Cyber Cinderella

by Christina Hopkinson

  I curled up into a ball on my bed and covered myself in the duvet. It couldn’t get me there.

  *

  The home phone woke me and I answered it, hoping that I’d never been so stupid as to give Ivan that number to join his armory.

  “Oh, hello, Maggie.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “Couldn’t face it. Didn’t want to bump into him.”

  “You can’t let him get to you like this. He’s winning if you do. It’s only a Web site, not a loaded gun.”

  I gave a wry laugh. Well, it started that way and mutated into a hysterical screech. “It is.”

  “Is what?”

  “A loaded gun.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you in the office? Log onto it now,” I instructed. I pulled my knees into my chest as I waited for her response.

  “You must go to the police,” she said. “Tell them who you think it is and show it to them. Take a printout with you in case they don’t have Internet connection. You never know. Tell them about Ivan and show them the dates.”

  “They won’t do anything. I’ve seen the television version. They’ll just say they can’t do anything until he actually attacks me.”

  “Don’t believe everything you see on television,” Maggie said. “And no, you can’t have that in writing.”

  *

  I wasn’t so depressed that I couldn’t get dressed. Things would have to be really bad for me not to be able to theme-dress for a visit to the police station. I even put in my contact lenses. I had taken to wearing an old hiking anorak with big pockets instead of carrying a handbag, but I wanted the police to take me seriously. They must be as susceptible to theme-dressing as anyone. I tried to wodge some concealer onto the infected stubble burn but it was carried out on a wave of weeping pus. I put on a suit, my only suit, the one I had worn for the pitch in the photo on the site.

  It had impressed Ivan the site-writer, who had after all described my besuited appearance at the conference as “slick.” I shivered to think of it. I was trying to reconcile Ivan the artist with Ivan the sycophant whose prose style was that of OK! magazine without the wit.

  I had never been inside a real police station before. I had expected it to look more like a doctor’s waiting room, but there were no magazines for me to read or toys for kids to play with. There seemed to be a lot of pine, and it felt like a grotty Scandinavian holiday home. My rubber-soled shoes squelched across the lino floor as I read the notices that covered the walls as enthusiastically as boy band posters in a teenager’s bedroom. A picture of handcuffs was emblazoned “streetwear for robbers.” The public were warned not to leave their mobiles visible to thieves, but one poster later were warned more strictly still not to make false claims of mobile phone theft. The happy smiling faces of now-missing persons were brightly color-photocopied onto posters to form a gallery of misery.

  One notice told us to report crime via the Internet. I was reporting a crime on the Internet.

  There was no one waiting so I stepped forward to the counter. No glass separated me from the police officers and I could see into their offices, where a helmet sat picturesquely by a computer, as if placed there by an art director.

  Aren’t policemen supposed to look younger every day? This one was well beyond retirement age. He was the oldest, most wiz-ened man I’d seen outside of a retirement home. He looked like he should be an oracle of wisdom in a science-fiction film.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but have you got five minutes?” I pay my taxes, but I felt like a fraudulent time-waster. They probably had murders to deal with. But then, I shivered, mine could become a case of murder.

  The old-timer looked around the empty station as if it was evident. I leaned forward, clutching the printout of the home page.

  “I’d like to report what I believe to be a death threat.”

  He looked more interested. I unfolded my evidence. “How would I go about doing that?” I asked.

  “You tell me how and where and I compile a report. Come through to the computer.”

  I shuddered as he ushered me through to a glass section in the corner, where he stood behind a computer and I in front. There was no getting away from them.

  I stood tall as I gave him my personal details.

  “About four weeks ago, this site came into being.” I slammed down the A4 sheet with my hand splayed across it. “It’s called izobel brannigan dot com. As I said, I’m Izobel Brannigan.” He remained impassive. “This morning when I looked at it, these dates had appeared. See, it says nineteen seventy-three to two thousand and three. It didn’t do that before.”

  He frowned. I wasn’t sure whether at me or at the site. “And?”

  “I was born in nineteen seventy-three...”

  “I see. Four weeks, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “And these dates only appeared this morning.”

  “Yes.” I felt as though I were reporting a leaky roof rather than my own imminent demise.

  “And the address of the site is?”

  “www dot izobelbrannigan dot com, my name dot com and my name dot co dot uk. It’s spelled I-Z-O-B…” Do you even know how to log onto the Internet, Granddad?

  “What is the tone of the rest of the site? Could it be perceived as threatening?”

  I sighed. “No, it’s flattering. A bit weird, maybe. Photos of me and stuff.”

  “And have you been verbally threatened or is there a more explicit threat on the site?”

  “No.” I was ashamed. At that moment, I almost wished that I had been, like I had wanted proof of George’s infidelity rather than merely the suspicion of it.

  “Are you known to us for any reason?”

  “What on earth do you mean?” Nutty police botherer?

  “Have you ever had call to contact the police before?”

  “No, except once to report a stolen bicycle. About ten years ago.”

  “Do you know who is behind the site?”

  Again I sighed. “Yes.”

  “Name?”

