Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  I had been open about my desire to meet someone and, online, that kind of openness can be a wound, waiting for the stinging salt-shake of a thousand tweets and blog comments. At that stage of the game, they were scarce, but I didn’t know then that a deluge was coming. I was too raw, too new, back then, just four weeks ago, to document the abuse. If I didn’t publish it on my site, it didn’t imprint itself in my head – or so I told myself.

  Jordan’s answers in his application were perfect; sarcastic and self-deprecating, he hated the same things about London that I did. But then that’s the whole problem with online dating, isn’t it? We fill in these questionnaires and forms in the hope of finding a match. A match. The process is doomed from the beginning. Are we really looking for someone who is exactly like us? Great, you can bond over your distaste for gherkins and your love of garage music on the first few dates, but what happens after that? What is left after all the likes and dislikes are neatly ticked off? Where do you go from there? We choose to enter into relationships with those who are like us, not those who like us, like us for all the madness being us entails. In the modern dating arena, Jordan’s application was without fault, pushing all the right buttons and tickling all the right nerve endings. But I should have known that picking him would only get me into trouble, no matter how gloriously the whole thing glittered at the time. That’s one thing I should know about myself: when things look too perfect, I’m meant to run a mile.

  The battery is dying again, down to 7%, and the light will soon die with it. While there’s still a little bit left, I go and find the overturned plastic bucket, pop it back up in the corner and then fold the laptop down to its slimmest sliver. I do what I should have done before I was interrupted by the unseen speakers: I go to the toilet. It will soon be lights out. Just like it used to do in work, going to the loo allows me to think. Poor Jordan. He had no idea what he was getting into. Neither did I. When all the dust on the small wooded trail on that first date had long settled, I did find someone through Five Parks, but it wasn’t him.

  12

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 47%

  Time remaining: 1hr 51min

  Where am I? As before, the few seconds after I wake up are pure confusion. I gasp into the darkness and stretch my arm out for a saving hand that isn’t there. It takes a few more gulps of dead air and the stench of cold urine before I realise: I am still in my prison.

  I peel myself off the mattress and stumble in the black, smacking my knee off the back of the chair and collapsing into the table.

  My left cheek, already swollen, comes down hard into the splinters and tears spill until they meld with the wood. Waking up is the hard part. Once I realise I am still trapped – that it hasn’t all been a bad dream – I lose control of my emotions.

  I scream out something – I don’t know what – just wretched desperate noise. It’s useless. No one can hear me. I cannot hear anything outside my dark cell. I am not going to be allowed to leave this place. I try to pry the laptop from its casing and shove the table from its spot but end up just cracking more fingernails and scraping more knuckles – neither object will budge.

  I drag a battered nail along the lid of the computer and wonder what would happen if I stood up on the table and stamped the machine into pieces. Would that spoil his plan for me? Or would he leave me to rot in here, wordless, forever?

  My anguish gives way to anger and I unfold the laptop lid, press the power button and return to writing. The FiveParks Word doc is back to blank; I begin again with these new words.

  I have to keep going. I have to keep writing and reading the blog until it fills in the gaps before everything went black. I know where I was when I was taken, I was in the park – my favourite park. The last park. I was waiting for Date #5. But did he come? I cannot process his image. He is as faceless and shapeless to me as my captor. Are they the same person?

  The laptop has got some of its power back, but I am more worried about my own battery life, which is proving just as adjustable. When the laptop lights go out, so do I, straight into sleep, although the grogginess is slightly less pronounced with each new awakening. He controls everything: the room, the laptop, me.

  There was a brief period when I controlled Five Parks before everything ran away from me, but it wasn’t at the beginning.

  In its infancy, it wasn’t my blog at all. It was Rob who gave birth to Five Parks and nurtured it until it was crawling and finally standing on its own feet. Then I took over. It was my idea to have the baby, but Rob was my surrogate.

  As a journalist who had spent far too many years of the digital age at a free newspaper, I was sorely lacking in the skills needed to bring Five Parks to life. That was where Rob came in.

  ‘Hi, I’m Rob from upstairs. Rob Naylor. You emailed the helpdesk. What seems to be the problem?’

  That was probably the first thing he ever said to me. Three years ago. Upstairs was two floors above, in the IT department, a room I cannot describe because I never went there. Editorial staff never went up, IT only came down.

  And when they did come down and ask us if we had tried turning the computer off and on again, they were to a man (they were all men) miserable and largely incoherent. Until Rob strode into the centre of the features desk one afternoon and demanded confidently and loudly: ‘Where can I find Suzanne?’

  He wasn’t really like the other IT guys, who seemed desperate – and even more desperate to shimmy into the stereotype the world had created for them. To call them monosyllabic would have been an inaccuracy; coaxing an entire syllable out of them was a monumental achievement. Rob stood out like a sore thumb. Slightly heavy-set back then but tall enough to carry it off, he looked like he was wearing an IT guy disguise. His faded red T-shirt with some kind of Avenger streaked across it said one thing, but the arms inside it told me another. Those arms were made to scoop someone up and tell them everything would be okay.

