Cyber Cinderella (21 page)

I felt like I could have been buying porn. “I know, I don’t usually. It’s not for me, I mean, there’s an article in here that I’d like to read. But no, generally, not my cup of tea at all.” We looked complicit in our disapproval of George’s employers.

I waited until I got home and opened it up. I had lied; a terrible part of me enjoyed reading the articles about celebrities being too fat or too thin, the which-bikini-for-which-body features and the stories about murderous divorcees. I skipped them all that day, though, as I searched for something about izobelbrannigan.com. Nothing, nothing, nothing, until I got to the section in the middle, called the women’s bit, as if all the news and politics preceding it had been nothing for them to worry their pretty little heads over.

MY GIRLFRIEND THE INTERNET STAR shouted the headline on a full-page article, illustrated with screen grabs from the girlfriend in question’s Web site. “If another man is after your beloved you can always fight it out, right?” said the introduction. “Not if he anonymously uses the Internet to woo her, finds George Grand.” George’s name was in bold letters, accompanied by a photo of him where he looked more Second World War Ministry of Home Affairs correspondent than ever.

I skimmed George’s piece, but not so fast that I couldn’t judge it very ill-written. In it, he recounted how he’d found a site on the Internet devoted to his girlfriend and his dilemma as to whether to tell her or not. He wrote of how unnerving it was to find that your girlfriend has become Web-famous and that strangers were offering up proposals to her, both sexual and marital. He attempted to garner sympathy by painting himself the old fuddy-duddy who knows he can’t compete with these young things with their technology and wacky ways. Why, he can’t even work out how to text-message yet, the old curmudgeon that he is.

I shook my head. Even the site seemed to contain more truth than this piffle. I was pilloried in print and online. I half expected to turn on the radio and hear a panel discussing me or find myself the subject of a television investigation by a consumer affairs program.

George went on to interview others whose lives were dominated by Internet presence: a porn star’s boyfriend, the partner of a boy band star and the new lover of the girl whose e-mail about blow jobs had ripped through the nation’s in-trays.

“I can’t help but wonder,” he wrote, “whether it doesn’t add a little frisson into a relationship and whether every jaded couple should have an Internet site devoted to one or the other. It certainly seems to be working for my beloved and me. Not that I’m suggesting, of course, that the girlfriend could have created the site with this intention herself…”

The calumny of this statement was further compounded by the fact that careless copyediting ensured I was referred to in this last sentence as “girlfiend.”

Then in italics at the bottom of the article:

George Grand’s girlfriend’s site can be found at
www.izobel brannigan.com
.

Hence the spike in page impressions as noted by Ivan on the site.

I once went into my primary school and removed my coat only to find that I had forgotten to put my skirt on that day, just my thick woolen tights. That was embarrassing. Ten years later, I got my period when staying at Frank’s parents’ house, actually in their marital bed, which we’d annexed in their absence, and left it looking like something from a medieval wedding night. That was humiliating. At about that time, I was a member of the chorus of wailing women in a musical version of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
at university that was wrongly interpreted by the audience as a satirical comedy. I still blush at the memory.

But nothing, none of these things, could come close to the mortification I felt at the thought of hundreds of thousands of tabloid readers logging onto my site and assuming it had been created by me. I bloated with discomfort at the idea of strangers reading about how I rocked my world and how I liked to keep my shopping basket to ten items or less. What would they make of the pap shot of me pulling my knickers out from where they had crept up my bottom? Or picking my nose? Thank God the message boards hadn’t been introduced to the site yet.

I felt my face sieve with sweat.

It was as if George had taken my most horribly soiled pair of pants, perhaps with some sort of thrushlike discharge upon them or period-stained, and pinned them to the noticeboard at work with a plaque identifying them as mine. No, worse, he was flying them as a flag over a central London landmark. Everybody would be laughing at me.

I looked at the site as if a stranger, one of the strangers now examining it. I must look like an egotist with no shame, the sort of person who praises themselves yet at the same time abases themselves with their actions. I was like the very worst sort of reality TV contestant, enduring any humiliation to get myself noticed, showing off my shortcomings.

