by Eliza Clark
He smells of baby powder.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a drink. Any particular milk preferences, or…’
‘Oh um. A latte? With full fat milk, if they… I mean, you don’t have to buy—’
I shush him and walk over to the counter. There’s a girl with dark hair and a lip ring arranging brownies on a wooden serving platter.
‘Will in today?’ I ask.
‘Nah. I’ll tell him you said hi, though.’
‘Hey, this is going to sound a little…’ I clear my throat, lower my voice. ‘Do you ever have any problems with him and female members of staff?’ Me and this barista chat sometimes – I think she invigilates at the Baltic at weekends. She has one of those haircuts, like she has a Tumblr and runs a feminist Etsy store; you know, those very short fringes? Like Betty Bangs but shorter, like she’s seven and she cut them herself.
‘He actually keeps, like… bothering one of the new waitresses. Texting her and stuff. Why?’ And then, ‘Aren’t you two friends?’
‘We were,’ I say, pointedly. ‘I’m not telling tales, but you know… Just keep an eye on him, babe.’
‘I will now. Thanks.’ She takes my order, and doesn’t charge me for Eddie’s drink, with a wink, murmuring something about solidarity.
I sit back down with Eddie from Tesco. He is fiddling with his curls, wrapping one dark lock around his middle finger, and letting it bounce back into place.
‘Did you used to work at the Tesco on Clayton Street, or something?’ I ask. He shakes his head.
‘Oh. No. I worked at one in Leeds, where I did my undergrad. I did my teaching qualification at Northumbria,’ he tells me, like I asked for his life story. ‘But um… then I worked at this little Tesco Express in High Heaton? Why do you ask?’
‘You just look really familiar,’ I say. ‘Maybe someone I’ve shot before, or something.’ He shrugs and doesn’t seem to know what to say. An awkward silence hangs between us, which I break. ‘So… your email said you teach primary school?’
‘Yeah… I really love kids. I just… This is so cliché, but I’m really just like a big kid myself, you know? Um… not in a weird way, though.’ He clears his throat, and trails off, staring down at the table, then back to my chest. ‘So, do you, um, do you like kids?’
I shrug. I actually fucking hate children. Teaching at a primary school is a personal nightmare. In Irina’s inferno, the seventh circle of hell is me doing potato prints with a room full of five-year-olds.
‘They’re fine. I’m probably not going to have any.’ I’ve been scraped twice: once when I was nineteen, and again when I was twenty-two. A couple of mishaps related directly to my latex allergy. Hormonal birth control makes me go a bit loopy, you see, and no one ever just has latex-free condoms. I have since learned that the pull-out method is not effective, and if one would like to avoid bareback accidents (barebaccidents, if you will) one must simply deal with carrying her own special condoms.
‘Yeah. I mean I love them, I just… I like being able to give them back at the end of the day? But… I mean, I do probably want them, just… not right now. Well. I don’t know. If I had a girlfriend – which I don’t – and she was pregnant, I’d be fine with it? I think?’
‘Cool,’ I say. Am I sneering? I scratch the top of my lip, knock it back down to a neutral position. But the damage is done, and the checkout boy has shrunk into his chair, flushed redder than before, with a thin film of sweat on his forehead. ‘I promise I don’t bite,’ I tell him. It doesn’t seem to help. ‘I know I’m quite intimidating—’
‘Oh, oh God, you aren’t! I’m sorry, I just don’t spend a lot of time with women outside of a customer service setting. I mean, on placement I talked to quite a lot of mums, and some of them were quite attractive, but…’ He trails off, and screws his face up like he’s just stubbed a toe.
‘Stop talking. I know I’m quite intimidating. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Just… answer my questions. Speak when spoken to, if it helps.’
‘Okay.’ He nods. ‘Speak when spoken to, okay.’
Men get like this with me, sometimes. I find it quite repulsive that anyone could so openly roll over and show their soft parts to a stranger. It’s so gross, it’s almost captivating – like when people cry on public transport. I’d literally rather die before I acted like this in front of someone. It feels like he’s expecting me to mate with him and bite off his head, or perform a backwards traumatic insemination ritual that’ll end with a load of ginger spiders bursting out of his chest.
