Cyber Cinderella (13 page)

“Why would they go to all this trouble if they don’t want to give you a message directly from them or to let you know how they feel about you? Remember how when you used to send Valentine’s cards, you’d make sure that the postmark or some other clue would let them know who you were, if they really wanted to find out? We used to write hidden messages on them in lemon juice when we were at primary school. You’d leave a clue, yet it wouldn’t be so obvious that you couldn’t deny the connection if necessary.”

“Yes, but what are you getting at?”

“That I could’ve been too lateral about this, assuming that whoever is behind it is trying to cover their tracks. Maybe whoever it is won’t deny it if you ask them straight out, because they want you to know how they feel. Or there’s a really obvious clue actually on the site. I don’t know, like the first letter of every sentence spells out their name, or they’re visible in the background of one of the photos or something. Think, Maggie, think,” she exhorted herself. “What would happen in a film? You know how you can play heavy metal tracks backwards and they talk about the devil? What if there’s some message hidden in the pages? In the code stuff.”

“Maybe.”

“You need to talk to your technical consultant about that. Ask him whether it’s possible to add phrases into the code without them showing up on the page. Hasn’t he come up with the goods yet?”

“Ivan. No, he doesn’t seem to have. In fact, I feel he’s dragging his heels a bit. I don’t think he realizes that I can’t get on with my life until I find out who’s behind this.”

“Well, hassle him then,” said Maggie. The words “instead of hassling me” were left unsaid. “And take this list. I can remember the names on it, even if you can’t. And don’t come back until you’ve investigated them all.”

*

I sat in reception of Married Man’s office, a TV company. We’d been hired by them to boost their profile just before launching on the stock exchange. We’d boosted that of their CEO as well, while I had boosted his ego by sleeping with him, a man who hadn’t had a blow job since Virginia Wade won Wimbledon.

TV attracted as many slips of girls wearing slips of clothing as PR. Both industries, to use Douglas Coupland’s phrase, go in for Brazilification of wages: those at the top were buying houses in the South of France, while those at entry level were being paid less than part-time supermarket shelf-stackers. At least waitresses got tips. PR girls and TV researchers got late nights and lecherous bosses.

In the ten minutes I sat waiting I saw so many employees whose faces were full of hope. I listened to two of them, talking loudly and proudly.

“Yeah, the TVR was fabulous, totally dominated the eighteen to thirty-fives in that slot. Thirty-three percent share in fact.”

“LE’s the way to go, I reckon,” replied her lissome friend. “Totally the best people too.”

“Have you seen the guy execcing my program? He’s an amazing man. And so handsome. Got a girlfriend, but apparently she’s really let herself go since having the baby.”

They were the envy of their contemporaries for working in the media and herding C-listers into hospitality. I could see that they had a sense of themselves in the third person, too, at the epicenter of crap television output. Don’t do it, I wanted to say to them, all jobs are just admin so get yourself one with bigger pay and proper employee rights. Your friends won’t envy you when you’re unemployable once you have children or want something more from your life.

They were so young—the stomachs were flat and their faces full. Their hipster jeans crept ever more stealthily southward, dangerously hovering above their pubes. Was there some link between the stock exchange and how low trousers were going, as there reputedly was between the market and how high the hemlines of skirts floated?

Married Man was the squire of the television feudal system. He had the wealth to be able to afford to hire someone to do the site. I had looked up his company’s Web site and it wasn’t in a dissimilar style to mine. It wasn’t exactly similar either. I didn’t know how I was going to approach him, but I was curious to see him after all this time.

I was gestured into his office, an orange glass pod at the corner of a vast open-plan office. He was wearing a suit. Relations had been brilliant between us when I had only seen him in a suit or naked, both of which he wore extremely well. They had started to go wrong when we made the mistake of going out in mufti. Then he had sported the regulation chinos and Icelandic pattern sweaters of dress-down Friday, just like any other banker in the City at the end of the week. He looked like a middle-class dad about to mow the lawn. Which wasn’t so far from the truth.

And he was a banker. I kidded myself that because he had such a thriving company, making such innovative combinations of reality shows and docu-soaps, that he must be creative himself.

But he was Mr. Money while in the next-door podule grubbed MC Creativo. All my lover had cared about were numbers, although some of those included my measurements.

“Hello, Izobel, to what do I owe this pleasure?” He shook my hand for the benefit of the minions on the other side of the glass.

“Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”

“I’m always happy to see you.”

We stared at each other and then I glanced away to look at the photos of him with television stars suspended like a giant mobile from the ceiling, and the BAFTAs that lined the window-sill. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” I said. I couldn’t help but speak in the mechanical clichés of a business reception with him. Those or sporting metaphors were his lingua franca.

“Time flies. How long has it been?”

Since I dumped you for your employee Elliot, I thought. “Since we finished work on the campaign and you went public.”

“Four years then.”

I had loved him professionally and sexually, pinstripes and nudity, but we had never had anything to say outside of board-rooms and bedrooms. His business brain had inspired me into going to bed with him. And I had loved going to bed with him. He was as driven and enthusiastic there as he had been when building his company.

“Yes, four years.” Four years since I’d last slept with him. I had adored the way he had talked in bed; he’d tell me I had fantastic “knockers” and use the word unironically. He was a sexual Rip Van Winkle, having been married for twenty years. His carnal vocabulary was straight out of the seventies: it was Benny Hill and Carry On. His tastes were those of a naughty schoolboy reared in a tradition of British smuttiness and good-natured jollity. He made remarks about éclairs and “having it off” and “giving you one.” He’d stroke my “fanny” and bury his face in my “boobs.”

I’d responded by eschewing utility underwear for lace, satin and garters. I’d worn the sort of transparent negligees not seen since window cleaners did daily rounds with bored housewives wearing naughty nighties. I was starring in a film called
Confessions of a TV Executive
where I was, to use his parlance, always up for a bit of nookie.

He looked at me expectantly. “Well, Izobel, don’t beat about the bush. What do you want?”

“Do you have Internet access in here? I feel like I’m trapped in a cough drop.”

He spun round his flat screen and clicked on the “E” of Explorer. I could see the home page of his company reflected in his German architect’s glasses. They were a new addition. I wondered whether he’d picked up another young lover. He started typing “www” into the search box for that site. Clearly, Web-savviness was something he left to the kids, both his own and those he employed.

“Do you mind?” I asked and captained the keyboard, bringing up my site.

He read it and laughed. “Do you want a photo of me for it?”

“No, it’s not mine. I mean, I’m not behind it. I’m trying to find out who is.”

“How rum. But how can I help?”

“Exes, they’re all suspects,” I said apologetically.

“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.”