Two
Back
The first time I noticed what Rona could do was the year after the divorce. Mum was renting out the house while she travelled; Dad had moved to a tiny suburb on the outside of the city. The sort of place that had probably once been a village in its own right, co-opted into the city by bypasses and Tescos and housing schemes.
It was February, the air was sharp and good for you; we’d just started having to put an extra jumper on under our coats. Thirteen. She was thirteen, for fucksake, probably hadn’t even started her periods yet (not that I’d know).
There were five of us at my school who lived out that way, the only ones. Me and Rona, Jenna Anderson in the fifth year and her wee brother, and Malcy Lamont. If we made it in time, which we usually didn’t, we could catch the school bus, the one put on by three city centre schools for a disparate bunch: kids from village schemes and the part-timers staying with the parent who made less money.
Anyway, that day we were on time; weren’t going to shamble shamefaced into first period as usual to everyone mock-tutting, James Gibson pointing and going oooooh! Crossed the road and I went to grab her hand out of instinct. She glared right up at me.
‘I’m not a baby,’ she hissed. ‘And there’s no bloody traffic.’
Screw her. I was in a good mood that day. We sat down in the wee shelter and I leaned out the one window where someone had punched the scratched Plexiglas away completely, grinned up the hill, still a bit heathered, the sky above it blinking off the last of the sunrise.
Rona was thirteen, but she already had more chest than I’d ever get. Not that I knew that at the time, still clinging to old Judy Blume tales of hope and late development. Even in uniform I was nobody’s fantasy of a schoolgirl; I’ve never really worked out how to stand. But this was the day I realised it.
Dad lived at the last stop before the bus turned and ploughed down the bypass. It usually filled up at the five earlier stops and we almost never got a seat together. Not that Rona would mind that day. After a few seconds she got up and marched down to the verge, glaring into the road, hood of her duffel coat pulled up in the sunshine, shooting the odd glare back at me. Still all pissed off because I’d tried to take her hand. Oh, get over it, you stupid kid, I muttered at her in my head.
Just the two of us there, that day. Looking up the hill again, I saw him coming.
Malcy Lamont. He was in my year, but we never spoke. What would we say? He’d been in trouble ever since he arrived, just turned up one day about six weeks into second year. I think it was just the way he looked at the teachers, default expression of solid, nasty insolence. Eyes deep set with a shock of long fantasy girl’s eyelashes, greasy gingery curtains over a round head, fat lips always wet and half open. Not sixteen and already sexed, sizing the female teachers up when they told him off, just standing up there, itemising them – breasts, legs, back up to the crotch, where he stopped – till they backed down, every one. There were whispers about who he’d poked round the back of the science building, who had let him get three or even four fingers up, who he’d gone all the way with. Nobody really mentioned whether the girls had had much say in the matter. It was Malcy Lamont. He just happened. My plain girl’s invisibility cloak didn’t work on him, either – I’d had to pass him in the corridor on the way to PE once and he’d put his arm up, not let me through till he’d had a good, slow look. No words. Just letting me know that he would, if he felt like it. You dreaded getting anywhere near him during country dancing, in the progressive numbers, but you dreaded it silently.
Malcy Lamont was coming down the hill to the shelter now. Soft flop of cock at the crotch of his tracky bottoms, sour smell coming off him downwind. Malcy Lamont was only physical. The times before, when we’d made the bus, hulking Jenna Anderson and her brother had been there, the two of them like a barrier, soaking up some of Malcy. Not today. And he was coming over. I curled into the wall of the shelter, carried on staring out of the window frame, ready to flinch, wondering after what neverending length of time the bus would come.
He didn’t come into the shelter, though. I turned around, and saw him standing in the grass, him and Rona facing each other. Her hood was down, the coat open and slipping off her shoulders, her hair blown back from her face. Just staring right back at him, eyeballing, keeping his sightline level with hers. Her jaw was set; not the way it would be when she was going to start a fight.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing, really. I’m not sure I do now. No idea what their two bodies were saying to each other, what sort of silent conversation happened there. Malcy Lamont didn’t move. I didn’t move. The bus came and Rona broke it, stepped past me and told me to come on, commanding, making her point. Schoolies spilled and burst all over us, jeering across the aisle, warmth and the fart stink on my skin. Somebody’s tinny transistor playing that Robert Miles song, ‘Children’, scratching and fuzzy at the strings. Rona was three paces ahead of me, cutting briskly through the tangled limbs of the aisle. She got a seat beside a smaller girl in her year, turned to her and started chatting.
‘Are ye getting on, then, son?’ the driver was asking.
Malcy Lamont walked quickly down to the back seat, where his mates were whistling at him. Head down. Didn’t stop to brush his groin up against any outstretched knees, didn’t look at Rona. I looked at her instead, through the seat behind. Her and thin, lank Donna Bruce nattering away, the same age except one of them was a child and the other one wasn’t.
Next time I got a chance to talk to her was after lunch, passing her on the way to French.
‘What was all that about this morning?’
‘All what? You just need,’ patronising voice, full height ‘to remember that I’m not actually a baby, Fiona.’
‘You know what I mean. With him. With Malcy.’ I whispered that bit, didn’t want to get caught saying his name out loud.
‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ she said, peeling off and away from me, her hair whipping out behind her.
I wasn’t even surprised when the knock on the door came that night. Dad was out at the shops and Rona was in the toilet, so I went, already half-knowing who it would be.
‘Eh. Is your sister in?’
He was wet through – it had just stopped raining – huddled up under a man’s coat too big for him. I looked down on him from our steps and thought it was maybe the first time I’d ever heard him speak. I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I just closed the door on him, softly, and went back into the living room, turned the telly up louder.
That was it, for Rona, though. I heard her new laugh in the corridors and on the bus, bright and healthy. From nowhere, she had boy friends and then boyfriends, mostly third years but once, for two terrifying, glorious weeks until the slaggings from his friends got too much for him, Chris Wood in fifth year, captain of the football team, lead actor in the school plays. Never Malcy Lamont, although I’d sometimes catch him staring at her cheek on the bus, immobilised. She was untouchable for the likes of him now. She walked taller than me, bunched her school skirt into her belt, stretched her legs out at break times to pull her socks down into thick rolls over each ankle. She started staying out late, crashing home at one and three and four. Her clothes and makeup got much, much cooler than mine, quickly. I’d pass her in the playground, screeching and flirting and petting with an entirely different set of friends from the ones she’d had before. I just stood back and watched her, got my grades, told no tales to either parent. They were busy finalising the divorce then, anyway, didn’t notice, didn’t want to.
