Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  On the odd occasions when my brother invited Sylvie and I to hang out with his friends, Johnny always seemed to gravitate naturally towards us older ladies. Even though I was either seeing or engaged to Michael, I always detected some kind of frisson when Johnny slid up the table to join us. Secretly, I think my brother was on a matchmaking quest to put Johnny and I together; not so secretly, Stephen didn’t think much of Michael. The feeling was mutual, judging by what Michael did to my brother’s face after we broke up.

  Johnny worked with Stephen in recruitment and was young and handsome and interesting; Sylvie and I joked that if either of us ever needed a toy boy, then Johnny would be perfect. And so, when I was stuck for a Date #1, I turned to him. And he said yes. It was all very last minute, and I had already published my made-up questionnaire; as far as my handful of Five Parks readers knew, I was going to Queen’s Park to meet Jordan. Perhaps I should have explained the confusion to Johnny before the date, because as the Daily Herald states, he didn’t hang around in the park for long.

  Johnny hadn’t seen the blog before he arrived that blistering afternoon, the words Five Parks meant nothing to him, as he was not one of its handful of readers. He thought I had asked him out on a genuine date. I tried to explain my situation, but it only riled him, which was understandable. I tried to be upfront with him, that was the least he deserved, but it didn’t come out the way I wanted. I told him about the blog, told him I would be doing some kind of a write-up about the date, and that I planned on using him as a template, but that the date would be about me and Jordan, not me and Johnny. I wanted him to be Jordan, just for a couple of hours.

  It all sounds so ridiculous typing it out now, and hearing it in my head again before tapping it out here makes Johnny’s reaction all the more justified. He told me he didn’t want to be messed about, didn’t want to be Jordan, didn’t really want to hear from me again. So he stormed off, left me in Queen’s Park with only my thoughts and a blog that was already straining my relationships. I strolled around the park for a bit, admired the girls in their underwear with their long legs and their Kindles pointed into the sky – they were real, at least – then returned home and started writing. I wrote about my glorious day in Queen’s Park with Jordan. The lie was so much more beautiful than the truth. I didn’t tell anyone about Johnny, not even Rob or Sylvie, but Miles Phillips found out somehow. Maybe Johnny went to the Herald himself and sold them the story to get back at me. Or perhaps Johnny did something much worse.

  The Daily Herald article says Johnny was approached by Phillips but refused to comment, which means he knew the article was coming. Would the prospect of having his name blasted over the paper and internet been enough to give Johnny a motive to kidnap me? Could he have been that angry that I deceived him? I hope not. He was annoyed when he found out my plan for him in Queen’s Park, but he isn’t capable of this. He has a good heart, and I abused his good nature to try to get Five Parks off the ground. I tried to thrust him into Date #1 against his will, just so I had a warm body to play off and wouldn’t feel sad and dateless. Would I have written about him had he stayed in Queen’s Park that afternoon? I don’t know, I cannot say. But after he left me there alone, if I wanted Five Parks to survive its traumatic birth, there was only one thing I could do; write about Jordan.

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 45%

  Time Remaining: 1hr 50min

  I shouldn’t have dumped all that pressure on Johnny, and I should have known that Nick Hatcher and the Herald would come after me when I blew them off after Date #3 with David in Greenwich Park. I should have known there would be consequences.

  When I called Hatcher and told him I was quitting my column after the stitch-up job on David, I was certain I was doing the right thing. But sometimes doing what’s right only leads to trouble. Hatcher wanted my blood, and with this exposé from Phillips, he’s got it. I hadn’t heard of Phillips – his name meant nothing to me until a few minutes ago. His byline never appeared in the paper, he must have been a fairly low-level news hound on the Herald website, or he may even be an even lower lowly freelancer like me. Skewered by my own kind. Whoever he is, Hatcher must have set him to work as soon as I told him the column deal was off. He only had a few days’ turnaround to set Phillips up and get him on a date with me. I wanted to bury Five Parks completely after the Date #3 disaster, but Rob convinced me to drop the Herald column and keep going with the blog. If only I had stuck to my original guns, then Date #4 and Aaron and Phillips and my imprisonment would never have happened.

  I did the right thing by dumping the Herald, I know that, but I should have prepared myself for its inevitable retaliation. You don’t slash at the lion’s paw then crawl back into the jungle unharmed.

  Phillips’s piece lies that the Herald dropped me once they learned of my deceit, when it was I who broke it off with them, but the whys and wherefores don’t matter. What matters is that I broke the rules and Hatcher was never going to let me slink off unscathed.

  The Herald article also spins the reason behind my sacking from the City Voice, but not by much. I lied in print, that’s all that matters. I didn’t fabricate entire articles, but what I did was shameful enough to warrant dismissal. No doubt the exact details are already floating around the internet or, indeed, in follow-up stories on the Herald website I cannot see, so I may as well explain myself here. It’s the least I owe my readers, if they ever get to read this. I think they will. My captor must be enjoying this.

