Three

Public

The strangeness of another person in the bed. I didn’t sleep well, all that alcohol dehydrating me, every alien mutter and twitch causing me to start, awake, on the defensive. Realising all too late that I haven’t done this since Bethan for a reason, half-hoping I’ll wake up alone, before Mum brings her upstairs, before she opens the door and –

Daylight, the grey beginnings of it on the backs of my eyelids. The body beside me easing up by centimetres, small calculated movements of limb. The shufflings for clothes, the agonising hushed noise of a zip done slowly. Then the nearness of warmth, then a hand on the side of my face, stroking my hair away from the temple, gently. A small, dry kiss on my forehead, then the door opening, closing. I’m pretending to sleep, so I don’t see any of this, but the smell of sadness left in the room is almost overwhelming.

XXX

There’s always a kid skiting about the dancefloor on its knees at a wedding. If its parents are too pissed by the time the dancing starts it runs the risk of being mown down, or being hit by a flying shoe, because there’s always women kicking their high heels to the side and dancing on in their stocking soles at a wedding.

There’s always country dancing at a wedding, too, so of course there’s country dancing at Heather’s, the bride first up, pulled by her kilted nothing of a husband in her strapless floor-length white number, same thing every bride’s been wearing for at least the last ten years, since sleeves went out. It’s on a figure like Heather’s that you really see the limitations of this style, because her tits are too big to stay in easily, are already bulging and rushing out the sides, under her arms. That bride could have your eye out in a Strip the Willow, I’m wanting to whisper to someone. But hey. It’s her Big Day; her chance to be a princess, and how will people know you’re a princess if you don’t dress exactly like all the other princesses.

The band play a loud chord to get everyone’s attention. It takes me a second to realise that it’s actually my daughter on the floor, and I need to rush up and grab her off, two great dirty marks on her white lacy knees.

‘Look at you, poppet. Look at what you’ve done to your pretty tights. You’re all over dust! Mummy’s goingty havety wash them for you! Come away and sit down for a bit or you’ll get hit by the dancing.’

‘You’re speaking funny,’ she says, and she’s right, I am. I’m talking clucky and my accent’s got stronger, manhandling her off the floor in big, plump mother hen movements.

The other mothers we used to meet at Tumble Tots, the first-time mothers, would always stop themselves at something like that. Oh god, I sound like my mu-um, they’d moan. Tonight I appear to be acting the part of a mother. Like a pantomime dame, I find I’ve muttered out loud.

‘Mummy, I think you’re drunk,’ Beth’s saying, solemnly.

I mean, the thing is, I look good tonight. I know I do. I’ve done everything that could possibly be required of me. I had a hairdresser iron down my frizz so it hangs sleek, and my dress is new and blue, dark blue, and I’ve borrowed Mum’s pearls.

It works well.

That fuzz sinking in already, the bit when you feel the welch and warp of the booze around the limits of your vision; that’s happening. I noticed it beginning about half an hour ago and decided to go with it, not to counter the acid sharps of my cheap white wine saliva; another glass, another.

That guy is looking over again. Everyone else is staring at Samira, the sharp green of her dress and the brown of her skin snapping your eyes to attention in a sea of whey-faced bores in pastels; she’s been snapped up for the first dance by one of the two anxious-looking friends of Ross’s who flitted about her during the buffet. But that guy is looking at me, peeking out from under his weird baseball cap, which actually looks pretty good with a suit, shy, turning away, looking back again.

All the girlz from the hen-night are getting up, Claire’s big face turning, nodding at the man beside her, just as dull and awful-looking as she is. I have to say, I think it’s a bit off of Heather to have put me and Samira at different tables, I really do. It’s not like either of us know anybody here, although Samira’s clearly not bothered by that. I had one of them and her boyfriend beside me, and it was a bit embarrassing because I was sure she was the one called Kelly, but she wasn’t, she was the one called Andrea, and it even said it on a card in front of her, although I didn’t notice that until I’d called her Kelly twice and Bethan’s right, I am drunk.

I’d had a chat with Heather’s dad, Beth straining and twisting at my arm because she was only interested in staring at the bride as hard as possible, trying to absorb those fake Swarovski crystals by osmosis. Beth hadn’t quite got over the hug Heather had given her earlier, bearing down on her, cooing.

‘You look great, Heather.’

‘Aw, thanks. And doesn’t Beth look cute, eh? Who’s this beautiful girl, then? What a pretty dress!’

Heather is transformed, in Beth’s eyes, at least, into a sparkling, scented celebrity. A brief, paranoid flash, from nowhere: did it seem like she’d made the fuss over Beth so she wouldn’t have to talk to me? No, no. Probably just drunk.

Beth’s in a foul mood, too. She’s decided to start whining.

‘I want to da-ance. Mu-um. I want to da-ance!’

I smile at the older couple sitting it out on our table, one of those mother smiles. I pick her up on my lap and crush my arms in round her.

‘I want to da-ance with Aunty Sameeeera!’

‘What we’re going to do is we’re going to watch Aunty Heather and Aunty Samira just now, and see how the dance goes. These dances can get very rough, and I’m not wanting you getting hurt in there. Can you see Aunty Heather and Aunty Samira? See where they are? What we’ll do is, we’ll go and dance alongside them if it’s not too fast. We’ll go in and dance at the sides.’

He’s not dancing, just looking over again, the guy in the cap. The idea that people are still attracted to me. One person, but still. I could kiss him, later. I could pull him away, find a quiet corner of the hotel, a corridor somewhere, push him up against a wall, take him home –

A tug on my bodice.

‘Mu-um! You’re not watching!’

The immense rustling that fights with the music as everyone turns, a mass rotation. Like a machine in Dorothy Perkins formalwear. The spinning is the best bit, actually, all those skirts, all that hair birling round, the men hemmed in at the centre with their arms raised like cranes. Heather’s got her free hand jammed across the top of her bodice, her flesh spilling, bouncing; but Samira is just flowing, the loose, bright green material of her skirt like conical water, her fanned hair rippling. She’s spinning so quickly you can’t see her face.

‘Look at Aunty Samira,’ I whisper to Beth, and she does, she’s silent.

Something suddenly clicks between her and her partner as she lands back into him, and he pulls her out from the filed shuffling circle and into the centre, where they dance a faster polka all the way round the circumference. You can do that, in a Gay Gordons, you can break out of the circle if you’re both clever, if you can feel it in the music. They take turns about, leading. Her forward, two three. Him back, two three. I sit Beth up on the table so she can still see, tiny Samira in danger of disappearing behind all these anonymous bodies. She gets up on her knees, and I perch up there beside her.

‘Aunty Samira’s like a fairy princess, isn’t she,’ I whisper. She nods.

‘Your breath smells of being drunk.’

Flat disapproving tones just like my dad’s – actually, no. It’s exactly the sort of putdown Rona would have used.

The older woman at the table gives me a funny look and I smile another mother smile at her.

‘Would you mind watching this one for a second? I just have to go to the loo!’

Private

There are days when I feel like I’ve stepped through the looking glass. That the days before that hen weekend – before that conversation in the ski slope cafeteria, before the smell of tea on Christina’s breath – that they were part of some other life, other world. A world where I was aware of prostitution, course I was, but only in the same way that I was aware of, say, accountancy.

Now it’s everywhere. It’s like being given goggles that allow you to see another dimension sitting on top of the one you live your normal life in. Rona used to love this story when she was a kid, in a book of world fairytales one of Mum’s friends brought her back from somewhere, about the djinns. Indian spirits, living their own spirit world, one that lies on top of our own. There were connections between the worlds – at certain points in time and space you could feel the djinns’ presence, and most people, fearful, would call them ghosts and run. There were those who could see the second world for what it was, though, and now I’m one of them.

I turn on the telly and a former teen pop star in expensive lingerie, playing at being a high class call-girl, fellates a lollipop and flirts with a handsome man who just happens to want to pay her. Old school friends on Facebook post links to furious online debates, where angry voices claim that all prostitution is violence against women. Shopping on Saturday, I pass a face that I know on the high street, and my mouth smiles, says hello, before my brain kicks in and it’s Holly, the young one, the Audrey Hepburn wannabe who shows her face. Her thickly-linered eyes crease in panic as she realises I can only know her from one place, is turning, scuttling off into a thicket of sale racks. I watch her go, delicate moves, bad posture, and she turns a hardened stare back over her shoulder, gives me the full fuckyoulookinat.

They’ve been here all this time, walking amongst the city, running their businesses, doing their things, completely unseen. This other world, off-grid, and Rona a secret corner of it. I heard implications in every stranger’s conversation on the street, every wisp of the radio from the office next door.

‘No darling, don’t touch yourself there. Only dirty girls do that...’

‘A third prostitute was discovered dead in Suffolk last night...’

‘No better than a common hoor, so you are…’

‘Of course, Jonathan thinks I’m prostituting my art.’

‘Patricia Arquette plays the tart-with-a-heart…’

‘MP’s £500-a-night romp with vice girl…’

The late-evening gloom of having worked too long means I catch a taxi back from work. I use my own money.

‘D’ye read in the paper? They’re knocking down the old Sanctuary Base down the road from here,’ says the taxi driver. White hair, moustache. Grandfatherly. ‘Crying shame that, if ye ask me. Crying shame. Used to work this area, back in the nineties, ye know. I wis in the polis, for a time.’

‘Were you in the vice squad?’ I ask, thinking of grim-faced cop dramas from the telly.

‘No, no. And I don’t know that they would call it a vice squad, the ones whose job it wis to charge the girls. Mibbe now, right enough. Aye, they might well now. No, we were just a unit working the area. The girls trusted us cos they knew we wereny goingty book them; they’d tell us things, not the others. Some of those others, they just treated they lassies like they were scum.’

‘The, ehm. The punters?’

‘Naw. The other polis. Shovin them about, screaming abuse at them, you dirty slag this – aw, sorry, mind ma language, pal. Ye just needed to treat them wi respect and they’d gie it back to you. They’d tell us about any dodgy punters they’d had, help us out catching the odd dealer; in return we could sometimes fix it so if the lassie went down an alley wi a punter, we could turn up just after he’d handed the money over, but before she had to do onything for it, chase him aff.’

