Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  He scanned it quickly. “Nice schoolgirl photo, darling, wish I’d known you then.”

  “Don’t be disgusting. You’d have been in your mid-twenties.”

  He glanced at the screen again. “They don’t see fit to talk about the love of your life now, though. Where’s the stuff about Izobel’s handsome gentleman caller? And it’s really badly written, isn’t it? ‘She rocks her world.’ I think we need to find a half-wit illiterate American teenager and then we’ve got our man.” He chortled at his own wit. The crime of the perpetrator lay in his poor use of English rather than in his creepy intrusive tendencies.

  “But don’t you think it’s odd?”

  “To use rock as a verb, yes terribly.”

  “Don’t be annoying, George. That it exists. That there’s a site devoted to me. Your girlfriend. If anybody should be creating a cyber-paean to me, it should be you.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “I wasn’t going to, because if I held my breath until you praised me I’d die.”

  It was just a turn of phrase, but I felt sick talking about death, now that I had a stalker. I imagined the site perp to have a grotty bedsit somewhere plastered with blurred photos of me and cuttings from the Arlington Crow, my parents’ local paper, where the fact that I had been in Knightsbridge with my mum one hour before the Harrods bombing was considered worthy of the front page.

  I sat down, defeated, while George started surfing the Net.

  “So how did you find the site?” he asked.

  “I Googled myself.”

  “Hmmm, sounds kind of kinky,” he slobbered. “Can we have some mutual Googling later?”

  “I went to the search engine page like this.” I waited as the site flickered into view. “Then put in my name.” I began typing I-Z-O-B—when George interrupted.

  “Put in my name, go on, put in my name. Google me, baby.”

  “I’ve done it before; it’s not that interesting.”

  “Go on, Google your one and only.”

  I typed in George Grand and hit “search.” “Have you ever thought, George, that this isn’t about you?”

  He watched the screen, rapt, as he never normally was by the “thing they call the World Wide Web” as he insisted on referring to it.

  “This isn’t very good,” he judged as links to a few desultory articles by him chugged into view. “This is no better than the cuttings system at work. I don’t want stuff by me, I want stuff about me. This is all about some Victorian actor, not me. Why not? This person was born in eighteen seventy-four—I’m not that bloody old. Look here.” He shoved a clammy finger onto my screen, leaving a moist smudge as his footprint in the sand. “This is about someone who isn’t even called George Grand. It’s about someone called George and someone else called Henry Grand. It’s just stupid. Stupid Internet thing, World Web rubbish.” He flounced off the chair and threw himself onto the sofa and the waiting TV remote control.

  “George, for fuck’s sake.” He lifted his head to look at me quizzically. “It’s not about you. It’s about me. There’s some nutter out there who clearly thinks about me more than you do and you’re worrying about your Internet profile. What are we going to do about it?”

  “Create a site about me. That would raise my profile.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “I was joking,” he said grumpily.

  “This is not a laughing matter. We’ve got to find out who’s behind this site. Someone has taken the trouble and taken the photos to make a Web site devoted to me. Don’t you think it’s a bit odd? Don’t you see, we’ve got to find out who it is and to stop them. It starts out innocently enough but what if I don’t respond? How will they react? By following me? Attacking me? Killing me?” My voice was squeaking.

  “I think you’ve watched too many women-in-peril films. Or been talking to that bloody Maggie again.”

  “George,” I screamed. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “We,” he emphasized the word, “don’t have to do anything.”

  “Too bloody right,” I replied, calmer or exhausted, I wasn’t sure which. “But I do.”

  And that was that. We then had more to drink followed by sex, our twin hobbies, the panacea for all ills of the world. George was very lazy except when pouring drinks and pawing me.

  It might seem strange that we should make love when I produce so much bile and fury toward him, but that was our way. I never understood why relationship experts said that sex was a barometer of the health of a relationship. If that were the case, then George and I would be the Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman of coupledom. But we weren’t. Sex was not the barometer of our relationship, it was the Band-Aid. Have an argument, have sex. Have a problem, have sex. Get bored, have sex. It was the grout that kept the tiles of our relationship together and without it they would come tumbling down. I could not help but suspect that behind those slabs of physical intimacy there lurked some major subsidence. For now it was hidden, storing up its problems for later.

  *

  I was still irked by George’s indifference to my little tribute site when I got an e-mail from him at work.

  “Check out www.izobelbrannigan.com now.”

  I smiled. George was now sexy, fun, life-enhancing George once again and I forgave him the fact that he had reacted to my site as if it were no more than spam e-mail.

  I logged on.

  I was surprised by what I found.

  I logged on again. Same response: “The page cannot be displayed.” Page can’t be displayed? That was worse than being “under construction.” I was no longer “found.” I was lost. I could hear George’s sneers about the supremacy of print media. “You don’t turn over the pages of a newspaper to find a blank page with ‘the page cannot be displayed’ across it, well do you?”

  Had I imagined it all along? No, George had viewed it, albeit in a perfunctory fashion.

