Not a bird, not a boy
on being both
Boy ish
They’re playing Stan the acoustic piano version at Islington Vue. I am ascending, I text, followed by another when I reach the top. To the future.
Maybe it’s the planetarium ceiling, or the infinite possibilities of snack-drink-main, popped corn blue isomalt, moana-themed drinking cups and m&ms separated by colour delivered down pompidou-style shoots…
My companion arrives a few minutes later, in the same pair of ASICS he wore when we first met, or didn’t, but then did. A shade or two away from the pair I spotted on a kind-eyed, spectacled gent in the doorway of a café one hot day, some months before he would become my housemate’s boyfriend. The same style of trainer that I don’t own even though I think of them as perfect accompaniment to all clothing, even the sort you wouldn’t think they’d work with at all; underwear, bikini, ballgown, dressing gown missing its belt, with nothing worn beneath.
Despite all this, I do not own them, I move around and near them. I buy old pairs, worn shoes, those often in need of immediate re-glue.
Oh boy! It’s one rule for you and another for me. This kind of thinking was to blame for the judgement I laid around the necks of the graphic designers who arrived at my place of work - a co-working space - in cycling gear, helmets clacking against the door as it closed behind them. Those smooth-skinned ex-ravers, or wealthy primogenitors, posing convincingly as however they wished to be seen. Those who needed us to serve and flatter them, clean their mess and complement their dress sense. The lack of clarity over which one at what time caused a sort of whiplash; notes were left on the front desk reading i hate all men.
Nature flirts with nurture, and I’ve long been brushing up against the boys. The one who fed me honey on top of the metal counter, and dressed in the morning playing Hall & Oates from his phone. The pale eyed, skinned, and haired boy I chased around the playground, they way he wore his socks one up, one down. Jeremy Irons in despair, my brother’s red hair, the way they wear their way through the world, dials to move away and toward.
There are constant inputs, sights, suggestions and sounds. On the bike I am free, genderless, wind through my girl hair, boy feet pushing pedals. It allows me to be present in practicality; I hang keys from my belt loop, forgetting concentrated piss-taking of those carabiner-toting posers who did the same.
To be hit off my bike was to be knocked back into my in-between body, a hole torn in the safety net. It was to have my wings clipped, returned to ground by a large hand at my forehead. Down to the truth of things, speed halved to the pace everyone else was going, scheduled for underground tunnels, or traipsing on my toes for miles. You are alive, it said, a girl trying to be somewhere two boroughs away, get on a bus or bust!
I go to a street party, and I go to a show. At the rave, everyone is wearing trainers and smiling, clouding only with a filthy enough bassline, and it’s approving mock-scowl. The group which greets me are all wearing black tshirts. I have paired mine with a silver necklace looped through so that it hangs at the side, a charm for my arm. Below, a sarong, tied at one side, the studs on my bikini bottoms are visible to the looking eye. But I have bared feet in ballet shoes, dancer in longing, applying a toe to a cigarette butt. It is summertime, I am baring something, suggesting above these shoes there may be a woman and her legs.
We are mixed, in motion, but everyone is safe. Safer on the slope beside the Central Post Office, facing toward a huge honeycomb soundsystem than on the floors, say, of Jay Jopling’s cube.
Georg Baeslitz paints feet into every frame: free and wild for him, trapped in heels for his wife. We decide that he paints them the right way up in the studio, flipping before framing, so that they dangle from the top as though suspended between states. Being returned to the ground floor, from the confusion of difference, devotion, love.
This bike girl is a frog prince. This is a non-academic conversation about gender. This is focusing on the clothes, wondering whether I want to be them or love them, and that maybe it’s both. This is someone saying tomboy is back! and my response as to how they might know. This is me dressing like a girl in summertime, only for the winter to layer over the cold parts, and my spare energy on making up with smiles.
This, is an invitation toward simplification in a complicated life. This is The Beano offering Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx. In the last room before the exit, there had been one eagle. Wings brushed into being, tips stretching red and outward. Fierce, free and faceless. Not a boy, but a bird.
In the Rearview in which we borrow from the recent past
➳ Nose to tail - Fergus at 60, a good man in a dark industry, a hymn to tree-less Tiree
➳ Bbc archive, baby drinks beer. Docklands then, before it was the glass matchbox world of now.
➳ This paragraph conjuring the eternal mandate of judging others to keep thyself warm, from a 1992 book on Nico’s final attempt at touring:
The guys munch gum. The girls zip and unzip their designer flying jackets. Vampettes with blonde hair and red lips, bored to the back teeth with life at twenty. Their entire aesthetic was built upon a thumb-flick through some style magazine and the first Joy Division album. Only if you set yourself on fire, naked, could you expect even an arched eyebrow. The guys would carry on chewing, occasionally mentioning who they’d seen the night before that was better, who they were going to see at the Milkweig on Saturday that would be better still. We were just Tuesday night at the Paradiso.
