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.