Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  “And everybody else is so interesting?” I asked with irritation.

  “More so, yes. We don’t feel that we can talk shop to people outside our worlds so we make an effort to cultivate other interests and observations. We don’t insist on only mating with others who work in the same sector and we don’t think we’re better than anybody else. Instead we strive to make ourselves better. That’s what your lot fails to do.”

  “It’s not my lot.”

  “All right, everyone you work with, hang out with and go out with. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you’re not prejudiced against those who work in banking, or the law, or, God forbid, IT?”

  “No, of course not. Now, if you don’t mind excusing me, mere technical minion, I have some high-level phone calls to make to journalists, TV producers and editors to discuss glamorous celebrity evenings and the launches of new lifestyle magazines.”

  Ivan laughed and I smiled.

  “And I’ll get back to you if the analysis of a technical nature pursued by your IT consultant yields any evidence beyond the merely circumstantial,” he said. “Ditto, if your probe of previous emotional involvements proves fruitful.”

  “Thanks,” I said turning back to the celebrity gossip message board I was currently investigating in depth.

  Chapter Nine

  George was in repose on the sofa, quaffing a lager and watching a James Bond repeat.

  “Let’s get out,” I said. “It’s a nice day. Let’s go for a walk or to an art gallery or a street market.”

  “Or one of those other activities as prescribed in listings magazines that nobody but tourists actually does.”

  “Let’s do it, go on, George. It’ll be fun.”

  He faked a snore and continued watching the television. I stood up and he looked at me with interest for the first time since we’d got out of bed.

  “You couldn’t be a love and get me an ashtray.” I ignored him, but he lit up anyway.

  I fired up my computer in response to his indifference. I was just like any sad old man chatting to Lithuanian lovelies online because his wife won’t put out.

  There hadn’t been a change since the new photo and the link. I still hadn’t heard any more back from Mr. Contact Us via e-mail, despite repeated cyber-entreaties from me. Yet I always opened the site up with a sense of expectation, a hope that this time the mystery would be solved.

  “Oh my God,” I said on viewing izobelbrannigan.com. “Shit.”

  George grunted and turned the television up.

  “The site, it’s changed. My God.”

  He continued his recital of farmyard animal noises with a snort of derision. “Site, site, shite. That’s all you talk about these days. Christ, you’ve become dull.”

  “But really, please George, take a look at this.”

  “You’re obsessed with the bloody Internet. It will never replace newspapers, never.”

  “I’m not saying it will.”

  “Yes you bloody are.”

  “Of course not, you can’t wrap fish and chips in a computer. Please, George, come and look at this.” I dragged him from the sofa. He sat in the chair in front of the computer as I leaned over him.

  “Yes, yes, it’s your site. Now what?”

  “For God’s sake at least put your specs on, your reading glasses.”

  “It’s your site, I don’t know what else to say about it. I’ve already admired it and talked about it ad nauseam. Darling.” He spat out the last word and replaced it in his mouth with a gulp of his beer.

  “But it’s different. Look. I’ve been papped,” I said, clicking on the link off the home page that read photo gallery and which led to a display of paparazzi-style photos, images of ordinary situations that are usually made extraordinary by those embroiled in them. The page showed familiar papping situations taken with a long-lensed camera, but with an unfamiliar protagonist: me. Me at the supermarket with ten items or less in my basket. Me in tracksuit bottoms blinking blearily, coming out of the flat, not celeb-style on my way to yoga, but wearing comfy clothes in lieu of getting dressed properly. Me at the bus stop, instead of unlocking the doors of a four-by-four as is more common in this genre. Me coming out of the bookshop. Me picking my nose. If that one had been published in a magazine, it would have been in the “Celebrities, they’re disgusting like the rest of us” section.

  Each had a caption, characterized by the cheery inanity of the magazines I loved to read and the style already pioneered in the rest of the site: “Izobel tries to make sure she eats her five portions of fruit and veg by stocking up on spinach”; “Izobel’s not above using public transport”; “Hot picks—sometimes life gets right up Izobel’s nose.”