  “Ivan Jaffy,” I told him before giving Ivan’s address and a description. About six foot, hair dark, eyes hazel, I said. Eyes fringed with thick eyelashes, hair that shone, a body that was hard in all the right places, I thought. I should have been describing Ivan to my female friends in girlish excitement, not to a grumpy old policeman. “I think it’s him.”

  “Think?”

  “I am almost certain, but he hasn’t confessed to it yet. Actually, I haven’t confronted him yet.”

  “Have you any proof?”

  “Not exactly, but all the clues add up and he’s got a motive.”

  “Which is?”

  “He admits to being sexually attracted to the site protagonist.”

  “And do you think he has a motive to”—Officer Aged paused—“attempt to make true the statement introduced to the site as of this morning?”

  I heard that medics now wore their stethoscopes slung around their necks and rode on the stretchers in a way that they never did before ER. I wondered whether police officers walked in synchronization around the beat and talked of things going “pear-shaped” in deference to actors playing police officers. This policeman looked to be more Dixon of Dock Green than NYPD Blue.

  “I don’t think so, no. I don’t think he’d want to do something so,” I stuttered, “terminal. But I think he wants to frighten me. Maybe to hurt or harm me in some way. He knows that I know he’s behind it. I discovered likely proof yesterday and sort of accused him.”

  “And that may have provoked him?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m here for. Can’t you tell me?”

  “Not for me to say, I’m just making a crime report.”

  “What will you do with it then?”

  “Send it upstairs to CID. Criminal Investigation Department. I’m just a station officer so I don’t have opinions. I leave that to them.”

  “So what will they do?
How long will they take with it?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Like I say, I don’t have the thoughts, just the fingers.” He waggled them above the keyboard in a way that reminded me of the gesture that boys from the grammar had used to indicate that they’d “fingered” a girl.

  “I’m not asking for your opinion, just wondering if you could give me a guess about what they’ll do with the information you’ve so kindly collated.”

  “You’ll have to ask one of the boys.” He emphasized the last word. “Oi, guv, can you answer this lady’s questions?” he asked a young plain-clothed man who had appeared on the other side of the hatch.

  The man nodded. Male-pattern baldness and adult acne, always an unlucky combination. Officer Krupke began explaining my predicament to the young upstart, who was looking at me lasciviously, his lips as shiny and slimy as the wet-look gel in what remained of his hair.

  “There’s an e-mail that says she might die in the year two thousand and three. But she doesn’t know who it’s from and the rest of the e-mail site is quite nice about her.”

  “It’s a Web site,” I corrected, “in my honor but created anonymously, which now implies that my life’s dates are nineteen seventy-three to two thousand and three.”

  Youngster seemed to be computing this information intensely. “You don’t look thirty,” he concluded and switched into a more professional mode.

  “How long would CID take over investigating this and what would you normally do about it?”

  “There would be an assessment of the matter overall—for example the tone of everything else on the site, a check through our records to see if the suspect’s got previous, a check on you to see if you’ve been threatened before.”

  I shook my head.

  “Then we’d run a threat assessment.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Could be today. Could be next week. We prioritize. Depending on the result of the threat assessment, we ask our IT experts to try to find out who designed or updates the Web site. Maybe confiscate the suspect’s hardware for examination.”

  “That would be good. Then you could arrest him.”

  Kid cop giggled. “As you can imagine, our IT experts are very busy with matters pertaining to global child pornography.”

  “Of course.”

  “And until the threats became more specific, we could only issue a warning.”

  “Fine, thank you.” I was desperate to dab my chin. “Thank you for your time.”

  I scored some powerful and probably prescription-only antibiotic cream on the way home. I think the pharmacist felt sorry for me on seeing the fountainhead on my face. This gave me something to do these days off work, as I could dab my chin with chemicals in between trying to nibble on dry toast and turning the pages of the magazines I had bought.

  I went into a bookshop, too, and found a copy of Dune. It had strange snakelike pods across the cover and the recommendation of having won a “Nebula Award.” It looked to me like a seventies prog rock concept album cover and I knew even as I bought it that I would not be reading it that afternoon.

  I was in a state of nothingness. I couldn’t go out as Ivan would be watching out for me. I couldn’t eat, which was a rare state of affairs. I could make a dash for the gym, I supposed, or read some edifying literature, but daytime television and pulpy magazines were my limit.

  Everything came back to the site. I looked at the photos in magazines of stars walking down Manhattan streets in their celebrity casual wear and was reminded of the ones of me (albeit without that studied insouciance). How did they feel, I wondered. Sometimes they smiled at the paparazzo, usually only the minor celebrities, to collude with their stalker, to say, I know you’re there and I don’t mind. This goes two ways. What was it like to walk down Bond Street and feel yourself papped and snapped? I ought to know.

  I had been snapped. I was breaking.

