Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  First I looked in his e-mail in-box. For what, I wasn’t sure. I scrolled through, attempting to look nonchalant yet investigative.

  “I’m going for my own lunch now,” said Hettie. “Somewhat more modest than my boss’s. Are you happy being left here in the corner?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  The proportion of work to play e-mails seemed to be about one to five. A few desultory ones sent out to chase freelancers’ copy, but most were the usual selection of sick round robins, the fixing of pub meetings and scraps of gossip. I started reading all the ones from Catherine, his ex-wife, but realized after a few that they were concerned with child-care arrangements rather than amorous assignations behind my back. There was, though, a defiantly flirty tone to them.

  I looked in his e-mail folders directory. No folders at all. His electronic filing was no better than his real-world or emotional variety: all tangled, tortured, torn. I don’t know what I had expected, some discreet folder entitled “Izobel’s tribute site” with neatly filed correspondence with whoever had created the site on his behalf?

  I used the e-mail search functionality and typed in “Izobel.” Nothing came up. It seemed that, if he ever mentioned me in e-mails at all, he would not refer to me by my name.

  I gave up on the in-box and opened up Internet Explorer to see what sort of sites he viewed. His home page was the Media Guardian. How I loathed the self-referential nature of those working in the media, myself included. I’m sure I saw more column inches about the way that wars are reported than on any war itself. I went to his Favorites list. Again it was a jumble of unfiled and defiling detritus, a commonplace book of new media trivia—a gossip chat room, a games site, mild porn, photos of him taken at a restaurant launch, and various e-zines and online newspapers. I scrolled my way down it to see if www.izobelbrannigan.com had at least joined these far-from-illustrious colleagues. Again, nothing.

  I gave it my last shot and began to type the letters into the address bar at the top of the page. One of George’s colleagues gave me a slimy smile from across the desk, which I returned as whole-heartedly as I could muster. A random girl hacking into one of the paper’s computers seemed to be no cause for alarm.

  Into the address bar on the top of the Internet page, I typed an “i” and various permutations of ITV and ITN popped into the previously accessed list of sites that unfurled themselves below the bar, but no izobelbrannigan. This indicated that he didn’t go into my site with any frequency, otherwise it would have popped up to join them. I typed “iz” and then the “o” and then the “b.” Nothing. This, I presumed, meant two things. First, that he was probably not the instigator of the site, given that he could barely be bothered to look at it. Second, that he didn’t give a monkey’s about it anyway, not even to have a laugh with his workie friends: clearly it wasn’t anecdote-worthy. He didn’t even glance at the site at his desk.

  I went to “Tools” and “Internet Options.” How long did sites remain in his Internet history, I wondered? If it was only a day, then it was possible he had looked at my site yesterday and the day before that. There it was: “The History Folder contains links to pages you’ve visited, for quick access to recently viewed pages. Days to keep pages in history: 10.” Ten days? George hadn’t looked at the site for ten bloody days. I wasn’t part of his history; was I even part of his present? I counted back. It was about a fort-night since he told me the site was down; the chances were that this was the last time he had bothered accessing my site, my lovely, lavish, beautifully designed site. The tribute to me and my uniqueness and my celebrity in the eyes of one.

  Yes, I thought to report back to Maggie, it was unlikely that George was my man.

  I was just about to start rummaging round his nonvirtual drawers when my mobile went. It was Mimi from the office.

  “Are you monged or something, babe? You’ve got three boffs in here who say they’ve got a meeting with you, Candida and Amanda or something.”

  “Shit, I’d forgotten. Tell them I’ll be over in fifteen.”

  “All right then, doll, laters.”

  In my excitement at being PR-girl-turned-PI it had slipped my probing mind that Camilla had bullied me into having a meeting to discuss free PR for her new business venture. Ironically, the proposition was something to do with the Internet. I felt that the World Wide Web had truly caught me in its sticky threads. What did I know about PR for the Web anyway? This was always happening, me being viewed by amateurs as a PR guru, when all I could offer them was a bit of common sense and ridiculous costs. Still, I reasoned, I could continue with some detective work on Frank via his girlfriend.

