‘I’m trying to get to Denmark,’ I said, trying to keep a straight face.
The bloke didn’t flinch.
‘Hill. Denmark Hill. It’s on the Overground.’
He showed me on my fold-out map. I had always wanted to go to Denmark.
On the way to Denmark Hill on the train, I tried to find more European countries inside my Tube map, hoping it might save me precious time at the station once I have the next part of the phone number. But the map didn’t give up any secrets.
But at Denmark Hill, the back of the whiteboard read:
‘Time to make new tracks 7uptown 4 your next 6cess…
I kneel before two princes, stuck sweating between the same place twice.’
This was a terrible clue. Denmark Hill is as south as Clapham: everywhere is uptown.
Two princes… Philip? Charles? Naseem Hamed?
I was so close. I realised I’ve been smug, thinking I was the only one on the trail, but for all I knew someone else had got the last clue and bagged the date already. But I wasn’t going to give up now.
What other princes were there? Prince Harry… Prince William… perhaps Wills, for Willesden Green? No, that was rubbish.
And then I read the first part of the clue again.
‘Make new tracks.’
I’m on the Overground, so it could mean a different line, or returning to the Tube network, but new tracks implied something else. Tracks that aren’t for a train. A tram! I scanned the Docklands Light Railway section of my map. It didn’t take long to leap out.
There is a station on the DLR called Prince Regent. And below him, Royal Albert – another prince.
‘Between the same place twice…’
I looked along that branch of the DLR – there is a Beckton Park and then at the end of the line, a Beckton. There are two stations in between Beckton Park and Beckton. The one I’m looking for wasn’t Gallions Reach.
I arrived at Cyprus DLR station dripping in sweat. I needed two more numbers. The final message was on the back of the whiteboard.
‘What a f9 adventure! You’re 6y and you know it!
Text me your location now.’
I added the 9 and the 6 to the numbers I had and cued up the message: ‘Cyprus.’ I sent the text.
And then I waited.
A minute later, the phone vibrated in my clammy palm. The message back read: ‘Go to the counter and recite the following. All of it.’
I read what follows. There was no way I was saying all this out loud.
I shuffled to the counter and was about to be first in line. Two or three other people filed in behind me. I didn’t want them to be behind me. I tried to let them go before me, but the woman at the counter beckoned me forward.
‘Come on, hurry up, we haven’t got all day.’
I looked through the glass at her, then back down at the content of the text. I felt the impatient line of people behind me.
I tried to read the first bit, but it came out of my mouth in something less than a whisper.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she asked. ‘Can you speak up please? And please hurry up.’
She had a face like thunder. I was not about to make her day.
I took one last deep breath, held the phone up high in my eyeline, then raced through the text, a little louder than I wanted.
‘I am here. I am alive. The prize is near. I’m Date No. 5.’
I lowered the phone and trembled. The woman kept her thunder face on me. Then it cracked, into a huge smile.
‘You know, if you had just said the first bit nice and loud, I probably would have let you away without doing the rest of it.’
She was in on it the whole time.
‘I have something for you,’ she said, as one of the people in the queue clapped, while the other scowled. London in microcosm.
She handed me an envelope. Through the paper, I felt something hard and misshapen.
‘This is to prove you’re you,’ she said. ‘Have a good day.’
I thanked her, stepped out of the queue and ripped open the envelope. Alongside the hard object, there was something else: a card. It was white. Printed in the middle, on simple black lettering, was the name of a park in London, followed by, ‘Tomorrow. 4pm.’
I did it. I am Date #5.
34
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 75%
Time remaining: 3hr 49min
I would be lying if I wrote that the treasure hunt wasn’t fun. It was always going to be fun when I was the treasure. But someone – my captor – has taken that idea too far. Could it be ‘Paul’ who imprisoned me? I do not know, because I do not know Paul.
I shouldn’t have been so stupid. I didn’t check him out. He has the voice I gave him by asking him to email me his copy for the blog, but he has no face. I remember waiting on that bench in the park for a long time, but I’m not sure he turned up for the date. Unless he was in the growing shadows, watching and waiting, poised to strike. Is he the dark figure standing over me, blocking out the sun?
I put a lot of effort into preparing the challenge for Date #5, but it merely served as a distraction because I didn’t want to contemplate the date itself, as I was – still am – swirling Aaron around in my head. I felt I had found who I was looking for, so the fifth and final date was never going to be anything more than a Five Parks footnote. I just wanted the whole project to end and I wanted to contact Aaron and have a normal relationship, not one played out in blog posts and Twitter trends and newspaper columns. I wanted a life with Aaron. I wanted him all to myself.
When I was sitting on that bench in the park on Date #5, waiting for Paul to arrive, I wasn’t even that angry. I didn’t care if he showed up or not. If he did, I was ready to go through the motions, exchange pleasantries and old dating stories and walk around the park, then go our separate ways, never to meet again. Perhaps Paul deserved more than that.
Of all five of my winning challengers, he had gone through the most hardship. The treasure hunt was designed to be tough and didn’t disappoint. Once the ball was rolling and he worked out the format of getting from one station and one clue to the next, it wasn’t an unfathomable test, but the tricky part was deciphering that opening riddle, delivered by the man in the green suit on the bench.
