Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  “Izobel, Izobel,” he spoke very quietly, all the while looking out of his glass cocoon toward the grubs in the open-plan area. “You’re batting from a very sticky wicket here. What on earth are you suggesting?”

  “I know.” I did, Frank had made sure of that. I shrugged my shoulders.

  He continued staring at the screen. “I couldn’t create something like this myself, could I? The only people who could would be my son or someone I’d paid to do it.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve taken some risks but I don’t think I’d distract Jakey from his A levels to create a Web site about my mistress. My ex-mistress.”

  I rolled my eyes. Mistress was an old-fashioned word too far.

  “That leaves paying someone. Can you imagine if that got out? What that would do to a man in my position? It would be compromising to say the least, don’t you see? Can you imagine what fun Media Guardian would have with it, or God forbid one of the tabloids?”

  “‘This family man claims to make family entertainment. Instead he spends his time creating Internet filth in honor of his girlfriend,’” I posited as a potential storyline.

  “Exactly.” He smiled at me. I smiled back. I did like him. I’d forgotten that. Strange that my only experience of adultery should be one of the less shameful episodes in my sexual history. Though his wife and children might disagree should they ever find out. I felt a belated twinge of guilt about them while at the time I had been able to justify our affair quite easily.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just stuck. My life is stuck. It hasn’t moved on since I last saw you and then this site comes along. And it’s made me even more stuck as all I can think about is who might be behind it. I’m stuck in a stupid job, in a bad relationship, and it’s all caught on the bloody Internet.”

  He leaned forward and whispered, “I’d hug you if we weren’t displayed in a glass podule, you sexy gorgeous creature, you.”

  I did so want to be held by him. He was of the type characterized in gay classifieds as “bear,” huge and hairy.

  “But it wouldn’t do you any good,” he continued. “What are you still doing at PR O’Create? It’s such a two-bit operation.”

  “You hired us.”

  “I hired you. Get out of there and get yourself a real job. Or have some children. Make your life change. Don’t wait around for some stupid Web site to change it for you. We in television are finding that all this interactivity stuff is very much overrated. You should be a top striker, not stuck on the subs’ bench of life.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now get out of here, before I rip your top off to reveal your splendid boobs to the troops.”

  *

  Bored, I was so bored in the office, but look where getting bored got me. I’d never have found the damned site if I hadn’t been so bored. I fired it up once more to search for clues. I squinted at it through half-closed eyes, as if it were one of those Magic Eye pictures they sold on the street and, if I looked at it right, a 3D dinosaur would appear.

  What had Maggie suggested? That the perp was revealing himself on the site. I read the text and extracted the initial letters of each sentence. T, B, S. Tony, Toby, Thomas, Tom, Tim; Bill, Billy, Boris, Bob, “Hot Bob” maybe? Sebastian, Stephen, Simon, Sy, Sid, sod it.

  I pressed my face up to the screen to check out the logo, fat blobby “Izobel” underlined with “her site her world.” Still. That would have been a cunning place to put a clue. But none.

  There was a treasure book when I was growing up that had a rabbit hidden on every page. I moved my head away from the screen. Did the arrangement of the photos make up a letter? A “C” maybe? Yes, it could be a C.

  I stared hard at the photos individually, pressing my nose almost up to the glass like the academic’s children of my youth who didn’t have a television used to do outside the rentals shop on the high street. I could make out a figure lurking in the shadows of the pub. I’d have to ask Ivan to do something clever with it, blow it up like they do on detective programs.

  Ivan. I hadn’t rung him yet. Something was stopping me. I don’t know whether I felt bad about hassling him when he was only helping me out, or scared he too would fail to have the answers and I would have run out of options.

  I continued staring at the site, my mouth agape, possibly with a faint dribble coming out of it. That’s what I felt anyway, idiotic, befuddled and belittled, not beguiled and bemused. I put my head to one side in order to get a different perspective. I right-clicked on photos in the way that I had seen Ivan do. Nothing.

  “Hello, Izobel.” I looked up to find Ivan by my desk.

  “Talk of the devil.” I definitely did have a bit of spittle squatting on my chin. I tried to lick it off, but succeeded in making myself look like I was dementedly attempting to lick my lips in a gesture of lasciviousness. And that wasn’t the impression I wanted to give Ivan. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Why?”

  “My friend Maggie reckons that the person behind the site might be trying to hide a clue as to their identity in the site, buried somehow.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do you remember you got that box full of code up? Could there be additional words in that?”

  He smiled. “Of course there could be. I like it. Depending on the code you put around the words, you could put any number of phrases into it and it wouldn’t affect the look of the Web page at all. Look, I’ll show you.”

  Here we go, I thought, another science lesson.

  “Here’s a Web site, for example. And here’s its code.” He brought up the white box with an ugly typeface filling it. “I could put these words into the code.” He typed “my name is Ivan” into it, the sort of phrase you use when testing out pens in a stationer’s. “Because of the symbols I’ve put around it, it won’t make any difference to the page at all. It could just be an in-joke between programers.”

  “Not a very funny one.”

  “No, of course not. I wasn’t trying.”

