* * * *
The next day I called the office, but I got an answerphone the first six times, and a flustered-sounding woman the seventh. She told me that Dexter was taking a few day’s leave—if I wanted to book him, I had to leave details. There was no point doing that, so I apologised and told her it was personal and, as a last desperate gambit, asked her for his mobile number or email. Of course, she didn’t give it.
The apartment fell into dusty disarray, the gym visits went by the board. I reverted to a diet of convenience food and alcohol while my deadlines danced out of sync and merged in my head. Nothing was real to me but Dexter, and his whereabouts, and his problem with me. I walked the streets all day, just looking for a glimpse of him that never came. I thought and thought and thought back to everything he’d ever said, everything I’d ever seen, in a mammoth effort to comb my brain for clues. On the fourth day, I remembered seeing him with a Sainsburys bag. There wasn’t a Sainsburys near here, but there was one, five miles away, out by the new housing estates. Perhaps he shopped there. Perhaps…but my thoughts were barely seconds old before I had moved to the door, grabbed my handbag and made a mental map of how best to get there.
It was one of those super-hyper-mega-markets, this Sainsburys, with all kinds of extraneous services like a dry cleaners and a travel agent. There were many entrances, but only one exit, which was heartening—I supposed the store detectives wouldn’t like it any other way. Listen to me, thinking like a detective! I’d obviously been bitten by the private eye bug.
I spent the afternoon moving from the magazine rack to the photo booth to the change machine, occasionally risking the open space by the trolley park when I thought I was about to be challenged by a bemused employee. Streams of shoppers passed me and I managed to amuse myself, at least for the first hour, by studying human nature as seen in the supermarket—bored children, harassed mothers, chattering old ladies, truanting teens swearing at the store detectives for not having ID when they tried to buy beer. After an hour, though, the repetition of it all started to wear me down. What was I doing here? What would I do if I saw Dexter anyway? Rush up and gush, “Oh, fancy seeing you here!” I think not.
But suddenly I was forced to put my plans into focus. There, at the self-checkout, buying a newspaper and a box of green tea bags, was an unmistakable tall figure, all in black, glasses glinting under the unforgiving glare of the strip lights. My fingers lost their nerves, and the magazine story I’d been pretending to flick through—‘I gave birth on a mountainside with a broken pelvis’—blurred before my eyes. Just as well I didn’t want to read it. The magazine fell to the floor, and I left it there, scurrying off to the shelter of the photo booth, praying that Dexter had no plans to renew his passport today.
I saw his feet, shiny polished black brogues, pass by and I gave him half a minute before I darted out from behind the curtain and followed his helpfully high-set head through the crowds on the edge of the carpark, out of the pedestrian exit and into the newly built maze of the housing estate.
The place didn’t seem very Dexterous, I thought, flitting after him through identikit streets and squares of faux-Georgian houses and flats. I had thought he would live in one of those warehouse conversions in the East End, or maybe a big glassy tower by the river. This all seemed very suburban and drab, despite the cheery terracotta-and-cream exterior paintwork and the sloping roofs over the front doors and the effortful landscaping.
Dexter rounded a corner and let himself into a tall, narrow building that seemed to be split into about six flats. They didn’t look very large—I guessed he lived alone. I saw him, through smoked glass, unlocking a ground floor door. The ground floor was good. I could lurk around the windows, under the cover of the gathering dusk, maybe take a peek inside, though they all seemed to have blinds drawn against them.
I scurried across a patch of young grass and sat down beneath one of the windows that faced into the square. I thought it was a kitchen window, for no better reason than its proximity to a large waste pipe, which could have meant nothing. I waited for a light to illuminate some of the grass, but when it did, it was at the side of the house and I had to creep round. There was a tiny crack between the window frame and the blind—if I was very, very careful, I could just fit my eye in that space and take a look…yes. He wasn’t in the room. It looked like a bedroom. I could see fitted wardrobe doors and a small section of neatly tucked dark bed linen. There might have been a paisley pattern on the duvet cover
, but it was hard to tell because the bulb wasn’t very strong, sixty watt at most, and…
I screamed.
A pair of hands caught me around the waist and I was swivelled round to face the middle button of Dexter’s shirt—black, for a change—before daring to lift my eyes to what I presumed would be a face of fury.
“Lara,” he hissed. “What is going on?”
Without waiting for a reply, he dragged me through the open door of the block and then into his flat. Even though I was shaking and scared and fighting a massive urge to kick myself to death, I noticed that his flat was very, very tidy and clean, shortly before I was flung onto a pale grey leather sofa and encouraged to explain myself.
“I followed you,” I managed to say, my voice all flutey and shrill.
“Why?”
“Because I like you…I…can’t let you…I miss you.”
“It’s only been four days.”
“You don’t want to see me again and I’m…” I looked away, over to a computer desk and a pot plant. “Gutted.”
Dexter wouldn’t sit down. I wished he would. The way he loomed, stiff-backed and straight-necked, was so very unnerving.
“You’ll have to go,” he said, though it seemed to take him a long time to formulate the sentence—grounds for hope?
“I don’t want to go.”
“Look, there are websites that can hook you up with other people who like spanking…”
“I don’t want other people. I want you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Don’t tell me what I want!” I bawled, suddenly demented with anger. “I might be rubbish at making lists but I know when I’ve got the hots for someone!”
He removed his spectacles, as if the force of my crazed shouting had blown them off his face, and stared. If I burst into tears, I thought, would that make things worse? Probably. Too late now, though.
“Oh God. Emotion,” he muttered, but then the sofa tilted me sideways, into him, as he sat down beside me and placed an awkward arm around my shoulder. “Lara, shhh. Control yourself.”
“I don’t want to control myself! I want you to control me!”