Five Parks Read online

  Five Parks

  Ross McGuinness

  © Ross McGuinness

  Ross McGuinness has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

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  For Winnie, Winnie, Winnie and Wendy.

  1

  I am in a bad way. My eyes are open but baked in blackness; I cannot see. My head rattles. My left cheekbone burns. My right elbow throbs. I don’t know where I am.

  A growl rips upwards from my stomach and I swallow hard to stem the noise and the flow of inner bile; something hideous is building in me, slimy and menacing. I don’t want to throw up here, wherever here is. I gulp down and breathe. I’ve always been good at keeping things hidden, locked away inside.

  The darkness is overwhelming and I think this must be what it is like to be born, into confusion and equipped with eyes not yet ready to be opened.

  I am horizontal, the back of my head caught in something cold and metallic that wants to worm its way into my skull. Rust clogs my nostrils, telling me a burnt copper spring pricks at my neck. I am on a bed. My brain sends a long slow message down to my feet, which make a tentative splash up and down on a springy surface. Copper grows down there too, plucking at my calves, pinching me awake into a nightmare. A piece of cloth tickles my chin. A scarf, perhaps, but I don’t wear a scarf. Why would I wear a scarf in summer?

  My breathing quickens and the noisy panting that comes out of me sounds like it belongs to someone or something else.

  I shift slightly to the right, the clumsy beginnings of an effort to sit up. The decaying mattress beneath me is too thin to repel the copper from the bed frame further below – I smell a mangled shape once made out of metal, now charred with ancient rust.

  I need to move. I peel my back off the mattress, sit up and try to shuffle my weight elsewhere.

  I can’t. There is the sound of a quick rattle, like a snake poising itself to strike, and then comes the venom, where I least expect it, shooting into my left wrist. My whole body writhes at what feels like a charge of electricity and I bite hard into the inside of my damaged cheek. This fresh pain disguises the first for no more than a second.

  ‘Stay still, Suzanne, stay still stay still stay still …’

  I say it out loud, searching for comforting words in the blackness. I arch my back up fully and endure another sharp burst in my left hand, which I then cup with my right. Metal grazes my free hand, which I use to follow the icy steel trail that begins at my left wrist and slithers all the way back to the corner of the bed frame. The shape and feel of the object chaining my left side is unmistakable; I am welded to the bed by a set of handcuffs.

  Panic engulfs me like someone’s doused my body in petrol and lit a match. The realisation that I am shackled turns me wild. I am a prisoner. Someone has chained me here, in the dark.

  I don’t want to be here I don’t belong here I don’t want to die here.

  Someone must come for me. I am sort of famous now, there will be people looking for me. People waiting for what comes next, people who need me to keep going. I haven’t finished what I started.

  How could I have been so stupid? I should have known better. I should have paid attention to the warnings. There were plenty of them: emails, texts, tweets. All the weirdos crawled out of the woodwork once things got going. I ignored them. Not me, I thought, they won’t get me. But here I am. In the dark, drowning.

  I finally hear myself scream. I need it. Tears are coming. I resist the urge to throw up and make myself concentrate. I need my feet on hard ground. I loosen the slack of the chain between the handcuffs, spin my body around and my toes find the floor. My wrist burns again under this new strain on the cuff, stuck in a tug-of-war between the frame on one side of the bed and the tips of my flat shoes on the other.

  Bent over the bed like an old hag, strands of hair tickle my eyelids and I switch to auto-pilot for a second, reaching into the back pocket of my jeans for a hair band. Something pricks my shaky fingers and I pull my hand out, partly in pain and partly to wrestle the flopping hair from my eyes, as if somehow that might help me see.

  I try to calm myself with deep breaths but the gasps don’t go far: my prison cell is small. An oppressive heat hangs in the dead air.

  There is something else, faint at first but soon sickly sweet, an alien odour in this foul place, one that belongs in a field teeming with colour and life, filled with the possibilities that come with lust and maybe love. It reeks of otherworldliness here, a scent beyond comprehension.

  My heart kickstarts again and I lose control of my breathing, hyperventilating away in the void.

  Someone wanted me and someone took me. But someone else will come for me. Because of what I am doing, I will be missed. I haven’t finished yet.

  I scrape around the head of the bed until I find a wall, wishing that my left hand might somehow break free. I am still unsure of my footing, so I back myself into the wall, feeling its odd warmth through my jeans, tightly clasped around my waist. It doesn’t feel like they have been removed and there is no discomfort down there, no urge to pee.

  This new consolation that I haven’t been raped stems my tears and calms my breathing down to intermittent sighs.

  And then one of them bounces back at me from the other side of the room. An echo? I clasp my right hand over my mouth and blink, forgetting the fruitlessness of the effort in this pitch black.

