Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  I drop to my hands and knees again and push the Wurlitzer between the penetrated door and my next target. Shards of glass cling to my wrists as I slide the statue across the floor to the second set of doors. Halfway across the gap, I turn and expect to see my captor bearing down on me, blood streaming from his forehead – but the nightmare doesn’t become reality. I keep looking back into the theatre as I push my stone saviour just in case. I want to leave them all behind in there, every single one of them. Jordan, Eric, David, Rob, Date #1.5 and especially Miles Phillips. I don’t want to think about any of them again.

  The statue hits something a few seconds later; I have reached the other doors. I reach up and rattle the handle. Locked. Might I have been better searching for keys at the reception desk? It’s too late now. My stone organ has taken me this far, I will trust in it again. I lever my back into the glass and face back down into the darkness of the foyer. If he comes at me now, I don’t think I will have the strength to hold him off. I have learned from the first door breaking. Facing back this way will allow me to swing my body around and gain the required momentum to break through the glass. If I can lift the fucking thing.

  I go into my routine, dropping to one knee then gathering the statue on to my thigh. But this time it feels as heavy there as it did at the chest stage on my first pass. I don’t think I can do this. This will be where he comes for me, when I am at my most vulnerable. I bite down on my lip and squeeze my back and bottom against the glass for one last smidgen of leverage. I cannot let the stone fall now, for I might not get it off the ground again. But to my surprise, the glass bumps me back, prodding me, pounding at me. I can feel it in my spine and hear it ringing in my ears; the thudding and prodding of defeat. Startled and confused and lost, I loosen my grip on the statue and scream as it plunges into the wooden floor. It misses my foot by a millimetre, but the damage done cannot be measured in something as frivolous as broken bones.

  I don’t think I can lift the Wurlitzer again. I slump to the ground and brace myself for a panic attack, an all-out meltdown. I deserve one. But the glass won’t leave me be. My head vibrates as it thumps into my brain again. The thudding doesn’t stop. And then my ears clear and the pounding is accompanied by screaming.

  ‘SUUUUUUZE! SUZE! SUZANNE!’

  It’s my mum, inside my head and in our old back garden, twenty-five years ago, setting the tone for our subsequent relationship. It’s a woman’s voice. And then a man’s.

  ‘SUZANNE! SUZANNE! SUZANNE!’

  I shoot my head up through the broken glass doors and into the foyer. But no one is coming. He isn’t shouting at me anymore.

  The glass won’t stop. It keeps beating at my back. Leave me alone. I just want to sleep now. I have failed. I have come so close. I did so well. I almost made it back into the world. I can hear sirens and the growl of traffic. I close my eyes. In a minute or two, nothing will wake me.

  ‘SUZANNE! TURN THE FUCK AROUND!’

  My mum never shouted at me like that. I’ve never heard her swear. I wish she swore more. Maybe then we could have solved our problems. Because it isn’t her, I do what the angry desperate voice says. I turn the fuck around. And when I do, I feel my face change, turn upwards into the kind of smile that only sits on the criminally insane. There is no way what I am seeing now can be real. On the other side of the glass, staring back at me, tears streaming, arms flailing, is Sylvie. Behind her, above her, shaking her shoulders, cajoling her or comforting her – I cannot tell – is Michael. Two familiar faces peering in at me from another world.

  ‘We think we know where you are. We’re coming for you, Suze.’

  They came for me. Sylvie and Michael. My friends have come. I have to go now, mum, my friends are at the door. They’ve come to get me. I have to go out and play. I won’t be late home, I promise. I won’t go far.

  I slide myself up the glass and Sylvie thumps every bit I touch from her side in jubilation.

  ‘Hang on, Suze!’ she shouts. ‘We’re coming in!’

  She turns her head and makes a gesture to the black emptiness behind her, leaving Michael to stare in at me. He looks like he doesn’t know what to say. Neither do I. He just stares at me and smiles. He looks happy to see me.

