Boy Parts(11)

I had fumbled with boys before Lesley. Over the summer, I had made an effort to dress for my new shape, to dye my red hair black, to fill in my eyebrows, to apply winged eyeliner and red lipstick – and to change my profile pictures, and make sure I was seen in places I knew the in-crowd hung out. They started adding me on MSN, inviting me to things. And I’d turn up, and I’d buy everyone alcohol because I never got carded, and get blackout drunk, and wake up with my underwear around my ankles, or my skirt pulled up over my stomach. I remember stumbling out of someone’s spare room after a house party, and their indulgent mother telling me, ‘Your shirt is on inside out, petal,’ and her lending me a thin, silky scarf to cover a love bite on my neck the size of a fist.

I went back to school popular. Girls who used to pick on me liked me, because I could get fags and vodka, and I’d held their hair back while they were sick. When I’d started sitting with the pretty girls, when the boys snapped my bra straps, and hung round my worktable – this was when Lesley noticed me.

My mam told the school he’d started grooming me at GCSE, which was bullshit. Lesley was a shallow man; he didn’t pay any attention to me till everyone else did. He held me back after a lesson in late September and told me: You have a lot of potential, Irene. (It’s Irina, sir.) You haven’t done much over the summer – you mustn’t let your modelling career distract you.

Of course, at the time I thought he’d gotten me mixed up with Molly Jones, who I sat with. My new friend had been a six-foot-tall netball player: pretty as a picture and thin as a rake, she’d spent much of the previous school year bragging about signing to a modelling agency. We both had bottle black hair – but she was flat as a board. I’d been the exact mix of flattered and offended that I assume he was shooting for. I’d corrected him, shyly, and swallowed that compliment like a mouthful of the ice cream I’d sneak while Mam had me on a diet.

I know he was negging me, now. At the time, I was stupid enough to believe he’d genuinely mixed me up with Molly. But I wasn’t quite so stupid that I didn’t realise he was trying it on with me. I can’t remember what he looked like in any detail, which annoys me. I don’t have any photos of him, or even sketches. I sometimes google him, looking for a social media profile, or a tabloid news article. ‘Sex-pest teacher allowed to work in school again’, or something. But he’s off the grid.

He was in his forties, with thick, black hair, and he wore glasses. He was slim, and taller than me, but none of his facial features stick out in my mind.

I remember finding him very attractive at the time; though any man who pays attention to you, at that age, can transform from frog to prince in the time it takes to tell you he likes your hair.

I leant into being stupid for him. I giggled for him, and I smiled bashful smiles, as he edged further into my personal space with each passing lesson. He’d make up reasons to hold me back; a few minutes for oh, hang on, is this your jacket? then fifteen for I just think you’re very talented, and we should talk about your future. In late October, he gave me an arbitrary detention for an unfilled sketchbook page (I’d done three rather than the requested four). The detention was administered at half past two, and by four thirty his dick was in my mouth. He didn’t tell me when he was about to finish, so I choked, and coughed, spraying cum from my aching mouth all over his crotch. It was disgusting: the unexpected smells, the presence of a distinct flavour and the texture of wiry hair in my teeth, and flesh (somehow hard and squishy at the same time) bumping dangerously close to my throat.

I got used to it.

The sketchbook descends into a wall of hairy limbs, flat chests and comedically large bulges in jeans – Tom of Finland, eat your heart out. I put it down, and flip through the others, finding more men, and escalating tastes. This was around the same time I got into extreme cinema, and with my palate whet for the violent, disturbing and bizarre alongside my new-found interest in grown men, my artwork becomes a twisted mash of flesh, hair and bodily fluids, rendered in pencil and sickly watercolours.

A birthday card with a pressed flower taped to the inside falls from my AS-level exam sketchbook. The smoking gun. A large number seventeen glitters on the cover. The badge is still attached.

I move a couple of sketchbooks and find a fat wedge of birthday cards banded together in the bottom of the box. They’re all different, all seventeenth-birthday cards and all from M&S. Must have cost him a fucking fortune.

Lesley did this thing where he would get his A-level students birthday cards, and tuck them into our sketchbooks without telling us.

This one reads: Happy birthday, I hope you enjoy your party on Friday evening, I’ve heard the food at Princess Gardens is delicious! So I’d get this, and I’d know to meet him at Princess Gardens on Friday evening. If my mam found it and was like, ‘What the fuck? Your birthday’s in November and it’s January,’ I could just tell her he’d gotten me mixed up with Molly Jones whose birthday it actually was, and that he got Molly and I mixed up all the time.

My mam is a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. Upon reflection, I don’t know how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. She’d pick through my sketchbooks like a rat picking through the bins whenever I left the house: silent, but increasingly disturbed by the content.

He told me once that she’d rang him. She wanted to know why he was letting me draw stuff like that. Lesley said it was just me expressing myself, and that teenagers were macabre, unpredictable creatures. I was hazy with wine from our date and thought I should move my stack of birthday cards out of my art stuff, and under my mattress, or something. I forgot about it promptly, and I giggled, and told him not to talk about my mother while he was fingering me.