Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  ‘I AM 5’

  I am lost. A child’s birthday message. Another unexpected puzzle.

  ‘Can we fix it?’ Bob the Builder asks me with his beady eyes.

  Yes, we can, Bob. Yes, we can. We just have to work out how.

  I put Bob on the table, then go back into my pocket and latch on to the elusive hair band and use it to turn my sweaty mass of blonde into a ponytail. Once it’s up, I stare into the computer screen and wait for the battery to die and everything to go black.

  5

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 52%

  Time remaining: 2hr 23min

  I lie in the long grass, trapped. The train comes towards me, but it swirls through the air until it is upside down, unstoppable. I close my eyes to brace for the impact but when I open them again it has peeled off the tracks and into the sky, closing in on a gigantic burnt orange sun until the two collide in an explosion of bright white that is blinding. And in the centre of that sun, bearing over my beaten body, is a dark figure.

  When I next open my eyes, I am back in my black prison. The train, the sun, the sky, the figure – part of a broken dream or separate fractures of my twisted memory fighting for prominence?

  I do not know. All I know is I am back in my cell and I have woken into a recurring nightmare. My unwanted reality is confirmed by the already familiar line of light goading me from the other side of the room. The darkness, my captor, the key, the handcuffs, the table and chair, the bucket and bottle and Bob the Builder – it all exists. It is all happening.

  I bring my hands to my eyes and stain them with fresh tears. It wasn’t a dream. I am still here in this hell.

  There are notable discrepancies between my first and second awakenings, however. My left arm is free of its shackle and the rattle in my head has gone, replaced by a heaviness that no painkiller could kill. I feel like my brain has been injected with a concrete mix, but at least it’s a step beyond dizziness and confusion; the effects of whatever he gave me to get me here are slowly, but painfully, dying out.

  The light across the room reveals the laptop, like me, has risen from the dead. The room went black when the battery died, but I do not recall crawling back to the bed. A new fear grips me: is he manipulating my sleep patterns? Perhaps the explanation is more simple: I am just exhausted. The room is hot and heavy. I don’t know how many more times I will wake up. I don’t want to guess.

  The open laptop draws me across the room and I take my seat at the kiddies’ table. The machine greets me with a half-opened bright smile. I can’t remember if I closed the lid after everything went dark. I peel it back and the FiveParks Word document is already open, but this time it beams nothing other than white: my previous words have been wiped. Anger surges through me that my effort has been eradicated at the casual flick of a delete button. He is testing me. The slate is clean and he is making me start again. And yet I don’t defy him, not yet. I write, but it’s not for him.

  The battery power is at 52%. Two hours and twenty-three minutes left on the clock. How is that possible? The metal casing covers its power point and it must also hide a cable that runs to a socket somewhere, either in the room or somewhere outside it – how else could he charge the laptop?

  He has given me more time, this time. Has he been in here while I slept? How long have I slept? The computer will not tell me – the clock has been reset to midnight on New Year’s Day – so I look around the room for other signs of change.

  The bucket and the bottle are still tucked away in the far corner. I don’t want to contemplate using either of them, but I fear my resistance will soon be broken. My lips shrivel at the sight of the bottle. I don’t know how long I just slept, but I am thirsty. My bladder tightens at the thought of quenching that thirst, as if it already knows the bucket is waiting.

  I close and reopen my eyes, rebooting myself, just like my new toy. The laptop glow is a strange comfort, but it doesn’t show me any noticeable alterations to my prison – if he’s been in here while I slept, I don’t see any traces.

  Bob the Builder stares up at me from the table, his face full of optimism. ‘I AM 5,’ he maintains.

  Why do I have the badge? I was in the park before I blacked out. I know that. I think I gave it to someone, but it was in my pocket, so I must be mistaken; someone gave it to me.

  Attempting to figure it out, I stretch my legs out under the table and fold my arms, imagine I’m back in work, searching for the opening line to the day’s two-page feature. The office always swirled with unnatural noise – blaring 24-hour TV news and phone calls that would never be answered – so I used to picture myself as a calm boat in a rousing ocean and wait for the words to come. That routine evaporated when I left the paper and went freelance six months ago. Just before I left Michael. The two were mixed up in the same confusing ball, two distinct colours of Play-Doh that would soon become one. The glue in that messy ball was Jessica. I couldn’t unstick myself from her, no matter how hard I tried, she was under my nails. But it was me who blew things with Michael. Jessica was there at the end, in the shadows, buzzing in the background, but I have no one but myself to blame.

  I blew it with Sylvie too. She should have been with me before I blacked out, before I ended up in here, protecting me as always, but I chased her away when all she wanted to do was help. I need her help now.

  Someone has to come. Who knew where I was going before I was taken? Who had gone from smitten to smote?

  It comes again, a burst from a short-wave radio, like a song playing in another room that I cannot quite identify. I remember waiting on a bench, waiting forever, and the tennis ball and the train and struggling with the steps and the grass folding over me, and the sky turning blood red – it was late, I had been there too long, something went wrong. The night was closing in, and so was my captor. I didn’t see either arrive.

