Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  At least the Herald let me use their photographs on my blog, even if they stipulated that my words there had to match the final published versions in their paper and on their website.

  There is just one photo with my Date #3 recap, stuck at the bottom of my piece. I wanted to bury it where no one would see it. On Date #2, the Herald photographer was in our faces, snapping Eric and I wherever we went and whenever we jumped on and off a horse. But in Greenwich Park the photographer was unseen – I knew he was lurking but not how close. Wherever he hid, he caught me at my lowest point, fighting back tears as I reached the bottom of the hill. I look at the photo now and see the loneliest girl in the world. I thought I had reached rock bottom back then, but I wasn’t even halfway there.

  Studying the depressing image on the screen in the dark, I am reminded that the photographer wasn’t the only one watching me. David was long gone at this point, of course, but there is someone else I know in the photo, higher up the hill than me, mingling between the Spanish and American tourists, her head hidden by the hood of a dull brown raincoat. Only I know it’s her.

  In this photo, I look like a different person to the one in the corresponding image at the end of Date #1. Then I was glowing as the sun dipped behind me, my cheeks flush with the perfection of that first date with Jordan, my eyes excited about the prospect of prolonging things outside Queen’s Park. But in the photo at Greenwich, taken only two weeks later, I am defeated and beaten, a victim of the rain and David’s cruelty. I don’t want to believe that he is capable of keeping me locked away in here, but I cannot rule him out. And yet I know there is good in him; I only have to replay his Breakfast Club video in my head, picture him earning the laughter and respect of his pupils, to realise that.

  He is not the obvious candidate for all this. David may have walked out on me in Greenwich Park, but he was no Eric.

  Date #2 … Maybe

  Eric was not as dashing as the pictures plastered all over the Daily Herald made him appear. Perched on a horse, he looked like the perfect gentleman. Perched on a stool in a pub, he was something else.

  I lied about the end of my blog post on Date #2 and, as a result, in the pages of a national newspaper. Yes, we went to the pub after we left Richmond Park, but we didn’t sit on a bench outside and watch the sun go down as I described; in reality, we retreated to a quiet corner inside the bar, out of the way of prying eyes. And we didn’t just have one drink. If only I’d been that disciplined. I didn’t really click with Eric, but he was entertaining company, even if I guessed he would rather have been regaling a whole gaggle of women about his life’s exploits, rather than solitary old me. He struck me as a man who liked an adoring (female) audience. He was keen to have another drink, and I obliged him, but he must have been ordering me double gin and tonics, for my head was already light halfway through the second one, probably not helped by the muggy day and the largely untouched picnic. By this stage he was on his third pint, and after he downed the second half of it in one enormous gulp, he stretched his head over the table and whispered in my ear.

  ‘Tu. Es. Une. Pute.’

  He drew his head back, then gazed straight into my eyes, more French words interrupting his growing grin.

  ‘Tu sais ce que ça veut dire? It means “You are a whore”.’

  I knew what it meant without the translation, but the G&Ts had dazed me, dulled my senses. Everything he did and said ran in slow motion.

  He leaned back on his chair in our booth, happy to have stunned me. He threw some hand gestures and said it again, his smile wide and intimidating.

  ‘You. Are. A. Whore. You are a whore. C’est ça! There you have it. Wooplah!’

  I grabbed my handbag and tried to leave, but he was ready for me, pouncing round the side of the table and putting a firm hand on my shoulder. He wasn’t smiling any more.

  ‘SIT DOWN!’

  He pushed me back into my seat and I shouted at him to get his hands off me, escaping the pub my only thought until something he spat made me stay of my own volition.

  ‘I know what you did to Michael,’ he said.

  Smug and triumphant, he saw that he had my attention, and sat back down before I did. We had the whole corner of the bar to ourselves, and if someone else had heard our commotion, they had chosen to ignore it. I wanted to sprint out of the pub, but I also needed to hear what he knew about Michael. I didn’t hear much.

