Cyber Cinderella (17 page)

Or like Married Man, he’ll want to spank me and have me wear scratchy panties and garters. He’ll encourage me to put on a naughty nurse’s outfit and then tell me I’ve been remiss in my duties to which the only recourse is for him to administer a love injection. He’ll like it when I call him a “stud muffin” and respond by calling me his “creamy crumpet,” until I feel that we’re starring in our porno version of a slap-up spread in a chintzy country tea shop. And, like cream, I’ll end up being whipped into shape, into what he hopes will be peaks of lust for him.

I really don’t like being spanked, even lightly; why would I like the sight of a red welt across my body?

Frank, what was he like in bed? I don’t remember, so long ago. Being born after 1966 meant he was condom-dexterous. He was enthusiastic, too. We laughed a lot and giggled at ourselves in the mirror and spent whole weekends eating bad student food and each other. I bet he didn’t do that with Camilla.

Spanish Artist was scientific. There wasn’t much in the way of tapas with Pepe, if you know what I mean, just straight in there with the chorizo.

Ivan and I had not talked about contraception yet. He hadn’t pressured me for sex but had seemed content with kissing. Would we have to go for triple protection as Jonny and I had done? Rubberized both within and without.

And George, what was he like in bed? How good was George really? He was very good at convincing the world that he was a fun-loving bon viveur rather than a sybaritic louse living off his parents, me and his glory days as editor of a punk fanzine. He had conned the paper into thinking him capable of editing a whole section. He had fooled Catherine into marrying him and bearing his child. And I had believed that he loved me for me, not for the place I was offering him to live. I continued to trust that he was faithful to me, when he never had been to any other woman. Maybe he had duped me into believing he was such a hot lover. He never went down and I hadn’t come in months, after all.

Ivan, I suspected dreamily, would be better than all of them. I felt my lips. They had been kissed dry. My lips were cracked, my chin rough, my eyes bagged. Yet I was sure I looked lovely.

George, my live-in lover, to use the parlance from his newspaper. We were “living in sin,” yet it was I who had sinned against him. Ivan and I hadn’t had sex, so did it count? But I knew I’d transgressed. I’d crept back at three in the morning and given myself the adulterer’s bath—splashing water on my face and neck, drying myself between my legs, washing my mouth out with minty breath freshener and chewing gum, hoping that its sugar-free hardness would attract all the taste of Ivan into its tasteless little ball. I had lain next to George and felt smug. That was it, I hadn’t felt guilty so much as smug. I had wanted sex so much at that moment, but I had not wanted it with George.

“Nice time, angel-girl?” he had asked.

“Lovely, thanks,” I had said without remorse.

The phone on my desk rang.

“Izobel speaking.”

“Hello, Izobel.”

“Hello,” I said to Ivan, both pleased and appalled. You’re not supposed to ring me yet. I felt nervous.

“I was just ringing to check that you got home all right last night.”

“Yes, fine, thanks. I must say it’s very chic to have a black cab rank near your house. Most of us only have those really grotty minicab places with a flashing beacon outside and Formica and illegal workers inside. And then have to get into an un-MOT-ed Mercedes with a man who doesn’t know where Oxford Circus is,” I gabbled. “But where you live is different. It’s great, the best.”

“I had a nice time last night.”

“It was nice.”

“We should do it again.”

“We should.”

My mobile rang. It was Maggie; I rejected her call. “Sorry about that. Are you feeling rough today?” I asked. “I am. Gosh, I think I was really drunk last night. Steaming. Off my head.”

“I wasn’t.”

The mobile went again, Maggie again. Its insistence was like an annoying child, poking their parent in the arm. “Sorry, Ivan, but the same person keeps ringing. Can we speak later? Ring me back.”

“Fine. ’Bye then.”

“’Bye.”

“Hello Maggie, what do you want?” I felt guilty about the hurt note in Ivan’s voice. What a cringing woman’s guilt—nothing about having got off with a man who’s not your boyfriend, just feeling really bad about not being more enthusiastic the next day and potentially hurting his feelings.

“You’re so going to love me. In my efforts to keep my mind off all the nonspecific pregnancy anxiety, I have been working so hard on your behalf.”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to find out who’s behind the site, that’s what.”