  The room is silent and unmoving. Until two things: the sigh returns, long and deliberate, made to be heard, closely followed by the muffled drag of a chair leg on the thinnest of carpets. My one free hand falls and my mouth opens to let out a scream but only swallows up more darkness.

  There is someone in here with me.

  2

  The room turns to ice. My wrist twists in its handcuff as I hope for a miracle, but my only achievement is to rattle the metal chain against the wall. I freeze in an attempt to camouflage myself, but it is too late: I have signalled my exact location.

  The sounds were emitted from somewhere to my left, but not far. The room becomes smaller with every second as it settles back into silence.

  I make my move. There is only one I can make: back the way I came. I spin round from the top of the bed to its side, my chained arm a big hand on a clock that can only go backwards. Turning back time. I want to go back a month and wipe everything clean.

  Something shuffles then dies behind me as I lean over the side of th
e bed, my knees the only guide to my position, scoring themselves on the jagged bed frame. Leaning over the bed, I am exposed, ready to be eaten.

  The lull is like a twisting knife in the side, as I wait for whatever it is to leap through the dark and devour me. It doesn’t matter that I have silenced the handcuff chain – my mouth makes more noise than any metal. Breathing too fast. I can’t keep quiet even if I try, so I go the opposite way.

  ‘Who’s there? What do you want? Why are you doing this?’

  Silence was the only weapon I had, and I have tossed it away. The words disappear into the dark as if they never existed. A tear falls on the bottom of my left arm, an almost refreshing burn. I start to count my breaths in a bid to slow them down. I get as far as six.

  The mattress tastes like it smells. My mouth is wide open when I hit it, in the middle of a deep breath that wants to become a scream. I hit it hard. When the weight consumes me, I try to shriek, but I am shoved with such force and speed that the mattress gags me before I can let it out. My left arm stretches with the handcuff chain until I fear it might pop from its socket, while my right is crumpled at the elbow into the bed by something bony and bracing. A knee. Another knee drives into the small of my back, melding me with the mattress. A firm hand pushes my head down and down and down.

  A thought thunders through me: this is it. I am going to die. Or worse. I don’t want to contemplate what’s worse. But there is something else that is more frightening than the fear; the hope. Whatever is about to happen, this might be my best chance to escape. My only chance. Close contact. He might not risk getting this close to me again.

  I wriggle my right arm, expecting nothing, but it slips out from under his knee and I flail my fist backwards, hoping to connect with something hard. I don’t even come close.

  Instead, my wrist is caught in an unstoppable grip and my arm twists into shapes it shouldn’t understand. I grimace into the mattress, accept the pain and bite back. My heels kick out to find my knees but hit nothing. He is too far along my body now, sitting on the bottom of my back, stretching my left arm and pinning my right between my hip and his thigh. My head jerks up from the mattress, and not of its own accord, then springs back the way it came until my captor is satisfied my breathing has slowed to a level that means my body is controllable.

  ‘Don’t … do … this …’ I manage, before I’m slammed back into the mattress. Then up again.

  ‘Help me!’ Not to him. To anyone else who might be within earshot. Down I go again.

  I stay there longer this time, and when the hand is released from the back of my head, I am too afraid to move. There is a shared pause, almost like this dark chaos has tuned us into the same frequency, until something warm catches my ear. He strokes me there with gloved fingers. I am shaking, but his manner is almost playful, like an established lover tickling in the right places. The thought repulses me and I wish I could bring back the bile that had risen in my stomach a few minutes ago.

  With my head free, I am able to hold my nose a centimetre or two off the mattress, and that sweet smell hits me again, this time in all its glory, not subdued by the rankness of the room.

  I’ve been up close to that smell before. Even with the stale mattress an inch away from my nostrils, I recognise its succulence. It takes me to an entirely different place, somewhere alive with sunshine and laughter and promise.

  As if attuned to my daydream, my new master’s hand returns and pushes me back where I belong.

  He has a strength that is as oppressive as the room itself. The weight on my back has stifled me, but there is a lightness to it that makes him all the more terrifying. If he were big and slow I might have a chance, but there is a swiftness and poise to every one of his movements that is alarming. Everything he does is intentional, every small act designed to control.

  I have imagined myself in dangerous situations – but not this. And I have always pictured my own defiance. Yet here I am, meek as a kitten, as this unknown thing that isn’t even a shape bears down on me, ready to bend me to his will. He owns me now.

  My right arm has lapsed into numbness and my head is light enough to fly off my shoulders. I’m not all there. Sensing my surrender, he places his hand under my stomach with a gentle power and pushes me across the bed, towards the wall, until I am up on my knees. The bed frame creaks in protest as he folds his body into mine and presses something hard and familiar and unwanted against the back of my jeans. This is where I cannot cave, I cannot give up. This is the moment that changes the rest of your life. This is what he wants.

