“George,” I asked one evening soon after. “Am I your number one? The most important person in your life?”
“Naturally, darling, my number one grown-up girl anyway. Of course, Grace is my number one number one. I’d be a monster if it were any other way.”
Grace. The divine Grace. Beauty, intelligence and saintliness in a pert six-year-old package accessorized by Gap Kids. He’d once said he’d kill himself if anything were to happen to her. “I’d get over you dying,” he had said to me, “but one never gets over the death of a child.”
That’s the trouble with going out with a man with offspring by another woman. The one person who should put you above all others has the most horribly valid excuse not to. And even to question this principle is to be the wickedest common-law stepmother in the history of fairy tales. Stepmothers are very much maligned, generally, I would think, as I’d read another bloody boring story to a demanding child who was not only not mine, but belonged to Catherine, the woman I most resented in the world.
I phoned Maggie.
“Do you think you’re number one in Mick’s life?”
“I suppose so, though I don’t know for how much longer. When the baby’s born, I’m sure he or she will be my number one. And Mick’s. Are you asking who you’d pull out of a burning building first or who you like best?”
“I don’t know. It would just be nice to feel like you’re number one in somebody’s life.”
“It’s not the charts, you know. It’s not that simple. And this week’s number one in Mick’s life, pop pickers, is Maggie, closely followed by Mick’s mum, but with the six-month-old fetus poised to make the highest new entry.”
“I know, I just don’t think I’m anybody’s.”
“Could be a good thing,” she said. “Christ, I’m my mother’s and I’d give anything not to be. The top of her hit parade should be my father. More like the top of her hit list. It’s horrible being her number one best friend, daughter, quasi-lover, receptacle for all her hopes and dreams. Every morning she phones me. I told her not to use my work number as that was for work calls so now she phones me on my mobile, or ‘portable telephone’ as she calls it. I told her only to use that for emergencies, so now she prefaces every message with ‘It’s nothing important’ in this really sad and passive-aggressive way.”
I couldn’t see Maggie’s mother creating a Web site devoted to her daughter. She was of the generation that still talked to answer-phones in the third person: “This is a message for Maggie, tell her that her mother rang and that I miss her very much.”
“At least you’ve got two people who put you top, and a third on the way,” I retorted.
“Izobel, we are all the protagonists in the movie of our own lives.” Maggie was a TV drama script editor both professionally and emotionally. “In everyone else’s you’re just a bit part—the wisecracking best pal, the mother figure, the girlfriend, the nemesis, doesn’t really matter. You’re only your own number one.”
“But shouldn’t I be surrounded by best supporting actors?”
“Yes, but supporting, secondary. There’s only one star in your life and that’s you. Don’t rely on anybody else to give you applause.”
“But as I’m going out with someone, though,” I asked, “shouldn’t I expect George to have me played by Julia Roberts in the biopic of his life? At least, have almost equal billing?” I decided not to tell her about the Web site. Not yet anyway.
“Yes, but would she be in a cameo? Or do you really think that George thinks as much about you as you think about yourself? We’re all pretty solipsistic in the end, aren’t we? In George’s film would the actress playing you get nominated in the best actress or best actress in a supporting role category?”
“I’d be below the barmaid in the credits.”
Maggie laughed, though I wasn’t actually trying to be funny.
*
I felt that my life was far from being an epic. It was a low-budget short, made by students and lacking real plot or narrative arc; one of those ones where amateur actors shuffle around bemoaning the state of the world without anything really happening. All the audience would be talking through it just waiting for the arrival of the main attraction.
Chapter Two
I checked the under-constructed www.izobelbrannigan.com intermittently, but then I checked a lot of sites at work. I saw The Apartment recently and I wondered what work there had been to do in an office before the advent of computers and e-mail.
One day, though, www.izobelbrannigan.com was different. It was there. My site had flickered into life, dormant but now animated, a fairy-tale princess awoken with a kiss marked “Put Live.”
