Free Fishnet by Kirstin Innes Page A

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!!
    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 livesbeginning 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