Boy Parts(38)

‘You should get some scented candles in here,’ I say. The air is clammy and stale. ‘Do you have a fan?’

‘In my bedroom. I’ll get it in a second,’ he says. He seems to notice my nose wrinkling as I run my eyes over his dusty telly and PlayStation. ‘Sorry. I guess… I mean, especially compared to yours, it’s a bit minging in here.’ He chews his lip. ‘Do you want me to hoover?’ Before I can answer: ‘I’ll hoover, and I’ll get the fan, just, hang on. Have a look round, if you like.’

He hoovers. I look in his bedroom. It is juvenile, but neat. If you told me this was the recently tidied bedroom of a thirteen-year-old, I’d believe you.

The walls are lined with bookshelves that seem to exclusively contain manga, graphic novels and comic books. There are figurines on his windowsill, and he has that Akira poster that everyone has, as well as a Bruce Lee poster, and a bunch of pictures of some idol girl group. There are stickers on the headboard of his bed. I imagine grabbing the headboard and feeling stickers under my palms.

I look closely at the manga. He’s filed all his porn onto the bottom shelf, as if he hoped no one would bother to bend down and look there.

He catches me with my nose in a comic where, I gather, the protagonist is this boy who has been purchased by a MILF who dresses him as a maid and keeps him trapped in her house. I flip through and stop at a double-page spread of the MILF sitting on the boy-maid’s face. The proportions are bad, but the perspective is worse. Everyone’s hands are huge, and the MILF character’s back is twisted in a bizarre shape, so you can see her breasts and her backside at the same time. I snort.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Eddie from Tesco. I turn the comic round and show him.

‘Being nosy,’ I say. ‘The art in this one is shockingly shit.’

‘Did you look at anything else?’

‘No. Why, do you have anything worse?’ He does. I can tell by the look on his face. I stick the manga back on the shelf, and my knees click when I get up. I talk before he answers. ‘Thanks for hoovering.’

‘It’s fine,’ he says. He looks at me for a while, either waiting for me to apologise, or too mortified to speak. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Not really. I’ll have a drink, though.’

‘I picked up some wine? Red, because… you bought red before. I don’t really drink but I got myself a couple of beers.’

‘What? And you’re going to watch me drink a bottle of wine alone?’ I roll my eyes, grab his fan, and brush past him as I head into a freshly hoovered living room, and plop onto the sofa. ‘You’re trying to get me drunk.’

‘No! No, I just…’

‘Well, have a glass of wine, then. Make it fair.’

He doesn’t own wine glasses (I don’t know what I expected) so I drink out of a small plastic tumbler, and watch him do the same, wrinkling his nose with every sip. He chatters. He doesn’t really like wine, he doesn’t really drink, he feels like a proper grown-up with this red. I make him have another before he switches to beer.

‘Can I ask you something?’ His eyes are big, and brown, like a cow’s.

‘No.’ He looks stricken. ‘I’m joking. Ask.’

‘When we met at the coffee shop, you asked me why I wanted to do this. But… Why me?’ he asks. ‘I mean, like… Why are you interested in me? For photographs, for anything?’

I knock back the rest of my wine and mull it over. There are a few possible answers: I like curly hair; I like weak men; you’re well behaved.

‘You’re really cute,’ I say. He doesn’t believe me. ‘You are! Honestly, I can’t believe you’re single.’ I smile. I’m half telling the truth – he seems like the kind of man whose girlfriends are perpetually younger than him. Like he dates fourteen-year-olds when he’s seventeen, eighteen-year-olds when he’s twenty-five – never enough that it’s illegal but enough that it’s weird. I can also see him with some bossy, frumpy pony-club type or an adult-emo with a dated haircut and a lot of Joker merch. He smiles, just a small smile, but then it drops, and he starts chewing his fingers.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘If you say so.’

I ask him to show me his camera. He gets it for me, apologising as he does, because it’s just a hobby, and it’s his brother’s old camera, and it’s not very good, and neither is he. It’s a digital Nikon, maybe five years old. I’m a Canon girl, myself, and I tell him, prompting another apology. I flip it on, and immediately go to his photographs. A lot of squirrels, in black and white, and macro shots of leaves. There’s a shot of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, so he must have taken these on a trip to London. They’re all a bit too dark. Like he’s tried to do something with the settings, but he’s just cocked-up the exposure instead.

‘This is Hyde Park,’ I say. He nods. ‘I used to live in London,’ I say.

‘I know. Your website says you went to Central Saint Martins and the Royal College? Amir – my brother – did London College of Communication. That’s like, the same uni group thing as Saint Martins. Isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. The LCC photography course always read as really commercial. Your brother does, like, photos of food and stuff, doesn’t he?’ And the checkout boy nods. ‘Mmm. I couldn’t do that. I mean, obviously I’ve done my share of freelance commercial stuff, but usually it’s fashion photography, so you get a lot more artistic freedom.’