This whole other world. I take my daughter to school, go to work, sit at a computer for eight hours, pick my daughter up, go home, eat dinner in my comfortable flat, watch television, pick over celebrity gossip on websites that make me feel bad about myself, sleep.

‘At the end of the day, ye know, it’s somebody’s job. It’s always goingty be somebody’s job. And you’ve got tae respect that. This is how some of them support their weans, make their money, and there are laws set up that dinnae even treat them like they’re part of society?’ He pulls up at my flat. ‘Sorry, pal. Here’s me been talking all that time. Ye have things that just get you up on that soapbox, eh?’

‘No, not at all,’ I say. ‘Thank you. Really.’

‘Anywey, that’s how I came to leave the polis.’

It’s like the world won’t let me stop thinking about it. The next morning the condoms in the car park drains seem terrifyingly important.

XXX

I’d started spending a lot of time on ‘Swedish Sonja’s’ site; the one who I thought was almost definitely that blonde, foreign girl from the protest, Anya. Her blog was updated daily at the moment, short, righteous bursts of anger directed at the council, at the demolition of the Sanctuary; longer musings about what this meant, about why street girls were such easy targets for the sort of disgust that underpinned this kind of action. We think of them as victims, not real humans – disposable people, she’d say. She talked a lot about stigma. About the way sex workers were regarded in society. ‘Sex workers’ was what she said. Not ‘prostitutes’. Sometimes, she’d call herself a ‘hussy’ or a ‘whore’.

It confused me, this website. The force and blast of her intelligence shining through, the fact that it was designed on clean lines, no jiggling gifs of sexy silhouettes, no garish fonts, no adverts; that the photographs in her ‘private gallery’, the one you had to hand over your credit card details and pay for a week’s access to, were beautifully shot and lit, framed in unusual ways, felt more like art portraits than pornography, even as she spread her legs, displaying the sharp titanium bar through her clitoris, head thrown back in apparent ecstasy so you couldn’t make out her face.

I poured out the last of the bottle.

If you were that smart, that conscious of the world; possessed of that much taste and dignity. Women who had these sorts of choices, whose brains gave them that, they didn’t have to do this. Didn’t have to sink this low. Rona didn’t have to, for fuck’s sake.

Shot from behind, her pale-bleached crop rumpled, the shiny black corset nipped in on her waist. Bare arse, bare legs, long, sturdy platform boots. The white-golden length of her, from raised fingertips to heels.

Close up on a breast, the nipple pierced through, sturdily obedient to the bolt.

Short black nails paused mid-air, flicking powerfully over her genitals. There’s nothing crude about this show; none of those stretched holes, not the smallest wisp of exploitation about it. She’s just very, very beautiful, and aroused, and she wants to share that with me –

‘Mummy?’

Bethan, nightmare-mauled, at the door. I swipe the screen away in time, rush to zip my jeans back up, stand, confused. The room is thick with sex and guilt and I hope she’s too young to detect either. I curl round her, warm her back to bed, stroke her damp temples till she drops off. I shake myself; I think, what the hell are you doing?

I need to bring this under control. This new world; it all exists in my head. I find out more and more every day, and I don’t talk to people about it. It’s going to become too big for me. Maybe it already is.

There’s a contact email address on her site.

Dear Sonja,

Really, really sorry for the out-of-the-blue email, and a hundred apologies if I’m wrong. But were you one of the protestors outside the RDJ Construction office last week?

If not, I’m so, so sorry for the intrusion. Please ignore me. If I’m right, though, we met there. I was the employee who brought you all tea.

You have no reason to trust me, I know – especially not me – and I appreciate that you probably won’t respond to me.

But, the reason I’m writing to you: the weekend before your protest, I discovered that my sister, who has been missing for six years, was a sex worker before her disappearance. It’s taken me some time to come to terms with this. I’m not sure I have, still. Anyway, I found that out, then I came to work and saw your protest, then I read your blog. And I think I’m on the wrong side. I’d like to not be.

I would very much like to buy you lunch at a convenient time, and talk some things through with you. I understand that you are a very busy person, but I think, given my job, I could be of some use to your campaign.

I will understand absolutely and utterly if that isn’t possible. I just need to help in some way. I need to talk to other people in this world. I need to understand.

Yours,

Fiona Leonard

At the end, hitting send before I could sober up and take it back, I was gasping. I opened it up again immediately, read, re-read. You fucking idiot, I rail against myself through wine-blacked lips in the bathroom mirror. Of course she’s not going to respond. She can’t confirm what her real name is. You’ve fucked it. You’ve fucked it, I’m muttering.

But oh. Actually writing it down and sending it away for someone else to read through me. Seeing the words take clean black shape.

I woke up on the sofa, soaked through with sweat. High electric fuzz in the room. Beth had come through, switched her morning cartoons on.

There was a new email, sent at four in the morning:

Fiona,

You are right. I wouldn’t usually answer this sort of email. It goes against all of my better instincts. But you were kind to us, and you didn’t have to be, and so I’m going to take a risk and trust you. Please, please be deserving of my trust.

She was quite happy to meet me for lunch. She suggested a restaurant about fifteen minutes from my office, expensive enough that nobody from my office would be there. I couldn’t really afford it, but I’d manage, somehow. How does Tuesday afternoon, 1pm, suit you, she said.

The world throwing a rope out, letting me grab it. A pull. A connection with something, anything.

She’d signed it Sonja. I’d need to remember that.

Public

It’s cool down here, refreshing. I rest my hot forehead against the marble wall between the Ladies and Gents doors, just for a second. The wedding party creaks and thumps into the next song upstairs, louder as someone opens the door. Footsteps.

‘Oh. Are you alright?’

Claire. Nosy bossy Claire, makeup already melted off her scarlet face, although to be fair she does look alright in the plain blue bridesmaid dress. Nothing fancy, but alright. She sees it’s me as I turn round and the concerned smile ossifies.

‘I’m fine. Just trying to cool down. Hot up there, eh?’

She nods, moves past me to the toilets, uneasy. After a couple of beats I follow her in, lock myself in a cubicle, listening to the stream of her forthright piss and a hearty, unabashed fart. She rustles. She flushes. The lock clanks open and the tap water runs as she scrubs, thoroughly. Oh Claire, you’re so healthy. So clean. So good.

‘Claire! Hi! Well done up there, by the way!’ Samira is here, suddenly, outside.

‘Oh, thanks. Thanks. Lovely to see you. Nice dress.’

‘You too. Well-bridesmaided.’

Weak laughs all round and the door slams. I flush, come out. Samira is patting her shine away with powder, the contents of her makeup bag strewn between the sinks.

‘Has she gone?’ I pull a comedy face round the side of the toilet door.

‘Oh. Hiya.’

‘Oof. Hot. You looked bloody gorgeous up there by the way, Meer. Loving that frock.’

‘Mm. Thanks. Bethan looks adorable. Anyway, I’m off back up –’ and she’s trying to scrabble her various powders and liners back into the bag.

‘I mean it. Gorgeous. A cut above that buncha boring fuckers up there! I mean, a bit predictable, trotting out the same old dances, but it’s a by-the-book wedding, eh. And you were making it work for you.’

Her face in the mirror freezes for a second, and her rich voice is clipped-off at the ends when she speaks.

‘It’s tradition, Fiona.’

‘Yeah, but you know what I mean. It’s just so safe. Exactly what you’d expect at this sort of wedding. I’m not getting at Heath– ’

‘I’ve been having fun. I’ve been having a great time. Maybe you should get up there and dance yourself instead of just leering away at everyone else. Even your six-year-old is having a better time than you.’

I’m not sure what’s going on here. My brain sloshes, cheapwinely. I try to make a joke.

‘S’one of the pleasures of a wedding, though, the bitching about people’s outfits!’

She whips round, not talking to me in the mirror any more.

‘Could you just say something nice? Just one thing?’

‘Eh?’

‘D’you know, I’d actually been meaning to meet you and talk about this after the hen weekend. But I thought, nah, just leave it. You probably wouldn’t even show, anyway.’

‘Meer, what –’

‘I was going to ask you to apologise to Heather. You ruined that weekend for her.’

‘I – what?’

‘Okay, I know, I know the choice of place was a bad one for you, but you didn’t make much of an effort to get on with it. Couldn’t hide your contempt, could you? And you were downright rude to poor Claire –’

‘Poor Claire? Everyone hated her, Samira.’

‘You hated her. And you made sure we all knew it. You made such a big point of not going on that fucking bike ride, too, and then you just disappeared, turned up an hour late to the pole dancing class and wouldn’t look at anyone! I mean, why come at all, eh? Why come at all. Me just left there, all of Heather’s workmates staring at me, wondering what kind of freaks she called her oldest friends. Why come?’

‘For the same reason you did. For Heather. Loyalty… the past.’

‘Loyalty? You’ve been staring at Heather’s dress with this horrid little sneer on your face all day. I know it doesn’t fit her, hey, but what if she’d caught you? How would you feel, seeing someone looking at you like that on your wedding day? Just couldny be bothered to hide it, could you? Don’t think I’d want your sort of loyalty at my wedding.’

‘Did Heather – did Heather say this to you? Did she send you?’

‘Of course she didn’t. Heather? Come on. I saw it with my own eyes well enough. My own eyes saw quite enough to get this angry, on my friend’s behalf.’

Samira’s face, this redness, this spite. I don’t know it.

‘Listen, I had a lot of stuff going on that weekend that I have no intention of apologising for. Bethan was ill, for a start, and as you said, the place isn’t exactly good for me. As you don’t have kids you won’t understand…’

‘I won’t understand how hard it is for you, as a single parent, yeah yeah. Know what? Heather and I have done nothing but understand. For six fucking years. We’ve offered you solid gold support whenever you’ve needed it, and we’ve done that without expecting anything, precisely because we know how hard it is for you. We’ve reminded ourselves of it every time you’ve turned down invitations, cancelled on us at the last minute, or been fuck all use when we’ve had problems of our own. But after that hen weekend, I think we both realised we’re gonny have to admit to ourselves that you just don’t actually like us that much. In fact, you don’t like anything, do you?’

Upstairs, applause as another dance finished. Footsteps on the stairs outside.

‘Come on, Samira. Of course I like you. I like you fine. You’ve maybe had a hard week. We’ve both had a lot to drink. This isn’t you talking.’