Paul supplied me with photos and a video documenting his quest, and I stuck them in between his words on Five Parks, the last words to be written on my blog before I woke up in here. In his first photo, there is a familiar face hiding in a green suit.
Rob was my only companion at that stage, just a few days ago, and he stepped up when he was needed. And I needed a man clad in green to stand up on a bench with a megaphone and announce my last challenge to my followers. In the photo amid Paul’s words on Five Parks, Rob stares at me in my dark prison, completely embedded in his role. He took his acting very seriously, just as he did when we re-created the scene from Trading Places. He wanted to do whatever he could to help me and my blog. He was all I had left.
Rob’s announcement from the bench set the Date #5 challenge in motion, but I devised the treasure hunt alone, coming up with the clues and keeping them to myself. I didn’t want any leaks; I didn’t want someone cheating their way into my affections. The press office at Transport for London owed me a favour after I wrote a puff piece a year ago about the London Underground, so they helped me with writing the clues on their whiteboards and briefed staff at each station to expect a flurry of bizarre random men with moronic queries about taking a Tube around Europe. There wasn’t quite the flurry I anticipated. Perhaps I made things too difficult.
Although there were a few hundred men in Regent’s Park, very few graduated from there to Holland Park by figuring out Rob’s megaphoned clue. Paul led the way, of course, a lead he didn’t relinquish despite his paranoia that someone else was ahead of him the whole time. He was right to be slightly paranoid, however, as two more suitors were on his tail, but they weren’t quick enough. By the time they arrived at Cy
prus DLR, Paul had already won the day, and the station staff had followed my strict instructions to rub off the clue containing the last two digits of my burner phone number and replace it with the simple but rather cruel missive: ‘TOO LATE’.
There were videos of Rob making his announcement as the Green Man all over social media, and #5ParksHunt trended on Twitter, but only for a few minutes, an indication perhaps of my waning popularity. Maybe my would-be dates and the rest of the world were growing just as tired of Five Parks as I was.
I rub my eyes with the tips of my dirty fingers and try to think. Paul is in play now, completing my set of five dates. Did he want me in here more than any of the others? More than Eric or David? Because I cannot picture Paul, it strikes me that he could be anyone, even one of my previous dates. Would they have gone to such lengths to win another date with me that they would have ridden public transport all around London, latching on to increasingly cryptic clues? I’ve spent so long contemplating that Date #5 may have taken me, when I didn’t consider that perhaps Date #5 had already been Date #2 or #3.
If Eric was my captor it would all be so simple. He was a piece of shit who treated me like dirt, a nasty investment banker with an arrogant streak that thought women and horses were both put on this Earth for him to ride. He would be the perfect pantomime villain. And that’s the problem; he’s too perfect. Just as I wrote in that bullshit Herald article that he was too perfect to date again, so he is too suited for the role of my captor.
He liked to play an open hand, all his cards on the table. He told me I was a whore at the end of our date – he couldn’t wait to tell me, like he was building up to it every moment in Richmond Park. My captor is patient, not prone to outbursts, entering and exiting this room like he is the night itself. In the pub in Richmond, Eric always seemed a millisecond away from physical violence, which frightened me, but such hot-headedness wouldn’t wash when carrying out a plan as big and bold as this one. There was nothing controlled about his abrupt actions, defined by his imposing frame, while my captor is sleek and slender and discreet and cunning; he has all the angles covered. His temper is under his control as much as his captive. Eric is evaporating from my mind. I can’t deny that it feels good.
Date #2: No
Date #3: Maybe
David is different. To Eric, I was just some slut who might have wronged a guy he met in a bar, but David had more motive. As much as it hurts, David is a more plausible candidate. He is closer in build to what I imagine in my captor, strong but far from muscular. He is capable of keeping things close to his chest, I know that. In his game, the ability to stay quiet is an asset. The warmth he showed in his video application made me think he was a good person, and even in the unpublished comment he left on my blog, I could tell there was love in him, for his departed sister. But I have changed him. He holds me responsible for not being able to say goodbye to her, and that gives him a powerful motive to punish me. I have cost him the love of his family and I have cost him his job, his reputation. He is dangerous because he has nothing to lose. The primary school size table and chair at which I agonise are constant reminders that I cannot rule him out.
The scariest suspect is still Jessica. She hated me for taking Michael away from her (‘Beware the ex. Bitch.’) and I can only guess she hates me even more for rubbing his nose in the dirt with Five Parks. I moved on from my broken engagement far too quickly for her liking. She warned me there would be consequences of taking Michael from her, and she was right. She had her revenge six months ago. Now, after Five Parks, has she come back for more?
