‘Anyone else see these blog posts? @SuzeParks kidnapped?! WTF #FiveParks’
Soon the police will be alerted, and they will have to investigate. In the meantime, I have to help them, give them any clue I can. It’s clear from the titles of the blog posts he has chosen that he wants my readers to know I am suffering. It horrifies me, but I am strangely exhilarated, because he is letting me continue the blog – for his own ends, yes – but I can make them mine too.
Act fast, Suzanne. I must do it before the courage dissipates. I have been granted my voice again, and I intend to use it. I hope this next post gets published, but it won’t be aimed at thousands of people like all the others – it will have a targeted readership of one. And this time, I’m choosing my own title.
13
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 34%
Time remaining: 1hr 19min
‘I won’t let you beat me. I am going to win’
I won’t let you beat me. You like doing that, don’t you, taking the post title from the opening sentence, so I’ve done it for you this time, saved you the trouble. Is it because you’re lazy? Have you even read what I have written? I know you have. And I know you have me. You control me. I know the only way anyone will read this is because you will allow it. But I don’t care. Because this piece of writing is not for them. It’s for you.
You have me but you don’t own me. Do you think I’m telling you everything so far? There are things you will never know about me, could never hope to learn, because I will never tell. You are the closest person to me right now, but do not mistake that for intimacy. I am in a position of weakness, but do not underestimate my strength. I am not going to rot in here. I am going to figure this out. I am going to figure you out. Whatever I’ve done to you to cause you to do this, or whatever you think I’ve done to you, it is gone. You have made your decision, carried out your plan, caught me in the headlights, locked me in the dark. I don’t deserve this, but do not expect me to whine. I am going to act. And in here, the only way I can do that is with the tools that are my trade and the tools you have given me.
You can delete anything I write in here, but you’ve started the ball rolling now by publishing those other posts, and I don’t think you’ll stop. You’ve set the game in motion and I think you’re already enjoying it too much. Why tell the world the great deed you have done when you have me to extol your power for you? Look how mighty you are.
I hope you know what you’re doing. They’re going to be looking for me now, and that means they are going to be looking for you too. Searching through the dark until they find a girl at a lit laptop. You obviously want them looking, or why else would you publish my words, but will your confidence hold up in the face of what’s to come? Believe me, they are coming. And you will fail. You will fold in the onslaught. Because I think you are a coward.
You keep me and cuff me because you are afraid. Whatever I did to you in the world away from here, you didn’t have the guts to confront me face to face. And you don’t have the courage to do that in here either, even though it’s just the two of us. Stop hiding in the shadows and show yourself. Then maybe we can talk.
This is the only post I will write in here where you will have the privilege of being directly addressed by me. And here is my address: Fuck you.
I won’t let you beat me.
14
‘Date #2 poetry competition: The final three’
Posted by Suzanne
Thursday, July 7, 2016
And now for something completely different. When I set the challenge for Date #2 two days ago, I really didn’t know what to expect. The naysayers told me London’s male population didn’t have a poetic bone in their bodies, that I would only receive entries that began with either ‘Roses are red …’ or ‘There was a young girl from …’ – and there were quite a few in those categories – but there were more than enough wonderful works to make this week’s decision very difficult indeed. And that … is where you come in. But more on that in a moment.
Back in the innocent days (five days ago, in fact) of Date #1 (you remember him, don’t you? Jordan? Funny? Good-looking? An inch taller than me?), I chose my lucky guy from dozens of entries, but this time I sifted through hundreds of applications. Imagine! Hundreds of men want to go on a date with me. It’s amazing, really. Well, it’s amazing what a little exposure can do.
The challenge was simple: write me a poem.
The response was overwhelming, and I’d like to thank all of you who applied – yes, even those of you who rhymed ‘love’ with ‘bruv’. You really know how to make a girl feel special.
I don’t pretend to speak for every girl who’s ever tried to find a guy, but I like to be wooed. Poetry is something we’re taught in school then asked to forget for the rest of our lives, which is a crying shame. Poetry is all around us and it is beautiful, so even if you reworked a nursery rhyme or borrowed some Barrett Browning, give yourself a pat on the back. Poetry is hard. But then finding someone you might consider spending some part of your life with – maybe even the rest of it – should be hard. It shouldn’t be achieved through the opening of an app or the click of a button. Writing a poem in two days is bloody tough.
I didn’t really know what I was looking for when I set this task. I wasn’t too bothered by assonance or metre or onomatopoeia, mainly because I’ve forgotten what those things are, but the poems that jumped out at me after the initial cull all made me feel something. That feeling could even have been total confusion – it didn’t matter. As long as it was something.
And difficult as it is to write a poem, it’s equally challenging to elevate one above another. And I have struggled so much, in fact, that I am turning to you for help.
As a gift to my new readers who have jumped on board the Five Parks train this week, I am going to give you the final say on who should be Date #2.
