He shouted back at me with so much venom that for the first time I was frightened to be in his presence. I tried to put my arms at my sides to stop them from shaking. He said the fact I could even think that he had something to do with my sacking, and then iterate that to him out loud, showed we had no future together.
He said it took him a lot to trust me after he first found out about my actions at work, but that he wanted to forgive me because he wanted to believe we still had something. But after accusing him of colluding with Jessica to get me sacked, I could no longer have his trust. And so we were done.
At the time, I felt ashamed of accusing him. The same pang drills through me now typing this in the dark, but it is dulled by a new thought; what if … what if I was right?
I feel guilty for thinking it and even more so for writing it, but what if Michael was so angry when he found out about my lies that he decided to punish me by taking the evidence to my employer? The cat was out of the bag. He knew he couldn’t trust me any more, and that my actions could hurt his career, so our engagement was over. If that was the case, why not burn me as I was plunging down into hell? Why not use the evidence to get me sacked and have a little revenge to ease the heartache?
The ultimate revenge, however, would be to drug me, kidnap me and lock me away. Please, no. Please, Michael, don’t be involved in this. They could have done it together. Michael and Jessica. The golden couple. They belonged together and I got in the way. All their workmates said so; it must be true. Who was I to stand in the way of this great legal love pairing? No, please, no.
Michael and Jessica knew I had lied in my articles. They were the only ones who knew, until my editor found out. One of them must have told him. Jessica, please be Jessica, not Michael. Not Michael, not Michael, not my Michael. But he wasn’t my Michael, not any more, and perhaps never at all. He was hers. He was always hers. Jessica’s Michael.
We miss Jessica. Where is Jessica. How’s Jessica doing. Jessica is much better than Suzanne. We hate Suzanne. We wish Suzanne would go away. Can’t Jessica and Michael make Suzanne go away? That would be so much better …
If Michael and Jessica were the only ones who knew about my lies in print, then they were the only ones who knew why I was sacked. The exposé in the Herald was their doing. They tipped off Phillips and he did the rest. Michael, how could you? No, I don’t want to believe it. But I can’t strip it from my mind. Michael and Jessica got me sacked and then planted the story in the Herald. And worst of all, the exposé provided the perfect cover for my kidnap.
‘You think she has made this whole thing up. I wonder what on Earth gave you that idea?’
My readers think I’m lying because of the piece in the Herald and no one will go looking for me – and no one will find me – until it’s too late.
One of the things that strikes me about Phillips’s piece after reading it over and over again is that there is something missing. Phillips unearthed every detail that could hurt me, apart from one. A big one. There is no mention of Michael. There is no mention of my engagement crumbling because I was sacked. If Phillips knew everything else he put in that article, he must have known about our break-up. I can only see one way it didn’t make it into his piece; Michael told him to omit it. Michael would give him the scoop, but only on the condition that his name was left out of the story. He must have known that some journalist would eventually link him to me and write about him, but by then he would be able to say he dumped me when he found out I had been falsifying my articles – and his legal career would survive intact. The only thing he lost was the £1,000 deposit he sunk into the venue for our wedding reception, at a restaurant along the Southbank. It must have felt like a small price to pay for revenge on me and reconciliation with Jessica.
It makes sense. Michael and Jessica. Michael and Jessica. The words just roll along, don’t they? Michael and Jessica belong together and I got in the way. But I was just a blip in the story of Michael and Jessica, and now I have been removed from the perfect picture. Three strikes. My sacking, the exposé and my kidnap. Three strikes and I am out.
It took me a week to move out of Michael’s flat. I slept in the spare room and he ensured he had early starts and late finishes, so our paths barely crossed in those remaining days I spent boxing up my stuff.
I didn’t know what to do. I thought about going back to Northern Ireland, but that would have meant leaving with my tail between my legs, and it would also have meant moving back in with my mum.
I turned to my only other family member instead. I wasn’t on Stephen’s couch for long. One night. That was all it took. We were never good at sharing a room when we were children, I should have known a one-bedroom flat would host a similar outcome.
I told Stephen that Michael and I had split up, but not the reason why. He didn’t need an excuse to storm off and find Michael – the bastard had turned his big sister into a sobbing mess, that was reason enough.
Stephen came back to his flat late that night, so even though I noticed him arrive from my squashed position on the couch, I didn’t get a proper look at his face until the next morning, before he set off for work. It wasn’t quite a black eye – not yet – but it would have been by the end of the day. I didn’t hang around his apartment to find out. He wouldn’t tell me who gave it to him, but I knew he’d gone to face Michael, defend my honour, all that bullshit. I was disappointed in Stephen, disappointed he’d shown me the evidence of Michael’s violent side, something I’d thought I glimpsed in his kitchen a few days previously when I accused him of colluding with Jessica. I was pissed off with Stephen, so decided to get out of his way.
It only took one morning to find somewhere new to live. I found the girls from Cambridge on Gumtree – they needed a body in their spare room as soon as possible, and I needed a space to think alone. I was in their flat in Kilburn, passing inspection, by early evening. They seemed alarmed when I asked if I could move in that same night, but were assuaged when I transferred the first month’s rent into one of their accounts. It was part of the money I’d been saving for the wedding, no point holding it for something that wasn’t going to happen.
