Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  Michael admitted he may have had a few more drinks than Eric had at this stage, so he was unable to hide his hurt when informed about his former bride-to-be’s new project. Eric cajoled the details from him and provided Michael with a sympathetic ear, and Michael admitted that he had been all set to marry me.

  ‘I told him we were engaged and that we split up, but I didn’t go into any details,’ said Michael. ‘And I didn’t encourage him to apply for a date with you – I was still trying to digest the fact you’d started this blog.’

  Back in our bar, Michael looked like he must have done when Eric told him about my article a week previously; hurt. Perhaps when I started Five Parks I should have warned him what was coming, but the truth is I didn’t think I would ever speak to him again. Until Eric’s abuse brought us back in the same room, the same room where it all began. Eric had seen the pain in Michael’s face and decided to act on it, strike a blow for mankind against all the whores that had wronged them. He decided to play Prince Charming on a steed during the date, then transform into a troll and tell me what he really thought when it was finished.

  Feeling guilty, I let Michael control the conversation. When we were together and stuck in a trivial argument, and he was winning, I’d tease him with my legal knowledge, almost all of it extracted from early ’90s courtroom dramas. ‘Stop badgering the witness!’ I’d cry, which would always raise a smile from him. I should have tried it at the end, when we fell out for real. And for good.

  Michael asked me what happened after Eric’s reveal. I lied and said I brushed it off and we parted soon after. Michael didn’t buy it.

  ‘I would be careful with this guy, Suze. I read your article on him yesterday. He’s not going to like being embarrassed in front of however many million people read the Herald. The guy is a walking ego. I hope that’s the only thing you’ve done to upset him. These people that work at his bank … they’re okay when they’re celebrating a big deal or a successful case and the drinks are flowing, but deep down they’re ruthless, willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, and they don’t forget. They’re vindictive, experts at holding a grudge.’

  He leaned across the table, placing his hand over mine, the first time he’d touched me since we were still a couple.

  ‘Which brings me to why I brought you here. There’s something I want to tell you. I want you to do something for me.’

  He’s never asked me to do anything for him. When we were together, he asked so little of me. He loved me. No demands. Up until I screwed everything up and he demanded that I leave.

  ‘I want you to quit the blog.’

  I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. He wasn’t making any sense. This felt like an ambush, less aggressive and frightening than Eric’s three days before, but just as startling.

  ‘I want you to stop because I am worried about you,’ said Michael. ‘I’ve been reading some of the stuff online that people are saying about you – I think you’re putting yourself in danger. There’s a lot of weirdos out there, Suze. I’m worried about your safety.’

  I thought of the strange ransom letter under my pillow. I almost told him that Sylvie is looking out for me on the dates and that he shouldn’t be concerned, but he has irked me with his command to end Five Parks, and I have never liked being told what to do.

  ‘This is my blog. You can’t tell me to shut it down.’

  I raised my voice, too much, and I caught two women at a table near the bar turning their heads in our direction. I felt ridiculous in my grey Eddie Murphy suit and I felt slightly drunk after a couple of gin and tonics in the previous pub with Rob and Sylvie. I hadn’t told them why I needed the Dutch courage, hadn’t told them I was meeting Michael. Sylvie would have killed me – she was still angry with Michael for dumping me and throwing me out on the street.

  This was typical Michael. He always had another agenda. It was my turn to lean in on him.

  ‘What is going on, Michael? What is all this about? Why are we back here? Are you trying to rub it in?’

  He ran his fingers through his thick head of black hair – one of his tells when he is nervous – and smiled at me. He hadn’t smiled at me like that for a long time. No one had.

  ‘You haven’t changed, Suze. Not one bit. You still love a scrap. But you still need me to explain things for you sometimes. Don’t you get it? I … I want you back.’

  I wished I had downed a few more drinks at the pub with Rob and Sylvie. I hadn’t seen this coming. Don’t start talking again, Michael, please. But he couldn’t help it.

  ‘I miss you. I made a mistake. I know it’s lame to say I saw your articles in the paper and realised I’d made a mistake, but it’s mostly true. We should be getting married this summer, Suze. We’ve thrown all that away. I want you back.’

  Maybe there was some other dimension where we still are getting married and this drink in this cocktail bar is just us adding more kindling to the roaring fire that is our unbreakable love. But it’s a towering fire of bullshit.

  ‘What are you doing, Michael?’

  I lifted the sides of my mouth, but not to smile; to prevent me from bursting into tears. We had our run and it ended, all because of me, but it was Michael who dealt the relationship its final blow. He finished things, told me he couldn’t be with me any more, told me to get out of his flat. And now he wanted me back. No. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to turn things around. It all came flooding back; the tears, the pleading, the apologies … all of it at the end, all of it from me. And then what came next; leaving his flat for the last time after he had gone to work, sleeping on my brother’s couch, my confusion when Stephen returned home with a burgeoning bruise after going to confront Michael.

