Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to find out who’s behind the site, that’s what.”

  “Oh, that.” I wondered whether I should get her off the phone and call Ivan straight back. That would be craven. I shouldn’t worry about being a bit cool, cool was good, cool was what I usually failed to do. Anyway, he wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t even my potential boyfriend, I already had a boyfriend. “Great, thanks Maggie, you’re a star. What have you got then?”

  “Two things. For starters I’ve got something on our friend Pepe Gomez Gomez. I have to say, it was pretty easy. I just Googled him and then got this hilarity. I’ve e-mailed you the Web address to look at.”

  “Does it incriminate him?”

  “Of doing your site? Probably not. But of being a total plonker? Yes, he is guilty of that crime. You can be judge and jury on that score.”

  “I look forward to it. And what’s the second thing?”

  “I haven’t quite got it yet, but I will do. Something even better, I think. Call you back.”

  I couldn’t phone Ivan and I couldn’t do any work so I looked for Maggie’s e-mail. “Hello, you may be amused by this.” It was named “Todas las Musas” and the Internet address ended in “.es” to indicate a Spanish address. I could imagine her saying the name of the site in a heavily British accent reminiscent of the request for “dos cervezas” on a thousand package holidays.

  I opened up the page as directed and found it covered in neat photos of women, equidistant from one another, like an American high-school yearbook. Chica salvaje read the caption beneath the photo of a girl in a dominatrix outfit, la negra by, unsurprisingly but politically incorrectly, a black woman, and la inglesa adjacent to a photo of me. I was wearing a pair of jeans and was braless in an old T-shirt, looking cheerfully toward the photographer. Pepe had never been without that Polaroid camera and I therefore looked nonchalant at being snapped in so casual a way. I might have been naked of makeup or grooming but at least I was fully dressed. I shivered as I glanced at the photo of my neighbor on the site, la asistenta de limpieza, who wore nothing but a pair of bright pink rubber gloves.

  A photo of me? My Spanish was pretty poor, restricted as it was to filth and anatomy as practiced by my Iberian lover, but I could make out Pepe’s name at the top of the page, and the words artista and instalación in the introductory text. Todas las Musas, of course, “All the Muses”; this was another piece of Pepe’s virtual art, his attempt to turn his life into something for the world’s cyber-gallery. This was all the girls he’d slept with, sorry, all his muses, all the girls he’d loved before. I looked through the arrayed photos. There were at least a hundred. How could I ever have thought that he might have been my cyber-stalker? True, online paeans were evidently a line of artistry he was interested in, but I was but one percent of his interest. And I was just “the English girl.” Nothing else, not the inglesa sexy or intelligente or bella or fantastica, not even my name. At least with izobelbrannigan.com I was its star; here I was just an nth part of somebody else’s life project and one that involved sleeping with as many chicas as possible.

  In the center of the page, displayed in the largest photo of them all, was Pepe himself. His green teeth were visible even in the badly pixelated Polaroid and his eyes had that odd paleness that I remembered from looking into them. He didn’t look at all Spanish. He did look foreign, but from another planet rather than merely from a country outside the British Isles. He was smiling broadly and I could not help but smile back at him. He was pre-posterous, but he always had been.

  I laughed out loud, tiredness and drunkenness and kiss-giddiness making me almost hysterical.

  “I wouldn’t look at porn at work, sweets,” said Mimi, glancing at the girls emblazoned on my screen.

  “It’s not porn, it’s art,” I said.

  “That’s what my boy calls it, but it don’t change the fact that it’s filth.”

  I laughed again. It might once have bothered me, even only the day before yesterday, that I was such an unimportant part of Pepe’s grand work of art called his love life. His hubris was now merely humorous. I thought of Ivan’s modestly displayed but far more beautiful pieces. He was an artist in all but name, Pepe was the reverse. I wanted to talk to Ivan about it, to tell him of the rubbish that my previous artist lover calls art. I thought he’d find it funny. On the other hand, he’d know about my past and at least one meaningless ex. Meaningless sex, meaningless men. He’d know just how dodgy they were and I didn’t want him to know that, not yet. I wanted him to know only what he had so far chosen to recognize in me. There was time to reveal the flaws, the superficiality, the neurosis, even the fact that I had a boyfriend already.