‘How would you know this isn’t me? How would you know? Because we send each other emails once a month, see each other what, three, four times a year? Because we went to school together a decade ago? People have kids all the time and they don’t just disappear!’

‘Yeah. Nice choice of words there. Thanks.’

‘Oh, for- you know what? Let’s just leave it, eh? Let’s just go. I won’t email you again, and you won’t respond two weeks later saying sorry, you totally meant to get back to me sooner. This isn’t a friendship. Let’s just leave it.’

She scoops up the last of her makeup and storms out of the door, nudging past the person who’s coming in, muttering a quick sorry.

‘Ah. There you are.’

It’s the older woman from the table, the one I’d left Beth with.

‘Your daughter was wondering where you’d got to?’

My big flushed face, in the mirror.

Private

The café Sonja/Anya picked is written in a language I don’t speak.

There’s some sort of thrashing girly punk music on the stereo. It’s awful. Really. And all the people in here are thin, and there’s something strange about their clothes, their hair. Some sort of structured fashionableness that I just don’t get. It’s not like those places Samira likes, where even though the people are all thin, they’re gelled and groomed and manicured. Sure, the, ah, clientele are still beautiful, but there’s something just off about the cuts of their fringes, their shabby knitwear, their makeup.

Their spectacles, where they wear them, seem to have been cast-off by Deirdre Barlow from Coronation Street.

She is keeping me waiting.

The abrasive music stops, fades into something lisped in a Scottish accent. At least it’s quiet. I look at the menu. There is no meat on the menu. Beside me, a boy with the raggedy beginnings of beard types into a silver Apple laptop, his face glowing with electronic purpose. Under masses of eyeliner and coiled, streaming black hair, a girl picks at her phone and a salad, intermittently.

‘Hi, what can I get you?’

A tired, skinny girl with a faint twang of something Australian, a stripy t-shirt, a pen behind her ear.

‘I’m waiting for someone,’ I say. ‘Just a white coffee, please.’

‘No probs. Just to check – you know we only serve soy milk here?’

‘Oh this?’ says a girl’s voice. ‘Vintage. Fleamarket in Brooklyn.’

My lunch hour ticks away.

She is definitely keeping me waiting. Playing trust games.

Look at these people. Look at them closely. I’d assumed at first glance that they were all art students, loafers, killing time in their inoffensive vegan playrooms, their dressing up boxes, before having to come out, blinking, into the drag and assimilate, join the rest of us at our imitation plywood desks, our wheezing black computers. But they’re not. There are wrinkles here, grey streaks. And they aren’t just here for pleasure. The woman with the salad takes a call.

‘God darling, if they won’t move on the matched funding we’re going to have to ask them to reduce the number of performers they’re flying over. Could we ask a local choir to do the choral number?’

Across the way, there’s a couple I’d assumed were out on a date, the boy with thick specs, sharply quiffed like he’s Buddy Holly or something, the girl with fake eyelashes and a fur coat draped over her seat. But he’s asking her questions and there’s a digital tape recorder sitting between them. She’s got a tiny blue sequin stuck on the end of each flick of her eyeliner. It’s a Tuesday lunchtime.

I’m suddenly overwhelmed by the idea of other people my own age, getting out, experimenting, making things new for themselves. Not just surrendering to a box and a screen and the first steady income they’re offered. A great long line of twentysomethings, thirtysomethings even, with their eyeliner and their strangely-cut pretensions and their vintage and their Brooklyn and their laptops and their busy, busy lives. The instinctive sneer and bristle in me melding into something else, and I’m ashamed of the thin, plasticky material of my supermarket-bought work trousers. That’s what I’m aware of. The slight itch around my thighs and knees from it.

But then. None of them have children. I bet none of them have children.

‘You are Fiona, aren’t you?’

Suddenly, she’s just there, in front of me. Eighteen minutes late, my phone says. She doesn’t mention that she’s late; there’s just a small smile, guarded, and I’m rushing the words out, absurd supplicant I am.

‘Yes, yes. Yes. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for this.’

‘You did not have too much difficulty finding this place, then? I like the atmosphere, the vibration in here? Also, it is very difficult to find good vegetarian food anywhere else in the city centre?’

I nod like I know this, like I understand the way these sentences are sliding into questions. I am very, very conscious suddenly that I don’t understand anything, and we look at each other for a second before I realise the onus is on me to talk, explain my purpose, juggle, dance, be something.

‘So. Yes. So. I just – thank you for coming. I just wanted to, needed to talk this out, with someone. And. I found your website by accident – I was just looking for people who had been writing about the protests at my work, you know. Eh. Because I wanted to understand it from another perspective.’

This is what I had decided I would tell her. I thought it would go down a lot better than saying ‘since we met I’ve become obsessed with you to the extent that I’m now confused about my sexuality’.

‘Through there, through your blog, I found the punter forums, and the various sites the other girls use, and…Well, with all this in mind, and knowing what I know about my sister, that new knowledge. I’m just – phhh.’

I exhale, trying to indicate confusion, blown minds, appealing to her with my eyes.

That guarded smile again, but before she can say anything, the waitress comes back over, and while Anya/Sonja is ordering, I take the chance to actually look at her properly. With her clothes on, face unblurred, hair longer and smoother than in the pictures. Her tiny waist is obscured by the bulk of a battered-looking leather jacket that she hasn’t yet taken off. Tight jeans tucked into glistening biker boots - all hard angles, but at her neck, under the jacket collar, there’s a flash of something ribboned, soft, red.

They’re both looking at me. It’s my turn to order. I’d planned jokes in my head about supposing they don’t have any steak, then, but stop myself just in time. There is a thing in my eyeline on the menu, a grilled courgette and pine nut salad. I would absolutely never order that, ever, usually. I point to it.

Anya/Sonja, this enviably cool woman, her accent and her fine, clear skin, leans across the table at me, as the waitress nods, smiles, scurries off.

‘So, my god. You have been on the forums?’ She sighs. ‘We are very public, all of a sudden. If I am on the forums, I can look up and there will be a counter, it says there are maybe fifty, sixty ‘guests’. People who don’t register, they just watch. Like ghosts, you know. Silent. Maybe getting their kicks, who knows.’

Her laugh is a deep hoot, one burst.

‘People are fascinated by us. I think you must be feeling very confused now. I can understand why you would need to talk to someone.’

‘Yes. Yes. I thought I could maybe, maybe if I pay for lunch, you might, there might be questions I could ask you?’

‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘It depends on the questions.’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Ask questions.’

‘I think the main problem is that I don’t understand. I don’t understand how my sister – how anybody ends up doing this. How you - you’re so intelligent! I’ve read your blogs. You’re not even writing in your first language and it’s fluent, well-reasoned –’ I’m tailing off because her eyebrows are knitting disapproval.

‘You are new to this, and you are in grief, I think, so I give you this one pass, just once. But please understand, I do not answer this sort of question.’

I want to just look at the way her lips move, how sure she is of the words they make, and so I almost miss what she’s actually saying. Almost.

‘This question, it comes from a place where for a woman to work in the sex industry, it’s shameful, wrong. I don’t think like that. I know many, many women who don’t think like that. It is maybe not your ideal job, but you have to realise that you don’t know anything about what it involves, what it really is. What you know is horror stories of rape and powerlessness, that teach us to prize our virtue, to keep our legs closed, that nice girls don’t do things. What you think you know is stereotypes about drug addiction, about desperate girls out there on the street. About the bodies that they find, whenever some fucking lunatic goes on a killing spree. And yes, this is all there; I am not so stupid as to say to you these things don’t happen, and that they are not awful, but it is not a complete picture. This is not my life. It may not be your sister’s life, how it was. If we are going to talk, if we are going to be of use to each other, you are going to have to accept this one very vital point that I am making; that what people call ‘the sex industry’ is not always, not completely, a bad thing. That just because a person sells their sexual skills, it does not mean that their life is – bam! – forever ruined.’

Her eyes are sharp on me.

‘Do you think you can begin to consider that a possibility, for the time that we are here? There is no point to us talking otherwise, because you will be always in the back of your head pitying me, maybe wanting to rescue me, and therefore nothing I can say will have any sort of effect on you.’

I get the impression she has had this sort of conversation many, many times before, the weariness in her voice. And I think that I’m going to need to accept that, in order to accept the brick-built reality of this woman sitting in front of me. I’m going to need to try and think like that, just for just now, just to get through this.

‘Yes,’ I tell her. I try to sound like I’m as firm and confident as her, like I’m an equal. ‘Yes, I can do that.’

Her eyes. We look at each other for a long time. Glaciers move. Species die out.

‘Good. That is good,’ she says suddenly. ‘I am not going to sit here and pretend to you that it is all wine and roses, that every woman who does this job does it because she just loves sex. We make a distinction. There is a world of difference between someone like me, who has chosen this job, actively chosen it, who made an informed decision, who works from a flat or hotel rooms and manages her own advertising – you know, there is almost nothing the same with me and someone who is forced out on the streets to fund her addiction. I mean. I do it, still, because I need the money. I am a student! But the vast majority of the world, they will run the two lives together in their heads, you know? It all comes under the word pros-ti-tute, and oh, that means bad things.’

The waitress is hovering by, staring, two big plates in her hands. They come down on the table suddenly, like she’s frightened of us, and this woman, my lunch companion, this person whose clitoral piercings I’ve seen but whom I don’t know what to call, Anya, Sonja, hey you, anything, flashes me a killer smile.

‘That salad,’ she says, pointing over at my plate, ‘is amazing.’

She’s right.

I don’t know what to ask. I didn’t really think through a list of questions.

What – what do you do? With the men?’

Stupid. What do you think, idiot? She’s patient with me, though.

‘There are limits. There are some limits. French kissing, for instance. I remember when women who did that were looked down on. Nowadays, most clients want the ‘girlfriend experience’. Even the ones who come to me, with all my piercings and my leather, mostly they are just wanting very sweet, plain, vanilla sex, lots of kissing, lots of cuddling afterwards. It’s just like, making contact with someone. Touching base, hah?’

That hoot of a laugh again.

‘Touching base for an hour. Just reminding yourself that the world exists again, and that you exist within it, hey. I think we all need to do that sometimes. But no, there are limits. I mean, I have a client who is eighty-five. A regular. And I am not going to French kiss him. I’m not. He knows the limits. And there are the awful ones, yes. The really unattractive ones. You get around that by just giving them lots of oral. You can shut your eyes, for oral.’

