He had to be going to see her. I was seething. I waited for a minute and then I left by the side door. There was a bike rack at the back of the building, I crossed over, walked a little way down the street and stood in the shadow of a tall hedge in someone’s garden. I could see Ifan unlocking his bike, putting on his lights, then he made a call, got on his bike and cycled down the street towards me. I moved further into the garden waiting for him to pass.
He stopped right by me. Got off his bike and smiling, stood by the garden gate. ‘You know, Anya, you’ll never make MI5.’
‘Maybe I wanted you to see me,’ I said. I didn’t believe that but I said it.
‘Maybe you did. But for what?’
He leant his bike against the wall and came towards me and we stood in the shadows looking at each other. He moved even closer but just as I thought he was going to kiss me, he turned round and said he’d be late. He got back on his bike. I said, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ That stopped him, he turned round, looked at me for a long while, or that’s what
it seemed. ‘Maybe someday I will,’ he said. ‘When the time’s right.’
‘It is right.’
He laughed. ‘Not yet it isn’t.’
‘So when?’
‘I’ll know when and so will you.’
He cycled off. I shouted after him, ‘Enjoy yourself wherever you’re going.’ He waved and disappeared down the road. Another wasted opportunity. I should be awarded a prize for messing things up.
The next two weeks I made sure I was busy at work, meeting new clients, making appointments to see designers, but my mind was never far from thinking about Ifan. It felt like he was playing games but I didn’t know the rules. The last meeting with him had annoyed me but at least we hadn’t fallen out.
When I wasn’t thinking about Ifan, I was thinking about JF but I was getting nervous. The more I upped the ante, the closer he’d get to cracking up, and the greater the risk he’d contact the police for help. But knowing that didn’t stop me.
The following Saturday I’d been up early shopping along Oxford Street and I was on my way to meet Maddy when life presented a delicious opportunity. It was a coincidence that, if planned, would have required the skill and split-second timing of a trapeze artist. As I passed Euston Station I saw JF walking on the opposite side of the road. I was heading in the same direction and walking parallel with him. He was accompanied by a young woman and laughing at something she said. Even from where I was, I could see she was well and truly enamoured with him. She was looking up at him as if he was the most interesting man in the world.
They swung into the Quaker Meeting Rooms. Was she his latest conquest? Had he seduced her under the same guise he’d used with me, claiming to know what she wanted? A wave of repulsion passed through me. I wasn’t going to
miss this opportunity of harassing him, although how I didn’t quite know.
I threaded my way across the Euston Road traffic and stood outside the meeting rooms. A poster announced a conference, called ‘Key Concepts for Therapists and Trainees’. I ran my eye down the speakers. None of them meant anything to me with the exception of Mr Jason Fellowes. He was talking on ‘The Erotic Transference’. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was a moment of serendipity that only my alter-ego, Anya, could have organised. I walked into the foyer and hung around.
When the crush died down, I spoke to the woman on reception. ‘I wonder if it’s possible to register for the conference. I tried yesterday but the lines were always busy so I thought I’d just turn up and see if it was possible.’ I smiled sweetly, ‘That’s of course, if there are vacancies.’
The woman had grey hair in a bun and was wearing a long, multi-coloured skirt and flat lace-up shoes. She looked over the top of her glasses at me. I seemed to be specimen number one. I looked at her hoping she wasn’t into mind reading, mine in particular. Her dress sense was ‘Charity Shop’ minus the charity. An odd ensemble of ill-matching clothes, and looking so severe she reminded me of the therapist in Finsbury Park, the one I’d walked out on.
‘Which organisation are you training with?’ she asked.
I blagged it. I said the first thing that came into my head. It happened to be where JF had trained and it had jumped off the poster, the one I’d just read. ‘I’m applying for the London School of Transferential Phenomena. I’m waiting to hear from them actually, you know, if I get in.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s very popular. One of the speakers represents that organisation.’ She looked down her list of names. ‘If you can wait until just after the start, I’ll be able to see who hasn’t turned up and I’m sure I can find a place for you.’ She smiled.