  I sank back, disheartened. My little time of celebrity was over as soon as it had begun. “Phew,” I practiced saying, in readiness for seeing George, “what a relief the site’s disappeared. Now I don’t have to worry anymore.” And he would draw me to him and tell me what a silly bunny I’d been to make such a big fuss about it in the first place and then we’d have sex or go to the launch of another restaurant doomed to the lifespan of a fruit fly.

  If only I had at least saved the page or printed it out. Now I had nothing except the fact that George would feel like he’d been proved right and the disappointment of having gone from nonentity to notoriety back to nonentity again in but a week.

  The phone went.

  “All gone now,” he boomed.

  “Hello, George.”

  “What a lot of fuss about nothing. I’ll make it all better tonight. What are we doing?”

  “Fiona’s company’s doing a launch for a cigarette company. In Soho.”

  “Free fags?”

  “I guess so. It did exist, didn’t it? The site, I mean, I didn’t just imagine it.”

  “What site?”

  “Don’t be a jerk, George. It’s still weird and there still is a stalker person out there who made it even if I can’t see it anymore.”

  “I really think you ought to stop worrying about it and tell me where the party is. What kind of fags anyway?”

  I looked at the screen and with my free hand went to refresh the page once more in a pathetic gesture of hope. Control R. Refresh. If only I could do that to my life.

  I couldn’t refresh my nonvirtual life, but it had worked a miracle on the site. It was back. And with a new addition to the ticker: “We’re sorry for any inconvenience to Izobel fans who may have been trying to view this site today. We’ve had technical difficulties that are now fully resolved. Izobel and her site can now keep on rolling!”

  “George, the site. It’s back. It’s working again.”

  I could hear a sigh on the other end of the phone mutate into a cough. “Fantastic news,” he said in a voice that suggested it
was anything but.

  Chapter Three

  Life ground on in its dull and dulling way: frottaged by flesh on the Underground, shocked at the price of a frothy coffee and slumped in the office. Every day was the same, yet every day more irritating than the last.

  Every day, I’d be struck by the way that my place of work was like one of those grand houses whose perfect Georgian facade only conceals chaos and architectural incoherence beyond. The clients saw shiny flagstones and meeting rooms with flowers in. I dwelt in the back room of the overcrowded offices covered in redundant piles of newspapers like the house of a crazy person. There mobiles would make their unharmonious chorus of tunes distorted into an indistinguishable blur of grating sound.

  In the office, I’d flick through the papers, skipping the politics and getting straight onto the gossip and “Your Life Is Incomplete Without…” sections and would discuss how fit/unattractive various celebrities were and which of them were sporting collagen/breast implants. After that I would get down to the real business of reading the horoscope that appeared in the paper George worked for. I’d sigh as Pisceans were once more advised to show financial prudence and were never promised love or luck.

  Every day these things would irritate me anew and yet nothing was ever fresh to me. The only things that could penetrate my jaded self were those that depressed, never those that delighted.

  Except for my site. It didn’t gladden, exactly, but it had excited me, piqued me, intrigued me. It was the first time something different had happened in the two years since I had got together with George. Curiosity expanded and swelled inside me, filling my brain like one of those new foaming cleaners that billow down drains.

  My PR missions of getting a plug in a daily or sucking up to the junior fashion features accessories editor at Vogue were even more desiccated of their meaning. My relationship with George was still lubricated by drink and sexual pleasure, but dehydrated of the sap of emotions.

  The only thing that meant anything to me was finding out who was my cyber-admirer. Or virtual stalker. Whatever you wanted to call it. I didn’t even know where to begin in my quest and was convinced I needed to call in an expert. Not a real live policeman, but the next best thing: someone who had worked on TV police dramas.

  I invited Maggie round for supper.

  “Mags, can I just show you something on my PC?” I asked her before she’d even got her coat off but after I’d poured us both a glass of wine, a marginally smaller one for her in deference to her distended belly. She held it protectively, the belly rather than her glass of wine, in a gesture that I guessed she had copied off actresses playing pregnant women, who’d stroke their fake bellies and fake babies, rather than as a prenatal instinct.

  “What Internet delight? Woman eating her own feces, man having sex with a chihuahua, George Dubya…” she posited.

  “Not exactly.”

  I clicked the mouse so that the screen saver of George and me on holiday melted away to unveil my site.

  Maggie frowned, then giggled, then frowned again. “Bizarre bizarre bizarro. What a funny home page or is it called blogging these days? This is your Web log. Why have you done that to Frank’s and my eyes? And I’m sure my nipples didn’t show as much in that top. When did you do this? Can you do one for us? Mick’s on about creating one for the fetus and putting photos of the birth on it and stuff. Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?”

  “Because I didn’t create it. What do you take me for?”

  “You did once send yourself a Valentine.”

  “One, I’m not weird enough to create my own tribute site. Two, I’m not technically capable of creating one. And three, I never sent myself a Valentine.”

  “True to the first two of those statements.” Maggie folded her arms around her chest. “So if you didn’t make it, who did?”

  I shrugged and my stomach cramped. She read the text that floated in the middle of the screen.

  “It’s anonymous? That is so creepy.”

  “Is it? Or is it flattering?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, it’s creepy. It’s weird and stalkie and strange. We’ve got to find out who’s behind it.”

