Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  Our guide insisted the horse she demanded was too big for her, but the pre-teen wouldn’t be tamed by the staff or her father, who eventually took the stable hand to one side and whispered something about the money he’d ploughed into the centre and his daughter being ‘an experienced rider’.

  A few minutes later, the Veruca Salt of our group was on top of Trojan, an imperious-looking specimen who packed a frightening combination of power and disgruntlement. Veruca, like all of her ilk, was a terrific actress, so put on a brave face after she’d mounted that said she was in control. But something poking out from behind her two-faced smile, one she undoubtedly expected to wear throughout her entire teenage years, told me she was far from comfortable.

  And now here she is, still on top of Trojan – but only just – and faced with a new problem besides the sixteen-hands-high one between her trembling legs: oncoming traffic.

  The crossing should have been routine, traversing one of the main roads through Richmond Park in order to swap a dusty poo-ridden horse trail for another, but Veruca had gone too far ahead of the group, putting the foot down on Trojan when she should have been gently warming his engine. When this mismatched pair – one in pink riding boots, the other black as night – reached the road that sliced through the trail, travelling too fast, something unforeseen altered their course.

  The pair of dogs scampering along the roadside were small – terriers, perhaps – but they were feisty, stupidly unafraid of the pulsating beast seventeen times their collective size, and sprang from a bush to display their bravery just as Trojan and Veruca slid towards the road, yapping canine expletives into the arid air. Trojan flipped, and almost flipped Veruca off his back.

  She has managed to hang on, but the cars and the cyclists are closing in on her. Trojan spins around from the first braking vehicle, its shrieks echoed by his own. He shifts his weight to his back legs and almost goes vertical, ridding Veruca of her rein as she wraps her little arms around his neck and screams. She is in trouble.

  I watch all this from my position back down the trail, my feet on the ground where they belong, my own rein in my hand, attached to the bridle that binds me to Prudence, the aptly named slowcoach that is my steed. Prudence chews on something that isn’t there and stares through the cluster of trees at the commotion on the road. I have had several stirrup issues since we left the riding centre, and the guide has jumped down from her own horse to assist me. Veruca is helpless.

  Her last hope is a Frenchman I know only from a picnic in this same park a few hours ago, a gathering – with a notable eavesdropper – that feels like it happened in a different lifetime. In between strawberries, keen for some reassurance about my lack of riding ability, I asked Eric if he had ever been on a horse before. ‘A few times,’ he had said, tossing his thick curly hair off in another direction, into another subject. I am beginning to suspect he was misleading me.

  Like Veruca, Eric had also been ploughing ahead from the rest of the group, forgetting he was on a date and indulging in a spot of Mr Darcyery. He knew how to ride all right, like a boxer knows how to punch. And the big kid that he is, Eric was giving his horse, a beautiful brown being called Apollo, an intense workout. Veruca doesn’t know it yet, but Eric’s immaturity is the one thing that might prevent Trojan from flicking her on to a moving car, the one thing that might save her life.

  But Eric has work to do. He was ahead of the group when Trojan dragged Veruca off the trail, but is still too far back to reach her. Trojan brings his front legs down on the hot tarmac and his shoes squeal as loud as Veruca. When the horse pauses, the girl is smart enough to grab the rein again, clenching it inside her shaking fists.

  The guide has sprinted from my side to intervene, but she isn’t going to get there in time. Neither is Eric, perched on Apollo on the edge of the wood, but he sees what Trojan is going to do next. A queue of cars in front and behind him, interspersed with edgy cyclists, Trojan does what any cornered animal does: he looks for a gap.

  A racing bike slams against the side of a people carrier and expletives are tossed in the air as Trojan punches through the crowd and gallops down the sloping road. An orchestra of beeps erupts and a helmet whizzes off someone’s head, but it doesn’t belong to a cyclist. The straps must have been too tight for Veruca, or maybe she just didn’t want to ruin her perfectly plaited hair. Whatever the reason behind her loose headgear, she has lost that protection. She is in huge trouble.

