by Eliza Clark
‘I know,’ I say. I run a hand through my hair and take another photo of him. He asks if he can have a go, if he can take my picture. I tell him to take off his clothes. I tell him not to kiss me on the mouth. I tell him not to pull my hair. I tell him I hate spit, that he shouldn’t lick me; that I only like to be on top and I don’t like talking. He nods, tripping out of his jeans.
‘Anything you want.’
I don’t think I’m drunk enough for this. Watching him stretch out on his grotty couch with his underwear still on and poorly disguised panic on his face, I’m wondering if this was a bad idea. I know it’s a bad idea. It’s a cheeseburger, and me sticking my fingers down my throat in an hour.
I unbutton my jeans, and it takes me a while to pull them off. I take off my shirt, and I stand in the middle of the living room, and stare into space while I think for a moment. I hear a bell. I twist my neck.
‘What’s wrong?’ He asks. I tell him nothing. I tell him to lie down on the floor, because we won’t both fit on the couch. He lies down next to his coffee table, and I stand over him. He stares up at me with big, grateful eyes. ‘It’s been a while,’ he says. No shit.
I take off my underwear, he shuffles out of his briefs, and I perch on the sofa and watch him fiddle about with the condom for longer than he should. I don’t help, I just watch, and when he’s done, I straddle him. He tries to put it in me and misses, mashing the blunt head of his dick into my thighs before I smack his hand away and guide it in myself. I tell him not to move, though I doubt he could, with my weight on his hips. He’s breathing heavily, his eyes shut tight. I run my hand up his chest, through the hair, and settle my palm on his neck. I squeeze it. I squeeze it hard, with both hands, and I let go when he turns purple.
‘Um,’ he says.
‘Just try it,’ I say. Then I shush him. I shush him, and I squeeze his neck again, moving my hips, because I feel him going soft inside of me. He squeaks, and he gurgles, and I let go when he bats at my wrists. He takes great gulps of air, and splutters, and doesn’t fight when I start choking him again. I can feel him twitching; I can feel the sharp knot of his Adam’s apple wriggling against my palm.
He’s small, purple, stiff, and silent. There’s a moment when I think I might have knocked him out, but his eyes flutter back open as soon as I let go. He starts coughing, and I keep riding him. I slap his cheek.
‘Hey. You good?’ I ask. He nods, still coughing. ‘Gimme a thumbs up.’ I get a thumbs up. I’ve been moving hard and fast enough that we’ve travelled across the living room. The checkout boy’s head is now up by his radiator, and my knees are stinging. His eyes are streaming. The shaky, sudden breath he takes could be a cough, or a sob. When I go to grab his neck again, he grabs my wrists, and pushes them away, and slaps my hands. I smack his face. He could be lifting his hips to meet mine, or he could be trying to throw me off. He’s still hard. He’s crying and coughing.
‘Please get off,’ he says. He wipes his eyes on the back of his wrists, and shoves me. I lose my balance. We both hiss when he slips out of me, and I bang my tailbone on the floor.
‘Ow!’ I snap. ‘You said you were good. You… The thumbs up, and everything!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he snivels. He hugs his knees to his chest. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I was fine, but I wasn’t. I’m sorry. Don’t… Please don’t hate me.’ I’m getting up to grab my underwear, and he asks me to come back, catching my leg with his little hand. ‘Please? I’m sorry. Come back.’ So, I come back, and I sit next to him on the floor. ‘I’m sorry.’ He grabs my breast with one hand, and moves around, so he can slip his fingers between the lips of my cunt. ‘I’m sorry.’ I try to remember his face while it was purple and tune out the sound of his snotty nose by my ear. ‘I just want you to feel good,’ he says. ‘Is this good?’ The angle is awkward, and I’m embarrassed for him, but I nod. Despite myself, I nod. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he says.
He pets my hair when I finish. I hate it. I pull back, clearing my throat, and making a successful grab for my underwear this time.
While I’m dressing, he’s all like, so do you want to get pizza, do you want another drink, he stands in the kitchen and wipes off his dick with a tea towel, and dumps a filled condom in the bin. I didn’t notice him come.