And PR O’Create got all the papers and this was one of the most read. I thought of Tracy slamming the article down as further damnation of me and proof that I was behind the site.

I e-mailed the site.

Please take the site down, please, please, I can’t stand it being looked at by all these people. If you do care about Izobel Brannigan at all please take it down.

Then I rang George, hoping to get to him before he went out for lunch. Too late. I tried his mobile.

“You fucking fuck-off fuckhead fucker,” I said articulately.

“Sorry darling, I can’t hear you,” he shouted through the noise of a fashionable London restaurant on a Friday lunchtime. I felt estranged from office life so quickly, the ebullience of the end of the week. “It sounded like a random selection of expletives.”

“You fucker,” I said again. “How could you do this to me?”

“Do what?”

“The fucking article, that’s what. I’m so humiliated, it’s so embarrassing.”

“Oh, that. I thought that’s what you wanted me to do. I don’t know, sweetheart, I can’t get it right. You said I didn’t pay it enough attention and then when I bring it to the world’s attention, you make a fuss. You can’t buy that sort of publicity. You should know that.”

“I don’t want that sort of publicity,” I wailed. “All those people looking at my site. I feel so exposed.”

“But darling, haven’t you always wanted to be famous? Isn’t that what everyone wants?”

It was true; I had practiced my Oscar acceptance speech in the mirror, I had always walked down the street as if about to be papped, I did write my biography in my head.

“No, not famous,” I said. “Renowned. I’d like to be respected and not as some loon who creates a site about themselves. You’ve abased me.”

“Not my fault, is it? I mean, I didn’t create the site. As you’re so fond of reminding me.”

I thought I could hear his chums chortling in the background at the neuroticism of the “girlfiend,” only increasing my ire. “Come home now, come home immediately. We have to discuss this at once. You are in big trouble, George, I am fucking furious.”

“Ooo, I’m scared. What shall I do? Have delicious meal with funny, clever colleagues or come home to dry toast and a mad bint who’s ranting at me? Ooo, I don’t know, what a tough decision. You know what, I think I’ll stay here if that’s OK.”

“It’s not OK. You fucking fucker, come home at once, fuck-head,” I shouted but realized I was shouting into a mobile that had been cut off. I felt my whole body tingle and tense with impotent fury. There were so many levels to the anger I felt toward George. It had subtexts and interpretations. There was the normal, everyday, why aren’t you more reliable and why do you never come back when you say you’re going to? anger. Then there was the betrayal. This was more like the pointing hysteria that I feel when I suspect him of having been unfaithful, ditto the anxiety that my humiliation is public. Then there was a new fury, a blacker and bigger one than any of the others, one that was telling me: this is it.

I rang him again, but his mobile was switched off.

I rang Ivan.

“Izobel, I’m so pleased…”

“Take down the site.”

“But I can’t…”

“Take down the site, now, or I will tell the police something that will make them take you down.”

“Izobel, wait…”

I rang George again and left a message. “George, if you don’t come home right this instant, you’ll be sorry. I’m giving you ten minutes to call me back.”

Ten minutes passed and site didn’t come down and George didn’t get back to me. That’s it, I thought. Another message. “Seriously George, you are going to regret it.”

I quickly showered and wore non-slob clothes for the first time since visiting the police. I only seem to wear my sports clothes when there’s no chance of me doing anything more strenuous than switching over TV channels. I wore a sharp little skirt, the one George liked me best in, and expensive shoes. I took a taxi to the restaurant where George lunches every Friday. He and his friends were very keen to damn the rest of the world as boring, but no one was as entrenched in their customs as they were.

I stood outside its large plate-glass windows for a second. It was designed as a goldfish bowl, to allow ordinary people to look in at the fashionable diners. I could see George with four males and one female, all with their mouths agape to imbibe or cackle or snipe. His hair was still swept back and his suit impeccable, but as he guffawed his mouth opened to reveal its cargo of carpaccio.

