Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  Q7. S: If the 7.03am Southern train from Clapham Junction to London Victoria is delayed by six minutes, and it usually takes nine minutes, how much later will it arrive at its destination than the 7.06am South West train from Clapham Junction to London Waterloo, which takes eleven minutes and is running as normal?

  J: Oh, this one’s easy: don’t live in Clapham.

  Q8. S: What are your pet peeves?

  J: Apart from the phrase ‘pet peeves’?

  Q9. S: Where do you see yourself in five years?

  J: I see myself on a veranda, overlooking a dirty orange sundown above a big blue ocean, and a beautiful woman in a long white dress walks out from the bedroom and joins me, handing me a mojito as she sips her own. She asks me, ‘Have you ever experienced such a perfect moment, darling?’ And I let out a long sigh, smile into her big brown eyes and reply: ‘Yes, I have, dear, as it happens. I once met a girl through answering a series of deliberately inane questions on an online dating blog, and at the end of our first and only date, we stared at each other beneath a sun a bit like this one, only it was in a park in London. And we decided that the moment was so perfect, so magnificent, that we could never re-create it. So we made a pact to never see one another again. She went on to date four other guys through her blog, but her heart wasn’t in any of them, so she decided to devote her life to her work instead, and has since won both a Pulitzer and Nobel prize for her journalism. In the same year. And I, as you know, darling, went on to form the world’s most successful web design business, all while working from home, so here we are in my penthouse apartment overlooking the sea in Monte Carlo. Now do me a favour and put a dash more ice in my mojito, will you, dear?’

  Q10. S: What happens when we die?

  J: There’s no heaven, there’s no hell. Everything goes black. You wake up and open your eyes, but there is nothing for them to see, just darkness. And that’s totally disconcerting for a while, because you can’t see anything or feel anything or do anything. And you scream that you want to get out and you try to cry but the tears don’t come, because your eyes aren’t there. You think you have opened them, but you don’t have any eyes, you don’t have anything – you’re just you. And once you calm down and accept that you are gone, accept that the pain is over and there’s nothing to cry about even if you could, then you drift away and the blackness is left on its own again. And you’re just … gone.

  9

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 29%

  Time remaining: 1hr 02min

  He is watching every word of this. At least I know that now. What did I expect?

  ‘Keep writing.’

  That was the message. But I am writing just for him.

  And yet these words on a screen are all I have. I must plough on. But not before I take care of something else.

  I need to pee. My knees scrape against each other, tightly crushed between the legs of my tiny chair. The squirming makes it worse. I turn my head back into the darkness where the toppled bucket lurks, waiting and wanting to be filled. I really have to go. I peel back to the screen and re-read Jordan’s answers. If I concentrate on something else, even something that also causes me pain, the drum beat in my bladder will soften. I wish I was young. In my twenties, my friends at home used to call me The Camel, such was my prowess in holding my drink and then holding my urine.

  Jordan was young, an earlier male version of myself, a mirror into which I could gaze and rekindle some of my own forgotten vigour. He was just like me, hated the same things I did, like the phrase ‘pet peeves’ and travelling out of London to Clapham. He had been reading my blog since I started it.

  I put too much on him. He was the first so it was always going to be that way, but that doesn’t make it right. Four weeks ago, when I set out to find someone, I had all the questions and all the answers. Now there are just questions. Who took me? Why? How?

  ‘Everything goes black. You wake up and open your eyes, but there is nothing for them to see, just darkness.’

  Jordan’s final answer has a frightening resonance in my new abode. There’s no heaven, there’s no hell, he said. He was wrong. He wasn’t pinned within four dark walls with just his own thoughts and his own failings for company.

  I give the room another going-over to distract my bladder. I might have missed something earlier, a crucial opening or a chink of light separate to that brought by the laptop’s buzz. The irony that the room is at its darkest just below its only light source is not lost on me, so I kick off the chair and crawl under the table, banging my head on its underside as I delve. The carpet there scalds my hands, defending itself against something it has rarely encountered: human touch. I grasp the bottom of the table instead, but its legs share only splinters. They remain embedded in the carpet. I emerge as I dived, with a bump on the head to greet me back into the light. The rush of blood as I stand upright dizzies me and I totter until my hand finds the plastic back of the chair. My ship steadied, I leave the light behind, almost on autopilot, and make my way to the back of the room. Standing has turned my bladder against my will and I make the decision to empty it without inner debate. I inspect the bucket. The thin steel handle is icy in my grip, while the container is forged from cheap plastic. But it feels and smells relatively clean.

  I put the bucket back down and undo the top button of my jeans. This simple release is wondrous, lifting a weight off my belly that makes me question if I have to relieve myself at all. I use this momentary injection of comfort to put off my peeing, pick up the large bottle of water next to the bucket and carry it over to the laptop light for closer inspection. The container is full and the liquid is clear, alluring, suspicious. I skim my palm over the cap and curse the ease of its removal: the bottle was not sealed. I will not drink this. I roll the bottle under the bed and wait for its resigned plop against the bottom of the wall. When it hits, I put my knees on the bed and pat my hands against the wall, like a bizarre alternative artist creating a canvas. The wall above the bed is warm, and it feels just like the carpet on the floor, worn and jagged. The other three walls are the same, as if some prickly fungus has crawled its way off the floor and spread around every inch of the room. I thump all four walls with my fists, but there are no weak spots.