‘You must be hungry. I’m starving,’ he says.
‘Nah.’ I clear my throat again. ‘I might go?’
‘Oh. Okay,’ he says. He’s washing his hands. ‘I could drive you home?’
‘I’m good,’ I say.
The Uber driver agrees that I’ve had a weird evening, and while I’m drafting a post-mortem to send to Flo, I get a few texts from Eddie from Tesco.
Hey!
Hope you’re okay.
Sorry it got weird.
The more you apologise the weirder it gets.
Okay.
I don’t know what to say because I feel like I should be apologising.
Thank you?
FRANK
I’ve been putting off going back to the archive because I know which bit is next. I get an email from Jamie with a soft deadline when I tell her I’ve been too busy to go through my archives in full. As long as you’ve got some bits to us by September, it’s fine!
I can see myself putting it off – dragging it out to the last minute, so I get myself halfway down a bottle of red, then crack on. The box for most of second and third year of uni is next, which means I have to go through Frank’s box. I give up on my glass and drink straight from the bottle.
An email. I pull my hand from the box lid, and lunge for my phone.
Dear Ms Sturges,
My name is Dennis. You gave me your card on the bus around three weeks ago. I have looked at your portfolio and I am interested in being involved with your work. Due to your prolificacy, and the fact you mentioned you scout lots of men a week in your bio – I have attached an image of myself to jog your memory.
Kind regards,
Dennis
‘Ms Sturges’ is oddly formal. And PC. I use Miss, personally, because Ms always has a ‘divorced thirty-five-year-old boho-chic cat-lady’ smell to it.
To my surprise, the attached photo is not a dick pic.
It is a charming image of an older man – a suit – smiling shyly and standing against a plain white wall. The photo is slightly out of focus and taken with a low-spec front-facing smartphone camera. He has stubble, greying hair and what I assume is a Dad Bod hiding under that shirt. He has one dimple and kind of a domesticated, northern Jon Hamm look to him. I have no memory of him. I’ve always taken a scattergun approach to scouting, and it’s rare for me to remember them, unless they contact me immediately.
I’m almost disappointed by how brief the email is. It doesn’t require a long response, so I just send a boilerplate email.
Good Evening Dennis,
Of course I remember you. Attached is my address, as well as parking and public transport information. Are evenings and weekends best for you? If so – I am free all week.
Irina
I think he’ll chicken out. Suits always do.
I’ve lost steam. The bottle is empty, and a new one is uncorked before I break into the boxes.
At first glance, the pictures of Frank actually don’t stick out at all, except for being a tad more conservative than my output at the time.
You know how every uni has one of those lecturers. Like, they step in front of a PowerPoint presentation and open their mouth, and you can hear knickers dropping all over the lecture theatre.
That was Frank. Frank Steel. Not her real name, obviously. Christened Francesca Leigh, she dropped her much-loathed parents’ surname in favour of something she just liked the sound of, paired with her preferred masculine moniker.
She was from Manchester – a guest lecturer they wheeled in once or twice a term to tell us about feminist photography and Judith Butler and queer theory and shit. I have a distinct memory of her ‘Introduction to Michel Foucault’ lecture, writing ‘I’d l
et her Discipline and Punish me’ in my notebook. She’d occasionally come in for a few days to deliver one-to-one tutorials. You had to sign up for them – spots always went in a flash. I’d wanted one since first year but didn’t get one till January of second. I bragged, really rubbed it in to whoever would listen. Weird for me. Even me at twenty-one, and I was weird at twenty-one.
Frank had that effect, though. She was shorter than me but not short, she was slim and flat-chested, with solid, boyish shoulders. Very butch — not Stone Butch Blues butch, but getting there. She looked a bit like James Dean, and she leant into it hard. Always in Levi’s and biker boots and a leather jacket. I always thought she was too pretty to properly pull it off, though. She had these huge eyes, big and blue, with eyelashes so long they looked fake, like a doll. I’d try and get her to wear makeup, sometimes, but she’d always get annoyed with me. Frank is the only woman I regularly photographed.
She started it.
