Cyber Cinderella (23 page)

I wailed some more. “The site. That site has taken away my life. I never would have split up with George if it hadn’t been for it. It’s like a voodoo doll of me and any information on it is like sticking a pin in to produce awful consequences in my real life. I sometimes feel that izobelbrannigan dot com is more 3D than Izobel Brannigan, that it leads and I follow. I feel like the site has robbed me of my identity; I’m an aborigine thinking his soul will be stolen by having his photograph taken. Mags, you’ve no idea what it’s like, I don’t have an identity anymore. You’re so lucky to have your own.”

“Identity?” Maggie stood up quickly and then looked dizzy so sat down again. “You’re talking to me of identity?”

“Yes,” I said grumpily.

“Izobel, I’m pregnant.”

“Exactly, you’re lucky, you know what you’re doing in life and who you are and your life has taken shape.” I looked at her profile with its wonderful curves, the pregnant belly and the arching back. “You don’t have to worry about which way your life is going anymore.”

“Haven’t you thought for a second what it does to your identity to be pregnant?”

I was about to mutter something about identity consolidation, but looked at her and shook my head.

“It’s shattered it. And that’s just being pregnant. God knows what it will be like after the baby’s born. Having a pregnant belly is like being the girl with massive tits, people talk to it and not to you. Nobody looks me in the eye anymore. All anybody talks about is the bloody baby. Even my body’s not mine now, as everyone else seems to think they know more about what it’s going through than I do, you should feel that, you shouldn’t feel that, my friend says morning sickness is psychosomatic, blah blah blah.

I am dispossessed of my own body. I’ve got a sitting tenant in there, a squatter with far more rights than the landlord, and every time I put food or drink into my mouth I am supposed to ask myself: “Is this the very best I can be giving my baby?” I found a Web site that accused women who have the occasional glass of wine while pregnant of being child abusers. How do you think that feels? I’m a child abuser. Nobody asks me about me anymore, just when’s it due, is it a boy or a girl, what names are you thinking of, are you moving out of your flat, what kind of car are you getting, have you read
Contented Little Baby
?”

“I don’t think I just ask you about the baby,” I protested.

“No, but that could be because you’re so preoccupied with yourself that you haven’t asked me about anything at all. I don’t know how you can lie there and talk to me of losing your identity. You’re still Izobel. I’m Maggie pregnant woman and soon I’ll be Maggie mother. It’s bad enough at the moment, but friends tell me that when you’re pregnant you at least feel celebrated and special, then when you’re schlepping a stroller round dingy London streets you feel very unspecial indeed. I don’t know if Mick and I will ever have sex again. Once the baby’s born, his life can go on and mine will be irrevocably changed. Up until now it hasn’t made any difference that he’s male and I’m female, but now it’s everything. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a career again, let alone any money. Or what my body will be like. I’ll have saggy tits and belly and, you know, bits. A woman I know put a Tampax in six months after giving birth and it fell out.”

I winced.

“Only women will talk to me now, not men. I am no longer sexually desirable.”

“There are those porn magazines devoted to pregnant women.”

Maggie snorted and walked into the kitchen area and put the kettle on again.

“Sorry, Mags.”

“Forget it.”

I hadn’t known it would be possible to feel worse than I already had done, but I was tripping into whole new potholes of remorse.

“I don’t need pity,” she said.

“No, but you’d like some support. And that’s completely reasonable of you.” I wanted to cry but knew I wasn’t allowed to anymore. The site could caption me at that moment with “Izobel’s a selfish solipsistic cow who completely ignores the needs of her best friend!” I needed to say something, anything, to absolve myself. “It’s the site, it’s distracted me…”

“It’s not since the site, Izobel. You used to be such a brilliant listener. You loved listening and your advice was better than anybody’s. You had a sense of people, the people generally—politics and the outside world—and then the people close to you. You cared about stuff. It’s not the site that changed you, it’s everything, your job and George. I wish you could do something that would make you like you were.”

I did too. I wanted to go back to being the girl with principles and optimism. I used to think I was great. I
was
great. I once was worth creating a cyber-paean to, but somewhere along the decade the pappy press releases and bad boyfriends eroded that girl.