  What lurks behind these walls? How did he get me in here, and how did he get out?

  I decide to finally carry out the threat issued by the unbuttoning of my jeans. When I worked at the paper and was stuck with an opening paragraph or a way into a feature, I would go to the toilet and that simple relaxing act would knock a thought loose, instil me with inspiration. That could happen here too. But first, I close the laptop lid as far as it will go without losing all of its light. He is watching me write. I won’t rule out the possibility that he is watching me pee. This time I want the darkness.

  I take the bucket into the far corner and plonk it on the carpet. I bring my jeans and my knickers together and slide them halfway down my thighs, low enough to do what I have to do, high enough to conceal some modesty. The stale hot air tickles my bare flesh, parts of my body I feared would be exposed in here much earlier, back when I awoke to find him over me. I squat and hover a good two inches above the bucket, years of practice at festivals finally paying off. I need to pee, I tell myself. I need to go. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s sheer necessity. The water, I mustn’t drink the water. I ready my body to relax but a crackle interrupts me. It comes from above, in a corner of the ceiling, in a place the light might not reach even at its fullest capacity. I postpone my business, clench whatever needs clenching and begin to ease myself upwards.

  The words explode out of the darkness and I lose balance, going bum first into the bucket. If someone shined a light on me, I would look like a visual punchline from a rude 1950s seaside postcard, but I am too terrified to find the funny side.

  The noise is terrifying in here, like dropping a stick of dynamite into a goldfish bowl.

  The song is instantly recognisable - it’s Rock Around the C
lock by Bill Haley and the Comets.

  Its chorus belts out of nothing, then clicks and goes again, skipping back to the start of an already infinite loop. I roll around until the bucket falls off my bottom, pull up my jeans and press my hands into my ears, then scream into the darkness. This is what it feels like to be inside an amp at a rock concert, albeit a rock concert sixty years ago. I stumble to the table, spin open the laptop and readjust my eyes to the light. One hand still over one ear, I use my other hand to drag the chair back into the corner. I mount the seat with both feet and look into the ceiling, covering both ears again. The sound is distorted and torturous, spilling out from somewhere above. There may be speakers there, but I cannot see them, as they must be black like everything else. I climb off the chair and perform a neat forward roll. The noise overpowers me and I curl into a ball on the floor, a grazed knuckle in each ear.

  It’s a song I’ve heard a thousand times, from the car radio on family camping trips … in music class at school … in the background in various films. It’s probably one of the first songs I ever heard, or the first song that ever made me dance. I think it is going to be the last song I ever hear too, because if my captor doesn’t come and finish me off soon, Bill Haley could do the job for him.

  Peeing was supposed to help me think, but now I cannot even hear myself do that. I turn to the only thing available that might offer a distraction. I crawl over to the table, rise up on my knees and press those knuckles even harder, imagining them piercing my earlobes and plunging into my brain. I will block out the torture by torturing myself. I will concentrate on something else, even if it also causes me pain. I don’t need a chair for this, my knees will do fine. I read about Jordan. I read about our date together. I read about the first real step that put me on the path into this hell.

  10

  ‘Date #1: A walk in the park with Jordan’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Saturday, July 2, 2016

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November. That was the date, in 1887, when Queen’s Park, as it is now, was officially opened. Ever since its birth, this seemingly simple square of green has been, as a Rolling Stone might say, practising at the art of deception. The largely flat expanse was originally called the Kilburn Recreation Ground in a nod to its location, but the park had ideas above its station and soon sought royal approval. The name was changed in honour of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and Her Royal Highness had been a visitor to the park back in the disco days of 1879, when she stopped in to check out the Royal Kilburn Agricultural Show. If it’s good enough for Queen Victoria, it’s good enough for me.

  The name is not the only thing about Queen’s Park that has altered. When the idea for the park was conceived, it was done so to allow ‘the creation of some fund for the benefit of the poorer classes’. That worthy goal seems laughable now, when the park is surrounded by four walls of haughty and comfortably seven-figured terraced houses, which leer over the low black railings at the smouldering yummy mummies, waiting patiently to entice them back inside where they belong at the climax of another sticky north London day in the sun.

  I know the brief history of Queen’s Park because I stand before it. I am just inside the entrance at the north-east corner, underneath a tall black wooden information board. Reading when I should be dating. The story of my life.

  What I’m really doing is stalling. It’s five minutes to four, and I have a date for which I cannot possibly be punctual. With a potential five dates in five weeks, it would be a crying shame to be unfashionably early for the opening round. I cannot help being early for this date, however, given this is the nearest of my five parks. I started jogging here a few months ago – anything to get out of the house. But while the intolerably hot women in their late thirties and forties trundle their offspring-strung strollers across the road to their millionaires’ mansions when they are finished sunning themselves, I sneak out a side entrance and beat the longer way back to my less salubrious surroundings just off the Kilburn High Road.