  What I hated about my life was that it was always the same. The site changed, yet just served as proof of the unchanging nature of my life. It had pap shots of the shopping trips and taking out the rubbish, but not the leading features of marriage, birth or a shiny new home.

  “Look, there’s me,” said George, pointing to a picture of us, not emerging from an upscale restaurant but from a gastro-pub, leaning on each other, physically if not emotionally. As a new trick, his face had been pixelated to become unidentifiable rather than sporting the low-tech black strip across his eyes. “I look like I’ve got a gut. Do I have a gut?” He sucked in his stomach. “I don’t have a gut, do I?”

  “No, you’re perfect. I don’t remember these photos being taken.”

  “That was on Wednesday,” said George, pointing to the one in which he costarred. “Doesn’t mention me in the caption, though.” He read it out in a soppy voice. “The night before the morning after for Izobel!”

  “It never mentions other people. Only me, in fact. I knew it was Wednesday, I just don’t remember seeing a camera flashing. Do you?”

  “I am a fine figure for a man of my age, aren’t I?”

  “Don’t you remember anything odd about that evening?”

  “I barely remember anything about that evening at all, sweet-heart.”

  “Nobody flashed us then.”

  “I may have flashed you later.”

  “Think, George, can’t you remember anything?”

  “I recall having pan-fried calves’ liver as a main and a very fine bottle of Barolo.”

  “Don’t you see what this means, George?”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “It means that they’re following me. It means that they know where I live, where I go, what I do. They’re stalking me, staking me. Scaring me.”

  “I suppose it does,” he said, while continuing to stroke the convex planes of his stomach. “I’m sorry, poppet. Let me make it better for you.” He tried to pull me onto his lap.

  I shook him off and walked out of the flat. As I stood on the doorstep I looked around, trying to catch a photographer in the bushes or in the building opposite, pointing a long-range camera at me. There was nobody. I was alone. “Izobel emerges from her flat in the fashionable fringes of the throbbing metropolis. What exciting event are you off to, Izobel?” the caption would read.

  I went to a café. Those photos, they were my life. A life that involved going to the pub, to work, to the supermarket, to a party. Where was the snatched shot of me giving up my time to work in a soup kitchen or delivering leaflets for a worthy cause? There were no pictures of me holding a placard on a march or helping an old lady cross a road. I did nothing for anybody but myself.

  I felt overwhelmed by self-pity, exacerbated by the knowledge that I couldn’t let my tears leak for fear of them being snapped with a caption reading: “The secret sadness—we’re sure you’ll feel better soon, Izobel.”

  *

  I flopped out at Maggie’s, while she busied herself around me. I was aware that she was the one who ought to be supine, but I was pregnant with worry. I saw myself as if through a camera’s eye, splayed out and pulling ugly, blotchy faces. Every pose I made was now captioned by myself, as if I were a new-wave photographer, turnin
g my life into an installation. This one read: “Izobel gets tired just like the rest of us.”

  “I feel like it’s mocking me, Maggie.”

  “He, she or they are mocking you. It can’t do anything. It is inanimate.”

  “Much like Izobel Brannigan herself,” I said.

  “Come on, Iz, don’t be so lumpen,” said Maggie, as she plumped up cushions around me. “I’m so nesty nowadays.” She flashed the roll call of suspects she had written weeks previously. “You haven’t done half the people on this list. Get onto them. This site is making you feel powerless. Well, empower yourself.”

  I sighed. “I feel like my life is in abeyance until I find out who’s behind it. I’m preserved. Or pickled, thanks to George, most of the time.”

  “You’re only stuck if you let yourself be. Pull yourself together.” If she’d written that in an e-mail to me she’d have inserted an exclamation mark to convey jocularity. As she was saying it to me in the flesh, there was none. “Elliot you’ve done, albeit by accident, and we’ve agreed that going out with Talitha probably keeps him busy enough. Frank is not fully eliminated, nor is George.”