  I reached toward the phone to ring him; I had to speak to him, I had to make good my curtness on the phone to him. Just as I reached toward the handset, it rang again.

  “So what do you think? Clever, aren’t I?”

  “Maggie! It’s hilarious, I can’t believe I didn’t know about it. What a prat, all the muses indeed.”

  “Just think, two sites devoted to you.”

  “For what it’s worth.”

  “I don’t think he’s your man.”

  “No, he never was, evidently.”

  “And I’ve managed to unearth something far more impressive in our search for site perp. You may call me clever and gorgeous, but I’ve only managed to go and get a list of the names of the people invited to Hot Bob’s party.”

  I had almost forgotten about the site and our search and the party. “Oh my God. How did you get that?”

  “I was brilliant. I went to the club and stuck my pregnant lady belly out and said that I needed the guest list from the night of Bob’s party in order to find out a man’s name. That man, I told the dippy woman at the club, needed to be found to face up to his responsibilities. At that point, I stroked pregnant lady belly in poignant way and she almost cried. They keep all the door lists in case of any trouble afterward. I explained how a young man had got me into trouble.”

  “But do the dates add up?”

  “They almost do and how should she know exactly how pregnant I am anyway? Shall I read out the names to you, then? One of them could be our man.”

  I looked over to Tracy’s office. “Yeah, why not.” I noticed her come out of her office. “I would be grateful for your feedback on the target list. Would you like to respond to the one I e-mailed over to you earlier?” Tracy walked out of earshot. “Sorry about that. Fire away, Mags.”

  It was like being back at school as she read a roll call of the middle-class names that had been popular with seventies parents: Jonny, Kate, James, Edward and Charlotte. I felt my ears muffle over, lulled by hangover and Maggie’s mantras. I doodled lips onto my notepad and did that schoolgirl thing where you can work out what percentage Izobel Brannigan loves Ivan Jaffy by counting up each time an L, an O, a V, an E and an S appear in your respective names. Izobel and Ivan love each other a whopping eighty-seven percent actually, that’s almost the best score you can get. Was it fate? Don’t be silly, I don’t love Ivan. I don’t even know him.

  Maggie continued to read, oblivious to the fact that I only didn’t love Ivan a mere thirteen percent. The names she spoke meant little or nothing to me.

  “Stop,” I said after Maggie had read out six dozen or so of them. The name on my notepad matched a name that she had called out. A familiar name, at last, the most familiar name to me that day. “Ivan who, did you say?”

  “Ivan Jaffy. Why, do you know him?”

  Know him? I knew the crease of his tongue and the stroke of his hand. “Yes, I know him.”

  “Could he be, you know, the one?”

  I had asked myself the very same thing only that morning. How different Maggie’s question was.

  “Yes.” I paused. “It could be him.”

  “Oh my God, I’ve got him, I found him, I found him. Forget your technical consultant, it was old-fashioned detective work that got him. Does this Ivan hav
e technical know-how? Does he fancy you? Is he a bit creepy?”

  “I suppose.” Yes, yes, yes. He was all those things. Images of the truth flashed through my head: the picture from Hot Bob’s party; the photo of me at the conference, hanging in the foyer right under my and Ivan’s noses; the sluggishness about doing anything about finding who owned the URL; knowing too much about Dune; the computer nous; the crush on me; the getting close to me through the site.

  And it had almost worked. I had almost slept with him last night.

  “Iz, are you OK? Am I right?”

  “Yes, I think you are. I think it’s him.”

  “And what are you going to do about this tosser? Who is he anyway? Do I know him? Do you want me to deal with him?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s just a techie from work.”

  “So he’d have the technical knowledge then. Bingo. What are you going to do about him? Do you want me around? Maybe Mick should come along too.”

