Fishnet (6 page)

I can find all these things, of course. Anyone can find anything they want, instantly, any story they want to believe in, any pictures they need to see. It's all there. Almost.

I'd had this picture in my head of Rona prowling round the streets, one of those ghosts dropping condoms outside my office, but that doesn't seem to be how it happens these days. All you need is internet access and a picture with your face pixelated out.

Just a couple of clicks and I'm back in the right narrative again. I've found a forum where the girls and men both go, where the girls advertise themselves and the men critique them. Where be dragons. Where be young women photographed from behind, a lipsticked grimace and a splayed, waiting arsehole on every individual profile. Where be punters, and the opinions of punters. Field reports, they're called.

Her tits were really disgusting. Once I got the bra off they just sagged all over the place. They were flopping in my face.

She's back on the scene after a long break and I'm thinking she must have had a kid cos my god, the stretchmarks on her. Boobs not as pert as I remember either, and it was like a fucking tunnel up there.

She went down on me and it was alright, but not anything special, and her hand moved on my shaft just mechanically.

Holly is a real gem, who should only ever be treated like a lady.

Wow! What a technique! And that's all I'll say ha ha. Afterwards we cuddled for a nice long stretch. I certainly didn't get the idea that she was a “clock watcher” or anything like that.

I eventually fucked her doggy while trying to ignore the disgusting smell coming from her fanny. But then the most repulsive thing hapened, my cock was suddenly covered in blood. It even ran all over my sheets!!!! She said she didnt know she was due well poor excuse if you ask me, how can you not know??? It was like something out of a horror movie!!!

She's also a great conversationalist, can talk about any subject really well.

It says on her blog she likes to wear boots and so I was pleased to see she'd come dressed in them and her fishnet stockings, just like I'd asked. She has the most beautiful legs, too.

We did it twice: i was so anxious about pleasing her
that I maybe finished a little bit quickly the first time, fortunately Angela is a lady and was very nice about it, and let me go down on her for some time. She certainly seemed to enjoy herself, too, she's a real sexual adventuress.

Tiffany is a really sweet girl. Now I truly understand the meaning of “girlfriend experience”. I'll be back.

XXX

By the time I left the office, it was dark outside. The station is at the top of the hill, the concrete felt treacherous, slippery in the rain. We'd all had to stay late, cover for work lost in the protest mess, and I realised I'd missed my window for leaving before the transfer happened. These streets were no longer my place.

It was the first time I'd seen it happen up close, though. The woman walking across the road from me, skinny jeans, eyes ringed and her hair up in a high band, the tail twitching as she walked, hitting her shoulders. Probably not even nineteen. Her limbs were thin, very very thin. A car pulled alongside her; she looked, indicated her head round the corner to a lane with a dead end. The car blinkers turned smoothly and she carried on, catching up with it without ever breaking her stride, although she looked over her shoulder at me. Alley cat flexing and spitting on a wall.

Oh.

Even the click of my heels on the concrete was full of meaning, suddenly, the noise of them. Another set of footsteps cut over my beat. Speed up, head down, grip knuckles round my handbag. Keys in my other fist, in my pocket, ready to strike at someone's face, but it passed.

I'd got halfway up when headlights smeared the wet tarmac ahead and around me, the noise of brakes cranking together
at my back. The car made warm animal noises as it pulled in, waited for me.

Me. The fucking cheek of it. Me in my work clothes, my plain trousers and heeled boots, my fitted coat. Me, a woman in this area, a woman who works here. Did the very fact of my being female and in this patch of real estate after dark mean that they think I'm-

The car purred sexily, a hot gust on my legs, and a sudden bad bit of me thought, what if I did it? What if I turned round to meet this car, the man inside, leaned in at the window? What if I got in, pulled my trousers down to my knees, climbed on top? In one minute, if I wanted to, I could have had a stranger's cock inside me.

Instead, I broke into a run, up the hill. The scuttle of an outraged, virtuous member of society. Every noise in the dark, every shadow on the empty platform once I'd made it to the train station was a threat. I'd shrunk my muscles in on myself, tense up and wait the train out, those agonising seventeen minutes counting down in yellow computer font on the screen. It was a fright when the recorded monotone began, in an itchy burst of static:

The train now approaching
Platform two
Is the
Seven
Twenty-three
To
Helensburgh

The car hadn't followed me.

