Thrill Seeker (23 page)

In the living room, on the mantelpiece, was a framed photo of the newly-wed Logans. She was a petite, red-haired woman in an empire-line dress while next to her, grinning broadly, his feet planted wide, was Baxter in a blue-green kilt and thick, cream socks. Damn, he looked good, so solidly sexy.

‘So what are you wearing under the kilt?’ I’d asked, picking up the picture.

‘Ach, that shouldn’t be there.’ Baxter hurried to take the picture from my hand then dropped it in a drawer as if the object meant nothing to him. ‘Sorry. You know how it is. Sometimes you see things so often, you stop actually seeing them. Hadn’t noticed it was still there. Must sort this place out.’

I’d swallowed his excuse hook, line and sinker. I had no reason to distrust him. As Baxter did in his professional life, I believed in the presumption of innocence in my personal life. But with hindsight, I can see our time together was littered with big, flashing warning signs I would have noticed if I hadn’t been so utterly besotted. And he kept promising it would get better once they’d sold the house and he’d got the promotion he was aiming for. Promises can carry you a long way if you believe in them.

In most other respects, as far as I knew, he was who he said he was: Baxter Logan, a criminal defence solicitor working for a law firm in Saltbourne. Mainly legal aid cases, he said. Low level stuff. Anti-social behaviour offences. I could Google him, as I had done before we met, and find a picture of him on the firm’s website and, elsewhere, his name on Saltbourne’s magistrates’ court duty solicitor rotas.

With Den, I had no starting point. And clearly I was becoming desperate, clutching at straws in a bid to find some route towards him and unravel the mystery. Going to the theatre with Liam made no practical sense but I’d taken that option because I had so little else to go on. Sometimes, my blood ran cold to think how much worse our confrontation with the thug might have been. We’d got off lightly. But most appallingly, though the encounter had been vile and terrifying, and memories of it made my blood boil, the incident wasn’t enough to deter me from trying to discover more about Den.

I wondered how low I might go to find him. I worried, too, that my sexual hunger for submission and suffering might be seeping out to infect my day-to-day life. I’d wanted to temporarily surrender my dignity and autonomy
to Den but now that opportunity had been denied me, was I subconsciously sacrificing valuable parts of myself in my pursuit of him? Was I trying to re-channel my needs in an unhealthy, dangerous manner? Was wounded pride making me want to challenge his rude exit from my life?

But amidst these worries about the wisdom or otherwise of choices I’d made, and might continue to make, was my stupid, stubborn obsession with Den. I couldn’t dislodge him. He’d taken root in my brain. Den. Was that even his name? Was it short for Dennis or Denham? Or could he actually be called, say, Darren or Gavin? Again, I wished I could erase him but that would entail erasing my memories of him in the theatre. I loved what I’d experienced there, and what I’d learned about my sexuality. I liked the pain and strictness more than I’d thought, although I missed the rough spontaneity of Baxter. I still wanted Den. I wasn’t proud of myself for that but, while my reason recognised I ought to forget him, my dark desires craved satisfaction. And that longing refused to be hushed by logic.

One night, drowning my sorrows with a bottle of Malbec, I emailed him again. This time, I told him he was a bastard, told him he was an emotionally stunted, arrogant, deceitful cunt. I dithered over delete or ‘send’. This could change everything. He might respond and explain himself, perhaps apologise. Or he would do nothing and my suspicions he was gone for good would be confirmed. If I hit ‘send’ I would be taking charge of the situation, expressing my feelings rather than nursing them alone. Would I regret it in the morning? Was my tone too aggressive? Should I save it in my ‘drafts’ folder and send when sober? On an impulse, I hit ‘send’.

I sat back, triumphant and relieved. Seconds later,
postmaster returned my message as undeliverable, informing me there was no such address as
[email protected]
. Defeated, frustrated and angry, not to mention drunk, I couldn’t let it drop. Minutes later, I got the idea to Google the meaning of ‘kagami’. I’d never thought to do that before, but then I hadn’t been quite so determined to flush him out until now. I put the term into the search box, clicked Wikianswers in my results, then felt distinctly unsettled when the site starkly informed me: It means mirror.

I wanted to ask, and what the Hell does that mean?

