Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  21

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 60%

  Time remaining: 2hr 55min

  Elvis is alive. And so am I. He won’t let me quit.

  It wasn’t long after I finished reading about Aaron that it started. Up high, up in the unseen speakers again, screeching. It feels louder than before, as loud as any sound can be, but then Bill Haley can’t compete with The King. Elvis is alive. He’s singing ‘Rave On’.

  The first verse has played over and over and over and over again since I retreated to the bed, for what I thought – what I hoped – might be the last time. I had given up. But he hasn’t. He wanted me back where I am now, tapping on this fucking keyboard. Time is almost irrelevant in here, but I’m going to guess that Elvis has been wailing in my ear for at least thirty minutes.

  He won’t turn off the music. He doesn’t want me to give up, he wanted me back at this laptop, writing nothing into nowhere. So I am back to try to shut out the sound. He won’t turn it off.

  Please stop the music please stop the music please I will keep writing I will keep writing I will keep writing I promise just make it stop.

  Elvis is dead. The song has stopped. Tears dribble down my cheeks, over my chin and on to the table. It’s funny how something as innocent as music can inspire such terror. I used to love shuffling through Michael’s embarrassing iPod Classic, which he refused to throw out; everything from Chesney Hawkes to Weezer and whatever was in between. But in here music has become just another instrument of torture.

  And yet now that is has gone, the silence brings its own unique dread, and I fill it with screams. He wants me to suffer before I die. He is getting his wish. I shout at the words filling the Word document as I type them and flecks of spit smatter the screen. I find myself rubbing it off with my wrist, protecting the one source of light in here even though it is also everything I detest. Instead of cleaning the screen, my action smears a dark goo there – my wrist is bleeding from rattling against the handcuff earlier, when he was in the room. I can’t help but think of the obvious solution to my pain. What’s the difference between him killing me and doing it myself? Big difference. He doesn’t deserve to get off so light. If he has put me in here to kill me, he should have the guts to do the job himself. I won’t do it. I gave up before, I vowed to stop writing, but I forgot he is in complete control – and it led to more torture. I won’t give up again.

  He won’t let me stop writing, so there is nothing else to do but try to unmask him. But that means showing him the workings of my mind. The numbers run through my head, each one with a revolving verdict. It’s time I started sharing them.

  Date #1 … No

  Date #2 … Maybe

  Date #3 … Maybe

  Date #4 … No

  Date #5 … Maybe

  They form an obvious list, neat and numbered. There are other candidates, of course, lurking in the shadows, but they are somehow faceless. Jessica may not be the figure who has stood over me in here, but I know she is capable of this, after what she did to me, even if it involves a male accomplice to carry out her heavy lifting. I cannot rule her out, because I will not underestimate her again.

  My stalker is also a suspect. He has been in my bedroom. He left me the letter. He told me he had been watching me and would continue to watch me. Is he watching me now?

  Of the five dates, there is one who leaps out, but only because he has no identity. Date #5 is as faceless as any internet troll, but much more dangerous. He shares the same kind of shadow where my captor lurks. But maybe that is because I did not meet him. I cannot remember him, so there is a chance he didn’t turn up to our date. I remember waiting. I remember sitting at a bench and bending down to pick up a tennis ball and after that … flashes of other images; the steep steps, the train shooting into the sky, the reeds closing in on me, the black figure leering over me, blocking out the sun. That figure could be Date #5 or it could be someone else. It could be anyone. Someone I wronged in the past, someone who submitted an unsuccessful application to be a date.

  But going down that line of inquiry is too unfathomable, because I do not know them. For now, it is better to stick to who I know. If my captor is one of my previous dates, there are two main contenders, smack bang in the middle of the four who do have real names and faces.

  I made the mistake of rejecting Dates #2 and #3 across a two-page spread in a national newspaper. I should have known there would be repercussions. They knew what they were getting into, knew there would be exposure, but perhaps they underestimated just how deep my words could cut.

