Boy Parts(10)

‘Sorry,’ he says. I don’t know what the fuck he thinks he’d do about it, if a bloke had hit me. Beat him up for me? Console me? Will is soft. I do press-ups every morning, and advanced yoga and Pilates twice a week. I push his left ankle closer to his ear, and he grunts, his glutes twinging against my stomach. I make sure he feels how strong I am, how easy it would be for me to keep him knotted up like this.

I let him go and get him to kneel. I wrap his hair around my fist and wrench his neck back.

‘That hurts.’ The timed flash goes off.

I tell him not to be such a baby while he dresses. He invites me to a party at his on Monday night. I tell him I might see him, and I kick him out.

The photos turn out great. I do love his hair. I’ve told him before, if he cuts it, he’ll never work for me again.

I go through his book. I met him when I moved back up north after my MA. Years pass as I flip the pages; I watch his hair get longer, and his outfits get skimpier. I watch him get more and more desperate to please me.

The shoot-comedown hits me a bit harder than usual, and I find myself slinking off to Tesco, after going through Will’s photos for another hour or so.

Eddie from Tesco is, thankfully, here (he wasn’t yesterday) and while he rings up my vodka, I tell him I’d really really like it if he modelled for me.

‘That’s not funny,’ he says. He’s red from scalp to collar. He checks over his shoulder, as if he’s nervous someone will hear. There’s a big, older woman arranging frozen food an aisle away. The manager, I think.

‘Do you think I’m taking the piss?’ I ask, lowering my voice and leaning close enough for him to smell my perfume. ‘I’m not. Look at my website. I’m serious,’ I say. ‘I always am. I literally have no sense of humour.’

He laughs.

He stares when I leave.

I think about Eddie from Tesco at home. Will he be pudgy? Slim? A surprise gym rat? Would his chest be hairy? He looks small. I can’t tell how small, though, as he’s always in a chair behind the cash desk.

He’s my favourite kind of boy to shoot, I think. A nice boy. A boy who works a demeaning job and has the subtleties of his beauty overlooked by glamorous women, and the industries of the aesthetic. The kind of boy who’s bewildered, and grateful, and will gaze down the barrel of my camera and do anything for me.

It’s like discovering a new flower no one else has noticed. Pressed in a photo; preserved and filed away forever, ageless and lovely and all mine.

I think about him all evening. I even pull out a sketchbook and scribble some ideas for photos. I try and find him on Facebook, and fail, without a last name.

I text Flo.

U were sooooo right about the new boy at tesco omg

Gave him my card the other week

Basically totally besotted

Yeah ha ha i thought you’d like him

See what i meant tho he is cute isn’t he??



I’m gunna see how his shoot goes but i actually get a really interesting feeling from him.

Might let him take me out for dinner, who knows?

Oh?

I thought you werent dating atm

I’m not

But maybe I’ll make an exception this time.

We’ll see.



Hmm okay.

Be careful, i guess?



About an hour later, I check her blog. She’s posted I fucked up, in isolation, and does not respond to her concerned orbiters.

Occasionally, she needs a wake-up call. I can date anyone I want. I can make friends.





JUVENILIA




Hackney Space want a little bit of everything for the photo book – including old work I think might serve as an ‘interesting artefact’ to accompany the short biography at the start of the book.

I pull out my entire archive. Albums and portfolios, sketchbooks wrapped up in tissue and plastic, kept in boxes beneath my bed, in my wardrobe, and stacked up in my studio.

I have a digital archive as well, but that’s more of a best of. It’s a lot more recent, too. There are things I’ve deleted, things I’ve forgotten about and, at the end of the day, it’s a good excuse to look through my work. It’s good to get your hands on a physical archive, sometimes, to rip it to bits, and put it back together again.

I remember being six or seven and getting immense satisfaction out of lining all of my My Little Pony dolls in order by colour – starting with the red and pink ones, ordering them as close to the rainbow as I could, and finishing with the purples. I feel just like that, almost giddy, as I get the boxes stacked into chronological order.

I sit on the floor in front of the oldest box, labelled A-LEVEL/FOUNDATION, 2006–2009. I don’t know if I’ll end up pulling anything from here – it’s a lot of drawing, of greatly varying quality.

The early AS stuff is ropey – really ropey. There’s a lovingly rendered watercolour of Galadriel in there, and a lot of drawings of Brigitte Bardot, and, later, Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire. I did a whole project where I tried adapting Barb Wire into a graphic novel without realising it was a comic first, and the upward quality curve in my drawing is surprisingly steep.

My second sketchbook for that year opens with women but closes with men. I open the book – Barbarella, Dita hanging from her prop Martini glass, Jayne Mansfield and her impossibly tiny waist. Wishes – Wife Goals, or Life Goals? as Flo is wont to say when confronted with a beautiful woman. It’s funny the way my work changes – like a switch flipped. I turn a page and find a study of a grown man’s chest – headless, flabby and spattered with hair – next to a chest which is young, and androgynous. Typical for me, the line work is very good, but the shading is a bit half-arsed.