I want to ask something about the sex, the act of it. Your body, and another one, one that you haven’t selected, aren’t attracted to. The feeling of sex of that sort. I want to know how she does it, and to try and phrase it in a way that does not imply that I think she’s degrading herself. I want to try and think that myself. Instead I ask her how this all started for her. She tells me about when she first moved here from her home country. She doesn’t say what her home country is, and I think of her website, the Scandinavian Sonja headline. She was trying to fund her first degree, which was in Manchester, and I start again, think Manchester, always Manchester.

‘So, I think, I’ll get a bar job. Easy, no? Pfff. Bar job. Hotel job. None of these pay me enough money to cover my big fat international student fees, let alone my rent, my living – no rich parents for me, hey? I have to do it myself. So this girl on my course, she says well, there’s a job going where I work, and where she works is a massage parlour.’

I must be looking blank, because she expands, in the sort of voice used for tourists and fools.

‘A massage parlour. The men come in and pay for a massage; it’s very cheap. Anything they want extra, they have to tip for. You wear a tight t-shirt. They maybe have a sauna afterwards. You know? And hey, it suited me. It offered a way to make the sort of money I needed to be earning. This system, you know, it will keep us trapped if we let it: pay you the smallest amount so you never dream bigger. Me, I got out.’

It isn’t what I meant. What I want and never manage to ask her is the stages in her head she’d had to go through to turn herself into a person who does this. Maybe I’d never know; maybe it was all there in the first thing she’d said. The gaps between us sag.

‘Then I come here,’ she’s saying. ‘And I am looking around for decent fetish clubs, for my scene, and I don’t really find anything too much here, so I started thinking, surely, the desire is still there. I think there must be some demand for it, no? So I set myself up as an independent. As a specialist. I had no desire to go back to working in a parlour – there were two older women there who were great to me, who talked me through it, but it can be a very bitchy environment, that one. I prefer to go solo, ha? But it was a valuable apprenticeship. It helps to learn things in a controlled environment.’

The strange taste of the food, oily and green and new.

‘You need to learn to trust your instincts in this job. You always sense when something’s wrong. It’s something that grows, the more of them you see. I am a buddy: you know we have a buddy system, we women? We help each other out. Any new girl coming up who makes herself known to us, she always works with a buddy. There is always a person on the other end of the telephone. My new girl, she phoned me up once and said, oh it’s great, I’ve got my first booking! Two guys, in a Travel Inn! and you have to grab her, you know, say no, no, no. We don’t do that.’

She’s not – I don’t think she’s deliberately trying to shock me. If I am shocked it’s a by-product, of the distance, is what it is. Yes.

‘Do you think you could ever be with a man again normally, though?’

‘Ho! That is another one of those questions. I have a boyfriend.’

Obviously my face didn’t hide that one. She screws up her mouth in imitation of me.

‘Oooh. Look at you. This is not what you were expecting, hey? We have been together for a couple of years. He knows my job, knows everything. He is cool with it. I pay him to come and be my minder with new clients. Just to check. You can have sex with different people and have it mean different things. I like sex. I have sex normally with my clients. Yesterday I came four times and got paid for it, more than you’ll make in at least three days.’

The exoticness of my salad. Of the people in here. Of the frankness. This whole other world, other way of thinking and being. It sort of bursts out of me when she says that.

‘I just – you don’t really, really think this is an – an uncomplicated choice, do you? A job that anyone could do? I just – sorry. No, I’m sorry.’

I expect this to be the final straw, that I’ve lost her now, that she’s going to get up and stomp out, those thick-soled boots beating angry holes in the floorboards. I’m surprised that she leans towards me, says more gently than she’s said anything:

‘Listen. I have a little half sister at home. She is eleven. And that is the question they always ask, all the anti-prostitution campaigners, would you want your sister to do this, your daughter to do it? And I think about her growing up and going with some of these guys. The really sleazy ones. And I say no, to that, in my head. It is not hypocrisy, though. Do you see? I can want to do it for myself, still, and not for her.’

I think about the only other person I’ve had this sort of discussion with, ‘Fiona’, the not-Rona. Her defensiveness, the need to apologise her way out of the job to another woman, and it hits me that this is absent here. This is shamelessness in the true sense of the word. She exudes it. And it’s why I’m compelled to keep looking at her.

‘So,’ she says, finally, as soy milk curdles in my second coffee. ‘You mentioned being able to help us. Do you mean, you will be able to give us information from your work? Are you, basically, proposing to spy for us?’

My brain has been racing through so many things I trip, need to double back on myself. Yes. I suppose that was what I meant.

‘I have answered an awful lot of your questions. What do you say to mine?’

The air sharpens into transaction.

I’m forty-five minutes late back to work and I creep in like a traitor. Norman, sour-faced, turns cold eyes on me. I seek absolution at Moira’s desk.

‘I got a call from the school: Beth had got into a wee squabble with a classmate. Nothing big, really - bit embarrassing. It knackered my phone battery, taking the call, so I couldn’t phone you, let you know. I’m going to make the extra time up this evening - my dad’s picking her up. Is Ian angry?’

In my head, I apologise to my little mouse-girl, to her quietness. Moira is not sure that she believes me. ‘He’s still down at the site with Graeme, love.’

‘I never got a call from the school with my Toni. They’d tell you afterwards, when you picked them up. If anything was wrong.’ Norman releases his proclamations into the air with the gravitas of a preacher, and I’m not sure if he’s calling me a liar or berating a feeble new-fangled school system, but I find myself turning round anyway, snarling at him.

‘You maybe never got a call, Norman, but I’m pretty sure your wife would have done!’

I type up data from manila files for the rest of the day, in self-righteous silence. I give myself a papercut. Occasionally I flip open my diary, stroke the new entry for next weekend. Scottish Union of Sex Workers meeting, Glebe St. Hotel, 4.30pm.

Public

‘I hope she wasn’t too much trouble,’ I’m saying, auto-pilot mother.

My face still feels hot from the encounter with Samira. I’m absolutely not equipped to deal with the judgement of the older woman from my wedding table just now. She’s marched me up from the bathroom in silence, back into the body of the kirk. Samira’s over there at her table, talking with forced sparkle at the man she danced with earlier, radiating shrapnel.

‘No, no, we had a lovely chat, didn’t we, Bethan? Bethan was telling us all about what her wedding’s going to be like.’

This is all directed at Beth, for Beth. Not for me.

‘She’s going to have a pink dress! Can you imagine? A pink wedding dress. And all the bridesmaids – thirty of them – are going to be covered in sequins, and there’ll be a pink horse to ride in on. Isn’t that right?’

‘That sounds lovely, Beth.’ I’m picking up the woman’s sugary tones.

‘Anyway,’ and her voice drops back to flat, contemptuous, adult-speak, her head flicking at her husband, who is holding their coats, ‘we need to be going, now. Nice talking to you, Bethan!’

‘We should probably go home too, darling. It’s getting late.’

‘It’s only late because you were gone for ages. And I haven’t been allowed to dance yet.’

‘Mummy’s not feeling so well, Bethan.’

‘Is it because you’re being drunk? I wa-ant to daa-nce! You sa-aid I could da-ance!’

‘I’ll dance with you.’

It’s one of the henz, the one from our table. Andrea? Andrea.

‘If that’s alright with your mummy?’

She gives me this smile, this smile of camaraderie and friendliness, this we’re-in-it-together smile, and I almost burst with something, almost want to hug her or cry or something. Then she bows low to Bethan, who is star-struck again, and asks her formally for the pleasure of the next dance.

I get out my phone, tap out a hurried rescue message to Dad.

Come and get us. Please. She’s overtired, and it’s a nightmare.

Thirty seconds later.

Ok.

I sink back into my chair.

‘Eh, hiya.’

It’s the guy, the one in the weird baseball-cap-and-suit combo. I must look a state. I try and manage a smile, anyway.

‘Mind if I sit –’

‘Go for your life.’

I reach for one of the not-empty bottles on the table, shoogle it at him.

‘D’you want a glass? We’ve still got half the bottle over here.’

‘Eh. Are- No. Sorry. Thanks. Sorry to bother you, man. It’s. Eh. You just look like someone I used to know.’

Could be.

‘My sister,’ I say. ‘I look like my sister.’

‘Was your sister called, eh, Rona?’

‘Yes. Yes. Oh god. Have you seen her?’

I’m pouring out those words, but my brain’s ticking, thinking, first of all, he called her by her actual name, so he wouldn’t have been one of her – punters.

Second, he said was.

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

I can’t make that come out casually. It’s not small talk and he knows it, pulling back from me as I realise I’m clutching at his wrist.

‘Oh. Eh. Dunno. Must be, like, five years ago, easy. More.’

‘Five? Are you sure?’

‘Naw. Hang on. Ehm. It would have been before I left Edinburgh. Probably more like seven, eight years, now.’

I let him go.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Rona - Rona went missing, six years back. We haven’t heard anything since then. Sorry. That must have come on quite extreme, there, eh?’ I do a little chuckle to try and brush it off; he stares like I’m madder than ever.

‘No, no, it’s understandable. I didn’t know that. That she was missing. Sorry, man, eh. Fuck.’

He sucks the sweaty air in through his teeth, reaches for the wine bottle after all.

‘What, eh. What happened? Was it when –’

‘When what?’

‘Naw, eh. She just kind of vanished one day, wasn’t around any more, didn’t answer her phone and we all thought she’d just gone back home or something, man. Had enough. I’d hoped so. Was that it?’

‘When you were living in Edinburgh – did you know her well?’

He wishes he hadn’t sat down, I can tell. I’m making him uncomfortable, because that’s what I do, tonight.

‘I did. Aye, I did. I was pretty fond of her, eh. She was nice. She was a nice lassie.’

I resist the temptation to snort. Nice is an interesting word, I want to say. Swallow it, swallow it. He could have said no, there, fudged it, walked away from the intense drunk in the low-cut dress and back to the warmth and skirl of his family. He didn’t.

‘Did you know she was – how she made her – sorry. Sorry. Hi. What’s your name?’

‘Ally,’ he says. ‘Ally McKay. Cousin of the groom.’

‘Fiona Leonard. School friend of the bride.’ And we shake.

