Away from Becky’s reasonable influence, the madness soon set in. Michael wouldn’t talk to me, but that didn’t mean the trail was dead. The following day, having called in to work and claimed illness yet again, I picked up my mobile and started calling all those people in my contacts list who had some connection to my ex-boyfriend. Michael’s sister was first. I’d never really liked her and it was clear that the feeling was mutual. She told me quite primly that I couldn’t possibly expect her to be anything other than loyal to her brother and I should delete her number from my phone forthwith. I told her it would be my pleasure.
A couple of others (including an old school friend of Michael’s who had given me his number in case I ever wanted to “upgrade” from his childhood pal) put me straight through to voicemail. I did get through to Michael’s tailor (I had that number because I’d picked up some altered shirts—sleeves shortened), but though Ahmed was very sweet and claimed he was sad to hear my news, he assured me that he knew nothing about Michael except his inside-leg measurement.
“But I hope you find a nice husband soon,” he told me kindly. “You are a very pretty girl.”
The compliment washed over me. I was on a mission.
Having exhausted all other possible leads, I called Helen, the friend who had introduced me to Michael at her birthday party all those months ago.
“Oh, I’m sorry you guys broke up,” she said. Of course, she must have heard about the incident in the office but was tactful enough to pretend otherwise.
“Who is he seeing?” I begged her.
“Ashleigh,” she said, “I promise you I have no idea. I left the firm on maternity leave four months ago. At the time that I left, the pair of you seemed to be going strong.”
“Are you sure? Did he talk about any women in the office in a way you thought inappropriate? Was there anyone in the office he seemed especially close to?”
“How would I have known? It’s a big company. Thousands of people work there. And after Michael got promoted to partner, we were working on different floors. We were four floors apart. He could have been having an affair with Kylie Minogue and I wouldn’t have heard a thing. I’m sorry. Look, I’ve got to go.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve got a new baby, remember? Poor thing’s been wailing for the past fifteen minutes.”
Another day off work. A huge increase in my phone bill. And I had achieved exactly nothing.
But I was not to be discouraged. It struck me as I looked at old photographs of me and Michael on holiday, and tried to work out if he looked unhappy even then, that if Michael had announced the end of our relationship via Facebook, there was a very strong chance that he would announce the beginning of his new relationship in the same way. The problem with that was that I no longer had access to his Facebook page. The only Facebook “friend” we had in common was my assistant, Ellie. Michael had signed her up after meeting her at my thirtieth birthday party, back in the day when we were all trying to get as many Facebook contacts as we could and were making friends with all comers, even actively hunting down people we had once spoken to at a bus stop.
But I couldn’t ask Ellie to let me know what Michael was doing. I was supposed to be off work with a virulent stomach bug, for a start. Asking her to help would mean telling her the truth, and that I did not want to do. Not yet. Ellie was like a Komodo dragon that merely nips its prey on the ankle and waits for sepsis to set in. Whenever I showed the least sign of weakness, I would feel her gaze upon me, as though she were calculating just how much longer she would have to wait before I keeled over and she could have my job, my desk, and my view of the executive car park. Though I wasn’t thinking straight by any means, I was compos mentis enough to know that I did not want to show any weakness in front of Ellie.
So how would I get access to Michael’s Facebook account? At about eleven o’clock that night I had a small stroke of genius. I didn’t have to ask any of my real friends to check up on Michael for me when I could create a stalking horse in the form of one of his own acquaintances.
Sitting in front of my laptop, I concentrated hard as I tried to remember the faces on Michael’s friends list and fit them to the names I knew. I was looking for just one member of his crowd who didn’t yet have a Facebook profile. Someone who had pooh-poohed the idea. There was bound to be one. Michael’s friends were mostly accountants. They pooh-poohed a lot of things.
After much thought and much Googling, I thought that at last I had found the perfect alias to use.
