Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  The piece was bright and breezy – fluff – but my world changed after it was published. First #FiveParks, then #5Parks for the lazier web user, trended on Twitter. The next day, Wednesday, I was on TV. Someone from This Morning called the Herald after seeing the article, and before I knew it I was on a sofa opposite Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, my legs shaking beneath my skirt but my mouth chuntering on like an old punditry pro. The make-up people tarted me up for the couch and I flirted to fit my appearance. I’d had a crush on Schofield since he was on Going Live! – before I knew what crushes were – and I told him as much on air.

  ‘There’s still time to get that application submitted for my second date, Phillip …’

  At the time I thought I was just flirting with Phil, but I was really digging my own grave.

  After the Herald and This Morning, there were follow-up interviews over the phone with other newspapers and websites – the Herald didn’t mind me talking to other outlets, as long as I didn’t reveal anything about the upcoming dates themselves, as it merely spread the word about their new columnist. Any external interviews would all feed back to my exclusive date recaps for the Herald.

  The flurry of media attention meant my blog started to get a serious amount of hits and the entries for Date #2 flooded in; hundreds of poems were compiled by men across the country. It’s amazing what a little exposure can do.

  In total, 327 poems were submitted, an astonishing figure. Although that’s not entirely accurate. Some were poems and some were filth. Some were stolen straight from the pages of Shelley or Shakespeare. I needed help. I needed Rob. He came up with an algorithm to separate the wheat from the chaff and save me time. Any poem with the word ‘Suzanne’ in it, for instance, fell at the first hurdle. A similar fate befell any prose containing ‘Roses are red’ or ‘Love’ or ‘There was a young girl’. Rob’s algorithm could also spot poetic plagiarism, so any word thieves were also removed early in the application process.

  I brought Sylvie on board the Five Parks train too. She had got me the gig with the Herald, and was a welcome buffer between me and Hatcher. She had enough on her plate without meddling in my affairs – like me, she too had just gone freelance, but unlike me, she had made a success of it, taking many of her high-profile clients with her – so I was grateful for her input.

  She loved the blog idea and felt insulted at the thought that hundreds of thousands of people might not read it, which was why she played her hand with the Herald. Had Hatcher said no, she would have lined me up at another publication, I’m sure of it.

  Thanks to Rob’s algorithm and Sylvie’s unforgotten grasp of A-level English literature, we managed to narrow the crowded field down to just three poems. But asking my readers to choose the winner wasn’t a cop-out. It was a team effort and we were torn.

  Rob liked the first of the final three, the funny one that rhymed ‘quoted with wroted’ yet somehow got away with it. He thought the mixed French/English effort was pretentious drivel. Sylvie loved that one, however, and liked the twist at the end where the writer revealed that he knew I was from Northern Ireland (and not a ‘rosbif’) all along. I obviously didn’t disguise my nationality well enough in my blog and on social media. Sylvie thought PoèmeDeux had a personal touch mixed with a sense of romance.

  ‘You’re in this to meet someone you fancy the pants off, not someone with a sense of humour,’ she would argue at me, talking over Rob.

  The romantic in me liked the French poem, mainly because I’d gone to Poitiers during my Erasmus year at university. I went there thinking I might shack up with a gorgeous Gallic hunk in between skipping classes, but the reality was more jarring; a daily gauntlet of sleazy guys blowing kisses at me as I walked home from the boulangerie in my tracksuit bottoms. French men in France were an enormous letdown, but maybe one who’d spent some time in England could be my white knight.

  I threw the third poem, the one about London’s parks reaching out to grab me, into the running because I thought it contained the best writing, even if its strain of creepiness was quite unsettling. To be honest, I was relieved in the end when my readers picked Eric’s poem.

  ‘Just forget you’re writing for us at all,’ Hatcher had said during our meeting in the boardroom. ‘Just write what you’d normally write on your blog.’

