Fishnet (7 page)

There was a link to a website. West End Girls, it was called. Listing the finest independent escorts in your local area, it said. There was faceless ‘Fiona', all thin shoulders, big breasts, fake tan, blue French knickers and a head full of smoothed brown curls. It was definitely our hair.

Back

A peace of sorts, damp-smelling and resigned, has settled about our family these days. In the evenings we usually group together downstairs, in Mum and Dad's tenement living room, let the dramas of made-up families wash over us. They sit on the sofa, together but not touching, I sit in the single matching chair, Beth scuttles about the floor. One two three four.

The room could do with redecorating, to be honest. It's looked like this for well over a decade now, ever since Mags Leonard, thirty-five and with two teenage daughters, married to a man almost ten years older, walked into it with her hair all different one day and screamed that she was feeling stuck, that she'd never asked to be a mother. Soon after that, the walls were painted in pale, inoffensive colours for the tenants who would come in, while the two teenage daughters and the floundering confused husband moved out to a chewed-up suburb. The room we shared in Dad's rented house had Care Bears on the walls and was never repapered. Every second weekend we'd share the sofa bed at Mum's new flat and make formal conversation with her young-looking boyfriends about our school subjects over dinner. When we moved back in, first Mum, then Dad, then me, with Beth, in the flat upstairs, which had been on the market for months, we didn't talk about doing the place up. The agreement we didn't need to voice was that we were only here temporarily, so Mum's strange wall-hangings and ornaments collated from her travels, Dad's stodgy watercolours of Scottish island landscapes, and the cheap cotton throws and cushions of my student life have stayed in their boxes in the cellar space. We put up Bethan's nursery and then school pictures, though, in their free cardboard mounts. Not on the walls: she ages along the mantelpiece, from two to six, the face thinning and the eyes widening and the teeth disappearing.

Mum was seeing that Andrew guy; Dad and Jackie had been awkwardly coupled for a couple of years. Two sets of lives
beginning to be lived together, neither bond strong enough to absorb the gap Rona left. Their grief not only pulled them back together again, it finally gave them something in common, beyond having been a pair of idiotic romantics who worked in the same café together that summer when she left school and he was trying to finish his first play and I was conceived. They've never said anything out loud, not to me, and perhaps they only had the conversation telepathically with each other, but we are all aware of their sticky puddles of shared guilt. His selfishness, preferring to write plays than earn money for his bloody kids, the ongoing affair with that woman. Her martyrdom, taking on three jobs and bullying him for his inadequacies, making him feel small and bloody stupid all the bloody time. Those things they shouted at each other in this room, their faces purple and ugly, while I flinched and Rona, blank-faced, turned up the volume on the TV.

Forth

All this week, I've been nipping downstairs in my lunch breaks, calling from the alley, scuffing the same shards of glass under my toe as I wait for the answerphone to kick in. She never answers her phone, it seems. Not during the lunch hour, anyway. A breathy Hi, leave a message in a voice that could be anyone's; too quick to tell and she might be putting that accent on like I am. Muffling it through my coat, a bit of an Irish twang to keep her from guessing.

‘Hi, I'd still like to make an appointment to see you. Could you call me back on this number, please.'

I imagine her playing back her voicemail, gruff requests from regulars, first timers full of nerves, and then me, bell clear, from nowhere. Maybe it would feel tight at her throat, my voice, or it might make her dizzy. I know why she isn't answering.

Fresh condoms in the car park today, I noticed. I'd need to make another call to street services, or Ian would be on me.

I didn't get out till six that night, those musky patches of no-light already waiting up the alleyways for the girls, and a text message on my phone, glowing there, waiting for me.

Please stop calling i dont do women thx.

‘Graeme, would you be up for doing me a wee favour?'

I lean over his desk a little and his eyes fidget over my cleavage for a second, coming back to my face then flicking down again. He's going to make himself dizzy. I've dressed up for this; astonishing the amount of planning I put in, I'll think later, hot with shame.