  ‘Why did you hit my brother?’

  Michael was waiting for an answer to his new declaration of love, but I had other things on my mind. I wanted to drag out the past.

  ‘He came home with a black eye after going to see you. What did you do to him?’

  He wouldn’t answer.

  ‘I … I’m sorry, Suze, I don’t …I don’t remember a lot about that night. I was a mess. I was trying to get over you.’

  A new anger surged through me.

  ‘Get over me? You kicked me out!’

  Now the women at the other table weren’t just glancing; they were staring. I only knew this because Michael shot them back apologetic looks.

  ‘Don’t worry about them,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’

  I had built up a head of steam. And I kept going. He tells me to quit my blog. Then he tells me he wants me back. After he broke up with me! Ha! I presume he expects me to do both. I might be in trouble if I’m dating strangers while I’m reengaged.

  ‘When was the last time you spoke to Jessica, Michael?’

  It just spewed out. I wanted to lash out at him with something spiky and picked up the only appropriate weapon I could find.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Suze.’

  The anger spread across the table like a disease.

  ‘We didn’t break up because of fucking Jessica!’

  No, he’s right, we didn’t. We broke up because of me. But Jessica was there at the edge of the cliff when I pulled Michael and me over and into the rocks below.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, but we couldn’t help overhearing. Did you say “Suze”?’

  Of course they couldn’t help overhearing – Michael and I were shouting – but they don’t look sorry to be interrupting. The two women from the next booth stood over our table.

  The bolder of the two continued: “Are you Suzanne? Suzanne from Five Parks?”

  I nodded and was received by an outburst of giggles.

  ‘We knew it was you! Love the suit, by the way.”

  They were the same age as me, maybe even older, and dressed the same way as Michael’s female colleagues at his firm, but they were acting like a couple of schoolgirls who had just met their boyband crush.

  ‘Can we get a selfie with you? We love your blog, we th
ink you’re great.’

  I obliged, taking the picture myself with one of their phones, yet all too aware that a flustered Michael had slid off his stool and gone to the bar. My new groupies saved me from a showdown. When the selfie-taking was over and the well-wishing was done, I grabbed my handbag and slipped out of the bar alone, before Michael returned.

  Back in the neon lights of London, I thought about how much I wanted to tell Michael the truth about Jessica. And I think the same now, here in my dark room. I could never find the right words. All I have are words now, so here is what I should have said to Michael, not just on the last night I saw him, back in the basement of Belugi’s, but only a few weeks after we started seeing each other.

  I realise now that I don’t even have to say it with my own words – Jessica’s do all the talking for me. There are only four of them to remember, so it’s easy. They were sent to me a few weeks after Michael and I started dating, in a text from an unknown number, one I later discovered to be Jessica’s after sneaking through Michael’s own contact list. She had sent me a message. A warning. Four little words.

  ‘Beware the ex. Bitch.’

  27

  ‘Date #4 challenge: The Ex Test

  Posted by Suzanne

  Wednesday, July 20, 2016

  I’ve quit questionnaires, pulled poetry and vetoed videos. It’s time to go back to basics. The challenge for Date #4 is very simple. If you want to be my date this Saturday, you only have to do one thing; give me an email address. No, not your own, but the email address of … YOUR EX. I will do the rest.

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 15%

  Time remaining: 0hr 37min

  I prepare myself for the darkness. He could come back in here any second – I never see him coming. I have to try to stay awake when the darkness comes this time, but the room is stifling, like every corner is already plotting to pull down my eyelids. I’ve got to keep chipping away. A rumble in my stomach lets me know my appetite has returned and my head is clearing – if he did slip me a roofie to get me in here, I’m well over the worst. The pictures from that last park are still sliding around inside me, however, and I can’t work out the order. I stumbled on the steps, but I also crashed through the long reeds, waited on the bench and something smashed to pieces before my eyes. I picked up a tennis ball – did I throw it? – or am I mixing it up with cricket in Regent’s Park on Date #4? How can I have seen a train shooting into the sun? That must be from a dream. But the human shape standing over me, blocking out that sun and my own eyes, feels all too real. That was the moment he took me.

  The last time I was given a roofie was different. Back then, I had my best friend and my new boyfriend to take care of me. It was nearly three years ago and Michael and I had only started going out. It was our coming out ball. The first time I met all his legal friends. No wonder they hated me from the start.

  We were in a lovely pub, not some skeezy club, in North London, so my glass-covering defences were down, but I started losing my balance and my bearings after just a few drinks. I clearly remember almost falling into one of Michael’s workmates, then everything else was a blur. But amid the grey wavy lines that distorted my vision, I kept seeing intermittent bursts of Sylvie and Michael, taking turns to hold my head up, trying to help me vomit in a loo. When I woke up the next afternoon, Sylvie was lying on the bed beside me, on top of the duvet, while I was tucked underneath the covers. It was Michael’s bed. They’d taken me back to his flat. It would soon become my home.