  Leaving the paper was a mistake. A permanent feature-writing post in this economic climate at a daily newspaper – even though it was the much-derided free one, The City Voice, that they hand out on the Tube – I must have been crazy to leave. I was ready to escape though, try something new, and the offer of a full if not quite fat redundancy package helped push me over the edge.

  The lump sum came in handy, a little too handy, because freelancing has been a struggle; working from a home that doesn’t feel like home. My new flatmates are younger and distracted, fleeing back to their boyfriends in Cambridge every weekend; to them, I am merely a Gumtree transaction. They needed a room filled and I needed to fill it. In all honesty, I would be amazed if they could reel off my surname to the rowing crowd when they go back home on Friday nights.

  I only managed a night at my brother’s after it all finished with Michael. I jumped from Stephen’s sofa-bed before I was pushed, knowing what he thought of Michael and knowing what he was dying to say now that everything had been broken.

  Freelancing has too many lost causes, too many jobs that take too long for not enough money, too many emails that go unanswered. The uncertainty of the whole thing frightened me. If I hadn’t been so disillusioned with the daily chase for work, I wouldn’t have started what I started. And I wouldn’t be in here. I started but I haven’t finished, and I wonder if my captor will let me complete my work. He hasn’t kidnapped me for my money, I know that.

  A dark room, a laptop with no internet connection – this is how I should have gone about freelancing. I have always lacked self-discipline, but I’m beginning to learn what it smells like. It reeks of a stale mattress.

  The past is painful, but it still acts as a warm balm over my current plight. It helps me forget for a few minutes that I am here. But it also distracts me from what is right before my eyes.

  I haven’t noticed it until now, but the Word symbol is no longer a lonely figure on the toolbar at the bottom of the laptop screen. There is a new icon there, the familiar and detested blue ‘e’ with the yellow halo, the Internet Explorer motif. And the browser is open, minimised but open. For
the first time in my life, I am overcome with excitement to be on a computer that has Internet Explorer. He has put it on the laptop somehow, just as he deleted my first batch of writing.

  Before opening the web browser, I glance at the bottom right of the screen, where the Wi-Fi bars remain empty; there is still no internet connection. Whatever is in the browser is for reading only. I will not be contacting the outside world.

  I take a deep breath and click on the blue ‘e’, an Alice about to sink into Wonderland. When the unconnected webpage fills the screen, the first thing I see is myself.

  In the top right-hand corner of the page, trapped in a thumbnail, blonde hair as long and perfect as I could make it, eyes sparkling, chin up, my tightest top but no cleavage – I wanted to look hot, not sleazy – it’s me. The person staring out from the screen is different from the one gazing in, but it’s still me. I look like the queen of the internet. This is my domain and I am in control, that’s what the me from five weeks ago is broadcasting across the worldwide web. If only the worldwide web knew the present truth.

  It was Rob who took that photo of me, Rob who helped me do everything. Rob knew what he was doing. I try to open a new window in the browser, test out the empty Wi-Fi bars.

  ‘Sorry, but you are not connected to the internet. Please try again later.’

  I snap the dead window closed and my confident mug reappears. Underneath my picture, there are two words: ‘About me’.

  The page is offline, so if I click a link I might not get back to the homepage, where my captor wants me to linger. I don’t need to click ‘About me’, anyway. I know all about me. The good and the bad and the ugly. I was fed up with me. I wanted someone else. And that’s what got me into this.

  Attempting to open a new window was just another effort in procrastination, a wishful distraction from the task in hand. The task he has left me. He has left me everything. Or, to be more accurate, I have left me everything. It’s all there in front of me, everything from the past five weeks, just as I left it yesterday – was it only yesterday?

  The colour of the masthead matches my eyes, and green gazes in on green. The image is a grassy slope that I recognise but cannot quite comprehend. In the middle of the picture, in some font I let Rob choose (‘You can’t just have Calibri!’ he said), there are two words in capital letters: ‘FIVE PARKS’.

  This is it. This is my blog. FiveParks.com. I scroll down the page a bit and roll my eyes over a few posts, as I have done every day for weeks, then return to the top. It’s all intact, just the way I left it. When I started the blog, I knocked off the ‘continue reading’ function, meaning there was no clickbaiting skip from the homepage into each article. The contents of every post are on the homepage, except for the comments beneath each one, which can only be accessed by clicking into each piece of writing. But everything I wrote is on this one page – it doesn’t matter that the laptop is offline. I can reread everything.

  So this is what he wants me to do. This is where his game really begins. This is his revenge. For the moment, at least, he doesn’t want me to write; he wants me to read. And I do what he wants because I want to do it too.

  I spin down the site, through masses of text and photos that were all posted in the last month, yet already seem like a Dead Sea Scroll. This is my Old Testament, and in it I must find the clues that can set me free. Whoever took me, whoever has me – he is in here. I know it. And if I am to solve this puzzle, I have to be a good detective.

  I scroll and scroll and scroll until I land on the bottom blog post with a thud.

  A good detective starts at the start. My eyes travel five weeks back in time. I read.

