#82: It Stuck With Me – No. 04 (full piece: no paywall)
A vignette titled ‘After School Job’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory
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[Image description: Text ‘It Stuck With Me No. 04’ on a lilac background]
Almaz note:
I actually wrote about the particular flirtation I describe in the story below, in the second half of a piece for British Vogue (‘What It’s Like To Have Sex With A Man Twice Your Age’), which was published five years ago. Since then, I’ve sharpened my ability to describe and analyse interpersonal dynamics, and I think this new version you’re about to read offers a more nuanced account of what was really going on back then.
I’m publishing the full piece – without a paywall – for this mailout, so that you guys can follow my thoughts to the end. Early readers of this piece have told me that the way I describe the dalliance has made them uneasy… let me know what you think in the comment section below.
(And I’ll be re-looking at the situationship I wrote about in the first half of that British Vogue piece in my next essay in the ‘It Stuck With Me’ series.).
After School Job
When I was 14, I got an after-school job in a little stationery shop. I liked being there. Stacking pens and erasers, unspooling ribbons, organising the packets of greeting cards in their thin plastic sleeves. The shop was small enough that I could stand in one spot and see everything.
There was a regular customer who owned a shop nearby. A man probably pushing forty with a partner and little daughter. He’d crash into the shop with an energy that made me straighten up and give him my attention, almost before I’d even fully registered the sound of the door swinging open.
He was loud, maybe obnoxious, but I liked how his presence filled the space. I liked the way he bought things in a rush, how his hands, broad and slightly rough, scooped up reams of printer paper and let them tumble onto the counter. I thought him ever so handsome. I would stop whatever I was doing, mid-stack, mid-fold, mid-swipe of a cloth across the glass displays, to chat to him.
It felt like the most natural thing in the world, this sudden pausing, this deliberate redirection of attention. He’d ask me about my weekend. I’d say I had done violin stuff. Then, as now in adulthood, I spent a lot of time doing orchestral playing. I could tell that he was intrigued and impressed by what I did in my spare time. Not just by the classical music, but by the seriousness of it, the discipline. I picked up on it in the way his eyebrows rose, the way he smiled before his next question, and the humour and jokes he made that were never patronising.
At some point, I realised that he and I were playing some kind of game. It wasn’t something I would have been able to put into words, not then, but I felt it.
The people who owned the shop called him my “friend [redacted]”, making sure I heard the italics and quote marks in their tone of voice . The word “friend” didn’t quite fit, but it was the word “friend”, along with their knowing smiles, that made something unspoken into something manageable, something allowable. Code for, “We see it, too, and we won’t say more.”
Their calling him my “friend” was part of that quiet, ambient training that girls receive; the way adults teach us, through tone and raised eyebrows and implication, how to interpret attention. How to recognise it, how to feel lucky to receive it, how to carry its weight, without actually naming it at all.
I ended up working there for years and years. Right until after I sat my A-Levels at 18. And so, as the years went by, he and I became very familiar with each other.
He noticed what I wore, which was always a little offbeat. I’d save up to buy clothes from PunkyFish – I loved how their tops often featured zip-off sleeves or asymmetrical hemlines, or that iconic ska two-tone check pattern. Then, as now, I liked the act of assembling an outfit, the way it made my personality feel visually legible to others. Back then, my outfits would often feature layered fishnet tights in clashing colours, each with a different-sized weave, paired with high-top Converse and a micro-mini skirt of some kind.
I was slim, but my thighs were thick and my hips wide; curvy in a way that marked my West African roots, and stood in contrast to my white peers. Sometimes, I’d ‘accidentally’ drop a pack of pens on the floor, and bend down ever so slowly to retrieve them, knowing exactly where his eyes would be. He wouldn’t say anything, but he would raise an eyebrow, and I would smile back.
One weekend, when I’d already been working at the stationery shop for a couple of years, I was walking past his shop, heading to hang out at a friend’s house, when he must have caught a glimpse of my legs; the bright flash of neon pink tights from out beneath a corduroy micro-mini skirt. He stepped outside and let out a sharp, deliberate wolf-whistle.
Shocked, I turned around. But once I saw that the sound had come from him, I grinned. He’d made the unspoken thing that we shared, suddenly loud.
“Oh! It’s you! Hiya, [redacted].”
“Love the skirt,” he said.