  I scooted back to the office with the continual sense of being watched. But then, I’m the sort of self-conscious person who always feels as though I’m in a film or being described in the narrative of the type of novel with embossed lettering on its cover. I have a particularly bad habit of imagining being photographed for one of those articles about what real people are wearing every time I get dressed. For this reason, I can never wear more than one item from the same shop at the same time and always try to include some very costly designer item to “lift” the cheap rest of the ensemble.

  Camilla looked as imperious as ever in the office reception area, her yoga-bendy body contrasting with her pointy, precision mind. She was even carrying a Psion in one hand and a yoga mat in the other, as if posing for a feature about women who juggle the spiritual and the professional. She was flicking through one of the glossy magazines that lay shiny face up in the foyer. Beside her and looking eagerly over her shoulder to the pages of the magazine were two girls. They were dressed similarly to Camilla, but their clothes were of decreasing expense and in each case more faded than the last, so that the second one resembled a bad photocopy of the willowy blonde beside her, while the third was so muted as to be a photocopy of a photocopy, where all that had once been sharp and bright was obliterated. She was the sort of person who could commit a crime and no one would be able to create the photofit of her afterward, so unmemorable was her face.

  “So sorry I’m late.”

  “That’s OK,” said Camilla, which was gracious of her given that I was offering my time for free. “I’m pretty busy with all my projects, but Becksy and Alice are still working full time, so it would be good if our lunchtime meetings could start promptly. Thanks.” She brandished the glossy magazine. “We need a piece about us in one of these. Can you do that?”

  “That is, I’m afraid, the holy grail of PR, the Herculean task of PR, the glass mountain being climbed in slippers of PR…”

  “All right, all right, I get the picture. But, like, how hard can it be?”

  I ignored her and introduced myself to the girls, Becksy and Alice, I presumed.

  “They know who you are,” said Camilla. “They were at school with us too. Don’t you remember anything? We were rather renowned as the St. Tree’s Tasties.”

  “I’m sorry. You were a couple of years younger, I think,” I said to Becksy and Alice.

  “Three actually,” Camilla corrected to giggles from her acolytes. “There’s a whole gang of us Tasties working on the business in fact. It’s just like old times.”

  “I’m not really in touch with people from school,” I said. I wondered why; was it because I thought I was above their provincial ways or that I had not reached high enough?

  “Ahhh,” the three of them said with one voice. “How sad.”

  I jostled them into a meeting room and determinedly didn’t offer them anything to drink. From the lofty Camilla downward, they were smaller versions of one another, like a set of Russian babushka dolls.

  “Have you got any green tea?” Camilla asked almost immediately.

  “We love green tea,” said the medium-size Camilla doll.

  I ignored them. “Right, why don’t you three tell me about your Internet service, what it is and what your roles are. Then I can give you a few ideas about what PR you could get and how you’d go about it. All right
?”

  They concurred.

  “OK, so tell me about the thing then.”

  “It’s an Internet dating service with a difference. It’s going to be huge,” said Camilla.

  “Gynormous,” said middling girl.

  “I thought all that sort of thing was over, that it was all dot gone not dot com these days.”

  “Not in the dating sector, and not with our agency. In New York, Internet dating is massive and it’s growing here,” Camilla spieled. “The stigma has completely gone these days, there’s nothing sad about logging on and loving in.”

  “It’s cool,” said Camilla’s echo.

  I shivered. “I don’t know, seems a bit creepy to me, finding love online. You never know who’s out there.”

  Camilla sighed. “That’s why people need us, to vet and match people accordingly.”

  “Would you use an online dating agency?” I asked her. “What about Frank? Does he use the Internet much? Does he ever, like, I don’t know, create Web sites in honor of you or something?”

