Five
Mind
We’re snacking on small-person food tonight. Half-sized white and orange sandwiches with the crust cut off, squares of cheese and tomato pizza, dry slices of cake. The bland things that children are taught to like. Most of the decorations are down now, but the plain grownupness of the room is broken up by scraps of wrapping (pink) and shards of burst balloon (also pink). It’s been a long, loud day – at one point all three of us winced as one at the volume of noise bouncing off the ceiling – but it’s been good. The planned garden treasure-hunt was rained off, but we managed to keep them entertained even as they were caged up. Bethan and Amy, her current best friend, loaned out for the treat of a sleepover, have finally collapsed into sleep after performing speeded-up versions of all the songs from Mary Poppins for us in a state of near hysteria. We’d clapped, applauded, overseen toothbrushing and pyjamas together, like a three-headed parenting machine. Then we sank into companionship in the sofa, me, my dad, my mum. I hadn’t felt as close to them for a long time.
Dad had gone downstairs for another bottle, and his bringing it back, uncorking and pouring me a glass seems to have been a prearranged signal between the two of them, because the air in the room tilts and they breathe in as one.
‘So, we’ve been thinking, lovey.’
‘It has occurred to your mother and me that this is a significant – a, well. Yes. Anniversary.’
Tripping over each other’s sentences like they’ve rehearsed it.
‘Seven years, Fi. Beth’s birthday means it’s been seven years now.’
‘That’s the time, you know. The period of time they need.’
‘Need for what?’
‘Well, do you remember that the policewoman told us that when we first reported her? No, no, maybe, no. Of course you wouldn’t. None of us were really…’
I cough, cut through her.
‘Are we talking about Rona? Are we? Could you come out and say it if so? And then, could we just drop the subject again? We’ve had a great day today. It’s been one of the first times I can think of that all three – four – of us have properly enjoyed ourselves. As a family. Let’s not let her intrude. Just this once. Come on.’
Mum is backing down before I’ve finished, ever-conciliatory.
‘You’re right, you’re right. Of course, darling. Not today –’
‘Why not today?’ says Dad, suddenly, my quiet befuddled dad, rubbing his eyes. ‘Why not, and for all the reasons you’ve just said, Fiona. It’s been seven years, and your mother and I were discussing that that means we can have your sister declared legally dead. What do you think?’
‘What?’
It’s not just what he’s saying. It’s the force of it.
‘Have her declared legally dead. And then we get on with our lives. Perhaps we move house. She doesn’t seem to want to come back to us: why should we wait around for her for the rest of our lives? This isn’t healthy for us, especially for you and for Bethan. The two of you need to live in a new place, away from here. Too many memories here: I’m sure you feel it every time you come downstairs: imagine how it feels for us living in it. You’re still young. You should be able to have a proper life, not one your sister dumped on you. What do you think?’
The effort seems to have exhausted him. He doesn’t like to speak for this long, with this sort of force. Mum is staring as though she’s never really seen him before. She actually looks a little bit turned on.
‘She’s not dead, though,’ I say, finally.
‘Well, none of us know that really, lovey –’
‘Yeah, I think we do. She’s not dead, she’s just deliberately dragging it out. She wants us to do this. We’re not giving her what she wants. Not again. We carry on, and when she comes back, we force all the pain she’s given us back on her. Twenty times and much more if it makes us feel better. But that’s what we do.’
I storm off to bed, shaking, leaving them to finish the bottle on my sofa. I put my head under the covers, and tried to work out why I’d said all that. Because really, it made sense. Kill her off. Finish her. Let it go. Perhaps it’s just hearing my parents voice it, that they could cut her off. No, I really just don’t want to let her get away with it.
She can’t feel as present to them. She left me, not them. The wound’s not as fresh. Not like the way she lives with me, seeping through into my life, sticking angry fingers into her curls, jabbing and fuzzing them higher till the light glows through them.
‘It says here that your hair should always have volume and lift in it, so that’s what I’m doing. So shut up, flathead.’
And she closed the door to our mutual bedroom on me, pop static flaring out from her radio.
‘Will you both be quiet,’ our father howled, from the room he insisted on calling a study. He only communicated in cries of pain and frustration over this period; it was a long time before we got sentences addressed to our individual selves, by name. He would be in there by the time we came home from school, typing, typing, swearing, moaning. At the weekends he would leave in the morning, switching on the telly for us, come home in the evening with shopping bags full of tins. In the period after our mother left him, during which point Rona and I shuttled between our old flat in the city and this wobbly-walled semi, he was Writing. If we’d listened, perhaps we would have heard him tell a story of child and wife and work-thwarted ambitions; but we were thrawn, hurt teenagers, so we mocked him for it.
‘Mr Shakespeare, is that you?’
‘Watch out Rona, there’s Very Important Writing happening in here today.’
We were never closer, Rona and I, than when we were making our father feel small and bad about the breakdown of his marriage.
Back. Mum’s red face, a head below his, screaming.
‘You arsehole, you weak, ineffectual little man, stabbing away at that self-indulgent crap while I raise the fucking children you foisted on me.’
We’d sat at the top of the stairs, just out of sight, scared to breathe in case they heard us, and Rona had curled her thin pyjamed limbs into me.
Forward. Mum, slightly boozy over the cot, on the second night, when we’d pulled our three shellshocked selves together in the same place, whispering.
‘Fiona, I should take her. It should be me. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault. I let her think this was acceptable. She’s just copying what I did to you. Let me take the baby.’
No, I’d said. No. And I’d ushered her away from Beth’s room, let the shame sit on her. This is just how we communicate, in a lazy slick of unsaid resentments, and I think it’s suited us all, ever since, to live in our own guilt, stay mucky with it. Imagine we actually did it, declared her dead, drew a line under it and began to live again. The shock of such a psychologically healthy action could actually kill us.
The next day, I dropped in on them at breakfast: they’d promised to take Beth and Amy to the park. I held the girls in front of me, human shield against conversation.
‘Let me think about it, okay? Just give me some time.’
Body
Ask, and ye shall receive, right?
‘Thanks for coming in, Fiona. Have a seat.’
‘That’s okay. I wasn’t. I wasn’t too busy or anything. Thanks. Thanks.’
