by Eliza Clark
My hands were red with a rash, from fingertips to wrist. This is how I discovered I’d developed an allergy to latex.
I kept my car in London, even though I barely used it. I just drove for a few days. I drove to green, leafy places, dug, dumped and took photos with my proper camera, so I’d know where the bits were.
But I only saved the photo of me by the site of the skull.
But there was no skull, was there? Just Fritz.
And if the police had found it, they’d have taken Fritz, surely?
Maybe kids dug it up, took it. Maybe, maybe (even as the evidence sits in front of me) there was no boy. No boy at all. I touch the photos, like they’re a trick, like they’ll crumble beneath my fingers. I wouldn’t be dumb enough to photograph something like this, surely?
I remember looking for my boy on the news, on the internet – any call for missing persons, a boy in his mid-teens, 5’9”, very slim build, black hair, brown eyes.
No one was looking for him.
It’s like, if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, did I even chop it down?
I stuff the pictures in an envelope.
Hey B,
Been a while! Sorted that glass effect out — sent some polaroids to the PO box.
Just some experimental stuff, hope you like it!
Irina
It’s three a.m., and I power walk to the nearest postbox with a hoodie pulled tight around my face, even though there are no cameras around here, and it’s hot as fuck.
They’re gone. I tear my house to bits looking for more, but they’re all gone. No more. None in the DVD case, none. Gone. Done. I click and drag this whole incident to the recycle bin icon in my mind, and I empty that bin, and I take a magnet to my hard drive in the form of a bottle of vodka and two Xanax, which have me out for the count for a full twenty-four hours.
I wake up to an email from Dennis letting me know he’s okay, and nothing else. I’m grateful. If he contacts me again, I’ll ring the fucking police.
I feel extremely dopey. I keep dribbling, despite how dehydrated I am, and I cough so hard I gag. I down a few glasses of water too quickly and spew a little back into my mouth.
I’m about to worry about the fact I’ve had no email from Mr B, and I’ve barely gotten my kettle boiled, when the doorbell rings, and there’s courier holding a huge stuffed bear, with a fat stuffed heart. I panic for a moment, thinking Eddie from Tesco sent it, before realising it’s well out of his price range. The courier calls me a lucky girl when I sign for it, and with a lascivious look at the gap in my robe, he says whoever sent it must be lucky too. I smile and take the bear. It has a little card with it, with a letter opener taped inside:
Break my Heart,
B
I take the letter opener and split the stuffed heart open. It’s Velcro’d to the bear’s hands, and shockingly heavy.
It’s heavy because there’s about 30k vacuum-packed into a plastic bag inside it. I count. Thirty rolls – every roll a grand in fifties.
I ring Ryan and quit the bar. I laugh down the phone at him, and before he can start to argue with me, I’m literally like, ‘Bye bitch!’
No more sticky bar shoes, no more tiny humiliations. No more. There’ll be more like this after Hackney, more money, more recognition. The recognition I deserve. The recognition I earned.
Then I go to my emails, I type a very excited thank you note – but it bounces back. And again. And again. I go to reply to the last email he sent me, but it’s gone. Every message is wiped from my inbox, like blood from a wooden floor.
Hey Finch,
Finally getting around to critiquing your work! I know it’s been ages since you asked, but I’ve been VERY busy. As you suspected, the heavy praise you received for these photographs was likely motivated by performative allyship. While technically competent, you rely too heavily on your trans schtick and yeah top surgery is brutal, but I feel like it’s very obvious for you. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Frank Steel but I used to do a little work with her when she was still lecturing at CSM, and you should look at her career trajectory as a warning. Vanished from academia and now everyone thinks she was like a 2000s flash in the pan, and she could have been really important if she’d moved away from the LGBT stuff, don’t you think? Hacky! Boring! All of Gen Z is queer now so it’s a little… whatever if you’re aiming for your work to be gnarly and transgressive. Am I saying the photos are bad? No, they’re just meh. Identity politics is always a hard sell any way, and you should try something else.
