Fishnet (8 page)

I put on my most expensive clothes; the red cashmere sweater, the pencil skirt, the leather boots. I put in the little gold earrings Gran had left me. I want her to see them.

And I leave my flat. I walk down the stairs like I always do, and steady myself on the rail at the top of the hill. The noise of my heels clipping the macadam as I turn left, like I always do, for
the station and the cash machine, where I withdraw £200, feel it in my hand for a while.

Number 28 is a pale, new-build row meant to blend in with the Edwardian tenements, although its poky, plastic-bound windows will always give it away even after the too-clean sandstone succumbs to the grime of the main road, of life. Its squares and angles are too neat; its fronts too flat. I couldn't live somewhere like that, somewhere with no history, although I imagine it would suit Rona just fine.

The buzzer at 2/3 doesn't have a name on, not like the others. I fumble in my handbag with one hand while pressing the button with the other.

A pause.

A click.

A crackle.

A scuffled, deep ‘Hello,' and I hold my new voice recorder up to the intercom.

‘Hello, this is Graeme Bain
,' Graeme says.

‘Mon up,' says the voice.

She could be putting that accent on, too.

The stair smells of new carpet, of showrooms and polythene, of summer holidays chasing each other round floor-mounted tiling samples while Mum hissed Dad's name and he flushed. The door is cheap wood, varnished up. Gold bell. Brass knocker. There's a joke in there, somewhere, surely.

I ring.

Footsteps, coming towards it.

As it opens, I realise I haven't thought for a second what I'm going to say.

Back

At first, the TV was just there to distract us from the billion questions and worries flickering back and forth in our heads. He had to go back to work first, then her, and we were no nearer to working out what was happening. I began to take up residence in this room when they weren't here, and I was haunted.

The Health Visitor said the baby was picking up on my anxiety, on theirs, that's why she wouldn't settle. That's why she cried. I could be changing her, or playing with her, or out in the park with her held safe in front in the pram and she'd sense Rona coming into focus and me tensing up, and it would scare her.

I made a promise to my baby, one day, to stop her crying. I promised her that when she was around I wouldn't allow myself to be haunted. So we improvised, the two of us, just like we always do, with the gleam of Mum's old television. I didn't have one of my own then, so at the first sign of trouble we'd lock the door and move smoothly down the concrete stairs to the living room, switch on and curl up, the small softness of her on me. She came to know it so well that just the noise of our door shutting behind us and the different smell of the stair would calm her.

We looked out together, from this blank room, into the lightweight opinions and overwrought acting of daytime telly, and soon she was annotating my sarcastic commentary with her own babble, and I'd talk right back, and we were in perpetual nothingy conversation all day, Miss Bethan Leonard, me, the telly. The Health Visitor said I should be proud of the progress she'd made, how advanced her speech was, and I swelled with it. Keeping myself limited to one space and concentrating everything into her was working out well for both of us.

They'd come home, first Dad, then Mum, and not ask why I was always there. He'd sit down beside us for an hour and when Beth grew able to she'd sometimes curl into him and he'd feel the same peace of her, I could tell. The telly stayed on, always, there for us, offering respite from having to think or talk to each
other. The Leonards are a television family, now. We have our regular viewing schedule, agreed upon silently. In the first year, when a soap opera plotline would veer too closely to our lives – teenage runaways, missing girls, single mothers, violent divorce, abandoned children – one of us would cough, shift, press the remote. At some point we stopped doing that. We let them smart out, those stories, now. Just pressing the old bruises to check they still hurt.

Eight o'clock is bedtime now. Probably it should be earlier, but the Health Visitor hasn't been for years, and it seems to fit us all about right. At 7.45, in the last advert break, I tell her to pick up her toys and she does, usually without too much complaint, scoops them into a box behind the sofa. Most of her toys have found their way down here. Then there are kisses, for Granny, for Grandpa, and we climb the stairs, me and my girl. In the bad years I would only let Rona back in after Bethan was in bed, after I'd checked the sweet rhythms of her breathing twice, almost breaking with a love that worked as anaesthetic.