‘It'll not take two minutes - I just need a – well. A man. Through in the store cupboard.'

‘Eh. Aye. No problem. Sure. Now? Right. Eh.'

Moira's face disappears into the wrinkles of a knowing smile above her computer as he follows me through and I feel suddenly mucky, like I'm deceiving her.

Inside the cupboard, I let the door close behind us and he flinches at it, arranges each nodule of his back against one side
of the wall.

‘Boxes, is it? Which ones?'

He's putting on more of an accent than usual, staring somewhere around my shoulder.

‘Boxes?'

‘Aye. Can't you reach the boxes?'

‘Oh, no. Actually, it's a little bit of a strange request, and I'd appreciate it if you could keep it from the others, just for just now.' I've thickened my voice to match his.

‘Ehm.'

I take a half step nearer to him, we both breathe in the three extra scooshes of perfume I'd put on, and something alien begins to speak with my lips.

‘Oof, it's warm in here, isn't it. Anyway, hon. I'm trying out a new system for arranging Ian's meetings, using a programme I found online. If it works, I'll buy it for the office and it could make everything a lot easier, but - you know what the older ones can be like with changes – I'd rather present it to them as a working model, you know? I'll not bore you – you need to get back to your work and I don't want to hold you up.'

I'm talking very, very quickly. His face says he's scolding himself for every look he's stealing down my top. Naughty boy. I know what's in your inbox.

‘Basically, I just need to record a man saying a few things, so I can try out the answering system. It doesn't seem to be working as well with my wee girly voice! So I've got this recorder here. You okay with this, yeah? You'll be back at your desk in a second, I promise. Thanks hon. You're such a pal.'

The skin under his old acne scars reddens. I ease my weight forward again, stroke his shoulder, hold up the recorder. Later, I'll be shocked at myself. I've known this man for three years and never been able to advance our relationship between the odd awkward shared joke. I don't know if I've ever flirted in my life, for sex or any other reason. Not with him, not with anyone. Certainly not for years. Later, it will terrify me, what I can do
when I want something.

She didn't answer her mobile in the evenings, either, I'd noticed; that was all to the good, though, as my plan would probably work better.

I'd put a tenner into the new SIM card, and fiddled around changing them while Beth was doing her homework that evening. The card got stuck under my fingernail for a second while I was trying to shove it in; the metal edge pricked me and I worried that it would have come out, that I'd have to go and do all this again tomorrow. I needed it to happen now, this evening.

Beth seemed to pick up that I wanted her out of the way, too; she whinged and put on baby voices when I tried to rush her through her bath.

‘Me want to stay in, Mama!'

She began to punch the water and a torrent slopped up and hit me in the face, lukewarm, stinging my eyes and giving me the excuse I needed.

‘Bethan Camilla Leonard. If you don't get out of this bath and go to bed right now, I will skelp you till you're raw, so I will, you little madam. And stop speaking in that stupid voice. You're a big girl now. Act like it.'

She went tiny and silent then, shrunk away from my hands as I tried to wrap the towel round her. But she went to bed.

In the living room I pushed cushions from the sofa into the crack from the door, and took the corner furthest away from her room. I thought she was probably awake still, lying there, but I couldn't wait any longer.

It always rang seven times before the voicemail clicked in, her phone. I had the little recorder held right there at the mouthpiece, as she garbled her message.

‘Hello, my name is Graeme Bain
,' said Graeme's voice, flustered under this morning's tits and perfume. ‘
I'd like to make an appointment with you at half past eleven next Friday, for an hour. Thank you.'

He has a nice voice, Graeme. Polite. Middle-class middle-management. Well-trained by his mammy. You'd never guess he liked it kinky.

I held the phone close to me for the rest of the night, like I was waiting for a message from a new lover. At one point, Beth coughed and I went through to check on her. There were tear stains dried on her face, but they were old ones. She looked sleepily at me through one eye.

‘I'm sorry Mummy,' she said.

I sat on the bed and her warm legs curled around my haunches.