And it was my site. There was no doubt anymore. It was my site and it was all about me. In the center of the screen in Arial 24pt bold, a couple of paragraphs about my life. Or at least my life as imagined by a Hello! features writer crossed with an adulatory adolescent boy.
“This site is dedicated to the life of Izobel Brannigan, who rocks her own world and that of those around her. Born 1973 (she’s a Pisces), she went to St. Teresa’s Grammar and then to the University of Sussex, where she read European Studies and Good Times. She’s now cutting a swath through the glamorous world of the capital’s public relations industry.”
It went on: “Enough of the past. But what next for Izobel and www.izobelbrannigan.com? We want to make a site that’s every bit as crazy and dynamic as the woman herself. Over the coming months, we’ll keep you informed of all her antics and her ever-changing world. And we’ll be throwing in a few secrets that maybe she wouldn’t want out there! Keep logging on!”
Nobody described me as “cutting a swath” through anywhere these days. Not even me in the third-person commentary about my life I’d run through my head to a John Barry soundtrack when trying to cheer myself up.
The site was nice-looking; the stalker knew his stuff when it came to the Web. It was only a one-pager, but professionally exe-cuted. The background was an attractive shade of blue and the logo “Izobel” in large squashy letters, like comfy sofas, ran across the top of the page. That was nice of them, I thought, to have taken the trouble to fashion a logo out of my name. It looked like it was underlined in navy, but on closer inspection I made out the words “her site her world” in an angular script, like the border on an Egyptian tomb.
Eliminating all doubt about which Izobel the site was devoted to, there were a couple of photos set at jaunty angles and with fake crinkled edges, as if this was not the Internet but a page from an old-fashioned scrapbook or photo album. The text was in a yellow box, to look as though a Post-it note had been randomly affixed to this commonplace book.
One photo was of me from school, a blurred thumbnail from a group shot. My face was so fat in those days. When people try to flatter women by saying they’ve the body of a sixteen-year-old, they’re clearly not referring to mine at that age. And the hair. Why did I ever think it was cool to have a bleached spiky fringe? I remember how I used to tie it up in a sausage of elastic bands each night, like a unicorn’s horn, and then release the vertical plumage in the morning.
Then there was another photo, a more recent one. I couldn’t work it out at first; eventually, by looking at the clothes I was wearing and the background, illuminated by a flash, I realized that it was taken at a party to celebrate somebody’s thirtieth I’d been to about six months before, held in a club. I was wearing a one-shouldered top and a pair of satin combats with heels in an effort to practice what PR people and magazine editors were encouraging mortals to sport. I like to think I’m quite street: High or Bond, depending on the mood. You could see my nipples. I’m sure you couldn’t on the day, so at a guess they had been digitally enhanced.
It was a typical party picture: I had my arms around two friends and was doing that glowing overarching smile of the mildly tipsy while my eyes had been flashed up into a demonic red. My chin was tipped downward, as it was in all photos taken since I had realized as a teenager that if
I didn’t do that, it looked like I had a goiter. Of course, the flip side was that it meant that the dark rings around my eyes were more prominent, but this was the lesser of two evils.
Dark rings around the eyes were not something that Maggie and Frank, the friends I was embracing and learning on, had to worry about in this photo, for they had little black strips across their eyes to protect their anonymity. The effect was sinister, as if they were MPs partaking in an orgy splashed across a tabloid newspaper, or the innocent victims of a kiddie porn ring, while I was the leering perv they’d been taught to call “Uncle Tommy.” Stalker–Web site maker clearly didn’t see why my anonymity should be protected in such a way. Instead the bare facts of my life were broadcast across the whole wide world.
Whose party had it been? Some friend of Frank’s? Must ask Maggie, I thought, not that she’d be able to remember any better than me. I’m sure if her eyes had been visible they’d have had the enlarged pupils of the totally boxed, her irises like the glow of the sun being eclipsed by the full moon of her pupils. It must have been before she was pregnant. Or at least before she knew she was.