  Forgetting was easier said than done, especially because the paper sent a photographer – the eavesdropper I mentioned in the article – along to trail us in Richmond Park.

  Hatcher hated my blog post from Date #1. He hated all four thousand words of it. He said readers didn’t want a dreary walk in the park – they wanted drama. It was his idea to go horse riding and it was his idea to go to Richmond Park. When I started Five Parks, I intended to stick to London’s smaller, more serene green spaces. But Hatcher was right about everything. The horse riding gave his readers their drama, and his photographer was there to capture every second of it. In the eventual double page spread that ran in the Herald on the Monday after the date, there was one small picture of the two of us sweating over our picnic, hiding amid at least five images of Eric riding to the rescue. It was a great coup for the paper, and part of me was relieved that something shocking had happened during the date, because I’m not sure what I would have written about otherwise.

  I didn’t hit it off with Eric. I was prepared for the backlash before the piece was published. Judging by the pretty girls flitting in and out of his Facebook page, Eric was a very popular man indeed. My hunch was proved right after publication, when hundreds of women sent me messages of abuse and bewilderment over my failure to be wooed by the horse-riding Frenchman. They didn’t see him up close like I did. They didn’t know what I knew.

  Sylvie made me famous. And for that I have to thank her. Because despite all the pain that came with my new life in the spotlight, that fame might be the only thing that saves me. If my captor continues his game, people will read this and they will know I am missing. And someone will come for me. Because of who I am. I have to believe that. If I do not, then all of this is pointless, and I am lost, alone in the dark.

  18

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 81%

  Time remaining: 4hr 00min

  A click wakes me. Behind my head, loud and undisguised. And then another further away, down in the dark at the end of the bed. There is no light from the laptop. I move to put both my elbows down on the mattress but it’s impossible – I do not control my left hand. It is back in its handcuff and the death rattle is in my ears, the chain slashing against the bed frame. My stomach groans and my heart kicks into action. I try to twist my body to use my right hand to go for the key in my back pocket, but something searing stops me. My left knee jars and my cry of pain coincides with a second rattle. The pain flows down my leg and into my ankle, then rocket propels a message the whole way back up to my brain – he has cuffed my foot to the bed too. He has come for me again.

  The cuff down there is too tight. My ankle wants to explode. The scream I let out only terrifies me further. Stretched by the two handcuffs, I am pinioned along the mattress. I poke my writhing right leg at nothing and shove my free arm behind my back in search of my jeans pocket, hoping the key is still in there. I know I won’t get far and I wonder which one of my short erratic breaths he will interrupt.

  I told myself after last time I would be ready, but I am not.

  I can’t get my fingers into my back pocket. Frantic, I repeat the accusation from my most spiteful piece of writing in here so far, the piece of writing that has surely brought him back to this bed, but this time it is screamed in desperation not typed in misplaced hubris.

  ‘YOU FUCKING COWARD!’

  I should not have written that entry. I see that now, even in the darkness. I have angered him. I give up on the key and clench both hands into fists, even my useless left one. The handcuff chain rattles as my limbs shake. That thick sweet smell has returned to the room. His smell. It crawls up my nostrils like a bug that wants to t
ake over my brain.

  I shouldn’t have written it.

  There is a clanging noise at the bottom of the bed, a rival to my rattling handcuff chain. It is the tap of something solid on rusted metal. He is standing over me down there, armed with something he is banging on the bed frame.

  The hamstring on my right side tightens as I swipe my free right foot into something solid, an arm or a side maybe, but he doesn’t flinch. The small of my back aches from being pulled by both ends of my body.

  I gulp in his scent, so sweet just seconds ago but now hot and revolting and wrong, and my free knee collapses deeper into the mattress. He has put his weight on it. I launch my right fist upwards like it’s been freed from the spring recoil on a pinball machine and at least two of my knuckles land on something human and satisfying. There is a slight grunt above me but there is no time to celebrate the breakthrough – he twists my arm and whips me on to my side so I am facing the wall, still trapped by the two shackles at either end of the bed.