I took my bag and coat off at the door, put my shoes in their place on the rack, began the sort of comforting bustle that helps the brain short-circuit back to home mode. Mum nodded at me from the sofa, began to gather her things, retreat back to the flat
downstairs.

‘She's asleep?'

‘Like a light. About half an hour ago.'

‘Great. Thanks. She wasn't any trouble?'

‘No, no.'

She made her way to the door. I heard it close. Beth was pouting in her sleep. I propped her door a little more ajar and moved to the computer, without really thinking. You want to know a thing, you type it into a white, blinking space.

prostitute scotland

And now the clock says 02:14. I'm probably going to be late for work tomorrow again. I take my clothes off and the mirror looks at me, red eyes, faded cotton pants around its ankles, and I'm not sure what I was supposed to do with that, so I go to bed.

Do you remember the first time?

Early forties. Thin, short, unhemmed like his edges had been gnawed. Something feral about him, but not bad looking. Not really.

I'd thought he would be ugly. Old and fat and ugly. I'd thought about fucking someone repulsive, fantasised about rolled lolloping flab that'd shake as he shagged, kept my fingers and brain in place on the transaction, the power, tried to train myself into it.

Old skin touching me.

Instead, just this little vulpine man, smell of dead smoke off him. His mouth was dry, smacked as he opened it to say hi, white flecks in the corners.

I said hi back, and he let me in.

Just two of us in a room, a very ordinary hotel room. ‘I'm Jimmy,' he said. Irish.

‘RXXX,' I said. (That was the name I used, when I was starting out.)

‘Yeah – I guessed.'

‘Of course.'

‘So.'

‘So.'

That's when I realised it was my job to break through this. My job, this, to ease him out of the nerves, to take his hand through it. Maybe it was his first time too.

All I had to do was smile at him, and say, in that voice like it was a normal thing to say:

‘So. Shall we discuss services?'

And I smiled at the end, a little bit, like we both knew how awful a thing it was, to have to ask, to have to reduce it down to money.

‘Just the basics, please. Just the hour.'

The words flat, no expression.

He handed me an envelope without me having to ask.

It probably wasn't his first time.

My phone rang, before I could check the amount.

‘I'll just need to –'

‘Of course,' he said again.

No, not his first time.

‘So?' she said, down the line.

And I thought, well, I'm not sure. It was something you were supposed to know, by instinct, she'd said.

Well, my instincts weren't telling me to run, but they weren't telling me anything at all. I was just in a room with this expressionless man, and he was skinny.

‘I'm here, and it's fine,' I said.

‘Okay. I've got the hotel on speed dial anyway,' she said. ‘Two rings as soon as the hour's up. And good luck, my honey.'

If my instincts had been telling me anything, the code was ‘I'm here, and he's
really lovely.'

We both stood there in the silence again, and I remembered that this was also part of my job.

‘Give me two seconds,' I said, taking a step towards the bathroom, ‘while I go and change into something, eh –'

‘Just do it here,' he said, gesturing to a space on the floor. ‘I'd like to see you undress.'

I was thinking, I haven't been able to count the money yet. I was thinking, I haven't done the lube yet.

He sat down on the bed, looking at me, and I stood in front of him, and pulled at the zip on my dress. It stuck for the first few seconds, and I had to wrestle with it, trying to keep smiling, swaying my hips a little to distract him. Cheap fucking thing. It came, eventually, and I let it swish down around me, stepped out of it. See through panties and a half balcony bra, so this man, this stranger was now pretty much seeing me naked.

He didn't say anything, his face didn't change, but he
unzipped the front of his trousers and pulled himself out, already mostly hard.

‘Would you like me to suck your cock?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I'm right in thinking I don't need to wear a condom?'

‘Not for oral, no,' I said, like that was what I always said.

Eyes closed, and it's just like giving any other blowjob. Could be someone I'd met in a bar. Could be a new boyfriend. I was touched that he'd washed it.