Now we’ve established that he only speaks when spoken to, we can get on with things. I ask him if he’s seen much of my work, and he has. He went through my whole website – he really likes it. I let him go off on one about how great my work is: ooo the colours, ooo isn’t it so revolutionary to see the female gaze, ooo eroticised images of normal men by a woman. The phrasing is decidedly similar to a Vice write-up of a show I did during my MA. I think that article is still the third or fourth result when you google me, as well. But that’s fine. Forgivable. A little sweet, even, that he’d try and pass off a write-up from four years ago as his own clever observations. Maybe he thinks I don’t read my own reviews.
I ask him if he’s cool with doing some more explicit stuff, as a trade-off for the mask. He shrugs – as long as his face is covered, he doesn’t care.
I ask him why he’s doing this.
‘I just…’ He shrugs again. ‘Just not every day this happens, is it? I mean… I’m not ugly. I know I’m not ugly; I’m not fishing for compliments. There’s just a big difference between not being ugly – having an okay face – and being attractive, isn’t there? I’m just… I’m short. I’m really short and… weird. And I know it’s risky and stuff, I just. You’re like… It’s really flattering. It’s really, really flattering.’ He’s red again.
I’d take his photo now, if I could.
Yo…
Saw that dude from Tesco today hes going to drop in for a shoot after his shift on wednesday.
So you know. Thanks for the rec.
As hit and miss as your picks for models normally are, he was a good shout.
I quite like him. Like, more than I expected.
I see you watching my Instagram stories
Ugh whatever.
Eddie from Tesco comes over the day after our coffee date.
He likes my house.
‘Spartan,’ he says. ‘Modern.’ The only decorations are prints of my own photographs, a couple of Flo’s drawings hanging, and a set of pressed flowers above my mantel. The walls are white, the floors are wooden – slate tiling in the bathrooms and the kitchen. My mam thinks it looks like a hospital, smells like one too. I bleach everything.
Eddie from Tesco settles into my leather sofa with a squeak, a cup of peppermint tea in his hand, and asks me about myself. I do this to walk them through what’ll happen in the shoot, get them to sign consent forms, scan their IDs. They normally just sign the paper, and monologue at me for a bit until I ask them to stop talking.
Eddie from Tesco signs without reading, but he asks me what attracts me to a model, and how I get those washed-out pastels when I shoot in colour. How do I know if a photo is going to be black and white? And how do I know if it’ll be in colour? Do I just see a model and instantly know; I’m going to shoot you like this and it’ll look just like this. Or do I just wing it?
‘A mix. Sometimes I see someone and get an idea, sometimes I just like the look of them and want to try some stuff out,’ I say. I don’t have any explicit ideas for this shoot, just that we’ll be working with masks, which is fine. I also warn him my studio used to be a garage, in case he panics at the sight of my dad’s box of hammers and saws and power-tools. The nervous ones do, sometimes.
I have a rack and a bin full of clothes in there, and I set about pulling out masks. I have a couple of gimp masks (which I hate, and I should really just bin, but you never know, do you?), one of those weird, leather dog-mask thin
gs (pilfered from the toilet of a gay bar during Pride last year) and a couple of porcelain masquerade masks I cadged from Serotonin during MA. They’re very delicate, and I’ve broken one before. Easy enough to glue back together, but I still give Eddie from Tesco a sharp warning when he starts fingering them. There’s also the bunny head, a big, mascot-looking thing, but not cartoony. Its face is a bit like Peter Rabbit’s, very… Beatrix Potter, you know? Makes it creepier, I think.
‘Where did you even get that?’ he asks.
‘Don’t worry about it. It’s horrible, isn’t it? I love it.’
‘Well, if you love it… it’s cool, I guess,’ he mumbles. ‘Cool, cool, cool.’
I get him down to his pants and do a couple of test shots of him with the masks, then in the bunny head. He is more or less as I imagined. Thick thighs, soft stomach and a flat, ribby chest. He’s not as hairy as I thought he’d be.
