Boy Parts(56)

I go over the DVDs again, just in case. No more.

The Polaroids lay around me, like a circle of salt. I grab one – the boy is intact, in my kitchen, no glass. Skinny, greasy, eating a piece of bread, not even bothering to butter or toast it. I hate Polaroids now – they’re so cliché – but they’d just gotten trendy again. I must have just had this to hand.

I found him at a bus stop. I’d been drinking in Clapham, that night, like a fucking estate agent or something. Two a.m., just me and him at this bus stop. I asked him if he was waiting for the 345 – he shrugged and didn’t meet my eye. I took him for a rough sleeper. I asked him if he wanted a shower, a sofa for the night, and when I scooted closer to him, he flinched away. I said suit yourself, and he asked me what happened to my neck, because I was sporting a noose of bruises.

Bad boyfriend, I told him. Then, twisting my lips, I could really use the company, you know.

He got on the bus with me. I paid his fare. We went through Clapham Common, Lavender Hill, to Battersea, where my flat was. I explained, I’m a photographer and then, as if it hadn’t occurred to me before, hey can I take your picture? It could be, like, pay for the food and the shower.

He shrugged. There was a distant look in his eye – unfocused, dislocated – one I recognised, one I identified with, I guess.

I remember him flinching away from the flash, like something feral. I’d asked him how old he was; he said eighteen. I didn’t fucking believe him, but I was just like… sure, whatever. Looking at the picture, I’d put him at sixteen. Maybe.

I put the photo of him in the towel next to it; the next in the sequence. I’d popped one on his head, for his hair, and one across his shoulders, and told him to give me a little smile. That’s what I’ve got here, his little smile. I put his clothes in the wash while he was showering, telling him they’d be done in an hour, and I had lots of stuff he could wear. I offered him a nightgown, and he laughed, because he thought I was joking. I wasn’t joking. Drunkenly, I told him, I don’t have a good sense of humour, babe, and I threw the nightgown at him, telling him it was that, or nothing. He chose nothing.

Another bad one next. Another one I did burn, I swear to fucking God, I burned it. The landlady lived above me, and I remember her bollocking me for burning stuff in the garden. Clear as fucking day, I remember her stomping up to me, fag hanging out of her mouth, complaining. I told her they were pictures of my ex, and she took a look at my fucked-up face, and my neck, and my bandaged-up hand, and said oh, sweetheart… and left me to it. God knows what I burned instead.

In this one, the boy from the bus stop is in the kitchen, and he is naked and betrayed. He has a panicked look in his good eye, and a hand over the bad one.

I tried to get him to let me hit him. I barely touched him. He went from zero to sixty like that, and knocked me to the floor. He went into animal-panic mode, all adrenaline and wiry strength. He hit me – not with an open palm, but a closed fist, again and again and again, till he was out of breath and I could barely see. I grabbed an empty wine bottle, from by the bin, broke it on his face because he wouldn’t stop. He could have killed me. He was going to kill me. He scrambled away, felt the glass in his eye and immediately started squealing, freaking out, making noise that my landlady would hear. I took his photo. I tripped him, and he landed on his face, with all that glass. He stopped squealing.

The next photo is before the bottle. He’s in the shower, with his head tipped back and his mouth open. His back was covered in cigarette burns, old ones. He didn’t notice me take the photo, but he noticed when I got in the shower with him. He noticed me when I touched him. He noticed me when he came, and he slipped, and I caught him. He could have cracked his head open and died there.

That’s the last photograph of him whole.

I thought he died when he fell, but he didn’t. I turned him onto his back, and he was still breathing. I poked his legs and arms hard, and he didn’t respond; there was no reflex at all – like the glass had gone into his brain and severed something. I don’t know. I didn’t know then. I decided he must be dying. I decided, if he was dying, if he was going to die, there’d be no point in taking him to a hospital – no point in getting myself in trouble, you know? Lose everything for some fucking kid no one cared about, who was going to die anyway.

I put him out of his misery. I carried him to the bath and did it there.

What shocked me most weren’t the sounds he made, the bulging of his eyes, the colour he went – not even the shit. It was just easy. I’d always heard manually strangling people was really hard – like, serial killers who strangle will try to do it once, fuck it up, and graduate to a tool – stockings, a belt, piano wire. But his breathing was so faint, and his neck was so thin, it just… He just died.

I squeezed his neck. I remember his Adam’s apple pressing against my palm. I can still feel it. The photo in my hand is another close-up, a close-up of his poor face, full of glass, his head now separated from the shoulders it had once been attached to. I have a photo of each leg, each arm, and his torso: all these boy parts, which I can arrange on my living room floor like a jigsaw.

I fucked it up, at first, because I tried to use a knife. You can’t get through bone with a fucking kitchen knife, can you? Stupid. I got blood on my shower curtain, hacking away at him, sawing away with a knife so dull it would barely cut through a broccoli stem.