I went in for this tutorial. I remember it being first thing on a Tuesday morning, and I’d gotten up at seven a.m. to do my hair and makeup. She looked me up and down and said, ‘Christ, you’re tarted up for this, aren’t you?’
I was wearing this baby-blue summer dress, and a beehive, with my hair loose and curled. I had on that heavy sixties eye makeup I was obsessed with at the time. I was mortified – men don’t usually clock this shit, do they? But she did.
I told her I had a date that afternoon, and she told me I looked like Priscilla Presley on her wedding day, if she was ginger. I think I’d been aiming for more of a Brigitte Bardot thing, but I told her I’d take that.
She sort of negged me. She looked at What would you do to be my boyfriend? and told me it was an incredibly cruel piece of work. She said my other photographs had a pervy feel, and she was almost impressed that such a young woman would come out with something this nasty. She said, based on both the work and my writing around it, I had a contemptuous attitude towards my models. I clearly saw them as interchangeable, disposable objects. She asked me if I hated men, or if I liked men and hated that I liked them so much.
‘At the end of the day, Irene,’ she’d said, ‘and stop me if this is too personal… you’re not making art here; you’re making porn. And you know what? I think it’s interesting to see this kind of work from a young woman. But you could be so much better than this. Fresher. The world doesn’t need more nasty, voyeuristic photography, does it?’ And she went off on one for a bit about empathy – had I looked at Arbus or Mapplethorpe? Or any other photographers who looked at sexuality and strangers with a sensitive lens. Did I exclusively consume the photography of heterosexual men? Because that’s what it looked like to Frank.
‘Have you ever modelled, Irene?’ And then she snorted at herself. ‘I mean, look at you. Of course you have.’
I told her I hadn’t. She looked genuinely surprised. To this day, I have no idea if she was pulling my dick or not. I told her I’d done it casually, for friends, but no agencies would take me, that I was too big to be a normal model, but too skinny for plus size. There was probably glamour and fetish stuff I could do, but…
She waved her hand to stop me, apologising if she’d touched a nerve. I felt stupid.
‘I think it’d really help you empathise with your subjects if you did some more modelling yourself. In fact…’
I have her business card glued into my sketchbook. She took one out of her wallet and handed it to me. She told me about her latest project – photographing LGBT northerners transplanted to London. She needed more femmes. She assumed I was straight, from my photos, but told me with a wink, ‘What the gays don’t know won’t hurt them.’
I stuttered; I’d been with women, I just didn’t make a big deal about it. Frank cut me off and told me not to pull a muscle.
So, I turn up at her studio in Hackney about a week later, after bragging about it to anyone who’d listen. She told me to bring makeup but arrive barefaced. Bring a couple of my favourite outfits, but come in something basic. So, I did. I wore the only pair of jeans I owned at the time and a plain T-shirt. I felt like an absolute fucking clip, and rode the Overground with my head down. I didn’t turn heads, or get cat-called at all, and that put me in a foul mood. It’s annoying when it happens, but when you get used to it and it doesn’t happen – that feels worse.
When you’re that age, it takes a lot to make you feel young – or to realise how young you are – and I spent the whole journey, the whole walk to her studio, feeling silly, trying to impress my fucking teacher. My nails and thumbs were bitten bloody by the time I actually got to Frank’s studio, and I had a face like a smacked arse. That’s what Frank said, when she let me in. She asked me if I was okay, and I snapped something about how I hate being dressed down, and I hate going out without makeup on.
She laughed at me, and said I looked fine.
The first set of pictures in this box are pictures Frank took of me. I made her give me copies, and I bought this scrapbook with black pages to glue them into. First picture, I’m just standing in the jeans, the T-shirt, no makeup. My hands are by my sides, and I’m staring down the lens, trying to look anything but uncomfortable. I think I was aiming for defiant, but I landed on stiff and weird. Jesus. That face. I trace the line of my skull with a long, acrylic fingernail. I still have puppy fat on my cheeks. I hadn’t quite filled out around the hips, either, so I’m all limbs, all legs and arms and ribs with these disproportionately large tits that look like someone stuck them on with an ice cream scoop.
