Boy Parts

by Eliza Clark

  ‘Why is my life always like this?’ he asks. He starts punching the door, and screams for about twenty minutes before wandering back off into the night. I feel creeped out. Actually frightened, in a way I know I have no right to be, given the things I might have done.

  There’s a story about Ted Bundy – that during his trial lots of women turned up dressed like his victims. They would wear hoop earrings, dye their hair brown and part it in the centre. And there was one girl who would sit in the courtroom, dressed like that, and mouth I love you, over and over again to Bundy, I love you. And Bundy asked his girlfriend to stop this weird groupie from coming to court because she was creeping him out so much. Like, I’m Ted, and I’m about to ring Flo to see she if she’ll come round and wait with me, in case he comes back. Fucking Susan comes over to ask if I’m alright, and I don’t even have to pretend to be shaken up. I tell her that I’m going to call the police. I beg her not to tell my mam, then I threaten her.

  ‘I swear to God,’ I say, ‘if you tell my mam, if you fucking dare tell my mother about this…’ I don’t finish it. She leaves.

  Like putting on my American Apparel dress after a few weeks of errant bread consumption, this is a lesson in self-control. It’s a lesson in fucking sad little men.

  The video is cool, though. Very effective. A nice souvenir.

  At least I know he’s leaving Tesco in September – I can’t go to Waitrose every day. I’m not made of money.

  Irina,

  This is a hard email to write. I assume you think I’m thick because I work at the Tesco and I’m training for primary and because of the way you speak to me in general, but I do actually have an English literature degree, from Leeds and everything, so I can write well if I want to. I am drunk.

  I’m not even sure if I’m going to send this, and if I do send it, it’ll probably be because I’ve gotten even drunker, and it’s 3am, and I’ve decided that I’d rather just send you my heart on a platter than let all of this fester inside of me with what’s left of my dignity. I don’t know how to feel about what we did together, and I don’t know how to feel about you. When I’m with you, I feel like the only person in the whole world, and no one at all at the same time. No one has ever made me feel so wanted (which is a weird thing for me to say, because I don’t think I’ve ever ever ever felt sexually desirable before) but so awful at the same time. It’s weird. I don’t know if you realise how you speak to people sometimes, the way you feed people table scraps. I know that’s what I get from you, table scraps, but because it’s scraps from your table, it’s better than a 3 course meal with someone else. And you’ve given me glimpses into your life, your real life, and I wonder if it’s your fault. I wonder if you’ve got anything but scraps to give.

  Everyone is always telling me I’m too sensitive. And I think I am. Every little knock with relationships leaves me in pieces. I always manage to pull myself back together again, but I think there’s only so many times you can break and glue your bits back together before you start to lose pieces of yourself. I always looked at these times where my heart gets smashed as the climax to a relationship. The smashing is Ben ignoring me in the pub, or the girl i was in love with for 2 years in high school telling me ‘you must be at least this tall to ride’ and holding her hand a foot above my head. It’s realising you’re being catfished after nine months. Long, drawn out things.

  I’ve only been with you a handful of times, and I feel like I get smashed up and put back together on the hour – every time you open your mouth, or put your hands on me, or send me a text, I don’t know if I’m about to fall to bits or feel brand new.

  I don’t think this is healthy. But I’ve never been good at healthy.

  I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t know if I’m trying to tell you it’s for the best if I stay away from you, or if I’m begging you to stay with me forever. Do I want to keep these shitty pieces of myself together, or do I just want to give them all to you.

  I think about you all the time. I hear your voice in my head, I rehearse conversations with you, I talk to myself, and imagine I’m talking to you. And I wish you felt like this about me, but I know you don’t and I don’t think you ever will. I think you’re happy giving people your scraps. I think that’s easy for you, and I don’t blame you, because I hate being like this, and I wish I was more like you.

  I don’t know, Irina. I don’t think you’ll reply to this. I don’t know why I thought someone who looked like you would ever be remotely interested in me, and I almost wonder if this is a slap in the face from my own entitlement, that part of me ever ever thought that YOU could be really, truly interested in ME. It’s a joke really, an absolute fucking joke. I’m a joke.