  Eric told me I was a slut for starting Five Parks so soon after splitting up with my fiancé and that he applied for a date with me so he could say so to my face. He dared me to write about his outburst in my next blog post, saying I wouldn’t have the guts because it would expose my past with Michael. I was wrong to sit back down. I had heard enough. I shot up from my chair again, but Eric was as agile off a horse as on one, even filled with three pints, and reached out and grabbed my arm. He was too strong. He pulled me close and poked a finger in my face.

  ‘You dirty fucking whore,’ he said, his eyes bubbling with rage and an alarming sense of satisfaction. He thought his behaviour was justified, which only made it all the more disgusting.

  My own eyes filled with tears, but I ignored the urge to break down in front of him and returned fire in a language he could understand. Not French.

  ‘Take your hand off me, you piece of shit.’

  He cracked another smile. I didn’t know a smile could be something so nasty. He was enjoying this. His nails dug deep into the skin of my arm, a grip that wouldn’t be loosened with mere barbed words. My eyes flickered down to the table to find some kind of weapon, but my almost finished glass of gin and tonic was too far out of reach. With my free hand I delved into my handbag in the hope of clasping something solid that might free me from his clutches, and maybe even break his nose as a bonus. He noticed what I was trying to do and his eyes followed my movement, and that was his undoing. He didn’t see her coming.

  Eric hadn’t ordered a fourth pint, but he got one anyway. All over him. She appeared from nowhere, neither of us was aware of her presence, but when she did arrive she made a proper splash. Even when my right arm went cold I didn’t quite know what was happening. It wasn’t until I saw the empty pint glass in her hand, and the dark stain of beer over Eric’s shirt, that I twigged what she had done.

  ‘Oh I am so sorry!’ she said, wiping him down with her hand. It was only then that I saw it was Sylvie doing the wiping. My guardian angel. She had come to my rescue yet again.

  Eric was furious. He flicked her hand away with his own, called Sylvie a ‘stupid bitch’ in English then muttered a half-dozen French expletives, fixed me a glare and stormed off to another corner of the bar in search of the toilets.

  His grip on my arm was replaced by Sylvie’s, warm and soothing.

  ‘Are you okay, Suze? Sorry I got beer all over your arm.’

  ‘Yeah. . . yes. I’m fine. I just want to leave.’

  Sylvie stepped back to give me room to exit the booth, but when I was out she held up her hand. She frightened me, as she was looking right through me, downwards at the table.

  ‘Hang on, let’s not dash off just yet. Let’s give this prick a taste of his own medicine.’

  My head followed her eyes and I saw what had caught her attention. It caught mine too. Eric had left his phone.

  I can’t remember who suggested it – when Sylvie and I arrived at an idea, we usually got there by some sort of bizarre shared telepathy – but before we knew it we had made our own visit to the toilets. The ladies’ were on our side of the pub, at the opposite end to the gents’, but we didn’t have much time.

  We clambered into a cubicle together and went to work on Eric’s phone. The first thing Sylvie did was take a selfie, pointing the phone high above us, using the camera to chop off our heads but keep our cleavage.

  His personal apps on the iPhone gleamed up at us, almost as if they were begging to be selected for naughtiness; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. . . Sylvie posted the picture on all of them, along with the hashtag
‘#ToiletSexWithTwoBitches’. She didn’t stop there, going into his texts and sending the image to as many female contacts as she could find in the little time we had. Even ‘Maman’ wasn’t excluded.

  When we emerged from the toilets a few minutes after we’d gone in, Eric was at the bar, gesticulating at his shirt and arguing with the staff. Demonstrating balls of steel, Sylvie walked back to our table, unhurried, put his phone back and turned around, giving me the thumbs up on her return as she swept me out a side exit and into the dying summer night. We laughed the whole way down the hill to Richmond Station.

  26

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 30%

  Time remaining: 1hr 07min

  Sylvie was the girl in the photo, watching me well up from a distance in Greenwich Park. And she was there on Date #2 in Richmond Park, but I didn’t know she was in the pub, keeping an eye on Eric. I had texted her when Eric and I were leaving Richmond Park to tell her to stand down and go home. I was glad she disobeyed me.