  Three years ago, I was given the role of news features editor at the City Voice. Don’t be dazzled by the title – it was just a fancy way of indicating that I wrote almost all of the news features. There was one in the paper every day, across two pages, up to 1,000 words long, supposed to be an in-depth analysis piece on the big stories that week. That could mean anything; news, politics, lifestyle, tech, science – I became a jack of all trades, interviewing as many experts as I could over the phone and via email each day; there wasn’t time to leave the office and talk to someone face-to-face. I took the job because it got me off the more menial tasks as a humble reporter on the news desk, it came with a small salary increase and I had a two-page platform in the paper every day with my face on it. I thought it might lead to bigger and better things elsewhere, perhaps at a newspaper the public paid to read. I also took the job on the condition that I could call on freelancers to supply me with one feature a week, giving me more time – although not a lot more – to concentrate on the four pieces I had to write myself.

  I slaved away in the role for two years, counting the working weeks that totalled fewer than sixty hours on the fingers of one hand, until last spring my editor called me into his office. He told me budget cutbacks meant no more help from freelancers; I would have to do everything alone without a salary increase. I could either accept or look for a new job. Perhaps I should have just walked out of the building. I may not have had a job then, but I might have a career now.

  After three months of toil, churning out five features a week and running myself into the ground, I started taking shortcuts. One evening in the office, the night editor was crying out for my feature a few hours before the print run, and when it arrived on his page layout, it was a few paragraphs short. He rightly demanded more copy. Time was tight, it was close to 8pm and I couldn’t get hold of any of the university professors I’d already interviewed for the piece, which was about autism, and none of their unused quotes were of any relevance, so I let my fingers do the talking; I put my own words in one of the professor’s mouths. It was only two paragraphs long, but I had made up quotes for someone, albeit fairly bland quotes. And they went in the paper. I had pushed myself off the top of a slippery slope.

  In the days that followed, I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again, even though I got away with it. But the next time I was stuck against a tight deadline with space to fill, I couldn’t resist. Soon I was slipping in fabricated quotes in at least two articles a week – I was addicted. I told myself I
did it because there simply wasn’t time to write five long features in five days, but I see now that I was deluding myself. The real reason I kept doing it was because I enjoyed it. The thrill of getting away with something when your head should be on the chopping block.

  After a while, making up quotes wasn’t enough – I created fictional spokespeople to go with real stories; tech gurus who didn’t exist and politics experts who only lived in the pages of my newspaper articles. I condoned my own actions by telling myself that half the stuff in the sport and showbiz pages every day was made up – why shouldn’t I get in on the act? I was no longer at the top end of the slope, but hurtling full-speed through its steepest middle-section. The crash at the bottom of the hill would come soon enough.

  In the end, the law caught up with me. Copyright law. I was writing a feature on photo copyright and how individuals can protect their pictures on social media (a thorny issue with newspapers and news websites, who will happily grab them without permission). The deadline was looming and I had quotes (real ones) lined up for two experts on picture copyright, but I needed one more to pad out my article. So I made someone up and sprinkled some magic fairy quotes on him and the piece was published the next day. I didn’t think about the article until a shaky hand slammed the paper in which it resided down on our kitchen table one evening a few weeks later. That was last November. The hand belonged to Michael. He wanted an explanation.

  I huffed and puffed and bluffed for a while, but when I was done, Michael told me he had a colleague at his firm who specialised in copyright and had brought the article to his attention. I pictured this conversation in my head from our kitchen table.

  ‘Hi Michael, isn’t this article written by your fiancée? Because there’s an expert she’s quoted in it. . . and I’ve never heard of him or come across him, because I’m fairly sure he doesn’t exist.’

  Michael was angry, as angry as I’ve ever seen him. I couldn’t keep lying, not to him. I told him what I’d done. He was disappointed in me, I could see it in his eyes, and he was disappointed in us. He thought we were strong, that nothing could break us. We were getting married the following summer. This hit him hard, personally and professionally.

  ‘Suze, how can I trust you when you’re doing something like this at your work? You could ruin your career. And if this got out, even to one person at my firm, it would ruin mine too. Do you know how many senior associates make partner when their other half has been revealed as a liar in public?’

  I could grant him his disappointment in me, but I felt cornered, like a defendant he had called to the stand, and I lashed out when he made it all about him and his career and his all-consuming chase for partnership. Even though I was the evil-doer, I resented the way he had attacked me with my misdeeds, flinging the article down in front of me like it was a murder weapon covered in my fingerprints. I was in the wrong.

  But when I’m forced into a corner, I tend to get my retaliation in first. At least I used to, before my incarceration in here taught me I’m not the strong person I thought I was. But back in Michael’s kitchen, back when it was our kitchen, I still had guts. And I had the nerve to try to make him the bad guy.

  I thought his ‘colleague in copyright’ story was bullshit, just as false as any of the quotes I concocted for my faked feature pieces. And I told him so.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it? It was her who put that article under your nose. As if you ever read a fucking thing I write. You turn your nose down at it because it’s just the free paper that gets forced upon you in the Tube. You like telling your friends that I’m a journalist because it means I’m not a lawyer but you hate answering the follow-up question when they ask you where I work. I’m not good enough for you, never have been.’

  I didn’t know where all this spite had come from, somewhere deep and dark inside me, and I am ashamed to recount this conversation now. But you, my readers, deserve the truth now. I have run out of lies.

