Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  “Yes, well, I had wanted to talk to you about that.” He went to the kitchen to refill his glass, while leaving a trail of ash in his wake. “I’m afraid, poppet, that it’s a bit of a no-go.”

  “Did they pull the plug on it? That is so unprofessional! Which agency was it anyway?”

  “They didn’t exactly pull the plug on it.”

  “What then?”

  “Grace’s eczema has come back and the doctor said getting out to the country would do it good.”

  “You’re taking Grace? It’s hardly the country anyway. I thought that was the whole point of this place, that it was the country for those who don’t really like the country in all its smelly, manure-spread reality. I can’t believe you’re taking Grace.”

  “She is a child, she is my child.”

  “You could take us both. Surely we could get a family room. She’s not exactly going to be enjoying shiatsu massage, is she? Oh God, don’t tell me, Catherine’s already taking her for beauty treatments. She did tell me my nails needed shaping one time.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible. Grace is clearly stressed at the moment so she probably needs time with just me.”

  “Just you?”

  I saw him pause for a second. “Don’t tell me, not Catherine as well? You and Grace and Catherine in a ‘family room’ because you’re such a perfect family, aren’t you. Jesus, George, my life’s being threatened and you’re just fucking off without me and with your bloody ex-wife.”

  He was cold. “That woman is the mother of my child. My child. You just never get it, do you, Izobel, that Grace takes precedence over you. You’re not the center of the universe, just that bloody site. You’re not being threatened, that’s all in your head. Grace’s eczema, on the other hand, is real. And if you don’t think you take second place to a five-year—”

  “She’s six.”

  “To a little girl, my little girl, then I don’t think we’ve got much of a future. Why don’t you try Ian Hounslow? Maybe he’ll put up with you.”

  “Maybe I will, he can’t be any worse than you.”

  “Fine, if you like stalkers.”

  *

  We lay in bed, me wearing a pair of pants, as a not-so-subtle signal. They were very much emergency knickers too. “George, do you love me at all?”

  He sighed, “Of course, I do. What a silly question.”

  “But how do I know? Can you prove it?”

  “I don’t have to prove it, though there is a way,” he said, attempting to ping the elastic of my knickers, not realizing that it had already gone.

  “But all you do is say you love me. And you say that to lots of people. One of your ‘I love yous’ is worth a lira, while one of a normal person’s is worth a pound. There are two thousand of yours to one of everybody else’s. There’s a different exchange rate.”

  “Darling, why don’t we all just use euros?”

  “I’d still like you to do something, a gesture.”

  “What, like stalk you? Create a creepy crappy Web site about you? Propose to you on daytime television or take out a Valentine in the papers? Spend all our money on French restaurants and jewelry? A dozen red roses? For Christ’s sake, you have become so common in your pursuit of reassurance. Stalking isn’t love. Clichéd gestures aren’t love. Your friend Ian should try living with you, he’d soon stop adoring you. Why don’t you ask him to move in with you if you’re so keen on sappy soppy sods. Maybe he’ll make good his threat, because I tell you, you’re killing me with boredom.”

  He was right, of course, love isn’t obsessive or infatuated or crushed. But I wasn’t sure love was convenience, sex and a place to live, either. My parents loved me, but they loved Wispa and Snickers too. My friends loved me, but I irritated them and they did me. We were pleased for each other’s achievements but better in disappointments. Ivan said he fancied me, which had potential, but his love was twisted. George snored beside me and I felt my whole body flush. I looked at the copy of Dune by the bed. All that “Atreides, who could that be?” when he’d been the one to put in that stupid crossword clue and register the administrative contact in the name of the book’s hero. Stupid cult sci-fi novel, anyway, just the sort of book I don’t read, exactly as stupid, nerdy, geeky Ivan is just the sort of man I don’t go for.