There’s something about his manner worrying me. He sighs.
‘As you might have heard, we lost the Jackson Group contract. The development won’t be going ahead. In fact, there won’t be any more contracts with them: they’ve decided to sever all ties with RDJ.’
Norman was still in hospital, a week afterwards. He probably wouldn’t be able to walk again. The enquiry had already ‘discovered’ that the site was certainly not suitable for the planned developments, meaning that the Jackson Group could whisk away from the investment. The office had been a silent terrible place where no-one met anyone else’s eye. It wasn’t just that we missed Norman’s forced, terrible jokes against the aircon whirr: we all had a sense that when blame came, it would lie with the surveying department. Probably even with Norman himself: in the last few days something almost imperceptible had shifted, and it was only Moira who could bring herself to mention his name. Without being told, the staff had somehow picked up who the pariah would be.
All the many meticulous surveys Norman had completed, to the letter, always to the letter, the teeth-grinding irritation of his checks and double-checks. Anya’s conspiracy theories about Jackson Group came right into focus there, in my boss’s office.
Ian is frayed at the edges, one hand gripping his desk to make sure it was still there.
‘The thing is, Fiona, that relationship meant a great deal to this company, and especially this branch. An awful lot. Our finances have not been, ah, excellent. Not for some time. There was a lot resting on this project, and I admit it was a big risk to take. We took that risk, and it hasn’t paid off. And now we’re going to have to look at ways of economising, ah.’
‘Starting with my job,’ I finished for him.
He sighed again.
‘I’m sorry Fiona. I really, really am. This has come from above me – this “credit crunch” thing they’re all talking about–’
He did quote fingers, not trusting the idiom to carry.
‘We’ll try and give you at least a few months’ salary, just to get you back on your feet. It’s just, your position is the most – expendable. Elaine can do a few extra hours to manage my calendar, and I think we’ll be putting the databasing project on hold for a few months, at least. It’s not a priority any more. And there are people who’ve been here longer.’
‘Is this just because of the circumstances?’
Another pause, another sigh.
‘I have always been very happy with your work, Fiona. Very happy. I’ll be giving you a satisfactory reference, certainly, and let there be no doubt that the only reason we’re having to let any staff go at all is because of our current financial situation. But I’d be lying if I said that your, ah, two years here have been entirely without incident. There have been complaints, about your loyalty to the company, and about your use of computers.’
‘Elaine,’ I say. Clenched jaw. No point hiding what I feel, I think. No point, now. At the same time, I’ve realised, they have not found me out.
‘And your efficiency. Look, I know you’re a clever girl. I’m well aware that you’ve just been doing this job because you need the money, because you need to support your daughter. I know that organising my meetings, basic data entry and making sure Norman gets his tea in the mornings – I know you’ve always felt like this was a temporary stop, that it’s not the sort of work you thought you’d end up doing. But management doesn’t see it like that. Those employees to whom this company has meant a career, has become their life. They don’t necessarily see it like that.’
‘I’ve always worked hard here,’ I say. One of those comforting little lies you tell people and yourself, sometimes.
‘Fiona. You were seen taking cups of tea – cups of tea made with company teabags – to those idiots who chained themselves to the railings last month. Those idiots who had, not half an hour before, committed criminal damage on my car. Those idiots whose actions contributed to RDJ Construction not only getting some very unwelcome publicity, but also losing one of the biggest contracts in our history. You made them tea, Fiona!’
Company teabags. Oh, he suspects. He does. But he can’t prove it was me. Everyone at that meeting had access to those minutes, and he doesn’t know for definite that they were leaked to the protesters. I decide to keep bluffing it out, keep angry and innocent. Keep my reference and my redundancy pay.
‘Look, I know Elaine’s always had a problem with me, but to be quite honest she’s not –’
‘It was Norman who showed me the footage,’ Ian says. ‘The police wanted the CCTV tapes of the day of the protest, and I’d asked Norman to go over them for me. Tea. Cups of tea. On a tray.’
Norman, his checks and double-checks. The petty little jobsworth soul of him. I thought of the denouncement that would probably come to him, his prone body, and he’d be unable to deny it, build a defence as two big companies hung him out to dry. I don’t know if that makes it better, to be me just now.
‘It was a cold day,’ I said, helpless.
XXX
‘Can we take you out for a wee drink, hen?’
Moira, her hand smoothing the back of my shirt, perhaps not even aware it was there.
‘Just me and Graeme. Maybe Elaine? Maybe big George? After work on your last day? We can pop down the road to the pub, get a wee bit of food? Just thought you’d maybe like a wee send off.’
‘Och no, Moira. I wouldn’t want to put anyone out.’
‘Ah, go on,’ she says. She smiles and her features dissolve in it. ‘We’ll miss you here. You’ve been a good girl, and it’s a shame, so it is. Go on. You deserve it. We’ll put a kitty together. God knows we could do with a wee bit fun, eh?’
Features gone entirely now, just the smile. It’s the first time I’ve seen her do that faceless smile since the accident. Even the news last week that Norman had come round, had gone through the first round of surgery successfully, would be able to have visitors, hadn’t shaken the fat grey silence hanging over Moira’s desk.
‘I’ll lay a wee bit of a guilt trip on Ian, eh. Get him to pay for it.’
There’s a bit of me that’s looking forward to walking right out of RDJ Construction, wiping my feet, climbing the hill and never having to come back. That’s not the bit of me that nods at Moira, says, okay, and gets on the phone to beg yet another favour from my mum. A good girl. No, Moira, I’m not. But out of everyone in that office, it’s important to me that she thinks that.
Red velvet seats and framed adverts for cheap wine. Everyone buys me drinks. We sit round a table where conversation needs to be jump-started every ten minutes, Elaine and big George and Graeme and Moira and me. Ian had stopped off ‘just for twenty minutes’ to put £50 behind the bar and kiss my cheek drily, awkwardly, wish me luck. He stayed, though, talking work and avoiding my eye, burying himself in conversations about the local council and the motorway works, about taxes rising, and big George saying I know, I know, you’re right there man.