  Artist Ivan, kisser Ivan, systems Ivan, funny Ivan.

  Stalker Ivan, creepy Ivan, malevolent Ivan.

  I didn’t know what to do about any of them.

  My landline went again and I answered it although I knew who would be calling. “Mags, I’ll have to think about it. I have to go now.”

  “Hello, Ivan.” The same phrase from an hour ago, my voice very different.

  “We were saying,” he said. “How we should do it again sometime.”

  “Maybe.” This was how girls were supposed to act when with a potential boyfriend, all hard to get and elusive. Apparently drives men wild, though I wouldn’t know as I’d never managed it. Until now. I didn’t want to drive him wild. That had got us into trouble in the first place. “Yes, of course. Out of interest, do you know someone called…” I paused, what was Hot Bob’s surname? “Robert. He had a thirtieth in a club about seven or eight months ago. Works in academia. An economist I think.”

  “Robert Ives? He’s my cousin. Why, do you know him?” Listen to the eagerness with which he sought coincidence and shared experience. I almost believed him.

  “I went to that party. Did you?”

  “Yes I did, I was there, of course I did. Robert and I are almost the same age. We grew up together.”

  Hot Bob was his cousin. Made sense, they shared the same looks, though I had thought Ivan’s more attractive.

  “I didn’t see you there. How annoying,” he continued. “There’s always something so bonding about bumping into work people outside work. Hang on, I wouldn’t have recognised you, I don’t think. It was about that time we took on this account. Did I know you then? Could we have met then? I was with my girl-friend. My then girlfriend.”

  I think I may have been with my now boyfriend but that was not an issue that needed to be raised anymore. Listen to lies trot from his tongue. I had loved that tongue and now I hated it.

  “What a coincidence,” he exclaimed.

  Or not, I thought.

  “Didn’t you realize,” I asked, “that it was the party in the photo?”

  “What photo?”

  Oh stop it, don’t patronize me. You’re not the one with all the knowledge anymore. “The photo on the site. In the first batch, there was the school one and the party one.”

  “No, I hadn’t realized. It was pretty indistinct.”

  “I worked it out, I knew which party it had been taken from.”

  “But I hadn’t even known you were at that party so why would I have made the connection?”

  Connection. How he bandies round these computer-related words with ease. I would stay calm. I had to pretend that I still didn’t know, that I didn’t suspect. Why, I wasn’t sure. Partly because it seemed so humiliating and embarrassing for both of us to accuse him of having done what I knew he had done.

  “Look, Ivan, you know as well as I do that I’m on a warning from Tracy so I really had better go. Crap products to promote, horrible people to publicize, my life continues. My life goes on.”

  I put the phone down and felt sicker than I had ever done before. I felt the taste of vomit in my mouth. The hangover and my shock collided with one another and mated to reproduce more and more bile.

  My life goes on?

  “Babe, you’re like a traffic light, your face keeps going from red to green and back again,” observed Mimi as I tried to stand up.

  “I feel like rubbish. I’ve got to go. Sorry. A one-day bug, some sort of virus.” Still those evil computer words kept coming. “Tell Tracy for me. Tell her I looked really sick, please.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Mimi, hello, it’s me, Izobel,” I said weakly. It didn’t matter what your sickness sickie claim was, you always had to do the voice that made it sound like you were slipping in and out of a coma. “I can’t make it into the office today. I vomited all night. I think it must be food poisoning.”

  If everybody who claimed to have food poisoning did have it, Britain’s kitchens would have to be the most unhygienic in the world.

  Despite my warning from Tracy, I couldn’t face PR O’Create for a second day in a row. I didn’t even care about the prospect of being sacked. Just do it, I thought. Ivan was bound to be there, skulking. I wanted to confront him. That’s what all this detective work had been about, but I wasn’t ready yet.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I really did look ill. It was a rare occasion when a videophone would have been of some use to the malingerer. My hair was lank and I wore an old pair of glasses and an even older pair of tracksuit bottoms. The lips that had been moistened by kissing had now dried and chapped. I had prodded my raw stubble burn so much that it had become infected and there was a little bubble of suppurating sore dripping greenish gunk continually from my chin. From sex kitten to pus galore, I said to the mirror, a feeble quip aimed at cheering myself up. It didn’t work.