  I go for men like George, don’t I?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day I decided to go home. When does your parents’ house cease being called ‘home’? I suppose when you’re no longer leaving boxes of old clothes there and escaping to it when being a grown-up gets too tiring. I’d need to stop being stroppy like a teenager on entering its walls and to start helping with the washing-up for it to no longer be my “home.” My sister has children of her own and a house with more than one toilet and with its own eat-in kitchen and a car in the drive. I don’t think she calls our parents’ house “home” any longer and she’s transcended the description “the children” that includes my brother and me.

  It was Friday at least, so I only had one more day of ringing Mimi and putting on that voice of sickness again.

  “You poor thing,” she had said. “You sound terrible.”

  “I feel terrible,” I had croaked.

  “Do you want to talk to Tracy? She’s been asking after you. No offense, babes, but I don’t think she believes you.”

  “No, no,” I said, as if each word would be my last. “Just tell her I’m really bad.”

  After only two days off work I had already slipped into not wearing underwear, and not in a sexy way but accompanied by tracksuit bottoms, and not noticing that the weekend was almost upon us. I topped off the look with some shades and a bobble hat.

  The look was not so much celebrity going incognito as mad woman with rusting shopping cart.

  I bought my ticket at the station and made my way to the appropriately named “suburban platforms.” I liked the dogs Wispa and Snickers anyway; they were my biggest fans, well, had been until Ivan had made his appearance and his tribute site.

  They’d worry about me, my parents, when they saw me. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror outside the photo booth, onto which someone had drawn a beard and glasses in marker pen at about head height. Bearded was better than the wan reality.

  I had disappointed my parents. My mother wanted for me all the dreams she had held for herself and that were now only partially realized by the Creative Writing evening classes. She had given me a unique name in the belief that I would live up to it. I wasn’t even proving adept at the grandchildren-churning stakes as at least my sister had been. They had been so proud of me. I’d won the English prize at school and was solid academically. They thought I’d become a barrister or newspaper editor or politician. But then, so did I.

  I supposed I ought to ring them first. I pulled up H for Home on my mobile and spoke to my father, who was now in semi-retirement and, as a consequence, approaching semi-dotage.

  “Hello, it’s Izobel.”

  “And how is my youngest unwed daughter?”

  “Fine. Is Mum there?”

  “I’m afraid she’s just popped out.” He knew I always wanted to speak to Mum, and not to him, and was as resigned to the fact as other middle-aged fathers across the country. We had a desultory conversation anyway.

  “What are you up to this weekend?” I asked.

  “Busy, busy. We’re going to see that new film about women on Saturday night and are having lunch with the Jacobs on Sunday.”

  “The Jacobs?”

  “Yes, I expect we’ll hear all about Jonny’s latest adventures. I’m sure you could come along, too, they’d love to hear about your job, I’m sure.”

  He didn’t sound very keen for me to do so. There was a window, just after all three of us had left home in our early twenties, when my parents’ life was so empty that my mother would ring every Wednesday and ask “Are we seeing you this weekend, then?” and then on hearing the negative response say, “Oh, that is a shame. Your father will b
e so disappointed,” as if it had always been a given that I’d be there for every Sunday lunch. Soon, they and their friends realized that we were never coming home, not for good anyway, not until the messy divorces and the redundancies kicked in, and so they remade their own lives with a disconcerting degree of efficiency. My old bedroom had recently been turned into an office, or “snug” as my mother called it, with broadband connection and an aggressively powerful PC. My brother’s room was their gym.

  “No, I wasn’t thinking of coming back. I just wondered, that’s all. I’ve got a hundred things to do in London.” I couldn’t face being lumpen adult daughter in front of their friends and answering their questions about public relations and not being asked questions about my marital status. Especially not by Jonny’s mum and dad. “How are Wispa and Snickers?” I asked.

  “A bit worried about the United Nations, actually,” my father replied. They had never disappointed Mum and Dad, especially not now Snickers had a new trick. They alone had fulfilled their puppyish potential.