Elaine. Why is Elaine here? Because it’s correct, I suppose, the company represented correctly at every work social gathering. Elaine talks mostly to Moira, sometimes to me. Sometimes she talks to the table, and when she talks to the table she is mostly addressing Graeme, and her voice is lacquered.
‘So, what do you think you’re going to do now, Fiona?’
Elaine has no problems with me any more. There is patronage in her voice. I am no longer a problem in the work place, a discredit to the company. I’ve become a formality, and Elaine understands formalities.
‘Well, I don’t know Elaine. Think of all the possibilities, eh! Four months’ salary and the whole world spread out in front of me. Certainly no need to go back to the old nine-to-five right off – it’s not as though I’ve got any ties, now, is it? I think the first thing I’ll do is buy myself a really nice handbag. Maybe get my nails done. Where do you go? Who does yours?’
Her face shuts down. She understands that something isn’t correct here.
I am bright. I fizz with the drink in me, talking too loudly and laughing hard, brittle at everyone’s jokes. I am made of exclamation marks. I’m dazzling.
I’m playing Rona, shellac-glossed. I am too good for these people, that job, this bar.
‘Anyway,’ Elaine’s saying. ‘Anyway. I’m going to have to get going. Moira, you wanting to share a taxi? George? Any takers?’
She’s done her duty, has Elaine. She doesn’t have to stay here any longer.
‘Aw, come on!’ I’m shouting. ‘It’s my leaving night! Who’s up for staying out? Graeme? Ian, you going to stay out and see me off?’
‘I think I’ll go with Elaine, hen,’ Moira’s saying. ‘It’s just making me. You know. Norman would have loved this, all his colleagues out tonight.’
Norman would have hated this, I think. Too much frivolity. Too much me.
She hugs me again, kisses my cheek.
‘Bye love. Thanks for everything, eh.’
‘I’ll just get these girls home, I think, Fiona,’ Ian says, a hand on the small of Elaine’s back to usher her away from the table, the shameful sight of me.
She leans in to him with surprising familiarity. I wait until Moira and big George are out of earshot at the door.
‘Are you two sleeping together, then?’ I say, cheerily. ‘Gosh! Just think of the blackmail opportunities there! If only I’d known, eh?’
‘What?’ Elaine turns round on me. ‘You watch your –’
‘Just leave her, Elaine. Just.’ Ian holds onto his dignity. ‘Fiona, I know you’re upset but that’s a very wild accusation. I suggest you go home and get some sleep.’
‘Right, Graeme,’ I’m saying, volume up as we watch their backs leaving, their stupid boring coats, their self-righteousness. ‘Right Graeme. Looks like it’s just you and me, kiddo.’
Graeme just looks at me with his stupid face, giggling.
‘I can’t believe you said that to Ian and Elaine! Did I laugh? Shit, you don’t think I’ll get into trouble for it? Hah! They totally are, aren’t they! Can’t believe you said that, eh!’
There’s an approximation of a smile, and the weight of alcohol swimming behind his eyes. Doesn’t matter. I’ve made my decision for the evening. Mortal fucked, we used to say at school, meaning drunk, that crazy drunk where you’ve no responsibilities. I am getting mortal fucked tonight.
Last orders comes and goes. I ask him a couple of times how he’s feeling, and he shrugs, says the bruises are healing, says he doesn’t want to talk about it. We talk instead about films we’ve seen, lurch out of the pub with our arms round each other like a cartoon of drunks. We stand there for a bit and there’s that long moment that seems to go on forever, his head and his smile hovering over mine. The bit before it happens, where men look down on you.
He puts a hand on my cheek. I stroke a finger down his neck and he shivers, and I wonder who touches Graeme, really, with his acne scars and his mumbling. Who lays hands on the single people? Why shouldn’t we have touch too, if we can, take pleasure in this closeness? I think of the cold-bodied quick hugs I’ve had from friends and parents, a perfunctory rub of arms through jumpers or coats as greeting.
‘We need this,’ I’m maybe whispering, and he nods and kisses me.
Who touches the ugly people, the shy people? Who touches the ill people, the disabled, the ones who don’t win? I think of Anya, imagine her performing this sort of service with the professionalism of a nurse. Graeme’s cold hand flutters around my waistband, timidly reaching down.
‘God, you’ve got the most gorgeous arse,’ he says, heavy boozy breath. ‘I’ve always thought that.’
Something in me freezes there, turns off, just for a second. Cover it, cover it.
‘Want to share a taxi, then?’ I’m saying, gesturing to the empty road.
He’s laughing. He’s holding me with a revolving grip, like it’s a dance, like we’re at school, and I turn under his arm too hard, and we stumble, and we begin to sing.
Step we gaily, on we go. Heel for heel and toe for toe.
Old songs.
Arm in arm and row on row, all for Mairi’s wedding! Graeme’s rented flat in a new-build block, just on the edge of the drag. He shares with other boys. Tiny hallway clogged with nothing but bin bags, air full of the crackle of electrical static. The noise of computer game guns and male competition coming from behind a door.
‘Zat you, Gayboy?’ someone’s shouting.
Graeme opens a door for me and ushers me in.
‘I’ll just be a second,’ he whispers.
He bends in for another kiss and misses my mouth before leaving me in the dark.
From next door, deep voices muttering. I put the light on and look at the very featurelessness of what must be Graeme’s room. Hard blue carpet, the same sort of thing we have in the office. Cream walls. No posters. Piles of clothes on the floor, double bed shoved in one corner, telly in the other and a tiny strip of floor space between that and the mirrored fitted wardrobe taking up one wall. I sit on the bed, on its plasticky-feeling sheets, rumpled. There is nothing to say about this room at all. There are no books, no CDs, nothing. Through the wall come grunts and cheers, and someone shouts Get in there, my son! Go on yourself, Gayboy!
The boys. Always with the boys.
Graeme’s feet coming back down the hall. Too late to run for it. Not that I was going to run for it. The light is too bright, dead, so I fumble for an anglepoise, check myself out in shade in the mirror, all the gravity of the drink in me.
Graeme, it seems, has had a very different idea about how this evening is going to go. He comes towards me all eager clumsy hands and muttered gasps into my neck.