Forth
I am beginning to know this world, I think. It’s like a soap opera. I tune into them every day, when I get home, when Beth’s fed and the telly is on. There they are, listed, all the women working in my city, reports on them, their own blogs, their new pictures.
I check the forum to see if anyone has posted a new field report any of the ones I follow, the ones who seem sort of famous with the men, the personalities. Sabrina. Tiffany. Casey. Shiny American names. Bubblegum exotica. I think I’ve found the blonde girl, the one with the piercings, from the protest. Anya. She calls herself ‘Sonja’. Her website says she’s Swedish, and specialises in fetish work. Her face is blurred out, of course, but you can still see the piercings. She has another one through her nipple, little silver bolt, the skin all bruised and puckered around it. Not for the first time I think how strange it is that most of these women will show every little part of themselves but hide their faces.
Holly has a new blog up; it’s short and boring, complaining about women in the game who lie about their age. Holly is nineteen, and she doesn’t understand why anyone would ever want to lie. What’s the point, she says. When I’m thirty-five, I’m going to tell everyone I’m thirty-five. I’m going to be proud of it.
Holly is one of the ones who is either far too trusting or knows exactly what’s she’s doing; I haven’t worked it out yet. There’s nothing blurred out here – there are only a few who do this, and they’re mostly young, very young, late-teens-grew-up-on-Facebook young. Holly also pours out her soul, though. Where the others blog about irritations with clients who don’t read their websites properly before calling, or use their sites to draw attention to political rallies, pulling for sex workers’ rights, she writes about her hatred for her mother; her college courses, her compulsions.
If there’s one thing I just can not stand it’s bad hygiene. I am OCD and proud of it! If you want to play with me, gentlemen, I’m always always going to insist that you shower first.
Her father. She writes about her father, sits it all up there alongside the pictures of her, modelling dresses and lingerie, spreading herself wide for the camera. With just two clicks I could book an appointment with her, this fragile bird-thing who I know far too much about.
Its Fathers day so I wanted to write something about my favourite man in the world, my Daddy!!! Its no secret that me and my mum don’t get on coz she’s an abusive bitch who ruined my childhood with her selfish behaviour. My dad couldn’t stand to live with her, she drove him away just like she drove me away by the time I was sixteen. I went to look for him and we had the most amazing reunion ever, it was like getting a second chance to be a little girl. After years of a jealous woman on a campaign to brake down my confidence, it was amazing to have someone tell me that I was actually beautiful and that I was his princess.
I imagine the men who come to her, having read this, spent time inside her bruised head, and I hope it’s a ploy, that she’s cleverer than this. Her face is not quite pretty – she missed being pretty by a hair’s width, a blink; everything individually is, but not together. She’s trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the eyeliner, the plastic tiara and underfed bones. The other one who goes without pixels is young and posh and beautiful, a student, through in Edinburgh. She calls herself Felicity and for all I know it’s probably her real name. Edinburgh’s not her home town. Why should she care what they think of her up here?
All this I know, because it’s right there in front of me. Click, click. Felicity charges three times as much as Holly, and is less upfront about the services she provides, although both make it clear that anal sex is not a problem. I look at their skinny bums, Felicity’s beribboned, in satin, Holly’s naked, her hands pulling the cheeks apart, blue-polished fingernails digging into scrappy flesh.
I am not even ten years older than either of them, but their display, their lack of shame, their sex makes me feel like I’m from another time. You see, Rona? People like to be visible these days. Completely visible. Everything on display for the whole world to see. You’re doing it all wrong.
I worry about Holly. I worry about her like I worry about the eighteen-year-old girl who lives near me and advertises on the site, doesn’t blog, only hosts two grainy pictures, one of her breasts, one of her shaved crotch, both taken on a mobile phone, and says she does ‘bareback’. No condoms. I want to write to her and warn her.
I forget that they don’t know me, no matter how much I can read up about them. I wonder if their clients, prospective clients, faceless men at computers, feel the same.
They are exciting, these lives, though. They are. That they can list, on a site, the things they will do, and men will pay to do those things with them. I find it exciting in spite of myself. In spite of the bits of me that are repulsed.
There are no new field reports on any of my girls. I go back to the search page.
Search by Lady’s name:
Search by Location:
Search by Services [tick]
Outcalls Incalls Fetish/Specialist
This computer is wise to me too, fills in the o and the n and the a after I type the R, and although I’ve broadened it out to search the whole of the UK, it only returns the one in Manchester.
Manchester, I’d thought, when I’d first found her, my skin prickling, Manchester was the last place we had any sort of sighting. But it isn’t her. Wrong skin colour, wrong age. I could tell from the first reports.
Not that she would be using her own name anyway. What does she go by, now, I wonder again. And then, back on the search page, without knowing why, I delete the R and put in an F and an i, my own name.
Field Report 15/03/08
On: ‘Fiona’
In: West End
Her place: Clean new flat in West End. Nothing much to say about it.
The punt: Went well. She immediately put me at my ease. A stunning girl in her mid-20s. I would say about 25. Curly dark hair. Looked like a young Raquel Welsh. Needless to say I was delighted. Started off with amazing blowjob. Let me come all over her beautiful tits. Then some petting until the half hour was up. Perfect lunchtime treat. I will be back for a longer session!!
There was a link to a website. West End Girls, it was called. Listing the finest independent escorts in your local area, it said. There was faceless ‘Fiona’, all thin shoulders, big breasts, fake tan, blue French knickers and a head full of smoothed brown curls. It was definitely our hair.
Back
A peace of sorts, damp-smelling and resigned, has settled about our family these days. In the evenings we usually group together downstairs, in Mum and Dad’s tenement living room, let the dramas of made-up families wash over us. They sit on the sofa, together but not touching, I sit in the single matching chair, Beth scuttles about the floor. One two three four.
