Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  I watched every one of the applications. There were at least ten Die Hards, clips of buff guys doing buff things in white vests to prove their buffness. Others tried a different avenue, ditching hi-octane action for sweet romantic comedy, but this was just as futile, particularly when things went down the Pretty Woman route. A little tip for you, guys; when you are trying to win the affection of a girl, please refrain from comparing her to a prostitute, even if it’s a prostitute who looks like Julia Roberts.

  But with Sylvie and Rob’s help, I did narrow it down to just three clips. The first was a reworking of a scene from The Big Lebowski, in which Jeff Bridges’ Dude visits the title character to complain about his rug being saturated by a thug’s urine, with my potential next date disguised as both roles in clever make-up as his camera switched from one side of the room to the other.

  The second shortlisted applicant worked in theatre and had used his contacts to pull off an extraordinary coup. He persuaded Timothy Dalton (yes, the Timothy Dalton) to star alongside him in a recreation of a scene from the so-bad-it’s-good ‘80s space camp adventure Flash Gordon. He picked the scene where Flash and Dalton’s character, the shady Prince Barin, play a bizarre game of dare in which each takes turns to slide his hand into various open tree stumps, hoping to avoid the deadly sting of the ghastly ‘Wood Beast’ that lurks somewhere inside.

  Although the applicant’s job allowed him to film the re-enactment on a stage somewhere in the West End (Dalton must have been doing a play there), the budget didn’t stretch as far as a special effects department. Instead of a series of large half-cut trees, he had procured five or six cardboard boxes and punched them with holes. And when Flash and Barin delved their arms into these boxes, there was no slimy green Wood Beast waiting to pounce, but an overly-friendly tortoiseshell cat, who was later revealed to be ‘Olivier’ in the brief closing credits of the 90-second scene.

  The best thing about the clip, however, was that Dalton didn’t play Prince Barin. The ex-007 was resplendent in a terribly ill-fitting red vest as Flash Gordon, while my suitor had strapped himself into a bright green Robin Hood costume to become the prince. The whole thing was hilarious, and was made even more so by a bonus behind-the-scenes clip in which a solemn Dalton explained his reasons for wanting to be Flash, insisting it was the role he was born to play. The man who used to be James Bond also took the opportunity to make it clear he was not the one applying to be my date.

  It was an amazing video, but the most amazing thing about it was that it didn’t win. I lost the chance to date the dashing Prince Barin. More than half of my readers preferred the last of the three shortlisted clips. And I couldn’t blame them. Rob lobbied hard for The Big Lebowski, ignoring the fact that it’s a film I’ve only seen once and, if I’m honest, didn’t really get. It was always between Flash Gordon and the final video in the shortlist.

  This third applicant didn’t need a West End stage – he already had his requisite backdrop and his co-stars. He was a teacher at an all-girls primary school in south London.

  In the video, bedecked in a bright beige suit and a black shirt, he strolls into his classroom and surveys five pupils, each no more than ten years old, scattered apart at separate tables. He starts handing out blank sheets of paper and pencils to his captors. And then he starts into his best attempt at an American accent.

  It is, of course, The Breakfast Club, and my guy – the guy who will be Date #3 – is playing the part of put-upon vice-principal Richard Vernon.

  In this new version of The Breakfast Club, all of its members are little girls with pouts on their faces. Even here, in my current dark hell, thinking about the video raises a smile.

  It takes a lot to top Timothy Dalton as Flash Gordon, but the primary school teacher had done it. I couldn’t wait to meet him. That was then, two weeks ago. And now? Now all I do is wait. Write and wait.

  Date #3 could be my captor, I cannot rule him out, not yet. I gave him a reason to do this to me, just as I did with Eric before him.

  ‘Let’s stay friends …’, ‘I really like you just not in that way …’, ‘I’m not in the right place for a relationship right now …’ – those excuses might wash in the real world, but there is no way to let someone down gently in the pages of a national newspaper. I did my best. Eric was not the person I wrote about in that article, but I tried to spare him further scrutiny. I didn’t grant Date #3 the same mercy.