‘You’re so sexy,’ he’s saying, and I’m thinking yeah, actually. Yes, I am. I am sexy. For tonight, anyway. Not like Graeme, who isn’t sexy at all. Graeme with his wet boozy mouth. I’m leading.
‘Hey, hey,’ he’s saying. ‘Take it easy, eh? We’ve got all night.’
I push him down on the bed and rub my hand over his crotch, thin Topman smarts left over from work. I probably say things like I know what you want. You bad, bad man, maybe. I straddle him, conscious of the weight of me pressing his legs apart and down. Crushing him, feeling him get hard underneath me. Gripping his wrists in my hand and doing violence with my mouth on his, just because I can. Because this is the sort of thing he likes, this bland man I’ve shared an office with for two years.
He’s unzipped and still not quite hard in my fist now, so I’m forcing my hand up and down, pinning his arms above his head.
‘Come on. Come on you bastard. Yeah. Yeah,’ I can hear myself muttering.
There is no erection. There is even less erection.
‘Look. Fiona. Look. Can we stop? Can we just –’
These things my hands are doing. These things my mouth is doing.
We lie there for a while. He says comforting things about it probably being the drink, and I realise that my skirt has ridden up around my waist in front of Graeme from my work and hustle to pull it down.
‘God. Sorry. Sorry. M’drunk, eh. I should go. Sorry.’
He puts an arm over me, reaches round and tucks some hair behind my ear. He kisses my face, Graeme-from-my-work does.
‘Hey. Hey. It’s okay, Fiona. It’s okay. You’re just upset. It’s been a hard week for you. Listen. Listen. Why don’t I do something nice for you, mm? Let me.’
He kisses my neck and gently tugs my skirt up again, fumbles over my new-bought knickers and struggles a little to untie them at the sides. There is very little hair there any more – I’ve been experimenting with my razor. This is Anya’s – Sonja’s – look, and my favourite so far: everything gone bar a small dark triangle, its point blunted just above my slit. He runs a thumb over it clumsily, gasps, lunges.
Then the sudden wetness of tongue, spreading over me, broken uncomfortably by his cold sharp breath. A feeble lapping around all the wrong bits; the sharp sting of the booze from his mouth on the thinner skin. Graeme has absolutely no idea what he’s doing here, but I’m touched. He’s trying to make me feel better.
I wind fingers into his hair and begin to rock and stiffen against his mouth. I moan a little, just to encourage him, feeling absolutely nothing. The ceiling has been artificially lowered, has crusty Artex sworls and tufts all over. Why did anyone ever think that was attractive?
‘Mmm. Mmm. Oh god Graeme. That’s so good.’
I raise my voice a bit, and through the wall ‘the boys’ whoop and laugh. Graeme, encouraged, laps harder.
I shuffle sexy images. Anya, her clitoral piercing exposed. Those two men in that hotel, their hands and mouths on me. Holly on all fours, looking back over her shoulder, mouthing fuckyoulookinat. I imagine getting my own photoshoot done, revealing myself slowly to a cameraman, showing more and more, and I find I’m rubbing myself, my neck and breasts, through my top. I imagine going to a hotel room with a stranger, that it just becomes about a cock, about a fuck, that it’s anonymous. Behind the camera, the man has taken his cock out and is stroking it because I’m so fucking hot –
The pillow is between my teeth. From the living room, the sound of cheering. Perhaps I did that out loud. Graeme is sitting up, looking pleased with himself.
The sort of man who wants to make a recently-fired woman come. The sort of man who will pull his co-worker out from under fallen bricks. All that time I’d idly dismissed him as nothing much, and there was all this depth and goodness in him. I want to do more for him. I sit up and kiss my own taste off his mouth.
‘Right,’ I tell him. I cup his face. ‘I want you to tell me exactly what you’d like me to do for you.’
Remembering his emails, I let my hand slap him, just a little this time.
‘Bad boy. What do you like? Tell me. We’re going to do what you want. My little pervert.’ It’s a command, whispered, but with affection and through a smile, and he responds. This. This is how you do it, I think.
I wake up as dawn is beginning to prickle through his curtains. His cheeks are pink and fat, and one of his thumbs is lodged in his mouth. There’s a decision to be made here. I can either curl into his arms, ride the hangover out when we wake together, let him see me lurching and ill, and make arrangements to go to the cinema some time, maybe get a pizza. He’s nice. He’s caring. You could do a lot worse, girl.
But. But but but.
People fuck for lots of different reasons: the taking or providing of comfort is just one. Out of gratefulness can be another. It doesn’t all have to stem from actual lust: sometimes the simulation of it will do just as well. I might have been pretending half of that last night, but it doesn’t change the connection we made, or the things we trusted each other to do.
Gently, so as not to wake him, I unknot the plain work-tie still attaching his other wrist to the bed frame before I leave.
Outside, the Saturday morning streets are sleepy. In the distance, industrial drones from the motorised road cleaners scooping up payday-Friday debris; the abandoned fish suppers, the condoms. Not my job anymore. I smile up at the sunrise and feel like something’s changed in me.
Mind
Beth had been building something on the floor, her back straight up against the sofa, her hair streaming over my knee. I was making tiny plaits in it, stroking her furzy curls smooth as TV flowed over us.
This calm, after school, before dinner, time just to enjoy my girl. Space where we’re quiet together, resting easily against each other. It happens in time that previously belonged to the office, had been held for me by afterschool minders. I’d been quiet around the house during the day while she was at school. I’d cleaned, shopped, organised games and surprises, bought treats, new books, new toys, waited for her coming home like a moony new lover. The computer, that hard little portal connecting me to the outside world, to all the mess and fuss I’d created for myself, stayed closed. If you don’t allow yourself to think about any of it, don’t allow it in, it can’t touch you. That was a revelation, actually, that if you just pull away, opt out, the world will carry on quite happily without you. Graeme called me, once. I let it go to voicemail, and didn’t listen to the message, and then I didn’t have to think about that, either.