The room could do with redecorating, to be honest. It’s looked like this for well over a decade now, ever since Mags Leonard, thirty-five and with two teenage daughters, married to a man almost ten years older, walked into it with her hair all different one day and screamed that she was feeling stuck, that she’d never asked to be a mother. Soon after that, the walls were painted in pale, inoffensive colours for the tenants who would come in, while the two teenage daughters and the floundering confused husband moved out to a chewed-up suburb. The room we shared in Dad’s rented house had Care Bears on the walls and was never repapered. Every second weekend we’d share the sofa bed at Mum’s new flat and make formal conversation with her young-looking boyfriends about our school subjects over dinner. When we moved back in, first Mum, then Dad, then me, with Beth, in the flat upstairs, which had been on the market for months, we didn’t talk about doing the place up. The agreement we didn’t need to voice was that we were only here temporarily, so Mum’s strange wall-hangings and ornaments collated from her travels, Dad’s stodgy watercolours of Scottish island landscapes, and the cheap cotton throws and cushions of my student life have stayed in their boxes in the cellar space. We put up Bethan’s nursery and then school pictures, though, in their free cardboard mounts. Not on the walls: she ages along the mantelpiece, from two to six, the face thinning and the eyes widening and the teeth disappearing.
Mum was seeing that Andrew guy; Dad and Jackie had been awkwardly coupled for a couple of years. Two sets of lives beginning to be lived together, neither bond strong enough to absorb the gap Rona left. Their grief not only pulled them back together again, it finally gave them something in common, beyond having been a pair of idiotic romantics who worked in the same café together that summer when she left school and he was trying to finish his first play and I was conceived. They’ve never said anything out loud, not to me, and perhaps they only had the conversation telepathically with each other, but we are all aware of their sticky puddles of shared guilt. His selfishness, preferring to write plays than earn money for his bloody kids, the ongoing affair with that woman. Her martyrdom, taking on three jobs and bullying him for his inadequacies, making him feel small and bloody stupid all the bloody time. Those things they shouted at each other in this room, their faces purple and ugly, while I flinched and Rona, blank-faced, turned up the volume on the TV.
Forth
All this week, I’ve been nipping downstairs in my lunch breaks, calling from the alley, scuffing the same shards of glass under my toe as I wait for the answerphone to kick in. She never answers her phone, it seems. Not during the lunch hour, anyway. A breathy Hi, leave a message in a voice that could be anyone’s; too quick to tell and she might be putting that accent on like I am. Muffling it through my coat, a bit of an Irish twang to keep her from guessing.
‘Hi, I’d still like to make an appointment to see you. Could you call me back on this number, please.’
I imagine her playing back her voicemail, gruff requests from regulars, first timers full of nerves, and then me, bell clear, from nowhere. Maybe it would feel tight at her throat, my voice, or it might make her dizzy. I know why she isn’t answering.
Fresh condoms in the car park today, I noticed. I’d need to make another call to street services, or Ian would be on me.
I didn’t get out till six that night, those musky patches of no-light already waiting up the alleyways for the girls, and a text message on my phone, glowing there, waiting for me.
Please stop calling i dont do women thx.
‘Graeme, would you be up for doing me a wee favour?’
I lean over his desk a little and his eyes fidget over my cleavage for a second, coming back to my face then flicking down again. He’s going to make himself dizzy. I’ve dressed up for this; astonishing the amount of planning I put in, I’ll think later, hot with shame.
‘It’ll not take two minutes - I just need a – well. A man. Through in the store cupboard.’
‘Eh. Aye. No problem. Sure. Now? Right. Eh.’
Moira’s face disappears into the wrinkles of a knowing smile above her computer as he follows me through and I feel suddenly mucky, like I’m deceiving her.
Inside the cupboard, I let the door close behind us and he flinches at it, arranges each nodule of his back against one side of the wall.
‘Boxes, is it? Which ones?’
He’s putting on more of an accent than usual, staring somewhere around my shoulder.
‘Boxes?’
‘Aye. Can’t you reach the boxes?’
‘Oh, no. Actually, it’s a little bit of a strange request, and I’d appreciate it if you could keep it from the others, just for just now.’ I’ve thickened my voice to match his.
‘Ehm.’
I take a half step nearer to him, we both breathe in the three extra scooshes of perfume I’d put on, and something alien begins to speak with my lips.
‘Oof, it’s warm in here, isn’t it. Anyway, hon. I’m trying out a new system for arranging Ian’s meetings, using a programme I found online. If it works, I’ll buy it for the office and it could make everything a lot easier, but - you know what the older ones can be like with changes – I’d rather present it to them as a working model, you know? I’ll not bore you – you need to get back to your work and I don’t want to hold you up.’
I’m talking very, very quickly. His face says he’s scolding himself for every look he’s stealing down my top. Naughty boy. I know what’s in your inbox.
‘Basically, I just need to record a man saying a few things, so I can try out the answering system. It doesn’t seem to be working as well with my wee girly voice! So I’ve got this recorder here. You okay with this, yeah? You’ll be back at your desk in a second, I promise. Thanks hon. You’re such a pal.’
The skin under his old acne scars reddens. I ease my weight forward again, stroke his shoulder, hold up the recorder. Later, I’ll be shocked at myself. I’ve known this man for three years and never been able to advance our relationship between the odd awkward shared joke. I don’t know if I’ve ever flirted in my life, for sex or any other reason. Not with him, not with anyone. Certainly not for years. Later, it will terrify me, what I can do when I want something.
She didn’t answer her mobile in the evenings, either, I’d noticed; that was all to the good, though, as my plan would probably work better.
I’d put a tenner into the new SIM card, and fiddled around changing them while Beth was doing her homework that evening. The card got stuck under my fingernail for a second while I was trying to shove it in; the metal edge pricked me and I worried that it would have come out, that I’d have to go and do all this again tomorrow. I needed it to happen now, this evening.
Beth seemed to pick up that I wanted her out of the way, too; she whinged and put on baby voices when I tried to rush her through her bath.
‘Me want to stay in, Mama!’
