by Eliza Clark
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.
The following week Mam turned up to one of our dates, birthday card in hand, and caused a scene. She physically dragged me out of the restaurant by the sleeve of my dress, berating the staff, screaming about nonces and CRB checks and calling the police.
She tells it differently, of course. As far as her friends, my late grandmother, my father know, she cracked the code in the birthday cards, and calmly collected me from the restaurant. I collapsed into her arms, weeping, like a little girl. She makes sure to call me her little girl whenever she tells it. People forget she was just a little girl – because she’s tall, and so well developed, like I was twelve and not seventeen. She was covered in bruises, she’ll say, tearing up.
They tried to keep it quiet, but everyone at school found out eventually. I always say everyone knowing was more traumatic than being with him. Because: I did like him. I liked the way he made me feel. I liked learning how to fuck – I liked having my hair pulled and being bitten and the way his big hands felt on my skinny neck. I didn’t like my dad, my nana and her cancer, my head teacher, Molly Jones, looking at me and seeing a raped child where Irina used to stand.
The flower taped to the card is a single white rose, stem cut short and pressed well. I used to press them all the time in high school and college, but I stopped doing it when I picked up photography.
When you get into theory, you find the flowers aren’t miles away from the photographs. They’re impressions of living things – like fossils, pressed and preserved, the way an image impresses itself onto a roll of film. I mean, fuck me if I can remember my early photography seminars, but that sounds about right. It’s always interesting when these genetic connections pop up in your work.
A book of pressed flowers was the first thing I handed in to my college tutors, once I’d specialised on my foundation course. When you do art at uni, you normally have to do a foundation year first – a year at your local college, or a uni, where you decide which kind of art you actually want to do. Like, are you an illustrator? A fashion designer? A graphics wanker? An erotic fine art photographer? You do a rotation of different disciplines, then pick one. I did Fine Art, because I hate being told what to do. If you get the right Fine Art course at any level, you’re essentially just set free to do fucking anything you like. And that’s what Colin and K
evin, the veteran tutors, offered their charges: anarchy, with bi-weekly hand-ins.
This is also where I met Flo; where I caught the social equivalent of a nasty case of herpes, if you like.
Colin took a look at my delicate, lovely flowers (the life expertly squeezed from them) and asked me if I liked to collect flowers – if I liked to make little collections like this. I said yes. He asked me if I had penis envy, in front of everyone, like that’s a yes or no thing.
He quoted the Baudrillard essay System of Objects at me and explained that collectors are either children, or sexually dissatisfied adult men. So I was either a child, emotionally, or I must have a strong case of penis envy to still be making collections at my age. He pointed to the wristwatch I was wearing, which I would check with compulsive regularity. He told me that was more evidence to support his theory. More Baudrillard: the watch was a masculine comfort object, something to check habitually, dispel ‘temporal anxiety’ and provide a constant ‘organic pulse’ in its ticking. I told him to fuck off and stormed out. I stopped wearing a watch around then. I suppose I’ve replaced it with the constant vibration of a smartphone, like a heartbeat in my pocket.
Next, I did this project where I drew gay porn, and I titled it XXXtreme Penis Envy. As I look through the pages of this particular sketchbook, I realise this was the last time I did any extensive drawing. It’s very good, anatomically, proportionally speaking. I spend a good few minutes admiring my delicate shading on a pair of swollen testicles.
Colin said he appreciated the defiant nature of the project, but I’d more than proved his point by doing it. The shock value of dirty drawings was clearly non-existent at this level, and the frequent accusations from a sixty-something-year-old man of being cock hungry on a deep-seated psychological level got very tiresome, very quickly. I decided to give photography a go.
I have a little book of test shots, which is small, and blue, and surprisingly heavy in my hands. They’re all photos of Flo and myself messing about in the college studio, when she was still skinny and faux-ginger with her Boho Chic + the Machine aesthetic. She’s modelling very hard for me in them; borderline blue-steeling her way through and doing some twisty shit with her hands like I imagine she’d just seen Florence Welch do in NME that week. There are a few photos of us together, which is beyond hideous. I’m still a bottle-black brunette, filling my eyebrows in with black eyeliner instead of a brow pencil. I have a blue ring on my forehead where the dye (clearly fresh) has leaked and formed a compound with the thick, white stage foundation I was trowelling on to cover my freckles. Red lipstick bleeding all over the place because this was before we had liquid lips and YouTube tutorials, and before I knew lipliner was a thing that existed outside of 1996 in a dark brown. I’m also wearing this ridiculous tea dress. It flatters my figure but, it’s just like… ugh, that rockabilly goth bullshit, it’s… so basic.
These photos are shit, but I loved taking them. I loved telling Flo where to stand, and what to wear. I loved fiddling with the settings of the cheap DSLR I’d been given for my birthday during the last year of my GCSEs. I loved the way the slightest nudge to the aperture or the white balance totally changed the quality of the image, the mood. I loved playing with lights and costumes and makeup.
I was hooked.
I’d visited London between terms and had come home with a bag full of those cards that sex workers use to advertise their services in phone boxes. All women. I had this idea to recreate them, but instead of advertising sex, I’d photograph the people on my course advertising their artwork. I had a tough time getting everyone into the various costumes I’d acquired for the project: the skimpy school uniforms, the cut-offs and construction helmets which matched what the girls on the cards were wearing. But I managed, with varying degrees of success, in the end.