  Jordan is not capable of doing this to me. He doesn’t have this in him. But that doesn’t mean I should have treated him like I did. I made no contact with him after our date. Five Parks just took on a life of its own in its second week and I lost him in the maelstrom. I made a resolution not to interact with each date outside of our park meetings, but in hindsight I owed Jordan better than that. He was the first. He will always be the first.

  Aaron didn’t do this either. Earlier, all I wanted to do was read the one blog post from Five Parks that gave me any true happiness – the recap of Date #4 with Aaron – and then climb on to that mattress and wait to die, but my captor would not allow it.

  What would Aaron think of me giving up? Was that the girl he fell for? I know he fell for me, I know we had something, and just because it started on some silly dating blog doesn’t make it any less special. That was only last week. Fuck. It feels like something I dreamt in another life.

  It hits me, in the dark, like a blow to the side of the head. Aaron will come for me. If he is reading the blog, and he must be reading the blog, he will see I am in trouble and he will seek me out. When those blue eyes opened on me in Regent’s Park, I didn’t just see some random guy on a dating blog, I saw the man I want to be with. In that photo we had taken as we left the tennis court, the two of us trying to keep our eyes open in the face of the sun, I am wrapped around him like I belong.

  Aaron is out there, searching for me. The truth of this overwhelms me and I start to cry again. I won’t let Aaron do all the work. I won’t give up again. I have to keep writing about my surroundings and hope something budges in a reader’s brain on the outside. Someone will come. And I have to keep writing to work out the identity of my captor. If I can do that, everything else will fall into place. I don’t have to die in here. I will help Aaron and I will help myself. It’s time to look at each suspect in more detail. I must keep reading.

  Date #3 … Maybe

  22

  ‘Date #3 challenge: I’m going to make you a star’

  Posted by Suzanne

  Tuesday, July 12, 2016

  I love a bit of drama. I always have, ever since Becky McConville pushed me out from the crowd of brown uniforms on the assembly hall stage twenty-five years ago. Our teacher, Miss Maguire, was seeking performers to act out a scene from her reworking of The Owl and the Pussycat. Becky didn’t want to be either animal. She didn’t see the point of acting in the school play. Even at the age of seven, school was already a play to her. The playground, the girls’ toilet, the canteen – these were her stages, but she played the same part on each; the teasing, conniving, cajoling villainess.

  Becky thrived on knowledge. Not the kind found in a verbal reasoning text book or a Mrs Pepperpot story, but the information gleaned from queuing up for the water fountain or standing on the loo in a toilet cubicle. If Becky found out there was a boy you liked chasing around the playground at break-time or you had a mole on your arm underneath your shirt sleeve, you were in trouble. Becky loved secrets. She loved them because she loved destroying them.

  I hated her then, but now I admire her. Becky had steel and a resolve to find out everything she could about everyone around her. She would have made an excellent journalist. In fact, I won’t look her up on Facebook for fear of finding out she has a high-profile role at the heart of the current Conservative government. If I did meet her now, two and a half decades on,
I would thank her for pushing me forward on that assembly stage.

  Miss Maguire thought I would make a perfect Pussycat, and paired me with Simon Reid’s less-than-perfect Owl, who too-whit-too-wooed at me in between takes, soaking me in accidental spit.

  But even a disgusting seven-year-old boy’s saliva couldn’t prevent me from catching the acting bug. The Owl and the Pussycat was just something we did in front of our own class, half of whom took a turn in the roles. However, Miss Maguire had bigger plans for me. She liked what she’d seen and asked me if I wanted to take part in a speech and drama festival. I’d have to practice hard and learn my lines, she said, but I’d get to go to other schools and perform in competitions. When I was in my early surly teenage years six years later, such a proposition would have horrified me, but then I was wide-eyed and open to possibility. For the next few years, Miss Maguire coached me through monologues from Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. My Toad of Toad Hall was the talk of the town and my mum still has the picture from the local paper of me clutching my gold medal, my face painted a disgusting light green.