Beth had been opening out under this new sun-lamp of attention I could give her, telling me more about her day, creating jokes with me. She’s louder, laughs more, asks more questions. I don’t – the other thing I was trying not to think of is that it would have to stop, and soon. My redundancy money would only last us so long, especially at the rate I was spending, and Mum and Dad can’t support the two of us. There will have to be another job, chosen as arbitrarily as the last one and as dull as the last one, because what else can I do, now? I’m twenty-nine years old with a limp CV of low-order admin jobs and temping, and four months as an intern at a publishing company before all of this. I have no particular talents or transferable skills, or if I do I’ve never had a chance to discover them –
– Beth wheeled her head round, hissing ‘Ow! You’re hurting me.’ I’d been pulling her hair too tightly without realising. Now, I’ve played this scene back in my head, over and over, and I think it started here, meaning the fault was ultimately mine: her scornful mouth and the knit of her eyebrows channelled Rona, again. This had been happening more and more. The resemblance has always been there, yes, but it was just the markings of the tribe, denoting her as ours, of our family. Now, as her features shift out of babyhood, Rona’s there, almost all of the time. It smarts, if I think about it. That’s the hardest one not to think about.
‘Don’t be cheeky,’ I’d said, irritated with all three of us.
‘It’s not being cheeky to say you’re hurting me.’
‘Bethan Cam– Bethan Leonard. What have I told you about answering back?’
‘What have I told you about answering back?’
And she was so exactly Rona then, right down to the high-pitched sneery voice that used to drive me impotently angry when the tired old repetition trick was played on me as an older sibling. So exactly Rona that I struggled for breath. Bethan shrunk small again, and neither of us really knew what to say.
‘Apologise for that. Now.’
The dance across her face, as she decided to push it further. This was new ground for us, so her ‘no’ didn’t really have the courage of its convictions. It was enough, though. Had I been spoiling her, these last couple of weeks? Had she stopped respecting me? Was that it?
‘You go to your room. You go to your room immediately. And you sit there, and you don’t even think about playing with anything, any of your toys. You will sit on the chair and you won’t come out until you can tell me why that was wrong and that you’re sorry.’
She didn’t move.
‘Did you hear me? I said now.’
Her arms and legs flounced, the strop exaggerated, but she turned and left the room. There was something still to come, though.
‘Fine. Fine. You’re not my real mum, anyway.’
– oh, you’d known this was coming, hadn’t you? Admit it. Always somewhere there, at the back of your head, the anticipation of this moment. No matter how needily I court her affection, you knew she’d always really known the truth, was just waiting to grow into it. I’m not her real mum. You are –
I’d tuned in to myself screaming at her back.
‘What did you say? What did you say? What did you say?’
Then I was sitting on the floor, pulling my knees in on myself. Then I’d started shouting, through her closed door.
‘Maybe you’d better go off and live with your real mum then, Bethan. I’m sure she’d love that. On you go. She really wants you to. That’s why you’re here, with me.’
Who told her? Did she overhear some conversation between Mum and Dad? Was it someone from the school – ideas flicking, a flash-fast shuffle, all the ways they could have found out. Someone with a grudge against me, someone in on it, like Samira? Was it something I’d said? Had she found something? Who told her?
And she shouted back, through the door.
‘My real mum’s a princess! My real mum is a Barbie Princess!’
I think the silence scared her, in the end. The door clicked open, anyway, and even from the place on the floor I’d curled up on, even with my eyes closed I could feel the soft flutter of her panicky movements.
‘Mum. Mummy. I’m sorry. Mum, wake up. Mum. I was being bad. I didn’t mean it. You are my real mum. Mummy. Mummy!’
Eventually, she’d lain down beside me on the floor, pulled my arm over her, sobbed in time with me, and I’d scooped her in and held her tight.
Body
The skirt is tight and short and bright and she’s right, it fits beautifully. I just stare and stare, fascinated by the curve and shape of my own backside reflected back to me across three mirrored cubicle walls. It’s a betrayal, though, and I know it. It’s a betrayal of principles I’d held to myself for some time.
Her hair smooth and her makeup thick and lovely, the assistant calls through the curtain, coaxing me in the faux-intimate language of girly bonding.
‘Well, come on out and let me see you, then! Aw, that is so totally you! You’ve got such a great figure! You need to show it off a bit more, eh? Look at your bum in this! Here, hang on.’
I can smell her perfume and hairspray as she pulls a scarf from the rack in the Personal Shopping Boudoir and knots it round my neck; more of the strange closeness of strange women that I’m getting used to this week. The last time I felt it was in the beautification scrum at Heather’s hen party, the cottage with its four mirrors to fifteen women, cans and tubs and tubes and sprays and pots rammed onto every flat surface, the chemical-sweet air hanging heavy on us. Heather’s friend Kelly was the furthest gone, up an hour before the rest of us and setting about her own face with the precision of a surgeon, twice a day, swabbing, plucking, squeezing, a different lotion to be applied to every contour. I’d watched her from my sleeping bag on the first day, woken by the faint hum of her straightening irons. The fascinating foreign ritual, smooth, practised movements as she bent to open and then close each tub in turn. The silliness of it all.
Heather had bullied and pouted Samira and me into a sad semblance of glamour at school, coaxed us into keeping watch in Boots while she slipped kohl and bruise-purple lipstick up her sleeves for us, although really our places in the social order had already been allotted and neither Samira’s natural beauty nor my enthusiastic use of blusher would bust us out of that. Our jobs were to get good exam results, which we both did.
Two years after we’d all left school, Samira sent word up from Durham that she had no intention of being a doctor and had decided to move into public relations. She’d hit some sort of restart button whilst down there, discovered the uses of being appreciated only on the surface level, just as a pretty face. Or that’s how I saw it, entrenching myself further in a self-righteous belief in my cleverness, even though I was struggling with my courses. Samira, from the centre of a bubbling, popping social life, began to resent her wasted teens, and the way I still personified them. We would sit together, grouped around a table at occasional Christmasses when we were all home, privately disapproving of each other, Heather (ever constant Heather, unchanged in her small vanity) our only conduit to conversation, and a decade’s worth of rot set itself about us from then.
So it became a deliberate choice for me, not to dolly up. It became one of the only things I was really sure of: that I could see through the beauty myths fed to other women, that I had no need to waste my money and time on these rituals and potions. Back at home for the holidays, I’d cultivated it as a way to annoy my sister, my preternaturally wise sister, her breasts stretching the word b a b e on her t-shirt.