I hadn’t even told Sylvie about the break-up at that point – although I’m sure she knew if the information trickled from Michael down to his friends – because I needed to fathom it for myself first. It happened with such speed and force that I was still stumbling around in the wreckage, incoherent. I just wanted to hide away from the world, and settled into a pattern of confining myself to my new room at the bottom of the stairs and interacting as little as possible with my disinterested housemates.
I was angry at myself more than Jessica. She had brought my activity to Michael’s attention, but in a way I couldn’t blame her for that; she’d warned me in her text to keep looking back over my shoulder. She was just a lion crunching the bones of an antelope as nature intended. I shouldn’t have left myself so exposed. I was the only one to blame for fabricating my stories in the paper. I thought about tracking Jessica down and confronting her – she hadn’t worked at the same firm as Michael since their own break-up – even fantasised about it sometimes, but in the end I didn’t have the guts. I crawled under a rock and admitted defeat.
I tried to reply to her threatening two-year-old text. I typed out just two words: ‘You win’. But they bounced back, the text didn’t go through, she must have changed her number. It was probably for the best. She didn’t need me to tell her she’d won. She had Michael back in her life as a constant reminder of that. When I last saw Michael, back in Belugi’s wine bar, the first time I’d seen him in the six months since we parted, I asked him when he last spoke to Jessica. He didn’t answer. He never had any answers when I asked him about Jessica.
She has had her revenge and now she can have Michael too, but what about Miles Phillips, what did he get out of all this?
I didn’t see it coming, that’s why this hurts so much. I knew there would be men applying for a date with me because they wanted
their own fifteen minutes of fame – and it felt like Eric, for instance, fitted into that category – but Phillips has caught me off guard.
As Aaron, he was so real, which is ridiculous given I now know he didn’t exist. The words under the byline of Miles Phillips feel as if they were written by a totally different person to the one I met in Regent’s Park, the one I brought back to my bedroom.
Could that blog post I published while he was in my bedroom made him do this? No, because he had already infiltrated his way into my life at that stage; the Herald sting was in motion. Aaron is dead, Miles Phillips has won, just as Jessica won. My captor may keep me in here, but he is not the true victor. Others have already picked off the spoils from my decaying carcass. Phillips has destroyed me and he didn’t need to lock me away in a dark place, he only needed a few hundred words on a website. I fell for someone who isn’t real.
*
I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me. Perhaps this is the comeuppance I deserve for all my lies. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but that’s not enough to shake off my shame. It hurts knowing that none of you believe a single word I write, not after Phillips’s piece in the Herald. The only person who can prove that I have been taken is my captor, and I am in his hands.
I don’t blame you for not believing me. I can accept it now without indignation. I am on my own and that is how it should be. I put myself in this position and I should have to get myself out.
I’m sorry I lied to you throughout Five Parks. I suppose I did it to make sure Five Parks survived, but that doesn’t excuse my behaviour. I wanted to find love and I wanted to be loved. It’s corny and trite, but I thought I had found the beginnings of something with Aaron.
You know everything now, and you knew it before I did thanks to Phillips. When I first woke up in here, I thought this black bubble was impenetrable, but now I know it allows secrets to seep in and well as float out, and that I have been behind in the game all along.
This post is part of my penance, and when you read it – and you will, for he is certain to publish it – I want you to know I am sorry.
37
Date: 01/01/16
Battery: 28%
Time Remaining: 1hr 00min
All of my secrets are out. Except one. There’s no point hiding it any more. Whoever has me knows everything about me. It’s all going to come out in the wash soon; I only need to look at Phillips’s Daily Herald work for proof. I must take ownership of my own truth before my captor does, even if it is confirm it to him alone and not my readers. For once I can be the one who pulls back the curtain to reveal my own stage show.
Like all tantalising secrets, more than one person knows about it. I’ve told Rob and Michael about it in some shape or form, but just the sketchy details. It’s time for the whole story. My final secret is this: there was a sixth date.
Calling it Date #6 would be inaccurate, however. It’s more appropriate to call it Date #1.5. It came after my imaginary walk in Queen’s Park with the even more imaginary Jordan, but before all that horsing around with Eric in Richmond, and I didn’t blog about it for one simple reason: I was afraid. I still am, but when you don’t think you have enough chips to get dealt another hand, it’s time to show the other players all your cards.
*
He had seen me on This Morning. That sentence is one of the more ludicrous I have written from inside my cell, but that is how I came to be in the ground floor bar of a Soho hotel on the Wednesday afternoon between Dates #1 and #2.
I’d been on the show that morning, in the middle of the whirlwind of publicity that was whipped up by the beginning of my Five Parks column in the Daily Herald. About half an hour after I said my goodbyes to Phillip and Holly and hopped off their couch, I checked my emails; there was a deluge. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Other newspapers, radio stations in Australia, reps for beauty products . . . they all fought for space in my inbox. Among the myriad offers, one stood out, not because of the subject – it was something bland like ‘Five Parks online dating interview chat’ – but because of the sender. He was famous.
