32
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 90%
Time remaining: 4hr 07min
What is he trying to tell me?
‘Time for a different voice’, he wrote, but whose voice is it? And where is it coming from?
I reread his interjection at the top of Five Parks. The first thing I notice is that he is taunting me with his own words, but also with mine.
‘Amazing what a little exposure can do.’
I’ve written that phrase before when describing how the Daily Herald articles gave me a wider audience and led to a flood of entries in the shape of poems and videos.
He is talking about the exposure since he took over my blog and I woke up in there for the first time. After I started the ball rolling by writing, ‘I am in a bad way’. The more readers the better, I think, because one or ten or hundreds or thousands of them must have alerted the police by now. But not if they don’t believe me.
‘You think she has made this whole thing up. I wonder what on Earth gave you that idea?’
Because Five Parks is offline on my laptop, I cannot click into individual posts, so I cannot read the comments. Perhaps that is just as well. It sickens me that there are people out there who do not believe I am suffering. He could be lying to me, of course, sticking the knife in to get a reaction, but I am riled. It hadn’t occurred to me there would be scepticism about what I am writing. Every dark second in here has been real.
Mouthing that sentence, ‘Suzanne and I are one and the same’, leaves a dirty taste in my mouth.
He wants me to know that he has stalked me.
‘I have been up close to her. Up close to her in the light, not just in here in the dark.’
He has watched me. He has been with me. I don’t want to believe it, but the twisting knot in my stomach isn’t hunger. If he isn’t lying about being up close to me, he could be anyone; one of the dates, or worse, someone I know even more intimately. It disgusts me that my captor may have touched me, talked to me, maybe even laughed with me, in the world away from this wretched place.
And he left a clue about what is outside.
‘None of those sirens outside are for her. No one is coming to save her.’
It feels like he’s made a mistake, and maybe I’m making my own mistake by pointing it out when he sees everything I write, but I can’t help latching on to this line. Has he misread something I wrote? I haven’t mentioned any sirens – because I haven’t heard them. He must think they are loud enough for me to hear.
If there are sirens outside, and lots of them, he couldn’t have taken me far from the location of Date #5. I must be in London. If there are sirens outside, there must be people too, and he must be supremely confident that one of them wouldn’t stumble on to his hiding place. Does that mean I am in a house, a basement of a flat, perhaps? Or a spare room in a high-rise? And yet I haven’t heard any sirens, so it could be a bluff to make the police search in populated areas, although where they might begin those searches I cannot imagine.
And then, as if on cue, a breakthrough. Not a siren, but something, a faint echo riding through the dark. It’s so tinny sharp that if it came from a corner of my cell I would think it was a mouse, but it’s not coming from inside. It’s out there somewhere, swirling around my black box. A noise. It sounds like. . . it’s being made by another human being.
Instinct takes me to the back of the room, where the speakers hide in the high shadows, as I fear my hopes are getting the better of my senses, but the noise turns dull back there, so I go back to the chair and grip it tight in my calloused hands. The sound comes again, biting and hard. Someone outside the room is shouting. And there’s something else; they are shouting my name.
It’s still faint through whatever walls hide me from the world, but it has at least a hint of that familiar sing-song I first heard running across our back garden when I was four years old. My mother’s voice.
‘SUUUU-ZAN!’
Long and drawn and halved for full preachy effect, my mum used my name to indicate that I was in trouble. But what about the voice outside this room, what is he using it for? And yes, it is a male voice, low but powerful, guttural and aggressive. I lie down flat on the floor and dig my ear into the coarse carpet.
‘SUZANNE!’
It’s somehow clearer down here, as if the caller is stuck in an even lower echelon of hell than me.
I freeze on the floor. It could be a trap. It could be my captor shouting, taunting me with my own name, knowing that it will be the last thing I hear from a living soul. But hope overrides my caution, and I picture my rescuer somewhere outside these walls – Aaron or Michael or maybe Rob or a policeman – somebody who has worked out my location, perhaps even done it from my writing.
‘SUZANNE!’
If the shout was louder I know I could work out if I recognised its owner. I almost scream Aaron’s name back into the void, but I get up on my knees and instead opt for a simple and screeching ‘HELP!’
I keep at it.
‘HELP! HELP ME! I AM IN HERE! HERE! HELP ME! HELP ME! I AM HERE! I AM ALIVE! HELP I’M ALIVE!’
Somewhere in the midst of my yelling I heard the echo of another ‘SUZANNE!’ and I shut up for a few seconds. It comes again.
‘SUZANNE!’
There is no change of tone; if he did hear my screams, he hasn’t indicated it with his own. I hear my name in every corner of the room, floor to ceiling. He is everywhere. Am I going mad? What if there is no one there? What if all this screaming is happening inside my head? I can’t take that risk.
‘HELP! HELP ME! IN HERE! IN HERE! I AM SUZANNE! I AM SUZANNE! SUZANNE! SUZANNE! SUZANNE!’
I keep shouting my own name until it loses its meaning. Maybe I am the only one shouting it. But I know I heard it first from outside.