Mum came home early one day, before Dad was there, and she switched the telly off, and the pudgy, napping toddler on my lap shifted and moaned in her sleep. She spoke smoothly and gently and didn't raise her voice, and neither did I. It was time, she said.

‘I never wanted this for you, love, but you're going to have to look for something. You know your dad and I don't make enough to support all four of us and both flats. Not indefinitely. And Bethan needs to go to nursery and meet other children. She needs to play. It's important for her.'

The guilt that had kept them supporting me, prevented this sort of conversation, slowly losing its adherence, peeling off. I was to ease myself back in. Just take a part-time job. A few hours a week helping out behind a reception desk. Odd shifts in a call centre. The same sort of work she'd done when we were small.

‘But you have to come to me. You have to promise that. The second you start feeling any sort – any sort of resentment.
Towards her. Or us, you know. Because it can come. The second, you talk to me about it.'

Knowing I wouldn't. Talk doesn't happen between us. Not like that.

Without the noise of the telly and a baby in my arms, Rona had insinuated her way back in. She found her way everywhere. Monthly dinner with the girls always started with cold pulsing dread through the smalltalk, knowing that just after the main courses arrived and the eye signals had been exchanged, one of them – usually Samira, with her well-bred tact – would tilt a cautious head to the side and say something with long, sympathetic vowels like
So. Any news? How are you holding up?

And what would I say? No, no there's no fucking news and there probably never will be? Shut up, I don't want to talk about this – in fact, I never want to talk about it again? Yeah she's back; can't you see her – she's sitting right there?

They were acting out of love and concern, those friends of mine; out of the perfectly logical deduction that anyone whose sister had gone missing would be frantic and worried and want to talk about it. She began to occupy the fourth place, the empty chair at any table when the three of us were out. So I stopped going out.

Forth

The woman behind the chain looks at me, and I look back at her. ‘Sorry pet,' she says. ‘I think you've got the wrong door.'

I must have, surely. Her big body blocks the gap, bulked out in a checked housecoat; the flat grey perm of hair that had given up at least two decades before curling round the door frame. A respectable wummin who probably had no idea that a house of ill-repute was being run from her building, or if she did, would probably hiss at the gentlemen callers as they made their way back down, blank her hussy neighbour if they met in the street – and yet, the enamel numbers on the door quite clearly said 2/3.

Surely not. Okay, pictures could be faked, but the men's drooling reviews had been unequivocal.
A right tasty piece. Total wee darling. Wanked thinking about her all week
.

She's still looking at me, but her eyes are darting occasionally over my shoulder, looking for something else in the stair. She's looking for the man, for Graeme Bain.

‘Is this, ehm, Fiona's house?'

Her eyes narrow behind the thick specs.

‘It is. And I'm telling you, dear, you've got the wrong door.'

‘I don't think I have. Look, I made the appointment. I'm the half eleven. I just wanted to – I've maybe made a mistake.'

She looks at me again.

‘I'll just go and have a word with her,' she said, and the door closes in my face.

A madam? I wonder. I think of glamorous older women in films, Dolly Parton's cleavage wrapped in silks and feathers, welcoming in leery cowboys.

The gatekeeper opens the door-crack again.

‘What is it you're wanting?'

‘Just to. To talk to her. Nothing, ehm, else. I've brought the money. She'll still get paid –'

The door shuts. Behind it, female voices tango blurrily.

What sort of prison was this? Even from the crack, I'd been
able to see that she was big. Strong. Fifty years ago, the sort of woman who'd have been scrubbing stairwells and lugging her family's washing back and forth from the steamie. Rona had always been delicate, small-made, bones like a bird. This woman could snap her neck under one meaty arm if she wanted.

They were supposed to be men, the traffickers, the pimps. According to the headlines. Sleazy men, vice kings if they were British; monsters and immigrants if they were not. This was not a thing that women did to other women, this crime. It couldn't be –

The door opens all the way, and the auld monster stands there in her pinny in the hall, beckoning.

