Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  With that I walked out, having failed to get a rise out of George, merely a raised eyebrow.

  *

  George thought it common to hit the town on Saturday nights and have to jostle with the hoi polloi of other nine-to-fivers. We went to bars with free drinks on Tuesdays, not expensive ones at the weekend. Friends of mine were out of bounds too, as eating at theirs constituted a Dido CD on the stereo. Instead that Saturday night we went round to the house of his work colleagues John and Jenny. For some reason eating at theirs was never dubbed a dinner party, it was just supper, more liquid than solid. They drank just as much as George did, but were older and more rancid.

  I drank to forget about the site. I wanted to blot out Jonny and the sense of my mortality his proposition had encouraged. Then I drank to obliterate the terrible specter that John and Jenny presented of what my life with George could become, where the only babies were bottles of spirits. Eating supper with John and Jenny was like being trapped in a real-life Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  “Where have you left the vodka, darling?” Jenny would spit at her husband as she keeled toward the fridge.

  “You know where I put the fucking vodka, darling,” he’d spit back at her, “in the fucking freezer where I left it last night,” and she’d open another bottle from the plentiful stock.

  George and I would never be like that.

  Chapter Seven

  Ihad Monday jet lag, not having been able to sleep Sunday night after getting up only eleven hours previously after our grim evening. Since I began going out with George, I always felt like I’d caught the red-eye from New York on Monday mornings. In the two years we’d been together, I had had a couple of killer hangovers a week, each lasting for at least a morning, until the salvation of that moment when you realize that, yes, you were going to be all right. That was a day disabled every single week, a hundred days of our relationship, over three months of scrap-metal head and rubbish-bin mouth. I wouldn’t volunteer for a prison sentence of that length, especially not one that involved nausea, crumbling brains and the taste of a small dead animal in my throat, yet that was exactly what I had done.

  “Hello, Izobel, good weekend?” asked Ivan IT-boy, who I bumped into in the foyer, raising an eyebrow at my choice of sun-glasses. I wore them a) to cover up the bags under my eyes and b) because they made me look like a film star.

  “Wild.” I felt a need to prove to Ivan how far removed my life was from the presumed tediousness of his. “Yeah. Went to an amazing party on Saturday night, actually. Got a lot of launches this week too. Never stop. Work all day, work all night, really. Don’t know when work stops and play begins. Exhausted.”

  “If you’ve got any space in your schedule, I’ll have some free time this week to help you with that site you were interested in. Do you want to show me your site then?”

  “My site? What do you mean, my site?”

  “Nothing. The one you were talking about on Friday, the one you want to find out more about. I’ll see what I can do. And you’d probably see a lot better if you took those glasses off.”

  I was too tired to think and at the moment agreed that Ivan, a stranger to me, should become my de-tech-tive. He couldn’t be any worse than Maggie or George, could he?

  “Thank you, it’s kind of you.”

  “Pleasure.”

  He disappeared and as if in a revolving door a pair of vaguely familiar figures appeared in the gloom soon after.

  “Hello, Izobel,” said Becksy and Alice with one voice. I wondered what the lesser Camillas were doing in my office. Through my dark glasses they seemed even dimmer than at my first meeting with them. I could barely recognise them without the presence of their leader.

  “Hello, what are you doing here?”

  “We just wanted to know whether you had any cool ideas for the PR yet,” said Becksy. “We both work nearby.”

  “Right. Well, no, I only saw you on Friday. Is there a hurry?”

  “Kind of.”

  “We need to raise more capital,” said Alice.

  “That’s not the fun bit. But the PR bit is such fun,” said Becksy.

  Both Becksy and Alice were barely looking at me, but were glancing round the reception of the building where I worked. Behind the shades, my eyes were narrowing. Strange. “Fine, fine. I’ll e-mail a plan over to you pronto. Things are a bit hectic here at the moment. I’ve got a couple of launches this week alone and some pretty high-profile clients being very demanding. You wouldn’t believe how completely frantic things can be in my line of work.”

  “I’m sure it is. It’s amazing that you find time for your charity work on top of it all,” said Alice.

  “It’s exhausting,” I said. Sarky cow, I thought.

  “Is it political stuff? You were very political at school.”

  “A bit.” Leave, please, I thought, but they continued to look surreptitiously around reception, with Becksy going so far as to start looking down the hallway into the open-plan area in which I sat. Becksy in particular seemed to be wearing more makeup than she had done on Friday.

  I got it. “And if you’re looking for systems man, he’s just left. And his name is Ivan, not Dan. I got it wrong.”

  They giggled in unison, like a pair of schoolgirls being faced with a sculpture of a male nude in a gallery. I sighed and left them to it.

  *

  Ivan the Elusive successfully evaded me for the next three days. I felt that I could not proceed with my own line of inquiry until I had discovered whether he could solve my mystery in one stroke.