  Up ahead of me, Eric didn’t bother following Trojan to the crossing. Instead, he waited to see the runaway horse’s next move. As Trojan drags his jerky jockey down the hill, Eric digs his heels into Apollo, shouts something in French, then ‘Wooplah!’, and away they go, not in the direction of the crossing, but straight for a bushy ditch that blocks the woodland trail from the traffic. A pair of pink boots fly past the hedge before Eric gets there, but he doesn’t flinch from his mission, merely dipping his head into Apollo’s to whisper some precious secret, and the horse’s front legs leave the ground. I let out a scream and let go of Prudence, then run towards the hedge.

  ‘ERIC!’

  I don’t have time to notice how utterly bizarre it is for me to howl a stranger’s name in that way. I don’t have time because horse and man, these two aligned gods, pile over the bush and on to the road, narrowly missing a stationary car. Eric reins Apollo’s head to the left and they kick off down the road in pursuit of their prey. I reach the hedge and look out. The road is chaos, cars and bikes randomly abandoned like dolls tossed from a toy box.

  I turn my head down the road just in time to see it happen. Eric and Apollo reach Trojan and Veruca at the point where the tarmac bends steeply upwards to the right and the corner goes blind. Eric veers his horse into Veruca’s to slow it down, grabs the reins from her with his right hand and pulls on Trojan’s neck as hard as he can. The two animals skid to a halt, but the danger isn’t over; Trojan lowers his head in readiness to shift his weight on to his back legs again, but Eric reads the situation, arches up in his stirrups and leaps from Apollo’s back on to Trojan’s, grounding the latter when he lands. A rein in each hand, he brings the two horses’ heads together in a nuzzle and then joins the party, burying his curly hair in Trojan’s mane, slapping him with pride on his thick neck. Veruca wraps her arms around Eric’s back and holds on tight.

  ‘It’s all over!’ he shouts to her.

  Eric turns the two horses around and trots them back up the hill. A cyclist flies round the blind corner behind them and tires squeak, a slightly louder rendition than the endless echo of crickets I hear in the bushes around me. But for the past minute, I had forgotten there were any crickets in Richmond Park.

  Cars beep and cyclists mutter and dogs bark, but out of this disarray comes Eric, a knight in shining armour, two horses at his call and a terrified nearly-teen maiden wrapped around his chest. When this unimaginable quartet is level with me, Eric leans Trojan’s head over the hedge and invites me to give him a pat.

  ‘It’s okay, Suzanne, he is calm now.’

  I decline the offer. Eric gives me a big smile over the ditch.

  ‘Ahhh,’ he says. ‘J’adore l’équitation!’

  Technically, in Richmond Park, it’s called ‘hacking’, and the staff at the riding centre had a good laugh on our arrival when they found out I was a journalist.

  No one is laughing when we return there after our shortened expedition. The guide is in a state of confusion, torn between chiding Veruca and soothing her – worried, no doubt, about the threat of legal action. Her father throws a bit of a wobbler when he hears what happened, but Veruca calms him down and says, ‘It was my own fault, Dad.’

  Her name is Samantha, I finally discover, and she has the guts to apologise to our guide without any urging. She also had the guts to hang on to that horse when things went awry, and I respect her for that. When she finally steps up into Daddy’s Land Rover to be delivered back to whatever palace she came from, she looks like someone who has learned a valuable lesso
n.

  With Samantha gone, the next person to receive a scolding is Eric, but not to his face.

  ‘What your friend did was incredibly reckless and stupid,’ the guide tells me. ‘And it’s quite probably the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do on a horse.’

  I accept the semi-accolade on Eric’s behalf and bite my lip to avoid replying, ‘But he’s not my friend.’

  I don’t think he’s boyfriend material, either. He’s handsome and flamboyant and funny and French, but he’s overwhelming. This wasn’t a date – it was a drama. What would he do to entertain me on a second date; jump out of a plane?

  *

  Queen Victoria used to ride in Richmond Park, and I thought it would be fitting to follow in her stirrup steps, given that I’d stalked her on Date #1 in a north London park named in her honour. But she was made of sterner stuff. She wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at Eric’s road rescue, but it’s thrown me, just like Samantha should have been hurled from that wild horse.