I would pretend to be Helen’s husband, Kevin. I remembered how, at the Christmas party at which Michael had danced with that big-haired tart who was redoing the company’s lobby, Kevin had ranted about the evils of social-networking sites. He had claimed that at the very best they were for children. Twittering was for the feeble-minded. And any personal information you plugged into a site like Facebook was doubtless being used by the CIA in an infringement of your basic human rights. Well, unbeknown to him, Kevin was about to change his mind …
It took me just a few minutes to set up a profile page for Kevin, using a fake Gmail address. It was easy to make the profile look convincing. I knew Kevin’s contact details and place of work and quickly plugged those into the “Info” section. I didn’t need to add a photograph: Kevin was a new dad; he had better things to do with his time than upload photos to Facebook. If Michael asked why there was no pic, I would say that I (or rather Kevin) would be adding lots of photographs over the weekend, which would give me plenty of time to have used the fake profile for my own evil means and closed it down. I chuckled at my own cleverness. Now all I had to do was “friend” Michael and hope that he “friended” me back.
And he did. It took him less than an hour. I was delighted. Not least because if Michael had time to check out his new friend requests on Facebook, then he obviously wasn’t making mad, passionate love to his new girlfriend that night.
“Hey, Kevin!” he said in a message sent via the site. “Fancy seeing you here. I thought you said that Facebook was evil! What made you change your mind? How’s Helen? How’s the new baby? How’s life as a dad?”
I wrote back, “I decided that I was missing something. If everyone is on Facebook, then the CIA will hardly have time to check us all out, right? Helen is well, as is the baby.”
“What flavor did you have?” Michael wrote back.
“Flavor?” I responded.
“What sex is your firstborn, dufus?”
At which point it occurred to me that I had no idea.
Despite having bent Helen’s ear for the best part of an hour that day, I couldn’t have told you with certainty whether she’d had a boy, a girl, or a baby elephant. I frowned at Michael’s question, which blinked at me accusingly from the screen. How come I didn’t know the answer? Was my alias about to fail at the first hurdle?
I toyed with the idea of calling up Helen and asking her again. But that would be wrong for several reasons. First, it was almost one in the morning. If Helen wasn’t up feeding the baby, then she would be trying to get some desperately needed sleep, and if she was up and she did answer my call, then I could hardly bear to think of how the conversation would go. Did I really want Helen to know that I had so little interest in her life that I didn’t know whether she’d had a boy or a girl?
I did not. So I did some more detective work. I trawled through my old emails, sure that somewhere among them there must be an email announcing the birth of Helen and Kevin’s first child. And there was. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Helen and Kevin are pleased to announce the birth of baby Alex!” the email exclaimed. “Nine pounds two ounces. Mother and baby doing fine. Father suffering from shell shock.” Kevin was such a wag. Anyway, I prepared to take that information and regurgitate it for Michael, except that even as I opened the message window to respond to Michael’s question in my cyber-disguise, I realized that I still didn’t know what sex the baby was. There was a name. An unhelpfully gender-
neutral name. And a weight. Nothing more.
“Bum,” I muttered to myself. I searched through all the other emails I’d received from Helen before or since the baby’s birth. In one she talked about the scan but added, “They asked us if we wanted to know what sex the baby is. Of course we told them we didn’t.” In the one email she had written after the baby was born, a round-robin to all her friends thanking them for their kind wishes and gifts (I imagine she included me to induce some gift-buying guilt), she continued to refer to the child in a thoroughly gender-neutral way: “Alex” or “the baby.” She never once used “he” or “she.” Kevin had written a similar email but there were no clues there, either. He didn’t mention his glee at having someone to take to the football or his disappointment at the years of ballet lessons ahead. Unusually mature for Kevin and exceptionally unhelpful for me.
Michael’s question was still waiting for an answer. And if I didn’t answer his question, how would I be able to start asking questions of my own? I would have to take a chance. After all, I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Alex. Over nine pounds. It had to be a boy.