  It feels weird to be standing still in here, when my usual routine involves panting my way around its four corners. Queen’s Park is tiny, which makes it perfect when you don’t like running too far, and ideal for an intimate walk in the park with a man you’ve never met. But the bluster from my first few posts on the blog has gone, and now it’s crunch time: just me and some strange guy who may or not be the one. I’m nervous.

  I’m due to meet Jordan at four on the dot, in front of the bandstand at the top end of the park. But I’ve made two rookie errors. First, I thought I would have a good view of the bandstand from this corner, which would have let me spot his arrival before I sauntered over, cool as a cucumber. Unfortunately, the tree line between those two points – no more than fifty metres – droops too low, foiling my plan. My second mistake is ringing in my ears. The bandstand is living up to its name. I can’t see it because of the trees, but there is a band in there, rattling through that familiar yet unfathomable hum of squabbling instruments.

  ‘Except jazz. I fucking hate jazz.’

  Whoops. If Jordan is early for the date, he may not be here for much longer.

  I don’t come to Queen’s Park on weekends, so this is an unpleasant surprise. I stride from the shade into hot heat as a saxophone tries to strangle some kind of unidentifiable wind instrument.

  There is a row of plastic chairs in front of the bandstand, each occupied by a gaggle of old ladies, nodding their grey and purple heads up at the players above while screaming children make circles around their seats.

  There is no one standing in front of the bandstand. My first date is dead before it even begins. My love life has been scuppered by the unstoppable power of jazz. I head for the music, looking down at the grass to weave my way between the various sunbathers and picnickers. But when I raise my head again, I don’t hear the music any more. He is here.

  He must have been hiding on the ground behind the seated old ladies, pondering whether or not to bail. His smile says otherwise. He swipes at himself, dusting grass from the front of his bright blue knee-length shorts. He whips off sunglasses, reels me in with his eyes and puts his hands over his ears in mock discomfort when I am close enough to appreciate the gesture. His visual in-joke reminds me where I am, and my brain switches off the mute button; I hear the jazz again in all its befuddled glory. And then I am right on him.

  He looks nothing like his picture on my blog, but not in a predictable manner; he didn’t Photoshop any blemishes away or add in a bicep or two, there’s just something different about him in the flesh that I can’t quite figure. The brown hair and brown eyes are still there, as is his smile, but he is vibrant now, an image that has magically come to life off a webpage.

  ‘You’re Suzanne,’ he says, as nervous as I am, his sunglasses in one hand, the other extended for me to shake. ‘I’m Jordan. But then you know that already.’

  I accept his offer and do my worst delicate girly handshake, holding on long enough to let him know that I want something more. He takes the hint and leans in to my right side for an air kiss and I copy his motion to make sure his lips don’t miss my cheek. He stoops ever so slightly to reveal he is taller than me by a perfect inch. He touches me. The boy in the photograph is real. The first thing he said is my name. That must mean I am real too.

  He flashes that smile again. ‘I like your playlist,’ he says, shaking his head up at the bandstand. I know it’s a joke he’s been rehearsing since he got here, but it makes me laugh anyway.

  I apologise and, as I do so, a few of the old ladies turn their heads to the silent duet that has just started beside them. Two of them consult for a second, then beam back in our direction.

  Jordan catches their unfeigned interest and turns back to me.

  ‘Fancy a walk?’

  Walking is good. Sitting down would deprive us of distraction, forming a breeding ground for awkward silence.

  I plot a trail from the bandstand to the most northern part of the park, where
the grizzled old Eastern European men ogle me on my run in between bouts of playing pétanque. They aren’t there today; the makeshift square of tiny stones that define their game is the harshest of sun traps, fierce and unforgiving. But the sun is no trouble to the shirtless gang gathered around the adjacent exercise bars, their black and white torsos glistening in the swelter. Like the jazz players, I hear them before I see them, as one of their phones has been transformed into a boom box.

  They glance over at us in between chin-ups as the distortion builds to a crescendo, but the result is something melodic not graceless. Our feet swap grass for gravel and we wither into the path that trickles through a mercifully shaded wooded walkway. Jordan’s shirt, white with a sleeve cut high above the elbow, brushes the unprotected skin of my left arm. Close contact.

  He takes a glance over his shoulder and mine to watch the boys – for that’s all they are really, much younger than him as well as me. I follow his head and take a last peek. They enjoy the attention. You can almost smell their satisfaction, mixed in with their stale sweat.

  We leave the boys behind, slip out of the sun and into the tiny wood, which twists one way then another for no more than one hundred paces and opens back out to the other side of the park.

  I tell Jordan that Queen’s Park is the perfect size for a lazy jogger like me; I am no gym bunny. He mentions his own aversion to pumping whatever men pump in the gym, but he is in good nick, toned and natural, a physique honed from regular five-a-side football perhaps, rather than hauling dumbbells.

  He catches me looking at him and gives his non-existent belly a pat, coupling it with a shrug that fibs he should do more exercise.

  ‘Modesty won’t get you anywhere,’ I say. ‘Try flattery instead.’

  He does.

  ‘Your dress is great, by the way. Really cool.’