  I shook my head.

  “What about Foreign Correspondent?” she asked. “It’s a bit odd that he turns up out of the blue and asks you to have his children just after this site appears, don’t you think? Did you even find out which war zone he’s on his way to?”

  “It’s not him. I just know it’s not him. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. Neither does George, nor does Frank, nor does anyone. I’m all alone, bar stalkie photographer person.”

  “No, you’re not. Don’t be stupid. You’ll feel better if you do something about it.” She looked at her list. “Get in touch with Married Man and Spanish Artist for starters. And William, didn’t I say it was likely to be him? You split up with Frank for him, don’t tell me he’s meaningless.”

  “You’ve never forgiven me for splitting up with Frank, have you? For messing up our cozy foursome.”

  “For God’s sake, I don’t give a monkey’s about that, I just want you to be happy. And to find out who’s behind the site. Perhaps whoever it is wants you to find them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would they go to all this trouble if they don’t want to give you a message directly from them or to let you know how they feel about you? Remember how when you used to send Valentine’s cards, you’d make sure that the postmark or some other clue would let them know who you were, if they really wanted to find out? We used to write hidden messages on them in lemon juice when we were at primary school. You’d leave a clue, yet it wouldn’t be so obvious that you couldn’t deny the connection if necessary.”

  “Yes, but what are you getting at?”

  “That I could’ve been too lateral about this, assuming that whoever is behind it is trying to cover their tracks. Maybe whoever it is won’t deny it if you ask them straight out, because they want you to know how they feel. Or there’s a really obvious clue actually on the site. I don’t know, like the first letter of every sentence spells out their name, or they’re visible in the background of one of the photos or something. Think, Maggie, think,” she exhorted herself. “What would happen in a film? You know how you can play heavy metal tracks backwards and they talk about the devil? What if there’s some message hidden in the pages? In the code stuff.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You need to talk to your technical consultant about that. Ask him whether it’s possible to add phrases into the code without them showing up on the page. Hasn’t he come up with the goods yet?”

  “Ivan. No, he doesn’t seem to have. In fact, I feel he’s dragging his heels a bit. I don’t think he realizes that I can’t get on with my life until I find out who’s behind this.”

  “Well, hassle him then,” said Maggie. The words “instead of hassling me” were left unsaid. “And take this list. I can remember the names on it, even if you can’t. And don’t come back until you’ve investigated them all.”

  *

  I sat in reception of Married Man’s office, a TV company. We’d been hired by them to boost their profile just before launching on the stock exchange. We’d boosted that of their CEO as well, while I had boosted his ego by sleeping with him, a man who hadn’t had a blow job since Virginia Wade won Wimbledon.

  TV attracted as many slips of girls wearing slips of clothing as PR. Both industries, to use Douglas Coupland’s phrase, go in for Brazilification of wages: those at the top were buying houses in the South of France, while those at entry level were being paid less than part-time supermarket shelf-stackers. At least waitresses got tips. PR girls and TV researchers got late nights and lecherous bosses.

  In the ten minutes I sat waiting I saw so many employees whose faces were full of hope. I listened to two of them, talking loudly and proudly.

  “Yeah, the TVR was fabulous, totally dominated the eighteen to thirty-fives in that slot. Thirty-three percent share in fact.”

  “LE’s the way to go, I reckon,” replied her lissome friend. “Totally the best people too.”

  “Have you seen the guy execcing my program? He’s an amazing man. And so handsome. Got a girlfriend, but apparently she’s really let herself go since having the baby.”

  They were the envy of their contemporaries for working in the media and herding C-listers into hospitality. I could see that they had a sense of themselves in the third person, too, at the epicenter of crap television output. Don’t do it, I wanted to say to them, all jobs are just admin so get yourself one with bigger pay and proper employee rights. Your friends won’t envy you when you’re unemployable once you have children or want something more from your life.

