Boy Parts(55)

I went to the RCA expecting solo shows and a Turner Prize nom within the next five years. I got into another show, a little corner in a big exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, right at the start of the year – at my first tutorial, my tutor called me the one to watch. About a month later, I had that Vice write-up, the one that still pops up when you google me, and I was interviewed by a bunch of small journals. I felt like a minor celebrity. I kind of was. I got invited to every party, and all the rich, skinny, fashionable girls wanted to be my friend. I picked Serotonin, still Sera Pattison at the time, to replace Flo because she was the tallest, blondest girl who showed an interest in me. And she always had coke.

Flo said she needed a change of scene, but she just didn’t get into any MA programmes, so she went to Leeds for an internship. I ended up moving in on my own. Professionally, things were going really well, but personally I was still a little… whacky. Whacky; with mounting pressure, and long evenings with no one to worry about me, or keep a proper eye on me.

Flo shouldn’t have left me. I shouldn’t have let her.

After a week of living by myself, I took a series of photos I titled Inconsolable Naked Man. I rip through the set looking for the photos I thought I burnt, but there is nothing hidden there. All of the photos are of a grown man crying on my kitchen floor. We were fucking on the floor, and he asked me to slap him. It was the first time a man ever told me to hit him. So, I did. I hit him, and I hit him, and I hit him, until his lip burst. I hit him until I came. He started to cry, even though he hadn’t asked me to stop. He went soft inside of me. He said he was sorry, and then he sat on my floor and wept like a child. I handed him pieces of kitchen roll to wipe his nose, and watched him cry. I grabbed my camera, and periodically took photos. I didn’t know what to say to make him stop, nor did I ask why he’d started. I just watched. I watched his shoulders shake, and his eyes swell, and blood dribble down his chin. He looked up at me, like I was supposed to do something.

The transition from being hurt to hurting was natural. Even though I didn’t really know why he’d started crying – it felt like something I did. It felt like being a great big black widow and realising that all the male spiders were tiny and weak and covered in soft vulnerable bits, whereas I had this hard, shiny thorax and great big teeth.

When I took the photos to college, I was surprised by the extent to which everyone was on my dick about them. I couldn’t tell if I was actually good, or if everyone was just telling me I was good because I was hot property. It was infuriating.

Sera said I should have filmed the shoot. The main feedback I got from my final BA show is that I should have filmed that on top of taking the photos live, because watching me shoot was more interesting than the individual photographs I’d produced. And I can listen to criticism, even though everyone says I can’t. The next lot of photos I took (with street-cast models), I filmed the shoot.

When I put the films online, everybody liked them. More cover in artsy magazines, more momentum. I booked a little solo show, which was very well received. The first box from my MA is mostly DVDs, and some prints of the photos I actually took. The DVDs are mostly the same thing – street-cast men, with me barking orders at them. Occasionally I’ll go into the frame, and fit them into place, or put a mask or silly accessory on them. All the DVDs are labelled in Sharpie with a vague description of the model: ponytail & goatee; fat boy; acne; adult braces & lazy eye.

I don’t watch them, the way I might have another night. I’m not looking for DVDs. I dump the box out, pore through the prints. I pull the DVDs from their cheap plastic cases and shake them, to see if anything falls out. Something does. A Polaroid. A Polaroid not anywhere near as battered or faded as it should be.

There he is.

Pretty, dead-behind-the-eyes, forcing a smile under a fluffy towel, and sitting on my bed. His skin is still lively and flushed here. His eyes are flat, but they aren’t cloudy. Not the one I thought I’d kept, which makes me worry I may have kept them all.

I get my rubber gloves from under the stairs, just in case I end up handling something I shouldn’t. I go over the Frank box, again. I pick through my foundation stuff, my A-level stuff. Nothing. I find a shoebox buried deep in the garage, full of clippings, articles about myself I’ve printed out, and it’s not there either. I try under the sofa cushions in the living room. I don’t know what the fuck I’m expecting to find there, but I do get 73p.

I spot my DVD case behind the TV, one of those big, black things where you can file like four discs into a sheet of plastic wallets, to save space. It’s thick with dust – probably the only dusty thing in the house – and I unzip it.

On a gut feeling (or, remembering) I flip to the Bs, to Boy Meets Girl, the film from ’94, not the BBC sitcom from 2015. Predictably, there is something folded up behind the disc, tucked into the wallet. I extract it from its home, like a rotten tooth.

‘I burned you,’ I tell it. The Polaroid shows a young man, a very young man, with sallow skin, and black, curly hair which is plastered to his forehead and sticky with blood. His left eye is brown, his right eye is ruined, with a piece of glass splitting it in two. I put the chain on the front door and shut the curtains. I figure that all the photos must be stuffed behind films that were rejected by the BBFC when I find the next one folded up behind my imported copy of The Bunny Game. I find more photos behind Caged Women, The Devils, Freaks, Grotesque, Hate Crime, Love Camp 7, Murder-Set-Pieces, The New York Ripper, and finally Sweet Movie. I have a few more banned films, after S, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Visions of Ecstasy reveal no additional photographs. Sticking one behind The Devils is a fuck-up, on my part, because it was never actually rejected – just controversial and cut heavily. I sigh. Stupid bitch. I could have easily missed that one, couldn’t I?