Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  I stare at the opening blog post, the only thing in here lighting my way, relaxing my gaze into the white gaps between the words, reading my former state between the lines as well as in my published online blathering.

  Written five weeks ago in a frenzy, it’s dripping with an optimism and a smugness that I didn’t really feel at the time. I was lying to my readers as soon as I started, not that there were any readers to deceive. Not then. Not yet. The readers would come later, as would the high of finding someone, that glorious kick to the chest, that newness of breathing in another being you never knew existed. But when I wrote that first post I didn’t think any of that was ahead.

  I sound like a moron. Here, in the dark, with the benefit of a harsh hindsight that comes from not being able to see at all, it reads like girly magazine tosh. I was trying too hard to come across as a strong, independent woman – whatever that is – when really I was a mess.

  The me from a month ago sounds like she was sick of sleazy men and scrolling aimlessly through Tinder, and there was a mini-truth in that, but the larger reality was that I was sick of life and sick of myself.

  The freelance life was a mistake. There was work for me, and work I did, but it was hand-to-mouth, low-paid and pointless. Long-read features that no one read on rich business people I didn’t know or care about, mixed in with mindless lists about ‘90s nostalgia for so-called ‘news’ websites who treated their readership like idiots.

  Working from home crippled me because it wasn’t my home. I was an unwanted lodger in a flat with two girls who didn’t want anything to do with me. Even this weekend, if it still is the weekend, they won’t have noticed I haven’t come home. They were going back up to Cambridge this weekend like every other one – but even if they were in the flat, it wouldn’t matter. They made it clear the living room was their domain, so I kept to my room, at the bottom of the stairs beside the main door, where I belonged. Easy entrance, easy exit. Quiet, unseen, unwanted.

  I was done with London. And after what had happened with Michael, I was done with men. I wanted to go home, but that would have meant facing my mum. So what does a girl do when she is tired of London and tired of men? She sets up a dating blog with the premise of traipsing around various London landmarks with random men, that’s what.

  The truth is I was deeply unhappy when I started Five Parks. The previous six months, from bitter cold January to pollen-filled June, had been the worst of my life. I left my job and I left my fiancé. I was wounded. There were a few non-starter dates in that time, but not the constant stream of wall-to-wall men implied in my opening blogging salvo. The break-up with Michael frightened me. When you break up a few years into your thirties, you wonder if you will ever get the chance to break up with anyone again, even if you find another person. I don’t want to end up alone, and yet refusing to discharge myself from someone out of fear of being alone seems an even deeper curse.

  I know people whispered that Michael and I were hurtling too fast because we were no longer in our twenties. When you’re young you have all the time in the world to get married, but a few years later you must latch on to what you’ve got if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life by yourself. That’s probably what they said about us. But with Michael it wasn’t like that. I loved him, and when he proposed, along the South Bank, with Tower Bridge eavesdropping in the background, I didn’t hesitate. I was ready to say yes not because I thought he might represent my last chance of happiness, but because I truly wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

  When I started writing the blog, six months after things fell apart, I was still in recovery mode. Everything caved in so fast that when I came up for air again my fiancé, my flat (well, his flat) and my job had all gone, taken in the flood. I kept myself afloat in the months that followed through the drib drab of various freelance work and long conversations with Sylvie.

  ‘It will all work itself out,’ she would tell me in whatever bar she’d dragged me into that night. ‘All this will just push you into a different direction. And anyway, we don’t need men, remember?’

  She was right; we didn’t need men. Not when we were together. The SAS, Michael used to call us. Suze and Sylvie. A few months after the break-up, she scored two tickets through work to see Adele at the O2 Arena. We didn’t need men then, crying buckets into each other’s faces while Adele belted out ‘When We Were Young’. But the morning after – the morning after every big night out with Sylvie, entertained by her repeated bloke-blocking antics (we were two good-looking girls on a night out, after all) – I would feel the pang of loneliness. Whatever went on between us, I missed Michael. I knew I couldn’t have him – not after what happened – but I still wanted a man. And I wanted a new sense of purpose.

  Five Parks was forged from all those feelings.

  I shouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but even secretly conceding you want male company feels like letting down the imaginary sisterhood. I wanted to find someone – was there anything wrong with that? I wanted to find someone and I think I did.

  I was ready to look again, put Michael in the past where he belonged, and I wanted something that was my own. My blog. My rules. My life.

  There is only one man in my life now, an anonymous black shadow controlling me through a computer screen. An online dating nightmare in unseen human form. Who is he?

  The question stops me in my writing tracks. I ponder it by taking my hands off the keyboard and leaning back on my tiny chair, testing how far it will tilt before snapping from under me, just like I remember doing back in the primary school classroom as I awaited the bell for home time.

  I almost fall back off the chair at what happens next.

  Even though I am a foot away from the keyboard, the cursor starts moving around the page very slowly, like a glass on a Ouija board. It swirls around the Word document until it makes sure it has my complete attention and then it rests under my last three words: ‘Who is he?’