“Oh, that.” I wondered whether I should get her off the phone and call Ivan straight back. That would be craven. I shouldn’t worry about being a bit cool, cool was good, cool was what I usually failed to do. Anyway, he wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t even my potential boyfriend, I already had a boyfriend. “Great, thanks Maggie, you’re a star. What have you got then?”

“Two things. For starters I’ve got something on our friend Pepe Gomez Gomez. I have to say, it was pretty easy. I just Googled him and then got this hilarity. I’ve e-mailed you the Web address to look at.”

“Does it incriminate him?”

“Of doing your site? Probably not. But of being a total plonker? Yes, he is guilty of that crime. You can be judge and jury on that score.”

“I look forward to it. And what’s the second thing?”

“I haven’t quite got it yet, but I will do. Something even better, I think. Call you back.”

I couldn’t phone Ivan and I couldn’t do any work so I looked for Maggie’s e-mail.
“Hello, you may be amused by this.”
It was named
“Todas las Musas”
and the Internet address ended in “.es” to indicate a Spanish address. I could imagine her saying the name of the site in a heavily British accent reminiscent of the request for
“dos cervezas”
on a thousand package holidays.

I opened up the page as directed and found it covered in neat photos of women, equidistant from one another, like an American high-school yearbook.
Chica salvaje
read the caption beneath the photo of a girl in a dominatrix outfit,
la negra
by, unsurprisingly but politically incorrectly, a black woman, and
la inglesa
adjacent to a photo of me. I was wearing a pair of jeans and was braless in an old T-shirt, looking cheerfully toward the photographer. Pepe had never been without that Polaroid camera and I therefore looked nonchalant at being snapped in so casual a way. I might have been naked of makeup or grooming but at least I was fully dressed. I shivered as I glanced at the photo of my neighbor on the site,
la asistenta de limpieza,
who wore nothing but a pair of bright pink rubber gloves.

A photo of me? My Spanish was pretty poor, restricted as it was to filth and anatomy as practiced by my Iberian lover, but I could make out Pepe’s name at the top of the page, and the words
artista
and
instalación
in the introductory text.
Todas las Musas,
of course, “All the Muses”; this was another piece of Pepe’s virtual art, his attempt to turn his life into something for the world’s cyber-gallery. This was all the girls he’d slept with, sorry, all his muses, all the girls he’d loved before. I looked through the arrayed photos. There were at least a hundred. How could I ever have thought that he might have been my cyber-stalker? True, online paeans were evidently a line of artistry he was interested in, but I was but one percent of his interest. And I was just “the English girl.” Nothing else, not the
inglesa sexy
or
intelligente
or
bella
or
fantastica,
not even my name. At least with izobelbrannigan.com I was its star; here I was just an nth part of somebody else’s life project and one that involved sleeping with as many
chicas
as possible.

In the center of the page, displayed in the largest photo of them all, was Pepe himself. His green teeth were visible even in the badly pixelated Polaroid and his eyes had that odd paleness that I remembered from looking into them. He didn’t look at all Spanish. He did look foreign, but from another planet rather than merely from a country outside the British Isles. He was smiling broadly and I could not help but smile back at him. He was pre-posterous, but he always had been.

I laughed out loud, tiredness and drunkenness and kiss-giddiness making me almost hysterical.

“I wouldn’t look at porn at work, sweets,” said Mimi, glancing at the girls emblazoned on my screen.

“It’s not porn, it’s art,” I said.

“That’s what my boy calls it, but it don’t change the fact that it’s filth.”

I laughed again. It might once have bothered me, even only the day before yesterday, that I was such an unimportant part of Pepe’s grand work of art called his love life. His hubris was now merely humorous. I thought of Ivan’s modestly displayed but far more beautiful pieces. He was an artist in all but name, Pepe was the reverse. I wanted to talk to Ivan about it, to tell him of the rubbish that my previous artist lover calls art. I thought he’d find it funny. On the other hand, he’d know about my past and at least one meaningless ex. Meaningless sex, meaningless men. He’d know just how dodgy they were and I didn’t want him to know that, not yet. I wanted him to know only what he had so far chosen to recognize in me. There was time to reveal the flaws, the superficiality, the neurosis, even the fact that I had a boyfriend already.