  After I’d gone down the Daily Herald route, in a blast of publicity that culminated in whoring myself on the This Morning sofa, things began to get a little scary. The abuse came thick and fast; in the comments section of my blog, in emails and on Twitter. I should have seen it coming, I’d done enough feature pieces on online trolls and women who had been threatened on social media, but it caught me unawares. How much hatred could a blog about dating five men inspire? Even I was surprised. I guess you can’t claim you’ve lived in the modern age until someone issues you with an internet death threat. The death threats were usually so monosyllabic and badly spelt (‘Die bitch, dye lolz’) that I could brush them off as the point-and-clicks of professional pubescent masturbators, but some of the other stuff was more sinister.

  ‘I hope you are raped on one of these dates, it’s what you deserve.’

  That one always stands out. I can recall the wording without effort. It’s the calm behind the writing that’s disturbing, like he was wishing me well ahead of a job interview.

  ‘Please pick me,’ another read. ‘If you do I will squeeze my thumbs into your eyes and fuck you until you are dead. And then fuck you some more.’

  Rob was great at shielding me from most of this stuff, clearing out Five Parks’ comments section as often as he could, but he let me see the really nasty ones, for my own sake. He asked if I wanted to take further action. Sylvie said I should report every last one of the hateful fuckers to the police, but I didn’t see the point. I’ve read enough stories focusing on the trolling of real celebrities to know that even convictions don’t stop the abuse, in some cases just inviting more of it. I decided to ignore the vile comments and concentrate instead on the hundreds who wrote under the line of my blog posts each week with encouragement, thanking me for bringing them out of their own shells and into the dating light.

  Things became more serious when I arrived home one night to find something in my bedroom. A letter. Under my pillow. I had a stalker. Recalling the letter’s contents makes me shiver, even in the hot stuffiness of my prison cell. There was no handwriting; the message was formed on one blank sheet of white paper in letters cut from magazines, making it look like a kidnapper’s ransom note. The coloured letters were pasted down with Pritt Stick to read:

  ‘I AM WATCHING YOU. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WATCHING YOU. I WANT TO PROTECT YOU. I WANT TO EAT YOU UP!’

  The letter rattled me. I didn’t go to the police. I don’t know why now, sitting here in my cell. Someone was watching me and someone took me. I didn’t tell anyone about the letter. I mentioned to Rob that my flatmates were doing my head in – which wasn’t a total lie – and he said I could sleep on his couch for a few days if I wanted. I took him up on his offer, tried to make it appear like he had instigated the arrangement, when it was I who had been fishing for a saviour.

  I didn’t tell Sylvie about it. She would have been furious. She was angry enough that my dopey new flatmates always left a key under the mat of their door. After the letter, I tried to ask casually if they had ever considered changing the locks, but they looked right through me. They were always forgetting things in taxis or nightclubs: wallets; phones; house keys – so were glad of the magic mat. It’s their flat and I am just a lodger – I didn’t raise it again. They don’t know me, I don’t think they know what Five Parks means.

  After a few nights at Rob’s, I returned home and the stalking stopped. I made sure I double locked the front door of the flat at night, and when my flatmates had returned home, I swiped the key from under the mat and kept it in my room.

  All of this left me on edge, and Sylvie and I decided she should shadow me on the remaining four dates. She would go to the parks and chaperone me from a safe distance in case anything went wrong. I took a basic pay-as-you-go Nokia with me on the dates to avoid using my own phone number.

  Such precautions hadn’t even occurred to me before my opening date with Jordan, which was a walk in the park in more ways than one. But on Date #2, in Richmond Park with Eric, I was glad I had Sylvie. She saved me. If only she had been there to protect me on Date #5.

  After Sylvie and I had parted ways on the train journey home from Richmond that night, I did something I hadn’t done for six months; I spoke to the man who used to be my fiancé.

  Michael was confused when he answered the phone, then angry. Perhaps he was preparing for a Saturday night date of his own, or maybe he just didn’t like being cold-called by the woman who ruined his life. I didn’t care. I had enough courage left from nearly two double gin and tonics to shout over his protests and I demanded answers about Eric. How did this stranger know our business? How did he know we split up? Tell me, Michael, tell me.