I’m a big fan of a bit more detachment in work, I think it shows a little maturity – instead of it being like ‘me, me, me’ you know? Hard not to be me me me with ID Pol work, and ID Pol is hard to separate from immaturity, like I see these pics, and they’re fine but it’s hard not to see the genetic connection between these and teen girls taking pics of their period knickers and dyed-unshaved armpit hair. Yawn! So I’d say detach yourself from your work – dump photography for a while and try something else, even.
See you in the pub,
Irina.
EDDIE FROM TESCO, II
I keep the money in a plastic bag under the sink, deciding I’ll deposit one or two rolls a month. I buy some dumb shit – I used to buy dumb shit all the time, and then my parents took my credit cards. No credit needed now, I guess.
I come home with a bunch of shopping bags, and none of the lights will turn on in my house. I hide the shopping in my spare room, then ring my dad and tell him to come fix it. He’s over in half an hour. When I open the door for him, he hugs me, and kisses my cheek. His hair is still red, even though he’s almost sixty. He’s an ugly man, but I see the sketch of myself in him. We’re the same height and colouring. He has a sharp nose that points upwards, and high cheekbones. Mam and I don’t even look related.
‘Daddy,’ I coo. ‘I can’t work out what I’ve done!’
‘I’ll sort it, love, don’t worry.’
He sorts it. The bulb in the living room has blown and tripped the fuse. He sorts the fuse, then changes the light bulb for me. I follow him around the house and tell him about how well things are going. I tell him I’m seeing someone, and prep for the show is going really well, and I’m getting so many private sales that I was able to quit the bar.
‘Well, you can tell your mam yourself. I’m not telling her.’
‘I never said I wanted you to tell her,’ I snap. He climbs down from a wooden chair, a new light bulb in place. His knees click when he gets down.
‘Is there anything else you need doing, love?’ he asks. ‘While I’m here? How’s the pipes? Your sink still leaking?’
‘No,’ I say.
I direct him to the drawer of my bedside table, the one that won’t close properly. I make him wait outside with the door closed while I move all of my bedside-table shit into the wardrobe. I perch on the bed and watch him work. He smacks aimlessly at the drawer with a hammer.
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ I say. He smiles at me, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up.
‘I do worry about you, love. Quitting your job like it’s nowt. I know you’ve been on the sick,’ he says. ‘I popped into your work, and that lad told me. The muscly one.’
‘Why did you pop in to my work?’
‘I’m sorry. I haven’t seen you; your mam hasn’t seen you. I just wanted to say hello,’ he says. ‘I worry, it’s my job. And you’re just full of secrets, aren’t you? Always have been.’
‘Maybe it’s because you’re so fucking weird about everything I tell you – did Mam tell you what she said when I told her I had the exhibition? She just started going on about how she hasn’t heard of the gallery, and how she’s not homophobic because she thinks my photos are shit, or something. It’s literally like… why would I bother?’ I say. ‘Seriously, Dad, I’m asking. Why should I bother if you’re both just going to give me gyp whenever I sneeze?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m not giving you gyp, love, I’m
just—’
‘Worried. You said.’
Dad convinces me to come home for dinner, even though I’m meeting Flo for drinks in a few hours. He waits while I put my makeup on. I only go because I’m hungry, and I only have a bag of spinach in the fridge and I’m not in the mood to deal with Eddie from Tesco today.
Dad has this awful, racing-green vintage sports car, and he always looks so fucking pleased with it. I keyed it once, when I was seventeen, because he dobbed me in to Mam for smoking after she found an open pack of tabs in his jacket pocket. He said they were mine and I’d worn his jacket out.
Mam complains that she didn’t know I was coming over.
‘I’ll fuck off then,’ I say. Rather begrudgingly, Mam lets me into the house, and continues to complain that they’ll have to rethink dinner. Dad will go and pick up fish and chips. I complain about carbs.
‘Just eat the fish,’ snaps Mam. ‘This has really thrown my evening off, Irina. It really has.’ She was going to catch up on Corrie tonight.
While Dad is out hunter-gathering, Mam sits me down at the dinner table and interrogates me. She says her curtain-twitching friend, Susan, (who lives on my street) saw me getting into an old car with a short foreign-looking man, and worried, because she’d been reading all about these Asian grooming gangs.
