Boy Parts

by Eliza Clark

  She ruined it, in the end. Six months we’d been fucking around, and then my mam visited and Frank wanted to meet her. I laughed in her face. Then she takes me to the PV for her LGBT northerners in London project, and I’m angry she put my photo in it without asking me (she just assumed I’d be fine with it) so we have this huge champagne-fuelled argument outside the gallery. She told me to get over myself and come out (be bi, be a lesbian, be Frank-sexual, be something other than a fucking closet case!) so I told her to fuck off. I shoved her against a wall and stomped off by myself.

  The last straw was this dinner party she made me go to, where she introduced me as her girlfriend, and her friend asked her which cradle she stole me from. I was horrible all evening, and we screamed at each other in the taxi.

  ‘Since when am I your girlfriend?’ I snarled. And she asked me if I was fucking joking. I ended up on the receiving end of this monologue – ‘I spent ten miserable fucking years in the closet; wearing lipstick, and having these insecure, transient relationships, where we never said I love you, and we never did normal shit, and it was all behind closed doors… And you know what? No, Irina. I’m not fucking doing it. I’m not going back. Not for you, and not for anyone.’

  And I was just like… Whatever. And she went off on one at me about my nasty streak. I’m rough, and I’m judgemental, and I’m self-involved and cruel. And I ask her if I’m so awful, why’s she still fucking me, then?

  She didn’t say anything. She got the cab to drop me off at mine, booted me out, and I never spoke to her again. She came to my final show at BA, and I blanked her. I haven’t seen her since.

  Stuck into the back of the book of those Frank photos, there’s one of Flo. When Frank and I split, Flo cut all her hair off. Then it was all blue jeans, white shirts, cigarettes, sports bras that kept her chest flat. It was creepy. In the photograph, she’s even standing with her thumbs hooked through the belt loops of her jeans, like Frank used to, fag dangling out the corner of her mouth.

  I let her do it. I mean, when she came home the first day with short hair (a week after I stopped seeing Frank) I was like, are you fucking joking, Flo, and she was just like what?

  Flo was my hair of the dog – a shot to get you over the worst of the hangover. And when Flo just fucking stood there, looking cute and butch, with her fucking mouth shut, it was absolutely fine. It was a warm bed.

  It got weird. It was already weird, but I think the amount of cocaine we were doing, and the drinking, exacerbated the weirdness of the situation.

  Flo kept over-sharing the way people do when they’re fucked up. And I’d shout at her, for making it weird, and she’d cry and start telling me she thought we could work, and I’d shout at her more. Then we’d wake up the next day, and act like it never happened. Rinse repeat, for a whole summer.

  I go to text Flo: do you remember when we used to get coked up and have bad sex where neither of us finished and we’d argue because you wanted to be my girlfriend and you’d cry and i’d scream at you and stuff. Lol.

  But I don’t send it. I don’t think I do. I delete our message history, because if I don’t remember doing it, and I destroy the evidence, it never happened. I laugh to myself. The sound echoes around the garage.

  I pull out a couple of the Frank photos, the one of her in the lipstick, and a couple of the blue shirt ones. I pick my phone up again and type her name into Facebook. I see someone who could be her, and then I wipe the search, and close the app, and pour another vodka.

  The next box is what I call The Forbidden Selfies. It’s scrawled on the side. I laugh again.

  This is my only set of self-portraits; I went off having my photo taken properly after this. The photos I take of other people – men I never have to see again – they are perfect little imprints, like those photos of my boy. They go away, and I have the photo, and that’s all that matters.

  I don’t go away after I’ve had my photo taken. I have to look at myself every day, so a collection of selfies, for me, is less of an exercise in narcissism, more a record of my own gradual decay.

  I check my phone before I open the box. My Instagram is going off. Over a thousand likes, a bunch of new followers and a lot of comments.

  Lol do you still look like this now tho??? I delete that one.

  We stan a queen who misplaces her underwear. I recognise the username, a young girl who comments on all my photos and covered me in her A-level art class.

  post smth more recent – also deleted, along with, do u have kik. I don’t even know what ‘kik’ is.