“A bouncing boy!” I wrote back. “I’ve already got him in a CFC romper,” I added for authenticity. Kevin was rabidly devoted to Chelsea.
“Congratulations” came Michael’s reply. “Can’t wait to meet the little fella at his barbecue next week.”
Oh! I gasped. Helen and Kevin were having a barbecue and they hadn’t invited me. Which could only mean …
My hands trembled as I typed, “Will you be bringing anyone with you?” into the message box. I pressed send and leaned on my desk with my head in my hands while I waited for an answer. An answer that would surely be the answer I was looking for and yet dreading with every fiber of my being. But it didn’t come. After a while I dared to look up and saw that Michael was no longer online. He had logged off Facebook without responding to my/Kevin’s question and I was still in the dark. Damn.
I hadn’t finished snooping for the night.
Now that Michael was offline, I clicked on his friends list and looked at all the faces there, searching the thumbnail pictures for more clues. Michael had not yet updated his relationship status. About thirty of the seventy-four people Michael had friended were women. Any one of them could be his new girlfriend. I had to go through that list in a systematic way.
There were quite a few I could discount immediately. No matter how evil I thought Michael was, it was unlikely he was having an affair with his teenage cousin. Likewise his sister-in-law. I knew also that he thought his office manager was a cast-iron cow. He’d told me he’d only added her to his list because he was too afraid not to.
By the time the light of dawn was beginning to filter through the window, I had narrowed the suspects down to three. Two were women I didn’t recognize at all. Michael had added them both to his list in the past month. The third was the woman I had seen him talking to at the Christmas party. The interior designer with the Grand Canyon cleavage and the cotton-candy hair. Her name was Giselle Kleinbeck.
Unfortunately, by the time morning rolled around Michael had still not responded to me/Kevin as to whether he would be taking a plus-one to the baby’s barbecue. That barbecue haunted me. Why hadn’t I heard about it before? As soon as it was decent, I called Helen and tried to engage her in a conversation that might lead to an invitation for me, too. I don’t know what I thought I would do if she did ask me along, but it seemed like a good idea to have the option. I wanted to see Michael again. There was no other event on the horizon to which I could casually rock up and bump into him.
“So,” I said, “now that you’re through the first sticky month, you must want to celebrate. Are you having Alex christened?”
“Oh, no,” said Helen. “Kevin doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“But you must want to do something to mark such a momentous occasion as the birth of your first child. How about some sort of secular naming ceremony? Or just a party?”
“Honestly.” Helen sighed. “Right now a party is the last thing on my mind. We’re just too exhausted with all the three AM feeds and the constant nappy changing. I had no idea …”
“So you’re not even going to do something really simple?” I pushed. “Like a barbecue?”
Helen drew breath. I thought that she was about to cave but instead she said, “I’ve got to go. It’s time for the baby’s feed. I’m trying to establish some kind of routine.”
She put the phone down before I could say good-bye.
Foiled by Helen, I sent Michael another message via Facebook, as Kevin, explaining that it was important to know numbers for the barbecue because there were sausages to be ordered. Still nothing.
I couldn’t just sit there and wait. I had accessed the limited profiles of the three women I suspected of stealing my man. I had Googled their names and found out a surprising and frightening amount of information about all three.
It turned out to be fairly easy to discount two more of the women. I quickly found photographs of one’s very recent wedding online. I know that being married didn’t entirely rule her out of the running, but the fact that she had married another woman suggested to me that Michael would not float her boat even with his nascent six-pack and new penchant for handmade shoes. The other woman resided in São Paulo. If Michael had been having a relationship with her, I had no idea how and when. Michael had been morbidly afraid of flying anywhere near South America since the outbreak of swine flu. In fact he was rather girlie about flying at all. No, I decided, if Miss São Paulo was his new girlfriend, she was not likely to last.
That left me with one more candidate. The interior designer.