‘God. Don’t you ever pluck your eyebrows? You look like a yeti.’
‘I’d rather look like a yeti than a vapid tart.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘No, fuck you.’
In my final year of university, I found a boyfriend who agreed with me. Brian was a member of the Socialist Party, and the first man I’d ever met who called himself a feminist. He felt things far more intensely than me; while I had always been content to understand the theory, Brian liked practical elements: he organised demonstrations and was earnestly committed to the principles of the female orgasm. He encouraged me to throw away the few sops I’d made to ‘conventional femininity’: my razors, face powder, mascara, deodorant. There was nothing wrong with my smell, or the way my hair sat naturally, he said. The girl in his politics class he dumped me for had beautifully sculpted eyebrows, and wore L’Air du Temps.
If I really believed any of this, of course, that wouldn’t have been a turning point. Eight years on, I would have become Claire, sensible and defiantly hairy while henz around me clucked and pouted. Instead, I wear enough makeup to pass in the world, at work, even out dancing at a hen night; just enough to be ignored, overlooked as neither beautiful nor freakishly insubordinate. Last place in the pecking order round the mirror, but still being seen to do it. I shave my legs for nobody in the shower every day, and I have done since I was fourteen, hacking chunks of accidental skin with my father’s razor.
As the woman in the beautician’s rips the strip off my face (and I notice a couple of the pores above my eye prick with blood before the tears start, and she coos to comfort me, don’t worry darlin, it only really stings the first time) it occurs that at least I’m feeling something.
For some reason, this needs more justification than the underwear, than shaving my pubes. The haircut; the free session with the personal shopper; the makeover at the beauty counter, me grown and freakish in a line of teenagers. Perhaps it’s because I’m finally altering the outside of me, and it feels like a declaration to the world, not just a secret to hold close to my skin. I have allotted a certain amount of my redundancy pay to it.
Perhaps it’s because, when I walk into my parents’ kitchen that evening, my dad scalds himself with the pasta-water and my mother bites her lip, hard, before they tell me how lovely I look.
I know what I look like. I also know what I’m doing.
There’s not really that much to all this, Rona, not really. Is this what you did? You just drew the person you wanted to be on top and then became it?
Mind
‘Oh wow, I totally didn’t know you were there! Hi! Can I speak to Dad?’
‘No, you can’t. He’s out.’
‘…’
‘You didn’t come to my graduation.’
‘No… I got your messages though. Couldn’t get the time off work, yeah?’
‘Jesus, Rona, I could really have done with the support. Dad was being…Dad, Mum was carrying on as though he wasn’t, and it was fucking awful.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry Fi. I’m sorry.’
Sigh. Pause.
‘How are you, anyway?’
‘Oh great, great. Working, like, all the time, but great. This city’s amazing, and the social life after hours is intense! Amazing clubbing. I love it here, yeah? So beautiful. Nothing like a fresh start, right! Amazing, seriously.’
‘Great.’
‘Great. How’s. How’s – the boyfriend?’
‘We split up.’
‘Right. Sorry. Oh well, plenty –’
‘Look, Rona, I’m going to have to go. Please give Dad a phone sometime. I think he’d really appreciate it. He’s not so well at the moment.’
Pause. Sigh.
‘And he misses you. She does too, you know that.’
‘Yeah, I will. Totally. Couple of days or so. It’s just been so busy. You know. New place, you want to live it to the full.’
‘Rona? I’m moving back home properly next month. Got a flatshare in the West End, it’s nice. Nice. You’ll have to come through and see me? Or maybe I could. To you. Show me all the good bars. We can have a wee drink, talk properly? If that’s ok. I’d like that.’
‘Me too. Totally. Yeah, that’d be good. Great. I’ll be back for Christmas so maybe then, yeah? Anyway, gotta go! Running late!’
Body
Our clanging non-connection echoes off the past and the haughty architecture of this place that Rona once lived in and I could not. Basslines and saccharine-high vocals thumping, screeching from doorways tonight, the street pulsing with wealth. Gorgeous bodies spotlit through windows, clinking glasses, laughing, and I realise I am always looking for my sister on these sorts of streets: streets commandeered for pleasure, for the loosening of ties, the booze-buzz, the suggestion of sex. Whether you’re in a winter-sports hub or a capital city, the motivation’s still the same. I watch a blonde woman in a black dress let a fake laugh warp her face, throwing back her head, patting a suited forearm. She’s creased, skeletal, aristocratic cheekbones then a hollow. The stupid spark of a thought that I might have found the mysterious Camilla, first time, dissolves as my arm is bumped, gently, by a near identical blonde being escorted along the pavement.
‘Oh my god, darling. Too funny. Too funny. And Tasha really believed him?’
The first woman clocks me staring, autopilot, curls a tiny lip and turns her back. On another street, in another city, I would have merited a fuck-you-looking-at warface. I check the outside of the bar. Yes, this is The Grand, the sort of name I imagine gentlemen would have given to their clubs in Edwardian London, formerly Dee-Lite and, for four months, workplace of my sister.
Were my mistake not already obvious from the curl of that woman’s lip, it clicks in as I open the door. I simply do not do this often enough to understand how to be here. With no pack of henz to belong to I do not make sense. Also, I have come in on a Friday night, as the various brokers and lawyers I presume I’m seeing around me are releasing a week of work all over the fast-paced all-female bar staff, who flick and turn within their enclosure like a ballet. Big eyes, short skirts, pretty hair, skinny legs. Red, bloated faces flirt with them, earn dutiful smiles. I add my body to the scrum, four-deep, press against other people’s sweat and work, the rising rising noise of three hundred shouting voices. Rona’s world, one of them. She knew this stuff like breathing.
I’d actually told my parents I had a date. I’d said it shyly. Asked it as a favour. Someone from my old job. Yes, he’s very nice. I’d really appreciate it. There’d been so much genuine delight on Mum’s face, as she teased me for answers, the recent makeover suddenly making sense to her in a world of logic that we all stopped operating within a long time ago. And was it the man from a couple of weeks ago? And how tall was he? And what was his position in the company?
I began to feel genuinely bad for lying.
