Fishnet (10 page)

Perhaps you barely remember these events. Perhaps you shrugged them off and haven't attached any significance to them since. Wrong! Under the laws, the sex laws written out by Those Who Know Better, these happenings of sex upon your person will have scarred you. Irrevocably. You are now damaged, because of them. Or you are if you accepted payment for any of them.

And this is what gets to me. Why can't we save the worry about damage and trauma for those who actually have been damaged. If you blur the lines between my job, or some boring sex some bored girl had once with the old guy from the shop because there was nothing else to do in her town – if you keep on maintaining that these things inflict the same amount of psychic damage as actual acts of rape and abuse, you trivialise those acts. And you make criminals and victims out of people who are neither.

And as long as we keep those laws, the men and the women both will think and act like that. So here we are for now, perfectly legal outlaws.

Today, my camera and I are just in the mood for a very simple leg shot, in my favourite stockings. Sure, fishnets are a bit of a hooker cliché, but look at me. I'm making them work.

Tags:
politics
activism
sexism
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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.