‘That’s so kind of you. I’m most grateful.’ She wasn’t as bad as expected. I walked away to the other side of the
room and rang Maddy. I told her I was going to be very late and whispered, ‘Wait till you hear this.’ She wanted to know straightaway but I told her I couldn’t speak right now.
‘Anya Morgan.’ I turned round. The woman on reception was waving a programme at me and smiling. ‘Several people haven’t arrived, so do go in. You can pay me later.’
I thanked her and walked into the hall. It was packed. On a raised dais behind a table was the chairperson. He was dressed in a grey suit, to give himself gravitas presumably, and in the middle of a welcoming speech. He was impressively tedious and self-congratulatory, so much so I felt like laughing. It felt as if I were back in the classroom in front of a particularly uninspired teacher, who covered their lack of talent and personality with verbal layers of pomposity.
I looked round the room for a seat and found one towards the back at the end of the line. I had no idea how I was going to use this opportunity but being able to make a quick getaway seemed a good idea. I looked down the programme for JF. He was on just after lunch and his event was billed as a ‘masterclass’.
Out of curiosity I listened to the first two talks which were about the different trainings and the personal qualities necessary for becoming a therapist. I didn’t find either interesting, maybe because I had no desire to become one, and for another, everyone looked intense and lacking in humour. They also dressed badly, so for an hour I amused myself by imagining them in some outfit I’d designed. At the coffee break I made a break for freedom, and checked out the book shops off Tottenham Court Road, planning to return just after lunch.
I was late and JF had started by the time I took my seat. He was on stage and in the middle of an introduction to ‘transference’, running through its origins, which apparently started with Freud. Even I’d heard of him. Sitting opposite and acting as his stooge was the young woman I’d seen earlier. She was very obligingly asking him leading questions which he answered unfalteringly. Well rehearsed, I thought, let’s hope you get your reward in heaven and not on your back.
He moved on to present-day usage, giving several case studies, his point being that love and sexual feelings were imagined by the client and little to do with the therapist’s own behaviour. It was all so perfect and all so wrong and the more I listened, the angrier I got. When he commented how seductive female clients could be, I’d had enough. I sprang out of my seat, brushing away the microphone someone passed me. I hadn’t planned it, it just happened.
‘Does transference justify rape?’ I shouted. ‘Does it justify seduction? Why do you portray the therapist as the innocent victim of a powerful client? The reverse is true.’
There was a silence. People turned their heads to look at me and then at each other, shuffling their papers with embarrassment, some looking disapproving, a few smirking.
For a moment JF looked nervous but not for long. ‘I’m sorry I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’d be happy to speak to you later.’
‘You know very well what I’m talking about, but this audience doesn’t. Tell them the truth, Mr Fellowes. Tell them what happen
s in your sessions.’
The chairperson leant forward, whispering to him. Two porters appeared, took hold of my arms and bundled me outside. As I left the room, I shouted again, ‘Check the web, look at “Fifty ways of getting his way”, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.’
JF got out of his seat, jumped off the dais, and was making his way to the exit, when I broke loose from the two porters and stood blocking his exit. I was quick. I said, ‘You can run but you can’t hide. I know where you are and every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.’ He pushed past me. He was wild-eyed.
He was followed by a woman from the conference, who also seemed in a hurry to leave, but she came towards me and
stopped. ‘Go for it, I couldn’t agree more.’ That’s all she said, then she left the building.
I was so touched by her support, I was close to tears. The two porters were still standing by me, waiting for my next move. ‘Don’t worry, I’m going,’ I said, and the lines of the poem ‘Her Kind’ came to me. ‘A woman like that is not a woman quite, I have been her kind.’ Still shaking, I left and caught the bus to Maddy.