It takes almost twenty minutes for me to work out how to get one of the girls’ attention. They’re lured by taller eyes, subtle gestures and the professional flick of banknotes. I have already missed chances – burrowing for the photos in my bag, pulling back in a crisis of confidence when I realised that none of the bar staff would have been old enough to have worked here seven years ago, simply not paying attention. The business of getting a drink is serious, competitive.
‘May I speak to the manager?’
She doesn’t hear me, frowns, mouths ‘Sorry?’
‘Gin. And. Tonic,’ lips stretched, for show, because I’ve chickened out again. When she leans in close to take my money, I haul my torso half across the bar to get her ear.
‘The manager. I need to speak to the manager.’
She shakes her head. Not a good time.
‘Please. Please.’
She points to a corner of the bar, mouths ‘Wait. There,’ flicks off, ponytail swishing with the self-righteous weariness of someone who owns her corner of the world, works it, knows it. I find my place, tucked under a large pot plant, back to the wall, hide.
Streets full of bars and their beery insides. I’m conscious again of that other world out there, the one where people understand the language of the music and the codes of the night. That world I missed out on whilst living someone else’s middle-age. I’m not sure though that the people here know it. They are all a good decade older than the bar staff, a good few years older than me, even, and there’s a smell or a pulse striking through them, thronging the air. It’s desperation of a sort, a grabby panic that turns them on to each other, underscores all the flirtations and forced group interactions. This idea of the fun that we are supposed to be having, that we have all been sold. We are not so different, you and I, I think in the direction of my sneering blonde, now turning a sun-lamp smile on her partner. The bar girls are high-stepping queens, thin and lovely and impervious to our stench.
A man is coming towards me, all hair gel and official assurance.
‘Hello darling,’ he says, in tones that even I can tell mean he does not fancy me a jot. ‘I’m Carl, the duty manager here. As you can see, it’s a bit of a busy time for us. What can I do for you?’
Deflated, I do not give good account. I mumble, repeat myself, apologise a lot. His eyes keep drifting off me to his work, his girls: I have to tug his sleeve to get him to look at the photos of Rona.
‘Yeah, she’s a bit familiar. When did she work here?’
I tell him for the third time.
‘Sorry, I wasn’t here then. To be honest, we’ve got a pretty high turnover of staff. A lot of young girls. I think the best thing to do would be to speak to Frank, he’s the owner. Maybe come during the daytime. Phone first. Okay, I’m going to have to get back to work, dear. Alright?’
The ‘dear’ a cursory sop to a much older woman, one who has lost her sex. Like a pat on the head. We are very probably the same age. He may even be older than me.
All this for that. All this. I still have most of my expensive drink left, and I decide not to waste it. There’s a small table over in the window, near my blonde, my Camilla-manque. A lone chair at it, the rest cannibalised to accommodate packs of cheering office-mates.
So, what would I say to this Frank, really? What would he say to me? Yes, she worked here for a while, years ago. No, we don’t exchange Christmas cards. I wonder how quickly a job like this wears them out, the bar girls, when their bodies start refusing another and another late night. This is not a job you could do for years on end; it suits only young people in need of quick cash.
What did I really expect to get out of being here? Camilla’s home phone number? For these people to capitulate and explain they’d been hiding Rona in the cellar the whole time? Behind the bar, Carl oils his way through the ballet, urging them on, mush, mush. One of them turns to face the till, blows air through rounded lips, counts three and slaps her smile back on for the next customer. No-one stops.
Why would they remember Rona, really. High turnover of staff. The girls’ value is all in their bodies, their youth and the stores of their energy. When they finally have enough and quit it’s probably pretty easy to replace them. And all I get is another name, Frank, another road of possibility to set off down. And he’ll just give me another name, and that name will give me another, and none of them will ever really get me anywhere.
There’s a shadow over my drink.
‘Well, you look like you’re lost in thought.’
Yorkshire accent. Not from around here. He’s large, this man who has placed himself in my eyeline. Not that he’s fat, not exactly, although it’s looming there, in his future. But for now, he’s just large, in that fleshy way. Round face. Curved shapes under his shirt and a bit of a foolish smile on. I wonder if he’s already regretting it: if he doesn’t find me attractive up close, or if he’s just playing that line back on itself in his head. I give him a smile and decide to see what can happen.
‘I was thinking I’d like to get out of here. Want to come with me?’
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to bother you. Quite right.’
He’s already turning off. I catch his forearm, make a gentle movement on it, bring him back round to me.
‘Did you hear what I just said?’
He replays it in his head. Ding.
‘Would this be a good time for me to say “I’ll get me coat”?’
I can’t tell whether he’s more excited about the pull or the joke. He kisses fast and sloppily in the street and the taxi, ushering me up the stairs and past the sleepy-eyed concierge in his fairly expensive looking apartment building. His breath is sour, his hands move steadily and his cock has a nice heft in my fist. Warm bodies moving together, and what moves and stirs me on that I was able to conjure this. I wanted and I got.
There is nothing like the sweetness of my still-recent encounter with Graeme, but it’s a thing in and of itself, this physical connection. He comes with his face clenched somewhere in the pillow over my shoulder and his fingers locked round mine, and freezes there for a second, making tiny noises on my skin. We disengage, and he smiles, strokes my face.
‘Mm. Nice.’
‘Nice.’
I use even, slow movements, because I don’t want to trivialise anything: I bend to check the condom – yes, still intact – then smooth hands on his chest and kiss him on the cheek. My clothes are tangled round the foot of the bed, and I reach for them.
‘You’re going already?’
He’s still buried in the softness, and I’m in danger of snapping him out of it.
‘Yeah. I’ve got a train to catch. But that was great. Thank you.’
‘Wait. Are you - you’re not a. Er. Is there a charge for this? Sorry. I hadn’t – oh.’
‘Hey, hey. No, I’m not. It’s okay. I have to go, but I mean it, that was great. It was very nice to meet you.’
He sees that I’m biting back a giggle at the formality, meets me in it, and just like that, we’re easy again.
‘Would you let me see you, for a second? Just, before you get dressed? You’re so lovely. Would you do that for me?’
Yes, I would do that for him.
