Boy Parts(31)

‘Did you used to work at the Tesco on Clayton Street, or something?’ I ask. He shakes his head.

‘Oh. No. I worked at one in Leeds, where I did my undergrad. I did my teaching qualification at Northumbria,’ he tells me, like I asked for his life story. ‘But um… then I worked at this little Tesco Express in High Heaton? Why do you ask?’

‘You just look really familiar,’ I say. ‘Maybe someone I’ve shot before, or something.’ He shrugs and doesn’t seem to know what to say. An awkward silence hangs between us, which I break. ‘So… your email said you teach primary school?’

‘Yeah… I really love kids. I just… This is so cliché, but I’m really just like a big kid myself, you know? Um… not in a weird way, though.’ He clears his throat, and trails off, staring down at the table, then back to my chest. ‘So, do you, um, do you like kids?’

I shrug. I actually fucking hate children. Teaching at a primary school is a personal nightmare. In Irina’s inferno, the seventh circle of hell is me doing potato prints with a room full of five-year-olds.

‘They’re fine. I’m probably not going to have any.’ I’ve been scraped twice: once when I was nineteen, and again when I was twenty-two. A couple of mishaps related directly to my latex allergy. Hormonal birth control makes me go a bit loopy, you see, and no one ever just has latex-free condoms. I have since learned that the pull-out method is not effective, and if one would like to avoid bareback accidents (barebaccidents, if you will) one must simply deal with carrying her own special condoms.

‘Yeah. I mean I love them, I just… I like being able to give them back at the end of the day? But… I mean, I do probably want them, just… not right now. Well. I don’t know. If I had a girlfriend – which I don’t – and she was pregnant, I’d be fine with it? I think?’

‘Cool,’ I say. Am I sneering? I scratch the top of my lip, knock it back down to a neutral position. But the damage is done, and the checkout boy has shrunk into his chair, flushed redder than before, with a thin film of sweat on his forehead. ‘I promise I don’t bite,’ I tell him. It doesn’t seem to help. ‘I know I’m quite intimidating—’

‘Oh, oh God, you aren’t! I’m sorry, I just don’t spend a lot of time with women outside of a customer service setting. I mean, on placement I talked to quite a lot of mums, and some of them were quite attractive, but…’ He trails off, and screws his face up like he’s just stubbed a toe.

‘Stop talking. I know I’m quite intimidating. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Just… answer my questions. Speak when spoken to, if it helps.’

‘Okay.’ He nods. ‘Speak when spoken to, okay.’

Men get like this with me, sometimes. I find it quite repulsive that anyone could so openly roll over and show their soft parts to a stranger. It’s so gross, it’s almost captivating – like when people cry on public transport. I’d literally rather die before I acted like this in front of someone. It feels like he’s expecting me to mate with him and bite off his head, or perform a backwards traumatic insemination ritual that’ll end with a load of ginger spiders bursting out of his chest.

Now we’ve established that he only speaks when spoken to, we can get on with things. I ask him if he’s seen much of my work, and he has. He went through my whole website – he really likes it. I let him go off on one about how great my work is: ooo the colours, ooo isn’t it so revolutionary to see the female gaze, ooo eroticised images of normal men by a woman. The phrasing is decidedly similar to a Vice write-up of a show I did during my MA. I think that article is still the third or fourth result when you google me, as well. But that’s fine. Forgivable. A little sweet, even, that he’d try and pass off a write-up from four years ago as his own clever observations. Maybe he thinks I don’t read my own reviews.

I ask him if he’s cool with doing some more explicit stuff, as a trade-off for the mask. He shrugs – as long as his face is covered, he doesn’t care.

I ask him why he’s doing this.

‘I just…’ He shrugs again. ‘Just not every day this happens, is it? I mean… I’m not ugly. I know I’m not ugly; I’m not fishing for compliments. There’s just a big difference between not being ugly – having an okay face – and being attractive, isn’t there? I’m just… I’m short. I’m really short and… weird. And I know it’s risky and stuff, I just. You’re like… It’s really flattering. It’s really, really flattering.’ He’s red again.

I’d take his photo now, if I could.





Yo…

Saw that dude from Tesco today hes going to drop in for a shoot after his shift on wednesday.

So you know. Thanks for the rec.

As hit and miss as your picks for models normally are, he was a good shout.

I quite like him. Like, more than I expected.

I see you watching my Instagram stories

Ugh whatever.





Eddie from Tesco comes over the day after our coffee date.

He likes my house.

‘Spartan,’ he says. ‘Modern.’ The only decorations are prints of my own photographs, a couple of Flo’s drawings hanging, and a set of pressed flowers above my mantel. The walls are white, the floors are wooden – slate tiling in the bathrooms and the kitchen. My mam thinks it looks like a hospital, smells like one too. I bleach everything.