  Michael was hurt, shocked, wouldn’t answer me. I should have realised I was out of line by the expression on his face, but I kept going. If anything, his stunned silence goaded me on.

  ‘It was her who did this and you don’t have the guts to tell me. Just tell me that she found the article. I know it was her. Unlike you, she’s probably read everything I’ve written since I started seeing you, waiting to pounce when I slipped up. Well, I’ve slipped, Michael, I’ve fallen off the tiny pedestal you made for me, even though it’s about half the height of the one you made for her.’

  Michael knew who I was talking about, he wasn’t stupid, but I decided to poison the air by unleashing her name into an already toxic atmosphere.

  ‘Jessica.’

  I had used up all my bile. All I could spit out was her name.

  ‘Jessica. Jessica. Jessica.’

  ‘Stop it, Suze! Stop it! I don’t want to see you like this.’

  He went for me across the kitchen table, his face a mix of anger and pain and confusion and pity, and then … he hugged me. His arms folded around me and told me everything was going to be all right. And I believed him. His slow strokes of my hair said I was forgiven. All the rage drained out of me and I cried into his broken collar bone, an old rugby injury I used to fondle when we were naked together in bed.

  ‘It’s going to be okay, Suze,’ he whispered into my hot forehead. ‘We’re going to be okay. We’re stronger than this. But you’re going to stop doing this. You’re going to stop publishing lies. If you don’t stop, we’re finished, do you understand?’

  I nodded into his chest, and I meant it. I did what he commanded, I stopped creating quotes and non-existent experts in my features. I promised I would be good, but it didn’t matter; the damage had been done.

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 37%

  Time Remaining: 1hr 29min

  I’d only been back at work a week and a half into the new year when my editor called me into his office. It was early, before most of the news desk and subs had arrived. The editor never came in early.

  The reason was on the large desk in his office used for twice daily conferences with the editorial staff to decide the content of the paper. Or reasons. The same article Michael had slammed down in front of me was open, but there were at least six others dating from the past five months or so, all examples of my fakery. Before I closed the office door I knew I was finished.

  My editor asked me to explain myself. When it became clear I didn’t have a leg to stand on, he told me had no choice but to fire me. He would let me go quietly there and then, without fanfare, and tell the rest of the editorial staff that I was offered voluntary redundancy because he was scrapping my section from the paper. He wouldn’t tell anyone why I’d really left. It didn’t matter what he said, I knew it would come out eventually, these things always do, just not in the pages of another newspaper and its corresponding website. He told me he couldn’t give me a severance package or a reference, and if I ever directed any future prospective employers back his way, he would be forced to tell them he couldn’t recommend me. It was for this reason that I had to go freelance – my career as a full-time staff journalist was over.

  I did what I was told. I slipped out of the office that morning, knowing I would never be back. No leaving drinks, no massive card with everyone’s well wishes splashed on different colour inks inside, no mock-up front page – the traditional farewell present for every exiting journalist. It was just as well. I didn’t want to face anyone. After I was sacked, I went back to our flat, crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep after many hours of trying.

  Michael was late home from work as usual. I’d not been in mine for much more than an hour, while he didn’t return until after eleven. The wait was excruciating. I needed to tell him to his face what had happened – I didn’t dare put it in a text or an email – and I had too long to collect all my thoughts. There were too many thoughts and none of them made sense. He came home to find me red-eyed in my pyjamas staring at nothing in particular on
the TV. I remember starting off by just saying ‘sorry’ over and over again until the word had no meaning. I insisted I’d stopped making stuff up in my articles ever since he confronted me about it two months before, but that didn’t matter. I was a disgraced former journalist now, whether my editor kept it to himself or not. Michael couldn’t handle it, thought if the news of my downfall ever got back to anyone in his firm – anyone at all – then his partnership would slide off the top of the horizon. If there’s any profession that revels in the spread of gossip more than journalism, it’s the legal one.

  I remember him slumping down on the couch beside me, hiding his head in his hands. I remember it because I knew when he came back up for air again, our life together would be over. He told me he didn’t want to see me again, and instead of accepting his decision, which was just, I reverted to my default arguing mode. I was flailing around, but that’s no excuse. I told him that Jessica must have gone to my editor with the evidence of my printed lies, that she was behind it all. Her words in that text, ‘Beware the ex. Bitch.’, scorched a trail through my brain; they were all I could contemplate. I kept asking Michael if Jessica had put my article under his nose, and he didn’t deny it. That was her revenge. And then two months after she sent it to Michael, she sent it to my editor. She had bided her time for more than two years, but the wait had been worth it; I’d lost my job, my career and my future husband, who she believed should have been hers.

  While Michael and I were screaming at each other, bringing everything crashing down, our faces streamed wet and our teeth clenched, I tossed one more grenade into the carnage. It just popped into my head and I spat it out at him.

  ‘You’re in this together, aren’t you?! She showed you the article and the two of you showed it to my boss to get me sacked.’

  There were a few seconds in which Michael’s jaw dropped, almost like a cartoon character’s, and his eyes turned to fire. And then my grenade went off.