  So I have bitch Becky and Miss Maguire and Simon’s saliva to thank for my love of the dramatic arts. Unfortunately, I became too cool for school once I’d swapped primary for secondary, and I dumped drama and shacked up with the unholy triumvirate of netball, the Spice Girls and Stephen King. Like every normal teenager, I was a strange beast.

  Not much has changed. I still listen to ‘2 Become 1’ every Christmas; I still have that dream where I miss the basket in the last seconds of the inter-school netball semi-final, and whenever I want to give myself a good scare, I re-read Salem’s Lot.

  Before I started Five Parks, it’s safe to say I let drama slip out of my life, until some French bloke on a horse interrupted our date to ride to the rescue and save a little girl’s life (see Date #2).

  It was poetry that led to that equine adventure, but its words weren’t enough to spell out dating success. Date #2 with Eric was a bust. So for Date #3’s challenge, I am going back to my acting roots.

  At the bottom of this post, you will find an embedded YouTube video. It stars yours truly – and a few fellow thesps – in a recreation of a scene from my favourite film. View it as an instructional video, as this week’s applicants must do likewise for a chance to win a date with me in my next London park this Saturday afternoon.

  Choose a scene from a movie you love, perform it in front of a camera, then send the video to me. The applicant with the best acting skills will be my date this weekend.

  The video can be as long or as short as you like and you can rope in anyone you know to help you, although roping in an Oscar-winning director who just happens to be your best friend won’t guarantee success. It doesn’t have to be a slick production – it just has to make me take notice. Think more Casualty than Gravity.

  Later in the week, I will put the best three videos up on this site and let my readers pick the winner.

  I know you can do it. Just like Becky McConville, we are all actors. We all go through life pretending to be someone else. Every day we put on a mask for someone. But if you put on one for me, it might just win you a dream date.

  Lights… camera… action!

  23

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 50%

  Time remaining: 2hr 15min

  The only light I know beams back at me. The underside of my chin still stings from the point of his blade. It reminds me of how close I came to escaping all this, and yet it’s clear now that at no stage in his little torture routine was my life in danger. He wanted to remind me of my place, not remove me from it. And my place is here, squeezed into this tiny chair for a child at this bright rectangle of light. This is my stage now.

  I hated speech and drama. When Miss Maguire informed my mum one fateful parents’ night that I had a talent for make-believe, the two of them conspired to ruin the rest of my primary school life. Recital after rehearsal, practice upon practice. I just wanted to go outside and run around like everybody else, or run off and hide in the cinema. If I could go back in time, I would push Becky McConville in front of the rest of the class before she could get to me. On second thoughts, I’d push her right off the stage.

  When you’re young and foolhardy, being good at something isn’t enough. You have to love it too. A week before I started at the big school, I stood at the top of the stairs and shouted down at my mum: ‘I hate acting! I am not doing any more drama!’

  She raised her head up at me, on her way into the kitchen to make dinner, confident and controlling.

  ‘That’s not what it looks like from here, dear.’

  She didn’t try to dissuade me, almost to the sad point of giving up on me, and I went to secondary school and forgot about play-acting. If only I had been so bold and stubborn twenty years later. I should have jacked in journalism long before Five Parks.

  I was lost in my last few years at the paper, sick of churning out the same features every year on the same topics, obtaining the same quotes from the same people, rushing to reach the same daily deadline. When I finally did get up the courage to leave, I should have dumped journalism forever and found something new and fresh. The last thing I wanted to do was more writing, and in the freelance world it was more writing for less money.