  She looked offended. She was chary of me as an ex and I of her as a present. “That would be nice of him. I’ll have to suggest it. However, I can’t see either of us using an online dating service. I mean, we’re hardly the sort of people that need to.”

  At that moment the mouse beside her roared, or at least spoke.

  “I would,” said Alice or Becksy. I didn’t know which, the very smallest one anyway. “I think it’s brilliant. We will make people happy. We’ll get invited to their weddings. We will change lives off-line by what happens online.”

  I smiled at her. “So, what do you think is so special about your site? What makes it different from the other ones out there?”

  Camilla interjected, “It’s a dating service with a difference.” My God, would she leave it with the sloganeering. “Most online match-making services just ask really boring questions about user requirements, but we match people up using whichever criteria they prefer including height, horoscopes, hobbies et cetera. You choose which criteria are important to you. That’s new. Loads of girls are obsessed with height, some with money, some with status, some with looks—it’s up to you which one you emphasize in your search.”

  “How do you decide how good-looking someone is?”

  “We don’t. The other punters do—it’s like that Web site ‘Hot or Not.’ The users give the other users a looks rating out of ten and we collate their scores. Then we can match the hottest with the other hotties.”

  “How Darwinian.”

  “Absolutely, though many of them will be unattractive, I’m sure.”

  “You.” I turned again to little one. “What do you think is the big selling factor?”

  “Ask me, I’m the figurehead and marketeer,” interrupted Camilla once more. “She does all the technical stuff. I’m the spokesperson.”

  “In new-media-speak we say,” said Alice, “that I’m back-end and they’re front-end.”

  “Like a pantomime horse,” I observed, to which Alice and Becksy whinnied and Camilla gave her equine laugh.

  We droned on for a while, with me having absolutely no intention of doing any free PR for their site and Camilla convinced that it was my patriotic duty to get it a plug in a broad-sheet. I was more concerned with interrogating Camilla about her boyfriend’s Internet usage.

  “Does Frank have an Internet connection at home?” I asked. “George is completely hopeless with anything new-media or new-fangled. Is Frank any better?”

  “Of course. He’s an intellectual, he needs access to other thinkers.”

  “Do you have fun playing around on it? Is Frank any good at making Web sites as well as accessing them?”

  “Frank is brilliant at whatever he chooses to do. Why the interest?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was going nowhere. I knew that I would have to get it straight from the other horse’s mouth. I felt very tired and attempted to wrap up our meeting.

  “It’s really nice to see you again after so long,” said Alice in her third sentence of the meeting.

  “Oh right, yes, strange, four of us all from the same school in a work situation together. Probably very normal for old Etonians in Conservative Central Office, but doesn’t happen to me much. Do you remember me, then?” I tried to be nonchalant, but I was shamefully pleased by the idea of meeting someone who remembered me rather than the other way round.

  “You were funny,” said Becksy. I decided not to take a woman who still went by her schoolgirl nickname very seriously. Nor one who still hung around in a big girly gang. “Political and stuff.”

  “Yes, you were. We were a bit surprised,” Alice added, “to find you doing this.” She lifted her head to glance through the horn-rimmed glasses that slithered down her pointed nose at the framed magazine covers and outsize lilies gracing our meeting rooms. “If you’d said to me then that in fifteen years you’d be doing PR, I’d have assumed it stood for proportional representation.”

  “I started out doing press for Amnesty actually,” I batted. “It’s not my fault you need a trust fund in order to work in the charity sector. The wages are so low.”

  “I’m still surprised to see you so changed. Camilla hasn’t changed so much.”

  “We haven’t changed at all,” giggled Becksy.

  Alice continued. “You were so impassioned. Are you passionate about the politics of heel sizes now?”