  24

  ‘Date #3 in Greenwich Park: Is it still raining? I HAD noticed’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Monday, July 18, 2016

  FADE IN:

  EXT. GREENWICH PARK, LONDON – DAY

  A GIRL’S FACE. She is crushed. But trying not to show it. She is SUZANNE. She is blonde and beautiful and confident. But not now. Not here.

  CUT TO

  A BOY’S FACE. DAVID. He is flustered, apologetic but unconvincing. David is Date #3.

  PULL BACK TO

  GREENWICH PARK. The grass outside the National Maritime Museum. The girl and the boy stand two metres apart, sharing only the steady rain. The water bounces off DAVID’s bright orange raincoat. SUZANNE, clad in a light jacket over a summer dress, wipes a mix of rain and sweat off her brow. It is wet but hot. DAVID tries again.

  DAVID

  I’ll be here when you come back down, I promise. I’m going to grab that bench over there.

  He points at a wooden seat behind them, right in front of a clump of yellow flowers. SUZANNE’s eyes follow his finger then turn back to him.

  SUZANNE

  Are you sure you won’t come up to the observatory with me? It will only take ten minutes. I can go slow.

  DAVID looks at the steep hill that winds all the way up to the Royal Observatory. He runs a hand along the back of his knee.

  DAVID

  Sorry, I probably shouldn’t. I can barely walk. I’ve twisted it pretty badly. That will teach me to play five-a-side the day before a date.

  SUZANNE

  Okay. It’s probably rubbish up there. But I just want to take a look at the Greenwich Line. Maybe time will stand still for me. I’ll be quick.

  A phone vibrates and beeps in the pocket of DAVID’s jeans. Another text. He pats a hand on it instinctively and shrugs in apology. SUZANNE can’t help herself.

  SUZANNE

  Anyway, it will give you a chance to text your mates and tell them how badly this date is going.

  She is half-joking, but the shrug of DAVID’s shoulders confirms her worst fear: he wants to be anywhere else in the world but here with her. He limps off towards the bench, taking out his phone as he goes. She puts her head down and starts out on the path under the trees up the hill to the observatory.

  CUT TO BLACK

  The trees shield me from the rain but nothing can protect me from the hurt. David does not want to be here with me. I plod my way up the path, splitting endless groups of chatty Spanish teenagers cascading in the other direction. The rain has tumbled down for the past hour, but Greenwich Park is still heaving with tourists. They tease and tickle each other, their laughter echoing around the branches, oblivious to the heartbroken ghost who walks right through them unnoticed. A rebel droplet falls off one of the leaves and smacks the top of my head. My bare legs, under a purple and blue flowery dress, run wet with rain.

  I have just walked away from the worst first date of my life. There have been other dating disasters down the years, of course, but this one crushes because I had such high hopes. This one hurts because it has all spun out of kilter for no reason. It’s not my fault.

  I arranged to meet David in Greenwich at the Royal Naval College, that magnificent old structure backing on to the muddy Thames that flicks two fingers across the water to the man-made mountains of Canary Wharf, centuries-late usurpers who flex their own considerable skyscraped muscles. Those two fingers are the college’s pair of white bell-towers, one over its chapel, the other protecting its Painted Hall.

  There were clear blue skies over Kilburn wh
en I got the Tube, but I emerged at North Greenwich into a dark world. The short bus ride from there to the Naval College was punctuated by lightning piercings and the scrape of thunder. By the time I stepped off the bus at my destination, the heavens opened their wrath on south east London, angry perhaps with its inhabitants’ smugness at three previous weeks of solid summer sun. Something had to give. In the thirty-second half-sprint from the bus to the college, I was drenched. I didn’t care. I love the rain - I’m from Northern Ireland, so it’s in my DNA – and I had a vague flash-forward of emulating a drenched Andie McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral when my date arrived.

  The choice of Greenwich was not by chance; as one of the most filmed locations in the world, it ties in with my Date #3 movie theme.