His body was falling apart as his suits would never do. The whites of his eyes were the color of a fashionable National Trust paint, way off-white, string-colored, jaundiced, shot. His body was apple-shaped, while his teeth suggested they never went near fruit. He had always looked as though he belonged in an old film. But now he just looked old.

“Hello, all. Hello, George,” I said.

“Hello, darling,” he replied. “What a pleasure that you’ve come to join us.”

None of them attempted to make space for me to sit down. I knew they referred to me as that “little PR girl,” never as Izobel. Today they all murmured greetings toward “Internet girl.”

“Actually, I haven’t.” My resolve almost crumbled. “George, can you leave with me now? It’s important that we talk.”

“We can talk here, can’t we, chaps? I’m sure if you’ve got anything worth sharing, you can share it with the whole class.”

“No, please, come away with me. We need to talk in private. About the article and the site and us.”

He didn’t stand up, but made a tiny move with his back so that it was turned from me. I felt my anger mutate and take on a whole new shape, but I tried to remain calm. I wasn’t going to be the “hysterical little PR girl.” I crouched down and spoke into his ear.

“George, if you don’t come away with me now and talk about this, it’s over.”

He leaned away to catch some piece of gossip about the managing editor.

“George, have you heard me?”

Nothing.

“That’s it. I’m going home and removing every single one of your possessions and putting them into the bike shed. Then I am changing the locks of the front door and you are never entering my home, or me for that matter, again. I mean it.”

He finally turned to me and raised one of his elegant eye-brows. “Yes, darling.”

*

At last, I had a purpose. Finding the site perp had been a goal, but one that had always seemed beyond my control. This one was firmly within it.

The newsagent gave me the cardboard boxes and sold me the extra-strong rubbish bags knowingly. The locksmith nodded at me as if he knew, too, as the fourth emergency service to domestic disagreement. I changed all the locks except the one for the storage shed to the side of the Victorian conversion in which we, or I, lived. We had no bicycles or surf gear or strollers as our neighbors had in theirs. We had no other life or hobbies.

I reckoned I had at least six hours before he came home. That would be enough.

I started in the kitchen. His chattels had not included all the upmarket Le Creuset and food processors of his wedding list, Catherine had got those in the settlement, but the bric-a-brac that had preceded the order and elegance considered worthy of married couples. A saucepan with pasta shapes clinging to its base like barnacles to a hull, a couple of now-sticky nonstick pans and a set of cast-off cutlery from his parents.

I filled one box and marked it “George Grand: kitchenware.”

The sitting room took longer, containing as it did the only thing worth anything outside of his wardrobe. The expensive stereo had wires connecting to amplifiers and speakers that coiled across the room. I’d always wanted a neat, self-contained little number anyway, but this machine had been worth thousands.

Why hadn’t we “ex-libris”-ed the CDs? I kept all the ones that I had given him. I was always buying him little presents on the way home, but I piled the Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and hip-hop into the box with their player. There was another box of vinyl that was never played and probably never would be again.

The books were easy, since most of his were still in piles stacked at the base of the shelves. The ones that duplicated my books were little indications of the sort of tomes bought by everyone over the last decades: Delia Smith, Ian McEwan, Donna Tartt.

I paused over the first edition Evelyn Waugh I had given him for his last birthday. I threw it in; I could afford to be generous, I thought, though that was an emotion I had long since given away.

In TV dramas they make packing up somebody’s life look easy. It’s always just a question of sweeping a wardrobe’s worth of garments into a big, flat, fat suitcase and snapping it shut. Throughout the flat George’s clothes had left a trail that I tried to follow. I dived into the dirty-laundry basket, picked pants off the clothes-horse, attacked the drawers that he’d annexed from my chest and stuffed the whole lot into bin liners.

I dragged the five boxes of junk, eleven cartons of books and six bags of clothes into the lockup. It was damp, I noticed, and I worried about the cashmere–wool of his winter coat and the lush cloth of his suits. I forced myself not to fret over them and to treat them with the disdain with which he had treated me.