  *slides into you DMs* – a photography bro who has actually slid into my DMs, who I am going to ignore, and a few more like that. Generic Wows! and emojis and shit from other brotographers. I get a lot of backhanded BS from them — a lot of came for that one selfie from three months ago, stayed because your photos are actually good? Like they’re in any position to judge who’s good and who isn’t.

  You look hot AF, remember to crit my photos bitch x – Finch. Ugh. I reply.

  For someone who’s supoosed to be a commubnist you’re really big on free work bb x

  He replies very quickly. Haha. Supoosed. Will buy you a coffee. Crit me x

  I’ll do it tomorrow. Nothing else jumping out from the comments, apart from one dude, in all caps. JUST NUTTED. I reply telling him I have a PayPal and a Ko-fi account so he can tip me if he liked it so much.

  I have, like, five or six new DMs. Good hit rate. There’s a dude offering to pay for my nudes, and not offering anywhere near enough money for me to consider it. Like, selling your headless nudes for a couple of hundred quid is fine when you’re a student, but I’m about to have a comeback, and I have all these followers, and it’s just like… Not unless you offered me Mr B levels of scratch.

  Nah m8, I reply.

  I put my phone down and crack open the box.

  I came back to third year with no work, but photos of Frank. I handed those in because she asked me not to, and my new tutor, this generic posh art man, takes them and he’s like: Hmm. Is this Frank Steel. Hmm. I don’t know if you should be showing me these. Hmm. These seem very personal. Hmm.

  I tell him, this is what I do. I violate people’s privacy. It’s kind of my thing. And he’s like, Hmm. Interesting.

  The word cruel is used again. He’s all like, I’m very aware of your work, and he tells me that if I want to progress, I need to look at making some more personal stuff. If I’m into revealing things about other people, I need to level the playing field.

  We had a show at the start of third year where you’re encouraged to do something completely different. He told me to take photos of myself, to do work about myself.

  At that point, I probably wasn’t doing so good. I was day drinking and taking drugs during the week, escalating the amount I was taking, what I was taking. During this period, I got chemical burns inside my mouth after swallowing GHB that wasn’t diluted; I broke one of my fingers after mixing acid and cocaine (which was probably mostly speed, upon reflection) and punching a shiny kettle because I didn’t want to look at my face, distorted on its surface. I got bored. I got very bored, very quickly.

  I tried casual sex with women I didn’t know, a couple of times, in the hope that’d give me a bit of a thrill. But after Frank the novelty of being with women had properly worn off, and the girls I went with were all too nice: older butch women, artsy bisexuals, breakfast in the morning, conversations about mutual friends we didn’t realise we had, non-threatening offers of phone numbers and second dates. Low risk. Even with drugs thrown in, it was always low risk.

  So, I went back to men. I remember going home with a strange man, whose name I didn’t know, not telling anyone where I was going, not being totally sure what was going to happen when I got back to his. Even though it was fine, I remember the way my heart was pounding. I remember the lurch in my stomach when he grabbed my wrist a little harder than I expected.

  It got better when I got someone rough – when it felt like I really mi
ght get hurt, when I did get hurt.

  But that just turned into Tuesdays, you know? You do anything enough, and you can get sick of it – particularly when you’re doing stuff to self-destruct, not because you actually like it. It took me a while to work out what I liked.

  It is during this period of my life that I’m advised to level the playing field. And I think I did level it. I got the idea to build a self-portrait out of a bunch of self-portraits. Like a snapshot of Irina, at this moment in time, warts and all.

  It didn’t go down well with the tutors. My work got pulled from the show, and I got referred to the uni’s counselling services.

  First picture from this set, I have a bruised cheek, a bruised neck and a burnt mouth. It’s a portrait from the shoulders up. I’m not wearing a shirt, my hair is pulled back, and I’m wearing no makeup. No makeup, but some no-makeup tricks: the telltale glisten of Vaseline on my lips, eyelids and cheekbones, my lashes artificially tinted and extended and my eyebrows tinted. My skin is milk-white, the bruises on my neck are purple, the one on my cheek is yellowing. The burns are red and angry.