‘I was so embarrassed when she rang me, Irina,’ she says. ‘What on earth were you doing?’
‘I’m seeing someone,’ I say. But she snaps that I should be more careful about who I’m seen with. ‘Are you telling me not to go out with men who look like they might be Asian? Or are you asking me if I’m being trafficked or something?’
‘Oh, so I’m a racist now,’ Mam snaps. She tells me the issue was the height difference and the dodgy car, not the ‘racial thing’. She was embarrassed because Susan had said your Irina got in a battered Micra with some little foreign-looking fella, and then brought up the grooming gang stuff, because she thought it was strange that I was with such a little bloke. Mam says Susan wouldn’t have brought up grooming gangs or pimping had we not looked so strange together.
‘Susan looks like she’s been hit in the face with a shovel,’ I say. ‘And she dresses like it’s 1997. Why would I care what Susan thinks?’
‘You know she had that stroke, Irina. So, who was he, then? I had a look through your tagged Facebook photos again, and I didn’t see anyone matching Susan’s description.’
‘Oh my God,’ I say, under my breath. I need to delete Facebook. ‘I just… It was just the once. He works in the Tesco near mine.’
‘You said you were seeing him a second ago. Susan didn’t make him sound very attractive,’ Mam says. ‘Not my type – working in a Tesco. Honestly. At your age.’
‘Well I might see him again. I don’t know.’ I look down at the table. I can’t look at her face. She’s smirking. I feel sick. I tell her he’s in teacher training. I don’t comment on the age thing. I think he might be twenty-four. At the most. I couldn’t find his Facebook page, because I don’t know his last name. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to pick dates based on who I think my mam will find attractive. Sorry he’s not conventionally handsome, or whatever. I’m a broad church.’ I think she’s about to drop it; she falls silent for a moment. Her fat upper lip is curled, and her over-plucked eyebrows are raised to her tight hairline.
‘I know you are,’ she says. I ask her what she means by that. She clicks her tongue. ‘Not everything’s a dig, Irina,’ she says. ‘But it must be if I’ve said it, because I’m the worst mother in the whole world, aren’t I? Just the horrible bitch who nursed you, and bathed you, and who pays your rent.’
‘Half my rent. And I never asked you to pay it,’ I say. ‘You did it to make me move out, remember? And it’s Dad’s money, anyway.’
‘You are so ungrateful. It’s like you were born ungrateful.’ She snarls it at me. Like I was born just to spite her. And she goes on to talk about the expensive Barbie whose hair I coloured red, the wrong-coloured bike I screamed about on Christmas day when I was ten, and the time I told her to fuck off in Tammy Girl when I was twelve, because she was trying to make me get a thong to wear with these jeans I allegedly had a ‘VPL’ in when I put them on. She tells me that I’d always pour salt in the wound by crying to Dad, and that I was an angel for him. Which isn’t true. I used to bite him, like, all the time. He just forgave me, and she never did.
I get up from the table while she stews.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m getting you a glass of wine,’ I say. And I go to the fridge. Suddenly relaxed, she tells me to make sure I get the Riesling and not the Chardonnay, because the Chardonnay they’ve got is bloody awful.
‘I want red,’ I say.
‘We don’t have any.’
I pour us both a glass of the Chardonnay. She makes a face, and I tell her it’s best to get rid of it – she slides her glass over to me with her eyes narrowed. ‘You drink it,’ she says. ‘I know you like a drink.’
She gets herself a glass of the Riesling, and there’s something petty in how little wine she pours for herself. She puts her glass beside mine to compare it, telling me that she only likes a splash of wine on a weeknight.
I ask her about her cancer friend – the annoying one, on Facebook.
‘She’s gone into hospital now, not long left,’ says Mam. ‘And you think she’d be spending a bit less time on Facebook, wouldn’t you? But no.’
That keeps her busy, till Dad gets back. He drops the bag of fish and chips on the dining table and begins dishing it out. He runs back and forth with cutlery, and condiments, and kitchen roll, while Mam and I sit and watch him. Mam points out there’s three portions of chips.
