Five Parks Read online

  If it does fit, that means he wants me up and about. He wants to give me freedom within my prison.

  The helplessness I felt just seconds or minutes ago, when he pinned me down and had me at his mercy, turning me into something I’ve never been – a victim – riles me. I do not want to be that person again. Next time I will be someone else, I will kick and scream and scratch and pierce and cut and I will tear his eyes out. It is this that makes up my mind … if I have to defend myself again, I want both hands to be potential weapons.

  I jab the key at the rim of my handcuff and pray for an opening. It’s easier than I expected, the first thing in this place that has been easy, and one clumsy poke pops the cuff open.

  I give my liberated wrist a pointless shake and shove the key back in my pocket. The broken badge pin stings me again. Good. It’s a painful reminder that this is not a dream. This is really happening. I have to get out. I don’t want to die in here.

  I swivel my legs round and stand up, watching the white rectangle shift position in unison. My eyes work, I am not blind. And I do something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years: I bless myself.

  I take my first tentative unhindered steps since my awakening, edging closer to the new noise in the room, a constant whirr only technology can bring. I know what the light is. A trickle of relief flows through me that I still have my wits and they are still working.

  After a few more paces, I reach my hand inside the light and make the brightness brighter. I open Pandora’s Box. The green blue haze that blooms from the laptop as I push the lid back is as beautiful to me as any ocean.

  My sight adjusts and an icon glares up at me from the screen, almost as if it is in 3D. It is one of those too-perfect screen-savers, every colour shimmering like a photographer’s fantasy, and Tower Bridge beams up at me, the lurid lights of London behind it, between a magical blue sky and the greenest of waters. The Thames doesn’t look like this in its wildest dreams.

  The laptop is on a small wooden table, one that barely comes up to my knees. I spot the matching chair in the bottom left corner of the room where it clattered into the wall. The laptop’s full glare is a decent but not all-encompassing guide to my surroundings. The room is even smaller than it was in my imagination, square and somewhere between ten and fifteen feet across. There is no reflection off the walls, which are dark green or black. The carpet is a sick brown colour that might have been orange in a previous life. The bed frame is rusty and disgusting, the once blue single mattress in barely better shape. In the opposite corner, there are two objects on the floor. One is a large bottle of what I hope is water. The other is a bucket. There is no door. There are no windows. There is no obvious way out.

  I fumble my way into the corner where he threw the chair but all I find is wall. I imagined it as concrete, but it’s as coarse as the carpet. I trace the four sides of the room, crawling under the bed, searching for a knob or a handle or a panel or anything that leads to an exit. Nothing. The ceiling is black and flat and low, like it might slowly cave in on me at any second. But there must be something in one of these corners. I grab hold of the laptop with the intention of shining it into those dark places, but when I try to lift it, I discover its bottom half is trapped in a metal frame that is in turn drilled into the table, the kind I used to see in internet cafés to prevent customers walking home with a new computer. I try to lift the table and the laptop with it, but it won’t budge either; the light won’t go under there, but the table’s legs appear to sink into the floor itself. The table is part of the room, as if the walls and the floor conspired together to consume it.

  He was lighting the way for me. He wanted me to find the laptop. Its glow exhilarated me, but there is something about its suspicious power that sends a tingle through me. I don’t trust it. The artificial shine is intoxicating, but now that I have released it, I feel strangely defeated.

  I lean over it, bend my knees to bring my arms down to the small table and gaze into the light. It’s not a new laptop – there is a bulkiness to it that dates it by five or six years – but surely it’s new enough to have the internet. I scan the screen. It’s running Windows of some capacity, but an older version. There is no web icon on the desktop. I rub my index finger over the mousepad and hover on the familiar Windows start logo in the bottom left corner of the screen. A row of options springs up, and right at the top, Internet Explorer. I know what’s going to happen before I click on it.

  ‘Your computer is not connected to the internet. Please try again later.’