We spoke in these clipped, formal sentences, both of us. Like neither of us were there for the conversation, so what was the point in pretending? Made sense. He helped me in a way, that wee skinny Irishman, because my response would have been to crack jokes, to ease things through a bit. And of course, with some clients you can do that, and it's great, but the first time, this one, he helped me pare everything right down, establish a rhythm and a way of being in the room. It wasn't a kindness to me, he was just a customer, waiting for a service; I was the provider, that was the point.

It didn't occur to me until afterwards that I'd crossed over, that I'd actually done it, that I was now
not one of us
.

Anyway. Ooh. Yowza, has this blog got serious, right? For being such good and patient little pervs, you can have a sneak preview of my new panties. I do love my bum.

Tags:
clients
memories
irish
outcalls
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Two

Back

The first time I noticed what Rona could do was the year after the divorce. Mum was renting out the house while she travelled; Dad had moved to a tiny suburb on the outside of the city. The sort of place that had probably once been a village in its own right, co-opted into the city by bypasses and Tescos and housing schemes.

It was February, the air was sharp and good for you; we'd just started having to put an extra jumper on under our coats. Thirteen. She was thirteen, for fucksake, probably hadn't even started her periods yet (not that I'd know).

There were five of us at my school who lived out that way, the only ones. Me and Rona, Jenna Anderson in the fifth year and her wee brother, and Malcy Lamont. If we made it in time, which we usually didn't, we could catch the school bus, the one put on by three city centre schools for a disparate bunch: kids from village schemes and the part-timers staying with the parent who made less money.

Anyway, that day we were on time; weren't going to shamble shamefaced into first period as usual to everyone mock-tutting, James Gibson pointing and going oooooh! Crossed the road and I went to grab her hand out of instinct. She glared right up at me.

‘I'm not a baby,' she hissed. ‘And there's no bloody traffic.'

Screw her. I was in a good mood that day. We sat down in the wee shelter and I leaned out the one window where someone had punched the scratched Plexiglas away completely, grinned up the hill, still a bit heathered, the sky above it blinking off the last of the sunrise.

Rona was thirteen, but she already had more chest than I'd ever get. Not that I knew that at the time, still clinging to old Judy
Blume tales of hope and late development. Even in uniform I was nobody's fantasy of a schoolgirl; I've never really worked out how to stand. But this was the day I realised it.

Dad lived at the last stop before the bus turned and ploughed down the bypass. It usually filled up at the five earlier stops and we almost never got a seat together. Not that Rona would mind that day. After a few seconds she got up and marched down to the verge, glaring into the road, hood of her duffel coat pulled up in the sunshine, shooting the odd glare back at me. Still all pissed off because I'd tried to take her hand. Oh, get over it, you stupid kid, I muttered at her in my head.

Just the two of us there, that day. Looking up the hill again, I saw him coming.

Malcy Lamont. He was in my year, but we never spoke. What would we say? He'd been in trouble ever since he arrived, just turned up one day about six weeks into second year. I think it was just the way he looked at the teachers, default expression of solid, nasty insolence. Eyes deep set with a shock of long fantasy girl's eyelashes, greasy gingery curtains over a round head, fat lips always wet and half open. Not sixteen and already sexed, sizing the female teachers up when they told him off, just standing up there, itemising them – breasts, legs, back up to the crotch, where he
stopped
– till they backed down, every one. There were whispers about who he'd poked round the back of the science building, who had let him get three or even four fingers up, who he'd gone all the way with. Nobody really mentioned whether the girls had had much say in the matter. It was Malcy Lamont. He just happened. My plain girl's invisibility cloak didn't work on him, either – I'd had to pass him in the corridor on the way to PE once and he'd put his arm up, not let me through till he'd had a good, slow look. No words. Just letting me know that he would, if he felt like it. You dreaded getting anywhere near him during country dancing, in the progressive numbers, but you dreaded it silently.

Malcy Lamont was coming down the hill to the shelter now.
Soft flop of cock at the crotch of his tracky bottoms, sour smell coming off him downwind. Malcy Lamont was only physical. The times before, when we'd made the bus, hulking Jenna Anderson and her brother had been there, the two of them like a barrier, soaking up some of Malcy. Not today. And he was coming over. I curled into the wall of the shelter, carried on staring out of the window frame, ready to flinch, wondering after what neverending length of time the bus would come.