  Five Parks was a way of rediscovering my love of writing, dates or no dates. It was my own work on my own terms submitted to my own deadlines. Or at least it was until I let it get hijacked by the Herald. That’s what it felt like when I was writing it out there in the real world, but reading my blog in here in the dark, with no other distractions, it rings hollow. It’s not me. And it didn’t make me happy, apart from Date #4. Five Parks was worth all the effort because I met Aaron, and that’s the only comfort I can take in my black prison. Five Parks led me here.

  I was already acting in my blog posts, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, so it made sense to make my date applicants dress up and play pretend too. I decided to indulge Miss Maguire and my mum one last time.

  I click on the YouTube embed below the article on the Date #3 challenge. I know it won’t work because the laptop is offline, but even going through the motions of something that won’t materialise can be consoling, like trying out for a sports team you know you will never make. When I click the embed, the YouTube video square turns black, matching the room around me. I don’t need to watch the footage, anyway, because it is already playing in my head. I remember every second.

  As far back as I can remember, my favourite film has always been Trading Places. I watched it for the first time when I was nine years old at a friend’s birthday sleepover. Sarah White smuggled it from her parents’ video cabinet, exhilarated by the number ‘15’ printed on the cover in red writing. Sarah said she had watched Dirty Dancing, which also had a ‘15’ on its cover, and it was amazing. The rest of the girls were appalled I hadn’t yet seen Dirty Dancing; I wouldn’t be swayed by Swayze for at least another three years.

  When Trading Places didn’t turn out to be Dirty Dancing (Trading Places only failing is that it doesn’t contain Patrick Swayze), everyone fell asleep. Except me. I found it mesmerising. All those naughty words I didn’t understand but knew were naughty, the silly Santa Claus with the salmon in his beard, the funny man in the gorilla suit. . . I fell in love that night, wrapped in my sleeping bag, my classmates dozing around me in their Polly Pocket pyjamas, the only light in the dark coming from the square box beaming out Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. The nine-year-old me must have blocked out Jamie Lee Curtis’s breasts.

  It’s the film I’ve seen more than any other, mainly because I made a point of watching it in the run-up to every Christmas, a tradition that included Michael for the past two years. He liked it too, but mainly because I loved it. Regardless of how things ended between us, he always loved it when I was happy. I was at my happiest curled up on the couch with him, laughing with great fury – as I did every year – at the moment when Eddie Murphy breaks the fourth w
all.

  When it came to picking a scene to demonstrate what I wanted from my suitors, there was only ever one on my mind. It’s quite early in Trading Places, when the nefarious Duke Brothers explain the workings of the commodities exchange to their new charge, the previously homeless Billy Ray Valentine, played by Murphy.

  Through her PR contacts, Sylvie managed to procure a room in a private member’s club in Belgravia, and there were a few funny looks when she, Rob and I turned up in matching grey men’s suits.

  Rob furnished the drawing room that stood in for the Dukes’ office with an old Commodore 64 he hadn’t binned to give the scene a more authentic ‘80s look. Rob also did most of the talking, playing the more approachable Duke brother Randolph, while Sylvie stood in for his sterner sibling, Mortimer. That left me as Billy Ray, hogging the scene’s one fantastic moment. It comes after Randolph explains the commodities exchange as if his unlikely new protégé was a five-year-old.

  At which Billy Ray, incredulous that this old rich guy thinks he hasn’t quite grasped the concept of a bacon sandwich, turns to the camera and gives the audience a hard stare. It remains the funniest split-second in cinematic history.

  We filmed our homage with an iPhone on a stand and Rob took care of all the technical stuff afterwards, editing it into one relatively cohesive scene. He was a pretty good actor too. I did my best to emulate Murphy’s famous look into the camera and after five or six goes at it, Rob called it a wrap and we shuffled back out into the real world, celebrating with a few drinks in a nearby pub.

  With the extra push from the Herald, the number of video applicants ran into three figures, almost 200. We didn’t have as many film re-enactments as poems, but then it takes less time to toss off three or four verses on a page than it does to craft a work of video art.