  “See if there’s anything on my site. Please. Thanks.”

  Izobelbrannigan.com flooded the screen, soon replaced by its code. He skimmed through the endless chevrons and symbols as if it were the easiest-to-read magazine article and then stopped. “There you go.” He laughed.

  “What? What is it?” I stared at the screen and he pointed to it with a pen. I put on a serious face as I saw my boss Tracy walk by and look at Ivan and me with barely concealed fury. “Show me.”

  “Read it.”

  There, among the technical nonsense, was a sentence in plain English, perhaps a Rosetta Stone that would unlock the meaning of the hieroglyphics. But it might as well have been in Ancient Egyptian for all it meant to me.

  “‘Said tree in distress,’” I read out. “Stupid site, what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Does it not mean anything to you?”

  “Trees? Ash, oak, sycamore… do I know anybody called those names? Or a tree surgeon? No, I don’t.”

  “I don’t think it’s someone who shares a name with a tree, actually. It looks more like a crossword clue.”

  Damn, I never could get my head around cryptic crosswords. “You don’t by any chance know how to do them?”

  “‘In distress’ implies that it’s an anagram. Of, I suppose, ‘said tree.’” He wrote out the eight letters in capitals in a circle on a Post-it note. “Sid someone, do you know anyone called Sid?”

  I shook my head. “Or could it not be a crossword clue but a hint that there’s somebody called Said? You know, the Arabic name Sa-eeed.”

  “Do you know anybody called that?”

  “No, but…” My desk phone made the sound of an internal call. Once ordinary people could recognize birdsong; now they just know the difference between mobile with message, mobile with call, internal and external office tones and the home phone. Not that the latter rings much anymore.

  “Izobel speaking.” Each trill had a different response.


  “Sorry, Ivan, got to go.” I made my way, as requested, into my boss’s office, which was enclosed. Open-plan only went so far.

  “Come in,” said Tracy. Or “Tracy, as in Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and Grace Kelly in High Society,” as she was wont to introduce herself. She modeled her clothes on such epitomes of restrained good taste too, never straying too far from black trousers, kitten-heeled boots and a pastel-colored cashmere top. She was my age.

  “Izobel Brannigan,” she began. “Who are you?”

  “Sorry?” I had enough trouble with identities without Tracy adding to the load.

  She leaned back and put her muscled arms behind her head. I should go to Body Pump at the gym more often. “You’re smart Izobel, who was hired for her way with words. You’re lots-of-experience Izobel. You’re a-creative-approach-to-PR Izobel.” She then switched positions and put her elbows on her desk.

  I nodded and mumbled some acknowledgment of gratitude.

  “But at the moment, you’re distracted-and-unproductive Izobel.”

  The further forward she came, the more I slunk back, maintaining that force field of distance between us.

  “Clients have been complaining,” she continued. “Every time I walk by your desk you’re surfing the Net. You disappear for hours on end. You miss deadlines. You fail to follow up leads. You haven’t placed anything in weeks.”

  How humiliating that in a profession famed for shirking, I should have been caught out.

  “I took the trouble of checking on your Internet usage. Well, my little helper did.” Tracy thrust a printout of my Internet history at me. It was like looking at an extended bank statement, a humiliating roll call of your existence that you never thought to see. It was the Turin Shroud of my office life, a negative imprint based on hours on izobel brannigan.com, interrupted only briefly by forays into media sites and gossip boards. “It seems like you spend many hours of company time working on your personal Web site, or blogging as I believe it’s called these days. We don’t pay you to create your own home page. Though we’re clearly paying you too much if you can afford to have all those photos of yourself taken. It’s the vanity of it that I find so extraordinary. I don’t even have a photo of myself on the company Web site. And this”—she pointed at my sheet of shame—“isn’t company business. Have you got something you’d like to say?”

  I was silent.

  “Take this as a verbal warning.” She avoided my gaze. “In the current climate we can’t be carrying slackers. See this.” She pointed at a pile of papers on her desk. “These are CVs from Oxbridge graduates begging to be allowed to come and work for us for free. Just remember that. And if you’ve got a problem, then please talk to someone about it. Don’t allow it to affect your professional conduct. If you want, you can leave work now.” It was almost five anyway. “Use the time to think.”

  I would think, I resolved quickly as I bustled through the office. I went to my computer and pulled the server support line number off the list of central resources. We had to sort this out once and for all.

  As I walked out into the street, the pap caption might have read, “A good day’s work: Izobel leaves the West End offices of the thriving PR business.”

  Chapter Ten

  I rang my technical consultant Ivan, who readily agreed for me to come round to his offices just north of Oxford Street, despite having seen me only half an hour before. George was disengaged, Maggie disgruntled and I was disappointed. At least my technical friend still seemed to retain the last vestiges of patience about finding out who was behind the site.

  I made my way to an unfamiliar area of the West End, but ten minutes’ walk from my office. Its streets were lined with wholesale clothes shops selling the sort of outfits only worn by girl bands: one-shouldered tops, spray-on trousers and six-inch-wide belts, all in fawn colorways. The rest of the area had a vaguely holiday feel, culminating in a crossroads of cafés with outdoor tables, complete with a mariachi band singing “Guantanamera” on repeat, and throngs of people enjoying not being in an office at just after five on a partially sunny afternoon.