  I went home and slouched, wondering how long I could survive on cereal. It couldn’t be any less nourishing than the diet of daytime TV that I also snacked upon. I ate my Frosties dry, in great handfuls. I couldn’t tell if I was gaining or losing weight. That’s the joy of elasticized waistbands. As I stood in front of the mirror, I pulled my tracksuit bottoms down and stuck my stomach out over them and put my hands on my back. I really could look pregnant when I did that.

  I wondered what it must be like to be pregnant. It’s a strange parallel universe where everything that has been bad is now good. Where a round sticky-out stomach is to be celebrated and touched; where you must eat lots but drink nothing; where smocks are a fashion item; where women stare at your body on the street, but men ignore you.

  It must be great to be pregnant. Lucky Maggie. She had everything sorted.

  I pulled my trackie bottoms up and held my stomach normally. I wasn’t pregnant. I didn’t even want to be so, at least not with George. I tried to think about what life with George as the father to my children would be like. They’d have stupid thirties country-house names like Ralph and Rollo and Hermione. Little Ralph would be a plucky little chap, stoical, who liked to look after Mummy because Daddy wasn’t so good at it, and wore shorts even in winter. Ralph, George and I would be stuck in my same old flat, unable to move out as the mortgage was getting bigger rather than smaller. Grace would sneer at it and us.

  I shivered as I thought of Christmas future, with George and Ralph. “Will Daddy have the falling-down sickness again tonight?” the little nipper would ask. “Yes, poor Daddy’s very sick and we must be brave for him,” I’d reply and then he’d inquire why there were no presents under the Christmas tree this year.

  I made an effort to end this daymare. I doubted George could fertilize anymore anyway; his swimmers would be lounging round on lilos, drinking martinis rather than doing the front crawl anywhere near my ovaries.

  Ivan’s wouldn’t. His sperm would be twisted and double-crossing. Why had he written the death date? I could almost have forgiven him the rest of the site, I could almost have thought of it as an elaborate Valentine. But not the death date. Why, Ivan, I longed to ask him.

  I hadn’t heard anything from the police, but then I hadn’t expected to. So I was just stuck there, suspended, snacking on food and trash TV, waiting for a sign that life would change once again.

  As usual, I switched on my PC and clicked on the Explorer button to bring up my site. The sound of the modem ringing the connection was the modern equivalent of chalk scratching on a blackboard, whiiirrr-eeee, bee-bo. I grimaced. It verified the user-name and password and yet the familiar page did not fill the screen. I refreshed izobelbrannigan.com in a way that I could not Izobel Brannigan dot woman, but the site was as listless as I was. Ivan was clearly experiencing server problems again. Or maybe he was adding a whole new batch of photos, all with the same theme, me badly dressed nipping out from here to the newsagent’s to buy the evening paper.

  There was a message from him on my mobile.

  “Izobel, listen, I know you think I’m behind the site, but I’m not. I can’t prove it to you, but I wish you’d believe me. There must have been hundreds of people at that party. That I was one of them doesn’t mean anything. Please phone me so we can at least talk about this.”

  “Don’t give me that,” I said out loud to my mobile. “What about everything else? That you fancied me for months, that you admitted coming to the office on false pretenses, your creepy computer set-up at home? Hey, what about that?” But I hadn’t said these things to Ivan, not yet. I was going to confront him, I just didn’t know when or how.

  I wanted to ask him why the site was down again. He wasn’t the best advert for his own server capacity. I wanted to ask him what new horrors he was planning. What if he had taken photos of us kissing? Of our mouths meeting, of my legs and arms wrapped around his, our limbs as twisted as his mind? “George,” I practiced saying, “it’s not how it looks.”

  I blushed, although I was quite alone. What if I had slept with Ivan? He could have had photos of me naked, of me licking him, or him stroking my breasts and the tops of my thighs and touching me everywhere, penetrating me, making me come.

  Phew, I thought. That would have been horrific.

  I checked the site again. I am still down, I am still broken.

  *

  I went back to the site at midday. I could see the logo forming slowly on the page and I knew that it was back. Despite my fears that kissing pictures were planned and my lurid thoughts about the things that Ivan and I never did, the site looked much the same, including the death date. I leaned in but that didn’t make any difference. I watched the ticker tick until a new message from Ivan appeared.