  I click the Explorer icon for luck a few more times before I tire of the recurring warning. Along the toolbar, the Wi-Fi logo of five tiny escalating rectangles sits impassive, all of its bars empty. I cannot contact the outside world, not with this machine, not in its present state. That would have been too easy for me, no fun for him.

  Beside the Wi-Fi bars, the battery icon looks about a quarter full. I hover the cursor over it. It reads: ‘0hr 52 min (21%) remaining.’

  The light of the laptop has only exacerbated my fuzzy state, making me wince. He has given me this device, but without wi-fi and without ample time – what does he want?

  He could be anyone. Someone who came close to me or someone who watched me from afar, someone whose advances were blocked by the type of a key stroke or the swipe of smartphone. Whatever I did to him and however I did it, he is having his revenge. He wanted me in here. He wanted me out of the handcuffs. And he wanted me to open the laptop.

  I don’t try to kid myself that I am making progress. I am only overcoming the obstacles he wants me to navigate, like an obedient dog jumping through fences in the hope of a treat. Maybe his treat for me is my freedom. Until I find out, he is in charge of the puzzle. And he wanted me to open the laptop. Why?

  My knees weaken at my ungainly sloped position over the table, a giant in a land where she doesn’t belong. I go to my left, pick up the half metal/half plastic chair from the corner in one hand. It is as light as a feather, as weightless as my head. I put down the chair and ease myself into it, snarling a bit when my knees crack off the underside of the table.

  I stretch my legs under there, fold my arms and stare into the glare of Tower Bridge. He wanted me at the laptop … he wanted me out of the handcuffs for a reason … he couldn’t risk uncuffing me when he was in the room, because then I would have had a chance to escape. Then he would have been fair game, he wouldn’t have been in control. So he disappeared, vanished into thin air, left me alone, but left me with the tools to make it to the next level, and here I am at the next level, with no clue what to do, just waiting on him to give the word …

  The Word. Word. The Microsoft Word icon stares up at me, a lonely blue-and-white buoy floating on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, but it is unopened. Nothing to see there. Nothing to see unless you look. Why is it the only application pinned to the toolbar? What is it hiding? I right click on the Word icon, expecting nothing, but what I see next changes everything. There is only one title listed as a recent document. My stomach churns as I read it, and all that beaten-down bile stirs in my gut again in a wretched desire to find a new home outside my body. I fit as many knuckles into my mouth as I can and reread the title. I click on it and the document opens, blowing up Tower Bridge in a blaze of bright white. The Word document’s title, leering at me from the highest centre point of the screen, leaves me in no doubt as to why I have been trapped in here. It has two words, spliced together, two words that have burned through my brain the past few months. The document is called ‘FiveParks’.

  There are another two words, only these two are separated, tucked away at the start of the newly opened document below, in the top left-hand corner, above a vast ocean of white space that is waiting to be filled.

  ‘Keep writing.’

  4

  Date: 01/01/16

  Battery: 17%

  Time remaining: 0hr 45min

  I obey. And that is what I have been doing since I woke. Obeying. Writing. Filli
ng the blank space beneath those two words he gave me. Writing got me into this, I can only hope it might also get me out. I have recorded everything that has happened in this room up to now. I have obeyed his written command, jumped through another hoop.

  This is what he wants, but isn’t it what I want too? I started all this for selfish reasons because I wanted to find someone, to find something that could be mine and mine alone. But I didn’t realise that in sharing it with the world, it was no longer mine. And that is when the trouble started. That is what brought me here.

  ‘Keep writing.’

  He controls my story now, but at least I have a story to tell. In here, trapped inside these four walls in the dark, writing is all I have.

  I push the ‘up’ arrow key and hold it down, my eyes flickering over the half-blur of black and white as I scroll back to the top of the document. I deleted his command, ‘Keep writing’, before I obeyed it. The words are seared into the front of my head anyway. My dizzy head is clearing a little, quelled by the calm thump of constant key-tapping. I try to glide over the keys as quietly as I can. I want to be alert to whatever noise he makes when he returns. He will come in again. I feel it’s as certain as the black in this room.