  The next, a photograph of my hip, moments before cutting it; after a moment; then a while: with the blood messy, claggy on my thigh. My fingers are strapped up in these, and my knuckles are black.

  I’d set up my camera on a tripod next to my toilet, go for a night out, drink myself sick, and get Flo to take pictures of me instead of holding my hair back like she usually did. And she just did it, too, no questions asked. There are a few of me in the same position, different outfits, throwing up – in one picture I’m throwing up blue, and I honestly have no idea what I’d been drinking. There’s one of me pissing in the street, looking wistfully into the distance (I assume Flo took this); a photo of me in my underwear digging an ingrown hair out of the inside of my thigh (fingers still strapped up, it’s a close-up crotch shot); a photo of a man I don’t remember feeding me a shot (angle’s awkward, I must have taken this without a tripod). There’s one of me taking what I assume is cocaine off a very big man’s chest, and then a photo of him choking me.

  Honestly, I reckon if I’d dumped the cutting photo, I wouldn’t have had any faff. It’s a bit OTT, on reflection, a bit self-consciously edgy.

  I only half-remember my presentation – when you do a crit, you have to explain your work to your group – because I was on this massive comedown, and I was just shaking, sweating, explaining each photo, and I snapped at the tutor, ‘You wanted me to level the fucking playing field, so here you go: it’s level!’

  David French was the first person to say anything. Are you okay, Irina? And then I think someone said it was brave for me to be so candid about my mental health issues, and then the tutor sent everyone to get a cuppa, and held me back, telling me he had to inform someone.

  Like nipples and swastikas are chill, but a bit of GHB and self-harm and it’s all ooo, u ok hun?

  I pull out the one where I’m pissing, the blue vomit, the cut thigh and the bruisey-GHB face for the book.

  I find a photo that doesn’t fit with the others. One I was fairly certain I’d burned. It’s me, somewhere green. Me by a dead old tree with a great hollow mouth. My arms are folded, and my hair is bobbed to my chin, face blank. Bobbed hair means it’s MA. And the tree means I should have burned this. I rip the photo in half, and into quarters, then eighths. I throw all the scraps in the bin, but eat the chunk with my face on it.

  I do a sicky burp, so I call it a night.

  Another nightmare. A boy is sitting on my chest, and I can’t move. He is a dead weight, and I can barely breathe. I think, for a moment, I’m dreaming about Eddie from Tesco. But I’m not. The boy’s face is too thin, he’s too long. His neck seems to crumple beneath an invisible hand. He coughs. He picks a piece of glass from his skull, and brings it to my eye.

  I sink into my bed, and I am in the ground. My head is in the ground, in a hole. The boy – my boy – fills the hole with dirt.

  I wake up.

  therabbitheartedgirl:

  I’ve been thinking a lot about irina lately. she keeps trying to get me to come round or texting me about the lad from tesco i told her to scout like rubbing it in??? and other weird shit she probably sent me while she was drunk or smth. I’m ignoring her textxs but im still really worried about her. the last time i tried to cut her out like this, she got reallly messy. Ive done it a couple of times before. Tbf the first time i did it she was with her gf (her only relationship ever fyi) during second year of uni, i literally did it bc i freaked out n got super jealous and i just couldnt stand to be round them when they were together. but when irina was with her gf it was just ‘gf gf gf’ all the time, she was so fucking obsessed she didnt even notice her best friend (and FLATMATE at the time) completely ignoring her lmao.

  but yeah she noticed next time. it was when rini was still in LDN bc she got into the RCA and i was having a go at graphic design/illustration stuff before i did teacher training, and i was doing this internship in manchester. and i just wanted a fresh start because this was less than a year after her breakup and she’d… u kno… used me for sex for like 3 months because she was sad.