I’m surprised by how into the bunny head I am. Like I said, it’s creepy as shit, and the previews on my camera are just like… gross. But like, sexy gross. So wrong it’s right? I don’t know.
I have a cotton tail, which I pin on him. I clip it to the waistband of his briefs (tight, navy blue), and he clears his throat when I brush my knuckles against the fuzzy small of his back
I get this great shot of his arse, with the little tail – and it’s round and fat, and the tail is so fluffy and cute. It’s like a peach; I could bite it.
He’s clearly uncomfortable, but he asks for direction, and he does everything I say – which is weird, because normally the models are stiff and ignorant, too busy panting and dribbling to think too much. They don’t think they’re performing – they have mistaken my critically acclaimed artistic practice for a prelude to a fuck. Eddie from Tesco hasn’t, though. Maybe he gets the work, maybe he doesn’t think there’s a world where I’d ever want to sleep with him. Maybe it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.
I want to touch him. Not just to look, but to actually reach my hands out and touch him. My fingers slip on the buttons of my camera, because my hands are so sweaty, and the plastic in my palms is a stand-in for his hips. I squeeze the lens and imagine it soft beneath my fingertips.
‘Stretch,’ I say. ‘Arch your hips, roll over, put your hands on your stomach, get on your knees, touch yourself.’ He’s a good listener.
After half an hour, we’re done. He takes off the rabbit head, and I find him red-faced, with his hair plastered to his skull. I’m looking at him like a piece of meat. Any man, any proper man, would be on me like a rash, but Eddie from Tesco just sits on the floor of my garage and starts getting dressed, knees lifted to disguise the semi I’ve already photographed.
I ask him on the spot if he wants to be in a film. For Hackney. I tell him he’s great – he’s perfect for it – responsive, engaged, compliant; he was made to be shown in two dimensions. He smiles at me, all pretty, all flattered.
‘It’ll just be a test run, though. I don’t know if it’ll work with the masks.’
And the smile drops, though just a little.
Instead of packing up my equipment, I watch him while he puts his clothes back on.
I see him out, then I am alone with his pictures. I cycle through them on the preview screen of my camera. I’m glad I didn’t shoot on film – instant gratification. My thumb trembles as I click down the tiny left arrow on my camera. The display ticks through two hundred images, and I don’t delete a single one. My hand drifts to the inside of my thigh, the crotch of my underwear.
It’s bad when it gets like this. It’s been a while since it’s gotten like this. I made a rule for myself – when I moved back up here, when I finished the little break from photography I had after my MA: don’t touch the models. I was under the misguided impression that touching was what pushed me over the edge, you know? Touching made my hands wander and my knickers drop. And I broke that, because you have to touch them sometimes, you have to put them in the right places, you have to physically arrange them. Sometimes the photos work better when I’m in them – a hand, a high-heeled shoe, a dramatic silhouette – a powerful female presence, a phantom dominatrix.
So now the rule’s more like ‘Don’t shit where you eat’ with ‘No touching’ applied at my discretion. I probably shouldn’t touch Eddie from Tesco, because I clearly want to, and if I can’t obey my only vague guideline I’m fucked, aren’t I?
I sit, for a moment, with my hand wedged between my thighs. I’m wet, and uncomfortable, and the lace of my bra is irritating my hard nipples. My cunt flexes.
I decide to have a cold shower. I decide to ignore the yawning, drooling hole, the way I ignore my treacherous growling stomach or my aching thighs a mile into a run. I catch a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror, and look away like I’ve made eye contact with a stranger in a gym’s changing room.
I quite often take cold showers – they’re better for your skin. I don’t often spray icy water straight onto my crotch, though. I cringe, but I feel better, colder, cleaner. More human. More than human.
But when I get out of the shower, I’m still thinking about him. I slap my face. I imagine the two of us fucking. I try to bash the thought out of my skull, but it comes in intrusive flashes, almost violent. I try to change the thought, squash it, kill it. I imagine my hands around his neck but that tangles with the thoughts from before. His neck flexes beneath my palms in the daydream, and my insides flex along with it.
