is a lady and was very nice about it, and let me go down on her for some time. She certainly seemed to enjoy herself, too, she’s a real sexual adventuress.
Tiffany is a really sweet girl. Now I truly understand the meaning of “girlfriend experience”. I’ll be back.
XXX
By the time I left the office, it was dark outside. The station is at the top of the hill, the concrete felt treacherous, slippery in the rain. We’d all had to stay late, cover for work lost in the protest mess, and I realised I’d missed my window for leaving before the transfer happened. These streets were no longer my place.
It was the first time I’d seen it happen up close, though. The woman walking across the road from me, skinny jeans, eyes ringed and her hair up in a high band, the tail twitching as she walked, hitting her shoulders. Probably not even nineteen. Her limbs were thin, very very thin. A car pulled alongside her; she looked, indicated her head round the corner to a lane with a dead end. The car blinkers turned smoothly and she carried on, catching up with it without ever breaking her stride, although she looked over her shoulder at me. Alley cat flexing and spitting on a wall.
Oh.
Even the click of my heels on the concrete was full of meaning, suddenly, the noise of them. Another set of footsteps cut over my beat. Speed up, head down, grip knuckles round my handbag. Keys in my other fist, in my pocket, ready to strike at someone’s face, but it passed.
I’d got halfway up when headlights smeared the wet tarmac ahead and around me, the noise of brakes cranking together at my back. The car made warm animal noises as it pulled in, waited for me.
Me. The fucking cheek of it. Me in my work clothes, my plain trousers and heeled boots, my fitted coat. Me, a woman in this area, a woman who works here. Did the very fact of my being female and in this patch of real estate after dark mean that they think I’m-
The car purred sexily, a hot gust on my legs, and a sudden bad bit of me thought, what if I did it? What if I turned round to meet this car, the man inside, leaned in at the window? What if I got in, pulled my trousers down to my knees, climbed on top? In one minute, if I wanted to, I could have had a stranger’s cock inside me.
Instead, I broke into a run, up the hill. The scuttle of an outraged, virtuous member of society. Every noise in the dark, every shadow on the empty platform once I’d made it to the train station was a threat. I’d shrunk my muscles in on myself, tense up and wait the train out, those agonising seventeen minutes counting down in yellow computer font on the screen. It was a fright when the recorded monotone began, in an itchy burst of static:
The train now approaching
Platform two
Is the
Seven
Twenty-three
To
Helensburgh
The car hadn’t followed me.
I took my bag and coat off at the door, put my shoes in their place on the rack, began the sort of comforting bustle that helps the brain short-circuit back to home mode. Mum nodded at me from the sofa, began to gather her things, retreat back to the flat downstairs.
‘She’s asleep?’
‘Like a light. About half an hour ago.’
‘Great. Thanks. She wasn’t any trouble?’
‘No, no.’
She made her way to the door. I heard it close. Beth was pouting in her sleep. I propped her door a little more ajar and moved to the computer, without really thinking. You want to know a thing, you type it into a white, blinking space.
prostitute scotland
And now the clock says 02:14. I’m probably going to be late for work tomorrow again. I take my clothes off and the mirror looks at me, red eyes, faded cotton pants around its ankles, and I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with that, so I go to bed.
Do you remember the first time?
Early forties. Thin, short, unhemmed like his edges had been gnawed. Something feral about him, but not bad looking. Not really.
I’d thought he would be ugly. Old and fat and ugly. I’d thought about fucking someone repulsive, fantasised about rolled lolloping flab that’d shake as he shagged, kept my fingers and brain in place on the transaction, the power, tried to train myself into it.
Old skin touching me.
Instead, just this little vulpine man, smell of dead smoke off him. His mouth was dry, smacked as he opened it to say hi, white flecks in the corners.
I said hi back, and he let me in.
Just two of us in a room, a very ordinary hotel room. ‘I’m Jimmy,’ he said. Irish.
‘RXXX,’ I said. (That was the name I used, when I was starting out.)
‘Yeah – I guessed.’
‘Of course.’
‘So.’
‘So.’
That’s when I realised it was my job to break through this. My job, this, to ease him out of the nerves, to take his hand through it. Maybe it was his first time too.
All I had to do was smile at him, and say, in that voice like it was a normal thing to say:
‘So. Shall we discuss services?’
And I smiled at the end, a little bit, like we both knew how awful a thing it was, to have to ask, to have to reduce it down to money.
‘Just the basics, please. Just the hour.’
The words flat, no expression.
He handed me an envelope without me having to ask.
It probably wasn’t his first time.
My phone rang, before I could check the amount.
‘I’ll just need to –’
‘Of course,’ he said again.
No, not his first time.
‘So?’ she said, down the line.
And I thought, well, I’m not sure. It was something you were supposed to know, by instinct, she’d said.
Well, my instincts weren’t telling me to run, but they weren’t telling me anything at all. I was just in a room with this expressionless man, and he was skinny.
‘I’m here, and it’s fine,’ I said.
‘Okay. I’ve got the hotel on speed dial anyway,’ she said. ‘Two rings as soon as the hour’s up. And good luck, my honey.’
If my instincts had been telling me anything, the code was ‘I’m here, and he’s really lovely.’
We both stood there in the silence again, and I remembered that this was also part of my job.
‘Give me two seconds,’ I said, taking a step towards the bathroom, ‘while I go and change into something, eh –’
‘Just do it here,’ he said, gesturing to a space on the floor. ‘I’d like to see you undress.’
I was thinking, I haven’t been able to count the money yet. I was thinking, I haven’t done the lube yet.
He sat down on the bed, looking at me, and I stood in front of him, and pulled at the zip on my dress. It stuck for the first few seconds, and I had to wrestle with it, trying to keep smiling, swaying my hips a little to distract him. Cheap fucking thing. It came, eventually, and I let it swish down around me, stepped out of it. See through panties and a half balcony bra, so this man, this stranger was now pretty much seeing me naked.
He didn’t say anything, his face didn’t change, but he unzipped the front of his trousers and pulled himself out, already mostly hard.
‘Would you like me to suck your cock?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m right in thinking I don’t need to wear a condom?’
‘Not for oral, no,’ I said, like that was what I always said.
Eyes closed, and it’s just like giving any other blowjob. Could be someone I’d met in a bar. Could be a new boyfriend. I was touched that he’d washed it.
We spoke in these clipped, formal sentences, both of us. Like neither of us were there for the conversation, so what was the point in pretending? Made sense. He helped me in a way, that wee skinny Irishman, because my response would have been to crack jokes, to ease things through a bit. And of course, with some clients you can do that, and it’s great, but the first time, this one, he helped me pare everything right down, establish a rhythm and a way of being in the room. It wasn’t a kindness to me, he was just a customer, waiting for a service; I was the provider, that was the point.
It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that I’d crossed over, that I’d actually done it, that I was now not one of us.
Anyway. Ooh. Yowza, has this blog got serious, right? For being such good and patient little pervs, you can have a sneak preview of my new panties. I do love my bum.