I went half blind looking at that tiny photograph, trying to work out if she was more attractive than I was. It was hard to tell, since she was wearing a pair of comedy eyeglasses with those plastic eyes that boing out on springs. All I could see was her mouth. She had a very big smile.
Using what IT skills I had, I lifted Giselle Kleinbeck’s picture from her profile and enlarged it to the maximum possible size. Then I printed out the picture and took it with me to the bathroom, where I pinned it on the wall next to the magnifying mirror and prepared to make a proper comparison. As I said, unfortunately her eyes were disguised, but I gave myself at least an equal score for eyebrows. Her hair looked good, but mine could look just as nice straight out of the hairdresser’s. I had a better jawline, I decided, and while my rival’s smile was cheerful, it was overly gummy. My teeth were a better shape, and when I smiled, you could see hardly any gum at all. I was a little comforted by the thought that my smile would age better, since her big gums would eventually recede and leave her looking like a horse.
But big gums or not, this was almost certainly the woman that Michael had chosen over me.
I got more information later that evening when Michael posted some photographs downloaded from his phone on his Facebook page. Among them was a group shot that included Giselle Kleinbeck without her comedy glasses.
I pored over those grainy shots for hours. I guessed from the background that the photograph was taken in the Gaucho Grill. I recognized the cowhide fabric on the bench upon which she was sitting. It was a restaurant that Michael had taken me to often. I suppose you could say it was one of “our places.” I tortured myself with the thought of that woman taking my place at “our table.” Over the time that I had been with Michael, I had come to know what he would order in various places by heart. In the Gaucho, he always went for an eight-ounce steak and asked me to share a salad. Had he shared a salad with her?
Finally that night came the last piece of the jigsaw. Michael responded to Kevin’s question about numbers for the barbecue. “Yes,” he said. “I will be plus one. I’m going to bring my new girlfriend, Giselle.”
Oh, the agony. Not only had I been replaced in Michael’s affections, I had lost my place in my social life, too. I couldn’t believe that Helen would have chosen to have Michael and his new girlfriend
at her barbecue rather than invite me. I had known Helen for a decade. What kind of friend was she to drop me from her guest list and invite my evil ex instead? I was the one who had been dumped. Weren’t all my girlfriends supposed to rally to my side and refuse even to meet the new girl? It was what I would have done. Well, I thought, as I wiped away another flurry of tears, Helen had better hope that Kevin didn’t dump her when the pressure of raising a newborn got to be too much. She’d find out who her friends were then.
Becky was unsympathetic. She reminded me that I had promised I would not try to find out who Michael was seeing. “And in such a dodgy way, Ash. You know that’s borderline stalking … Actually, forget borderline,” she added. “It is stalking full stop. And has it made you happy?”
I admitted that it hadn’t.
“You are nuts.”
She made me promise that would be the end of it. “You know her name. You know what she looks like. Anything else is only going to torture you.”
But it turned out I’d developed a taste for torture.
Of course, knowing Giselle Kleinbeck’s name and having access to a picture of her with spinach between her big teeth on Michael’s Facebook page was not enough for me. I had to find out more. With her name, unusual as it was for London, my earlier investigations had made it very easy to find out where she worked. Well-Sprung Interiors, southeast-area representatives for Well-Sprung Upholstery, had their premises in Wimbledon, a mere two miles from my flat. I investigated their website further. It was very dull. It explained that they specialized in office interiors, and there was the name of Michael’s firm among the company’s list of clients. The sight of it made me clench my jaw.
He really had met her while she refurbished his office. To think I had thought that between the hours of nine and five each day I had nothing much to worry about as far as my boyfriend was concerned: There was very little T&A in an office full of people who got excited about tax codes. I hadn’t allowed for incomers. Now I thought back to the first time Michael mentioned that his office was being decorated. Of course I’d thought nothing of it at the time, but now I wondered if the decorating had coincided with Michael’s visit to the personal shopper at Harvey Nics and his sudden renewed interest in weight training.
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 6