  ‘We have a key, Suze. Just hang on!’

  Sylvie continues to shout encouragement, but nothing is happening. This is the part, when the dawn creeps in to usurp the darkness, that the monster snaps back to horrid life and rips the heroine back into his jaws.

  Hurry, Sylvie.

  She and Michael are joined on the other side of the glass door by a policeman in a high-visibility vest and another figure in a suit, who struggles with a large set of keys. Too slow. I cannot wait. I don’t waste time and precious energy telling them to ‘stand back’ or ‘look out’, and I have the statue back against my belly before they know what I am doing, because I notice the policeman pull Sylvie by the shoulder as I wind up my pivot and swing. When the Wurlitzer punches through the glass I follow it, holding it tight like a mother gripping her baby. My forehead clips the side of the statue on impact with the cold hard beautiful ground and I swallow different sized chunks of fresh broken glass, but all I can taste is the sick hot air of a London summer’s night. Sylvie and Michael nuzzle at my neck and whisper in my ears.

  ‘It’s over, Suze.’

  ‘You did it.’

  The policeman asks them to give me room, says something about my breathing.

  When he replaces my friends and leans in on me, his breath is hot with kebab meat.

  ‘Suzanne. My name is John. Let’s keep talking, Suzanne. Let’s keep talking until the ambulance is here.’

  He disappears and I hear the crackle of a radio, instructions uttered and received as calmly as any pizza delivery order. Beeps and sirens bleat from above and I welcome them in. No more silence.

  Michael bears down on me.

  ‘Suze. We’re so glad you’re okay. Tell me. Where is he? Is he still in there?’

  I turn my head and try to speak to the man who was supposed to be my husband. I want to tell him to stay here with me, not to go in there, but the words don’t come out. I am in shock or something like it. He doesn’t need me to speak. He can tell by my eyes. He always could. I could never lie to Michael, no matter how hard I tried.

  He strokes my battered face with his knuckles and leaves me. I know this because I hear the crunch of glass under heavy footsteps heading for the foyer behind me, and because Sylvie screams his name. Her scream travels with her and the glass crunches again under a softer set of feet.

  The policeman shouts at them to come back, then there is more gargling back and forth down the radio. He comes back to me when it is done.

  ‘Hold on, Suzanne. Everything is going to be all right. It’s over.’

  I drink in the sirens, the car horns, the smells of what for millions of people is just another normal London night. I don’t believe you, I think to myself, but I don’t tell him that. I don’t have the strength. And words don’t seem important any more. I close my eyes and forget. I am free.

  44

  I am in a bad way.

  My lips suck on a mixture of hard plastic and my own drool. I am awake again – alive again – but when my eyes open there is nothing for them to see; I am back in darkness.

  I snap my heavy head away from the rough surface and try to balance it between my shoulders. My feet are on solid ground. I am sitting down. My elbows rest on the same plastic that had been supporting my heavy head. I am at a table.

  Am I back in my cell? Did I dream my escape? Did I make it all up? I try to raise my right hand to wipe the drool off my chin, but I am stopped by a familiar rattle. Oh God no. I attempt the movement with my left hand and meet the same ear-piercing obstacle. My wrists are bound in handcuffs. I didn’t take them off – there was no time – when I made my escape. And now someone has clasped them together, enclosing my fists so they cannot be flung.

  I am back in chains. I am back where Aaron �
�� Miles – believes I belong. It was Aaron’s face I punched and punched, wasn’t it? I remember. It was all so real. Sylvie, Michael, the glass doors – I was free. I am free. Am I?

  The blackness feels heavier now because there is no glimmer of hope, no lamp of a laptop to guide me. My hands won’t budge more than a few inches away from the table, so even if the laptop is right in front of me, I cannot reach it. Phillips must have realised that handcuffing only one of my hands wasn’t enough. I am defenceless. But I beat him. I stood over him in that lower room, lit by the harshest of naked bulbs, and I ran. I won. Then why am I back here?