  ‘You fucking coward!’ I spit into nothing and no one. No one I can see, just a mass of impossibly quick movements without a face. My fist scraped a cheekbone or a jaw, I’m sure of it, but flesh covered by fabric.

  He spits back, hissing through whatever masks his face at me, wrapping my arms tightly together, entwined with the handcuff chain, sinews overstretched. I struggle and retch and scream and flinch but he is unruffled by the noise, making no attempt to quieten me down, until he accomplishes the feat without saying a word.

  He steadies my head with one hand and then uses the weapon in the other to prick the underside of my chin. I bite down hard on my bottom lip: he is holding a knife to my throat. The tip of it scratches the top of my stretched neck. I am afraid to breathe. If I scream again the knife might drive up through my mouth. I welcome the tears down my cheeks, their burning saltwater the only available antidote to the icy blade. He pulls the sharp point away from my neck to listen to me sobbing. Broken now, I use this small interlude in the torture to urge him on.

  ‘Just do it,’ I say. ‘Just do it and get it over with.’

  His reaction to this is to tilt the tip of the knife back where he feels it belongs – against my neck. I must stay still. I must obey. That is what all this is about, a reassertion of domination. It’s just a game, Suzanne, I try to tell myself. Keep playing. Even if you are losing.

  The blade crawls along my skin to the bottom of my throat and is held there for a second, then whipped away again. But this time the movement is accompanied by the weight lifting off my right knee. I turn my head into the mattress and wail, while also protecting my throat from further attack. Water fills my eyes and keeps them sightless. He has broken me again, taken my momentary defiance and twisted me with it, twisted me into shapes I should not go.

  Thunder cracks around the room before I am left with the sound of my own face, pulsating and dripping wet. I want to wait weeks before lifting it from the mattress. When I do come up for stale air, I am surprised to find the light from the laptop smiling at me. A friendly face in a dark world. But he has gone. A ghost.

  My own face in the filthy mattress, my limbs pinned inside the rusty frame, I try to latch on to anything else other than my plight. My tongue talks for me; it has tasted nothing but thirst for too long. I want the water. I want something else in my mouth other than the sickening grit of his scent. I roll myself over and reach my free hand into my back left jeans pocket, until I fasten my fingers around the tiny key. There is no jubilation in unfastening the handcuffs this time, not even in removing the one around my ankle, which, for one horrible second, I feared would not oblige the same key. But one skeleton frees all my bones, and after I put it back in my pocket, I sit on the edge of the bed and cry. I reach under the mattress, pick up the bottle of liquid, pop its cap and guzzle, tears and water mixing between my nose and mouth. I can deal with whatever poison is in there when the time comes. Right now, I just want to drink in something other than darkness.

  When I have quenched my thirst, I drop the bottle back under the bed and follow the light to the table and chair, a good little girl doing what she’s told after a nasty visit to the headmaster’s office.

  Tower Bridge greets me as I sit down, its unnatural sheen an affront to my slowly adjusting powers of squint. I click on the open web browser icon, for what else is there to do? Five Parks leaps up like a sappy dog begging not to be put down, disgusting me. This is all I have. Perhaps it is all he has too, for there is a new post at the top of the blog.

  ‘I won’t let you beat me. I am going to win’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Sunday, July 31, 2016

  Below the headline is my defiant missive, written what I’m guessing was hours earlier, words that now ring hollow. He published my threat on the site in its entirety. And no doubt when he reads what I am writing right now, my inglorious comedown, he will publish that too. I consider not giving him the satisfaction, deleting everything I have written in the last few minutes, keeping his latest torture of me from the world. But people need to know what he is doing to me, even if it has left me broken. And people need to know what he has said. When I first maximised this already-opened FiveParks Word doc, just after I limped over to the laptop and checked the updated blog, there was a message for me at the top. I didn’t delete it. I’ve kept it underneath my writing the whole way down this document, a reminder of my place. Here it is. It is from him.