  I’m stopping now. If you’re reading this I’m sorry I sent it.

  THE FALLOW YEARS

  Jamie is pressuring me to send her stuff for the photobook. I tell her I’m most of the way through my archive, and I’ll have something for her soon. I ignore her response and click through to my website.

  I look for my own favourites, then bestsellers. Then I wonder if I even have favourites, if there are any prints that stand out as bestsellers or if they’re all much of a muchness. In the years since I finished my MA, and came back home, there has been an indistinct parade of flesh through my house, slabs of which between it is difficult to distinguish. These years, my wilderness years, have been very productive, but for what? Samey photos, for prints. Waiting to get another gallery show, getting nothing. Radio silence, and print sales. Instagram followers, and reasonable cashflow, but no prestige, no recognition.

  After the thing that didn’t happen happened, I felt strange on my own. I felt strange about my photography. And I stopped. I stopped taking photos of boys – I stopped fucking and I stopped leaving the flat, other than to go to college, where I’d sit in the studio and stare at the wall.

  I did some fashion-y stuff, made more of a thing of photographing women wearing clothes, rather than boys without them. I collaborated with some people I knew from the CSM fashion course (which didn’t go super well because, apparently, I’m ‘aggressive’ and ‘a control freak’). My tutors hated it – I hated it, to be fair – they said it was commercial, boring, very much ‘not what they had signed up for’ when they gave me a place on this course. It felt like a regression, a ‘castration’, of my work.

  I didn’t care. Everyone else stopped caring. I stopped turning up to uni. I didn’t go to graduation. I did some freelance fashion stuff for a couple of months, and then I couldn’t bring myself to apply for the work, to schmooze with the designers and the editors. I thought… fuck this. After about a month lying in bed, doing nothing, my parents twigged I wasn’t working, and they made me come home.

  I lived with them for a bit, got a job in the bar. I felt like a zombie, for months. I’d work, get trashed on my shift, I’d come home and sleep it off, I’d go back to work again. Rinse, repeat. I scroll and scroll and scroll through my website, till I reach the oldest image from my newest work, my post-London work.

  I remember him. At first glance he is just a man with an unfortunate birthmark. It is huge, the colour of wine, and splashed across his face, his neck and his chest. However, a discerning viewer of men will notice that he is actually very good-looking, underneath the unfortunate birthmark. He has a sharp jaw, a Roman nose, high cheekbones, and dark eyes. But this birthmark is so jarring, so ugly – you would only see an angry blur of purples and reds, were you not a worshipper at my Broad Church of Boys.

  I served him at the bar. I stared. He told me to take a picture, because it would last longer.

  Can I? Can I actually?

  I wasn’t even carrying business cards at the time. I wrote my phone number on the back of a receipt and Ryan huffed and whined, because I’d give him (the fucking elephant man over there) my number but I wouldn’t let Ryan take me out for a drink (back when I was a potential conquest for him, rather than a massive pain in his arse).

  I worked the
whole shift feeling jittery, lost in my own head as I imagined hypothetic ways to light him, pose him. I imagined he must feel so angry about the birthmark. Because he must know he’s like a solid 8/10 underneath that awful, ugly skin.

  I thought about myself. I thought about when I was a teenager and standing in front of the mirror feeling furious because I knew I was pretty. I knew that under the freckles, the extra weight, the big ears and the nose I hadn’t grown into, I knew I was beautiful. I could see it; I’ve always had an eye for aesthetics, and I could tell I was pretty, the same way I only had to look at the birthmark guy for a few moments, and I knew.

  He agreed to the photoshoot, reluctantly, and turned up at my house, and looked at me like I was a steak and he hadn’t eaten in weeks. That was enough.

  I took my photos, and I kept my distance, and nobody touched me, and nothing bad happened.

  I’ve been getting handsy again, lately. That’s why everything went sour with Eddie from Tesco. I got handsy. Will, I got handsy; the fucking teenager whose mam hit me, I got handsy. It’s hard just to look, isn’t it? It’s hard to look, and not touch, not squeeze, or prod, or squash all that soft, private skin they show me.