When I told her what had happened, she thought it funny. But, she asked, had it achieved what I wanted, his public humiliation? I wasn’t sure. Maybe he felt safe among his colleagues and I’d be judged as an embittered ex-client and as someone not quite right in the head. I thought more about it. I wanted something spectacular, something which would simultaneously humiliate him and catch the imagination of onlookers and I was prepared to wait until an idea came to me. I didn’t have to wait long.
I returned to observing him at Wigmore Street. He’d changed his routine, probably to avoid me, and because I kept out of sight he must have assumed I was off his trail. How wrong he was. It was easy to conceal myself amongst the crowds of the West End, but also I’d borrowed a bike from a friend and now wore a cyclist’s helmet and cycling gear. Armed with a street map, I’d stop opposite where he worked and pretend to study my mobile. I passed off as a ditsy tourist and since my head and face were obscured I was unrecognisable. I got to know his hours.
Wednesdays he always worked late, very late. I knew he was in the building because I could see his light, and when he left round about ten, he’d lock up, and walk towards the West End. What for? I had to know. The third week, I followed him. I left my bike locked to railings and followed on foot. He began walking towards Oxford Circus and from there made his way down the back streets until he arrived at Dean Street in Soho. It was easy keeping him in sight. He never looked over his shoulder.
Soho at night is unbelievably tacky. It’s the underbelly of London, full of tourists and sad, desperate-looking men on the hunt for sex, either by themselves or in groups. It’s London at its most ugly and rapacious. I guessed what was coming and I was right. His interests were in the numerous strip clubs, pole dancing clubs, and ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. Here he paused to look at the young women whose bright, brittle smiles did nothing to conceal their inner emptiness. Spray-tanned orange with augmented, unnatural-looking breasts and wearing badly fitting bras, they stood in doorways on display, supposedly enticing, their arms folded, vacant looking, bored, high on drugs to ease the pain of collusion with a system designed to profit from their bodies. Sad, depressed women with few choices, imported like cattle from Eastern Europe and with nowhere to go. I stayed just long enough to see him enter one of the clubs and then left. I’d seen enough and couldn’t bear watching the exploitation of my own sex.
I returned home and sat thinking. JF’s whole persona and attitudes towards women disgusted me and seeing what he got up to when alone, made me even more vengeful. I wanted to hit him with something dramatic, something dark, something he wouldn’t forget. A plan began formulating in my mind. It took a while but by dawn I knew what I was going to do and how to do it. If he had a voyeuristic interest in women’s bodies, I’d give it to him, but it would be a version he wouldn’t like.
I remembered my first foray into buying underwear, when the woman in Marks told me about burlesque dancers. Since then, the idea of the burlesque fascinated me to the point I’d used some of the ideas in my designs, mainly for shock value. It was a paradox. Women selling sex in a highly stylised way, emphasising their bodies and their sexuality but without any resolution, seemed to me an ironic comment on men’s lust. Meanwhile they were being sent up.
I began investigating the ‘burlesque stripogram’. The agencies selling these services stress how much ‘fun’ they are, but like I say, the ‘fun’ lies with the stripper. She controls when and how to humiliate. The joke is on men.
My plan involved one of these burlesque dancers. I was about to expose JF’s hypocrisy with a dash of humour. It was a little like defrocking a priest in public and the thought of it amused me no end. I employed a stripper from an agency, a stripper whose specialism was burlesque. She called herself Cherie Dear and she had the right mix of attributes; a sophisticated veneer concealing the underlying vulgarity, humour and brashness of burlesque. An out-of-work actress with a liking for comedy, she based her act on the night clubs of the thirties and forties.
It had to be carefully planned and there had to be an element of surprise. I rang Ifan, reminded him he’d offered to help and said I was ready. I asked if he’d disconnect the security light and alarm system and set up a simple sound system in the reception area.
‘Okay, but what’s that for?’ he asked.