I won’t reveal his identity here, but he is an extremely well-known TV presenter, perhaps not as big league as my old crush Phillip Schofield, but still a household name. He has made a recent high-profile departure from a particular terrestrial channel, which perhaps explained why he was surfing through stations that Wednesday morning. It seems TV presenters like watching other TV presenters, if his interest in This Morning was anything to go by, and he liked what he saw. He was watching me.
His email said he had caught me on TV and was very impressed. He used the word ‘eloquent’, not a trait I would ever apply to myself, and said he was putting together a programme with his own production company about modern dating; he thought I would make a perfect talking head. His email address didn’t match his famous name, so I smelled a rat. I scoffed back a short reply, thanking the sender for their creative attempt to con me, but that I didn’t agree to meetings with people who impersonated celebrities.
Within a few minutes he had emailed back, saying he anticipated my suspicion and that he had to change his address regularly to keep stalkers at bay. He also sent me his Twitter handle and his password to prove he was who he said he was. I logged out of my own Twitter app on my phone and entered his log-in details. He wasn’t bluffing. Within a few seconds, I was in control of the social media account of one of the country’s most famous faces, with 1.56 million followers and counting. I could have done whatever I wanted with his Twitter account; he trusted me. I logged out, emailed him back and apologised for doubting his identity. He replied that he wouldn’t have expected anything less … and that he would change his password. Then he got down to business.
He phoned to reiterate that he was making a documentary about dating which was almost completed, and that he thought an interview with me would help round off the programme and bring it up to date. He was in talks with all the major terrestrial channels – apart from the one he had just left – and even a few streaming services for the rights. He was hopeful the show would be broadcast within the next few months. I’d always enjoyed his presenting style – funny but just the right side of smug – and I was flattered by his interest in Five Parks. After I asked when he wanted to interview me, he replied: ‘No time like the present. What are you doing this afternoon?’
*
I had been sipping a tap water in the bar of a Soho hotel for twenty minutes. A frustrated waitress approached my table to ask for the third and likely final time if I was going to purchase a proper drink when I noticed a change in her face. She had been thundering towards me with the impatient look of a young woman about to issue an ultimatum, but as she drew near, her eyes grew bigger and her clasped mouth transformed into a teeth-baring dazzle. But she wasn’t smiling for me.
‘Hello, sir, how can I help you?’
A familiar voice boomed from behind my head, friendly but firm.
‘You can start by bringing us over two gin and tonics.’
The waitress retreated and a hand rested on my shoulder, a hand that had shared a grip with some of the most famous people on the planet.
‘Suzanne, delighted to see you. I’m sorry to keep you waiting.’
It was him. I hadn’t been pranked. He was the real deal. Dressed in smart brown shoes, dark blue jeans, bright yellow shirt and cream jacket, he looked like he had stepped out of the TV. His face had more lines around the eyes and mouth than it did on television, and there were one or two streaks of grey amid his thick brown hair, but they only made him more striking. In the decade above me, but still in good nick. A younger version of Phillip Schofield.
‘I wasn’t sure you were real,’ I said.
‘No one on TV ever is,’ he replied. ‘But then you must know that after your little chat with Phillip and Holly this morning. . . on. . .This Morning.’
I didn’t even bat him down for his lamest of opening jokes. I just let him keep talking.
‘How
is Phil, anyway? Was he asking for me? They offered me his job once, you know, I bet he didn’t tell you that. I said no, though. Holly is lovely, a joy to work with, great fun, but not even she is worth those early starts. This Morning is only the name of the show for the viewers. . . for the presenters, it’s called This Midnight. I’d rather be out in a bar at that time than in a chauffeur-driven car on my way to work.’
They say TV presenters these days talk too much, never letting the interviewee get a word in. He was living up to that billing.
‘Don’t worry, when it comes to the interview I’ll shut my mouth and let you do all the talking. Since my, ahem, departure from a certain channel, which I won’t tell you about because you’re a journalist, I have been busy selling the wares of my own production company, so it’s been talk talk talk for me.’
After our gin and tonics arrived, he settled down somewhat, asked me to tell him about me (‘But not too much – save the good stuff for the interview!’) and raved about Five Parks.
‘It’s a great idea, a devious new twist on online dating that is kind of old school, which only makes it that much more interesting – I love it!’
Halfway down our gins, he took a call from someone named Tony, who he barked orders at through his mobile about camera set-ups and lighting.
‘Remember to tell the cameraman to keep on my right side, Tony,’ he said into the phone while winking at me. Wink or no wink, I didn’t think he was joking.
Tony and the rest of the production crew were on their way to the hotel, where they would set up in a pre-booked suite for the interview.
‘We’ll probably have about an hour’s chat, which we’ll edit down to about five minutes for the doc,’ he told me. ‘But don’t worry, your five minutes will be at the end of the programme, so will have the most impact. I genuinely wasn’t sure how to round off the doc until I flicked on the TV earlier. You’re a life-saver, Suzanne.’
Five Parks Page 22