  They were so young—the stomachs were flat and their faces full. Their hipster jeans crept ever more stealthily southward, dangerously hovering above their pubes. Was there some link between the stock exchange and how low trousers were going, as there reputedly was between the market and how high the hemlines of skirts floated?

  Married Man was the squire of the television feudal system. He had the wealth to be able to afford to hire someone to do the site. I had looked up his company’s Web site and it wasn’t in a dissimilar style to mine. It wasn’t exactly similar either. I didn’t know how I was going to approach him, but I was curious to see him after all this time.

  I was gestured into his office, an orange glass pod at the corner of a vast open-plan office. He was wearing a suit. Relations had been brilliant between us when I had only seen him in a suit or naked, both of which he wore extremely well. They had started to go wrong when we made the mistake of going out in mufti. Then he had sported the regulation chinos and Icelandic pattern sweaters of dress-down Friday, just like any other banker in the City at the end of the week. He looked like a middle-class dad about to mow the lawn. Which wasn’t so far from the truth.

  And he was a banker. I kidded myself that because he had such a thriving company, making such innovative combinations of reality shows and docu-soaps, that he must be creative himself.

  But he was Mr. Money while in the next-door podule grubbed MC Creativo. All my lover had cared about were numbers, although some of those included my measurements.

  “Hello, Izobel, to what do I owe this pleasure?” He shook my hand for the benefit of the minions on the other side of the glass.

  “Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”

  “I’m always happy to see you.”

  We stared at each other and then I glanced away to look at the photos of him with television stars suspended like a giant mobile from the ceiling, and the BAFTAs that lined the window-sill. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” I said. I couldn’t help but speak in the mechanical clichés of a business reception with him. Those or sporting metaphors were his lingua franca.

  “Time flies. How long has it been?”

  Since I dumped you for your employee Elliot, I thought. “Since we finished work on the campaign and you went public.”

 
“Four years then.”

  I had loved him professionally and sexually, pinstripes and nudity, but we had never had anything to say outside of board-rooms and bedrooms. His business brain had inspired me into going to bed with him. And I had loved going to bed with him. He was as driven and enthusiastic there as he had been when building his company.

  “Yes, four years.” Four years since I’d last slept with him. I had adored the way he had talked in bed; he’d tell me I had fantastic “knockers” and use the word unironically. He was a sexual Rip Van Winkle, having been married for twenty years. His carnal vocabulary was straight out of the seventies: it was Benny Hill and Carry On. His tastes were those of a naughty schoolboy reared in a tradition of British smuttiness and good-natured jollity. He made remarks about éclairs and “having it off” and “giving you one.” He’d stroke my “fanny” and bury his face in my “boobs.”

  I’d responded by eschewing utility underwear for lace, satin and garters. I’d worn the sort of transparent negligees not seen since window cleaners did daily rounds with bored housewives wearing naughty nighties. I was starring in a film called Confessions of a TV Executive where I was, to use his parlance, always up for a bit of nookie.

  He looked at me expectantly. “Well, Izobel, don’t beat about the bush. What do you want?”

  “Do you have Internet access in here? I feel like I’m trapped in a cough drop.”

  He spun round his flat screen and clicked on the “E” of Explorer. I could see the home page of his company reflected in his German architect’s glasses. They were a new addition. I wondered whether he’d picked up another young lover. He started typing “www” into the search box for that site. Clearly, Web-savviness was something he left to the kids, both his own and those he employed.

  “Do you mind?” I asked and captained the keyboard, bringing up my site.

  He read it and laughed. “Do you want a photo of me for it?”

  “No, it’s not mine. I mean, I’m not behind it. I’m trying to find out who is.”

  “How rum. But how can I help?”

  “Exes, they’re all suspects,” I said apologetically.