‘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.