I have managed to narrow the selection down to three candidates, each of whom wrote me a very different poem. They’re so different I cannot decide which one I like best. So I am putting my dating fate in your hands.
Just read all three and then click your choice in the poll box at the bottom of this post. I will let you know the outcome tomorrow. The winner will accompany me on my second date in a mystery London park.
And on this date, there will be a secret activity planned. As wonderful as Date #1 was, strolling round a small park was just a little bit boring. It’s time to spice things up a bit. Okay, let’s see some poetic justice! Vote for your favourite!
POEM 1
‘Ditch the Plan’, by Ryan Toler
Rossetti and Wordsworth and Hardy I quoted
In the first version of the poem I wroted
But the words rang hollow and dull and untrue
This one’s from the stomach – from my gut to you
In the first I had lip-locking and longing and lust
This one I wrapped up on the twenty-three bus
The original was pretentious, no rofls nor rhyme
Now I pair ‘quoted’ with ‘wroted’ in heinous word crime
My first try was sullen then sulky, shoddy – a sham
That one had roast pork, this one has ham
Back then I sweated buckets over iambic pentameter
Second time out, I didn’t think it would matter
But just ‘cos I ditched my original plan
To pilfer from classics to prove I’m your man
Doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be rated
I’ll be the funniest bloke that you’ve ever dated
POEM 2
‘Le Frog et Rosbif’, by Eric Chevalier
Tu parles, tu cries, tu écris
J’écoute, je réponds, je lis.
You walk, you talk, you blog
T’es Rosbif, et moi: j’suis Frog.
Tu souris, tu ris, tu blagues
Je transpire, je vais mourir, I flag.
Je suis souris, t’es chat, I am dog
T’es R
osbif, et moi: j’suis Frog.
Tu cours, tu sautes, tu m’élèves
Je te vois, chaque soir, dans mes rêves.
L’amour est dur, un examen, a slog
T’es Rosbif, et moi: j’suis Frog.
Tu es toute isolée, une île qui flotte
Tu as un certain … I don’t know what.
I’ve been wrong all along, in so many ways
Tu n’est pas Rosbif – tu es Irlandaise.
POEM 3
‘Regents and Royals’, by Christopher Baldwin
Queens Regents and Royals, their powers combine
To lay a trap, for you in their Green
Brooks bridges bathers of the Serpentine
Lie for you, in wait, see saw unseen
The Basils of Bushy, tails up in jest
Implore you, adore you, swamp you in leaves
The Richmond set paw you, hold you deer best
Prise you away from poor London Fields
In Greenwich they stalk you, eye trained from the hill
Caught in a naval gaze, you flee from the watch
That ticks Jekyll into Hyde, the spaces bear ill
Once darkness falls, each lock up their latch
You reach for the gold, bounce east to Olympic
Searching for glory, you explode from your lane
Your admirers pursue, their poetry prolific
Outrun all but one, and you will be through
Seek saintly approval, from the flowers of James
Kensington’s Gardens invite you to bench
Just down the road, Holland’s in flames
Burning in heat, for your thirst to quench
They all promise promise, they all promise life
Swathes of grassed grandeur with so much to lose
If snubbed they will cut you, their branches will scythe
Be warned, be wary, of which ones you choose.
15
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 18%
Time remaining: 0hr 46min
I’m all poemed out. I lie on the bed, my folded arms my only pillow, tilting my eyes back over the room at the laptop. Poetry; whose stupid idea was that? Poetry has only ever brought me pain, going back to my struggles at GCSE with Thomas Hardy and going even further back to my early difficulties in love. The first poem that ever meant anything to me was in a Valentine’s card. It was blood red on the outside, in the shape of a beating heart, and the inside read:
To write in pink is a waste of ink,
But to write in blue means I love you.
Those were the only words inside the card, which landed on my desk at the end of the school day. I was eleven years old. There were a few candidates, of course; what boy could resist my gangly, long-armed charm? But I never found out who wrote it. I liked to think it was Charles Blake, the most handsome boy in our year, but I ruled him out on account of him being in a different class. Still, he could have passed it to someone in my class who dropped it on my desk when I wasn’t looking (my name was on the envelope, in capital letters), or so I liked to console myself.
Charles was tall and dark-haired and wore his shirt outside his trousers and didn’t tie his shoelaces and even though he had a silly name no one ever teased him about it – he was perfect. But I’d seen his writing on the wall of the assembly hall, where one of his stories had been pinned for posterity along with the work of the year’s other creative minds, and it didn’t match what I had in my card. The writing on the wall was scrawled in various spider shapes, but in the card it was neat and precise, almost like a girl’s writing, almost like my own. For that reason, I didn’t dare show it to anyone in my class, out of fear they would accuse me of penning my own Valentine’s card. Instead, I hid it in the bottom of the dirty washing basket in our bathroom at home, where I would steal away to read it at least once a day for the remainder of that faraway February. It was the only room in the house with a lock on the door.