Three hours after I arrived, I’m back at the station in time for the last train home, and I keep sniggering out loud in the empty carriage, dizzy with the ridiculous ease of this game.
Mum is sitting up at my kitchen table when I get back in, all that new glee still switched on.
‘So. Tell me everything. Where did he take you?’
‘Big bar, full of people. He was nice, but a little dull, really. Not sure we had very much in common.’
It’s not a lie.
‘You had fun though?’
My mother does seem to want me to have fun.
‘Yeah. Yeah, it was good.’
Not a lie either.
‘It’s just great you’re getting out there again, lovey.’
She wraps unaccustomed arms round me and her thumb brushes back and forth across my temple.
The Meaning of Control
A well-meaning person once told me that she worries about me, because I habitually put myself in danger, because I do it daily. I told her I’d never been in danger, and she wouldn’t believe me. You spend so much time alone with men who hate women, she said. Your daily existence is a series of situations you can’t control. There is no way you haven’t encountered some sort of threat to your life.
Like I said, she means well. But she’s also firmly on the side of the angels; and by angels, you know I mean the righteous ones, the campaigners, the people who want to rescue me from myself. She’s earnest, and hard-working. I like her. We probably could have been friends, if she hadn’t suggested that I chose my job because I had been sexually abused as a child, and I suggested in return that she chose her job because she’d never got over the trauma of losing her hamster to the neighbour’s cat when she was eight.
She’s wrong about a number of things, my well-meaning almost-friend. Shall we bust some myths, my little perverts?
Myth number one:
All men who use the services of a sex worker hate women.
Of course, every one of my clients would say that they love women. In the moment, at least. Mostly, what they mean is they love women’s bodies, and of course they do. Who doesn’t love women’s bodies (apart from the women themselves, ha ha)?
I might dress up as the big bad domme in my pictures, but the vast majority of my clients come to me for the girlfriend experience. They want a nice, affectionate fuck for fifteen minutes, then they want someone to hold them and listen to their worries until the hour’s up. This might be because they’re recently divorced or widowed, badly missing that companionship they’ve always had and not ready to try and find someone else. Or maybe because they’re too shy or inexperienced to interact with potential partners. I have a number of disabled clients who just want to be treated like any other human for an hour.
When it comes down to it, we’re just two people, alone in a room together. And who knows what’s going on in their heads, but when actually confronted with a strange woman, the men I see are overwhelmingly courteous, a little shy at first. It’s my role, in that room, to tease the sex out of them.
This isn’t to say I haven’t experienced misogyny. Or the odd idiot who’s there to act out a porno on me. Most of the time, it comes from the ones for whom a woman’s right to say no has become a personal insult. It can crystallise into hate, that sort of frustration. You learn the tricks of them, though. It’s a challenge, making them see you as a person, whilst still keeping them happy, but there are ways.
This is what my almost-friend is getting at, when she says, with no practical experience of what I do, but don’t they just look at you as a female body that’s already been degraded?
And what I want to say to her, but don’t, is that this is the condition of earning money in this world: sometimes, you do have to put yourself out, in some way. There are people who work for construction companies, who do manual labour every working hour of the day, whose bodies are used and used up by a system that never adequately compensates them. Me, I can live well off fourteen hours’ work a week, and that’s including the time it takes to manage bookings and keep myself in shape. And these idiots make up maybe a twentieth of my total clients. Sometimes I can go six months without so much as a sniff of it. The reason I don’t say any of this to her is because it’s really her who looks at me as a female body degraded, poor thing. She can’t get past it.
Myth number two:
As the client is paying, they have control of the encounter
Oh no they don’t. Do you call a plumber out and then sit there telling him exactly how to fiddle with your pipes (Ithangyew)? My services, my body, my rules.
I never, ever take risks. I don’t accept last minute or late night bookings. I always insist on a landline number or registered, non-webmail email address as verification. My incall flat is security equipped, and if I’m going on outcalls, someone always knows where I am.
I control every aspect of my life, from the way a situation will unfold with a client, on a booking, to the people who can or can’t be trusted to know what I really do, to the hours I do, or do not, decide to work. I don’t drink any more, because I don’t like the feeling of being out of control, not even for a second. Before I did this, I worked for companies who seemed to believe that they were buying a lot more than my services with their piffling salaries. As an employee, I was directionless, half my brain just shut down, marking time. I’m fully engaged now: with control comes self-respect. Funny that, isn’t it? That it took working as a prostitute to get me to respect myself? And if you don’t understand that, you won’t. Ever.
Myth number three:
All sex workers secretly hate their clients
There is no such thing as ‘all sex workers’. The reasons people decide to do this job are as varied as the people doing this job. (Although, we’re all in it for the money, right? LOL.)
Personally, I think if you can’t empathise with the client, see them as just another human being, you’re not doing the job right. I’ve seen the bitching on the boards, girls sniggering about overweight or ugly clients. Well, fine, do what you need to do. In order to have a good working experience, I’ve found it’s important to connect with the client, match yourself to them, whether they want to confess their secrets to you or just fancy a quick impersonal blowjob. And I seem to get a lot of repeat business…
Of course, there are the aforementioned idiots. The ones who start with a smirk, a glint, the hint of a fight. There are ways.
I begin by looking them in the eye now. I take the full force of me out on them. Here are the ground rules, I say.
You wear a condom for everything.
You don’t do anything without asking.
You need to take a shower first.
You must show me your fingernails before they go anywhere near my pussy.
After this, after this telling, often they’re erect already, stiffening at the strength of me. Either because it’s hitting some primal sweet spot, some small early fantasy of a teacher or a childhood friend’s mother, or because they want to break me. And this is when I sugar it, smile and curve myself, look down and up again into them and let it come out all honey and husk, And then we’ll have a lovely time, hmm?
Because that’s the transaction. That’s what we’re going for really; that point of exchange where I can intimidate them into respecting me, but still leave them feeling manly, moved, protective. Because one sour bastard leaving a bad review could hurt my business worse than an over-long fingernail can tear, and that’s the deal I’ve made. And there are worse deals you can make –
Oh, stop. Stop the show. This one isn’t going out there. You don’t get to see this. It’s just for me.