  I didn’t touch Birthmark. And the photos are fine. All the photos, of all the men, they’re all fine. Whatever I’ve dressed them up in, or sat them against, they’re just… fine.

  29

  We had the big blowout for my birthday this year, the weekend between Halloween and Bonfire Night. Like my birthday, Halloween had been swallowed by a Wednesday, so on the Friday night we went out a chunk of the people in town were still dressed up – mostly students, girls dressed as witches, and cats, and zombie schoolchildren, accompanied by boys with some fake blood on their shirts. We’re officially at the point of the year where photographers from the Daily Mail start hanging round the Bigg Market, hoping to catch photos of women without coats, in unseasonably short dresses, slipping in the rain, then the ice, then the snow.

  I went out in a group of about ten, starting in the pub. I looked around the tables and realised the party consisted largely of Flo’s friends, apart from Finch, of whom Flo and I share joint custody. I took cocaine and complained that the majority of my friends lived in London, unable to attend on such short notice. Neither Finch nor Flo pulled me on this. Finch just kept buying me drinks.

  My memories of the evening are faint, from pub onwards. I bragged about the exhibition, and split half a pill with Flo, and bragged more, and danced. I recollect going off on one, pure party chat, about how you don’t have to be in London, and people do know my work, and I’m not just an Instagram photographer or whatever, and I’ll be everywhere after this exhibition.

  I personally made my way through a gram of coke over the course of twelve hours, my memory coming back into sharp focus at around nine a.m. the following morning, with Flo shaking and sweating on my sofa, arguing with a stranger because he was trying to open my curtains. I drank a large glass of water and threw up in the sink – which Finch, smoking out my back door, declared to be the end to the evening. He threw everyone but Flo out, and dropped a Xanax in my hand. Flo said she’d stay up and keep an eye on me, in case I was sick in my mouth and choked while I slept.

  I took the Xanax, and lay on my bed, while Flo took my makeup off for me with a cotton pad. I remember being sure that this was how I was going to die – choking on my own vomit, with Flo’s sweaty face being the last thing I saw. I wouldn’t have to worry about turning twenty-nine on Wednesday, or thirty next year. I wouldn’t have to worry about boys, or Frank, or photographs to burn. I wouldn’t have to get old and ugly. I’d missed the twenty-seven club, but I could still get a cult following, a posthumous retrospective of my work at the Baltic, Tate Modern, then MoMA. Maybe they’d even find out about the boy. Then my work would be worth a fortune – like how John Wayne Gacy’s snidey clown paintings go for thousands. But I woke up, disappointed, with the sun down, and Flo’s arm slung across my belly.

  Happy bday love x

  Sorry about your mam x

  Will ddrop off your presents when ur back from London & have sent you some £££ for a treat when your down their

  Don’t get 2 drunk tonight remember you have a train!!! Lol xxx

  Dad has sent me £££, and Mam hasn’t even texted, unwilling to speak to me since I binned off the bar.

  I wait on the sofa for Flo, who is lighting candles in the kitchen, and Finch balances a party hat on top of my hair, kicking through the balloons he’s spent the evening blowing up.

  Flo has set up her little makeshift nest on my smaller sofa, and her bags of clothes are stuffed into the cupboard under the stairs. It’s my turn to have her tonight. She’s been at Finch’s since Sunday, driving him up the wall, I think. Complaining about his smoking and the fog of white spirit following him since he took up painting. He helped her make the cake – I could hear them bickering in the kitchen like an old married couple. I watched telly with my eyes out of focus, the comedown hitting me harder than it normally does.

  ‘Cheer up, duck,’ Finch says.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘London tomorrow,’ he says. ‘That’ll be good.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He turns off the television, and Flo comes in with the cake. They sing ‘Happy Birthday’, Finch’s voice breaking like a pubescent boy’s, Flo’s high and shrill.

  It’s a vegan chocolate cake. Dark, with ginger. Flo is a decent baker. I blow out the candles with a sigh, and the party hat falls off my head. Flo pours me a glass of red, and hands me a piece of cake. I take a tiny, tiny bite.