  When I finally plucked up the courage to be reintroduced to Michael’s work friends, they all showered me with sympathy and condemned the ‘some random who must have spiked your drink’. But I saw through their smiles. I knew they all hated me and I knew they all missed Jessica. One of them or more than one of them or all of them had tried to sabotage me; I just couldn’t prove it. Perhaps even Jessica herself had been in on it, haunting me from afar.

  If anything, though, the whole incident brought Michael and I closer together. He saw me at my lowest ebb and wasn’t repulsed (there must have been a point early in the evening, before I became a complete mess, when he thought I was simply drunk) – instead, he wanted to look after me.

  But in here I have no one to tuck me in and keep me safe, no one to help me remember what happened. I miss Michael and Sylvie so much, but I only have myself to blame for their disappearance from my life. I must piece everything together for myself, but also for Sylvie and Michael, because if I can figure a way out of here, I will make my peace with them. They deserve it.

  The effects of the roofie may be gone, but I am still prone to bouts of drowsiness. The room is so hot. Will I be able to fight the darkness and stay awake when the laptop dies again? There is nothing to do but plough on. On to Date #4.

  Aaron did not do this, but it would be naïve of me to think that the way I went about selecting him did not anger a lot of people. The Ex Test was controversial.

  I wanted to pick Date #4 based on what his ex-girlfriend had to say about him. I wanted to ask her if he was worthy.

  This challenge was divisive. Sylvie loved my idea – what better way to judge a man than through the relationship he has, or doesn’t have, with his former partner? But Rob was sceptical. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, and he was right.

  The media had been largely supportive of Five Parks, but that all changed after my scathing recap of my time in Greenwich Park with David. I had made myself fair game, and the knives were out.

  When I started Five Parks, there were a few people who took umbrage at what I was doing; feminists who said I was letting the side down and, at the other extreme, advocates of men’s rights (whatever the hell those are) who believed I deserved to be slut-shamed.

  But after Date #3 the coverage intensified. Outraged by my treatment of David in writing and my choice of application process for Date #4, several of the Daily Herald’s rivals ran stories on my own exes. Leafing through them was like travelling back in time, except the past wasn’t what I remembered, but a hastily concocted pile of bullshit.

  One paper tried to spin two pages out of a guy who claimed he had kissed me at a Halloween disco in our first year in secondary school. I’d never even been to a school Halloween disco – my parents stipulated that I could only go to one disco each term, and I always chose the one at Christmas.

  Another tabloid tracked down a guy I kissed in Freshers’ Week at university. I don’t deny kissing this one – it was at a traffic light ball, where my amber sticker attracted more admirers than a green one ever could – but everything he told the paper on top of that was a lie. I don’t think I spoke another word to him in my entire four years at university, but he told a journalist he was heartbroken at the time when he was forced to call off our relationship because he found out I had been doing the rounds of the college rugby team. I have never watched a game of rugby in my life.

  Some of the backlash did manage to make me laugh, however. I even posted a link from my own blog to one web article, ‘29 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Go On A Date With Suzanne From Five Parks’. My favourite reason? ‘Number 4: Because she is a bitch’.

  When I started screening my calls from journalists, they tried hassling my mum instead. ‘What are you doing with these men in parks, Suzanne?’ she asked me during one rare phone conversation.

  I could take the harassment, the vindictive clickbait, the laughable listicles and the fictional kiss-and-tells, but I dreaded opening a paper or a webpage to find Michael’s face smiling back at me. If they got to Michael, I was sunk. But, to his credit, and perhaps to ensure his own survival, he kept quiet. I know that journalists had contacted him. Some of the articles contained veiled references to my former long-term boyfriend and there were even a few mentions of an engagement, no doubt tipped off by Michael’s female work colleagues who hated my guts, or by Jessica, who really hated my guts, even though we have never met.

  I wasn’t sure Michael would protect me after our meeting
in Belugi’s turned so sour. I walked out on him, I didn’t deserve his protection. But he didn’t make the papers.

  In spite of the growing backlash in the media against Five Parks, against me, the blog was more popular than ever. It was averaging more than 200,000 hits a day; love me or loathe me, everyone seemed to want to peer in the window I had erected between myself and the world.

  The response to the Date #4 challenge was just as overwhelming. Almost 1,000 email addresses landed into my own inbox and I only had a day to go through them. Although Rob was reticent about the Ex Test, he was there for me when I needed him. He liked it when it was just the two of us, working together. I couldn’t cope with the deluge of email addresses, a large chunk of which were fake. Some applicants had made up an equally imaginary ex-girlfriend’s email address for fun, while others had sent in addresses that no longer worked. Rob weaved some coding magic and created an algorithm that tested each email address and sorted the wrong from the real. Once I had a list of a few hundred existing email addresses, I sent them a message.

  Hi, I’m Suzanne. You may or may not know me from my blog, FiveParks.com.