In this first proper photograph book, I have pasted next to a real calling card reading, Naughty School Girl Needs Detention: Red Cheeks For Louise? Genuine photo, a photograph of a boy named Luke, similar outfit, but his caption read, Straight White Male Painter Thinks Rothko Rip-Off Revolutionary: Original Ideas For Luke? Genuine hack.
I was such a cunt in the captions. Colin thought it was exceedingly funny, but Kevin was not amused. Kevin was a gentle man who’d spent the majority of his career teaching in private schools, unprepared for even the light brutality of the Fine Art foundation diploma and degree students he taught at the city college. He covered his mouth when we swore, and seemed genuinely distressed when he’d walk past Flo and me smoking outside the building, or when we’d complain about hangovers on a Tuesday morning.
Irina, this is exceedingly mean spirited. To embarrass your fellow students in such a way after they did you a favour is cruel. See me in the office on Monday please?
It’s written in red pen, torn from the feedback form and glued to the title page – beneath it I’ve drawn two stars, and written Kevin’s name, like a bad review. I recall getting into a huge argument with him in the office, with Colin sniggering in the corner.
This is my art, and it’s transgressive and I’m sorry if that offends you: I can hear my own voice in my head, girly and shrill.
Colin was on my side, and he and Kevin bickered in front of me like an old married couple. Someone had complained; I needed to be dealt with. Then Colin let slip that Luke, specifically, had complained. I hadn’t even been that mean about him, compared to the others.
I find a page with a picture of a girl called Georgie, who had let me photograph her holding a pair of toy handcuffs, and that was as racy as she’d let me go. I’ve written, ‘Insipid posh bitch, will paint your nana’s dog for a tenner’. Next to her, a photo of Tessa, who’s a full-on-Flat-Earth-Facebook-racist now. She’s dressed as a sexy builder, duck-facing, glossy lips shrivelled and pressed to the head of a hammer. I’ve written, ‘Hot Charva! Get her before she’s pregnant (please contact ASAP)’. It’s funnier with hindsight, now she’s a proper racist and stuff. And she did get pregnant about a year after the course finished.
She tried to fight me, for this. She told me to meet her round the back of the building after the tutors left. She was all bark and no bite, in the end. She squared up to me, and I came at her with a lit cigarette. The tip had barely brushed her cheek, before she scarpered. She wouldn’t come near me afterwards.
She didn’t tell on me, though. Not like fucking Luke. I reckon the comment stung because he loved Rothko, in that very genuine way only teenagers can admit to loving artists they love – it’s a cardinal sin by BA. I had to apologise to him in a letter, and his dad shouted at me at our final show. Kevin hid in the studio while a grown man screamed at me; my parents weren’t even there.
I peel Luke’s photo out of my sketchbook, and drop it into a plastic wallet marked, To include? That’s the only certainty at the moment. Maybe a couple of drawings from Xxxtreme Penis Envy.
About halfway through foundation they started telling me I needed to experiment and try something away from erotica and the erotic inspired (trying to push me to that conceptual installation bullshit tutors always cream themselves over), and when I complained they were still letting Luke repaint Rothkos, they said they weren’t and he’d gotten the same advice.
They made us do this transformation project, where we had to do something that was more or less the polar opposite of our current work. Well, they didn’t make us. I just followed their suggestions out of, like, intellectual curiosity. And, you know, you want to get into a good uni, you have to play the game a bit, don’t you? So, fair’s fair, I had to do some abstract bullshit, and I did some reading on Dada and German Expressionism and watched the first twenty minutes of Painters Painting.
Unfurling from an A3 sketchbook like a Dead Sea Scroll falls my result: an enormous ballpoint drawing of a penis, captioned simply with, je suis not un le penis, which Kevin hummed at with a thoughtful, ‘I think it’s a breakthrough,’ and Colin had responded, with a great sigh, ‘I think it’s a breakdown.’
Luke painted a na
ked lady instead of a Rothko.
Flo took over Kevin’s post when he retired properly, and Colin’s desiccated corpse is still there. We have a pint with him on occasion. He still thinks I have penis envy.
therabbitheartedgirl:
Me and Michael had another fight about Irina last night lol. She’s coming round for pre-drinks and he was just like being weird about it again. He knows we had a thing during uni, and he’s never been cool with it like as soon as he found out. I told him flat out he was being jealous and honestly???? Kind of biphobic????? Like he thinks bc me and irina r both bi and we had the briefest thing in uni like there’s something going on there????
Unreal tbh. Told him to fuck off down the pub and cool off. Like my feelings for her aside, I WOULD NOT CHEAT ON HIM and it’s not like he knows about it so wtf. Like where does this come from and why does he have this HUGE PROBLEM all of a sudden w my best friend who happens to be another queer woman. He swears its not a bi thing n he just doesnt like irina or ‘how she speaks to me’ but like,,, she never tried to police who i hang out w.
So he was on the sofa tonight but i let him come back to bed. Still annoyed tho.
WILL
Flo shrieks along to the entirety of Lizzo’s ‘Good as Hell’, and I wince. Her ‘THIS IS A GAYS ONLY EVENT, GO HOME’ playlist, finishes, then loops, and takes us back in with ‘Cool For The Summer’, which I just hate. The homoerotic over-current of the lyrics while we’re both in sat in the living room in our bras and curlers is just… It’s a lot.