  I look at my first words at the top of the document, which replaced his opening instruction.

  ‘I am in a bad way.’

  And then I scroll straight back to where I am now; further down the page, further into this nightmare, ignoring what I’ve written since I’ve been in here. If I don’t read it, maybe it won’t become real.

  I keep writing because it’s all I have in here. I don’t know how he got out. I could curl up in a ball on the bed and die but I don’t want that – and neither does he, not yet. Writing will help me focus on my situation, maybe even figure it out, but it will also let me leave this room and fly from this torture, if only for a few precious stolen seconds inside my own mind. These will be my words and hopes and fears and memories, and if I am the only person to see them on this laptop, that is a small comfort worth clutching.

  The clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the laptop screen has been deliberately skewed back to its default setting. It read a few minutes past midnight on January 1st when I sat down, an impossibility. I don’t remember exactly how I got here, but the days and hours leading up to my blackout were filled with soft swirly breezes and hayfever sneezes. It has been a typical London summer so far, sticky for someone who spent so many mild samples of the same season growing up in Northern Ireland.

  And if it really was the first hour of January 1st of this year, I would be back in Michael’s arms, back in his flat, letting him nuzzle my neck and hypnotise me with his big blue eyes.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ he had whispered then, finally ignoring all his lawyer friends who filled his flat – our flat. ‘It’s going to be a good one, Suzanne.’

  It was meant to be our year.

  That was the last time he had smiled into me, or at least in my head it’s the last time. There might have been other examples of upturned lips in my direction in the week or two after that, but I’ve erased them. New Year’s Eve, that was just before the beginning of the end. And the end came fast.

  I take off my rose-tinted spectacles for a second – the spell cast by his eyes that night was soon broken by a fog of Prosecco and resentment. His lawyer friends had never warmed to me, maybe because I was the opposite of someone else, and by that point I had given up trying to change their minds. She wasn’t there, of course, Michael wasn’t naïve enough to ever let us cross paths, but her spectre hung in the air every time he forced me into interaction with his work colleagues. They would whisper her name, pretending I couldn’t hear them but not pretending too hard, like it gave them a surge of power. Jessica. Jessica did this and Jessica said that and I haven’t seen Jessica in ages and Jessica is so great and I miss Jessica.

  Michael did his own pretending, always ignoring her name when it was flung around a room, moving the conversation elsewhere or just offering a fake smile then replacing it with a wine glass on his lips. I felt sorry for him. I raised it with him a few times – raised her with him a few times, like she was some spirit to be called from the dead rather than a former co-worker and girlfriend – but he would only say it ended badly, telling me not to get worked up by his friends’ hailing her as some kind of goddess – he said Jessica was far removed from their illusion.

  There had been other girlfriends, of course, but Michael didn’t mind talking about them. Michelle, the one before Jessica, had been a personal trainer, which should have made me more jealous but didn’t, and Michael used to joke that he still followed her tips when he went to the gym. He could talk about Michelle because she hadn’t meant that much to him, but with Jessica, he stayed silent.

  At the beginning, I tried to be the perfect girlfriend for Michael’s friends, but their topics of conversation made me gravitate to the other side of any room; when they weren’t cleaning Jessica’s vacated pedestal, they discussed acquisitions and mergers and commodities and witness statements and magic circles. That’s the one thing I don’t miss about Michael – all the excruciating law chat.

  The person on the other side of the room was always Sylvie. Sylvie didn’t fit into Michael’s own magic circle; in fact, I often wondered how she infiltrated it at all. Sylvie wasn’t a lawyer, which made her instantly special. She was like me, an interloper. In another life, we would have been enemies, me the deskbound journalist and her the outgoing PR girl, but when she brought me into Michael’s world, I clung on to her for dear life. She introduced Michael and I, appropriately enough, in a setting that echoed where she met each of us individually, him first, me second: a trendy Soho bar. The company she worked for ran client events for Michael’s firm and one night six years ago, a night in a million, when he had managed to extrapolate himself from work and sneak to the bar, they hit it off, bonding over a distaste for PR and lawspeak and an appreciation of the musical excellence of Belinda Carlisle.

