Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  I began to cry. About Maggie, about the site and about George. Or not George himself, but the prospect of being alone and the humiliation of having screwed up yet again. I felt an over-whelming impatience to get this bit out of the way, the sadness at the end of yet another relationship, and get onto the next stage. There was a finite amount of tears I had to shed on the way to feeling better. I imagined a big measuring jug or an outsize cardboard thermometer shape like they have on TV charity appeals. This would fill with my tears and when we reached a pint, I’d feel better again. I wanted to fast-forward to that time, skip the scenes, but with clarity, like on a DVD, when I would be over both George and Ivan and when Maggie would have forgiven me.

  Another text came through. I wondered what one word’s worth of insult would be etched onto my mobile screen this time.

  When you feel like it, please phone me, Ivan.

  Words spelled out in full and everything. For a crazy, creepy stalker he was very sweet. I had nothing to miss, and yet I missed him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Izobel, please, it’s me again. I hate this. I’m not the one behind the site.

  If you pick up the phone we can at least talk about this. It’s not even about the other night anymore, it’s about clearing my name and explaining that I’m not cyber-weirdo.

  Why? Why would I have created this site about you? I didn’t even know you then. I might do now. Oh, that’s come out wrong. You know what I mean. You’re so aggravating.

  The last of Ivan’s messages had a point. It was clearly pre-sumptuous to believe yourself to be so freak-sexy that a man you barely knew was busy creating cyber-paeans to your loveliness. But somebody had to have done it and I wanted to know why. I would find out why.

  Sunday saw a surge in spirits as I lathered myself up into a frothing frenzy of self-righteousness by scrubbing the flat. A murderer donning rubber gloves and cleaning the scene of the crime could not have expunged George’s presence as thoroughly as I did. I dug around in the bathroom sink to remove short dark hairs; I used his expensive facial scrub on the oven; I threw away the bottle of vodka from the freezer and the beers from the fridge; I changed the message on the answerphone from “we” to “I.” And that was it. We had no children to fight over nor possessions of any worth. Our mutual ties were dissolved by bleach and Flash liquid.

  Just at the point when the flat had reached a zenith of clean and my body a nadir of filth, the doorbell rang. I trotted toward it and then stopped to think who it might be. I presumed George was on his spa weekend, that his desolation at being dumped by me had not impeded the journey to Gloucestershire with Catherine, so it would not be him. Ivan? It could be Ivan, of course, bored with harassing me by text message and now here in person. I slunk toward the door and used my raggedy nails to pull back the letter box flap and look out onto the street. My eyes were just above the crotch level of the visitor and I could see that it was male with a reasonably well-filled pair of gray cords. I pressed my face further to the letter box. It was like some terrible, smutty late-night game show where the female contestants have to try to identify their boyfriends by looking at their groins alone. I could not tell who this was, though I didn’t recognize the crotch as belonging to George. He thought cords were for geography teachers.

  The crotch crouched and a pair of dimly familiar blue eyes met mine, only inches away on the other side of the door. I sprang back into the hallway, propelled by embarrassment and shock.

  “Izobel, does Izobel live here?”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s an old friend of hers. William.”

  “William?” I opened the door in curiosity and finally got a full view of the person on the doorstep, rather than the game-of-consequences part vistas I had previously had of bits of his body. He was wearing a neat button-down shirt and a crew-necked sweater, while his hair was almost crew-cut. He looked very different from the long- and lank-haired ex-boyfriend I remembered. He looked like a nice young man who worked in marketing, except for the fact that he was aggressively chewing gum.

  At the same time he looked me up and down. He smiled slightly at the beginning of this journey, when looking at my head, and I remembered that I was wearing an old pair of knickers to keep my hair off my face. I pulled them off and stuffed them into my pocket. My disheveled appearance was in contrast to his immaculate turnout, though it had always been the other way round.

  “Hello Izobel. You look the same.”

  “And you look so different.”

  “I am very different,” he said.

  What, no longer a drifting rich kid, trustafarian with a penchant for ever harder drugs, I wanted to ask, but instead came out with the question: “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “That’s exactly what I want.”

  I ushered him in, only then wondering at the wisdom of letting in a man who, even when we’d been together, I’d known to be weird. I thought of the death dates on the site for a second, but letting him in seemed less embarrassing than leaving him on the street. I thought that would be a characteristic way for me to go, done in by my fear of social unease.

  “Your flat’s nice,” he said. It was true, I thought on looking round. It now looked chic and minimalist, uncluttered by George’s presence and possessions.

  “You’ve never been here before, then?”

  “No, you were living in that house with those girls. And at mine mostly.”

  “Of course.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  Less time than since last we met, I thought. I hadn’t seen him for about six or seven years. After Frank, with some overlap with Jonny, but before Pepe, Married Man, Elliot and George. And here you are, after George. And after the site, what was he doing here?

  “A while now. Time passes.”

  “It does, but every day we learn something new.”