  His anger soon turned to concern and he calmed me down. He apologised for raising his voice and said he was glad I called. He suggested we meet face to face – and soon. There was something he wanted to tell me too.

  *

  I should have read the warning signs when Michael texted me half an hour before we were due to meet, the Tuesday evening that followed Date #2, when I was just parting from Rob and Sylvie in the pub where we convened after our successful Trading Places re-enactment. I didn’t tell them I was going to meet Michael. There was only one word in his text: ‘Belugi’s’.

  He had sprung the location on me as late as he could and I didn’t have the energy to suggest an alternative. So there we were, two broken former lovers huddled around a tiny table, both in men’s suits, six months after they’d called off their wedding, and three years after they’d first met in the same Soho cocktail bar. For a lawyer, Michael always had a penchant for the dramatic.

  He looked good. He was still following those tips handed down to him years earlier by his former girlfriend Michelle, the personal trainer who taught him his way around a gym.

  But if he expected me to slide in beside him and launch off with, ‘Remember our first night here when we sipped martinis and flirted over our shared love for Belinda Carlisle?’, he was very much mistaken. I wanted to know about Eric.

  The six-month absence hadn’t dulled Michael’s sixth Suzanne sense. He knew when to be up front with me; if only I could say the same.

  ‘What has he done to you?’ he asked. If that was his first question, Eric had previous form.

  I downplayed the incident in the pub in Richmond with Eric, didn’t mention that he belittled me, grappled my arm and made me fear he might pull it from its socket. I didn’t mention that Sylvie saved me, drowning Eric in a pint of lager – I didn’t mention Sylvie at all. I certainly didn’t say that Eric had called me a whore, but I told Michael enough.

  ‘He had a go at me,’ I said. ‘Told me he knew we’d split up, said I was disrespecting you with the blog. . . called me a liar.’

  Michael leaned back on the leather seating and sighed. It was clear he knew all about the blog. It would have been stupid of me to believe he hadn’t been following its progress.

  ‘I see you went big this week,’ he said.


  It was the day after the article on Eric’s horsing around had appeared in the Herald. I was becoming a tiny bit famous.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention any of this in the article?’ he asked.

  It was a good question, and one that Nick Hatcher would have posed had he known how the date really ended, but one that had so many different answers.

  ‘I didn’t want to embarrass us or you. . . or myself. I don’t want any of that stuff to come out.’

  I also didn’t want to ask Michael if any journalists had tracked him down and offered him some money for a kiss-and-tell on online dating’s Willy Wonka. We had our differences and our break-up was horrible, but not even the nastiest little part of me ever thought he would sell me out to the papers. Not just because he had a strong sense of integrity, but because it would also reflect on him. Long-time senior associates at law firms don’t get made partners when they’re splashed all over the pages of the tabloids.

  ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you started this blog and had it published in the Herald, Suze.’

  He was right. And in that lawyery way of his, he was having a dig at me while also trying to protect me. Like any good lawyer, he was also diverting me from the subject I wanted to discuss. This time I wouldn’t let him win.

  ‘Eric. Who is he? How do you know him? How does he know about us? Did you put him up to going on a date with me?’

  As soon as I tacked on that final question I regretted it. That wasn’t fair on Michael.

  He explained that he did know Eric; Michael’s firm had represented Eric’s bank on a case that settled last week before it had the chance to reach the courts. There were client drinks to celebrate in a bar in central London, and Michael got chatting to a rather flamboyant Frenchman who worked at the bank, even though the pair hadn’t crossed paths while their two institutions were building a case. After a few too many drinks, the topic of discussion inevitably turned to women. Eric mentioned he had read an article in that day’s paper about a female blogger on a mission to have five dates with five men in five different London parks. The French banker had been so intrigued by the article that he even remembered the blogger’s name, and he wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t recognise Michael’s face dropping when he uttered it. This was how Michael found out about Five Parks. Let’s just say my ex-fiancé wasn’t the first person I sought to iMessage when I started my dating blog.