  ‘I told you she’d eat some,’ she says to Finch. I’d spit it out if I hadn’t already swallowed. It’s good. My favourite, actually, this specific recipe. ‘It’s her favourite,’ Flo adds, smug.

  ‘Meh,’ I say, shrugging. But I eat the cake. The first time I’ve eaten something this sugary since… well, that affogato with Eddie from Tesco. Flo smiles, doting. She hasn’t gotten me anything, knowing I’m never in a good mood on my birthday. It’s better to get something for me next week, when I’ll feel better.

  ‘Is she always like this?’ Finch asks.

  ‘On her birthday? Yeah,’ Flo says. I grunt. ‘Since she turned twenty-four. Every year.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room, like my fucking parents or something.’ They talk, and drink wine, and I remain uncharacteristically restrained. Finch jokes: eating cake, not drinking wine, should he ring 999?

  He leaves to smoke a cigarette, and a tipsy Flo shuffles over to me on her knees. She tucks my hair behind my ear and kisses me on the lips. I let her.

  I think, this is fine, isn’t it? She could live in my house, and clean it, and eat me out on scheduled days of the week. I don’t have to tell my parents we’re together, because she sort of lives with me anyway, and they wouldn’t notice much of a difference. It’d be convenient, and it’d probably stay my inclination to start fucking choking my models. Because I know she’d be there, and I couldn’t hide it.

  She’ll have to lose weight and cut her hair, of course, and I can always dump her if someone better comes along.

  I wait to feel a twinge, a twinge of anything, something anatomical, or even one of familiarity. But I feel nothing. She’s so soft, now.

  I shove her, harder than I’d meant to.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asks. ‘You need it.’ I grunt at her. She lurches towards me, but I push her again. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner, really. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve. ‘I… You told me to leave him. You stopped seeing the Tesco boy, and you told me—’

  ‘Michael was a bellend. The Tesco thing was just like… It didn’t work out. It happens,’ I say. ‘What did you think I was going to do here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. I expect her to cry, but she doesn’t. She shuffles back to the other side of the room, and sighs, hugging her knees to her chest. ‘Never mind,’ she says.


  All these years, and I’ve never really questioned why she loves me. Or why she thinks she does. With men, it’s always projection – a cliché, I know, but they fall for the idea of me. But Flo has known me for such a long time. She’s watched me putrefy, and twist, and get thinner and meaner, and stranger. But here she is.

  ‘What do you want from me, Flo?’ I ask. ‘Like, what do you think I can give you?’

  ‘What do you mean? I just want you to be happy,’ she says. She’s quiet for a moment, thinking, frowning. ‘I’m sorry I’m not it.’

  ‘It?’

  Finch comes back before she can explain what she means. And I’ll never know, because fuck me if I’m bringing this up again.

  ‘Which one of your horrible fucking films do you want us to stick on, then, Irina?’ Finch asks.

  We watch Haute Tension. It’s a pointed choice.

  Do you want me to come to the station with you???

  I could meet you on my lunch break????

  Nah.

  Are you excited????

  Meh.

  Okey dokey.

  Do you want me to do your bedding

  Or anything else while youre away?

  Whatever you want.

  Dont go in my bedside table

  Lol :P

  Gunna lick all your stuff while you’re gone!!!!!! :P

  Flo sends a kissy face emoji. Part of me wants to tell her to make sure she doesn’t top herself while I’m away. I put my phone in my coat pocket. It’s the first time I’ve worn a coat since April. Over the knee boots, hold-ups, a black PVC trench coat, and I haven’t ended up soaked in sweat in five seconds. You just can’t dress during summer. It’s been so hot I haven’t even been able to get away with a waist trainer under my clothes, but I have one on today. It’s tight across my belly, like a hug.

  My hair flops into my eyes as I drag my suitcase into the Starbucks opposite the train station – I am growing out my fringe, from a Bardot Bang to something I can part on the side. But it’s not long enough, yet, and is persistently in my eyes.