  It was apt that I should have poisoned stubble burn from having kissed Ivan. He had contaminated me in a way as rancid as any computer virus infecting an e-mail address book. I hated him. I wanted to squeeze my chin’s festering discharge into a vial and dispatch it to his house anonymously. I wanted him to feel hunted and haunted as I had done.

  And yet, I didn’t. I wanted him. To be denied him at this point, the moment between kiss and sex, was too frustrating. To think of all that anticipation and to feel that kiss once again still made me tingle and dampen. I felt like I was dripping from all orifices. I disgusted myself.

  My mobile was like a Post-it note with the word “Ivan” scribbled across it, stuck at every point in my world as it rang and flashed his name up three times throughout the day. Sometimes he left messages, sometimes not. He never disguised his number though, which surprised me, since anonymity appeared to be his modus operandi in other areas of his pursuit of me.

  It is wonderful to be pursued, in theory, but in practice the way that pursuers choose to go about their business negates any succor an object of affection could derive from it.

  I put the baseball cap on once again and went to the newsagent’s. The nice man in the shop and George would be my only points of contact that day, I had already decided.

  George had been good to me the night before, threatening to go round and sort Ivan out, once I had given him a carefully edited version of events.

  “What did I tell you? That no good will come of technology,” he said. “Who is this geek anyway? My poor darling, what’s he like?”

  “Like you say, a geek. Nobody, nothing.”

  “Creep.”

  “Yes, creep.”

  “I could expose him in the paper. What’s his name?”

  I paused. “Ian, his name is Ian Jones.”

  “Common little name for a common little man. Let me and a few colleagues onto him. Have you reported him to Tracy? Where’s his office?”

  “Hounslow, I think, but please don’t go round. Let me talk to him, let me sort it out.”

  And we’d had sex that
night and I thought that it would sate the desire I had worked up for Ivan but it didn’t. It’s like when you’re at the gym, the way that the instructor says it won’t work unless you’re concentrating hard on pulling your stomach in or “sucking your belly button to your spine” in their anatomically disgusting phrase. Sex is the same, at least for me. If I don’t engage, if I don’t think about it really hard and concentrate on the muscles I’m working, it doesn’t work. George, in contrast, was even more enthusiastic than normal. He didn’t seem to notice that my chin was ejaculating bodily fluids, but had stroked me and called me his sexy girl and his angel-girl. All lips were dry.

  That morning, I rejected George’s offer of a sympathy sickie and had the flat to myself. I was the Lady of Shalott, but instead of being able only to view the world reflected through a mirror, I would look through izobelbrannigan.com. I fired up the computer in anticipation of a sign from Ivan.

  I overcame the labors of passwords and connecting it up to the ancient modem. The site was now my home page, reached automatically whenever I got onto the Internet.

  It was now so familiar to me in its Swedish colors that I almost didn’t register it anymore. It all looked the same, I thought, and then I noticed.

  There was a change.

  My stomach made a yelping gurgle, but no noise came from my mouth. I started swaying.

  A change had occurred, technically a very small one, emotionally a giant one.

  In the middle of the page, where the introduction to Izobel had originally floated, there it was. Two words and two dates that horrified me. I touched the screen with my sweaty fingers as if the letters and numbers were in Braille. I felt blind to their true meaning.

  But it was clear.

  Izobel Brannigan, 1973–2003.

  I fell onto my hands and knees and crawled away from the computer avoiding its range of vision, as if it could see me and were the instrument to ensure that those dates came true. My birth date and my death date? The PC monitor was a Cyclopean eye trained on me, it was a heat-seeking missile. I’m sure I even saw it move as I moved.