  If we were still at school, I’d be whopping her in detention at this point. Well, I would be had I been a prefect, but I was seen as too anti-establishment for such giddy responsibilities. Who were these horrid little girls coming in here to sneer at me and my life?

  “I do a lot of voluntary work outside of the office,” I lied. It really mattered to me not to disillusion my own remembered schoolgirl self nor anyone else who might recall me from that time. I did not want anybody at all to think the worst of me; that was my prerogative.

  “Really.” Alice was wide-eyed behind those distorting lenses. “Like what?”

  I was saved by Camilla, something I never thought would happen. “Is this really relevant? We’re discussing our product, not the halcyon days of St. Tree’s. Are you going to get us into one of the monthlies, then?”

  Becksy giggled at the use of the word “monthlies” in a non-menstrual context and I got back to drawing up a battle plan that could be used in the phony war of PR. I showed them out into the reception area, womanned by a temp in an inappropriate piece of nightwear that fell off one shoulder. She was showing the sort of flesh normally sported by soap starlets on red carpets, to the indifference of the IT systems administrator who was asking her about server room temperatures.

  “Who’s he?” whispered Alice, pointing at the departing figure of the technical guy, who was only ever flirted with in the disastrous situation of our e-mail network going down.

  “He’s scrummy,” said Becksy.

  “Him?” I queried. “He’s just the systems bloke. Dan the IT man.”

  “He’s very attractive-looking,” said Alice.

  “A bit gorgeous,” said Becksy.

  I grimaced. “But he’s a techie.”

  Chapter Five

  Techie, technical, tech, detective, de-tech-tive.

  That’s it. I needed someone technical to help me in my search for cyber-stalker. Maggie was all very well with her in-depth knowledge of the conventions of TV thrillers, but there had to be a more robustly mechanical approach to finding out who was behind the site. For all I knew there was a great big telephone book listing who owns every site in the whole wide world.

  I thought about Dan the IT man. I didn’t know him; I couldn’t ask him. Far too embarrassing. I flipped through my e-mail contacts list. Most of them hadn’t yet worked out how to use Video Plus, let alone anything about computer systems. Java for us was old-fashioned slang for coffee, rather than a script for making Web sites; wireless was something that blared out Radio Four. Microsoft Office was as high-tech as it
got. Camilla was the only person I’d ever met with a Palm Pilot.

  When we were at school, computers were just coming onto the curriculum. Unwieldy monsters with the memory of an Alzheimer’s victim and funny green screens that flickered into life by the typing of dyslexic command languages with lots of full stops. How we laughed at the people who were into them, the boys in the next-door grammar who had started their own computer club in a bid to meet girls. The only girls at school who were into computers were super-spods with boys’ haircuts, shapeless cords and Guernsey sweaters. We picked our boys’ school counterparts via the debating and drama clubs.

  The laugh was on us now, I had to concede, as those spods and boffins had made a mint with their software companies and contract work at a thousand pounds a day. Oh to have been that square, I thought.

  Oh to have at least one friend among them, I also thought, now that I needed a geek with the first idea about how the Internet worked. Alice, perhaps; hadn’t she just said she was “back-end”? What did that mean, apart from sounding rude? No, not Alice, she’d tell Camilla and Camilla would tell Frank and one of my suspects would be tipped off. Too embarrassing, that Camilla should know about the site. I could imagine her having a real laugh about it. Her and Frank in bed together, giggling at my hubristic reaction to the site, speculating that I might be behind it myself.

  And lo, my mobile went and Frank’s name flashed up on the screen. I did that mobile telephone walk, the one where you slink away from the desk or restaurant table, with a lopsided gait and your phone glued to one ear, speaking in an exaggeratedly hushing voice as you shuffle toward privacy in the most public of fashions. I would eliminate Frank from Maggie’s list, there and then, but I didn’t want my colleagues to hear of it.

  “Just phoning to check that you and Camilla are making good progress.” He never used to speak like a lecturer, but now he always seemed to be orating.