  Rob took my computer’s ID number then made his way back up to IT heaven. A few minutes later, something magical happened: a brand new browser began downloading on my desktop. This activity was accompanied by an email from the IT helpdesk address.

  ‘Hi Suzanne, sorry about the remote activity, but didn’t want to get you into trouble in front of your colleagues. I’m upgrading you from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome, but don’t let anyone else in the office know – we only do that for people who are special! Don’t want to get sacked in my first week. Happy browsing. Rob.’

  He had practically asked me out. And I waited for him to do it for real. Unfortunately for Rob, I didn’t wait long enough. I had already started seeing Michael for a few months by the time Rob finally plucked up the courage, in the pub over the road after work one night for someone’s leaving drinks. It was excruciating.

  ‘Would you like to go out for a drink some time, Suzanne?’

  He must have known I fancied him. What he didn’t know was I fancied him before I met Michael.

  I tilted my head around the pub, from the naff fruit machines to the pool table and back.

  ‘But we are out for a drink.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he whispered, making sure no one else from the office was within immediate eavesdropping range.

  I didn’t handle it too well. I thought blunt would be best, but Rob needed letting down easy. I didn’t see that through the mist of tipsiness.

  ‘I can’t. I’m with someone. Two months.’

  The light went out of his eyes and his bottom lip dropped a touch. He recovered swiftly by swigging on his prop pint, but I could see the damage was done.

  ‘Ah, okay then, no worries. You’re seeing someone? That’s great. How’s it going?’

  And from there we both played our parts in the dance; I waxed on about Michael – but not too much – and he pretended to listen and to care.

  I wanted to keep the friends thing going and we chatted briefly in the office and the pub a few times after that, but always with co-workers in close pro
ximity. He became more withdrawn around me, and in the next two years, right up until my departure, he also withdrew into himself, losing a fair bit of weight in the face and the shoulders, and losing his spark. He probably looked healthier to an untrained eye, but he had sacrificed some of his cuddliness, and judging by his continued excursions to the pub with the rest of the IT gang, hadn’t found anyone to change his social habits.

  I didn’t have the chance to really say goodbye to anyone when I left the paper – the redundancy offer came up quickly and I snapped at it, taking the freelance plunge – so he must have found out from someone else that I had gone. The DM he sent me on Twitter (I hadn’t left anyone a forwarding email) was sweet and non-flirtatious, for at that point he must also have believed that my upcoming wedding to Michael at the end of the summer was an actual future event, not a dead thing in tatters.

  ‘All the best for future Suze. If you ever need any freelance IT advice, just tweet!’

  A few months later, probably as much to his surprise as mine, ‘Future Suze’ did need him. Future Suze had decided to start a dating blog. And didn’t have the foggiest clue how to go about it. There was plenty of information out there on how to do it myself, of course, but there were so many unwanted decisions about platforms and themes and registers that I took Rob up on his offer. The first piece of advice he gave me over Twitter DMs was: ‘Just WordPress it. Dead easy. A monkey could do it.’

  Once I had a clear idea of what I wanted the blog to be called, Rob registered the web address, later telling me I owed him £15. I didn’t give him the money; instead I took him out for dinner, and we sat in a corner booth in Byron in Westfield, with two burgers and a laptop between us, and he set up Five Parks before my eyes, showed me how to run it. In the end he was right: a monkey could do it, but I was glad I had him.

  At the beginning, Five Parks was our little secret. He didn’t ask what had happened with Michael, how I’d gone from someone’s fiancée to searching for online dates in London’s green spaces, and I didn’t lead him on. We were two friends working on a project and, anyway, I didn’t want to complicate things with Rob, given that I somehow knew, even at the beginning of Five Parks, that I would need his help every step of the way.

  When we were creating the blog, it was just ours. I didn’t even tell Sylvie about it – I wanted to surprise her and the world at the same time. My hunch was right: Rob’s involvement with the site didn’t stop after I clicked ‘publish’ on that opening post.

  That opening post. That was where the trouble began. I thought I was being careful but I was exposed right from the start. They were just numbers to me then: Dates #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5 – but maybe one of those numbers wanted more than just an afternoon in a park. Perhaps one of them wanted me in here, squirming, desperate, fearing for my life. Whoever did this – whether it was one of my dates or a secret admirer or some online stalker – I have to unmask them and find out why they did this. I need to dive back into Five Parks, because the answers must be in there.

  The Internet Explorer icon, an icon I hadn’t clicked on for three years until I woke up in this place, not since that day Rob came down two floors to switch my browser, is alive on the taskbar on the bottom left of the laptop screen. Offline but readable. A flick of my index finger booms the blue ‘e’ to life again and FiveParks.com fills the screen. The smile in my profile pic, in the top right of the homepage above ‘About Me’, looks like it has slipped.

