Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  I stared. Of course her living in this street was an indication that she might be the one, but a clue that I had chosen not to truly believe. She was such a nonentity, a negative presence. It could not be that I had been made to feel a somebody by such a nobody. I felt an odd sensation of disappointment.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s me.” She moved to block it, only confirming her guilt. “Where did you get that photo from?”

  “Camilla didn’t want it.”

  That didn’t surprise me.

  I looked at Ivan, who gave me a smile. That was all I needed. “Alice, we know what you’ve done.”

  “What do you mean? Why are you here?”

  We’re here to accuse you of creating a Web site in my honor, you random person I was once at school with and hadn’t seen for thirteen years, if I’d ever seen you in the first place. I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t quite believe it. “We know you registered a domain name. The registrant confirmed it.”

  “Registrar,” corrected Ivan.

  “Piss off.” I felt fury froth within me. At Alice, but I channeled it toward Ivan. “The registrar confirmed that you bought,” I paused, “Izobelbrannigan dot co dot uk. And there’s dot com too. They gave us your name and address.”

  “That’s impossible. That’s not true, they don’t give away names and addresses. They don’t even have them,” she replied quietly, while edging toward the door. I moved toward it while Ivan stayed by the computer, making her piggy in the middle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.” I still couldn’t accuse her directly. It was embarrassing, that’s what it was, it felt too socially inappropriate to have to say it. “Do you want me to spell it out?”

  “What?”

  “Come on Alice, all the evidence is there. That photo, and you’d have easily found the one on the school site. You said the other day that you’re signed up to the school Web site e-mail letter or something.”

  “So?”

  “Those were the first two photos on the site. You could have got the other photo from the foyer of my office and you know how to program sites, you were a bit of an admirer of mine at school. Shit, you were there, you were there when Frank said that snidey thing about me being able to speak Chinese. You knew that.”

  “I expect lots of people know you speak Chinese.”

  “But I don’t. Ha. It was a lie to catch him out. But I’ve caught you out instead.”

  She sat down calmly. “I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Izobel,” said Ivan. “Are you sure? Why would she?”

  “I’ve just said why it’s her.”

  “You’ve explained how it could be her, but not why. Why did she do it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

  “And Izobel, she’s a girl.”

  At that moment, I was sure that I saw her stick out her chest at him. She was small, but had an unexpectedly fine embonpoint. It was a tiny puffing movement, but enough. I flew at her and pinned her arms back on the sofa while sitting on her, like I used to do to my little brother so that my sister could fart in his face.

  “You stupid fucking cow. Don’t you have any idea what you’ve done to me?”

  “No,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. Her face was too close to mine and I leaped back.

  “Ivan, keep an eye on her, don’t let her move.”

  “OK,” he said to me. “Sorry,” he said to her.

  I went to the kitchen area and opened the fridge. It was the usual single dweller’s void, a jar of pesto, a couple of yogurts and some milk. I found a can of cola lurking. That would do.

  “Right,” I said on returning to the sitting room. I pulled the gargantuan computer processor out from under the desk and tipped it up so that the underbelly spewed out its wires. I pulled out its intestines and held the can high above its target. “If you don’t start telling me why you created izobelbrannigan dot com, the computer gets it.”

  She remained silent.

  “Fair enough,” I said and opened the can, letting some of its caffeinated stickiness spurt out. I started tipping it.

  “Stop,” shouted Ivan and Alice with one voice. “Have you any idea how much one of those is worth?” he added.

  I continued until a little dribble began to form on the can and then ooze its way toward impregnation.

  “All right, all right. It’s me,” said Alice. “Please stop.”

  I had been sure of it, I had been convinced that she was behind the site, but I still felt my legs buckle at her admission. My face flushed as if I had been slapped across both cheeks. I didn’t want it to be her. She wasn’t supposed to be the one. “But why?”

  She exhaled, as if more relieved about her computer than embarrassed about what she had been accused of. I held my weapon above her beloved once again and repeated: “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Not good enough, Alice.”

  “I made a site, so what?” She was kicking her feet together and looking at them like a bolshie teenager accused of smoking.

  “So what?” I repeated. “It’s weird, that’s what.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” This was getting repetitive. “Because it’s creepy and weird and not normal. You must be obsessed with me or something.”

  “Not really. Elizabethans wrote sonnets, artists paint pictures, photographers take photos, I create sites about people I admire.”

  “Sorry? Why do you do that?”

  “It’s what I do, it’s my hobby. Don’t you have a hobby, Izobel? I thought you learned Chinese, but you don’t, do you? People like you and Camilla don’t do hobbies, do you? You’ve got nothing like my family of sites.”

  “Sites?” I asked, with almost a trace of disgruntlement. “Sites plural?”

  She did that whinnying giggle that I remembered from our first meeting. “Yes, you’re not the only person.”

  “Good,” I said. “Thank God for that.”

  “Like who else?” asked Ivan.

  “Tim Berners-Lee…”

  “He sort of invented the Internet,” explained Ivan to me.