Sometimes I’d read the contents of the card out loud to myself while lying back in the bath, blowing bubbles on the surface of the water with my lips as I slowly spilled out the words. On one of these occasions I got carried away and wrote Charles’s name into the steam-ridden mirror above the sink with one of my pruned fingers, only to forget to wipe it off before I left the room. Unfortunately, my brother was the next one in line for the toilet, and my secret admiration for Charles Blake was no longer a secret. There was only one Charles in our school and everyone knew of his existence, even my puke little brother who was two years below him. Showing the lack of scruples that would later serve him well in the business world, Stephen blackmailed me into two weeks of chore-swapping and several 50p-funded sweeties excursions to the local newsagent’s. And to his credit, he didn’t tell a soul – not while we were in primary school together, anyway – he saved the embarrassing story up for a night out with all his new mates soon after he moved to London.
‘To write in pink is a waste of ink …’
At the time, I took it to mean that writing in pink biro pen on a red card would have made the words unreadable, but lying on the mattress now, it occurs to me that it has a different meaning, one I could and should have applied to Five Parks. The rhyme means this: that writing with frills and whistles and bells doesn’t make the message any clearer. I should have been more direct and honest with my dates, with my readers, with myself. Had I done so, I might be soaking in a long hot bath right now rather than squirming on a stinking mattress.
I close my eyes to block out the shine from the laptop and pretend I am somewhere else, back in Michael’s flat, in the bath, with a copy of the Culture magazine from the Sunday Times in one dry hand and a generous glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the wet one. I picture myself in that gleaming bathroom – Michael’s cleaner was very thorough – but I utter the words from a different setting, imagine them bouncing off the water around my chin.
‘To write in pink is a waste of ink,
But to write in blue means I love you.’
I repeat the rhyme until my tongue rids it of all meaning. And then I start into another one, unsure if it escaped my lips in the bath more than twenty years ago, but certain that it makes at least some sense here and now in the imaginary pool of water I have created in this dark hole. It shouldn’t make any sense at all.
It’s the Teddy Bear’s Picnic.
I laugh out loud, the first laughter to echo around this room since I was reborn in it. The sound frightens me but I keep going, embrace the fear. I sing.
There’s something brazen about singing in here – even singing something so simple – that gives me strength.
I don’t realise why I’m singing this particular rhyme until I stop. I don’t sing again. I am not the only thing making a racket.
It’s faint, but somewhere close by there is another sound entirely, melodic but removed. It disappears. I hop off the bed and stand in the middle of the room, waiting for it to bite my ears again, waiting for it to punch its way through the walls. I didn’t imagine it. I stick my nose towards the ceiling like a rat must do before it scampers out of the sewers in search of tonight’s plunder. The sound resurfaces, swirling around in the dark like a buzzing fly, audible one second but gone the next. And then it settles, still faint but at least sustained. It is emanating from outside the room, and some distance away.
It is the sound of childhood, an echo of years past, of running through the sunshine with not one care in the world. It is the sound of an ice cream van pulling into a housing estate. The music isn’t quite loud enough to determine the tune, but I can hear chimes. That’s why I was singing what I was singing. The ice cream van that runs past the flat and distracted me from freelancing every day at four o’clock always blasts out the tune to Teddy Bears’ Picnic. This tune is different now, too different and still too quiet to identify, but the chimes themselves sing with a familiarity. It is the sound of ice cream in the sun, of a funfair on a late summer’s night that you hoped would last forever. I go to t
he laptop and write all this down, exhilarated by the first noise I’ve heard that wasn’t spawned within these four walls. Someone else is making that sound. Someone who isn’t him. I follow Charles Blake’s advice from more than two decades ago, even though the advice didn’t come from Charles Blake.
‘To write in pink is a waste of ink.’
I stop writing and I get busy. I step away from the table, arch my back up straight, put my arms by my side, and I scream. I scream as loud as I can. Please, please someone hear me. Someone. Someone who isn’t him. It takes a few minutes, until my throat burns itself hoarse and the chimes are dead, for me to realise that no one is coming.
16
‘Date #2: Horse play in Richmond Park with Eric’
Posted by Suzanne
Monday, July 11, 2016
It’s all too much. I want to pass out – but not just because of the heat, suffocating even without the sun. I’ve never been on a date like this before. This … this is too much.
Eric, my date – Date #2 – a man who I hadn’t met until a few hours ago, is doing something extraordinary, something you don’t normally do on a first date. Or any date. He is risking his life. He shouldn’t be where he is right now. And neither should she.
In the glimpse I got of her back at the stable, when we were all being allocated our rides, she displayed the insolence of a consummate teenager, but she can’t be more than twelve.
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