  There is something else that has slipped: the blog itself. It will never be the same again. The post that was at the top, a post I have avoided reading in here until it is absolutely necessary – the last post – has been relegated down the page, out of sight. It is no longer the last post. I scroll frantically until I can see its title again – there are half a dozen new posts ahead of it now in the site’s chronology. No, I’m wrong: there are more, more like seven or eight. The Wi-Fi bars are still empty, I’m still offline. I am spinning again.

  There are no photos breaking up these new posts, one chunk of writing runs into the next, separated only by a short title and the familiar phrase ‘Posted by Suzanne’. I did this. I fan my eyes against the earliest of these new interlopers. Its title grabs me by the throat.

  ‘I am in a bad way’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Sunday, July 31, 2016

  The post starts with the same six words as the title, the first six words I committed to this laptop. The first six words I typed in hell. I scan over the large chunk of text that follows, familiar words and phrases leaping out at me. I get to the end and my hands shake against the keyboard. The last lines are enough to panic me into searching frantically around a room I know to be empty.

  ‘There is someone in here with me.’

  I scroll back up one post on the blog. This time I do things in reverse order, letting the words – words I feel I have just written – wash over me until I reach the headline at the top.

  ‘I am going to die’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Sunday, July 31, 2016

  I scroll and scroll and scroll to the top. He has divided my prison writing into eight parts, eight blog posts, each one titled with a phrase plucked from my own words.

  ‘I am in a bad way’ and ‘I am going to die’ sit below six more blog posts with other titles. I wince at each one as I move up the page. They run as follows:

  ‘I will be someone else’

  ‘I obey’

  ‘I do what he wants’

  ‘I lied from the start’

  ‘I need to pee’

  ‘I don’t want to see myself’

  This latest title now sits at the top of Five Parks: ‘I don’t want to see myself’. But he is letting me see everything else. He has published everything online. Everything I have written in here. He wiped the Word document clean each time I fell asleep, but he wasn’t deleting it – he was secreting it. He didn’t just want me to write, he wanted me to keep the blog going. I can’t really keep my eyes still on a sentence for more than a split second, but at a glance my words are intact. He hasn’t changed anything, just put it on the blog without retouching. The perfect sub-editor. An egotistical journalist’s dream.

  He may have devised a clever facsimile of my site, a mock-up to fool me into thinking my words have somehow escaped this awful place. It’s possible, as he evidently has the tech know-how to pull it off, given that he can control the laptop in here remotely.

  But the long homepage looks like mine and I want it to be mine – and that is enough. If I will it to be true then the lie has no power.

  He has not only given me my voice, but he is sharing it with the outside world. There is a catch: he is twisting my own words into my side. How else can I explain his blog post titles? ‘I obey’, ‘I do what he wants’, ‘I am going to die’ – some torn from their text’s opening expression, he wants the world to know he is in control.

  But the greatest exhibition of his control is in his refusal to alter my writing. It fills me with a small hope that I might be able to get a message out to the world if I can glean something crucial about my whereabouts, impossible as that appears. But it might not matter; now that he has published my writing, the world will know I have been taken. I have too many readers for it to go unnoticed. The search for me will begin if it hasn’t already. All of the new blog posts were published at the same time, dated Sunday. If I was taken during my final date, Date #5, that means I have been in here for anything between six and thirty hours. I can’t work it out myself – my time in here feels like minutes one second, weeks the next. He wants to show the world what he has done. That means he is arrogant. I hope I can use this to my advantage. But it also means he is supremely confident of my hiding place. Why would he let thousands of readers know I have been kidnapped if he didn’t believe I was somewhere secure, somewhere no one would ever find me?

  The fact that he is letting me speak to the world means something else: he could have my own laptop, unless he somehow hacked
my log-in and password. Either way, he is in the back end of my blog, pulling the strings. If he does have the laptop, the password would be an irrelevance – I leave the device switched on almost permanently, so the blog would have been up and running, ready to control. And if he does have my laptop that means … he has taken it from my bedroom. In my flat. I shudder in the dark.

  I should have done something earlier, long before this. He had been in my bedroom before and I knew it. I was shaken by what was left there – what he must have left there – and talked to Sylvie, who advised me to change the locks, and I broached the subject briefly with my flatmates, who thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, but a few weeks into Five Parks, something happened in that room, something happened when I wasn’t there. Someone had been in there and left me a message. It scared me, but I convinced myself I was overreacting. Still, two pieces of a larger puzzle have slid together in my mind, it’s a start. He was in my room, and now I am in his. How could I be so stupid?

  Whoever he is, I have to be careful with my writing. It is his to control. If he continues with this, what I write will go online. If I work out his identity and name him, will he publish it on my blog? If I do name him correctly, will he flee, leave me in here to rot? Perhaps he will stop publishing my writing from now on, I don’t know. But I don’t think so. He has opened up the game now, and there is no going back. He is taunting me and anyone on the outside who cares about me, anyone who might be reading. They will be reading. I picture the Tweets and Facebook messages whirring across the internet out there right now …