She began to punch the water and a torrent slopped up and hit me in the face, lukewarm, stinging my eyes and giving me the excuse I needed.
‘Bethan Camilla Leonard. If you don’t get out of this bath and go to bed right now, I will skelp you till you’re raw, so I will, you little madam. And stop speaking in that stupid voice. You’re a big girl now. Act like it.’
She went tiny and silent then, shrunk away from my hands as I tried to wrap the towel round her. But she went to bed.
In the living room I pushed cushions from the sofa into the crack from the door, and took the corner furthest away from her room. I thought she was probably awake still, lying there, but I couldn’t wait any longer.
It always rang seven times before the voicemail clicked in, her phone. I had the little recorder held right there at the mouthpiece, as she garbled her message.
‘Hello, my name is Graeme Bain,’ said Graeme’s voice, flustered under this morning’s tits and perfume. ‘I’d like to make an appointment with you at half past eleven next Friday, for an hour. Thank you.’
He has a nice voice, Graeme. Polite. Middle-class middle-management. Well-trained by his mammy. You’d never guess he liked it kinky.
I held the phone close to me for the rest of the night, like I was waiting for a message from a new lover. At one point, Beth coughed and I went through to check on her. There were tear stains dried on her face, but they were old ones. She looked sleepily at me through one eye.
‘I’m sorry Mummy,’ she said.
I sat on the bed and her warm legs curled around my haunches.
‘Here, here sweetheart.’ I leaned in and stroked her hair. ‘Mummy’s sorry too. She shouldn’t have shouted at you like that. Bad Mummy, okay? We’ll get ice cream on Saturday to make it up to you. Would you like that, darling?’
She burrowed her face into the pillow a little more, affected apparently neither one way or the other by ice cream, which is a new state of affairs.
‘Mummy, who was the man?’
‘What man, baby?’
‘The man who was talking in the room.’
‘Oh. I don’t think any man was talking. Did you maybe have a dream about a man? There are no men here, baby. Just Beth and Mummy.’
I moved my thumb back and forth above her hairline, like my mum used to do for us when we were kids. It gets her every time, eyelids battling heroically as her face settles back into sleep – and my phone beeped. She stirred back up.
‘Come on, lovey. Go to sleep now.’
I moved myself as gently as possible up from the bed, but it still disturbed her back up, eyes open. I whispered one more sleep at the door, but three quarters of my body was already in the living room.
XXX
An appointment. An address. I’ve walked to it three times over the weekend just to be sure, but there it is, every time, number 28, the numbers on the buzzer going up to the fourth floor. A five minute walk from Beth’s school and less than ten from my flat.
Good view. You could probably see Beth’s school playground from up there.
It couldn’t, couldn’t be a coincidence.
Has she been here, right here all this time? Moving around the same routes to the supermarket, the bank machine and the train station, feeling her muscles relax in the way that meant almost home when she saw the rail bridge and the church? Watching me take Beth to school every day, leave her there in the playground?
I know the people who live in this neighbourhood. Sure, there’s probably thousands of them in the tenements, but you learn to recognise familiar shapes as you live here. I know the woman who walks her dandruffy spaniel to the bottom of the road and back, three times a day with her feet encased in blue plastic bags; I know the skinny businessman whose suit is always in the checkout queue just before mine; the polite boy at the deli, the broken veins in the old men who smoke outside the Victoria Arms, the melancholy woman who runs the corner shop and each angry commuter on the 8.15 to Airdrie. I would have recognised her, on a street somewhere; I would have seen her back, her walk, and chased after her. You can’t spend six years looking out for just one person only to have them living under your nose the whole time. You just can’t.
But it makes sense. The flat looking over Beth’s school. It made sense that she would expect me to fuck up, would be checking in, poised to intervene. God, what if she’d been planning to take Beth from the school playground one day? I spoke to the worried-looking splinter of a woman who ran the after school project.
‘I’d like you to be very, very careful not to let Beth home with anyone claiming to be a relative,’ I said. ‘Nobody but me or her grandparents will pick her up from school from now on.’
‘Mrs Leonard,’ she said, insulted. ‘We never let the children go home with anyone other than their designated carers.’
‘Not even if they are visibly a relative,’ I said. ‘Not even anyone who looks like me. Especially not.’
I read and read and reread those forum reports, what her clients have to say about her. Every nuance. They go back to 2007, so she’s only been here for a year, and there was no trace before that. I copied them into a Word document and emailed them to my work address so I could go over them in the office when Norman was out at the site, or in the toilet, or talking to Moira, while Graeme slunk around me, avoiding my company but burning holes in my back as avidly as though we had actually had sex in that cupboard, rather than just recorded a ten second message.
That’s how I fill my days until Friday.
I drop Beth off and stare up at what I think must be her window. There was someone up there, I was sure of it, a shadow. I bent in to kiss my daughter, hold her closer and harder than I usually do.
‘Ow, Mummy! Stop it!’
My head is throbbing after the run back up the hill home, so I take a bath, and then, without knowing why, shave my legs and the stubble under my arms. A razor cut under my knee I hadn’t seen in the water begins bleeding as soon as I step out, great scarlet streams of it loose on my wet skin and dripping onto the tiles, and I swear at myself, realise my hands are shaking.
An hour and a half later, I’m calmer. I’d spent a lot of time smoothing down my hair – it’s complicated, doing that, and I’d had to concentrate – and applying all the products in my little-used makeup bag, one after another.
I put on my most expensive clothes; the red cashmere sweater, the pencil skirt, the leather boots. I put in the little gold earrings Gran had left me. I want her to see them.
And I leave my flat. I walk down the stairs like I always do, and steady myself on the rail at the top of the hill. The noise of my heels clipping the macadam as I turn left, like I always do, for the station and the cash machine, where I withdraw £200, feel it in my hand for a while.
Number 28 is a pale, new-build row meant to blend in with the Edwardian tenements, although its poky, plastic-bound windows will always give it away even after the too-clean sandstone succumbs to the grime of the main road, of life. Its squares and angles are too neat; its fronts too flat. I couldn’t live somewhere like that, somewhere with no history, although I imagine it would suit Rona just fine.
The buzzer at 2/3 doesn’t have a name on, not like the others. I fumble in my handbag with one hand while pressing the button with the other.
