Boy Parts

by Eliza Clark

  ‘No, it’s fine. It was a weird lie, I know. I shouldn’t have, I just… It really is private. I’m so sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t worry about it… Let me walk you home, at least.’

  I let him. He apologises again, for prying. I say it’s fine. I apologise for being weird. I can hear this little bell jingling behind us. I turn around, expecting to see a cat, but there’s nothing.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’ he asks. I tell him it’s nothing.

  He confesses, shyly, that he’s been trying to ask me out for a drink, but he keeps chickening out. And he gets if he’s missed his window, but it’d be nice if we could go out. I take him into a narrow alleyway, and he asks if this is a shortcut. I kiss him. I grab his face, and his hair, and crush him against the wall.

  ‘Woah,’ he says. ‘I’m, um, not that kind of girl?’ He chuckles, and pushes me away, firmly, but gently. I try to unfasten his belt, my bony wrists awkward against his big stomach. He protests: rats in the alleys, and I know you must be feeling vulnerable right now, and finally, no. No, when I get my hands into his underwear, and stop it, when I grab his dick, which is completely soft. He pushes me hard.

  ‘What?’ I snap. ‘What the fuck?’ He’s fastening his belt, shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t… I told you, I’m not like that.’

  ‘So, what am I then?’ I snarl. ‘What am I like?’

  ‘You’re not like anything! It’s fine if you… I just… I don’t do stuff like this.’

  ‘Why not?’ I ask. He tries to leave the alley. I yank him back, try to fold him into my arms. I feel the fabric of his T-shirt against my palms, his soft buttocks against my crotch. I kiss his neck. ‘Why not?’

  He wriggles free.

  ‘It’s just not for me, okay? It’s… seedy,’ he says.

  ‘What the fuck ever,’ I say. And then, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll do it at mine.’

  ‘We’re not going to do it, Irina,’ he says. ‘Just let me walk you home, and we’ll… we’ll just forget it.’

  ‘I can take myself home, you fucking… girl.’ I stomp off, muttering. ‘I’ll make a note you can’t get it up without a candlelit fucking dinner!’ He doesn’t come after me. I turn around, and he’s still there, standing on the pavement, by the alley. ‘Can I just double-check that that happened?’

  ‘What?’ he shouts back.

  ‘In the alley, did that happen?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Okay. Fine.’

  ‘Are you alright? Are you… Are you sure you’re okay?’ he shouts. His voice echoes in the street.

  I give him a thumbs up, and keep walking.

  I can still hearing that fucking bell.

  345 BUS STOP

  I go straight to the garage when I get in. I get on my hands and knees, with a bucket of bleach and hot water and a sponge. I scrub the floor till the blood is gone. The water is grey and tinted pink by the time I’m finished. I dump the bucket into the bath, then I bleach the bath as well, and mop the bathroom floor. Then I mop all the floors, and tip bleach in all the plugholes. I shower. I make the water as hot as I can stand – I scrub at myself with the soap. Everything stings. I lose track of time. I don’t get out till the water runs cold.

  I check on the photos of Dennis from earlier. I feel like I took them a week ago. I don’t even feel like I took them. There’s a Susan Sontag book called Regarding the Pain of Others, which Frank made me read — there’s a bit where Sontag talks about how when people see terrible things happen, they used to say it felt like a dream, but now they say it feels like a movie. Movies have supplanted dreams in the popular consciousness, and have become our benchmark for the unreal, and the almost real. Today has been a movie, playing on an old, warped videotape.

  Dennis is bloody in the photos, but not as bloody as I’d thought he was. There is no glass. My camera is fine, but the bottom is sticky where it connected with his skull. I wipe it off before diving into the boxes where the photo (photos?) I want might be.

  I try the other box from third year. Everyone tends to ‘go big or go home’ with their BA show, and do some elaborate installation, which is sort of what I did. I set up this big fancy backdrop, and brought a bunch of costumes, and during the private view I ran around, grabbing boys and men and making them dress up, taking their photos. I’d print them out and pin them to the backdrop. It cost me a fucking fortune in glossy paper and ink, but it got me into the Royal College.

  Honestly, I thought I was hot shit. I was one of two people in my year who got in (me and David French, who follows me around like a bad fucking smell) – both of us on the MA photography programme. I remember ringing my mam to tell her I’d gotten into the Royal College of Art, and she didn’t get why that was good. I listed off some alumni – Tracey Emin, Mam? (The dirty bed woman? Shite.) David Hockney, Mam? (Who?) James Dyson, the hoover bloke? (Finally, she was impressed.) She wasn’t particularly arsed that I wouldn’t be coming home, but my dad was upset. He said he missed me. Mam said he just didn’t like paying London rent.

  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 fi
lms 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?

  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 jigs
aw.

  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.

  I ended up having to nip out to the twenty-four-hour Asda in Lavender Hill to buy a cleaver. I had to shower around the body, and sit on the 345 again, like nothing had happened.

  When I came back in, fucking Fritz had gotten into the blood in the kitchen and trekked it through the whole flat. I’m just lucky I didn’t have carpets. So, Fritz had to go. He always liked Flo more, but he did trust me. He didn’t scratch or bite when I picked him up, and when I snapped his neck, he didn’t make a sound.

  I hacked the boy up. I took more Polaroids, and got the camera so bloody I ended up having to rinse it off, then bin it. I put the cat in the bin bag with the head, the cleaver in with the left leg, and everything else separate. Bin bags, in bin bags, in bin bags, and I remember being very pleased with myself for bulk-buying bin bags the week before, because I forgot to buy more at Asda and fuck me if I didn’t need them.

  I was panicking about what to do with the bin bags, though. Panicking, because all I could think about were serial killer fuck-ups. That they caught Dennis Nilsen when he started flushing bits down the toilet, and how all the concrete in the world couldn’t hide Fred West’s skeletons. Dahmer’s fridge full of heads and penises, the Acid Bath murderer and his poorly-disposed-of drums of human soup.

  Then I remembered the Moors murderers – how there were bodies scattered all over the countryside, so vast and green that no one would ever find them. And those were whole bodies, not just bits.

  I packed up my boy and Fritz into two suitcases, wheelie suitcases, and I stuffed them into my boot. I mopped the flat. Mop water down the toilet. Suspiciously pink mop head, my dress and heels from the night before and the rubber gloves were shoved into another bin bag, under the sink, to be burned upon my return.