I can only ever ignore my stomach rumbling for so long before I have to eat something. I might want bread, grease, red meat, but I can ease that off with bag salad, and a teaspoon of olive oil, half a tin of tuna. So, if my twat is my stomach, and Eddie from Tesco is a cheeseburger, I’ll go get a salad. If Eddie from Tesco is shitting where I eat, I’ll go shit somewhere else.
I get dressed to go out. I curate an outfit that’s sexy but not desperate. A short, white wrap dress, cute and kind of sixties looking. A daytime dress, to match the light summer sky, the long warm evenings. Light makeup, date makeup: a gentle, sparkly eyeshadow, and baby pink lip gloss; the kind that irritates your lips, makes them swell a little for that just-sucked look.
I go to BeerHaus, where I consider taking home the manager, the one who’s fully given up charging me for drinks. I tell him I’m meeting someone, but they’re late.
‘Who could ever stand you up?’ he asks. I shrug.
I’m casting a wide net on my phone, sending the slightly more sophisticated equivalent of a ‘U up?’ text to a few ex-models I have no intention of photographing again. To Henson, too, who replies, but doesn’t seem to pick up the vibe I’m putting down. We end up chatting about Raw over text, and that’s fine. I’m always happy to chat shite about films, and I refuse to ask for sex. They ask me. They beg. That’s how it works.
I get chatting to this suit. He’s patronising. I forget his name as soon as he tells me, so let’s call him John. He’s broken away from work drinks to tell me about his job. A plastic surgeon, from London, talking about merging practices with someone up here. I’m supposed to be impressed.
He tells me: if I ever came in to get work done, he’d send me away.
‘Some girls are just born lucky,’ he says. ‘You’re one of them.’ I bet he says that to every cunt; I bet he says that to girls with tiny tits and bent noses. My mam actually had my ears pinned back when I was twelve – and then there’s my teeth. While I always had a good waist-to-hip ratio, what I have now is the product of years of dedicated waist training and exercise. My hair is dyed, and I have extensions. I smile, with my teeth, and he tells me my veneers look very natural. I tell him another girl knocked my tooth out, but in this version of the story, I was playing hockey, not getting lippy with a rough lass in a takeaway.
‘Has anyone ever told you you look just like Priscilla Presley?’ he asks.
‘They have,’ I say.
‘When she was young. Before all the bad work.’ He snorts. ‘Obviously.’ Then, with a squint. ‘You know, if you ever want a
nything done in the future… Those fuck-ups almost never happen, now. That Meg Ryan shit.’
I keep my hair over my ears.
We talk a little more about that Meg Ryan shit. About how everyone has lip fillers nowadays, and they always take it too far. We talk about the Kardashians – our theories. I think Kim’s had her nose done and her hairline taken back, maybe some lipo around her jaw to get it sharp.
We talk about her arse, at length, and I’m arguing in her favour. It was always big, and she’s had kids, you know? Kids, waist training, squats, illusions. She had it X-rayed. In season six of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She had it X-rayed, and she didn’t have implants.
‘Fat transfer,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t have injections. They’re risky. Fat transfer, and maintenance. Corsetry, squats. Tits are done as well.’
‘I know the tits are done. She’s had two kids; the tits are obviously done. The arse is more of a mystery, though, isn’t it?’
John disagrees. Fat transfer. He buys me another drink.
It gets a little blurry. I’m drunk enough that moving from point to point feels like teleporting. We’re in the alley outside, by the bins. I can hear a rat. I can hear John breathing.
He touches me surgically. I feel him weighing my breast in his palm, searching for resistance, or something. He slips his hand under my dress, and squeezes my arse, seemingly satisfied when his fingers find a dimple on my left cheek. And he pulls away from me, with a satisfied hum. It’s all natural, I think to say. I don’t. It isn’t, really. It’s yoga and corsets and salads and hours of my time, to wake up in the morning and wake up like this.
‘I’ve got a hotel,’ he says. And we walk together. He’s staying somewhere expensive, by the river. I ask him if he always looks a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Sorry about that. That fake shit ruins it for me. It’s like… What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a photographer.’
‘I meant for a job.’
‘I’m a photographer.’