  ‘Please … please,’ I say into the wall, spit dripping through my lips and down my chin. ‘Don’t do this …You don’t have to do this.’

  The disappointment drips off me. This is not what I thought I would become in this situation, I thought I would fight. I must fight.

  He hooks the scarf over my chin until it scratches my eyes and there is a tightening at the back of my head. It’s not a scarf. It’s a blindfold. My eyes spew hot tears into the soft fabric.

  His arms come round my belly and he leans down on me. Even though I am blindfolded, I shut my eyes tight, like I did when I was a child pretending to go to sleep.

  ‘Don’t … don’t do this to me,’ I say again, just so I can hear myself offer up some kind of protest.

  His upper body responds, pulling back from me, but his hands aren’t listening, sliding along the back of my jeans, fumbling their way into both pockets.

  It’s not over yet, I tell myself. There will be a moment very, very soon when he will pull down my jeans and another moment when he will remove whatever he needs to remove. That will be my moment to act. My ultimate moment of weakness will also be his. This is it. This might be my only chance. Close contact.

  But he ruins my chance. The mattress rises beneath me as it loses half its load and I breathe relief, cry more tears. He gives me a tiny taste of what might have been, smacking my backside hard. A rattle of the chain between the handcuffs follows. He smacks me again and shakes the chain.

  When his sweet scent flitters further away into the gloom, I take the chance to turn myself over, pull my knees up to my chin and retreat into the corner of the bed, my left arm hanging useless as the handcuff sends it in the wrong direction. The blindfold remains fastened, but if he comes at me again, I will kick him, hopefully in the face, hopefully hard enough to take his head off.

  Like a bull playing with a wounded matador, he glides to the other side of the room. I know because I can hear him. The leg of the chair scuffles along the floor as it did to signal his presence, and once more it is done with purpose. He is in control. He wants me to know where he is.

  He bounces the chair along the floor then flings it into a corner of the room. The unbearable crescendo makes me beg for the return of the silence I thought I hated.

  I cower into my own knees, expecting the chair to fly through the black air and cut off my head, but there is no extra pain to follow the loud crash.

  Seconds and maybe even minutes slide. When my breathing slows, the silence returns to wash over me, but this time it doesn’t come bathed in black. There is, finally, some light in the room.

  It’s fuzzy and faraway, but only because I am still wearing the blindfold. I pull the cloth over my head and fling it off the bed. I don’t want to close my eyes any more. I want to see everything now, face everything head on, no matter how dark.

  Without the blindfold, the light is still distant, but its blurriness dispels then transforms into a thin smile of bright white.

  It is unnatural, intrusive; the kind of light that brings no comfort, only questions. The biggest one – is he still here? I wait for my eyes to adjust to the shiny sliver, using its man-made reflections to scan the rest of the room, but the light is too slight to offer me a clear path out of darkness. There are enough unseen corners for hidden monsters.

  I put my nose up and search for that smell; his scent. There is still a trail of its sweetness in this dead air, but no long
er overwhelming. He has gone. How?

  Something clutches in my stomach, fear and relief and hope. A new thought brings me alive: if he can find a way out, so can I.

  3

  How did I get here? Half-memories leap at me through the dark, fragments from what already feels like a faraway afternoon: something falling from height and smashing into a million pieces … reeds of grass swallowing my ankles … tumbling along a flight of steps … waiting on a wooden bench …the rumble of a train that will not stop … a rolling tennis ball. And at the end of it all, a dark figure standing over me, its features blocked out by an unholy sun.

  These images are like the jumbled-up components of a picture round in a TV game show. When put together, they don’t form a logical equation.

  He has done something to me to get me here. I’m woozy, still not in control of the inside of my head. I have been slipped a roofie before, but this is different, darker, impossible to shake off because of my surroundings.

  I fidget on the bed and a sharp point jabs my skin through the back of my jeans, just like it pricked my finger earlier when I reached inside. I delve my free hand into my back pocket to find the culprit, fumbling over what feels like a plastic badge with a broken catch – the spiky pin won’t clip. But now I find something else in there.

  I know what it is as soon as I touch it. Flat and tiny, so small I worry it might vanish if I don’t get my fingers around it fully on the first try.

  The double smack he gave me and the rattling of the handcuff chain wasn’t what it appeared – he was sending me a message. And he put it in my back pocket.

  I take the key from my pocket and hold it up along my eyeline into the only piece of light in the room, the thin rectangle that seems so far away. Back here on the bed, the brightness isn’t strong enough to show me, but I trust my sense of touch. It’s a small mortice key, with a metal circle at the bottom and a single steel edge at the top. The key to the handcuffs? I hope so. Just don’t drop it. If I drop it, I’m dead.