A pause.
A click.
A crackle.
A scuffled, deep ‘Hello,’ and I hold my new voice recorder up to the intercom.
‘Hello, this is Graeme Bain,’ Graeme says.
‘Mon up,’ says the voice.
She could be putting that accent on, too.
The stair smells of new carpet, of showrooms and polythene, of summer holidays chasing each other round floor-mounted tiling samples while Mum hissed Dad’s name and he flushed. The door is cheap wood, varnished up. Gold bell. Brass knocker. There’s a joke in there, somewhere, surely.
I ring.
Footsteps, coming towards it.
As it opens, I realise I haven’t thought for a second what I’m going to say.
Back
At first, the TV was just there to distract us from the billion questions and worries flickering back and forth in our heads. He had to go back to work first, then her, and we were no nearer to working out what was happening. I began to take up residence in this room when they weren’t here, and I was haunted.
The Health Visitor said the baby was picking up on my anxiety, on theirs, that’s why she wouldn’t settle. That’s why she cried. I could be changing her, or playing with her, or out in the park with her held safe in front in the pram and she’d sense Rona coming into focus and me tensing up, and it would scare her.
I made a promise to my baby, one day, to stop her crying. I promised her that when she was around I wouldn’t allow myself to be haunted. So we improvised, the two of us, just like we always do, with the gleam of Mum’s old television. I didn’t have one of my own then, so at the first sign of trouble we’d lock the door and move smoothly down the concrete stairs to the living room, switch on and curl up, the small softness of her on me. She came to know it so well that just the noise of our door shutting behind us and the different smell of the stair would calm her.
We looked out together, from this blank room, into the lightweight opinions and overwrought acting of daytime telly, and soon she was annotating my sarcastic commentary with her own babble, and I’d talk right back, and we were in perpetual nothingy conversation all day, Miss Bethan Leonard, me, the telly. The Health Visitor said I should be proud of the progress she’d made, how advanced her speech was, and I swelled with it. Keeping myself limited to one space and concentrating everything into her was working out well for both of us.
They’d come home, first Dad, then Mum, and not ask why I was always there. He’d sit down beside us for an hour and when Beth grew able to she’d sometimes curl into him and he’d feel the same peace of her, I could tell. The telly stayed on, always, there for us, offering respite from having to think or talk to each other. The Leonards are a television family, now. We have our regular viewing schedule, agreed upon silently. In the first year, when a soap opera plotline would veer too closely to our lives – teenage runaways, missing girls, single mothers, violent divorce, abandoned children – one of us would cough, shift, press the remote. At some point we stopped doing that. We let them smart out, those stories, now. Just pressing the old bruises to check they still hurt.
Eight o’clock is bedtime now. Probably it should be earlier, but the Health Visitor hasn’t been for years, and it seems to fit us all about right. At 7.45, in the last advert break, I tell her to pick up her toys and she does, usually without too much complaint, scoops them into a box behind the sofa. Most of her toys have found their way down here. Then there are kisses, for Granny, for Grandpa, and we climb the stairs, me and my girl. In the bad years I would only let Rona back in after Bethan was in bed, after I’d checked the sweet rhythms of her breathing twice, almost breaking with a love that worked as anaesthetic.
Mum came home early one day, before Dad was there, and she switched the telly off, and the pudgy, napping toddler on my lap shifted and moaned in her sleep. She spoke smoothly and gently and didn’t raise her voice, and neither did I. It was time, she said.
‘I never wanted this for you, love, but you’re going to have to look for something. You know your dad and I don’t make enough to support all four of us and both flats. Not indefinitely. And Bethan needs to go to nursery and meet other children. She needs to play. It’s important for her.’
The guilt that had kept them supporting me, prevented this sort of conversation, slowly losing its adherence, peeling off. I was to ease myself back in. Just take a part-time job. A few hours a week helping out behind a reception desk. Odd shifts in a call centre. The same sort of work she’d done when we were small.
‘But you have to come to me. You have to promise that. The second you start feeling any sort – any sort of resentment. Towards her. Or us, you know. Because it can come. The second, you talk to me about it.’
Knowing I wouldn’t. Talk doesn’t happen between us. Not like that.
Without the noise of the telly and a baby in my arms, Rona had insinuated her way back in. She found her way everywhere. Monthly dinner with the girls always started with cold pulsing dread through the smalltalk, knowing that just after the main courses arrived and the eye signals had been exchanged, one of them – usually Samira, with her well-bred tact – would tilt a cautious head to the side and say something with long, sympathetic vowels like So. Any news? How are you holding up?
And what would I say? No, no there’s no fucking news and there probably never will be? Shut up, I don’t want to talk about this – in fact, I never want to talk about it again? Yeah she’s back; can’t you see her – she’s sitting right there?
They were acting out of love and concern, those friends of mine; out of the perfectly logical deduction that anyone whose sister had gone missing would be frantic and worried and want to talk about it. She began to occupy the fourth place, the empty chair at any table when the three of us were out. So I stopped going out.
Forth
The woman behind the chain looks at me, and I look back at her. ‘Sorry pet,’ she says. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong door.’
I must have, surely. Her big body blocks the gap, bulked out in a checked housecoat; the flat grey perm of hair that had given up at least two decades before curling round the door frame. A respectable wummin who probably had no idea that a house of ill-repute was being run from her building, or if she did, would probably hiss at the gentlemen callers as they made their way back down, blank her hussy neighbour if they met in the street – and yet, the enamel numbers on the door quite clearly said 2/3.
Surely not. Okay, pictures could be faked, but the men’s drooling reviews had been unequivocal. A right tasty piece. Total wee darling. Wanked thinking about her all week.
She’s still looking at me, but her eyes are darting occasionally over my shoulder, looking for something else in the stair. She’s looking for the man, for Graeme Bain.
‘Is this, ehm, Fiona’s house?’
Her eyes narrow behind the thick specs.
‘It is. And I’m telling you, dear, you’ve got the wrong door.’
‘I don’t think I have. Look, I made the appointment. I’m the half eleven. I just wanted to – I’ve maybe made a mistake.’
She looks at me again.