I reached toward the phone to ring him; I had to speak to him, I had to make good my curtness on the phone to him. Just as I reached toward the handset, it rang again.

“So what do you think? Clever, aren’t I?”

“Maggie! It’s hilarious, I can’t believe I didn’t know about it. What a prat, all the muses indeed.”

“Just think, two sites devoted to you.”

“For what it’s worth.”

“I don’t think he’s your man.”

“No, he never was, evidently.”

“And I’ve managed to unearth something far more impressive in our search for site perp. You may call me clever and gorgeous, but I’ve only managed to go and get a list of the names of the people invited to Hot Bob’s party.”

I had almost forgotten about the site and our search and the party. “Oh my God. How did you get that?”

“I was brilliant. I went to the club and stuck my pregnant lady belly out and said that I needed the guest list from the night of Bob’s party in order to find out a man’s name. That man, I told the dippy woman at the club, needed to be found to face up to his responsibilities. At that point, I stroked pregnant lady belly in poignant way and she almost cried. They keep all the door lists in case of any trouble afterward. I explained how a young man had got me into trouble.”

“But do the dates add up?”

“They almost do and how should she know exactly how pregnant I am anyway? Shall I read out the names to you, then? One of them could be our man.”

I looked over to Tracy’s office. “Yeah, why not.” I noticed her come out of her office. “I would be grateful for your feedback on the target list. Would you like to respond to the one I e-mailed over to you earlier?” Tracy walked out of earshot. “Sorry about that. Fire away, Mags.”

It was like being back at school as she read a roll call of the middle-class names that had been popular with seventies parents: Jonny, Kate, James, Edward and Charlotte. I felt my ears muffle over, lulled by hangover and Maggie’s mantras. I doodled lips onto my notepad and did that schoolgirl thing where you can work out what percentage Izobel Brannigan loves Ivan Jaffy by counting up each time an L, an O, a V, an E and an S appear in your respective names. Izobel and Ivan love each other a whopping eighty-seven percent actually, that’s almost the best score you can get. Was it fate? Don’t be silly, I don’t love Ivan. I don’t even know him.

Maggie continued to read, oblivious to the fact that I only didn’t love Ivan a mere thirteen percent. The names she spoke meant little or nothing to me.

“Stop,” I said after Maggie had read out six dozen or so of them. The name on my notepad matched a name that she had called out. A familiar name, at last, the most familiar name to me that day. “Ivan who, did you say?”

“Ivan Jaffy. Why, do you know him?”

Know him? I knew the crease of his tongue and the stroke of his hand. “Yes, I know him.”

“Could he be, you know, the one?”

I had asked myself the very same thing only that morning. How different Maggie’s question was.

“Yes.” I paused. “It could be him.”

“Oh my God, I’ve got him, I found him, I found him. Forget your technical consultant, it was old-fashioned detective work that got him. Does this Ivan have technical know-how? Does he fancy you? Is he a bit creepy?”

“I suppose.” Yes, yes, yes. He was all those things. Images of the truth flashed through my head: the picture from Hot Bob’s party; the photo of me at the conference, hanging in the foyer right under my and Ivan’s noses; the sluggishness about doing anything about finding who owned the URL; knowing too much about
Dune;
the computer nous; the crush on me; the getting close to me through the site.

And it had almost worked. I had almost slept with him last night.

“Iz, are you OK? Am I right?”

“Yes, I think you are. I think it’s him.”

“And what are you going to do about this tosser? Who is he anyway? Do I know him? Do you want me to deal with him?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s just a techie from work.”

“So he’d have the technical knowledge then. Bingo. What are you going to do about him? Do you want me around? Maybe Mick should come along too.”

Artist Ivan, kisser Ivan, systems Ivan, funny Ivan.

Stalker Ivan, creepy Ivan, malevolent Ivan.

I didn’t know what to do about any of them.

My landline went again and I answered it although I knew who would be calling. “Mags, I’ll have to think about it. I have to go now.”

“Hello, Ivan.” The same phrase from an hour ago, my voice very different.

“We were saying,” he said. “How we should do it again sometime.”