There was a ticker running along the bottom of the site. “Coming soon: a message board where you can talk about what Izobel means to you. Live chat too.” I waited for the next installment to shuffle across the screen, very slowly, for it was an arthritic ticker. “Sections on her family and friends.” All with blacked-across eyes, no doubt. “E-mail alerts for her birthday and breaking news.” It continued to meander. “Future attractions: Izobel-themed ring tones and faceplates. Comps and prizes galore!”
I rang Maggie. “Whose party was it, you know the one where you wore a boob tube thing that kept on slipping down? The thirtieth. Some bloke.”
“That narrows it down,” she replied. “I no longer go to many thirtieths anymore. Do you know, I’ve been invited to a fortieth. A fortieth! Can you imagine? I can’t believe we’re entering the age of Big Chill and no longer St. Elmo’s Fire. This year marks the specific point at which we become nearer to forty than our teens.”
“I suppose so.”
“Amazing.”
“Yes, amazing, how strange, we’re so old, but whose party was that thirtieth? The one in the club place where we only had a cordoned-off bit and all the other normal punters looked at us as if we were cattle at an agricultural show?”
“Friend of Frank’s, wasn’t it? Some bloke from the university who he works with. Economist, I think. It must have been around seven months ago as I was worried that I might have already been pregnant then, but the scans reckon it was about a week or so after. I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t pregnant. It seems like a different age. How I miss drinking. And the rest.”
“That’s right.” I remembered now. The host was a goodlooking man called Robert who I would have lunged at had I not been conscious of the fact that he was having a party in a club, was far too pretty and wore a very tight T-shirt. “Bob was his name.”
“Hot Bob, we liked him.”
“But he doesn’t like us, does he? I remember thinking he was hot but maybe no ladies’ man. I think he was wearing lip gloss.”
“No, don’t be old-fashioned, Iz. He’s straight. I think I remember Frank telling me about some dodgy business with one of his female students.”
Would I want Hot Bob to be my stalker? I wouldn’t mind, though I thought it unlikely. But whoever had created the site must have been at the party and must have taken a photo of me. I needed to get the list of invitees from Hot Bob. Not that this would be definitive. After all, I had been there and I had not been invited directly.
I e-mailed George triumphantly.
Subject: Me.
Hurrah, I was the subject of an e-mail to George. Now there was a first.
“Please look at www.izobelbrannigan.com. Let’s discuss later. Love you, I.”
Ha, I thought, he said no one would devote a site to me, that I was unworthy of a stalker, but he was wrong.
A stalker. I felt my face flush and bright red hives slide down from my cheeks across my chest.
“You all right, babe?” my colleague Mimi asked without bothering to hear the stammered reply.
“Fine, fine, yeah, fine.”
I wasn’t. A stalker, I had a stalker. I was like a weathergirl or newsreader without the blonde highlights, cropped Meg Ryan haircut or perky personality; just the creepy man watching me, taking photos of me, devoting a site to me. George was right: why would anybody devote a site to me in an adoring way? It had to be malevolent.
I felt my cheeks. They were still hot, as was my forehead. I knew that I’d look terrible; I always did when I got this sort of reaction, piebald in pink and purple hues. I breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth in a yoga-type way in a hopeless attempt to calm myself, before going into a meeting with a new client.
I’d find my stalker. Or was it my admirer? When did one become the other?
*
I switched on my ancient desktop computer when I got home and watched it crank up in its decrepit fashion. At every command, it would whir alarmingly in a way that I think my brain does when asked to do anything logical. I could feel my head making those sort of strained noises once again as I attempted to compute the odd events of the day.