  The slim magazines with exclamation marks in the titles continued their candyflossed hold on me. They all had covers with a recently married couple cooing about the joys of marriage. “Why being a wife is my greatest role,” proclaimed one actress; “I never knew true love until we had our baby,” said another of life with her dorkish-looking husband and preposterously named child. Another couple were being married on a beach, with the white dress of an English country do incongruously superimposed onto a Caribbean resort terrace. Some stupid cow of an actress who probably blow-jobbed her way to the top was saying that the professional acclaim meant nothing to her, she preferred to cook up some pasta and hang out with her husband. “Starry parties and a cupboard full of awards just aren’t our thing. Give me a pair of jeans and a free weekend to go hiking with my fella.”

  Being George’s girlfriend wasn’t my greatest role. I did the George-Grand-loves-Izobel-Brannigan schoolgirl game on a page of the magazine, though I already knew how it turned out. One L, two Os, no V, three Es, no S in our names that leaves a score of 12030, reduce to 3233, 556, until it came down to two figures, 23. He loved me twenty-three percent. Twenty-three percent was a less than mediocre score. It was almost as bad as it got. Eighty-seven percent was much higher. George and Ivan.

  I did some more maths, thinking about those two and the others, Pepe, Jonny, Elliot, Frank, William et Alan. I’d kissed a number of men and boys, slept with that number minus ten and gone out with that number minus five. These were the mathematics of my sexual past, but would there be a final figure in the calculation? Had I ever thought that the final figure would be a portly and family-burdened one? When I was with George, did I ever think he was my future, or even my present? He had always had a sense of the past about him, not only in the way he dressed and spoke, but in my relationship with him, one where I was always unknowingly thinking ahead to the day when he would be my ex-boyfriend. He had just been the old bloke I had met at a launch and our fling had segued sexually into my one and only living-together relationship. He was never supposed to be the one.

  I had laughed so much with George. He made life fun. We had laughed and drunk and partied and screwed. He was ten years older than me but he made me feel ten years younger. I had stayed up all night and all day too. But life wasn’t fun anymore, we couldn’t be irresponsible.

  “Please, George,” I said to him on the phone. “Please come straight home from work today.”

  He almost managed it as well, arriving back at about seven. He once explained to me that although he knew he could have a drink when he got home or met me across town, the drink straight after work with colleagues was always more immediate and always more enticing. I was glad to see him, nonetheless.

  I held onto him like a koala to a tree. His overweight belly offered me ballast against the site’s threat and the police’s indifference. Beneath the soft overhang of his gut, I felt his cock harden.

  “There, there, darling girl.” He stroked my hair. “To what do I owe this? Are you feeling a little bit horny from a day at home, honey?” As if playing Twister, he reached behind me, shuffling me along slightly in the process, to grab a gulp of his drink and to light a cigarette. I continued to bury my head in his chest as he smoked and drank around me, and then he switched on the news. He was really so very good at multitasking. Having finished his cigarette, he prized us apart and put his hand up my T-shirt. I pulled away.

  “No.” Too forcefully.

  He looked puzzled and sat back on the sofa, still watching the news. “I thought that’s what you wanted, with all that clinginess.”

  Not now. “I wanted you to hold me.” He beckoned me back and into the crook of his arm and held me against him. “I think I’ve got a death threat against me.”

  He pulled back. “A what?”

  “I think somebody, Ian maybe, has threatened to kill me.”

  “What, he phoned you? Just pull the plug out on the phone, we don’t need the landline. In fact, why don’t we stop paying the bills? We’ve both got work mobiles. Or has he been around? Let me at him.” He leaped up and exp
anded his chest.

  “No, no. It’s on the site.”

  He sighed. “Oh, the site.” Bored voice. “What does it say?”

  “Izobel Brannigan, nineteen seventy-three to two thousand and three.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Izobel Brannigan born nineteen seventy-three and presumably dies two thousand and three.”

  “Presumably.”

  “Yes, presumably. Well, what else do you think it means?”

  “Look, some little creep hasn’t got the guts to chat you up properly and so creates a site. When you don’t react to it in the way he wants you to, he puts something on it to scare you. This is a man who doesn’t believe in action. He didn’t act on fancying you so he’s hardly going to act on a murderous threat, is he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I know so. It’s nothing.”

  “The police wouldn’t agree with you. They’re taking it very seriously indeed. The whole of the CID department are running a threat assessment on it as we speak and will act on it immediately. There was even talk of a permanent police presence, actually.”

  *

  Later, I asked, “Is there anything I could do that would make you want to kill me or yourself?”

  “Of course not, sausage-girl. I might want another drink though.”

  “What about Catherine, did you ever feel so passionately about her?”

  “I frequently wanted to kill her, yes, irritating little bitch. Especially during the divorce case.”

  “And you’d kill yourself if anything were to happen to Grace?”

  “Yes. Children are different, they always come first. How often do I have to tell you that, poppet?”

  And how often did I think, well, if Grace comes first why did you cheat on your wife and ensure that your daughter therefore came from a home not so much broken as shattered?

  “I’m tired and I’m bored of feeling tired,” I said. “Thank God for the spa weekend. It couldn’t be better timed. Thank you, George.” I would go and I would forget Ivan and the site and escape it all in a fug of aromatherapy flavors. George’s and my ailing and sagging relationship would be made taut and well-oiled by the spa’s health-giving properties.