MODERN STUDIES WAS PUBLISHED IN WHAT ARTISTS WEAR BY CHARLIE PORTER, PENGUIN, 2020

1987
Erotic charge, electric jolt of looking down and seeing an upright Tampax, index of her, analogue of wanting, vertical in the inside pocket of her blue 501 denim jacket, hanging on the back of her black plastic chair, negative shape, index of outside her, in class. Modern Studies. On the outside pocket of her jacket, a red hammer and sickle badge. On mine, a gold baby Lenin. 

1991
I’m standing behind the counter in Mace, watching a boy across the road. He’s standing outside Spar, in a navy blue sweatshirt. Two figures of indeterminable gender sit in symmetry, back to back. Sitting on invisible ground. Kappa, the sweatshirt says. Now the boy turns to go inside. The jeans say Pepe. 

Our gayness was unspoken between us, me and K, as we pushed and pulled at either end of the tea trolley. We were care assistants at Inchmarlo House Nursing Home. He had ginger hair like me but slightly darker, and the same pale lashes. Our sky blue polyester uniforms hung stiffly on our bodies. Mine buttoned all the way up the middle. His, being the male uniform, buttoned at the side. The torso fastening doubled back on itself. 

1993
These middle partings were exact. The line of the comb, splitting into two sections based on a grid like techno. Like the intensively farmed fields where I grew up. Crop rotation, divisions. Straight lines, precision. Austere like the minimalist techno. Except the techno had soul. The Presbyterians did not. Thank god for Detroit.

2010
I had a bit of a cataclysmic break up. I had really fucked up, was caught between two things. I didn’t know where to go, so I withdrew and rented this friend’s static caravan near Balfron for a month on my own, travelling on the bus into the city reluctantly only for my DJ shifts at night, then returning next morning to hide again. Splitting wood, watching The Wire, walking up and down the muddy track.

The caravan stood on the bank of a burn. It came with the name Nebraska. To get there you started down a sloping field that gradually narrowed like a funnel strung with pylons, then upstream river on your right, then across one of four fields depending on the bull. There was a “school for naughty boys” nearby. Nothing much else around except for a thousand year old yew tree that’s recorded in the Domesday Book. I never saw the boys from the school but I know that some would escape from time to time, because occasionally two adults would come past the window asking had I seen any boys down here. 

I got those A.P.C. jeans second hand somewhere. Or a friend gave them to me, I forget. They were faded, loose, a not very fashionable level of fade I guess, not like that heavy selvedge denim you get. I remember although it was a decade ago the hang of them on me, how they felt, getting looser on the waist while I was there. And the smell of me in them then, a break up smell, a slight animal smell of adrenaline and uncertainty and abstract lust. Sometimes not wearing underwear because maybe I didn’t have enough with me, and it was that point of turning autumn where it feels like a tap running hot and cold at once and not fully mixing. I remember the feeling of my hand down that waistband in the forest, and of someone else’s hand there in the city. I remember that in sharp focus. 

One of the mornings, I washed my clothes and hung them on a line suspended between silver birches. A couple of days later I couldn’t find the jeans, not anywhere. I asked the older dyke couple that lived in a caravan nearby, but I knew they didn’t have them. I still wonder where they went because I would like to have them now. I think those boys took them. 

2013
C lives in a flat with two friends on Woodlands Drive, back when people could afford to live west. She works in a coffee shop three streets away and comes home every evening smelling of milk, an invisible film of it. We’re kissing inside her bed. It’s winter, wet tenement windows. Dark a few hours and near dinner time. Tall windows and dark in the room. By coincidence we’re both wearing grey marl, also known as heather grey. Me a hoodie, both of us sweatpants. Hers Slazenger. A line of light is coming under the door from the hallway. And we’re kissing with all this grey marl bunched up around us. Hands down each other’s pants like boys. 

Sound of a key in the door, the line of light bursts wide. G calls out THREE LIVE CRABS and C comes right on those words. Her coming is drowned out by the wet bustle in the hallway receding into the kitchen, where later we all congregate to peer at them. G was working a temp job, receptionist at the Chamber of Commerce. They help businesses fill in licensing forms. There was a new seafood place opening. The man had come in a lot, nervous and confused about the paperwork. After the job was finished he came in with a box of twenty live crabs as a gift. G was tasked with getting rid of them. 

2015
Clothes are analogues of bodies. Not only because they are cut in the shape of a body, but because they are next to it. Next to it for a day, for five years, a decade. The smell from this person’s body, the person whose caravan it was, a person no longer in the world, stays on a grey wool herringbone scarf sealed inside a Ziploc bag for a few months, maybe a year. A recording of this person’s voice, sound of spit and of breath (the engine of her) gets transferred from one format to another for preservation across decades, obsolescence snapping at its heels, while the smell on the scarf dissipates. And it came to me with moths. I took it to the alterations place on Victoria Road, said can you darn the hole. The woman looked at me, said have you gotten rid of them, because I don’t want moths in my shop. I said yes. That turned out not to be true.