  Sylvie became his cool friend who did cool friends’ things instead of staying stuck in the office all night; she was embedded in the city lights below rather than gazing down at them from a skyscraper window.

  I met Sylvie a few years later. She helped me track down a few contacts for a feature I was writing for the newspaper where I worked, and when her clients were happy with what I’d written (some forgettable puff piece about the best brunches in London), she took me out for a thank-you drink. One thank-you drink turned into six or seven or eight thank-you drinks, until the next thing I knew Sylvie was introducing me to the complete works of her beloved Belinda in the bowels of a decrepit East London karaoke bar. She kept insisting the machine in our private booth was stuck on Belinda Carlisle’s Greatest Hits, and like a goldfish losing its memory every eight seconds, I kept asking her why we couldn’t change the record. It was bliss. After a while I gave up duetting with her, sloped back into a pile of scratchy faded cushions and watched as she stood on the sofa and went solo. She was so beautiful. The awful lighting in the booth made it look like she was on fire.

  And that was it. She introduced me to Michael a year or so later in another Soho bar, at some drinks for his firm that I crashed. I’m glad I crashed. I didn’t fall in love with him as soon as I laid eyes on him or anything – that came later – but there was something about him that fitted. It was easy. I never really thanked Sylvie properly for setting us up. At the end of the night, while she was easing sozzled solicitors into cabs, he slipped me his business card. I gave him a week of waiting, then I emailed him. It all tumbled on down the slope from there, just as quickly as it would eventually end.

  In those final few months, Sylvie remained my protector from Michael’s sneering circle, who feared I was about to take him away from them for ever. And in the early hours of this year, after too much Prosecco, things turned nasty. One of Michael’s work friends mentioned Jessica once too often, right in my earshot, and Sylvie stepped in with a verbal takedown. I shoul
d have been embarrassed that I needed someone to defend my honour, but if anything it made me feel more powerful. Sylvie was always there for me, until I ruined everything.

  *

  This written ramble has done me good, even if it picks at old ground that might be better left undisturbed, and has almost blocked out my situation, as if it were possible to block out blackness. The reminiscence is broken by an interrupting warning message. A yellow exclamation leaps from the screen and rebukes me.

  ‘Your battery is less than 5%. Please plug in to a power source to continue working.’

  Continue working. That’s what this is now, a job. I haven’t had one for six months, so why not take on some work?

  I run my hands along the sides of the laptop. The metal casing trapping it to the table blocks its portals. If there is a cable underneath the casing, it doesn’t lead into a socket that is switched on. It looks like he didn’t want me to write for long.

  I’ve done enough writing. I need to think. There must be a way out of here, even if I didn’t find it in an initial sweep. And there has to be a reason why I am here. If I figure out what that is, I can identify my captor.

  I stare into the bright white Word document, FiveParks, and save my progress to the desktop. I lean back on the chair and fold my arms, then remember there is something else I want to do before I am plunged back into darkness.

  I reach into the back left pocket of my jeans, tickle past the handcuffs key and find round plastic. I want to know what this thing is while I still can.

  As expected, it is a badge, and the prickly pin is just as impossible to close in the light as it was in the dark; it’s broken. I turn it over and a familiar face grins back up at me, with his thumb pointed upwards, as if he knows what I am going through and wants to give me some much-needed encouragement. His bright yellow hat is a dead giveaway. And his overalls. It is Bob the Builder. To his left, trapped in a white speech bubble that covers a good third of his attire, is a message, one that probably meant a lot to me twenty-seven years ago but confuses me now. Like his hat, Bob’s blurb is bright and yellow and celebratory.