‘I’ll just go and have a word with her,’ she said, and the door closes in my face.
A madam? I wonder. I think of glamorous older women in films, Dolly Parton’s cleavage wrapped in silks and feathers, welcoming in leery cowboys.
The gatekeeper opens the door-crack again.
‘What is it you’re wanting?’
‘Just to. To talk to her. Nothing, ehm, else. I’ve brought the money. She’ll still get paid –’
The door shuts. Behind it, female voices tango blurrily.
What sort of prison was this? Even from the crack, I’d been able to see that she was big. Strong. Fifty years ago, the sort of woman who’d have been scrubbing stairwells and lugging her family’s washing back and forth from the steamie. Rona had always been delicate, small-made, bones like a bird. This woman could snap her neck under one meaty arm if she wanted.
They were supposed to be men, the traffickers, the pimps. According to the headlines. Sleazy men, vice kings if they were British; monsters and immigrants if they were not. This was not a thing that women did to other women, this crime. It couldn’t be –
The door opens all the way, and the auld monster stands there in her pinny in the hall, beckoning.
‘Okay. In you come. But I’ll warn you, she’s no happy about this.’
I think for a second, I could take this woman right now, do enough damage to keep her distracted, scream RUN – but what if she’s tied up, or if there’s someone else in there, some big bruiser paid by the pimp to keep her down–
My feet tread fluffy carpet and I’m ushered into a small living room. Sunny. New sofa. Mirrors on the walls, china ladies on a stand in the corner. Uplighters. A woman’s face, suddenly, right in mine, its pointed teeth.
‘So are you the one that’s been phoning, then? For fuck’s sake. I’ll just tell you this one last time, doll, to your face, so you get the message. I am not a fucking lezzy. Okay?’
She’s wearing a silky, bum-skimming dressing gown, sheer black, with something purple on underneath. Flipflops, dark blue toenails and a deep, even tan. Dark eye makeup. She’s the right height, right size, her hair has been straightened but was probably pretty similar to mine. I knew her from somewhere.
She’s definitely not my sister, though.
Of course she isn’t. Of course of course of course.
The room smells too sweet in the heat, is beginning to lurch about me. The woman who is not my sister is still going, her voice getting louder, her face redder.
‘– absolutely wasted an hour of my fucking day. I mean, this might be a wee joke to you, hen, or it might be some great big moral crusade, but it’s my fucking job and you’ve just cost me a perfectly good paying client, do you get what I’m saying? Do you? Ho. Doll. Are you alright?’
I come to on the sofa. There’s something cold and wet on my face and it’s being held by the older woman.
‘There she is. There you are, madarlin. Okay. Okay now.’
The dressing gown material shushes against itself as the younger woman – Fiona – comes to sit beside me.
‘Alright. Come on, I’m not gonny shout at you. But want to tell me what all this is about?’
‘I’m really, really sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ve made a huge mistake.’
‘Aye, you have. But you’re here now.’
‘I thought you were my sister,’ I said. ‘She’s been missing for years, and your – your pictures on the West End Girls site. You look like her, a bit.’
She breathes out.
‘You’re not from the council, then?’
‘The council?’
‘Aye. The council. Their Ways Out hingmy. Ann was hearing that they’ve started coming round the women in flats now, as well. As though we were criminals or something. Buncha interfering auld biddies.’
‘No. I’m not. I’m not from the council, and I’m – I’m not the police or anything either. I was just looking for my sister.’
The older woman comes in, presses a hot mug into my hand and leaves again. I hadn’t even noticed her go the first time.
‘Wouldn’t care if you were the police. I’m no breaking any law here. Your sister – is she a working girl?’
My sister is many things, I think, feeling suddenly lucid. A flirt. A dancer. The beauty of the family. A fucking bitch.
‘She was, about seven years ago. I’ve just found out. I thought I could maybe find her using the sites, maybe. Sorry. It was a stupid idea.’
She makes a soft noise in her throat.
‘And was she working from a flat, or on the streets, like?’
‘A flat, but it wasn’t hers. Up north, in a wee village – she’s not there any more.
‘Obviously. Sorry.’
‘And she looks like me?’
‘Not really, no. Not now I see you. But in the pictures. And you were so nearby.’
‘Is she called Fiona, aye? Is that why you thought it?’
‘No. I’m called Fiona.’
Her breath comes out in something that had probably originally been a laugh.
‘Right. You thought your sister was working, right by your house, and using your name to do it? I mean, I’m no saying it’s impossible, but that’s pretty fucked up, likes.’
She has a point.
‘Look, I’m really sorry for wasting your time. I should go. I just - I just wondered. Her name’s Rona. She looks like me, a bit. Prettier, but there’s a resemblance. Do I look familiar to you?’
A thin wee smile for a second, and she looks away.
‘You look familiar to me for the same reason I probably look familiar to you.’
She pauses again. I stare over at her china figures, elegant long white statues with skirts, no faces. She coughs, starts.
‘Our kids go to the same school, doll. I’ve seen you at the gates before – I think your wee one’s the year behind my Adam. I’d appreciate it if this went no further, because if it does you and I will seriously have words. You get me?’
‘You’ve got a child?’
‘Aye. It does happen.’
‘I didn’t realise. Of course. I do recognise you now.’
‘Yeah, well. You forget you recognised me. I’m a good mum. I’m doing this for him. Okay?’
‘How does it… Sorry. Do you mind if I ask: how does it work?’
She sighs, she nods. She breathes in.
‘Ann through there,’ she jerks a thumb back at the kitchen, ‘comes round when I’m taking him to school, lets herself in and gets the place cleaned up. My first punter comes in at ten, leaves at eleven. Half an hour to tidy before the second,’ she snorts, looks back at me, ‘usually. Final one’s out by four unless I’ve driven out to see one of my disabled clients, and Ann gets the last of it tidied while I go and pick him up from afterschool, get back to my flat. I don’t work weekends or evenings and I’m trying not to do school holidays unless he’s in playscheme.’
She’s been looking over my shoulder, at the mantelpiece, at nothing, while she says this. Now she stops, fixes on me straight.
