Fishnet Read Online Free PDF Page A

in this strange soothing voice. ‘I know darling.’
    She patted his hand a couple of times.
    â€˜It might help,’ I said. ‘Later on. It might help us understand, just from being here.’
    â€˜You’re maybe right,’ Mum said, not meaning it, not really.
    All the spark dreeping slowly out of her, out of all of us, evaporating into that smell of smoke and frying. A month later they were living together in the old house again. Two months after that, Beth and I had moved into the vacant flat upstairs.The official reason is that we all want to be in the place she’s most likely to come back to. Really, it’s because with all of us mostly absent, together we approximate a whole person.
    We’d sat there for a bit, staring out the window at the paint peeling off the ski shop, the people. Most of them seemed to be aged sixteen to twenty-two, marking time up here, making money then leaving again. The smell, the music. The empty fourth chair at the table we were at. The uneaten food.
    They’ve got the same tartan carpet as they had six years ago in the Ochil, and the frying smell’s stronger since the smoking ban came in. The same sort of music, playing loud for hypothetical tourists who are the same nationality as the staff. A man at the bar, older, the sort of stubble that looks painful, caught my eye as I stood in the door, started, then recovered himself and winked. There were no other customers, just a girl behind the bar who couldn’t be more than twenty. She had pretty skin, her hair pulled back with a ribbon. Transient. Another transient.
    City
    This is where I work. The International Financial District. The Call Centre Capital. The Graveyard of Graduate Dreams. And after dark, The Notorious Drag. The Red Light Zone. An awful lot of names for an uninhabitable slant of tarmac so steep it’ll give you a stitch if you can make it up in one go. There’s not a single growing thing in the whole grid, not by design anyway. Weeds, maybe, between the cracks in the paving, between the designated areas of ownership, because nobody cares enough to root them out. Lots of pickings for rats, between the sandwich crumbs of office workers and the detritus of night time activity, in this proud new area intended to attract free enterprise and the glories of capitalism to a former industrial city.
    Nobody lives here. They work here; they drink here, some of them fuck here, but they don’t live here. That makes it perfect. Eight, fourteen, twenty storeys of hard new architecture behind which there’s probably no sky; buildings designed to suck in the sun, channel it into money.
    The shift happens at around seven, later in the summer months, if you’re working evenings. The girls emerge from wherever they spend their daytimes just as the last of the suits disappear. They must just be ants from the seventeenth floor, ants on the march out of the zone, before the concrete is reclaimed by slaters scuttling in and out of the corners. When the cuts started, we had an email from head office: could female employees stop taking on overtime after dark, because the company can’t afford the taxis.
    One of my jobs every morning is to check the car park gutters for used condoms.
    â€˜Did you see that bloody carry on outside?’
    Norman doesn’t bother with hello Fiona, how was the hen weekend because Norman is furious, his already pouchy eyes distending even further. He mutters in headlines: no respect and shameless hussies and it’s just gone too far. Too far! and his hair crackles with static indignation.
    Over at the window, Moira is closing the blinds.
    â€˜Ach, it’s just a protest,’ she says with her soft voice. ‘Just a couple of daft buggers. You’ll not have seen them, Fiona – they look like they’ve been camped out in the car park since cock crow. We’ll just pull these shut and get on with our day, eh? How about you put the kettle