It’s like discovering a new flower no one else has noticed. Pressed in a photo; preserved and filed away forever, ageless and lovely and all mine.
I think about him all evening. I even pull out a sketchbook and scribble some ideas for photos. I try and find him on Facebook, and fail, without a last name.
I text Flo.
U were sooooo right about the new boy at tesco omg
Gave him my card the other week
Basically totally besotted
Yeah ha ha i thought you’d like him
See what i meant tho he is cute isn’t he??
I’m gunna see how his shoot goes but i actually get a really interesting feeling from him.
Might let him take me out for dinner, who knows?
Oh?
I thought you werent dating atm
I’m not
But maybe I’ll make an exception this time.
We’ll see.
Hmm okay.
Be careful, i guess?
About an hour later, I check her blog. She’s posted I fucked up, in isolation, and does not respond to her concerned orbiters.
Occasionally, she needs a wake-up call. I can date anyone I want. I can make friends.
JUVENILIA
Hackney Space want a little bit of everything for the photo book – including old work I think might serve as an ‘interesting artefact’ to accompany the short biography at the start of the book.
I pull out my entire archive. Albums and portfolios, sketchbooks wrapped up in tissue and plastic, kept in boxes beneath my bed, in my wardrobe, and stacked up in my studio.
I have a digital archive as well, but that’s more of a best of. It’s a lot more recent, too. There are things I’ve deleted, things I’ve forgotten about and, at the end of the day, it’s a good excuse to look through my work. It’s good to get your hands on a physical archive, sometimes, to rip it to bits, and put it back together again.
I remember being six or seven and getting immense satisfaction out of lining all of my My Little Pony dolls in order by colour – starting with the red and pink ones, ordering them as close to the rainbow as I could, and finishing with the purples. I feel just like that, almost giddy, as I get the boxes stacked into chronological order.
I sit on the floor in front of the oldest box, labelled A-LEVEL/FOUNDATION, 2006–2009. I don’t know if I’ll end up pulling anything from here – it’s a lot of drawing, of greatly varying quality.
The early AS stuff is ropey – really ropey. There’s a lovingly rendered watercolour of Galadriel in there, and a lot of drawings of Brigitte Bardot, and, later, Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire. I did a whole project where I tried adapting Barb Wire into a graphic novel without realising it was a comic first, and the upward quality curve in my drawing is surprisingly steep.
My second sketchbook for that year opens with women but closes with men. I open the book – Barbarella, Dita hanging from her prop Martini glass, Jayne Mansfield and her impossibly tiny waist. Wishes – Wife Goals, or Life Goals? as Flo is wont to say when confronted with a beautiful woman. It’s funny the way my work changes – like a switch flipped. I turn a page and find a study of a grown man’s chest – headless, flabby and spattered with hair – next to a chest which is young, and androgynous. Typical for me, the line work is very good, but the shading is a bit half-arsed.
I had fumbled with boys before Lesley. Over the summer, I had made an effort to dress for my new shape, to dye my red hair black, to fill in my eyebrows, to apply winged eyeliner and red lipstick – and to change my profile pictures, and make sure I was seen in places I knew the in-crowd hung out. They started adding me on MSN, inviting me to things. And I’d turn up, and I’d buy everyone alcohol because I never got carded, and get blackout drunk, and wake up with my underwear around my ankles, or my skirt pulled up over my stomach. I remember stumbling out of someone’s spare room after a house party, and their indulgent mother telling me, ‘Your shirt is on inside out, petal,’ and her lending me a thin, silky scarf to cover a love bite on my neck the size of a fist.
I went back to school popular. Girls who used to pick on me liked me, because I could get fags and vodka, and I’d held their hair back while they were sick. When I’d started sitting with the pretty girls, when the boys snapped my bra straps, and hung round my worktable – this was when Lesley noticed me.
My mam told the school he’d started grooming me at GCSE, which was bullshit. Lesley was a shallow man; he didn’t pay any attention to me till everyone else did. He held me back after a lesson in late September and told me: You have a lot of potential, Irene. （It’s Irina, sir.） You haven’t done much over the summer – you mustn’t let your modelling career distract you.
Of course, at the time I thought he’d gotten me mixed up with Molly Jones, who I sat with. My new friend had been a six-foot-tall netball player: pretty as a picture and thin as a rake, she’d spent much of the previous school year bragging about signing to a modelling agency. We both had bottle black hair – but she was flat as a board. I’d been the exact mix of flattered and offended that I assume he was shooting for. I’d corrected him, shyly, and swallowed that compliment like a mouthful of the ice cream I’d sneak while Mam had me on a diet.
I know he was negging me, now. At the time, I was stupid enough to believe he’d genuinely mixed me up with Molly. But I wasn’t quite so stupid that I didn’t realise he was trying it on with me. I can’t remember what he looked like in any detail, which annoys me. I don’t have any photos of him, or even sketches. I sometimes google him, looking for a social media profile, or a tabloid news article. ‘Sex-pest teacher allowed to work in school again’， or something. But he’s off the grid.
He was in his forties, with thick, black hair, and he wore glasses. He was slim, and taller than me, but none of his facial features stick out in my mind.
I remember finding him very attractive at the time; though any man who pays attention to you, at that age, can transform from frog to prince in the time it takes to tell you he likes your hair.
I leant into being stupid for him. I giggled for him, and I smiled bashful smiles, as he edged further into my personal space with each passing lesson. He’d make up reasons to hold me back; a few minutes for oh, hang on, is this your jacket? then fifteen for I just think you’re very talented, and we should talk about your future. In late October, he gave me an arbitrary detention for an unfilled sketchbook page （I’d done three rather than the requested four）。 The detention was administered at half past two, and by four thirty his dick was in my mouth. He didn’t tell me when he was about to finish, so I choked, and coughed, spraying cum from my aching mouth all over his crotch. It was disgusting: the unexpected smells, the presence of a distinct flavour and the texture of wiry hair in my teeth, and flesh （somehow hard and squishy at the same time） bumping dangerously close to my throat.
I got used to it.
The sketchbook descends into a wall of hairy limbs, flat chests and comedically large bulges in jeans – Tom of Finland, eat your heart out. I put it down, and flip through the others, finding more men, and escalating tastes. This was around the same time I got into extreme cinema, and with my palate whet for the violent, disturbing and bizarre alongside my new-found interest in grown men, my artwork becomes a twisted mash of flesh, hair and bodily fluids, rendered in pencil and sickly watercolours.