  “I wish. I feel like every day I just forget something I had once learned.”

  He looked earnest. He always used to be a giggler, but that was perhaps because he was mostly stoned or on something harder. He could spend hours watching his video of cane toads or old children’s television programs. “Do you mind?” he said on getting out a packet of cigarettes.

  I was surprised. He seemed too clean-cut for nicotine. I had toyed with the idea of making my flat nonsmoking now George had gone, but I got out an ashtray, into which he put his piece of chewing gum, wrapped in the clear cellophane of the cigarette packet. I fought an urge to whip it away and empty it immediately. Even George didn’t leave bits of gum lying around.

  “The NA doesn’t have a policy on nicotine, caffeine and sugar,” he said on putting three heaped teaspoons into his cup.

  “NA?”

  “Narcotics Anonymous. I’ve been clean for almost a year,” he added proudly.

  “Great. I didn’t know you were a drug addict, actually. I mean, I knew you were a bit of a stoner and there was the coke. But a junkie?”

  “That was the first step in curing myself, admitting that I had a drug problem.”

  “Well done,” I said and I meant it. With the money he had, the company he kept and the indolence he maintained, that must have been hard. I couldn’t see George ever admitting to a drink problem and seeking help. For a start, he might have to become as earnest and squarely dressed as this figure before me. William looked like a priest in home clothes.

  There was a silence while I thought about the coincidence of having had relationships with a junkie and an alcoholic. Then I wondered what the hell William was doing here. Spending awkward moments with ex-boyfriends had become so natural to me that I had forgotten that this time it was he who had sought me out and not the other way round. I now understood how unnerving it must have been for the others.

  “It’s great to see you, William, but to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  He twitched and I was reminded of the old William, the druggie one. He’d been much more sexy then, it pained me to think. Our time together had been
a mixture of high glamour and low life. He lived in a house that had the exterior of a pastel-colored mews house in an expensive part of London and the interior of a student crack den. We’d gone to Glastonbury and slept in a sludge-filled tent, but we got there by helicopter. He was a vegetarian whose mother organized a home delivery of a box full of costly organic vegetables in season. We’d stay up smoking all night, but we would almost never have sex.

  “I was at my training course. I’m going to man the NA helpline once a week. You can only do that when you’re at least five months clean. I’m not a sponsor yet, you’ve got to be clean for longer for that.”

  “Great, but why are you here?”

  “It was nearby so I thought I’d pop round. I remembered you lived here.”

  The William I had known had never remembered anything, nor had he ever known I had lived here at all. I had never told him. We had not ended badly but I had loved that house of his so very much that I felt its loss too keenly to ever go back to visit. I began to feel uncomfortable.

  “Do you still use your computer much? You played a lot of games on it and stuff,” I asked.

  He shook his head. “That’s another addiction. I got hooked on the Internet and all the games so Wise Al, he’s my sponsor, he said I should give that up too. After the drugs, I was spending fourteen-hour stretches at my computer so I was replacing one drug with another, you see, instead of achieving a sense of a power beyond the addictions I had around me.”

  “So you never use the Internet now?”

  “Never. Al says I’ll slip back into all my old habits if I do.”

  “What were you doing on the Net anyway?”

  “Games that you play across networks with other addicts and the porn, of course.”

  “Porn? But you never, well, I never thought of you as being an aggressively sexual person.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I suppose.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him. Did it matter, since I knew Ivan was behind the site? I realized then that I didn’t know anymore, that I wasn’t sure I had ever really known it was Ivan. I feared it might be him and I feared it might not. I supposed I should be asking William leading questions and telling him a falsehood to incriminate him, but at that moment I felt very tired of the whole business.

  Another pause. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.”

  “Well, yes. I did ask.”

  “I’m trying to make amends for harm I may have done.”

  “Big Al told you to do that, did he?”

  “Wise Al, yes he did advise me to, as well as the power beyond myself. For me to really break free of the past, I have to right any wrongs that I have done in the darkness of my addictions.”

  “You didn’t harm me. Really, any mess I’m in is entirely my own, thanks.”

  “I bumped into your friend Frank recently. It was him who told me where you lived so I guess that’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.”

  “He told me other stuff about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “The fact that you weren’t moving on and that your boyfriend was an addict. I feel that I may have started off a chain of codependency in your life and I wanted to help you break it. There are support groups for people like you, too, you know, partners of addicts.”

  “Mumbo-jumbo, codependency. Next you’ll tell me that I’m an enabler.”

  “You are.”

  “Thought so. Anyway, I’m not with George anymore. I dumped him and I’m leaving my job, too.” Was I? “I am moving on.” Yes, I was, I thought at that moment.

  “Cool, Izobel, it looks like you’re beginning to have your own spiritual awakening. Would you like a sponsor?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Thanks.”

  “We could work through some of the issues, the ones that we developed while we were together, go through the past together. I want to make amends, Izobel.”