‘I was a cleaner, doll, when he was a baby. Manky minimum wage work – getting up at four every morning, living with my mum so there was someone to watch him, knackered by ten am. Scum under your fingernails that doesn’t come out. But there areny that many cleaning jobs that only take up school hours, you know? And when they cut the benefits –’
She recovers, something in her face pulling back, returning to a place where she doesn’t have to justify what she does. Not to me.
‘They don’t know about him, he definitely doesn’t know about them, and nor do the teachers at that school. And I want it to stay that way, alright?’
She bares tiny, pointed cat’s teeth at me again.
‘As for having seen your sister about, I really wouldn’t know. It’s no like there’s a working girls’ social club or anything, eh. The street girls probably know each other, but I’m just a mum who does a job from a flat, that’s all. The only non-punter I see in my working life is Ann here, and she’s just my next door neighbour.’
‘She’s not your, ehm, pimp, then?’ The word sounds stupid and prissy in my mouth.
‘Fucksake, no! She’s been round the block enough to suss the timewasters out at the door for me – most of the time – she’s a help with the cleaning, she’s handy to have around in case any of them get funny, and she’ll sometimes sit in and watch for a wee bit extra.’
‘Watch?’
‘Aye, watch. Some of them like that. Doesn’t bother Ann. She’s seen everything before.’
Surely this is all a dream. Surely. The room is still too hot, and I need air.
‘Look. I really should go. I’m sorry to have mucked you about like this and wasted your time.’
‘Okay. Did you say to Ann you’d brought the money, but?’ She laughs at my face. Probably I was looking confused. ‘No point pussyfooting about, is there?’
I nod, reach for my handbag.
‘Just make it fifty, eh. You’ve only been here half an hour. That’s the quickie rate.’
I count notes. The numbers, the famous Scottish faces and the smell of money are reassuringly familiar things.
She takes it and her face gets younger again, eyes bigger.
‘And I’ve got your word you’ll not let on? Imagine if it was your kid, if the other parents knew that about you. They’re fucking snooty enough as it is, some of them. I’d have to move him schools, the teachers would probably get the social work involved. I’m a good mum, eh. And what I do – it’s legal. I even pay my bloody taxes, for chrissake. Okay?’
‘I promise,’ I say, feeling the strange bend and flex of power between us. ‘It’s none of my business, anyway. Really.’
She sighs.
‘Look, there’s a group of them. Scottish Union of Sex Workers. They got in touch a wee while ago, looking for new, eh, recruits. The sort that want to get rights and that. Campaign, eh. Just attracting a load of trouble for themselves if you ask me – anyway, they’ve got a website. I’ll write it down for you. They have meetings every couple of months.’
At the door, Ann hovering in the background, she puts a hand briefly on my shoulder.
‘I hope you find her, eh.’
It closes, and I run down the stairs, out of the main door, trying to get to the air. I lean over the gutter for a second, wondering if I’m going to retch, but nothing comes and in the end, after a couple of deep breaths, I just make my way back home again and the world goes spinning on.
Later that afternoon I see her at the school gates. Jeans, glasses and a ponytail, face scrubbed, hugging a little boy in a green coat close. We make eye contact, and she flinches for a second. I nod, smile a bit to reassure her, then walk inside to pick up Beth.
Back
Okay.
We had opened the window the night before because we were drunk and the room stank, and we thought it was a good idea. The skin on my arm was pricking, cold, and the binmen had got me up two hours early. Trying to prise my numb hand out from under Simon’s vicious cheekbone, I woke him up. He rubbed his erection into my hipbone twice, then wandered off to the bog to try and piss rid of it.
I was twenty-two years old, working in the most junior position there was at a publishing company. I took minutes in meetings. I got coffees. They were starting to remember my name. My nights were spent in a fusty flat in the West End with a privately-educated final-year medical student. Simon had sublet me his spare room until one night, two bored, horny young people who hadn’t been touched in a long time, we fell into bed. We read books on the sofa at night, and sometimes went out to watch rock bands in sticky-floored pubs. We had a favourite café we got scrambled eggs in on Saturdays. We’d tried to have sex in the shower once, but the smell from the mouldy grouting put us off.
That was my life. Not a grand romance, not a great job. But both of them had potential. I’d liked them, and I’d liked who I was beginning to be in them. Maybe if I’d had longer, one or both of them would have survived it all.
Beth and I eat cheese on toast for tea and then she reaches for the kitchen roll and, finicky, wipes every crumb away from her mouth before sending her tongue out – one, two – into the corners. She washes her hands a lot, too, doesn’t like being dirty. I don’t know where that comes from. What will you say when she asks about her father? my friends said, my parents said. I didn’t know. I still don’t, because she hasn’t asked, ever. Maybe she hasn’t worked out that she has one yet.
None of them ever ask what I’ll say if she wants to know about her mother.
You’re a good girl, Gran used to say, pressing a twenty-pound note into my hands like she used to do with coppers from her pension when I was younger. My mother’s helpless, fluttering grip on me, her deliberate, teary glances. My father turned off, tuned out.
Okay.
The phone rang. I was at work and the phone rang, and it was my sister. I didn’t answer it, my boss did. I was told it was an emergency.
‘I’m at the station,’ she said. ‘I’m at the station and I need your help, Fi.’
I told her not to worry, I told her I’d be there in twenty minutes. I took my lunch-break early, not realising that I wouldn’t be back to work for weeks, and then just to collect my stuff. I ran almost all of the way.
I had lived away from home for five years by then. In that time, Rona had phoned me three times, only ever looking to enlist my support in her ongoing war with our parents. She hadn’t come to my graduation. She was not particularly attached to ideas of family, my sister, and she’d only turned up at Dad and Jackie’s Christmas dinner under particularly heavy duress.
She’d put on weight. Big smudgy makeup eyes. Cheeks pink with the cold. Layers of textures and wraps all over her.
‘Fi. Thank you. Thank fuck. Make it stop.’
As I went to hug her, I realised there was something in the way, something warm. And she thrust this something at me and it started to cry and so did she.
That evening. Simon was stunned, quiet, decamped to a friend’s house, more because he didn’t want to deal with the situation than because he needed space. I don’t remember what we said to each other, or even if she could say anything, or if I could say anything worth saying, anything more than oh hon. Oh hon, it’s going to be okay, which was a lie, one of those little lies you just tell people.