  I made my way up steep stairs, having waded through the mail almost blocking the door of Ivan’s building, letters addressed to fake-sounding businesses with names like “Flair International Fashion” and “ERM Elegant Models.” I was stuck in an optical illusion; the stairs went on forever, up and up and up. By the time I reached the top floor, I was doubled up and panting like a pervert.

  I almost fell in as Ivan opened the door. He was wearing non-office gear and he wore it well.

  “Hello again.” He smiled. “I’ve got a terrible advantage over anyone visiting me. They always look like they’ve completed a decathlon.” He was pressed and fresh. Even his hair looked like it had been steam-cleaned, especially in comparison to mine, which was held up with a rubber band garnished with the strands that it had already ripped from my scalp.

  He ushered me into a mezzanine room that was as small as the two computers it contained were outsize. I felt like a twenty-first-century Alice in Wonderland, facing a machine that would be labeled “use me.” I could still hear the grating sounds of the band playing from the street, although it seemed as though I had crossed into another world. A world where it was acceptable to have a hand-made poster bearing the legend: “Systems Administrators do it with their hardware.”

  “Is this your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do all the people sit? I thought you had a team of employees. Is it a team of one?”

  “Five people actually. They all work on-site or from home.” He shrugged. “There’s no point me shelling out for an expensive office when they wouldn’t be there most of the time and I’ve set them up with powerful computers at home.”

  I frowned. “But how can you tell that they’re not slacking?”

  “I don’t care if they are. They all get their work done, so what does it matter how long it takes them? I trust them and they trust me. No clients ever complain.”

  I sat down on one of the two swivel chairs placed in front of the computers that were raised on 1,000-page-thick manuals. The two screens faced coyly toward each other and their keyboards jostled for space on the desk. I spread out a hand on each of them and mimicked plinky-plonky electronic music sounds.

  “Hey, I’m Jean-Michel Jarre.”

  “I thought you wanted to get down to business.”

  “I do. But I’d love a cup of tea. I’ve just had a bit of a stressful time with Tracy.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Did you not get the Choo account? Or you forgot to order the giant penis ice sculpture and mini fish-and-chip canapés for the next launch?”

  “Actually, if you must know, I’m about to get sacked as I apparently spend so much time surfing my own site. If only they knew.”

  “I knew something was up,” he said. “Tracy asked me for a server printout of the Internet activity from your computer.”

  “And you gave it to her? Oh man,” I elongated the word. “Couldn’t you have faked it or something?”

  “No, because that would have been both illegal and unprofessional.”

  He sat down, fired up both the monsters on his desk and then went to the corner of the room where an ancient plastic kettle sat among mini cartons of UHT milk and café packets of sugar. He made us our teas, black with sugar, without my prompting.

  He looked intently at the screens before bringing up a black box with pale script. The box floated listlessly in the middle of one of the vast screens while he drummed his fingers in the one clear space left on the desk.

  “What do you want to do? Work on that anagram or see if we can find more clues in the code?”

  “I’m not sure. You said something about being able to get the name of the person who owns Izobel Brannigan, I mean, owns the name izobelbrannigan dot com. Can you do that for starters?”

  “Find the domain name? I could give it a shot. It’s fascinating,” he continued. “I can find out s
o much about the servers izo-belbrannigan dot com is using.”

  “But can you find out who’s responsible for it?”

  “Possibly.” He had become distracted, as if his world had turned into something black and white with strange prompt commands. “If I ping it,” he said, typing “ping www.izobelbrannigan.com” onto his screen, “we can see if the packet comes back from a remote server and how quickly it does. Look, nought point six milliseconds. These packets will keep spewing out until I press Control C.” Which he duly did.

  “Yes, but who owns the site? Who owns izobelbrannigan?” I felt hot and speckled. I had that sense of expectation that can only lead to acute disappointment.

  “If I do a traceroute, I can find out the quickest route between the server I use here and the server it uses. Probably via LINX at Telehouse.”

  I made the face he must have been tired of seeing. I was tired of making it. I felt like I should just keep my hand permanently raised with the words “But miss, I don’t understand” tattooed across my forehead.

  “London Internet Exchange,” he said patiently if patronizingly. “It’s the largest Internet Exchange point in Europe. Anyway, back to the traceroute.” He looked at my blank face and filled in the metaphor. “Like six degrees of separation. It will find the most direct links between servers and sites.”

  “But what about the owner of the domain name?”

  “I’ll do a whoislookup.”

  I liked the sound of that. At last computer language I could understand.

  “Let’s try on the co dot uk one first.” He typed “#who is izobel .brannigan.co.uk@whois.nic.uk” into that strange little black and white box on the screen. These computer commands were contradictory, in some ways so opaque and in others so insultingly simplistic. “Who is” indeed.

  “Who’s Nic?” I asked.

  He looked like I’d asked him who was top of the hit parade. “It’s Nominet, the registry for all dot co dot uk Internet names.” He shook his head.

  “And who owns my site?” I asked as information clattered onto the screen.