  6

  ‘Welcome to Five Parks, the blog that’s going to bag me a man’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Monday, June 27, 2016

  I’m not the blogger you think I am. If you’ve come to this post, hopefully the first of many, expecting a chirpy, cheery journey through the stereotypical struggles of the single girl in the big city, then I look forward to disappointing you.

  While I may be a) single b) a single girl c) a single girl in London and d) a single girl in London who is partial to making annoying lists, this blog will be less Bridget Jones, more Grace Jones.

  The great Grace has never worried about granny knickers or spent an evening in her flat with her best friend – a bottle of cheap wine – and moaned about why she can’t entice a male. No, she was too busy eating men to worry about where or when she was going to find one, and I am going to take a leaf out of her book.

  That’s why this isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill garden variety dating blog, where I pine for Prince Charming and when I finally spot him after kissing a thousand frogs, scale the tallest tower and make him mine. When did women start doing all the heavy lifting in the dating game, anyway?

  Mr Right doesn’t exist, but if he did exist, he wouldn’t be climbing the highest turret of a fairy-tale castle – he’d be in a basement flat in Bermondsey, logging on to Xbox Live.

  Well, to be totally honest with you (isn’t that’s what blogs are for, being honest?), I cannot be bothered running around the streets of London searching for something that plainly doesn’t exist. I’m sick of putting the effort in. Speed dating, slow dating, app dating, crap dating, blind dating, dating in the dark, day dates, dinner dates, coffee dates, abandoned dates, dream dates, nightmare dates, too many dates, no dates … I’ve had enough of dates. And that is why I am only going on five more. A-ha, I hear you mutter, I can’t hate dating that much if I’m going to put myself through another five. However, these five dates will be different. These five will be on my terms.

  This is all a rather waffly way of wishing you a warm welcome to Five Parks, the blog that is going to solve all my problems and bag me a man. Which is, I realise, a load of old cobblers. To think that another person can solve all your problems is the height of idiocy. I know this because I used to think like that. Just a few months ago, I was a totally different person. I was still single, but back then I believed that all I needed to do was find the right guy and my life would click into place. Now I know that no man wants the added pressure of rescuing a drowning sailor when he’s just trying to stay afloat himself.

  So this blog isn’t going to change my life or make me into a better person – in five weeks, I’m going to be the same cynical Suzie (seriously, don’t ever call me Suzie – I’m actually not sure why I just did it myself … I guess I’m nervous!) I am right now, but I might have a man I quite like at the end of it.

  As the title of this blog suggests, I plan to go to five different parks in London with five different men on five different dates on five consecutive Saturdays. But instead of chasing after London’s most eligible bachelors, they are going to come to me. I will set a separate task for my would-be suitors each week, and one lucky bloke will be picked every seven days to go on a date with me in a London park of my choosing.

  The dates and the selection process will all be recorded on this blog for posterity and names will be changed to protect the innocent. Just kidding; the only way a man is going to get a date with me is if he’s been properly vetted. I’m a journalist, and as everyone knows, journalists are really, really sneaky, so any men who want a date with me better clean up their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles before applying. I will be checking.

  It’s a shame that the internet has killed dating (says the girl announcing an online dating blog). I am 32 – don’t all click off this page at once – so I remember a time when a boy would have to call the house phone, deftly give my dad the verbal sidestep when he picked up the receiver, before taking a big gulp and asking me if I wanted to go to the cinema on Saturday. I cringe at the memory of that now, but that took balls. Like walking into a coffee shop and asking for a job, that kind of balls. The kind of balls you no longer see in the dating game. And believe me … it is a game.

  We smartphoned singletons swipe left and swipe right until we just don’t care a
ny more – we put more thought into ordering a take-away pizza. At least the pizza doesn’t try to shag you the first time you meet. So I’ve deleted my Tinder app and gone back to basics.

  Starting a blog is something people did back in 2004 AD, just after Neolithic man scrawled his own blogging on the chalky walls of the cave he called his home. A blog is the most primitive form of communication in the internet age. But that’s good. That’s the whole point. I want to find someone worth the effort, someone who thinks the same of me. This should be primitive. Have a read of the About Me page on this site and decide if you want to apply for a date. If you do, great … if you don’t, that’s fine too.

  This blog will be the modern equivalent of calling up my dad and asking me out. If you want to go on a date with me, you’re going to have to earn it – not make a millisecond judgment of how big my breasts are in my Tinder photo.

  This blog post is my coming out ball, my announcement to the world that I am ready to find someone special. If you take a quick look at my profile pic, like what you see and fancy an equally quick shag, don’t bother applying. If that’s all you’re interested in, you won’t bother applying anyway once you see the application process; because I’m going to make things difficult.

  Tomorrow morning, I will post an application form on this site. Fill it in and press submit and you will be in with a chance of going on a date with me this Saturday afternoon at a park somewhere in London.

  The game begins. Are you ready to play?

  7

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 42%

  Time remaining: 1hr 39min

  I lied from the start. At least I was right about one thing: Five Parks did not make me into a better person. Everything else was wrong. Contrary to my then confidence, the blog did change my life. If it hadn’t, I would not be stuck in this prison.