‘I got Rini a portion of chips as well,’ he says. I whine. ‘You don’t have to eat them, love; they’re just there if you want a treat.’ He smiles at me. ‘A few chips won’t kill you, you little skinny-mini.’ He kisses the top of my head.
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ I say. He lovingly moves a large cod from its sweaty box to my plate.
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ repeats Mam, in a high-pitched voice. Her splash of wine disappeared rather quickly. ‘Are you going to cut that up for her, as well, Nigel?’ she asks. He cut up a steak for me when we went out for his birthday one year, and she’s never let it drop. ‘What did you do on your date, Irina? Did you have that short lad cut your food up for you?’
‘Oh.’ Dad smiles at me. ‘Is this the bloke you’re seeing? The one you told me about?’
‘Of course you told him,’ snarls Mam. ‘I had to hear it from Susan.’
‘Oh, you’re seeing the little feller?’ Dad says. ‘I didn’t think he was in a grooming gang, love. I said he was probably just your friend.’
‘He is sort of just my friend,’ I say, shrugging, beginning to extract the cod from its batter. ‘Just.’ I shrug again. ‘It’s like a pity thing, basically. I feel bad for him.’
‘Ah, well,’ he says. ‘You always used to say you only went out with me ’cause you felt sorry for me, didn’t you, Yvonne?’ says Dad. Mam grunts. ‘I remember asking her out at the disco. Have we told you this story, love?’
‘No,’ I say, as Mam says she’s heard it a thousand times. I have; it just winds her up. I think it’s the equivalent of someone who had a terrible car accident being told the story of how they nearly turned left, but turned right instead, and drove straight into a truck.
‘Well, I saw her across the dance floor, sitting, face like a smacked arse – beautiful smacked arse, mind you. And I went over, and asked her if she wanted to dance, and you know what she said?’ Dad purses his lips like Mam does. ‘Erm… I’m minding my friends’ coats.’ He laughs, I laugh. Mam forces a smile. ‘’Course, she did dance with me, in the end – didn’t you, Yvonne? ’Cause you felt sorry for me. That’s what you say.’
‘Mmhmm,’ she says. ‘Well you kept asking, didn’t you?’
Dad’s a plumber, and at some point, plumbing started to go very well for him, an
d he started buying nice cars, and looking at big houses. And that’s when skinny, angry Yvonne from the disco developed a proper interest in him. There’s this photo of the two of them, when they first moved in together in the mid-1980s, and Dad’s wearing this awful big suit where he looks like an uglier, ginger David Byrne. Mam is tucked under his arm, with her big blond perm, and she’s got this skintight, metallic-gold dress on – it’s framed, and it sits in the living room, and Dad always points it out to guests. Me and Yvonne, back when she was just my trophy girlfriend! And Mam will usually say that she stopped wearing that dress so Dad would stop making that joke.
Aside from their wedding photo, all the other pictures hanging in this house are of me. Me as a baby, me at nursery, all my school photos. There’s a gap between the ages of twelve and sixteen (when I did not photograph well), then the photos start again, in earnest. Dad even had me print out a couple of my selfies for him to hang. I stare at myself on the wall as I pick at my fish. A little girl with freckles and orange pigtails. She is missing her front teeth. I run my tongue over my veneers.
Mam sulks over dinner and has a go at Dad for telling the same stories over and over again. She really lays into him and doesn’t stop till she runs out of breath.
‘Irina has some news about her job,’ says Dad. He blurts it out while Mam is between sentences, then curls down into his chair, avoiding my eye.
‘Oh?’ she says.
‘I quit.’ And then it’s my turn. She doesn’t believe I’m making enough money from photography to pay my half of my rent, that if I want to do stupid things, like quitting my job, she’ll cut me off, completely. That was the condition: I work part-time, at least, or she cuts me off. I pay my half, or she cuts me off. ‘It’s Dad’s money, though!’ I shout. And when Dad doesn’t argue with me, or back her up, Mam stomps out of the kitchen in tears. Dad follows her.
I eat my entire portion of chips. I eat them with my hands.