  “We’re sorry for izobelbrannigan being down for a few hours. Our servers were disabled by a dramatic surge in the number of users logging onto the site. We believe this spike in traffic was caused by unexpected press coverage.”

  Press interest was the holy grail of my profession, but I didn’t like the idea of my life and site being bared to strangers.

  I rang Maggie. “You get all the papers at work, don’t you?”

  “Officially, yes. They all get filched first thing, though.”

  “Apparently there’s been some press interest in the site. Could you have a look and see if you can see anything for me?”

  “I’m just about to go into a meeting, but I’ll try to check later. Is that OK?”

  How inconvenient of her. What meeting could possibly be more important than my site?

  I thought about ringing Ivan and asking him what he meant by “press coverage.” I did hope it was a broadsheet rather than a tabloid. If he had taken pictures of us tussling, then it could be the Star. I shivered. Saucy sexpot Izobel’s site shows sizzling sex. However, in the great scheme of Internet titillation, I reckoned that some fully dressed shots of me kissing Ivan were unlikely to get the punters drooling.

  A broadsheet would be better. There might be an article about the rise of blogging or self-promotion on the Net. I might be like that Turkish man, what was his name, Mahir, who became an international star through his use of the phrase “I kiss you!!!!” and his desire to take foto-camera of nice nude models.

  I went into my e-mail account and messaged mail@izobel brannigan.com. Aka Ivan.

  Subject: press interest

  What on earth are you on? What press coverage? Tell me now, Ivan.

  I paused and deleted the word “Ivan.” And added:

  The police know about the 1973–2003 business.

  Send.

  Ten minutes later, a message marked re: press interest came back to me. It was a short missive, only containing the name of a middlebrow tabloid. The middlebrow tabloid that kept George in vodka and tonics.

  I put on my baseball cap and slunk out of the flat to the newsagent’s. Having your newsagent greet you like a friend seemed shaming. Other than George, he was th
e only person I had seen the day before.

  “You don’t usually buy that one,” he said on handing me the change from the purchase of George’s newspaper.

  I felt like I could have been buying porn. “I know, I don’t usually. It’s not for me, I mean, there’s an article in here that I’d like to read. But no, generally, not my cup of tea at all.” We looked complicit in our disapproval of George’s employers.

  I waited until I got home and opened it up. I had lied; a terrible part of me enjoyed reading the articles about celebrities being too fat or too thin, the which-bikini-for-which-body features and the stories about murderous divorcees. I skipped them all that day, though, as I searched for something about izobelbrannigan.com. Nothing, nothing, nothing, until I got to the section in the middle, called the women’s bit, as if all the news and politics preceding it had been nothing for them to worry their pretty little heads over.

  MY GIRLFRIEND THE INTERNET STAR shouted the headline on a full-page article, illustrated with screen grabs from the girlfriend in question’s Web site. “If another man is after your beloved you can always fight it out, right?” said the introduction. “Not if he anonymously uses the Internet to woo her, finds George Grand.” George’s name was in bold letters, accompanied by a photo of him where he looked more Second World War Ministry of Home Affairs correspondent than ever.

  I skimmed George’s piece, but not so fast that I couldn’t judge it very ill-written. In it, he recounted how he’d found a site on the Internet devoted to his girlfriend and his dilemma as to whether to tell her or not. He wrote of how unnerving it was to find that your girlfriend has become Web-famous and that strangers were offering up proposals to her, both sexual and marital. He attempted to garner sympathy by painting himself the old fuddy-duddy who knows he can’t compete with these young things with their technology and wacky ways. Why, he can’t even work out how to text-message yet, the old curmudgeon that he is.

  I shook my head. Even the site seemed to contain more truth than this piffle. I was pilloried in print and online. I half expected to turn on the radio and hear a panel discussing me or find myself the subject of a television investigation by a consumer affairs program.