‘SUZANNE!’
There it goes again. One more time and not from me. And then nothing. That is it. His shouting is silenced. But there is a rumble from the ceiling, a crackling that I already know all too well. Even with the warning, I don’t cover my ears in time and the first blast thumps hard against my unprotected eardrums.
The speakers are alive again. I bury my head between my legs and stick my bruised body to the scratchy floor.
It’s not Elvis this time, but something from that era, the ’60s maybe. I don’t know who it is. The singer’s voice screams, ‘I Can’t Explain’.
Get out of my head get out of my head get out of my head …
A jolt in the speaker, and then it starts again. The same verse.
It repeats two or three times before I try to fight it. I scream for help and shout my name again but there is no way through the sonic barrage. I don’t know the song but, whoever it is, it’s slowly killing my resistance. He heard me calling. He heard me calling out in reply to my rescuer and turned on the music in here to drown me out. And my rescuer? I picture Aaron, screaming my name until his throat is ready to burst, unprepared for the black shadow that slithers out of the darkness and grabs him around the mouth, silencing him, maybe silencing him forever.
Hands over my ears, there is nothing to stop the tears spilling off my face and into my lap, parachuting fresh stains down to my filthy jeans.
If my writing has led someone, if it has led Aaron, into danger – into death – then I cannot forgive myself. I knew he would come for me and I wished for it so hard I must have willed it to happen. But I realise this was one wish that shouldn’t have come true.
Please no. Not Aaron please not Aaron please no not Aaron please.
Whoever I lead in here to save me, he will be ready. I have to figure it out for myself. I have to remember what happened on Date #5 – no one else is going to do it for me. Whatever pill he slipped me to get me unconscious and get me in here has worn off, so why can’t I remember? I still have my fragments: the long reeds of grass; the tennis ball at my feet; something smashing into a million pieces; the stumble on the steps; the impossible train shooting into the sky and
the shadowy figure leaning over me, blocking out the sun. I’ve got to put them in order, I’ve got to unmask the shape bearing down on me. For it was he who put me here.
Date #5 has no face and neither does my captor, so could they be one and the same?
I crawl back to the table, the music still blaring at me, trying to break me. I know what I have to do; read and remember before I can write. I’ve put this part off for too long. If I’m going to unmask him, I must read the post that was on top of the blog when I first woke up in here. I’ve put it off because I am frightened. I am frightened because that last post wasn’t written by me.
33
‘Date #5 application: Hide and Seek’
Posted by Suzanne
Thursday, July 28, 2016
You want me? Come and get me.
So here we are, at Date #5, your last chance to secure a date with Britain’s most eligible bachelorette. Four down, one to go. As people on reality TV shows are fond of saying, it’s been a rollercoaster, but it will soon be time for me to step off the ride. Just one more loop-the-loop to go. And who is going to be gripping me for dear life when I take it?
The challenge for Date #5 is even easier than the one for Date #4. This time, you don’t have to send me an email address. All you have to do is find me. It could be the most exciting game of hide and seek you ever play.
To enter the game, you must go to my last known whereabouts. Go to the location of Date #4 at 11am tomorrow. There, you will find a man on a bench with a briefcase.
You are to go to him and await instructions. Good luck.
‘How I became Date #5’
Posted by Paul
Friday, July 29, 2016
Hello world. My name is Paul. And this time tomorrow, I will be Date #5.
Let’s make one thing clear; my name isn’t really Paul. I’m under strict instructions not to tell you my real name, just as I have been ordered not to reveal the location of Date #5.
I have the privilege of writing on Five Parks right now because Suzanne has asked me to explain how I emerged victorious in the battle to become her fifth and final date. So here I go.
As you know from her most recent post, Suzanne’s instructions for this challenge were rather vague. But if I thought I would turn up at 11am at the tennis courts in Regent’s Park – the scene of Date #4 – and be confused about how to proceed in my quest to win Suzanne’s hand, then I was very much mistaken.
It wasn’t difficult to find the bench in question; it was the one with at least two hundred men – and to be fair to Suzanne, quite a few women – crowded around it.
As promised, the bench was the temporary home of a man with a briefcase. A rather large briefcase. He was dressed in a long trench coat and topped off with a black bowler hat.When he appeared satisfied that a large enough throng had gathered, he opened the briefcase and produced two items. One was a CD player and the other a megaphone. He stood up on the bench so everyone could see him and whipped off his trench coat, flinging it into the crowd, who cheered its removal.
The reason for the roar was plain to see for maybe even miles around. The man on the bench was wearing a bright lime green pin-striped suit. A modern-day Riddler. And like the Batman villain, he had a verbal puzzle for us. As many in the crowd began filming him on their phones, he shouted into the megaphone.
‘I am tall and green. If you want to find me today, you must follow me across Europe by train. Just find my number and give me a call..’
Then, he pressed a button on the CD player and lifted it high above his head, trying hard to hide a grin. The song that pinged out from the device was ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Jepson. The tall green man waited for the song to finish, and then he sat down on the bench. And that was the end of the show.