‘Rather not say.’
‘And I’d rather not do.’
‘Why not?’
‘On a need to know basis. Those are my terms,’ he said. I sighed. ‘Okay, I plan to humiliate JF at his place of work with a burlesque stripper.’
He laughed, then said, ‘Sounds good to me. Just deserts and all that. You’re on, leave it to me and I’ll call you when I’m ready.’
It was as easy as that. He saw it as a challenge. Two weeks later, I was watching a film on television when the phone rang.
‘Anya, are you ready?’
‘Ready? For what?’
‘To break in. You can be my apprentice.’
He’d changed his mind about me going. I was ready. I’d been waiting for this moment. I pulled on my stalking outfit. Black jeans, black motorbike jacket, black beret. I stuffed into my backpack disposable gloves, a Swiss Army Knife, my mask, my poem, my Coco Mademoiselle and my beautiful Anya bag.
We were going separately. Ifan would cycle. I’d catch the bus. We arranged to meet near Wigmore Street. Ifan was dressed in black too, wearing a hoody which he pulled up and over his head. Like me, he carried a backpack for his gear.
It was almost midnight. There were a few people around but no one looked twice at us. We must have looked normal. Ifan had done his preparation. He’d called in earlier that week and told them he was doing a safety check on the electrics. He’d disabled the security light and the alarm system. It’s amazing how trusting people can be. We looked around. The street was clear. We walked quickly up the front steps.
I’d expected Ifan to pick the locks but he didn’t have to, he had a set of firemen’s keys which could open any locked door. He’d acquired them, he told me, through his contacts but he had to return them within twenty-four hours. I didn’t know such things existed, but they were about to be put to an illegal use. After trying several keys, one worked and we could enter the building. It was creepy. We didn’t put on the lights but used large flashlights to get around. I showed him the reception room and left him setting up the sound system. That had to be concealed.
I went to JF’s room. I was curious. I wanted to see what it was like without him. I tried the door. He’d locked it. I went back to Ifan, got the bunch of keys and tried each of them until I found the one that fitted. Once inside, I walked over to a large cupboard. It was unlocked and contained a new looking computer. I took it out. Opened it. There was no password. It was dead easy to look
at the files and I could see he’d written about each of his clients but out of respect to their privacy, I skipped reading them.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Here was an opportunity to cause more trouble. I took it. An idea had come and it was one that made me smile. I walked back to reception and asked Ifan whether he’d seen a printer. He was fixing a cheap music player at the top of a cupboard and placing a box to the front of it.
‘I think that’s one.’ He gestured with his head across the room. ‘Why do you want one?’
‘You’ll see.’
I examined the printer. It was impressive with an industrial capacity to churn out a thousand copies of a document. It must have served all the computers in the building. I set it to print the maximum number of copies, removed the paper tray, and returned to JF’s room. I typed out on his computer the lyrics of ‘Every Breath You Take’. I clicked print, but not start. I’d wait until Ifan had finished and we were ready to leave.
I pulled out my Coco Mademoiselle from my backpack and sprayed the fragrance around the room. I knew it was a desecration of a beautiful perfume but I didn’t care too much at that point. I wanted him to know it was me, that there was no let up, that I was still around, still active, still persecuting, still out to get him. For my finale, I left the crumpled mask of Munch’s The Scream on his desk. Then I left. I locked the door behind me.
Ifan had just finished setting up the sound system when I walked into the reception. ‘Try this, point it towards that cupboard, then press.’ He handed me the remote control, ‘Now press.’ The music flooded out. I’d loaded on to a USB some tracks for the stripper. It worked but it was too quiet. He showed me how to make it louder.
We’d finished and stood looking at each other. I threw my arms around him and kissed him. It was the kiss of a friend not of a lover but enough to startle him. ‘Thanks,’ I said. He looked astonished. ‘Let’s go now.’
My Name Is Echo Page 25