But search engines don’t know everything. Eventually, I went to bed feeling I was succeeding only in generating mysteries rather than solving them.

In the morning, slightly hungover, I checked the message I’d attempted to send and was relieved I’d been thwarted. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how upset I was. Once again, I decided to put more effort into forgetting him. I resolved to stop trying to track him down, to put the ugly episode with the thug behind me, and parcel it all up as belonging to a short period of my life where I was conned and I made mistakes. I hadn’t been running quite as regularly. I needed to get back into the habit. I always feel better about life when I’m running.

And all that might have happened if Liam hadn’t emailed me a link to a short news item in our local paper about The Hippodrome. ‘Thought you might be interested in this,’ he wrote. ‘Looks like good news.’

ENCORE FOR SALTBOURNE’S HIPPODROME
A new partnership between Save Our Old Theatres (SOOT) and the University of South East Arts (U-SEA) looks set to raise the curtain on Saltbourne’s Hippodrome
after winning a bid to forge community links through restoration of the derelict theatre.

The 120-year-old Hippodrome, once host to luminaries of the stage and music hall, has fallen into disrepair since closing its doors in 1987. The collaboration between SOOT and U-SEA will transform the theatre into a cultural, learning and community hub, bringing the arts to a wider audience and generating research activity in the university’s Department of Contemporary Arts.

Dr Dennis Jackson of U-SEA said, ‘We’re delighted to be working with SOOT and are looking forward to seeing this important building rise from its metaphorical ashes.’

SOOT and U-SEA are leasing the Grade-II-listed building from its current owners, Glender Mayfield, for a nominal rent and estimate the cost of repair to be at fifteen million pounds. Businesses and individuals wishing to contribute to the project are advised to contact project manager Eleanor Riley via SOOT’s website.

Dr Dennis Jackson.

I turned the name over in my head. Den Jackson. Dr Jackson. Was this him?

My fingers were trembling as I hurriedly tapped in ‘U-SEA’ and ‘Dennis Jackson’. I clicked the first link on the returned results. And oh boy, I’d hit paydirt. Gotcha Dr Dennis, snared by the internet!

A small recent photograph on his staff profile page accompanied text I could barely comprehend in my urgency to scan for the gist. Dr Dennis Jackson, senior lecturer, former dancer and performance artist. Now choreographer, writer and director. A particular interest in the drama of masks, Noh theatre, and community arts.

I clapped my hands and gave such a loud, gleeful laugh that I startled Rory from her sleep. I was back in business, already on a high and craving more details.

I Googled again and again, testing a range of permutations: Den, Dennis, SOOT, Noh, dance, Saltbourne, masks and so on. Information about him kept on tumbling and repeating. I pieced together the sort of haphazard half-history you get when you play Google detective, discovering nothing about his personal life but plenty about his career and the subscription charges I’d need to pay if I were to access journal articles he’d had published. I read about dance tours he’d been on several years ago, theatre companies he’d worked with, papers he’d given and performers he’d directed. On YouTube I watched clips of his work, hoping he might make a Hitchcockian cameo appearance, but he never did. He stayed behind the scenes, the man pulling the strings of performers creating strange, leaping contortions in productions described as ‘darkly humorous’ and ‘visually stunning’ but which looked solemn and pompous to me.

I didn’t know what I could do with this wealth of new information. Nonetheless I was delighted to have unmasked him again. He appeared to be a big fish in his small pond, relatively famous although not famous enough to get stopped in the street. I could see why he might not want his profile picture on a dating website. Then again, it could simply be that he was married. I mustn’t ever forget that as a possibility. Not that I was likely to.

After about forty minutes of Googling, I struck gold – a gold so precious it terrified me. In two days’ time, Dr Dennis Jackson was presenting at ‘Intercultural Theatre: bridges, borders and blurrings’, a one-day conference held at Falchester University. My heart quickened. Falchester was
thirty or forty miles away, relatively close. He was gaining materiality again. Would he get in touch? Where did he live anyway?

Those might have been the only questions I’d asked myself if I hadn’t continued to explore the conference website. My thirst for info was unquenchable so I checked the schedule for the day. When I saw the title of the paper he was giving, my heart beat faster while a sick sense of dread stole over me. ‘“One chance, one meeting”: trance, transformation and transience in Japanese Noh theatre.’