And then, the wink.
Then, as now, I relish being winked at. It’s quick, light, and quietly flattering. There’s something thrilling about it because it doesn’t demand a response. It just lands and everyone moves on.
Another time, in the shop, I was wearing a striped knitted dress, which ballooned out below its empire waist. He eyed it with amusement, “Oooh, I like yer dress.”
I twirled a little, feigning bashfulness, “I call it my maternity outfit.”
“Are yer pregnant?”, his voice was light, teasing. A joke.
I gasped, in mock-horror, my hand flying to my chest, “No!”
He laughed. I laughed. And then we didn’t. The moment stretched. I held his gaze a little too long, just long enough to let my mind slip into wondering. Wondering what it would be like... His hands, his mouth, his voice, low and close to my ear.
I wondered if he was wondering the same thing…
I liked the attention he gave me. I liked the way I could tilt my head just so, could let my eyes linger on his handsome face a fraction of a second longer than strictly necessary, and could turn a small moment into something charged.
The boys at school didn’t engage with me like this. They were busy kicking footballs at each other’s heads and circling the same type of popular girls, who were blonde and glossy and easy to decode, with their chatter about shopping malls and alco-pop flavours. I simply wasn’t on the boys’ radar. I didn’t have the right hair, the right skin, and didn’t present my body in the way they thought they liked female bodies to be presented.
But this man looked. He noticed. And when he spoke to me, it was with a kind of attentiveness I found addictive.
Finally, I moved on from my little job to pastures new. He had never once touched me. And honestly, I was disappointed. I didn’t want him to take me home, or ruin his life or anything. I just wanted to stretch the moments where I felt seen, felt special.
I didn’t have the language for any of it back then. But I did understand how to play my part in our little game. A flirtation that never crossed a line but hovered near it, one that taught me how to play with proximity, how to translate attention into some sort of legibility of selfhood.
But it’s hard to separate what I actually wanted from what I was learning to want. Especially when you’ve been taught that being looked at is a kind of proof that inappropriate attention means you exist.
There is a twist to this story.
I still see this man ever so occasionally, as he still has his shop in my hometown. If I happen to walk past and he’s there, I’ll wave to him. I might see him in the supermarket, where we’ll hug hello and make small talk. Would I ever ask him whether, looking back, he thinks our “friendship” was inappropriate? No, I wouldn’t.
Not because I don’t wonder, but because I’m not sure what such a question could yield. What would I even want from him? A confession? An apology? A shared acknowledgment of the tension that pulsed between us?
I feel, even now, the pull to protect the story. To explain and justify his actions. To shape it into something harmless, something mutual, something that I chose. To tell it in a way that avoids the more difficult questions about power, permission, and the ease with which we excuse the behaviour of men; especially when we’ve loved the way they made us feel visible.
Previous posts in the ‘It Stuck With Me’ series:
In this vignette, ‘The Mooning’, I’m at a sleepover party at my friend’s 10th birthday. Her parents run a pub, so they live in the flat above. As usual, all of us girls are up to mischief:
In this vignette, ‘A Single Playing Card’, I’m nine or 10 years old and together, my primary school pals and I find a playing card in the dirt. It’s pornographic and we are stunned:
In the vignette, ‘School Disco’, it’s the summer of 1997 and I’m having the best time dancing to Hanson’s ‘MmmBop’, the Grease MegaMix and T-Spoon’s ‘Sex on the Beach’ (inappropriate!):
[Image description: Text ‘PRODUCED BY’]
I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
Visit my Work With Almaz page 😃
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Please do ‘like’ this post via the heart icon (❤️) that appears at the very top and bottom of this post, as it’s the best way to help others find my work.
If this project is something that you value, and want it to continue, readers are encouraged to upgrade to paid. With a paid subscription you’ll gain access to the content beyond the paywall and unrestricted access to the full archive of this newsletter.
Paid subscriptions are either billed monthly at £3.79 (less than a coffee ☕️) or annually at £34.99.
If you would prefer to make a one-off donation, feel free to send a contribution via PayPal.
You can also show your enjoyment without spending £££, by liking, commenting, restacking via Notes, or just generally sharing 😃
Beautifully written, Almaz. I like your openness in questioning your impulse to defend this memory. That feeling of being seen and liking it at this age is so familiar, and so fraught with danger.