He didn't come into the shelter, though. I turned around, and saw him standing in the grass, him and Rona facing each other. Her hood was down, the coat open and slipping off her shoulders, her hair blown back from her face. Just staring right back at him, eyeballing, keeping his sightline level with hers. Her jaw was set; not the way it would be when she was going to start a fight.

I didn't understand what I was seeing, really. I'm not sure I do now. No idea what their two bodies were saying to each other, what sort of silent conversation happened there. Malcy Lamont didn't move. I didn't move. The bus came and Rona broke it, stepped past me and told me to come on, commanding, making her point. Schoolies spilled and burst all over us, jeering across the aisle, warmth and the fart stink on my skin. Somebody's tinny transistor playing that Robert Miles song, ‘Children', scratching and fuzzy at the strings. Rona was three paces ahead of me, cutting briskly through the tangled limbs of the aisle. She got a seat beside a smaller girl in her year, turned to her and started chatting.

‘Are ye getting on, then, son?' the driver was asking.

Malcy Lamont walked quickly down to the back seat, where his mates were whistling at him. Head down. Didn't stop to brush his groin up against any outstretched knees, didn't look at Rona. I looked at her instead, through the seat behind. Her and thin, lank Donna Bruce nattering away, the same age except one of them was a child and the other one wasn't.

Next time I got a chance to talk to her was after lunch, passing her on the way to French.

‘What was all that about this morning?'

‘All what? You just need,' patronising voice, full height ‘to remember that I'm not
actually
a baby, Fiona.'

‘You know what I mean. With him. With
Malcy
.' I whispered that bit, didn't want to get caught saying his name out loud.

‘No idea what you're talking about,' she said, peeling off and away from me, her hair whipping out behind her.

I wasn't even surprised when the knock on the door came that night. Dad was out at the shops and Rona was in the toilet, so I went, already half-knowing who it would be.

‘Eh. Is your sister in?'

He was wet through – it had just stopped raining – huddled up under a man's coat too big for him. I looked down on him from our steps and thought it was maybe the first time I'd ever heard him speak. I wasn't really sure what to do, so I just closed the door on him, softly, and went back into the living room, turned the telly up louder.

That was it, for Rona, though. I heard her new laugh in the corridors and on the bus, bright and healthy. From nowhere, she had boy friends and then boyfriends, mostly third years but once, for two terrifying, glorious weeks until the slaggings from his friends got too much for him, Chris Wood in fifth year, captain of the football team, lead actor in the school plays. Never Malcy Lamont, although I'd sometimes catch him staring at her cheek on the bus, immobilised. She was untouchable for the likes of him now. She walked taller than me, bunched her school skirt into her belt, stretched her legs out at break times to pull her socks down into thick rolls over each ankle. She started staying out late, crashing home at one and three and four. Her clothes and makeup got much, much cooler than mine, quickly. I'd pass her in the playground, screeching and flirting and petting with an entirely different set of friends from the ones she'd had before. I just stood back and watched her, got my grades, told no tales to either parent. They were busy finalising the divorce then, anyway, didn't notice, didn't want to.

Forth

I am beginning to know this world, I think. It's like a soap opera. I tune into them every day, when I get home, when Beth's fed and the telly is on. There they are, listed, all the women working in my city, reports on them, their own blogs, their new pictures.

I check the forum to see if anyone has posted a new field report any of the ones I follow, the ones who seem sort of famous with the men, the personalities. Sabrina. Tiffany. Casey. Shiny American names. Bubblegum exotica. I think I've found the blonde girl, the one with the piercings, from the protest. Anya. She calls herself ‘Sonja'. Her website says she's Swedish, and specialises in fetish work. Her face is blurred out, of course, but you can still see the piercings. She has another one through her nipple, little silver bolt, the skin all bruised and puckered around it. Not for the first time I think how strange it is that most of these women will show every little part of themselves but hide their faces.

Holly has a new blog up; it's short and boring, complaining about women in the game who lie about their age. Holly is nineteen, and she doesn't understand why anyone would ever want to lie. What's the point, she says. When I'm thirty-five, I'm going to tell everyone I'm thirty-five. I'm going to be proud of it.