‘Okay. In you come. But I'll warn you, she's no happy about this.'

I think for a second, I could take this woman right now, do enough damage to keep her distracted, scream RUN – but what if she's tied up, or if there's someone else in there, some big bruiser paid by the pimp to keep her down–

My feet tread fluffy carpet and I'm ushered into a small living room. Sunny. New sofa. Mirrors on the walls, china ladies on a stand in the corner. Uplighters. A woman's face, suddenly, right in mine, its pointed teeth.

‘So are you the one that's been phoning, then? For fuck's sake. I'll just tell you this one last time, doll, to your face, so you get the message. I am not a fucking lezzy. Okay?'

She's wearing a silky, bum-skimming dressing gown, sheer black, with something purple on underneath. Flipflops, dark blue toenails and a deep, even tan. Dark eye makeup. She's the right height, right size, her hair has been straightened but was probably pretty similar to mine. I knew her from somewhere.

She's definitely not my sister, though.

Of course she isn't. Of course of course of course.

The room smells too sweet in the heat, is beginning to lurch about me. The woman who is not my sister is still going, her voice getting louder, her face redder.

‘– absolutely wasted an hour of my fucking day. I mean, this
might be a wee joke to you, hen, or it might be some great big moral crusade, but it's my fucking job and you've just cost me a perfectly good paying client, do you get what I'm saying? Do you? Ho. Doll. Are you alright?'

I come to on the sofa. There's something cold and wet on my face and it's being held by the older woman.

‘There she is. There you are, madarlin. Okay. Okay now.'

The dressing gown material shushes against itself as the younger woman – Fiona – comes to sit beside me.

‘Alright. Come on, I'm not gonny shout at you. But want to tell me what all this is about?'

‘I'm really, really sorry,' I say. ‘I've made a huge mistake.'

‘Aye, you have. But you're here now.'

‘I thought you were my sister,' I said. ‘She's been missing for years, and your – your pictures on the West End Girls site. You look like her, a bit.'

She breathes out.

‘You're not from the council, then?'

‘The council?'

‘Aye. The council. Their Ways Out hingmy. Ann was hearing that they've started coming round the women in flats now, as well. As though we were criminals or something. Buncha interfering auld biddies.'

‘No. I'm not. I'm not from the council, and I'm – I'm not the police or anything either. I was just looking for my sister.'

The older woman comes in, presses a hot mug into my hand and leaves again. I hadn't even noticed her go the first time.

‘Wouldn't care if you were the police. I'm no breaking any law here. Your sister – is she a working girl?'

My sister is many things, I think, feeling suddenly lucid. A flirt. A dancer. The beauty of the family. A fucking bitch.

‘She was, about seven years ago. I've just found out. I thought I could maybe find her using the sites, maybe. Sorry. It was a stupid idea.'

She makes a soft noise in her throat.

‘And was she working from a flat, or on the streets, like?'

‘A flat, but it wasn't hers. Up north, in a wee village – she's not there any more.

‘Obviously. Sorry.'

‘And she looks like me?'

‘Not really, no. Not now I see you. But in the pictures. And you were so nearby.'

‘Is she called Fiona, aye? Is that why you thought it?'

‘No. I'm called Fiona.'

Her breath comes out in something that had probably originally been a laugh.

‘Right. You thought your sister was working, right by your house, and using your name to do it? I mean, I'm no saying it's impossible, but that's pretty fucked up, likes.'

She has a point.

‘Look, I'm really sorry for wasting your time. I should go. I just - I just wondered. Her name's Rona. She looks like me, a bit. Prettier, but there's a resemblance. Do I look familiar to you?'

A thin wee smile for a second, and she looks away.

‘
You
look familiar to me for the same reason I probably look familiar to you.'

She pauses again. I stare over at her china figures, elegant long white statues with skirts, no faces. She coughs, starts.

‘Our kids go to the same school, doll. I've seen you at the gates before – I think your wee one's the year behind my Adam. I'd appreciate it if this went no further, because if it does you and I will seriously have words. You get me?'