  ‘I admire your guts, Suzanne. I admire them so much I am tempted to spill them all over your new bed to get a good look at them. All in good time.

  You won’t let me beat you? You’re pathetic. You wrote that like the words meant something. You trade in meaningless words, piled high, reaching out to nowhere. All those words on that blog, each post more self-centred and vacuous than the last, have been wasted just to end up here.

  You say I am lazy and a coward, but you have no idea of the work and courage that has gone into what I am doing. How could you? You’re a freelance journalist. You think work is something that starts at 10am and finishes at 4pm. You think bravery is going on a date with someone you have never met. Although spending an afternoon with a complete stranger has its hazards, I think you might now agree.

  You are right about one thing, however: the game is in motion. But I am disappointed in you. It looks like you’re giving up already.

  You are wrong about why you’re in here, why I’m letting you do what you’re doing. You can play Nancy Drew all you like, a good little girl detective. But that’s not why you’re here. You are here to suffer. You are here to atone for what you did, what you did to me. That is all. That is all I want. I seek no ransom. I have you and that is all I need. For now. When you have suffered and when you have atoned, atoned to the world, then you are going to die in here. You can die with a clean conscience; that will be my gift to you. Until that moment comes, keep reading and keep writing. See you again soon. Be good.’

  19

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 75%

  Time remaining: 3hr 40min

  I can’t do this any more. Not in the state I’m in. I refuse to play his game. After this, I will not write another word. This is goodbye.

  I will make it quick and it will all be over. I will say my farewells to those who warrant them, then read the only post I wrote on Five Parks that means anything to me – the only post that still rings true – and I will crawl on to the mattress and wait to die. If I do not write, he will have to come back for me.

  ‘You are going to die in here.’

  That’s what he wrote. And I believe him. It is clear to me now I will not leave here alive. All I can do to defy him is die before my time, his time. He will be the last person I ever see, I understand that. Or the last person I cannot see. I will not have the chance to say what I need to say to the people I love, not face to face. So this is goodbye. I am sorry.

  Mum, I am sorry I left you. I am sorry I left home and came to London after Dad died. I regret it
now, of course I regret it in here, where I regret everything, but I’ve regretted it since that day five years ago when you pulled out of the drop-off car park at Belfast City Airport. I’ve been home since and put a brave face on, but any chance we had died that day. I should never have left you. It wasn’t your fault Dad died, I know that. Just as it wasn’t your fault that you and I never had the same bond I shared with him. Too much alike, you and your mother – that’s what Dad always said, and he was right. He was right about most things. He was right when he said he didn’t have long after the cancer took hold of him and twisted him into intolerable shapes. Look after your mother, he told me. And I said I would. I lied. Before he was gone, I knew I too would leave, so when it happened, the realisation that I could not be around you wasn’t a surprise. I missed him and I saw him everywhere, especially when I saw you.

  We never did see eye to eye – Dad was always that bridge between us – and when he went I saw no way of crossing the gap to you. I was wrong. And I am sorry. I’m sorry I never brought any of my problems to you. I miss you. I shouldn’t have left you.

  Stephen, I am sorry. I always wanted to be that perfect big sister, but the truth is you never really needed me. I saw that early on so dropped the over-protective act. I know you wanted to leave home and come to London, but the guilt of leaving Mum on her own weighed on you. In the end, she saw she was holding you back and ushered you on to the plane, told you that your big sister would look after you. But I’ve never looked after you. Not in primary school when I wouldn’t be seen with you until we were almost home and it was safe to hold your hand crossing the road without being teased. Not in secondary school when I was too cool to be seen anywhere near my little brother in the corridor at lunchtime. I could lie and tell myself all that tough love made you steely. But love shouldn’t have to be tough. When you came to London, you didn’t need me, amassing more friends in a few months than I could if I spent a lifetime here. I shouldn’t have been surprised.