‘Right, Ally. Did you… When you knew her, was she working as a – as a hooker?’

Not the word I was going for. Just the one that came out, sitting there between us, full of what feels like judgement. A tut, in the air by my head. Claire and her boring man are making for the exit, coats in arms, and it seems she would like me to know she disapproves of my language. I gulp wine, probably not from my own glass, ignore her, try and suppress that burn that happens when you realise someone doesn’t like you.

He doesn’t look surprised, though, this Ally McKay, with his pleasant, handsome face and his trucker cap.

‘No exactly, eh. No, like, the girls you’d see in the street. But aw, man. That’s really shit. Sorry.’

He’d really, really cared about her. His face, like someone’s emptied it out. I do the gentle voice, the police officer delivering bad news.

‘Were you her boyfriend?’

‘Ach, we had a fling. A wee tiny thing. I was more into it than she was, eh. We were mates though, I thought. I’d tried to –’

‘Did you see me, Mummy? Did you?’

Andrea is being led by the hand back to the table. She looks worn out.

‘Yes. Yes, you were beautiful, sweetheart. You’re such a good dancer.’

Beth nods, pleased, and looks up at this Ally McKay.

‘Hello,’ she says, and she is so inescapably Rona in that moment that I almost break up and I can see he’s thinking the same.

On the table, my mobile flashes.

Outside.

My father is not a garrulous communicator.

‘Stay here,’ I say to him. ‘Please. Five minutes.’

I have her coat picked up quickly before she knows what’s happening. We’re out, fresh air kniving my skin under flapping chiffon layers.

‘Oh look! There’s Granddad! Am I going home?’ She’s disgusted.

I open the backdoor. Dad is in his pyjamas in the driver’s seat.

‘Dad, I want to stay out. Please. Can you take her? Put her to bed at yours tonight?’

‘Fiona, come on. I’m ready for bed myself.’

‘Da-ad. It’s my best friend’s wedding. I never get a night out to myself. Please. Please.’

The car drives off, Bethan’s fury steaming up the windows. Lying seems to come much more easily to me these days.

Inside, the party is already fading and it’s not even ten pm yet. The band are on a break; couples cling to each other and sway limply to the love ballad on the PA. Heather and Ross are nodding at an elderly relative. Samira and her gentleman friend are not in the room.

He’s still there, though. Ally McKay, where I left him. Frozen to the spot, maybe.

‘She looks so much like Rona, eh, your daughter.’

‘That’s because she’s Rona’s daughter.’

It strikes me that I haven’t admitted that out loud to anyone for ages.

Poor fucker. I don’t know that he can take much more of this. He’s living out a concentrated dose of my last six years. I pat his arm.

‘I need something stiffer than wine. There’s a bar next door. Fancy nipping out for half an hour?’

Private

I’d been expecting, I don’t know. An amphitheatre rustling with PVC and lipstick, maybe. Pillars. Glitter. Something.

Rentable meeting room in a chain of budget hotels. Corporate-purple carpet, pale wood-toned plastic on the tables. Projector with laptop connection up front, paper cups of coffee from the machine out in the hall. On the door, a printed-off sheet of A4 said SUSW. A table outside with a man behind it, starched shirt, spiked hair, so clean-shaven he looks like he can’t actually grow facial hair.

‘Hi. Sorry, don’t recognise the face - what’s your name?’

He’s friendly, but I have no doubt I will not be allowed into the room if I don’t pass.

‘Fiona Leonard.’

‘Ah…yup. Sonja’s accounted for you.’

Sonja, then. I wonder if any of them know each others’ real names.

The spikes of her blonde hair over someone’s shoulder, in the front row. A skip, somewhere near my stomach. About thirty people in the room.

Why am I always surprised by how ordinary they look? Do I expect them to be perpetually in fishnets, lubed-up, damaged and hollow? Yeah, I’ve realised. I do.

Jeans. Shirts. Business suits. Jumpers and skirts. Sure, there are a couple of girls up the back with suspiciously buoyant breasts, teased hair, false lashes, but for the most part these are just the sort of women you’d see in a supermarket. Not sex dolls, not desperate smackheads. There are men, too, three of them, well groomed, two younger and the one from the door, probably around forty. Pimps? I think, rent boys?

There is so much about all of this that I don’t know.

I take a seat in the back row, by the two heavily made up girls. They’re about my age, run their eyes quickly, appraisingly, over my clothes, find me wanting, and settle back into their conversation.

‘And have you seen her new set of pictures? I was like that, eh, hello! Photoshop!’

‘Yeah, would those be the ones where she’s claiming she’s a size ten? In what universe? Or does she mean an American size ten?’

I glance around, checking to see if any of the ones whose blogs I’ve read are here, trying to tease out the faces from behind the pixels. Holly, the young one who I saw in the street, Holly is absent.

A tiny woman in her fifties with elegant, streaked hair and a very beautiful face stands up, facing the rows of seats. She has the presence of a schoolteacher and the talk in the room ebbs its way to a respectful silence, at which she smiles.

‘Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming.’ Her tones are strong, clear, almost accentless.

‘Not a problem, Paulette. Anythin for you, ma darlin.’ A smoker’s cracked voice from the row in front of me. Paulette smiles at it, moves on, delicate, professional.

‘We’re going to hear from a number of different speakers today, and I trust that you’ll treat them all with the respect our speakers are accustomed to. First up is a familiar face both to our meetings and to the, ah, local media recently: Suzanne Phillips, director of the city centre Sanctuary Base.’

Suzanne Phillips stands up, and I recognise her as the motherly woman from the protest at my work, the one the papers had outed as a “former masseuse”.

‘Hello everyone. I’m going to keep this short and – well. It’s not going to be very sweet, I’m afraid. As you’ve probably read about by now, if you weren’t actually there, we staged three simultaneous protests the week before last: outside the council offices, at the building company who’ll be in charge of, em, of knocking us down, and at the vacant warehouses next door to Sanctuary Base, which the Jackson Group intend to be the cornerstone of their new... Well. Leisure complex.’

A laugh I don’t quite understand moves softly through the room.

‘To be honest,’ Suzanne says, ‘we were always on borrowed time with the council. You know, they encouraged the street workers to move into the Drag, originally: made them easier to contain and keep track of than when they were spread out up east, and there were no residents around to complain. But they can’t pretend it hasn’t buggered up the whole idea of people investing in the area, or of business coming in.

‘They’ve been wanting to get rid of us for a while – they cut the tiny wee bit of funding we’d got from them at the first sniff of credit crunch. The council have made it clear they’re going for zero tolerance on prostitution. The girls are making their International Financial District look a wee bit shoddy, eh? No offence, Ms Buchanan.’ She smiles thinly at the woman sitting beside Sonja.

‘They didnay say there wis somewan from the council here,’ mutters the troublemaker in front of me.

‘They’ve cracked down on everything, the fines have gone up again as much as they can manage, and the women are getting heavy treatment again. We’re nothing. Skeleton op these days, surviving mostly on volunteer help for the last few months. And I think we’re going to have to concede defeat.’

A few hisses through the room. The girl beside me is picking at her nail polish.

‘They’re going to finally move us out of Sanctuary Base on Thursday next week. Obviously, we’re going to resist that right till the end, and it would be great to see as many of you as possible helping us out there, but I understand about other commitments. The police are already aware that we’re planning a peaceful protest. There may well be photographers there, too.’

The woman sitting in front of me pipes up again, turning her head around to bring us all on side with her. Late forties, a creased, grizzled face.

‘Suzy, you know I’m all for it, doll, but I’m just not goingty run the risk of ma weans or thur teachers seeing me in the papers. Aye?’

‘Thanks Helen. I appreciate that. I know it’s going to be difficult for most of you, and I also appreciate that we’re asking a lot. Anyway, anyone who is interested please have a quick word to me after the meeting. That’s all. For now. Thanks for listening.’

The applause is well-behaved, downhearted. The older woman, Paulette, stands up again.

‘So. We’ve got a bit of a surprise guest here today. We’ve spoken a lot about the campaign to close down the Sanctuary Base recently, and so we were delighted when the council proposed that a representative from the service they’re intending will replace it come down here and speak to you. That representative has, of course, promised that anything she hears today in this room will be kept absolutely confidential. Now, I would like you all to join me in welcoming Claire Buchanan from the Ways Out scheme, and I can trust that she will be allowed to speak her piece. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end.’

‘Ooooh. Got awffy formal in here aw of a sudden,’ says Helen in the row in front of me, to no-one in particular.

The woman sitting beside Sonja – stubby, unstyled brown furze, navy blue suited shoulders – is standing up, turning round.

Claire. Heather’s now sister-in-law Claire. Claire of the cycling and the time management. Claire who I’d last seen just over a week ago leaving the wedding, tutting at me.

This country is so small. So small. So crazily small.

She’s gripping a set of cue cards in both hands, presumably to curb the shaking. Her neck hooks over them, and she reads word for word, in what’s almost a monotone, phlegmy with nerves.

‘I – Hem. Hem. I am here today on behalf of, and as one of the leading figures behind, the council’s new Ways Out scheme. We believe that no woman should have to suffer the degradation of prostitution for a minute longer.’

More muttering.

‘Oh, you and me are going to get on just fine, honeypie,’ Helen hisses, her whisper deliberately audible.

Claire goes on, staring down at her speech as though nothing had happened.

‘The Ways Out scheme will replace the current and soon to be demolished Sanctuary Base with a mobile unit, staffed and maintained exclusively by council employees, operating in the city centre. The mobile unit will have a greater degree of flexibility and be able to cover a wider area than the Sanctuary Base was limited to, and will offer exactly the same sort of refuge to any women forced into prostitution in the area. Women coming on board the mobile unit will become part of an active monitoring scheme to make sure their, eh, way out of prostitution is clear and accessible.’

Sonja stands up. She raises a hand out of courtesy, and talks gently, but there’s no sign that Claire has acknowledged her, or that she was waiting for acknowledgement.

‘So, street workers have now got to demonstrate that they want to leave the industry, before you’ll offer them basic shelter, free condoms or allow them access to the Ugly Mug sheet? They must be monitored? Like tagging animals or criminals -sex offenders, no?’

‘Sounds like the fuckin Joab Centre tae me!’ Helen says, barking out a laugh, looking around again to share it.

The girl beside me calls out.