Because we had got to sleep that night at around ten, nothing asked, nothing revealed, just hugging and stroking and crying. I’d pulled out all the blankets we had and wrapped her with them. I’d heated milk and formula in separate pans, as though this was something I always did, trying to keep the panic out of my movements. I’d held both of them, separately, till they stopped crying, rubbing my thumb back and forth across their temples.
The baby started crying at about five, before the sun was up. I padded through after a couple of minutes. The shape on the bed didn’t stir, so I picked the basket up off the floor, and said something comforting and instant like shhh, shhh, let’s let mummy sleep, and then I thought about what I’d just said, and who I’d just used the word ‘mummy’ to mean, and I wrapped myself in Simon’s smelly dressing gown and carried her through to the kitchen.
In all that time, the fifteen consecutive years we spent breathing the same stale air of the same house, I don’t remember once having shown her how to put on makeup or insert a tampon. I was an inadequate big sister, a geeky gawky spotty thing who didn’t speak and didn’t ever help her out, not that she needed it. Ever. Rona always had the skill of mixing with people, but coming out whole and still herself. If I was ready to tell her the secrets of our flesh she’d have heard them, and heard them some years before I had even known. I hadn’t ever fulfilled a need, so she had grown up not to need me. Until now.
After I’d fed her, the baby stirred and fretted for a while, then I felt her growing limp, watched her tiny eyelids flickering down, felt her nuzzle in to the softness of my chest and fall asleep on me. And I just sat there, overwhelmed, as still as I could. I was scared that if I moved, I’d spoil it, this huge, beautiful feeling. My breath slowed to match hers, and everything about us was perfectly in unison.
Half past seven. I needed to have a shower and get ready. So we made two mugs of coffee and we went through to wake up mummy.
I know Rona, though. I know her. And so I don’t know why I was surprised, as I pulled back that convincing-looking hump of duvet to find a faked body – blankets and couple of pillows. Like a bad joke from a bad film.
I wasn’t that old, not really. I might have managed three more years on the planet, but I wasn’t ready for this. I wonder if it even occurred to her whether I would be or not. And I needed to pee, and there was a baby beginning to cry again because I’d gripped her too tightly. We went through to the bathroom, and one-handed I pulled out towels enough to make a softish mat. I laid her down on the floor on top of them, and then turned her away so she couldn’t see me. All this seemed very logical. I sat down on the toilet and breathed in and almost collapsed. When I was done I washed my hands for about two minutes so that she wouldn’t pick up any germs. I looked at my palms, my fingertips, and imagined them encrusted with bacteria, so I scrubbed and scrubbed. And the baby started to cry again. And I said oh shit. Rona left my flat sometime between two-thirty and four in the morning, six years ago. She left behind the bag she’d brought, which only contained the baby’s things. There was a possible sighting at the bus station at five thirty am, but the person wasn’t sure. We had word that she might have been seen in Manchester four years ago, but it came to nothing. She hasn’t used her bank account since that day, although she’d cleared it out three days before. Her phone was a pay-and-go, which hasn’t been used; her passport hasn’t left the country. I have no way of screaming at her, or slapping her, or telling her to take her fucking baby and give me my life back.
After that morning, Beth would only sleep on me. Not lying down. Not on anyone else. And I thought, fine. I’ll take her. You’ve given her to me. But you don’t ever get to have her back.
Things Nice Girls Don’t Do
Difficult to know, really. When does it slide over? When do the walls rebuild themselves around you? The first time you have sex for money? It’s not as clear-cut as that, though. Before the act, itself, you have to market yourself into the mindset. Before that, even, you must have sensed something flexing in yourself, a relaxing of the codes you were brought up with, the easing away of all those hard-drawn pencil lines around Things Nice Girls Don’t Do.
Does it start to happen the first time you laugh at a dirty joke, because you mean it, not just because you’re being polite? The first time you have a wank over a really dirty fantasy you’ve made up, kind of thrilling at the fact that you’re getting off on things you couldn’t talk about in any sort of company? The first time you watch porn? Bed a stranger? Because things have changed; they’re supposed to have changed, right, but there are some things that women, nice girls, even liberated, modern women, still just aren’t supposed to be into. And undercutting it all? It’s still the assumption that we don’t like sex, isn’t it? That we don’t like sex and men do, and male desire, as it concerns women, is shameful and oppressive.
Nobody ever talks about what nice boys do or don’t do. We all know that men like sex. It’s written into the laws of sex. A man who has sex and is paid for it is a lucky bastard. A woman is a victim. That’s written into the laws of sex too. Because what underwrites these laws is a truth universally acknowledged: that every act of heterosexual sex (a thing, let us not forget, that happens to a woman, upon her) fundamentally damages the female partner in some way. Is there a time, ladies, when you might have gone to bed with someone who, perhaps, you weren’t particularly attracted to? A little act of mercy – you wanted to make him feel better, maybe, or you were just horny and didn’t really mind who it was? Or has an act of sex happened upon you that you didn’t really enjoy? It went on for a bit too long, maybe; your mind wandered. He seemed to be having a bit more fun than you. He just wasn’t very good.
Perhaps you barely remember these events. Perhaps you shrugged them off and haven’t attached any significance to them since. Wrong! Under the laws, the sex laws written out by Those Who Know Better, these happenings of sex upon your person will have scarred you. Irrevocably. You are now damaged, because of them. Or you are if you accepted payment for any of them.
And this is what gets to me. Why can’t we save the worry about damage and trauma for those who actually have been damaged. If you blur the lines between my job, or some boring sex some bored girl had once with the old guy from the shop because there was nothing else to do in her town – if you keep on maintaining that these things inflict the same amount of psychic damage as actual acts of rape and abuse, you trivialise those acts. And you make criminals and victims out of people who are neither.
And as long as we keep those laws, the men and the women both will think and act like that. So here we are for now, perfectly legal outlaws.
Today, my camera and I are just in the mood for a very simple leg shot, in my favourite stockings. Sure, fishnets are a bit of a hooker cliché, but look at me. I’m making them work.