  The black line showing the cursor’s position appears and disappears, blinking – or winking – at me. I lean forward and let my weight bring the front two chair legs back to Earth. I try not to breathe. I am no longer in control of the laptop.

  My last three words are joined by three more.

  ‘WHO. AM. I?’

  Is it him. The ghost in my machine. My hands reach out for the keyboard, although I’m not sure what I’m going to type in response. But before they can get there, the laptop is talking to me again.

  ‘Date #1 …?’

  I let it talk. Because I know what’s next. Simple maths.

  ‘Date #2 …?’

  ‘Date #3 …?’

  ‘Date #4 …?’

  ‘Date #5 …?’

  He is taunting me.

  ‘Take a guess, Suzanne. You have a one in five chance. Not bad odds. Better than your chances of ever seeing the outside of this room.’

  Now I do try to type, but my frantic crashing on the keys achieves nothing – he has locked me out of the laptop. He is showing me who’s boss. He is showing me that he is monitoring every word I write, almost as if he is standing over my shoulder in the dark. He is in my writing and in my head and I am in his room. He isn’t going to let me leave. He goes on.

  ‘1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 …?’

  ‘One has his fun?’

  ‘Two has you?’

  ‘Three is me?’

  ‘Four felt sore?’

  ‘Five took you alive?’

  I kick the chair out from under me and scramble to the other side of the room, back-heeling the bucket over by accident. Even from here I can tell he is still typing – from who knows where – because the screen slides downwards in a black and white blur. When I go back over there again, I promise myself it will be to read not write – I don’t want to stay in that document with him watching.

  After a few seconds the screen comes to a halt and I dare myself to return to the table. The Word document is back in my control but the following is waiting for me,
spread across three or four pages, almost all of which I delete:

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You lie.’

  ‘You die.’

  ‘You die.’

  ‘You die.’

  ‘You die.’

  ‘You die.’

  8

  ‘I’ve found Date #1! Would you like to meet him?’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Friday, July 1, 2016

  Easy peasy. Londoners are adept at two things: pushing past other Londoners in their unerring pursuit of bum-resting on public transport … and moaning about how difficult it is to meet the right person. While I freely admit I haven’t quite cracked the art of shoving the pregnant and the elderly out of my path on the Tube, I think I’ve finally got this dating thing down. And all I had to do was go public, enlist myself on the WLTM Exchange. My Initial Public Offering has brought an immediate reward: a promising man.

  When I started this blog at the beginning of the week, and posted my questionnaire the next day, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. I didn’t know where it would lead me. I had rolled up a big snowball-shaped blob of neurosis and tossed it into an online furnace. Up until the last few months, I’d always been fairly lucky with men, perhaps because they tell me I’m pretty (girls don’t like hearing that they’re pretty – they want to be gorgeous). I’ve never wanted for suitors, even when they were unwanted and unsuitable. That’s not me being boastful – don’t worry, you’ll know when that’s happening – just honest. That’s always been the way it is. Ever since Philip Knox leaned over the back of my seat in the cinema one rainy Saturday afternoon twenty years ago and whispered: ‘Suzanne, would you like to go out with me?’

  I was there with all the girls and he was there with all the boys. We were three quarters of the way through Jumanji. Maybe he was bored or dared or had simply run out of popcorn, but I wasn’t in the mood. I obviously didn’t have the same lusting in my loins as Philip Knox. I didn’t know I had loins. A good few years later, when I was more used to the attention, I might have pretended not to hear him. But back then I was innocent.

  ‘No thank you, Philip, I’m okay,’ I said back over the seat into the darkness, forgetting to imitate his whisper, inadvertently rejecting him in front of two aisles of eleven-year-olds, the cruel prepubescent equivalent of taking out a full-page ad in a newspaper. Philip disappeared back into the black, girlish and boyish titters raining down on him, and never spoke to me again.

  I’ve often wished I could go back to that cinema, tell Philip Knox not to fret, that everything is going to be okay, that I may not want to go out with him – whatever ‘going out with him’ means – but I think he’s really nice and cool and sweet and brave to ask me out, and just because I don’t want to kiss him doesn’t mean I don’t like him. I tend to frighten the sweet ones away.

  But I’m not stuck in a dark room any more; with Five Parks, I’ve dragged myself out of the shadows and into the light. Just because I’ve had to endure my fair share of cheesy chat-up lines over the years didn’t mean I was confident this blog would bring me any attention. Anyone who’s hovered over that ‘publish’ button knows the taste of trepidation, as well as the thrill, that comes with the final decision to push something you own out into the world unedited. Would anyone respond to what I am doing? Would anyone take the time to apply to be my date?

  The answer to both of those questions has been a resounding ‘yes’. While not in X Factor or The Apprentice proportions (although I quite like the idea of having a panel to help me hire or fire my applicants), there has been an encouraging number of men who wish to spend at least one afternoon in my company. And that’s … satisfying. There’s no point denying it. Feeling wanted by someone – a stranger who can only really guess at how crazy you are – is immensely uplifting. I’ve still got it, Philip Knox. You might have been the first to pluck up the courage to ask me out, but you were the first of many. Thanks for showing me the way.

