Fishnet (12 page)

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

‘You are Fiona, aren't you?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her laugh is a deep hoot, one burst.

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

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

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

‘Of course. Of course.'

‘Okay,' she says. ‘Ask questions.'

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

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

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

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

Her eyes are sharp on me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She's right.

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

What – what do you do? With the men?'

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

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

That hoot of a laugh again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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