  “George Clooney…”

  “But aren’t you, aren’t you, I mean, not interested in men?” Alice and I united in a disparaging look thrown in his direction.

  “Ada Lovelace,” she continued. “She was a nineteenth-century mathematician who wrote the first computer program. Who else? Mrs. Bredwin…”

  “Our old maths teacher.” It was my turn to patronize Ivan. “Does she know about it? Has she seen it?” Alice shrugged. “What does she think about having a site devoted to her? Have you thought about that?”

  “I expect she’d be flattered. Weren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a little bit?” She was growing in confidence. I wanted to slap her down again. “Isn’t your life better for it?”

  “No, it’s not. I’ve felt hounded and I’m about to get sacked from my job and my,” I paused, “my life’s just not the same.”

  “Isn’t it better? I mean, you’ve got rid of that drunken boyfriend of yours.”

  If I could have gone any redder, I would have done at this moment.

  Ivan looked at us both. “Boyfriend?”

  “Ex-boyfriend.”

  “He was horrible. Always drunk, wasn’t he, Izobel?” said Alice.

  “Me splitting up with George had absolutely nothing to do with the site. And fuck off, how dare you comment to me about my life when the only reason you know anything about it is because you’ve been following me. You disgust me. Don’t you dare claim responsibility for anything I’ve done.”

  “Bit of a coincidence though, that you should chuck him now.”

  “Did you chuck him for me?” asked Ivan.

  “Shut up. Shut up, both of you, I chucked him for myself.”

  “Really?” said Alice.

  “You can shut the fuck up!” I wa
nted to shove her, to grab her hair and pull it out of her head, I wanted some sort of physical contact because words alone could not express the strange mixture of fury and curiosity. I felt a tingling anger prick my skin and my fists clench so hard that the skin was stretched taut. “Why?” I wailed. “You didn’t even know me when you started it. How can you claim to admire me?”

  “You were so cool at school.”

  “That was a long time ago. I didn’t know you.”

  “I remember it so well. I thought you were amazing. You wore a black polo neck and funny secondhand clothes and always had on a Walkman and I’d ask you what album you were playing and it was always something really obscure while everybody else was listening to Michael Jackson.”

  “I was cool, wasn’t I?”

  “Amazing. You stood for the Greens in that mock election. I mean, I’d never even heard of the environment until you did that. I used to try to find you every day in assembly to see what you were wearing and doing and then copy you at weekends. Didn’t you ever see me on home clothes day?”

  “No.”

  “I wore stuff that you did, like velvet trousers and men’s jackets and fifties shoes. I don’t dress like that anymore.”

  “Sounds horrible,” added Ivan.

  “But it wasn’t. It was so brilliant,” she said to him. “Izobel was just so different to all the other girls and she wrote poetry and recommended Sylvia Plath to me.”

  “I did?”

  “I heard you talking about The Bell Jar to one of your friends.”

  Ivan was shaking his head. “Izobel, this is all very sweet but why the site?”

  “Yes, why then, why did you create a site a few months ago?”

  “I started working on OnLove with Camilla and she was talking about Frank’s friends and I recognized your name. Then I was looking through her photos and I saw the one of you and Frank and Maggie and it gave me the idea.”

  It grated on me that she should even dare to use Maggie’s name. She doesn’t know her, she’s not her friend.

  “What, and you saw a photo of me and you thought, ‘Oh, I know, I’m going to start stalking her’?”

  “Camilla told me what you were up to these days and I remembered how brilliant you’d been.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ivan rolled his eyes. “So you created a site?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “I thought I’d make it and then I’d contact you and I might show you it and we’d become friends like I always thought we would and hang out with each other. Maybe we’d update the site together.”

  “You created it before we met up again?”

  “Yes, I created a site about the Izobel who I remembered. Then I met you, when Camilla and I came into your office.”

  “And?”

  “And you weren’t the person I remembered. You were still pretty and funny and stuff, but you hadn’t become what I thought you would. You were less than that.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “You hadn’t become extraordinary.”

  “Great, thanks, so why continue the site?”

  “Then it changed. Rather than being a tribute to you, I thought I’d help you to become extraordinary.”

  “You what?”

  “I thought I’d help you fulfill your potential. To become that person that I thought you’d be.”

  “I still don’t understand. How is freaking me out and becoming my stalker going to help me?”

  “I thought if someone admired you then you might start admiring yourself. And the public too, the ones who wrote stuff about you and which I put on the site. Your public.”

  “They were real? The ‘Izobel’s fit and unattractive’? I thought you made them up.”

  “No, they were real. Some found izobelbrannigan after the article George wrote, which wasn’t very accurate by the way, others by just general Googling. There are bloggers who write up every site on bulletin boards. I do that too, so I just took their comments and those that were e-mailed and put them on the site. With a few spelling corrections, of course, what with you having won the English prize at school. I wanted Izobel’s fans to be grammatically correct. I knew they wouldn’t help you if they weren’t.”

  “Help me what?”

  “Celebrate yourself.”

  “What, like if you made me into a sort of celebrity then I’d become my own biggest fan?”