  Millions of women up and down the country will be screaming at this right now, thinking I’m mad for passing up such a gallant knight. And I wasn’t put off by the fact that he is an investment banker in the City. Shameful as it sounds, I quite liked the idea of his financial security.

  But, for all his heroics, Eric just didn’t fit. Over the picnic in the park, the taste of strawberries and sun screen on my lips, he told me it was the Frenchman in him, rather than the banker, who wrote the poem which won him the date.

  ‘I deal all day with numbers,’ he said across the picnic blanket, the top of his chest exposed above a largely unbuttoned shirt. ‘But I love words. That is what gets me excited.’

  I had very little words for him. He was too dazzling amid the beiges and light greens of the surrounding park, and only had the long blue dragonflies and tiny orange butterflies for colour competition.

  A plane rumbled above us every few minutes until enough rolled by that it was time to go riding and run into all that excitement I have already described.

  After the ride is over, Eric takes the plaudits of anyone lucky enough to see him save Samantha and we take the diagonal trek – on foot – across the park, interacting only with deer and dogs. When we exit the desert and go back to reality, I let him buy me a drink from a pub opposite Richmond Hill, and we grab a bench across the road in the gravel and stare out at Turner’s muse, the Thames.

  Before the sky goes pink and Turner’s sky turns into something more Monet, we retreat down the hill to Richmond station and go our separate ways. He is predictably suave about the whole thing.

  ‘Call me if you want to,’ he says. ‘But if you don’t want to … don’t worry about it.’

  I’m sorry, Eric. I know you’re going to ride in and sweep some lucky girl off her feet, but it’s not me. You’re just too damn dashing.

  Au revoir, Eric. Au revoir.

  This post was first published in this morning’s Daily Herald newspaper and on its website.

  17

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 8%

  Time remaining: 0hr 19min

  ‘This is far too fucking long. You’ve got to get to the story and cut out all the shit. The waffle. The flowery language. You don’t need it.’

  Nick Hatcher did not mince his words. As features editor of the Daily Herald, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain, he wasn’t paid to avoid confrontation.

  He purposely dragged me into the boardroom, just to show me how seriously he was taking all this, and then he started off by dressing me down. I had been introduced to him two minutes earlier.

  But there we were, the two of us huddled over the top end of an enormous table, the kind that is only filled when something really important is happening, like a royal sex scandal or a cabinet resignation. Huddled over a then insignificant, unheard of little blog. Huddled over Five Parks.

  His hands were too big for his iPad. He kept thumping it with a hairy forefinger, scrolling and scrolling for ever.

  ‘Does this thing ever fucking end?’

  Nick Hatcher liked to swear. He was running through my blog post recap of Date #1, my walk in Queen’s Park with Jordan.

  ‘How much is here, maybe four, five thousand words?’

  Again, his question wasn’t directed at me. I stayed silent.

  ‘If we’re going to put the next one of these things in our paper, you need to cut it down and give us a third of this. We’d be talking a two-page spread with pictures, but it needs to be succinct, to-the-point, attention-grabbing, okay?’

  This one wasn’t rhetorical. I nodded back at him like a robot, a good little obedient freelance journalist.

  It was Sylvie who made me famous. She knew someone at the Herald and sent off one of those persuasive emails at which she excelled, and her contact had the nerve to put my blog under Hatcher’s nose. His nose was intimidating, ferociously sucking in air, as if someone had told him the boardroom was running out of the stuff. There was a tiny hair on the end of it, one he must have plucked out every month or so, that danced in between his red cheeks. Hatcher was from the old school, had talked the talk and drank the drink in Fleet Street, and was now bludgeoning his way through his remaining working years, setting himself up for the stereotypical heart attack a week after retirement. All that may or may not have been ahead of him, but I was the only thing in his crosshairs on that Monday afternoon four weeks ago.

  Sylvie didn’t hang about.

  ‘You sneaky bitch!’