It was my flat and my computer, but George’s mess. He maintained that it was bohemian and I was bourgeois, yet his wardrobe was always kept as immaculately as an expensive boutique. The rest, with its ashtrays and saucepans, with its blurring of kitchen, living room and bathroom, was the student accommodation that George might have lived in if he had ever bothered to go to university two decades previously. I suspected he would feel differently about the tangle if it had been his flat. Or our flat, perhaps. Moving to somewhere bigger was on my list of things to do, but the set-up with George had never seemed permanent enough to merit a conversation about our arrangements. Instead of living together, we were living in layers, with my stuff at the bottom and his possessions floating on the surface, like scum at the seaside.
My computer finally blossomed and I looked at izobelbrannigan .com. The site hadn’t changed in the hour and a half since I had last looked at it. A little less professional-looking, transposed away from the flat monitor of my office computer and now framed with the ugly off-white of a cheap PC. The ticker still ran and the Izobel logo still flashed hypnotically. I was still flanked by friends with black strips in place of eyes.
I waited for George to come back. Where was he? I phoned his mobile and it clicked into its familiar voice mail. “Hello, darling, leave me a message.” Everyone was “darling” to him. I waited for my phone to ring back with news of where he was, for the computer screen to flicker in recognition of a mobile sounding nearby. I got bored with watching the endless groundhogging of the ticker going round and round and eventually switched on the TV for some trash that was little more interesting. The site had ceased to exist for me until I could discuss it with George, to get his appraisal, approbation and, I hoped, his appalled reaction that someone could be covertly threatening his beloved.
There’s that old philosophical question about whether a tree falling in the forest has to be heard by someone to have truly happened. If I were that person hearing the tree fall, it wouldn’t have happened until I’d exaggerated the story of its demise, found a punch line, practiced the anecdote, dressed up in a new top that was appropriate for its content, told at least three friends and then e-mailed a couple more about it.
If the site was that poor unfortunate tree, then it was live but had not yet come to life. Not until I’d shown it to George. Where was he? I felt like I was that tree falling with no one around to catch me.
I left him another message; no response followed so I resorted to desperate measures with my third call. “George, ring me quick. I’m in a bar with free cocktails; they’ll have run out in an hour.” Even the promise of a sponsored event did not induce him to ring me back. He must really have been in a place with no network covera
ge.
I didn’t get to show it to him, at least not that night. He didn’t ring but came back after I’d gone to bed, with the tinny tomato smell on his breath that showed he’d been drinking to excess. I always think of George when I smell a past-its-use-by-date tube of tomato puree.
“I rang you,” I said sleepily, grumpily, turning my back to him.
“Sorry, sweetheart, the batteries had gone on my phone. Damn annoying to have missed out on the jamboree. What sort of free cocktails? Gin- or vodka-based?”
“Seriously, I was worried. I called you again after that. I thought something awful must have happened to you.”
“What is this?” He picked up the phone set by the bed. “Your umbilical cordless phone?” Then he laughed at his joke. “Oh, that’s good. I think I can feel an article coming on. The way women use new gadgets and new technology to be ever more old-fashioned and clingy with their menfolk.”
I couldn’t be bothered to discuss the new technology that was my site.
The next night was his visit to “Gracelands,” as we euphemistically referred to his Saturday and one-weekday dadly duties with his daughter. For some reason, the trip with her and her friend Phoebe on a press freebie to The Lion King entailed everybody sleeping over at Phoebe’s mother’s house. A slinky single mother at that, with the embroidered-cashmere-cardie sort of name of Lulu. There was a production line of women like that at Grace’s private day school, flinging out mummies called Minty and Cressie and other edible names at the gates. They lionized George whenever he went to pick up Grace from school, as if he were the priest in a convent or the jumbo-jet pilot amid a giggle of air hostesses.
By the time I eventually showed the site to him it no longer seemed either significant or sinister. Needless to say, he had ignored my e-mail entreaty to check it out.
“Look,” I said, trying to retain the triumph of being vindicated that I had felt on first seeing it. “Can you still deny that it’s a site about me?” I watched as its photos filtered down into view, the slowness of my home computer artificially creating suspense and the sense that something momentous was being unveiled.
Cyber Cinderella Page 2