‘Look, no offence, right, but is this all going to be about wee junkie street walkers? I just do not see how this stuff affects those of us who work for agencies. Or even like youse independents. If the punters canny get it in a red light zone, they’re going to have to come and find us, aren’t they? More work! Good. Business. Sense.’

She taps these three words into the side of her head like Morse code.

‘I just do not see why I should put myself out for a few wee smackhead part-timers who – and let’s no mince words – wouldny give a flying fuck if the shoe were on the other foot.’

Claire tries a smile, for the first time.

‘That is a very good question, and I’m very pleased you asked that.’

It’s the first spontaneous thing she’s said.

‘I am here to say to you today that the Ways Out scheme is not just open to those women forced to engage in street prostitution. We’re here for all of you. We want to get every woman in this city who is exploited out of the sex industry and into proper, dignified work. We’re offering genuine, practical solutions. I’m going to leave some business cards here today, and anyone who wants to contact me about registering with the Ways Out scheme is more than welcome to do so.’

An explosion of voices.

‘You sayin ma work’s no dignified, eh?’

‘How does any of this make it actually safer for the girls on the street?’

‘What about the men in this industry, Ms Buchanan? What about the men who used Sanctuary Base as a shelter? Sex workers aren’t just women!’

‘You sayin ma work’s no dignified?’

Wide, flat, boring Claire. It’s been so easy and amusing to dismiss her in my mean little head that I’m surprised to find myself actually feeling sorry for her now. Because I can see that she genuinely believes she’s helping, however spectacularly she’s misjudged her crowd, however bad a plan it is. The last time I saw her, she was tutting not at me, but because she’d heard me using the word hooker. She must have thought it was derogatory.

She wants to make a difference in the world, Claire, must go to her work every day feeling that she’s actually doing something. And it’s not like I can say that.

Right now, though, she’s just battling to be heard.

‘At present, in its first, trial, form, the Ways Out scheme is just open to women –’

‘Oh! So you’re just going to give up on those teenage boys round the riverside, then?’

The woman called Helen is on her feet, suddenly, drowning out everyone else, twisting like a snake unleashed, going in for the kill.

‘Aw, I know you, darlin. I know you. What ye’ve no realised is that we’re ontae you. You dinnay think of us as real people, do ye? Oh, aye, ye’ll say you do. But what you’re meaning is, we’re aw poor wee victims. Intit? You dinnay think we’re capable of living our lives properly. Too damaged. You canny admit that whit we do is work, or that mibbe, actually somewan might choose to do whit we do! So fuck off –‘

‘Helen, I’m going to ask you to sit down,’ Paulette, from the front row.

‘ – with aw yer victim shite, yer sexual abuse survivor statistics –’

‘Helen! SIT DOWN.’

‘Helen, nobody’s said anything about sexual abuse.’

‘Aye, but they will. That’s how they justify it, eh. They make oot like wur aw fuckin, damaged, eh? No sane. Cos we couldnay be. Cos nobody sane wid be doin whit we do. No respectable wummin. No dignified wummin.’

She’s marched up the aisle and is pointing at Claire, now, chipped pink nail polish in her face.

‘Now. You wanty talk tae me about workin the streets? Cos uh’ve worked the fuckin streets. I’ve been there. Huv you? Huv you got any experience of that, Mizz Buchanan? Or huv ye actually fuckin spoken to anyone who’s actually fuckin done that joab? Cos mibbe we could tell you somethin about it, eh no? Mibbe you should give wan of us a nice fat consultant fee fer actually tellin you something useful, eh? I’ll tell you this wan for free, sunshine. I might no be zactly sane, eh, but I’m a human fuckin bein daein ma best with whit I’ve goat. An see these lassies here? They fuckin know zactly whit thur daein.’

She breaks off, relaxes her arm, turns a beautiful smile on the chairwoman.‘Sorry, Paulette. Awfully sorrah abaht that, old fruit!’ Her vowels stretched into caricatured Queen’s English. ‘One hud noat realised the sort of, scuse-ma-french, scum, one would be associatahn with at this here meeting today! One prefers only to associate with ladies who do what one would call dignified joabs! Ta-ta, now!’

She saunters out, head high, one wrist limp, and the door crashes shut behind her. The room breathes. The girl beside me gets up.

‘If that’s everything for today, yeah? I just don’t think this affects me, and I’ve got a lot on my –’

Sonja stands, finally, turns round, a sharp half-smile on her face, no mirth in it.

‘Okay. Right. It affects you, Sabrina, because this is the first stage of a two-pronged attack. I am right, yes, Ms Buchanan? Ms Buchanan looks surprised that I know this,’ she says, smoothly, playing the crowd for that small ripple of laughter, and it seems true; the back of Claire’s bushy head has jerked, suddenly.

‘The Ways Out scheme is only the start. I have it on very good authority that the council are about to start lobbying Parliament to criminalise the purchasing of sex. That means your clients and my clients. Because they think this will stop that nasty-wicked unspeakable thing they are calling the Sex Industry. Any woman –’

A cough from the audience.

‘I’m sorry, Douglas. Any sex worker who wants to report a crime will have to first grass up their client list. They’re basically going to war against us, whilst saying out loud that we are the victims in all this. Helen was on the right track, there.’

Claire has gathered up her things.

‘I’m so sorry but I’m going to have to cut this session short. I’m not at liberty to discuss anything other than the trial stage of the Ways Out scheme today. For follow-up enquiries you’ll need to go through my office. Thank you.’

The scuttle of an outraged, virtuous member of society.

I’m still riding all that pity for her, so I try and smile as she passes, realising only too late that she’s staring, shocked, at me. Her face does goldfish mouth for what seems like a laughably long period. I wonder, almost idly, what sort of repercussions this is going to have.

Sonja is shouting after her.

‘You are not going to stop the girls going out there on the street! It’s just going to mean they will not be so able to select their partners! Surely, you should look at complete decriminalisation and–’

Claire snaps back to life, turns, and flees.

The door slams, again. The girl beside me whispers to her friend.

‘Well, that was a productive one, yeah?’

Anya, Sonja – whatever she is – is still in her seat, heaving with anger as they begin to file out. I hang around as the room empties, limp pockets of small talk not managing to cover the atmosphere. She looks up and smiles at me, still tense.

‘So. Interesting meeting, huh?’

‘A headfuck.’

‘Ha! You should try it being on the inside. Let’s introduce you to Suzanne. Suzanne! Suzy! Come here.’

Suzanne comes back into the room, stops short when she sees me.

‘This is the one I told you of, yes? Do you remember her?’

That nice smile again. I can imagine it being very easy to relax around Suzanne.

‘The girl who made us tea. Hello. Yes, I remember.’

Anya waits until the room is completely empty, until the older man, Douglas, picks up his clipboard. They make swift eye contact and he nods, seemed to understand she needs the privacy, leaves us to it.

‘So, Suzy. This is Fiona, and she thinks she can be of some use to us.’

‘Maybe. Possibly. I’m not sure that there is anything. But I could try.’

Suzanne nods, looked me up and down.

‘You’re working in admin at RDJ Construction, is that right? So you’re just in the office the whole time. Have you ever actually been to Sanctuary Base?’

I hadn’t.

‘Got time for a visit this evening?’

Public

Even though we’re both traumatised people who you couldn’t possibly call normal at this point in time; maybe because of that, Ally McKay and I run out of the wedding reception hand in hand, stifling what cascades into full-blown nervous cackles when we’re out in the street. Saturday night screeches and flails around us, its sense of money let loose.

The bar we choose is quiet, though, smell of frying, ketchup still on the table, music turned so far down that it skips atmospheric and goes straight for insubstantial. The lights, we realise only after we have brought our first round to the table, are too invasively bright for us to pretend anything in.

Whisky, gin. Drinks strong enough to shoulder you through bad news and sad stories, but not likely to leave you with hope. And yet we pick them, and sit there, the closeness vanished. Ross’s cousin: suit, baseball cap, eyebags, wrinkles. Probably, though I hadn’t realised it under Heather and Ross’s disco ball and heart-shaped spotlights, at least my age, maybe older. Rona’s sister: playing-it-safe dress, pearls, hair frizzing back out, makeup melting. A failed first draft of the final product. That must be what he’s thinking. Oh, what do I care what he’s thinking.

‘So.’

‘So.’

We sip.

‘Sorry for pulling you out like that. I’ll not keep you away from your family long. It’s just. I’ve – we’ve, my parents and me – we’ve not heard anything about her in so long. Anything you can remember is a clue. Sorry. God. I feel like I’ve ruined your night now.’

‘Mate! Stop apologising, eh! It’s no your fault. And, know what? Anything I can do. Anything I can tell you that would help you find her, eh. That’s good stuff. Right?’

‘Right.’

There’s a fine gold chain round his neck, tucked under his collar, behind the bow-tie. I like him for all of this, for not just renting a kilt. I like him, Ally McKay, for the baseball cap, and for his smile, and the ease he’s trying to put me at. I like that he’s called me mate.

‘So. Begin at the beginning, eh? I used to be a, like, a sound and lighting engineer. In clubs, around Edinburgh. I did it at college, but I’d already learned the basics when I was about sixteen; one of my mates was a good DJ, eh, and because the club owners wanted him in, they’d let me in as well, as long as I didny drink anything. Sorry, man, eh. This is probably too much information!’

‘No. No. You’re setting the scene. It’s good.’

‘Yeah? That’s what I’m doing? Magic. Right.’ He catches himself in the act of displaying an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm, given the subject matter, winds his face back down accordingly. I drink. I wish I’d ordered a double.

‘Anyway. Long story short – I’d been doing it for years by the time I met your sister, eh. You’d see the various nights get popular, like, the DJs picking up followings with the crowds and either getting so big they’d pure loop –’ he’s waving his glass in a circle to illustrate, splashes the table ‘– it out of the circuit, out of there, or they’d stick, sink. Same thing with the promoters – see, because it’s Edinburgh, most of the boys – an I’m no being sexist here, eh, it wis always boys – running the clubs were rich and at the uni, or at least had been. Fresh up from private school, coked off their tits instead of going to class, eh, that sort of hing. And I’d be socialising with them, because, after you finish work, you want to go for a wee bevy or something, man. And there were always after parties – the dressing rooms of the bigger clubs, or somebody’s flat. Some of these posh dudes had amazing flats, eh? So. You get to know all the folk; all the ones who are hanging out with the promoters who are, eh, in at that point. An it’s all cyclical, eh. Some of them stayed, but so many of them were students – like these kids only thought it was worth marketing their clubs to their own demographic, eh?’