“You’re right,” I said. “And you’re not just pregnant lady, you’re an absolutely brilliant friend. I only wish I could apply the same good judgment and discretion to my choice of boyfriends as to my choice of friends. I couldn’t be luckier with you.”

She shrugged.

“And I wish I could be as good a friend to you as you are to me. I really am sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

But I knew it wasn’t really.

*

I spent the rest of Saturday on my own, with only the site for company. It had not changed; the death date remained and with it my unease. My new life of exhibitions, seasons at the National Film Theatre and parties could not begin until they or I had been removed.

I rang the police apologetically. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to get a report from CID asessing a threat made on a Web site.”

Blankness from the other end, then transferring me up to CID. They were laughing at me, I’m sure. “Silly bint reckons we’ll be onto this within a couple of days. Doesn’t she know we’ve got murders to solve?” “Reckons she’s more important than an abused kid, Sarge.” Chuckle, chuckle, especially from greasy-look hair, greasy-look face young copper. A different voice came onto the phone.

“Hello, Miss Brannigan. We are taking the matter seriously and it will be dealt with very soon. We’ll contact you when a decision has been reached. Thank you for your patience.”

I wasn’t patient. I thought about Maggie and George and Ivan in equal measure, though all were dwarfed by the amount of time I still spent thinking about myself. The site didn’t say anything about my relationships with others and it was as if, by ignoring them, the site had caused them to putrefy into nonexistence. Nothing outside of the site had the chance of life.

I thought about Grace, too, and this added another crust of guilt and misery to my mood. I should have been a better common-law stepmother to her. She was only six and I had treated her like a manipulative ex-girlfriend rather than a damaged little girl. I might have made a difference, but it was too late now.

I called Maggie, Ivan called me and I waited for George to call, but he did not. There was a text message.
Bitch.
That’s all it said. Text messages are the preserve of the newly in love, so that they can write billets-doux of abbreviated words,
yr lvly, I wnt 2 b wv u.
And then text messages play no part in relationships until the end, when the spoken word cannot be trusted to express the bitterness, when people no longer pick up their phone for fear of the eruption of bile.

Two years of life with George and that’s all I get. One word. At least, I thought, it was fully spelled out.

There was a place where words were plentiful: izobelbrannigan .com. It provided me with Saturday succor. I closed the curtains on reading the new additions to the site.

There, ticking along across the bottom of the page, were a dozen messages from my “adoring public.”

“Following the article in a national newspaper, messages from her fans have been pouring in for Izobel. Here are just a few of them,” announced my narrator.

“Izobel is fit,” wrote fourteen-year-old GarethGreat, “where does she live?” “I like the dress she’s wearing at the supermarket. What shop is it from? Does she have a favorite designer?” asked Jenny5000. Wolfie said that the site should have more pictures of me in a bikini, while JGG demanded a live Web chat with me, possibly naked. RealGrrl wanted to know if I ever agreed to meet people through the site.

“But not everyone’s a fan…” it went on to explain. Here we go, I thought. “What a terrible testament to hubris that somebody should think a nonentity worthy of a testament. How characteristic of our age of the celebrity for the sake of celebrity. Who was this Izobel Brannigan anyway?” I shuddered at the “was” jeremy_jones used; he alone had interpreted the dates as I had. The rest of his criticism seemed a more predictable response from the stick-in-the-mud readers of George’s paper. “The elevation of nobodies to fallacious somebodies has to stop,” Jeremy concluded with almost an audible harrumph. “I think she’s unattractive,” wrote a rather less articulate fan.

I continued to watch as the messages trickled past. They were, on the whole, trite, but all suspiciously lacked spelling mistakes or abbreviations. I didn’t believe them. I wasn’t fit or well-dressed or hubristic, and I couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t use the strangulated slang of instant messaging.