‘Here, here sweetheart.' I leaned in and stroked her hair. ‘Mummy's sorry too. She shouldn't have shouted at you like that. Bad Mummy, okay? We'll get ice cream on Saturday to make it up to you. Would you like that, darling?'

She burrowed her face into the pillow a little more, affected apparently neither one way or the other by ice cream, which is a new state of affairs.

‘Mummy, who was the man?'

‘What man, baby?'

‘The man who was talking in the room.'

‘Oh. I don't think any man was talking. Did you maybe have a dream about a man? There are no men here, baby. Just Beth and Mummy.'

I moved my thumb back and forth above her hairline, like my mum used to do for us when we were kids. It gets her every time, eyelids battling heroically as her face settles back into sleep – and my phone beeped. She stirred back up.

‘Come on, lovey. Go to sleep now.'

I moved myself as gently as possible up from the bed, but it still disturbed her back up, eyes open. I whispered one more
sleep
at the door, but three quarters of my body was already in the living room.

XXX

An appointment. An address. I've walked to it three times over the weekend just to be sure, but there it is, every time, number 28, the numbers on the buzzer going up to the fourth floor. A five minute walk from Beth's school and less than ten from my flat.

Good view. You could probably see Beth's school playground from up there.

It couldn't, couldn't be a coincidence.

Has she been here, right here all this time? Moving around the same routes to the supermarket, the bank machine and the train station, feeling her muscles relax in the way that meant
almost home
when she saw the rail bridge and the church? Watching me take Beth to school every day, leave her there in the playground?

I know the people who live in this neighbourhood. Sure, there's probably thousands of them in the tenements, but you learn to recognise familiar shapes as you live here. I know the woman who walks her dandruffy spaniel to the bottom of the road and back, three times a day with her feet encased in blue plastic bags; I know the skinny businessman whose suit is always in the checkout queue just before mine; the polite boy at the deli, the broken veins in the old men who smoke outside the Victoria Arms, the melancholy woman who runs the corner shop and each angry commuter on the 8.15 to Airdrie. I would have recognised her, on a street somewhere; I would have seen her back, her walk, and chased after her. You can't spend six years looking out for just one person only to have them living under your nose the whole time. You just can't.

But it makes sense. The flat looking over Beth's school. It made sense that she would expect me to fuck up, would be checking in, poised to intervene. God, what if she'd been planning to take Beth from the school playground one day? I spoke to the worried-looking splinter of a woman who ran the after school project.

‘I'd like you to be very, very careful not to let Beth home with anyone claiming to be a relative,' I said. ‘Nobody but me or her grandparents will pick her up from school from now on.'

‘Mrs Leonard,' she said, insulted. ‘We never let the children
go home with anyone other than their designated carers.'

‘Not even if they are visibly a relative,' I said. ‘Not even anyone who looks like me. Especially not.'

I read and read and reread those forum reports, what her clients have to say about her. Every nuance. They go back to 2007, so she's only been here for a year, and there was no trace before that. I copied them into a Word document and emailed them to my work address so I could go over them in the office when Norman was out at the site, or in the toilet, or talking to Moira, while Graeme slunk around me, avoiding my company but burning holes in my back as avidly as though we had actually had sex in that cupboard, rather than just recorded a ten second message.

That's how I fill my days until Friday.

I drop Beth off and stare up at what I think must be her window. There was someone up there, I was sure of it, a shadow. I bent in to kiss my daughter, hold her closer and harder than I usually do.

‘Ow, Mummy! Stop it!'

My head is throbbing after the run back up the hill home, so I take a bath, and then, without knowing why, shave my legs and the stubble under my arms. A razor cut under my knee I hadn't seen in the water begins bleeding as soon as I step out, great scarlet streams of it loose on my wet skin and dripping onto the tiles, and I swear at myself, realise my hands are shaking.

An hour and a half later, I'm calmer. I'd spent a lot of time smoothing down my hair – it's complicated, doing that, and I'd had to concentrate – and applying all the products in my little-used makeup bag, one after another.