Frank had me get changed, and watched me while I dressed, and told me I looked like something a little boy drew in the back of his notebook.
I finally flip the page. The next shot I’m wearing this dress I used to love. This horrible nylon, A-line mini dress. Vintage, bright pink – it clashed with my hair and squashed my chest. I’m all legs in it, with these nasty white platform boots, plasticky and skintight. Frank asked me, ‘Do you only wear this retro shit?’ so I’m sneering at her in the next picture. Frank was dry. I’ve never had much of a sense of humour. I took the dress off. I shrugged at her, and asked her if she was happy, like a child snapping at her mother.
‘I was just joking, Irene,’ she said. And then she fired off a self-deprecating quip about how she goes to Topman with a photo of Marlon Brando for reference, her big white teeth flashing like her camera. On the next page I’m pouting in my conspicuously matching underwear, arms folded over my chest, my mouth half open because I was in the middle of telling her my name was Irina, not Irene.
The next picture ended up in a gallery when she showed. Underwear and boots, hair almost hanging down to my waist, brows raised, hands on hips, left foot in front of right, eyes rolled back, lips twisted. I’m sucking my stomach in hard, so you can see my whole ribcage. Breathe, sis, is what little cunts on Instagram drop on each other’s pictures now — breathe, sis, when you’ve spotted someone sucking their stomach in like that.
I take a picture of Frank’s picture on my phone and upload it to Instagram. I caption it: RARE FACE PIC. This is me by Frank Steel, circa 2011? In b4 ‘Breathe Sis’ because I’m literally 21 here. Still have the waistline, still have the bra, lost the pants and the boots moving, gained about 5 inches on the hips.
I have over fifty thousand followers on Instagram. I don’t really use it that much, as I can barely post any of my shit on there on account of ‘community guidelines’.
Frank told me she was sorry for getting my name wrong, and she was just kidding, honestly, and put your fucking dress back on, come on. So, I took off my bra. I remember her sighing, her finger hovering on the shutter release. I remember her pinching the bridge of her nose and looking down at her shoes, and telling me to put my dress back on again. I told her to take a picture, because it would last longer. The next photograph’s framing is off, because she took it without looking at me. But she took it. There I am, smirking, tits out, left arm cut off, pushing my hair off my face. I run my nail along the line of my round breasts, my
concave stomach, my hipbones.
And that’s the last one. She murmured something about students, and straight girls. Then I don’t do this, but… I smiled, always happy to be the exception to a rule.
I peel the previous photo out of the book, the one I put on Instagram. Not one of mine, but maybe it’ll be good for the book. They’ll have to drop Frank a line – I’d get a kick out of that.
I grab a glass, some ice and a generous splash of vodka, before I open the next book. Intimate photos, a mix of mine and ones Frank took, mostly Polaroids and disposables. Lo-fi, pretentious. Frank grimacing in red lipstick I drew on her with her pinned down and struggling; me wearing one of her jackets and nothing else; Frank wrapped up in my Ikea bedsheets; me sitting on her kitchen bench in pyjamas, eating cereal from the box. I look very young in all of these.
She only sat for me properly once and told me she’d probably never work at the uni again if I showed them. I took the photos in her studio, with her camera and her lights. I made her wear this shirt, the same shade of blue as a Tiffany box, Open Me blue. Her body was flat, shapeless and bony. Her breasts were too small to grab (in what she’d call my big snatchy spider hands) so I’d always end up scratching her chest, looking for something to hold. She has one of my scratches in these photos – you can just make it out, on her sternum once I’d gotten her to pop a few buttons.
They’re not much like any other photos I’ve taken. I guess because I did have a thing with Frank. An okay thing, too. You compare these to the What would you do to be my boyfriend? photos, the pictures of boys in nightgowns, the stuff I do now – it’s like a different person took them. These photos feel warm. She’s smiling in them, having fun. There’s no weird power dynamic, just… Frank. Her grinning with her hand on her stomach; her slipping her shirt off her shoulder, unbuckling her belt, laughing. There’s one where half her head is cut off because she’s coming towards me, because I whined about the white balance being off, come fix it for me, but I just wanted to kiss her. Her lips were always chapped.