One chance, one meeting.

That was the exact phrase he’d used when terminating our time in the theatre. What did it mean? Had I been an unwitting participant in a piece of private performance art? Was this man incapable of separating fantasy from reality? Was he insane?

I felt as if I’d been the victim of a scam, although I didn’t have a clue what the scam could be. The emotions I’d been trying to escape, the anger, frustration and pain, came hurtling back. I didn’t think too long about my next step. Fired up with passion and determined not to be Den’s victim, I clicked on the tab marked ‘Register Now’.

Minutes later and forty pounds poorer, I was a conference delegate and, without having borrowed one single library book, an independent scholar.

Deliberately, I turned up late for registration. A young woman with a silvery-peach bob and a welcoming smile sat behind a long table dotted with oblong name tags. I was relieved to have found the conference venue after several nervous minutes of wandering down broad, clean paths set in clipped green lawns, praying I wouldn’t bump into Den. Here and there, taped to walls and trees, A4 signs in polypockets advertised the conference, corners of the pages fluttering in the October breeze. The words on the signs were printed in large black font while arrows giving directions were added in thin blue biro.

The campus, with its new buildings, architectural experiments, miniature bank and forking paths, felt like a toy village, a sanitised Utopia peopled by youthful creatures in layers of colourful clothing. What was the name of that town in
The Truman Show
? Seahaven, that was it. Except here, optimistic blue skies and sunshine were in short supply. Dark, bulky clouds crouched over distant hills, and the paths I walked along were scattered with autumn leaves. Did I look out of place? Everyone seemed to be carrying too much
stuff: books, laptops, bags. Should I have brought more stuff? When I’d read English Lit and History a decade or so ago in Manchester, had I looked as fresh-faced as some of these students?

Feigning confidence, I gave my name to the peachy-haired woman at the table, got ticked off her list and was handed my badge, a programme and a voucher for lunch. I briefly regretted signing up under my real name and hoped Den hadn’t spotted my badge when he’d collected his.

‘They’re about halfway through the first session,’ said the woman. ‘Some seats by the door if you want to sneak in.’

‘I’ll wait till the break, thanks.’

The conference suite, set back from the bland landscaping of the campus, was housed in the original college, an imposing nineteenth-century building whose air of gravitas contrasted starkly with the Fisher Price chumminess I’d just walked through. I went for coffee in a gaudily-furnished bar with pointy, leaded windows overlooking a cloistered courtyard flanked by a small chapel. I pretended to read a book, unable to concentrate on words but doing my best to look like an independent scholar rather than a stalker.

Should I have done this? Spending forty pounds on the event had been a spur of the moment decision. I could forgive myself for acting on a whim. But I’d followed up on that action by arranging a day off work then taking a train and a taxi to this remote campus set in rolling countryside. My actions were no longer quite so casual.

Was I losing perspective? Hunting someone down like this had to be the mark of a deranged person. But he’d hunted me down, hadn’t he? This had started with Den finding my address and breaking into my house. I was merely giving him a taste of his own medicine, although I
conceded he might not be quite so excited by my attentions as I’d been by his.

I wished my lust for him weren’t so strong, wished he hadn’t been so adept at catering to the drive I have to surrender and suffer. I remembered his parting kiss in the late-night street. ‘Let’s give it a few days,’ he’d said, ‘see how we feel.’ Why had he said that if he had no intention of getting in touch? Was he trying to get shot of me without a fuss? Had he meant it at the time and had since grown uncertain as to the wisdom of us continuing?

I set down my book and gazed out at the sombre cloisters, wondering if my sexuality was a blessing or a burden. A blessing, surely, if it gave me such deep pleasure. But a burden too if the specificity of my tastes meant my needs couldn’t easily be met. I only wanted to submit to a man who would regard me as his equal, even when I was on my knees, spattered with his come. I was starting to feel these men were as rare as hen’s teeth. I’d thought Den might be such a person, and in many ways I still did. He’d never treated me with kid gloves. He’d never doubted my lust or underestimated my hunger for submission. We were like sexual sparring partners. But he’d since blocked me out, his action implying my needs mattered less than his. Perhaps he’d underestimated my hunger, after all. Or perhaps he thought being sexually dominant gave him the right to call the shots beyond the bedroom.