The site didn’t seem to know I was single, either. Did Ivan care? Maggie was right; the site had never been much interested in my love life, when that was all that my friends and I had ever discussed. I felt a misplaced benevolence toward it again, despite the malevolence with which it reciprocated. While Izobel Brannigan had wasted the decade in pursuit of parties and men who were better in the telling than the doing, her alter ego izobel brannigan.com was vibrant, world-rocking and independent. She was the superhero to my flawed everywoman.

I began to cry. About Maggie, about the site and about George. Or not George himself, but the prospect of being alone and the humiliation of having screwed up yet again. I felt an over-whelming impatience to get this bit out of the way, the sadness at the end of yet another relationship, and get onto the next stage. There was a finite amount of tears I had to shed on the way to feeling better. I imagined a big measuring jug or an outsize cardboard thermometer shape like they have on TV charity appeals. This would fill with my tears and when we reached a pint, I’d feel better again. I wanted to fast-forward to that time, skip the scenes, but with clarity, like on a DVD, when I would be over both George and Ivan and when Maggie would have forgiven me.

Another text came through. I wondered what one word’s worth of insult would be etched onto my mobile screen this time.

When you feel like it, please phone me, Ivan.

Words spelled out in full and everything. For a crazy, creepy stalker he was very sweet. I had nothing to miss, and yet I missed him.

Chapter Fifteen

I
zobel, please, it’s me again. I hate this. I’m not the one behind the site.

If you pick up the phone we can at least talk about this. It’s not even about the other night anymore, it’s about clearing my name and explaining that I’m not cyber-weirdo.

Why? Why would I have created this site about you? I didn’t even know you then. I might do now. Oh, that’s come out wrong. You know what I mean. You’re so aggravating.

The last of Ivan’s messages had a point. It was clearly pre-sumptuous to believe yourself to be so freak-sexy that a man you barely knew was busy creating cyber-paeans to your loveliness. But somebody had to have done it and I wanted to know why. I would find out why.

Sunday saw a surge in spirits as I lathered myself up into a frothing frenzy of self-righteousness by scrubbing the flat. A murderer donning rubber gloves and cleaning the scene of the crime could not have expunged George’s presence as thoroughly as I did. I dug around in the bathroom sink to remove short dark hairs; I used his expensive facial scrub on the oven; I threw away the bottle of vodka from the freezer and the beers from the fridge; I changed the message on the answerphone from “we” to “I.” And that was it. We had no children to fight over nor possessions of any worth. Our mutual ties were dissolved by bleach and Flash liquid.

Just at the point when the flat had reached a zenith of clean and my body a nadir of filth, the doorbell rang. I trotted toward it and then stopped to think who it might be. I presumed George was on his spa weekend, that his desolation at being dumped by me had not impeded the journey to Gloucestershire with Catherine, so it would not be him. Ivan? It could be Ivan, of course, bored with harassing me by text message and now here in person. I slunk toward the door and used my raggedy nails to pull back the letter box flap and look out onto the street. My eyes were just above the crotch level of the visitor and I could see that it was male with a reasonably well-filled pair of gray cords. I pressed my face further to the letter box. It was like some terrible, smutty late-night game show where the female contestants have to try to identify their boyfriends by looking at their groins alone. I could not tell who this was, though I didn’t recognize the crotch as belonging to George. He thought cords were for geography teachers.

The crotch crouched and a pair of dimly familiar blue eyes met mine, only inches away on the other side of the door. I sprang back into the hallway, propelled by embarrassment and shock.

“Izobel, does Izobel live here?”

“Who is it?”

“It’s an old friend of hers. William.”

“William?” I opened the door in curiosity and finally got a full view of the person on the doorstep, rather than the game-of-consequences part vistas I had previously had of bits of his body. He was wearing a neat button-down shirt and a crew-necked sweater, while his hair was almost crew-cut. He looked very different from the long- and lank-haired ex-boyfriend I remembered. He looked like a nice young man who worked in marketing, except for the fact that he was aggressively chewing gum.

At the same time he looked me up and down. He smiled slightly at the beginning of this journey, when looking at my head, and I remembered that I was wearing an old pair of knickers to keep my hair off my face. I pulled them off and stuffed them into my pocket. My disheveled appearance was in contrast to his immaculate turnout, though it had always been the other way round.