  “Exactly.” She was so calm now, while I felt flustered.

  “For Christ’s sake,” interjected Ivan. “Don’t listen to this crap, Izobel. Look, she’s clearly a lesbian with a dangerous obsession.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think she is.”

  “But she was in love with you at school.”

  “No, she wasn’t, she admired me. It’s different when you’re at school.” Alice and I looked at each other in rare concurrence. “Was your school an all-boys’ one?” He shook his head. “When you’re at school, you see the same people all day every day and it’s like an office and you end up obsessing over people you wouldn’t do in normal circumstances. I mean, haven’t you ever obsessed over someone completely inappropriate at work?” He raised an eyebrow. “At school, you don’t know quite who you are yet and you don’t have exposure to boys but you do have older girls...”

  “Sapphic school frolics kind of thing?”

  “No. With teenage girls it’s not about sex at all. Even the crushes you have on pop stars aren’t particularly sexual. You fancy really pretty girl-boys who you want to look like rather than get off with...”

  “And with the girls at school, the girls two or three years above you, it’s that you want to be them rather than be with them.” Ivan and I turned to Alice with a start.

  “And still do?” he asked.

  She shook her head. I leaned against the wall and then found myself slithering down it in exhaustion. “Then why?”

  “I wanted you to be you.”

  “Oh right,” he said. “And just how was putting those death dates going to help Izobel become Izobel?”

  “They weren’t death dates,” she said. “They were section dates. I was going to start a new section for two thousand and three onward.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Ivan.

  I thought back to the day I discovered them. “It was after I got off with Ivan, wasn’t it? You were jealous.”

  “Exactly, she’s a lesbian.”

  “No, she was jealous of me, not of you. She fancies you. You fancy Ivan.”

  “No I don’t. Of course I don’t.” As if being accused of fancying a boy was worse than people thinking you were some weirdo cyber-stalker. “I just thought that things weren’t going very quickly. That things weren’t changing in your life despite all my best efforts. So I upped the ante.”

  “By threatening to kill me.”

  “Hardly, I just planted an idea in your head. And it worked, didn’t it? You’re happy to blow off work in PR and you dumped that George.”

  “Who is this George?” asked Ivan.

  “He’s the one in the photo outside the pub,” she said. “Balding.”

  “What, the old man?” They looked at me pityingly.

  “Piss off, both of you. If you’re so concerned with my happiness, why did you carry on with the site after I e-mailed you asking you to stop?”

  Alice shrugged.

  “Don’t you shrug at me.”

  “I was going to stop when I was ready.”

  “I see, it’s all about control, isn’t it? What sort of a sad and empty life do you lead that you should have to create and control your friends online?”

  “It’s what I do,” she repeated. “I do most things online, including chatting to friends and helping them to change their lives for the better.”

  “Weirdo. Why don’t you hang out with your real ones more?”

  She drooped.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’re lonely. You’ve got Camilla. And the other ones.
Why don’t you create a bloody site about them? Why isn’t there a camillajenkinson dot com?”

  “She’s not you.”

  “Well, at least have a normal friendship with her instead of an abnormal one with me.”

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Rubbish, you’re always hanging out.”

  “She’s just working with me as I’m so brilliant at programming. The others only put up with me because Camilla does. She never wants to see me outside work unless it’s to talk about Internet dating and making lots of money.”

  “But I’ve seen you together—at Mick’s birthday in the pub, at Maggie’s party and stuff.”

  “I followed you to that bookshop and then the pub after work and then pretended to bump into her. And I heard you and Camilla talking about Maggie’s so I went along. She’d invited Becksy and Molly along, but not me.”

  I thought back to that night and how I had come upon her with Camilla and Frank. “What does Frank think of you?”

  “Your friend Frank doesn’t like me or any of Camilla’s friends much. They’ve been arguing about us for ages and then they had a row in front of me. Camilla said that he had to be nice to her school friends if he loved her and anyway she had to be nice to me because of OnLove and he said it was creepy how I kept turning up places.”

  Of course; I thought back to the atmosphere between Frank and his girlfriend and their overheard remarks. “He said he wasn’t going out with one of Camilla’s school friends, but he was going out with her.”

  “Yes, they argue about it all the time. But don’t worry, I think they’re going to get married anyway.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes, he’s proposed and they were just about to announce it at that party but then they had the argument.”

  I always thought I’d mind the moment when Frank said he was marrying somebody else, but I didn’t. “Not quite the little home-wrecker this time then.”

  “But aren’t you glad about your and George’s home being wrecked? Don’t tell me your life isn’t better because of me and the site.”

  Something about her smugness and her self-belief and everything about the fact that she was right filled me with fury that turned itself into energy. “That’s it. That is fucking it.” And then I started screaming. It wasn’t as if I really felt I wanted to scream, more that I was wondering what I would do if this was happening to me and screaming seemed to be what I or a good actress would do. I couldn’t feel what I wanted to do, only try to think what I wanted to do in such an instance. It was as if I were autistic and had to teach myself human reaction, the whole situation being so far from one that I had programmed instincts for.