  And thanks to all of you who filled in the first online application form. You know who you are. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or the resources to reply to you individually – the only way you can find out if you have been picked or not is by checking here. If your name’s not down, you’re not coming in, so to speak. And the name on my lips this week, the first week of a hopeful five, is JORDAN. Congratulations Jordan, you are the lucky guy selected to go on a date with me tomorrow afternoon.

  I admit the questions I set in my application form were a little unorthodox, but that didn’t stop dozens of entries pouring into my PO Box. Out of the submitted questionnaires, Jordan’s sparkled the sparkliest. His prize is me. He will be Date #1.

  If you’re reading this, Jordan – and I know you are – then look out for my emailed instructions about when to meet and which London park to meet in. Just bring yourself. And your ‘A’ game. See you tomorrow.

  In the meantime, would you like to read the answers he gave to my cunning questions that earned him a date? Of course you would. Let’s meet him. As you can see from his picture below, he’s a bit dishy. Although I better not tell him that … Ooops! Too late!

  Name: Jordan Bates

  Age: 29

  Occupation: Web designer

  Lives: East London

  Twitter: @creJBates

  The Most Boring Online Dating Questionnaire Ever:

  Q1. SUZANNE: Do you come here often?

  JORDAN: Yes. Yes, I do. I’ve been coming to your blog since you started it. I was scouring the web for gardening advice and was really excited when I landed on FiveParks.com, hoping it was a one-stop online shop for all my weeding needs. I live in a third-floor flat in east London, so obviously I’m into that kind of thing. When it became apparent that my hopes had been misplaced, I consoled myself that at least I had stumbled on a website that offered a quintet of available car parking spaces across the city – finding one in London is such a chore, I’m sure you’ll agree, not that I drive. But no, instead of tickling my green fingers or inventing the next ZipCar, you’ve decided to use your url to find something even more elusive in London than a parking space: a decent bloke.

  Eager to help you in your quest, I lifted my head from my laptop and scanned the faux-derelict coffee shop I had unbelievably been able to locate in Shoreditch. There were men everywhere, tapping on keyboards, sipping flat whites and generally looking pleased with their own self-importance. One of these contenders is surely the man who could help you out, I thought to myself. But on a second perusal of the room, I realised I was wrong: they were simply a bunch of berks. The answer to your problem, however, had been staring me in the face all along. I looked into the screen of my laptop, and there it was, the reflection of the handsomest devil I’d ever seen. Who is this guy? I asked myself. He looks great. I looked into his eyes on that black screen, and without opening my mouth, persuaded him to fill in your very, very, very boring dating application form. And here he is.

  Q2. S: What kind of music do you like?

  J: I like the kind of music that doesn’t spew out at me through a smartphone from the back row of a bus. Apart from that particular type of aural torture, I’m pretty much into anything. Except jazz. I fucking hate jazz.

  Q3. S: What do you do?

  J: Sorry, I dozed off there. Every time I read one of your questions I fall asleep. Are you always this sneaky? Right, what do I do? Well, I work in web design in east London, so on a typical weekday I probably get out of bed around ten in the morning. Then I get washed and dressed, check my hair is okay (twice) and head out of the flat on my way to the office. I stop for a coffee before I get there, and maybe skim through the Guardian online to see what opinions I might pilfer for the day, should anyone ask me something later about the Eurozone or Taylor Swift. Then I stroll into the office, itself fudged into what was once a third floor flat in East London, give my boss (who used to be my mate) a nod that says, �
�I could be doing all this work from home, then we’d both be happy’, and slide into my chair and fire up my laptop.

  I hate my laptop. And not just because it’s my third arm. I miss the days when you’d get to work, turn on your computer and have to wait twenty minutes for the thing to even think about warming up. In those precious minutes, I could have quaffed a coffee or two and avoided pretending to work. But Apple’s instant gratification has changed all that, and my ludicrously overpriced MacBook Air bounds into life at the touch of a button. After I’m up and running, my former mate/boss emails me a list of work tasks (he actually calls them ‘wasks’, and not ironically) from his desk seven feet away, and I get to work, putting off the more fiddly wasks until well after lunchtime. These usually involve pimping up some PR company’s website for a fee of £100 an hour, even though if they implemented an idea instead of having several meetings about implementing ideas, they could probably do the whole thing themselves in about ten minutes. I take two weeks. I’d guess that in a typical day I probably do about twenty-five minutes of actual work. I love my job.

  Q4. S: What do you like doing in your spare time?

  J: I like reading and going to the cinema.

  Q5. S: What is your favourite colour?

  J: You really have thought these through, haven’t you? Okay, I’ll play along with a proper answer. I love the colour the sky over London gets in summer just before the sun starts setting. Not that red picture perfect shade that everyone Instagrams, but the dirty dark orange hue it takes on for the few minutes beforehand. The sour before the sweet. The muck before the magic. Give me that any day.

  Q6. S: What is your favourite animal?

  J: Animal from The Muppets.