  I try to control my breathing but the thought of my gauntlet dash in the theatre won’t let me. I shouldn’t be back in handcuffs, I climbed out of hell. Sylvie and Michael were there to greet me. And someone else. Cloaked in a bright yellow vest and a black uniform – he was a police officer. He told me his name. What was it? He smelt of something. His breath was hot like fire on my bruised face. John. His name was John. And he stank of kebab. I can’t have dreamt a detail like that. John was real.

  The room smells of something almost as sweet. My breathing ratchets up again for a few seconds, because I think it is Phillips’s scent – his pungent aftershave – but some deep breaths through my nose help calm me and pinpoint the odour; it belongs to a woman. It is fighting an uphill battle against the urine – my own urine – that still rises off me, but I can taste it out there in the dark. Perfume. A woman has been in here – and not long ago – a woman who isn’t me.

  There is something else. The room has changed. Even after a few seconds of consciousness, it feels colder, larger, more like an echo chamber. A chill creeps up the sleeve of my tattered shirt. There isn’t the same oppressive heat from before. And yet I have returned to the dark, slipped back into silence. No one will find me. Unless there is someone in here with me. This thought quickens my gasps for air and I bang my elbows on the table in panic. The chains perform their inevitable death rattle and the noise takes me back in time: waking up secured to the bed; whipping the metal cuff into his head, scraping it across the glass-ridden ground with the bronze organ as I fought my way to freedom. Those things all happened.

  Everything is back the way it was, yet something has changed. The room feels different, not just in temperature, but in set-up. Before I sat at the front end of the room, facing the wall, but now I sense my position has been reversed. The handcuffs have also altered. They’re heavier than before and their rattle is more substantial, steelier. The perfume clouds everything. It hangs above me in an unseen layer, drifting down every few seconds to tickle my nose, awake my senses.

  That chill has crawled up my sleeve and around my neck. I let out an unscripted shiver and the handcuffs bristle once more. I cannot step up from the chair without metal ripping into my wrists.

  In science at school, you learn that sight travels faster than sound, that you see the smoke from the starter’s gun before you hear the bang – but that’s a lie.

  The crunch of the door and the flood of light both attack me at the same time, co-ordinated barbs designed to disorientate. They are followed by footsteps, the wrench of a heel on bare concrete. I squint up at a row of light panels in the ceiling. The door clangs shut with the same lack of ceremony with which it was opened. I hear a chair being scraped from the other side of the room in my direction. The perfume, which only tickled a short time ago, gusts up my nostrils without asking. I open my eyes to their full capacity in time to see a woman sitting down on the other side of the table. My immediate focus, however, drops to my fists, chained in a set of shiny handcuffs that are welded into the centre of the table, which is laptopless. I am back in a cell, but this one is different.

  ‘Sorry about those, Miss Hills, but we did warn you.’

  I drop my hands down on the table to accept defeat and take in my new captor.

  Older than me, with a face that may have once prioritised beauty but gave way to something more stern, and gave way a long time ago. My head wants to drop off my shoulders. I long to ease its heavy burden with my hands.

  ‘I didn’t want to do this, but you struck one of my officers, Miss Hills, so you left me with little choice. Do you remember?’

  I look down at my knuckles. Tiny lines of black that used to be red are embedded in their crevices. But I used my fists on Phillips and no one else, didn’t I?

  ‘Do you remember who I am? It hasn’t been that long, Miss Hills.’

  Stop calling me Miss Hills. She stands out in this square of grey breeze-blocked walls and carpetless floor, but only just. Her suit – matching jacket and skirt – is a nondescript navy blue and her hair is jet black. She must have dyed it in the last few days. She confuses me. Her hair job shows she wants to maintain her youth by ironing out the greys, but her attire says she wants to look older. There is a harshness in her voice that sounds the tiniest bit forced – she is playing the role with gusto, but it is still an act. Her blue eyes belong in a younger face – perhaps she isn’t older than me after all. I do remember her name though, because of the way she treated me earlier. It’s starting to come back. Things are starting to make some kind of minimal sense.