After some applause and lots of murmuring, a few guys who were on their own wandered off. Some people approached the green man and tried to ask him questions about Suzanne’s whereabouts or even to repeat the riddle, but he sat impassive and stayed silent. There were teams of girls and guys conferring in huddles, trying to figure out the clue, and before long a whisper became a shout that the riddle could only mean one thing; a trip to the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras Station. There must be another clue there.
This theory caused several men to groan that there was no way Suzanne was worth traipsing home to dig out a passport for – and they gave up. But a large crowd headed out of Regent’s Park towards Baker Street Tube Station with the goal of going to St Pancras.
I didn’t have any better ideas, so I followed the crowd. However, once I was in the station, amid frantic pushing and shoving from desperate would-be fifth daters, I thought, ‘sod this’, it’s not worth it. Sorry, Suzanne.
I’d taken the day off work for this treasure hunt (that’s how much I wanted to go on a date with you, Suzanne!), so I decided to scrap the search and spend the rest of the morning elsewhere. At the movies.
My usual cinema is at Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush, but I live near an Overground line station in North London, so always use it to get there. From Baker Street, I had to check my route on a Tube map.
And that was when it hit me, gazing into the familiar board of train lines spanning all the colours of the rainbow.
Tucked under the right armpit of Shepherd’s Bush on the map, the answer winked back up at me. Two words. ‘Holland Park’. Holland Park Tube station on the Central Line.
I had solved the riddle, quite by accident.
Holland = tall (everyone in Holland is tall, right?) and Park = green.
Tall and green. ‘Follow me across Europe by train.’ I needed to start my train journey in Holland, but that didn’t mean leaving London. It meant going to Holland Park station. I didn’t need a passport, just my Oyster card. I was on the treasure hunt after all.
When I got to Holland Park station, I didn’t really know what I was doing, or if my theory was correct. I was, however, alone. If someone else had figured out the riddle, I couldn’t see them.
I scanned the station for any kind of clue about what to do next. After a few aimless minutes, I approached the woman behind the counter and tentatively asked her for help ‘getting across Europe’. She gave me a look that would have curdled milk.
Embarrassed, I went and stood outside the station, but not before hearing her tell a male colleague that some weirdo had asked for directions to Europe. I tried to ignore their howls of laughter.
Perhaps I was wrong about the clue. Maybe it was a trap. Or maybe I had to go into the park in Holland Park itself. Why not, I thought, may as well have a bit of a walk even if it is a wild goose chase.
But just as I shifted to leave the station behind me, a voice called me back.
‘Excuse me, sir.’
I turned to find the woman’s male colleague coming towards me.
‘Sorry, sir, but I think you dropped something. Over here.’
He ushered me to a whiteboard used for scribbling travel updates. On the front it said something about a delay on the Bakerloo but a good service on all other lines.
‘I think you dropped it back here, sir,’ he said, walking around the board. I followed. On the back of the sign, there was another message, written in pink marker. This one was not about the service on other lines. It read:
‘Eur0star 7ervice cancelled. Find alternative route, m8…
Loftier than a dull saint, two cheeses pleases.’
I had the first three digits of the phone number: 078. But what about the clue?
I glanced at the Tube station guy. He shrugged. ‘Good luck, mate.’
I went back to the counter and grabbed one of the little fold-up Tube maps. I was going to need one.
I studied the map code, the colours of the lines, all of them so bright except… the dull one. ‘A dull saint’. The grey one. Jubilee line.
St James’ Park! I thought, then realised I was being an idiot – it’s on the Circle and District. There’s only one saint on the Jubilee – St John’s Wood. Wh
o’s loftier than him then? I scanned the map from the top of the Jubilee line, from Stanmore down.
Queensbury and Kingsbury are up there; are kings and queens higher than a saint? But it was easy. Easy cheesy. I’d momentarily forgotten I was on a European adventure. Right above St John’s Wood were Swiss cheese and Cottage cheese.
Swiss Cottage.
I was going to Switzerland next. On the Jubilee line.
Retracing my route, I returned to Baker Street and changed for the Jubilee towards Swiss Cottage.
Once there, there was no fooling around. I went straight to the station’s whiteboard. The next message was there! It read:
‘42une fav0urs the brave…
Something is steep and rotten here’.
I had the next part of the phone number, 420, but the clue befuddled me. ‘Something is steep.’ What is steep? A hill, I suppose. But what is rotten? I said the words out loud over and over again, much to the confusion of commuters milling about the station. And then I forgot about steep and uttered: ‘Something is rotten. Something is rotten. Something is rotten… in the state of Denmark!’
Finally, my GCSE English literature had paid off. Cheers, Hamlet!
I scanned the Tube map in my hand for a station with Denmark in its name, knowing it must be the destination for the next segment in my ‘European’ adventure.
Frustrated at my lack of progress and no longer concerned for my dignity, I asked a member of staff behind the ticket counter.
Five Parks Page 18