Fishnet by Kirstin Innes Page A

binmen had got me up two hours early. Trying to prise my numb hand out from under Simon’s vicious cheekbone, I woke him up. He rubbed his erection into my hipbone twice, then wandered off to the bog to try and piss rid of it.
    I was twenty-two years old, working in the most junior position there was at a publishing company. I took minutes in meetings. I got coffees. They were starting to remember my name. My nights were spent in a fusty flat in the West End with a privately-educated final-year medical student. Simon had sublet me his spare room until one night, two bored, horny young people who hadn’t been touched in a long time, we fell into bed. We read books on the sofa at night, and sometimes went out to watch rock bands in sticky-floored pubs. We had a favourite café we got scrambled eggs in on Saturdays. We’d tried to have sex in the shower once, but the smell from the mouldy grouting put us off.
    That was my life. Not a grand romance, not a great job. But both of them had potential. I’d liked them, and I’d liked who I was beginning to be in them. Maybe if I’d had longer, one or both of them would have survived it all.
    Beth and I eat cheese on toast for tea and then she reaches for the kitchen roll and, finicky, wipes every crumb away from her mouth before sending her tongue out – one, two – into the corners. She washes her hands a lot, too, doesn’t like being dirty. I don’t know where that comes from. What will you say when she asks about her father? my friends said, my parents said. I didn’t know. I still don’t, because she hasn’t asked, ever. Maybe she hasn’t worked out that she has one yet.
    None of them ever ask what I’ll say if she wants to knowabout her mother.
    You’re a good girl, Gran used to say, pressing a twenty-pound note into my hands like she used to do with coppers from her pension when I was younger. My mother’s helpless, fluttering grip on me, her deliberate, teary glances. My father turned off, tuned out.
    Okay.
    The phone rang. I was at work and the phone rang, and it was my sister. I didn’t answer it, my boss did. I was told it was an emergency.
    â€˜I’m at the station,’ she said. ‘I’m at the station and I need your help, Fi.’
    I told her not to worry, I told her I’d be there in twenty minutes. I took my lunch-break early, not realising that I wouldn’t be back to work for weeks, and then just to collect my stuff. I ran almost all of the way.
    I had lived away from home for five years by then. In that time, Rona had phoned me three times, only ever looking to enlist my support in her ongoing war with our parents. She hadn’t come to my graduation. She was not particularly attached to ideas of family, my sister, and she’d only turned up at Dad and Jackie’s Christmas dinner under particularly heavy duress.
    She’d put on weight. Big smudgy makeup eyes. Cheeks pink with the cold. Layers of textures and wraps all over her.
    â€˜Fi. Thank you. Thank fuck. Make it stop.’
    As I went to hug her, I realised there was something in the way, something warm. And she thrust this something at me and it started to cry and so did she.
    That evening. Simon was stunned, quiet, decamped to a friend’s house, more because he didn’t want to deal with the situation than because he needed space. I don’t remember what we said to each other, or even if she could say anything, or if I could say anything worth saying, anything more than oh hon. Oh hon, it’sgoing to be okay, which was a lie, one of those little lies you just tell people.
    Because we had got to sleep that night at around ten, nothing asked, nothing revealed, just hugging and stroking and crying. I’d pulled out all the blankets we had and wrapped her with them. I’d heated milk and formula in separate pans, as though this was something I always did, trying to keep the panic out of my