  He wasn’t the author of the site, of that I was certain, but he sure was creepy. He always used to be weird, with that high-pitched laugh and that occasional rage against his father, but this beatific calm was even weirder.

  “But you can’t. I mean, you’ve nothing to make amends for. And it’s pointless going back to the past to sort out the future. It doesn’t solve anything. I thought it did, I thought the past held all the answers, but it doesn’t, I know that now. You’re not going to sort things out by talking to me, but by talking to Brown Al and thinking about what you want to do in the future. The past is only helpful up to a point. I’ve been looking at the past and now I’m done with it and I want to get on with the rest of my life.”

  He nodded slowly and repeatedly.

  I shrugged. “So I guess I ought to get on with the future right now,” I said and stood up to usher him out.

  *

  I got up early on Monday morning and washed the weekend out of my hair. I decided to go into the office. Apart from anything else, more than three days off work and I’d need a doctor’s note. I wasn’t sure whether I ever wanted to write one of PR O’Create’s press releases again, nor did I think I wanted to see Ivan. I shivered at the thought, God forbid, but I had to go in.

  “Babes, you’re back,” shouted Mimi. “Loved your bloke’s article about the Web site.”

  “A word in my office,” greeted Tracy.

  “Why don’t you return our calls? I’ve called you three days in a row,” barked Camilla on my voice mail.

  “If you’re back give me a call,” pleaded Ivan by the same medium.

  “Sorry about the other day,” Maggie told me on my mobile. “Must be the hormones. Such a fantastic thing to blame all crabbiness on, I wish I’d thought of it sooner.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I really am. You’ve nothing to apologize for and I’ve no hormones to blame. I’ve been a stupid cow lately.”

  “Forget it. Listen, I’ve been thinking, have you done anything about William? We’d forgotten about him, hadn’t we? And he’s such a likely candidate to be site perp.”

  “Funny you should mention him. Sometime I’ll tell you all about William, but let’s not talk about the site.”

  “But I want to. It keeps my mind active.”

  “But we’ve got our man, haven’t we? It’s Ivan.” Again, I tried to convince myself.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’ve never met him.”

  “More’s the pity, he sounds lovely.”

  “For a creepy techie stalker.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a bit circumstantial: he happened to be at Hot Bob’s party. It’s not exactly incriminating.”

  “And he’s admitted that he fancied me for months and used to stalk these offices, knows how to work a computer and can create a site in minutes. Anyway, enough about the site, though. How are you doing, Maggie? Are you well? How are your last few days in the office going? What do you think about the single currency?”

  She laughed. “I’m pregnant so I have instincts now. And my instincts are telling me it’s not Ivan. And don’t forget my leaving thing on Wednesday night. I need all the support I can get from you lot; my friends are the civvies to the troops that I work with. I’m sure they make these events deliberately mortifying in order to ensure that nobody ever leaves their jobs. You hadn’t forgotten, had you?”

  “Of course I hadn’t forgotten.” Of course I had. “Can’t wait to meet all your colleagues at last. Anyone eligible? Joke, by the way, am so not on the pull. Yet.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  It had been a terrible effort to drag myself into the office that morning. I didn’t feel strong enough to dress up and face a jostling party full of people who lived their lives with all the drama of their profession. But there was no way that I could shirk Maggie’s party. Death threat or no death threat. I felt mildly disgruntled for a moment that Maggie should feel that a cyber death date was not a valid enough excuse for nonattendance. I looked at my office computer screen in its sleek flatness. I imagined a h
and coming out of it and grabbing me by the throat. I had seen too many horror films.

  *

  I spent the morning looking toward the door of our open-plan office and looking busy should Tracy pass by my desk. There was no sign of Ivan.

  “You’re skating on thin ice,” she had told me in our five-minute meeting. “There’s no room for deadweight at PR O’Create,” she continued. “It’s time to pull your socks up.” That original mind had made us one of the best PR firms in the game.

  “I don’t think any of my clients would complain.”

  “That’s where you’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick, Izobel.”

  “Who?”

  “Camilla Jenkinson.”

  “What?”

  “I met her at a launch on Thursday, she’s fabulous, and she mentioned that you hadn’t been very forthcoming with a PR proposal for their fascinating-sounding venture, OnLove. Internet dating, it’s going to be so big. Wouldn’t use it myself, mind you.”

  “But, she’s not paying anything. We haven’t been hired by her and I didn’t want to do work on it as it was just a favor, she’s a friend, well a friend of a friend, and I didn’t want to use up company resources on that.”

  “It’s called a pitch, Izobel. It’s how we win business. Well, maybe not how you do. I’ve always been the pitch queen.”

  The pitch bitch, I thought, but muttered, “All right, I’ll have something for them by tomorrow.”

  “By today. I invited her into the office by way of an apology. She’ll be here at one thirty.”

  “But that doesn’t give me any time...”

  “She can only come in at lunchtime. Some people work for a living. Anyway you should have thought of that when you decided not to grace us with your presence for all of last week.”