He’s too friendly for the bitterness of that laugh.

‘Anyway. They’d move on. They’d all move on, eventually. And that’s what I thought it was with. With Rona, when she went.’

‘I think I’m going to need another drink for this bit. And so are you.’

When I come back, with doubles, he’s looking seriously at me, like he’s made use of his thinking time.

‘Are you sure you want to hear this, man? I mean, I’m probably not going to be able to give you any definite, eh. Leads. Leads. Get me, on a case.’

‘I want to hear this, Ally. Really. I just need to know something, anything concrete. Somebody else’s idea of her. It’s just been in my head too long.’

‘Okay. This isn’t going to be easy, eh. Rona was, was just another lassie hanging around this one guy, Jez, his parties. Now, Jez had been a student, but that was maybe five or six years earlier, like, back when I was starting out. So he was probably about twenty-six, twenty-sev– fuck. That’s younger than me, now. At the time he seemed, you know, the Man. The big man. He’d been running clubs in the city for years, had all these London connections, so he could always get the guys, you know, like the guys you’d hear about four months later they’d be remixing Kylie? You’d seen them at one of Jez’s clubs first, eh.’

I’m trying to look like I understand.

‘No a big clubber?’

‘Not really, no. Not even, really, before Bethan. Just, like, the indie disco or something.’

‘Okay. I’m going to talk civilian speak for you. Stop me if I get too technical, eh. Rona. Rona had been working in a bar run by this pal of Jez’s – Actually, mate, I should write these things down for you, eh.’

We have an eyeliner pencil and a table-top dispenser full of shiny napkins.

‘So, Rona was working in this bar called Dee-Lite on George Street, and I think it’s now called The Grand or something, but it’s under the same management. Somebody there would surely know who you were talking about. Anyway, as far as I could make out, eh, Jez had spotted her there and got her to do some modelling – not like that! Although I widnay put anything past that fucker. But she was – she’s a gorgeous lassie, Rona, eh. I mean, you know that.’

I know that.

‘So he’s got her, like, in this tight t-shirt with the club name stretched out on her – aye. She was on the flyers, and the posters – she became, like, the face of Jez’s clubs for a while, eh. Part from anything else, it’s good for business to have lassies that good-looking at your club. So, of course, she started coming back to whoever’s house afterwards, when we all did. And that’s how we got talking.’

‘Was she doing drugs, Ally? I’m not going to, ah, judge you or anything. I’d just like to know.’

‘Coke. We were all doing a couple of lines of coke; all that lot did. Pills, sometimes too, but it was mostly coke. Thing is, I know that sounds serious if you’re – if you’re not that experienced with it.’

‘If you’re a square like me.’

‘Come on, man. You’re fine. What I mean is it sounds like a lot, but actually Rona was always pretty restrained with it. You never saw her off her face or making a fool ay herself or anything. You never got the impression she was desperate for it. I dinnay think it was an addiction or anything. No like some of the others. Yeah. Some of those lassies.’

He drinks deep this time.

‘Just to make it clear, man, this is a long time ago for me. Coke is a fucking horrible drug, and the folk on it are even worse. The old Jack Daniels here is as hard as it gets now, and even then, only on special occasions, eh.’ He raises his glass, gloomy. ‘My wee cousin’s wedding.’

‘Oh god. Sorry.’

‘Will you stop apologising!’

He’s smiling though.

‘Anyway, so, me and Rona got friendly, at the parties and that. A lot of the time I couldny quite believe it, that a girl that pretty was actually hanging out with the sound engineer when there were full on DJs and that in the room, eh. She was like that, though. She was the sort of person who’d always take the time to make you feel special. Like she cared.’

I swallow the splutter rising up in me again. I smile. I nod.

‘She was maybe just that good with people, but I never felt she was snubbing me or anything, eh. Of course, a lot of the time at these parties we’d be the only ones there who hadn’t gone to private school, likes, and that kindy bonds you a wee bit. We could have a private joke about some of the accents on the go in there or whatever – I mean, I always try never to stereotype anybody, eh, but a lot of the time it really was that sort of, fwah fwah fwah fwah! Ken?’

I’m wondering if I’ve ever actually met anybody from that sort of background, or if I’m thinking of comedy show caricatures.

‘So maybe that’s why we kind of ended up – eh. In bed together, a couple of times. Sorry, Fiona man. Your wee sister. Eh. Anyway. It was lovely. We’d maybe go and get a breakfast the next morning together, that sortay thing. Read the papers together, always a wee kiss on the cheek before she left me.’

He’s smiling away at something beautiful in the corner.

‘It was never anything serious, like. I mean, the lassie was out of my league for a start, and only eighteen. But we became friends, even out of the parties. I’d come and hang around her in the bar before my shift started, and maybe I was sort of there cos I was hoping for a bit more, but she never minded me trailing about after her. Lovesick fuckin poodle, man, but she’d always pour me a pint on the sly. I just wanted to see she was alright, eh. Then she started hanging about with this. This lassie, Camilla.’

With gin on the brain, it takes me a while to sort this out, so he’s started talking again.

‘Camilla is my daught– is Bethan’s middle name. Says so on the birth certificate.’

His eyebrows shoot up under the cap.

‘Mate. Oh. Right.’

He drinks.

‘Listen. I maybe shouldny –’

‘You’re going to need to tell me, Ally.’

‘Okay. But I’m buying this round, first. Naw, your money’s no good here, man.’

Private

Sanctuary Base is the bottom floor of a huge red-brick warehouse towards the bottom of the grid. The warehouses on either side are already covered in scaffolding and RDJ Construction signs: scaffolding that I’d put the purchase order through for. It was beginning to get dark.

Suzanne had tucked her arm in mine as we walked down the street together, making conversation: the age of my daughter, the ages of hers, recommendations for music tutors if Beth ever wanted to learn an instrument. She’d shown me pictures of them, made me show her mine. When we arrive, though, she disengages, becomes taller and more businesslike as she pulls a computerised fob out of her bag, swipes it at a small black box by a nondescript side-door adjacent to the main entry with its friendly-fonted sign. There’s a people carrier with the same logo done small, on its flank, parked in at the curb.

Anya had kept quiet and a couple of paces behind us: I’d needed to turn my head to make sure she was still there. I needed her still to be there.

Inside, squeaky lino floors and the institutional smell of bleach. From along the corridor I can hear conversation and a fuzzily-tuned radio. Another swipe of Suzanne’s fob brings us into a basic office, hung with peeling posters advertising sexual health. It felt rather like doctors’ surgeries of my childhood. Not really what I’d expected. I should stop expecting, really.

‘So, this is us. Coffee?’

Suzanne breezes through the room, her chunkily-beaded necklace clacking as she moves. A thin, small woman in baggy clothes and a boy’s haircut looks up from a phone conversation, smiled. Anya is right by me.

‘An– and, Sonja. Do you work here too?’

She definitely notices what I was about to say, but I had to keep it up, this ridiculous fiction that I didn’t know her real name.

‘No. I have my own job. Suzanne is a friend, so I help her out with the campaign. I have done a volunteer shift for her once. It is fucking hard. I could not do Suzanne’s job in real life – she’s a magnificent woman.’

She forces her accent over the big word, then abruptly turns away to a poster above the desk. Suzanne returns, places a mug of milky Nescafe in my hands, and steers me through to a space with rows of squat padded chairs and pinboards. A kettle and some cups on top of a small fridge, and a sign printed in bright sugar paper beside a table: UGLY MUG BOOK. Two girls stretched out on the chairs, foam spilling out from a sharp rip underneath one of them, what looks like a photo album across their laps.

‘We call this the rec room. Neutral space – there’s a kettle and things for hot drinks. Sometimes that’s as far as it goes – you see these lassies just slink in here keeping their heads down, shoogle some coffee into a mug, take a couple of slurps once the kettle’s boiled and when you look up, they’ve vanished, aren’t seen again. We try and get them to at least take a look at the Ugly Mugs book before they go, note the most recent descriptions, but we’re not here to insist that anyone do anything, you know. Not like that lot. It’s just a safe space. But the majority of them, we have good relationships with them now. As good as you can have. We take it in turns to drive around during the night, help them feel safe, and they’ll pop into the van for a wee while if they’ve got anything to tell us. These rooms,’ she indicates three doors off the main space, ‘these are for advocacy work. Legal advice. In case they need a voice, someone to shout for them. It starts in there.

‘The other aspect of our service is outreach. We try – it’s tricky, but we try – to get in touch with the girls who work out of flats or for agencies. Check there’s no coercion there, that everyone’s okay. Actually getting through to them, though. Pff. I mean, in here, the girls are all out for themselves. But those anonymous names, advertising. Keeping a track on them, even actually making contact. That’s the bit that hits it home, you know, what it can be at this level –

‘Sorry. I should be talking in the past tense, now. We’ve not got the staff anymore. All our funding’s been completely cut, and there’s only so long you can power an organisation like this on the kindness of volunteers.’

She’s brisk again, hand on a shoulder to take me to a side room, and I remember that this isn’t just an excursion for either of us. The door shuts behind us and I’m not quite sitting as she explains that she wants the building plans. It’s been an efficient solicitation, the music lessons, the coffee.

‘You must have information on the history of the warehouse. It’s Victorian. Leftover scraps of the Empire.’ She laughs and I don’t feel I’m allowed to. ‘If there’s not some history in here, worth saving, then I’m sure the Jackson Group will have passed through some sort of dodge to get their all-out permissions. There’s something going on, and the records are the best place to look. We’ve got a week. Are you with us?’

Public

Camilla. Ally McKay is back from the bar, and he’s telling me about Camilla.

‘Camilla was just, always, like, around. I mean, she was about eight times as posh as the next of them, must have known Jez or Jules or one of that lot from, I don’t know, school or something. Rich people club. London. But she was, was something else. I mean, another gorgeous-looking lassie, probably only about the same age as me, as you, about twenty-two when this was going on, but, eh. Just dead behind the eyes, man. Ken those hyenas you see on nature programmes, eh? Like that.’