  That’s what she shouted down the phone at me late on the first Saturday night of Five Parks, after I’d published and tweeted a link to my recap of Date #1. She was flat out closing a big pitch to some mobile phone company the previous week, so my opening few blog posts went unnoticed. At the beginning, it was just me, Rob and a laptop. Now Sylvie wanted in.

  She was on a night out somewhere – I could hear a woman shouting for mojitos at a barman in the background. It was just the reaction I was hoping for from her. She was surprised, but she was delighted.

  ‘Suzanne, it’s bloody brilliant! I’ve just read it here, in the bar! The girls all love it!’

  ‘The girls’ were her PR minions, all bowing at the altar of Sylvie. I didn’t blame them.

  She couldn’t hear a word I was saying, so I just let her shout down the phone.

  ‘I think it’s great, Suzanne! Can you hear me? I think it’s great and I’m going to prove it to you. Give me tomorrow and Monday morning and you’ll see. Don’t make any plans for Monday afternoon!’

  True to her word, on Monday afternoon I was sitting in the boardroom of the biggest newspaper in the country. I’d heard the stories about the Herald, of course, but all from the safety of my desk at the free paper on the other side of central London. Every journalist knew another one who worked or had once worked there – usually the latter – and everyone who hadn’t held them in secret admiration. A stint at the Herald was journalism’s stand-up comedy; do it and you can do anything.

  I would be safe from the swearing, the insurmountable workload, the backbiting, the backstabbing and the firings then hirings then firings, however, as my role would be unique. I wouldn’t have to venture into the office. I would continue to write my blog, and they would pay me to do it, but the date recaps would also be published in the Herald. This would come with certain conditions. As outlined above by Hatcher, I had to cut out all the shit.

  ‘I mean, just look at it,’ he said, berating his iPad. ‘There are a thousand words here before you even meet the bloody guy, all this shit about Queen Victoria and fucking jazz. Jazz! For the next one, you have to jump straight in, right into the action. Grab the reader by the fucking throat.’

  The next condition was about timing. My blog posts would appear in their newspaper and on their website a few hours before I was allowed to publish them on Five Parks, where they had to be unaltered from the version that fell in the laps of the paper’s three million readers. I was giving up some kind of control, but in return
I was getting paid – and paid well (say what you like about the Herald and its methods, the money was decent) – and gaining something invaluable: the oxygen of free publicity. There was no telling where Five Parks could go with the Herald’s backing.

  After outlining the terms, Hatcher shook my hand, stood up and strode to the door.

  ‘Sit there,’ he said back to me, his finger pointed at my head like the sword of an executioner. ‘I’m going to send someone in.’

  A few minutes later, a rather flustered journalist entered, notepad in one hand and Dictaphone in the other, like a stroppy teenager who’s been asked to read out a poem in front of her whole family. She didn’t want to be interviewing the Dating Blog Girl – she wanted to be taking down governments. But what Hatcher said went.

  He sprang the interview on me, but I should have known what was coming. If they were going to serialise my blog, the first thing they would have to do was give me the big sell to their readers. I was apprehensive after her first few questions fired across the massive table, the Dictaphone still yet menacing in the demilitarised zone between us. At first, I didn’t enjoy being on the wrong side of a journalist’s questions. She wanted to know about me, why I began the blog, why I wanted to find someone, why why why.

  I went through the motions, told her how excited I was about the whole thing, steered clear of her probes about past disastrous ex-boyfriends (I didn’t mention Michael at all) and slowly started to enjoy myself. The truth was I wanted the exposure. It all happened so quickly, but that’s no excuse; that is precisely what I desired. I was sick of languishing in the shadows, hiding in the house – it was time to step into the light, put myself out there, make a name for myself.

  The interview went across two pages in the Herald the next day, along with my smug image and my poetry challenge for Date #2. The headline called me ‘Online dating’s Willy Wonka’. The almost endless blurb underneath read something like: ‘Suzanne is giving away five golden tickets to five lucky guys who want to date her over the next month, but the blonde beauty tells us: “I’m not that great a catch, really …”’