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 films 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.