  “We?”

  “Of course. I haven’t script-edited two dozen episodes of Britain’s favorite midweek long-running police drama for nothing, you know. I bet I can work out who’s behind it.”

  I hate myself. For being the sort of person to auto-Google and for being the sort of person to cry when anybody’s nice to me.

  “Iz darling, don’t cry.” Maggie never did. She was one of the people who’ll jab you in the cinema and say loudly, “You’re crying, I can’t believe you’re crying,” as you snuffle at the bit when John McClane meets his radio buddy at the end of Die Hard. “Really not a crying matter,” she said on seeing me dripping from both my eyes and nose. “You’re only letting them get to you with this site if you cry. This is so weird. I can’t get my head round it.”

  I wasn’t upset. I was relieved. Maggie was taking me and it seriously. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For thinking it’s important.”

  “But it is important.”

  At that moment, I heard the familiar jangle of the wrong keys being put in the slot by George. He took the kitchen exit off the hall before coming into the sitting room, vodka in one hand, cigarette in the other. This left none free for giving us the finger on seeing us hunched at my computer.

  “For Christ’s sake, you’re not still banging on about that bloody Web site.”

  “Piss off, George,” said Maggie, whose spleen was undiluted by the fear that George would leave her and she’d be left alone for the rest of her life and never have sex again, as mine was. “And don’t put that filthy fag near me.”

  “You can piss off, poacher turned gamekeeper, it’s my house,” he replied.

  “No, it’s not. It’s Izobel’s.”

  He was derailed by the truth of her comment and retreated into the tiny Formica-covered cave that passed as a kitchen in order to avoid us and to shout at Radio Four.

  “It’s always the boyfriend,” hissed Maggie to George’s departing back and the whiff of exclusive gentleman’s cologne that he left in his wake.

  “Always the boyfriend what?”

  “You know, when they have these appeals on the news and the reconstructions on Crimewatch and the boyfriend cries and says, ‘Please, please, if you know anything about my girl, then for God’s sake come forward,’ and you’re like, ‘poor chap,’ and he’s the murderer all along. Do you remember that couple in the Scottish Highlands, when he claimed a big dog had come and mangled her, the beast of Glenbogus or something? Of course, it turned out that he’d insured her about a week before and done away with her. He even faked fang marks on her flesh.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t compare this to a murder.”

  “Or like with that French woman,” she continued in a whisper. “First suspect was that nice banker fiancé, then all her exes.”

  “I’m really not happy with that analogy either. Anyway, it wasn’t any of them in the end. It was someone completely unconnected, a random stalker man.”

  “So they say. Still, unlikely in your case, unless you’ve noticed one?”

  I often have the sense of being watched and often I am, but only by me, Izobel Brannigan, who catches sight of my reflection in shop windows and captions the look with a series of flattering phrases. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “So, George is still our first and top suspect.”

  We looked toward the sound of a radio comedy show being berated by George.

  “No,” we said in unison. What was it about my boyfriend that made him the last person to be first suspect?

  “Well, maybe he is,” said Maggie as if sensing my dejection.

  “George can’t connect to a site, let alone create one.”

  “He might have paid someone to produce it.”

  “Ha,” I hissed back. I was abo
ut to retort that I’d have known if that was the case since he’d have to have borrowed the money from me in order to do so, but I stayed silent. The moneylending would remain my guilty secret. The sub-editors at the paper had a joke that they were thus named because of the amount of money they had to sub the editor of the “Life Itself” section. They would at least be paid back eventually, though. With money “borrowed” from me. “Anyway, why would George do it?”

  “He’s planning on proposing and one day you’re going to fire it up and it will say ‘Izobel will you marry me love George’? Or something.”

  “But it’s not his style. George is all about extroverted, crowd-pleasing gestures, ‘public relationships’ if you like. He’d never do anything covert or secretive like that.” Or costly.

  “Good point. We need to do a psychological profile of the person behind it, our site perpetrator, henceforth known as the perp.” Maggie grabbed a piece of paper from the printer and wrote “Suspects” in her overblown italic calligraphy at the top. “What do we know about the perp? First that he’s a stalker, which means he probably already shows some obsessive-compulsive tendencies and sociopathic leanings…”

  “Such as?” I asked. “You don’t even know what that means.”

  “Yes I do, it’s stuff like collecting train sets, heavy drug use, drinking, violence toward women, washing hands a lot, switching lights on and off. Probably got mother issues, we should check out anyone whose parents divorced or whose mum bolted as a child. Or whose mother is overbearing and loves them too much. Also anyone with a history of unstable relationships with women. Which, given that our first suspects are anyone you’ve gone out with, figures.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Second thing we can assume is that they know something about computers and new media. Either that or they know someone who does. Or can pay for their services.”

  “I don’t feel we’re really narrowing it down here.”

  It was as if Maggie had pressed the button on the remote control that made my voice mute as she ignored my comments. “Number one as previously discussed,” she intoned, returning to her list, “George Grand.” She pulled a face as she wrote down his name. “Sociopathic tendencies? Heavy drinking, some drugs too, addictive personality, can’t give up smoking.”