She is devious enough to pull this whole thing off, but she would need the help of a male minion to do her dirty work. I think back to my first moments in here, when the sickly scent of his aftershave hung in the stale air and his manhood pressed up against me as I was helpless on my knees across the bed. I thought he was going to take me then, take a part of me that would never be fixed. But he relented, slipped me the key to my handcuffs that set me down this painful road of reading and writing – was he doing so under Jessica’s orders? She wasn’t finished with me six months ago. She waited to see what I would do after things ended with Michael. And when I started into Five Parks, she decided I hadn’t learned my lesson. There would be no warning text message this time. That text is the only contact I have had with her. If she wanted to sneak her way into my life, get close to me, surprise me, kidnap me, I wouldn’t have seen the warning signs until it was too late.
‘TOO LATE’.
That’s what I told the men hunting for me last Friday, who were just minutes behind Paul. Those minutes may well have been a lifetime. First is everything. Second is nothing. Jessica was the first to win Michael’s heart, and to her, I was nothing.
But Jessica is a ghost, a phantom I cannot fight, and I keep coming back to Date #5, trying to put myself back on that bench, waiting for a date who didn’t come, waiting to be taken to this horrible place. The bench, then the tennis ball – I threw it somewhere – and the long grass and the shadow standing over me and the train shooting into the sun and the steps slipping from under me. It’s all there. But who was there with me?
It was all my fault. I only have myself to blame. I let my guard down on Date #5 and I paid the price. I glance down at my jeans and shirt, stained dark with dirt and the shadows of this room – I hadn’t even dressed for the occasion. I’d switched off, all because of Aaron. I don’t know who Paul is because I didn’t care. It didn’t matter who he was, in my mind there was no way he could usurp Aaron.
I didn’t check him out or ask for his real name because I had checked out of Five Parks. And also because I felt safe. The park was close to home and I had someone looking out for me, even if it wasn’t Sylvie.
She kept an eye on me during Dates #2, #3 and #4, but then I lost her. I should have told her I’d blown off Hatcher and ended the Herald deal. She had secured me the column, so must have taken it personally when I tossed all the exposure away. She didn’t find out until after Date #4, when my afternoon with Aaron didn’t go into the paper.
When I gathered her and Rob to discuss the plan for Date #5, she told me she felt betrayed, not because I’d jacked in the column, but because I hadn’t told her. I was worried she would be angry, but Sylvie was never angry with me, only disappointed, like an eager parent with an unruly child, which is ten times worse. She broke down in tears, something I’ve never seen her do – she’s always been the rocks to my crashing waves – and told me she couldn’t continue helping me with Five Parks. She said she’d done everything she could to make it a success and I had thrown it back in her face, then kept her out of the loop. She was right. And then she was gone.
Rob said he would step up and become my protector on Date #5. He told me Sylvie’s departure was for the best, that I didn’t need her, that she’d only been holding Five Parks back, despite gaining it the media coverage that made my name. The name the Herald gave me: ‘Online dating’s Willy Wonka’. But I don’t remember one of the spoilt kids in the story trying to kidnap Willy Wonka.
I should have gone after Sylvie. I wouldn’t be here if I’d reconciled with her, I know that, because her replacement on Date #5 didn’t do his job. Rob’s job was to make sure nothing happened to me, but here I am. He was there, I know he was, because he came to chat to me while I was waiting for Paul to arrive. I remember now.
Rob was at the bench in Date #5 just as he had been at the bench in Regent’s Park the previous day, the Green Man saying ‘go’ to scores of men trying to capture me. Did he give the riddle to the wrong man? My brain runs in circles. It all comes back to Paul, back to Date #5, who I cannot see. But I see Rob at the bench in that last park, telling me something then slinking off to find a good hiding place before Paul turned up. So where was Rob when I was taken? Only two people knew the location of Date #5; Rob and Paul. Did my captor take Rob out of the equation? That screaming I heard outside the room earlier, someone calling my name – is there a chance it was Rob? Is he
being held here too?
Date #5 is the strongest contender because he shares a crucial trait with my captor; I haven’t seen his face. He is the key. I have to figure it out, just like he solved all those clues I left for him in the treasure hunt. If he can find me, I can find him, drag him out of the dark, turn him from a monster into a man, make him real. I run through the clues I have, starting with his sweet smell, aftershave I’m sure I remember from a previous encounter, but in here it’s pungent and poisonous when before it was succulent and welcoming.
The next clue is the thing I am glued to right now; the laptop. He has the skill to control the computer in here from another location.
Then there are his movements in here; he is light on his feet, not heavy-set. There is an unbearable strength to him, but it wasn’t forged by lifting countless weights. He is athletic, not a body-builder.
He says he has been up close to me in the light, he says I know who he is.
He has taken me here to die, and maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do, but I refuse to do it in vain. There is only one consolation to my predicament, but it is a big one; I am almost certain I know who has taken me. And unless he lets me out of this hell, the next time I write, I am going to name him.
35
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 61%
Time Remaining: 2hr 56min
I have waited an hour.
What did I think would happen, the walls around me would crumble away like flaky icing on a birthday cake? There is no sound of a magic key turning in a hidden lock, no injection of natural light; nothing to kill my pain. There are only four words in my FiveParks Word doc, typed over and over again by faraway fingers. He has jumped back in control of the laptop for a few seconds to tell me something.
He is not coming.
Five Parks Page 19