‘A scavenger.’

‘Aye.’

She and Rona were well suited then, I don’t say.

‘But the thing about Camilla was, eh… For a start, she tended to supply all the drugs to that lot. And there was no way this little flower was a full-time dealer, so I presume she was employed by somebody, somewhere, some, eh, Mr Big. Camilla was the contact, ken? But she also did, eh, favours. She was also the, eh, the entertainment. Sorry. But, eh, you know what I mean?’

‘Less technical terms?’

‘It was – you’d hear jokes about it. Jez and that lot. If they had a big guest, or a DJ or something, and they really wanted to impress him, like. Camilla would, eh. Well. She would keep him company that night. And as I understand it, she would –’

‘Receive money for her services?’

‘No always. Sometimes, like, shoes or something – one time, when I was working for Jez, he sent me out to pick up like this £500 pair ay heels from one of they proper snobby boutiques, eh. That was the expenses code, entertainment, and I saw him handing them over to Camilla that night. Or coke. But she – eh – she didny do freebies.’

‘And Rona?’

‘Well, at first they were just pally, eh, couple of girls who liked to party. Good dancers, pretty, welcome everywhere they went. But after a while, I’d eh – I’d see Rona heading off, with Camilla and, eh, whatever visiting dignitary they were – Just in the taxi, and that. And then she just stopped turning up for her shifts at the bar. I’d go in to see her and the manager would say she hadn’t turned up, she hadn’t turned up, and then she was fired. But. Eh. She still had enough money to keep going out, to keep buying pretty dresses, eh. Shoes.’

We drink. The lights flash for last orders and I almost run to get there. Just to be doing something else, concentrating on something else. But he’s there, now, still going when I come back.

‘I’d tried to talk to her about it, but she just seemed so happy, man. She said she was fine, could handle herself. And, to be honest, she didny look – no like Camilla. That lassie, you could see her shrivelling up. But Rona. Eh, they hung about together for maybe four months, five months, something like that, and then, one day, Rona just wasn’t there anymore. I was a bit freaked out about it, like. Well, you would be. I got hold of that Camilla at a club one night and I was just like, look, where the hell is she? And I swear to god, it was like the first time she’d ever actually lowered herself to acknowledge me, eh? And she just sort of bleated something about Rona having run away up north, couldn’t handle it, something. Called her a silly little cow, so I had to, eh, remove myself from the area, man. But I just thought – I thought she’d be alright. Eh. Was that it, then?’

‘Was what?’

Oh, I’m so, so drunk.

‘Was that, it, the last – no. Wait. The baby. Fuckin hell.’

‘She did go up north. She went to Aviemore. Stayed with a school friend who’s a skiing instructor up there. Same story: got fired from a bar, made up the rent deficit by, ah… Taking payment. For sex. It’s just, it seems like she was advertising, this time.’

‘Advertising. Mate.’

‘She turned up here when I hadn’t seen her for six months, dumped a baby I certainly hadn’t heard of before on me, and ran away in the middle of the night. And that’s it.’

He puts a damp hand over mine. It’s the least sexual gesture I’ve ever felt.

‘Last time I saw Camilla, it was about three years ago, eh. I’d been back, visiting the folks – I moved through here for my job. Ach. She was sitting up at the bar where I was meeting my brother. I recognised the voice, first, eh. She kept laughing too loudly and planting her hand on the knee of this old, fat dude. She looked fucked man, eh, snappable. Nothing left of her, inside. About to crumble into dust. Like a – like an Egyptian mummy or something. Death mask.’

And we drink, and we drink.

‘Fucking hell. Tell me something good, eh. What about you, man. What do you do.’

‘I do nothing. I just work in an office.’

‘You’re raising – her – kid, though. As your own. That’s fuckin something, Fiona man. That’s pure amazing-style, right there.’

For that, he gets a smile. Hear that, Samira?

‘And you. Ally McKay. What about you, now?’

‘Eh. I work with kids – I run a youth club out in the housing schemes in the east. Teaching them all how to be wee DJs! They like some pure terrible hardcore stuff, man.’

‘Seriously? You’re actually almost too good, aren’t you?’

And it is as close as we get to a joke.

When our bodies eventually flop together, you couldn’t call it a seduction. The boozy inevitability of it all. We stand, across the table, as if accepting that it’s now the time for it, and we press damp, sour mouths on each other. In the toilets I check that I’m wearing passable underwear, buy condoms from a rusty machine, half-worried he’ll have run off while I’m in there, but he hasn’t. He’s there, acknowledging it. We kiss again and again on the fifteen-minute walk to my flat, as though we’re trying to convince ourselves we’re really into it.

My muscles creak out, remembering this sensation. I am not quite wet enough for entry, so there is some fumbling, some spit, a couple of sweet, whispered assurances that yes, I do want this. Because I really, really do, despite it all. Then the good, warm, filling, much missed. Then the gentle sound of something falling repeatedly onto wet sand. He doesn’t come. I don’t come. We just warm each other for a while, though, skin on anonymous skin. The being beside another person. Touching base for a while.

When I wake up again, it’s fully light. Proper daytime. I can still feel that small kiss on my forehead. There’s a note on the bedside table, beside the scribbled-on napkin and the torn condom wrapper.

She’s still downstairs. Thought it best she didn’t see you like this.
Please come and get her when you wake up.
Hope you had fun.
Mum.

I cried for five minutes. Just to get the gin out. Then I got in the shower, picked up a still-resentful Beth, smelling of clean wet hair. It was that night that I emailed Anya. Sonja. Whoever she is.

Split Personalities

We are exceptionally good at duplicity, we persons in the hussying trade. And I don’t mean that we’re more likely to double-cross or betray you, despite the number of movies I can think of which imply call-girls are not to be trusted (almost as many as those where we’re killed in the first act, to alert the town to the presence of a murderer on the loose. The canaries-down-a-mine-shaft of the serial killer world, us). Actually, I’ve met few people as honest as ladies of negotiable virtue. It’s all out there, you see. In one way.

What I mean, though, is that the vast majority of escorts are, at any given time, keeping up a complex series of appearances. We’re all suffering from split personalities.

Try and think of those casual acquaintances of yours. The friends-of-friends. People you were at school with, maybe, but don’t keep regularly up to date with. Your neighbours. The sort of people you’d wave to in the street or wish happy birthday to on Facebook, but don’t trust enough to share the intimate parts of your life with. It’s not that they’re not to be trusted, either, it’s just that you don’t know them well enough.

Now, imagine every single one of those people in your life knew that you did a job like mine. A job everyone has an opinion on, without usually knowing very much about it. A job that many people presume you have to be damaged in some way to do; a job that the very doing of means people make serious, deep assumptions about you in ways they certainly don’t do with dentists. Exactly. So that’s your basic, entry-level secrecy right there: you need a convincing backstory to explain, as boringly as possible, your income, just in case these people take an interest. Now, perhaps certain members of your family and friends aren’t as enlightened as you’d like them to be about the business. You either force all manner of uncomfortable discussions on them, or you up the secrecy even further. This amount of disclosure varies from person to person, depending on a whole host of variables conditioning your relationships with each one.

Even with those people who know, there’s often something kept back. Perhaps you’ve reached a tacit understanding with them where they know, but don’t want to be reminded of it, because in spite of you, they’ve never really got over their hang-ups about the profession, in which case you find a way round it, find a way to be more than half a person when you’re with them. I know women who’ve been in relationships whilst playing this old game, with some exceptionally tolerant, loving men, and they’ve nearly always mentioned a keeping back of the details, as a way of making a distinction between work and non-work sex.

So, there’s private face and there’s hussy face, for starters. Then you get to the clients. Now, I’m fairly expensive, in this city and in this field, and as you’ll know if you’ve read my FAQs, I’m also completely unrepentant about that. I’m worth it, and I know I am. And two of the reasons I’m worth it are I’ll commit completely to your fantasy, and I’m as discreet as they get.

I’m not sure a lot of people understand discretion. It’s not just a matter of not obviously looking like an escort when I turn up to an outcall. When I say discretion, I mean I’ve taken my own version of the Hippocratic Oath. Client–hussy confidentiality is important. I hold a lot of very important secrets in my head, and most of them are not my own. I’ve often said MI6 should recruit former escorts to its staff. Not only can we keep track of multiple identities, we’re experts in psychology; in gauging reactions, working out what people like, helping them connect. Providing a listening, counselling service is often as much a part of this job as the physical stuff. And clients can only feel free to be themselves with me if they know I’m not going to betray them.

Then there’s the me I am with you, my little online perverts, and with my clients face to face. And I’m not going to pretend for one second that this is the ‘real me’ you’re getting. This way I have of writing to you, this is just another personality. This voice comes from your fantasy girl, speaks from your fantasy body. I take her out of the cupboard and put her on when I’m going to work: I get into costume. And slowly, curling my eyelashes, painting my face, smoothing my skin and pulling up my stockings, I become her, for you.

And we both know that’s what you’d rather have. You don’t want a person who moans, farts and goes to the supermarket. You want arch and playful, with a great bottom. And you know you do.

Speaking of great bottoms…

It’s a lot of balls to keep up in the air (baddoom tsch!), a lot of switches to be flicked on or off at any time, sure. But until the whole of society shifts on its axis to accommodate us a little more, or at least accept us, that we have always been here, that’s how it’s going to be. And although the obvious way for it to work would be for us all to come out at once and say, here we are, this is what we do, deal with it, this is an independent business by its very definition. Dunno about you, but the stakes are too high for me to be the first.

This week I went to see a talk by The Fallen Woman herself, our great nation’s most famous former-prostitute-turned-writer. A huge hall-full of people there to see her for one reason and one reason only, and she knew it, had played up the descriptions and her fame to get a bigger audience for a presentation of the research project she’s been working on. She was working on a book about identity, about the way we can hide online; and she read from it, clicked through a presentation of statistics, brisk, witty. She tricked us, and she refused to be cowed by it, to allow anything to touch her; controlling the crowd and setting the agenda for the night so masterfully that no-one dared ask her about it, not the pervs nor the anti-prostitution campaigners (and I recognised a few of both in the crowd)…

Whole, she is. Whole and brainy and likeable and bloody admirable. She wears great shoes. She makes jokes about her great shoes. She makes jokes. Saying, look at me. No, really. Look at me.

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