  I checked my site, fearful that it might disappear before I had a chance to show him. Every time the same old site. I was bored with the photos and bored with the ticker that promised so much and yet never delivered.

  Then one morning, a change: a third photo and a rearrangement of the other two. The ticker explained: “the past… partying… PR… the many faces of Izobel.”

  I looked at the new addition. “This cracking photo of Izobel shows her in professional mode.” I stared at it. I was wearing an extremely expensive trouser suit. I didn’t carry it with ease, but rather as if I was attending a fancy dress party sporting the costume of “modern businesswoman.” The photo had been taken at a pitch that we gave at a conference of UK gaming companies. We were trying to win new business. We didn’t, as I recall. “We’re sure,” the text continued, “that her presentation skills are every bit as slick as her appearance.”

  There had been captions added to the other photos, too, in the form of cyber-Post-its scattered across the scrapbook-like page. They were written in the site’s customary gush. “Izobel’s not only about work. She has fun too!” was its interpretation of Hot Bob’s party, while it judged that “Izobel’s school photo shows a fashion icon in the making.”

  The site perp seemed to have entry points into every aspect of my life. I looked around my office, wondering if the perp could be among my colleagues, all of whom were disinterested females whose idea of techno involved Dutch hard-house DJs. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of being watched.

  There was another addition. There, in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, the bit that’s obscured when looked at on a small monitor, was a tiny contact us link.

  I clicked on it. Up popped an empty e-mail message, a new mail ready to be written. In the “To” box, the address mail@izobel brannigan.com presented itself. No clues there. What had I hoped? That the name of the site-maker would appear spelled out in the address?

  I filled in the subject box.

  Question

  And then in the message box beneath it:

  Who are you?

  I stared at the screen for a while and then pressed “send.” I had made contact. There was someone who would read that message and maybe reply to it. I could imagine their fingers typing but not the arms and body that they were attached to.

  I waited, all day, checking my in-box with even more frequency than normal. I’d stare at the bottom of my scree
n, at the tool bar, willing the little envelope icon to appear.

  The next day, still nothing. I clicked on the link again.

  Another question—urgent

  Then I wrote my second message.

  Who are you and why have you created this site about me? I demand to know. It’s my right to know. Tell me.

  Send. It was gone.

  *

  When Ivan eventually deigned to visit PR O’Create, I grabbed him and bundled him into a meeting room with a PC and steeled myself to show a third person the site. Please let it work, I thought, please let it work. I typed in the URL and as I did so I could see him blinking as he realized the words that I was spelling out.

  Carriage return, enter, site.

  “This is great,” he said, smiling. “You didn’t strike me as a blogger.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone who keeps their own Web log, an online diary. Well done, it’s not bad. I think blogging’s great, such a democratic voice for those who usually go unheard. Good for you. Did you design it yourself?”

  “I didn’t do this. God no, I don’t know anything about the Internet. Why on earth would I keep an online diary? In the third person? What sort of a person do you think I am? This”—I pointed at the screen—“is my problem. I don’t know who made it, who created it. Who owns izobelbrannigan dot com.”

  “I see, someone else made it,” he said, with some disappointment. “Then that is weird. Who on earth? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long has it been up?”

  “A couple of weeks. Three, now, maybe. They’d bought the domain name before that, I guess. I Googled myself and this came up.”

  “More than you bargained for.”

  “Exactly. I’ve always thought myself too anonymous, but now I’m too high-profile. Well, not anonymous exactly, I do quite interesting things a lot of the time, but I’m not a celebrity. Though I do know some.”

  He sat down and read the home page. “So you’re ‘cutting a swath,’ are you? Given that you’re in PR, you’re certainly not cutting the crap.”

  “Ha, ha.” Cheeky. I was going to tell him to stick it up his modem, but remembered that he was here to help and so put my head to one side. “I’m a bit scared actually.”

  “I’m not surprised. This is odd.”

  “That’s why I need help.”

  “Whoever created this site needs help.”

  “Not design-wise. It’s quite good, isn’t it?” I said, as ever rather entranced by the blue of the background and the contrast that it made with the almost bleached-out colors of the photographs and the yellow of their captions. My site would make a rather beautiful commemorative tea towel.

  He smiled ruefully. “Yes it is. Oh well, that’s all right then, as long as your cyber-weirdo gives good design then we needn’t worry.”

  “If I am going to have a cyber-paean, it might as well look quite nice.”

  He continued to run the mouse over the site, the small arrow of the cursor stroking its page, caressing the curves of my Izobel logo. He then clicked and a white box filled with chevrons and gibberish popped up in the middle of the page.

  “What are you doing? What have you done to my site?”

  “It’s the source code.”

  If we’d been in a cartoon, his thought bubble would have been filled with “</script>