  But rather than sweeping in like an action hero, David limped into the scene as the pantomime villain. Twenty minutes late. The first thing I noticed was his ludicrous luminous orange rain jacket (at least one of us had checked the forecast), but as he waved at me across the courtyard in what had died down into a drizzle, I could see he was shuffling, dragging his right leg along like it was reluctant for him to meet my acquaintance.

  ‘I might not be much use to you,’ he said, once we reached each other. ‘I twisted my knee at football last night, I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘We don’t have to walk too far. We can just grab a seat somewhere and chat if you like.’

  ‘No, we can see how I get on.’

  Thunder cracked a warning somewhere over on Canary Wharf.

  ‘Let’s see if you can make it inside,’ I said. ‘It looks like another storm is coming.’

  He battled across the courtyard, his stiffness slowing me down to a snail’s pace. Football the night before the biggest date of his life? You want to get your priorities right, David. You should have been at home studying, rehearsing all the eloquent lines you were going to use on me, planning how you were going to whisk me off my feet.

  My feet are wringing wet, so that is out of the question. We tiptoed tentatively up the steps of the Naval College, in front of the green split that separates two long rows of colonnades. This is where James McAvoy wooed Rebecca Hall in Starter for 10, where Keira Knightley set male heads swooning in The Duchess. This is movie history. Everyone from hammer god Thor to Les Misérables has conquered Hollywood in this spot.

  From the moment I clicked on The Breakfast Club spoof video, David was destined to be my matinée idol. A pity no one told him that.

  It was a slow slalom between noisy American tourists to the dry refuge of the chapel, but before we reached the door, David’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He grasped at it, forgetting I was there, ripping the device out of his jeans like it was a buoy in an ocean that was about to become choppy.

  He gave it a glance, absorbing the text’s contents for a split second, before banishing it back whence it came.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, not looking at me, our feet tapping their way up the steps and into the entrance of the chapel, out of the rain. ‘Just someone wishing me luck.’

  I gave him a pass, flattered that the date has taken on the magnitude of something that requires goodwill from unknown others to have a chance at success, like an A-level exam or a driving test.

  But as soon as we sat down on the blue cushions that ply the pews of the chapel, the phone went off again. This time it was a call, echoing through the old church, and he plucked it from his pocket as if it was about to speak the gospel of the Lord. He wanted to answer it – that was written all over his face – but decorum overcame him and he remembered his place, putting it back in his jeans.

  Before technology interrupted, I had been on the verge of telling him that this chapel was used as the location for the second nuptials in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and that he is supposed to be my Hugh Grant and I am supposed to be his Andie (or his Kristen Scott, whichever he prefers), but I hold my tongue. The noise of the phone has plunged us into silence. Instead, I ask him a question.

  ‘I’ve never been to Greenwich before. What about you?’

  ‘Uh, what… yeah. Two or three times. We take the kids here on history trips. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and all that. Pretty amazing they were both born here, really.’

  He didn’t look amazed. He looked bored. Probably because I’ve brought him somewhere he associates with screaming kids crying out for half-term.

  His phone buzzed again, another text. I wasn’t going to put up with it any longer.

  ‘You can turn it off, you know. I won’t judge you.’

  It was a thinly veiled joke, but he didn’t seem to grasp the punchline.

  ‘Yeah… I know. Sorry. Uh, do you mind if we get out of here. I’m roasting.’

  His bright orange jacket had blinded me to the big beads of sweat on his forehead. I had mistaken them for rain.

  It was bucketing outside, but we remained in the fresh air by twisting between the colonnades, distracting ourselves by watching two little girls in pink coats and matching Wellingtons who were hell bent on destroying any stray puddles.

  David put both his hands on a grey column, almost as if he was about to push it over like a Greek god, and grabbed deep breaths. Something wasn’t right.

  I have put him through an ordeal. This isn’t just a date – it’s a superdate. A date for the gods. Somewhere, in between the droplets from the sky, a stealthy photographer has been capturing our every move for the newspaper. David is nervous. But just because you are on edge doesn’t mean you cannot turn your bloody phone off.

