A birthday card with a pressed flower taped to the inside falls from my AS-level exam sketchbook. The smoking gun. A large number seventeen glitters on the cover. The badge is still attached.
I move a couple of sketchbooks and find a fat wedge of birthday cards banded together in the bottom of the box. They’re all different, all seventeenth-birthday cards and all from M&S. Must have cost him a fucking fortune.
Lesley did this thing where he would get his A-level students birthday cards, and tuck them into our sketchbooks without telling us.
This one reads: Happy birthday, I hope you enjoy your party on Friday evening, I’ve heard the food at Princess Gardens is delicious! So I’d get this, and I’d know to meet him at Princess Gardens on Friday evening. If my mam found it and was like, ‘What the fuck? Your birthday’s in November and it’s January,’ I could just tell her he’d gotten me mixed up with Molly Jones whose birthday it actually was, and that he got Molly and I mixed up all the time.
My mam is a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. Upon reflection, I don’t know how I managed to get away with it for as long as I did. She’d pick through my sketchbooks like a rat picking through the bins whenever I left the house: silent, but increasingly disturbed by the content.
He told me once that she’d rang him. She wanted to know why he was letting me draw stuff like that. Lesley said it was just me expressing myself, and that teenagers were macabre, unpredictable creatures. I was hazy with wine from our date and thought I should move my stack of birthday cards out of my art stuff, and under my mattress, or something. I forgot about it promptly, and I giggled, and told him not to talk about my mother while he was fingering me.
The following week Mam turned up to one of our dates, birthday card in hand, and caused a scene. She physically dragged me out of the restaurant by the sleeve of my dress, berating the staff, screaming about nonces and CRB checks and calling the police.
She tells it differently, of course. As far as her friends, my late grandmother, my father know, she cracked the code in the birthday cards, and calmly collected me from the restaurant. I collapsed into her arms, weeping, like a little girl. She makes sure to call me her little girl whenever she tells it. People forget she was just a little girl – because she’s tall, and so well developed, like I was twelve and not seventeen. She was covered in bruises, she’ll say, tearing up.
They tried to keep it quiet, but everyone at school found out eventually. I always say everyone knowing was more traumatic than being with him. Because: I did like him. I liked the way he made me feel. I liked learning how to fuck – I liked having my hair pulled and being bitten and the way his big hands felt on my skinny neck. I didn’t like my dad, my nana and her cancer, my head teacher, Molly Jones, looking at me and seeing a raped child where Irina used to stand.
The flower taped to the card is a single white rose, stem cut short and pressed well. I used to press them all the time in high school and college, but I stopped doing it when I picked up photography.
When you get into theory, you find the flowers aren’t miles away from the photographs. They’re impressions of living things – like fossils, pressed and preserved, the way an image impresses itself onto a roll of film. I mean, fuck me if I can remember my early photography seminars, but that sounds about right. It’s always interesting when these genetic connections pop up in your work.
A book of pressed flowers was the first thing I handed in to my college tutors, once I’d specialised on my foundation course. When you do art at uni, you normally have to do a foundation year first – a year at your local college, or a uni, where you decide which kind of art you actually want to do. Like, are you an illustrator? A fashion designer? A graphics wanker? An erotic fine art photographer? You do a rotation of different disciplines, then pick one. I did Fine Art, because I hate being told what to do. If you get the right Fine Art course at any level, you’re essentially just set free to do fucking anything you like. And that’s what Colin and Kevin, the veteran tutors, offered their charges: anarchy, with bi-weekly hand-ins.
This is also where I met Flo; where I caught the social equivalent of a nasty case of herpes, if you like.
Colin took a look at my delicate, lovely flowers （the life expertly squeezed from them） and asked me if I liked to collect flowers – if I liked to make little collections like this. I said yes. He asked me if I had penis envy, in front of everyone, like that’s a yes or no thing.
He quoted the Baudrillard essay System of Objects at me and explained that collectors are either children, or sexually dissatisfied adult men. So I was either a child, emotionally, or I must have a strong case of penis envy to still be making collections at my age. He pointed to the wristwatch I was wearing, which I would check with compulsive regularity. He told me that was more evidence to support his theory. More Baudrillard: the watch was a masculine comfort object, something to check habitually, dispel ‘temporal anxiety’ and provide a constant ‘organic pulse’ in its ticking. I told him to fuck off and stormed out. I stopped wearing a watch around then. I suppose I’ve replaced it with the constant vibration of a smartphone, like a heartbeat in my pocket.
Next, I did this project where I drew gay porn, and I titled it XXXtreme Penis Envy. As I look through the pages of this particular sketchbook, I realise this was the last time I did any extensive drawing. It’s very good, anatomically, proportionally speaking. I spend a good few minutes admiring my delicate shading on a pair of swollen testicles.
Colin said he appreciated the defiant nature of the project, but I’d more than proved his point by doing it. The shock value of dirty drawings was clearly non-existent at this level, and the frequent accusations from a sixty-something-year-old man of being cock hungry on a deep-seated psychological level got very tiresome, very quickly. I decided to give photography a go.
I have a little book of test shots, which is small, and blue, and surprisingly heavy in my hands. They’re all photos of Flo and myself messing about in the college studio, when she was still skinny and faux-ginger with her Boho Chic + the Machine aesthetic. She’s modelling very hard for me in them; borderline blue-steeling her way through and doing some twisty shit with her hands like I imagine she’d just seen Florence Welch do in NME that week. There are a few photos of us together, which is beyond hideous. I’m still a bottle-black brunette, filling my eyebrows in with black eyeliner instead of a brow pencil. I have a blue ring on my forehead where the dye （clearly fresh） has leaked and formed a compound with the thick, white stage foundation I was trowelling on to cover my freckles. Red lipstick bleeding all over the place because this was before we had liquid lips and YouTube tutorials, and before I knew lipliner was a thing that existed outside of 1996 in a dark brown. I’m also wearing this ridiculous tea dress. It flatters my figure but, it’s just like… ugh, that rockabilly goth bullshit, it’s… so basic.
These photos are shit, but I loved taking them. I loved telling Flo where to stand, and what to wear. I loved fiddling with the settings of the cheap DSLR I’d been given for my birthday during the last year of my GCSEs. I loved the way the slightest nudge to the aperture or the white balance totally changed the quality of the image, the mood. I loved playing with lights and costumes and makeup.