  I left my cat with her which was dumb. i took in this stray when we were living together and she named it Fritz and I didn’t want to take him to manc with me, so she used him as an excuse to just kept texting me like ‘fritz wants you to come back’ or ‘come pick up the cat plz i cant rlly afford to feed it’ and I just ignored it. She also kept sending me pics of her and her new MA friends having fun, especially this one girl who was all tall and skinny like rini (Serotonin shes like a proper artist now, HATED HER tbh) and she’d text me all the time about fritz. But yeah i managed to ignore her/give her the cold shoulder for ages and then she rang me one night at 3am having this full blown meltdown like not actively being like ‘i’m going to kill myself’ but she has a history of self harm (which got BAD after she broke up with the gf her hips are just shredded like she’d cut out chunks of her skin with nail scissors it was so grim) so when she rang me like that iw as literally just like ‘fuck’ and got in the car.

  ive never seen her cry sober so by the time i got to ldn i found her in a puddle of red wine and tears and TO THIS DAY i do not know WHAT THE FUCK happened to make her like that. She SAID that she lost fritz and she was sorry and I was *ShOoKetH* because ive NEVER heard an apology from her EVER. Fritz was actually lost, we never found him, but i just sincerely doubt she was actually upset about the cat.

  Any way by the time we were both back in NCL, when i first got w michael actually and she was really shitty about it — i tried again and the same thing basically happened. idk tbf she has rung me blackout drunk and crying when I havent been not speaking to her but she’s also rlly calculated sometimes and not super??? stable???? (which i know sounds like an oxymoron but she kind of is an oxymoron of a human being)

  but yeah so the tl;dr version of this is rini doesnt do well when shes left alone for long periods of time and idk if its attention seeking of if she’s actually just going a bit crackers on her own. Who the fuck knows!!!! either way i’m sure that lad from tesco she is shagging (I know bc she texted me about it in graphic detail & she only ever gets this weird with people she likes) is in for an absolute fucking treat lmfao.

  DENNIS

  I arrange to meet with that suit – the bloke from the bus. We spend an afternoon emailing back and forth, and we settle on the evening after next for a shoot. I am, as the kids say, ‘shook’ that it’s gotten this far. Honestly, his is the worst demographic for not turning up, for panicking last minute. The last time I scouted a bloke his age, I got a text from his wife the day of, all like stay away from me husband slut. I have a boilerplate response along the lines of it’s not my fault your husband is a cheat, you thick bitch. I usually get a response along the lines of sorry, you’re right and an occasional screed about how he treats her badly and how he never does the washing up.

  As much as I love a Hot Dad, I try not to go for this age
bracket. Maximum faff, and a big risk they won’t even turn up for the pics.

  I am still highly sceptical when I put the shoot into my diary, and I spend the entirety of my yoga class feeling weirdly pissed off. Granted, this could have been triggered by the skinny bint with white-girl dreads leading the class. Not our usual teacher, she smells of dirty hair, and keeps talking about how Mercury is in retrograde and chakras and other shit. She tries to correct my form while I’m in a perfectly acceptable bow pose, and I ‘accidentally’ let go of my ankle and boot her in the stomach. Mercury is blamed, and I am left to my own devices for the rest of the class.

  I’ve barely closed my front door when the bell rings. Eddie from Tesco is distorted in the peephole, clutching a bouquet. I open the door; the flowers aren’t even from Tesco. He tells me straight away that they’ve been teasing him all day at work for having flowers, saying they were probably for his mam. I ask him what he thinks he’s doing. He says that he can’t stop thinking about me. He doesn’t understand why I’d sleep with him but he’s really grateful that I have. He wanted to give me the flowers as a thank you.

  ‘For… fucking you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It sounds weird when you put it like that.’

  ‘It is weird,’ I tell him.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘What for?’ He just wants to see me. Chat. Maybe watch a film. ‘We didn’t watch a film last time though, did we?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘But… we could?’

  I let him in. We don’t watch a film. I haven’t even had a chance to change out of my ‘active wear’, so I tell him I’m taking a shower, and leave a trail of Lycra behind me as I ascend the stairs. I shower with the bathroom door open, assuming he’ll take a hint and get in with me, but he doesn’t. He stands in the doorway, and watches.