  ‘Harding,’ I say.

  ‘That’s right. Well done. I am Detective Inspector Justine Harding. So you do remember me. That’s good, Miss Hills. That’s a start.’

  She points a notepad at my hands, then continues.

  ‘Now, do you remember why I had to do this?’

  I shake my head. The glass, Kebab John, Miles Phillips, Sylvie and Michael … those are the shapes swirling around my head. Sylvie and Michael found me … and then they left me. Where did they go? What did they do?

  ‘You don’t remember? I find that hard to believe, Miss Hills. Or do you want me to call you Suzanne?’

  I don’t want her to call me anything. I want her to leave me alone. But not here. I want her and this room to disappear. I made the last room disappear, can’t I do the same with this one?

  The chain rattles between us. She has startled me. She threw the notepad between my arms without warning.

  ‘Perhaps this will jog your memory.’

  I turn my head from a shake into a slow nod and lower my eyes on to the open pad. A regular shorthand style notepad – except I was always terrible at shorthand – so there are no alien squiggles on the page at the top of the pile. But each line of that page is filled with words written by hand. And Harding is right; I do recognise them. They are mine.

  ‘I wrote this. I don’t want to believe it but it’s true. The words are mine.’

  That is what is written at the top of the page. That is what I wrote when I described my reaction to the last post I read on Five Parks. The last post published on Five Parks. And yet it was the first post I wrote in the dark. In it, I wrote how Aaron – he was still Aaron then – put me in the back of his car after I passed out and then he drove away.

  But my reaction to reading that blog post wasn’t written in the laptop back in the cell – there was no time for that. Miles Phillips poked his head through the hatch too quickly to write about it. I have recorded everything that happened after I read that last blog post – but I did it in here, in my new prison cell. In this police interrogation room. I know where I am now, and I know why they handcuffed me to the table. Harding is right; I did punch one of the officers – I hope it wasn’t Kebab John – and I know why I did it. Because he tried to take my notepad away from me.

  Harding can see the lightbulb going off inside my head, as bright as the garish panelling above us.

  ‘I appreciate you writing down what you say happened for us, Suzanne, but it won’t be sufficient. You’re going to have to give me an oral statement. And the sooner you do that the sooner we can let you go and this will all be over.’

  It’s over. That’s what Kebab John said after I smashed the glass. I remember now that I didn’t believe him.

  ‘I’ve read your blog and I’ve read your notepad, but I still have a lot of ques
tions for you to answer. You understand that, don’t you?’

  She’s read the blog. I need to see it. There’s something I need to double check. I don’t know if I can ask her to see it. Her tone is calm but her demeanour is exacting. I don’t know if she wants to help me or hinder me. She is a difficult read.

  ‘You were very clever with your blog posts, Suzanne, I have to hand it to you.’

  I can’t see over her side of the table, so she reaches down to what I can only guess is a folder or a briefcase at her feet and pulls out a small pile of A4 sheets. She licks her finger and leafs through them, enjoying the pause, revelling in the silence. I have to be careful with her.

  After some false faffing, she reads from one of the pages. The words are mine.

  ‘“I can’t do this anymore.” That is what you wrote. “I can’t do this anymore. Not in the state I’m in.” Very clever, Suzanne, very clever. You knew exactly what state you were in, didn’t you? You were in the Gaumont State Theatre on Kilburn High Road.’

  Her tone is congratulatory. She seems to admire what I’ve done.

  ‘You knew where you were, correct?’

  She wants to give me the first pat on the head I’ve had from anyone in a long time. I take her bait, even though I’m worried there’s a hook in the end of it.

  ‘Yes. I knew. Well, I thought I knew.’

  My words come out raspy.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry Suzanne, would you like a glass of water?’