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 jigsaw.
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.
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.