  After it blew up again I did too, because this time he answered it. Where is the guy from the video? I have been deceived. I mouthed to him that I was pressing ahead and he can follow me towards Greenwich Park, and he nodded in agreement before turning his head and his attention to his phone call.

  He caught up and we made our way in almost silence across the road from the college to the Maritime Museum and the park. He apologised for the interruptions and said he had been checking his phone as his football team, Crystal Palace, were playing a pre-season friendly. His friends had also been texting and calling him with score updates. Unbelievable. Football. And not even real football but a friendly. I was disgusted.

  *

  And now here I am, alone and even more disgusted, tackling the slope up to the observatory, while David rests his dodgy knee on a bench below. He has abandoned me.

  I turn around to see if he’s still there, perched in front of the yellow flowers. It’s a bad date, but he’s not a bad enough person to walk out on it. Is he? I can still see his bright coat, one orange arm raised to press his phone to his ear – he hasn’t moved.

  At the top, outside the gates of the observatory, I take another glance back. The orange beacon is still on its bench, although the view is more obscured now as the rain quickens. On the other side of the steel gates, tourists queue to have their photo taken on the Meridian Line, the thin strip of metal embedded in paving that divides the eastern and western hemispheres. No such barrier is needed between David and I, for we were never close enough in the first place.

  This is confirmed when I start back down the hill, because the bench that hosted the orange blob is empty. David is gone. Now it’s my phone’s turn to vibrate. I pluck it from my pocket and put my head over it to shield it from the lashing rain. There is a text from David.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Suzanne, but I have to leave. Something has come up. Sorry.’

  I raise my head from the text in disbelief and hot rain lashes my tongue. Bastard. I hope that after I publish this, he never gets another date. Later, my anger will be even more intense, when I check the Crystal Palace website. They do have a friendly… tomorrow. If you’re going to lie to my face, David, at least do it well.

  The tourists are still laughing around me as I trickle back down the hill, soaking wet, my head bowed towards the footpath. I usually love the rain, but not today.

  This post was first published in this morning’s Daily Hera
ld newspaper and on its website.

  25

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 37%

  Time remaining: 1hr 29min

  They wanted me to be meaner. Girly magazine shite. That’s what the Daily Herald’s Nick Hatcher called my description of Date #2 in Richmond Park. He said I was lucky that Eric’s horse-riding antics had injected some drama into the date and the resultant piece, or else he might not have printed it. He emailed me and told me their readers didn’t want some loved-up fantasy, they wanted grittiness. They wanted the dirt. I would have to up my game for Date #3.

  David didn’t do himself any favours. It’s difficult to believe now rereading my post, but I tried to go easy on him. Everything I wrote in the article was true – he was glued to his phone and he did ditch me in the rain – and yet in the first draft I submitted to the Herald I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. In this submission, I wrote of my disappointment about the date but I didn’t twist the knife into him – he wasn’t exactly God’s gift, far from it, but he seemed a decent guy who was distracted on the day. He was edgy about the date, his nerves got the better of him, he was trying to play it cool, he wasn’t into me… it could have been any one or all of these things.

  When Hatcher received my first draft, he emailed back: ‘Did this little shit REALLY do the things you’ve written about here? If so, you’re letting him off easy. I want more spite in this, Suzanne – our readers will demand it because of his behaviour. Give it to him with both barrels.’

  Spite not shite. Got it. I mustered as much bile as I could and injected it into a second draft, but Hatcher still wasn’t happy. But by then time was tight and the deadline for Monday’s edition was looming. He took what he was given, but not before adding his own venom. It was him or one of his subs who slipped in the ‘Bastard’ comment. I wouldn’t call my worst enemy that in print; I’m not vindictive and I’m not an idiot. I wasn’t just angry that Hatcher had twisted my words – every journalist has been cut by the sub-editor’s blade at some point in their career – but that he had made me out to be another bitter thirty-something who couldn’t hold down a man, not even for half an hour in a park.