Holly is one of the ones who is either far too trusting or knows exactly what's she's doing; I haven't worked it out yet. There's nothing blurred out here – there are only a few who do this, and they're mostly young, very young, late-teens-grew-up-on-Facebook young. Holly also pours out her soul, though. Where the others blog about irritations with clients who don't read their websites properly before calling, or use their sites to draw attention to political rallies, pulling for sex workers' rights, she writes about her hatred for her mother; her college courses, her compulsions.

If there's one thing I just can not stand it's bad hygiene. I am OCD and proud of it! If you want to play with me, gentlemen, I'm always always going to insist that you shower first.

Her father. She writes about her father, sits it all up there alongside the pictures of her, modelling dresses and lingerie, spreading herself wide for the camera. With just two clicks I could book an appointment with her, this fragile bird-thing who I know far too much about.

Its Fathers day so I wanted to write something about my favourite man in the world, my Daddy!!! Its no secret that me and my mum don't get on coz she's an abusive bitch who ruined my childhood with her selfish behaviour. My dad couldn't stand to live with her, she drove him away just like she drove me away by the time I was sixteen. I went to look for him and we had the most amazing reunion ever, it was like getting a second chance to be a little girl. After years of a jealous woman on a campaign to brake down my confidence, it was amazing to have someone tell me that I was actually beautiful and that I was his princess.

I imagine the men who come to her, having read this, spent time inside her bruised head, and I hope it's a ploy, that she's cleverer than this. Her face is not quite pretty – she missed being pretty by a hair's width, a blink; everything individually is, but not together. She's trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
: the eyeliner, the plastic tiara and underfed bones. The other one who goes without pixels is young and posh and beautiful, a student, through in Edinburgh. She calls herself Felicity and for all I know it's probably her real name. Edinburgh's not her home town. Why should she care what they think of her up here?

All this I know, because it's right there in front of me. Click, click. Felicity charges three times as much as Holly, and is less upfront about the services she provides, although both make it clear that anal sex is not a problem. I look at their skinny bums, Felicity's beribboned, in satin, Holly's naked, her hands pulling the cheeks apart, blue-polished fingernails digging into scrappy flesh.

I am not even ten years older than either of them, but their display, their lack of shame, their sex makes me feel like I'm from another time. You see, Rona? People like to be visible these days. Completely visible. Everything on display for the whole world to see. You're doing it all wrong.

I worry about Holly. I worry about her like I worry about the eighteen-year-old girl who lives near me and advertises on the site, doesn't blog, only hosts two grainy pictures, one of her breasts, one of her shaved crotch, both taken on a mobile phone, and says she does ‘bareback'. No condoms. I want to write to her and warn her.

I forget that they don't know me, no matter how much I can read up about them. I wonder if their clients, prospective clients, faceless men at computers, feel the same.

They are exciting, these lives, though. They are. That they can list, on a site, the things they will do, and men will pay to do those things with them. I find it exciting in spite of myself. In spite of the bits of me that are repulsed.

There are no new field reports on any of my girls. I go back to the search page.

Search by Lady's name:

Search by Location:

Search by Services [tick]

Outcalls Incalls Fetish/Specialist

This computer is wise to me too, fills in the o and the n and the a after I type the R, and although I've broadened it out to search the whole of the UK, it only returns the one in Manchester.

Manchester, I'd thought, when I'd first found her, my skin prickling, Manchester was the last place we had any sort of sighting. But it isn't her. Wrong skin colour, wrong age. I could tell from the first reports.

Not that she would be using her own name anyway. What does she go by, now, I wonder again. And then, back on the search page, without knowing why, I delete the R and put in an F and an i, my own name.

Field Report 15/03/08

On: ‘Fiona'

In: West End

Her place: Clean new flat in West End. Nothing much to say about it.

The punt: Went well. She immediately put me at my ease. A stunning girl in her mid-20s. I would say about 25. Curly dark hair. Looked like a young Raquel Welsh. Needless to say I was delighted. Started off with amazing blowjob. Let me come all over her beautiful tits. Then some petting until the half hour was up. Perfect lunchtime treat. I will be back for a longer session!!