Cyber Cinderella (29 page)

She glanced at the baby.

“Sorry, stupid question, we just have to ask it. Do you enjoy stepping out of the nine-to-five routine that most of your peers undertake?”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” She put the baby down on a brightly colored activity center. “I spent so many hours in the office wishing I wasn’t there, but each of those hours feels like a day being stuck here. I really thought it would be fun being at home with a baby.” She laughed. “I thought it would be like a holiday. But do you remember the school holidays and how boring they were?” I thought back to my blissful discovery then that reading made time pass quicker than you guessed it did and nodded.

“I force myself not to look at the kitchen clock,” she continued. “And then I guess what time it is and it’s about half past nine and I thought it would be at least eleven. I battle with the Underground to have lunch with friends, just so that some of their office efficiency might rub off on me. I ring them up in their offices and they talk to me for three minutes before saying ‘I mustn’t keep you,’ and hanging up. The bit between six and seven, that’s the worst, waiting for Tom to come back and then he says how was your day and I have to say it was exactly like the day before and he’s done lots of interesting things and sometimes he has to go out in the evening, work stuff he says, and I am so bored and so sick of the television. I bet you think Radio Four is really good, don’t you?”

“The
Today Programme
…” I muttered.

“Exactly, it’s good before work and it’s good after work but the rest of the time it’s so boring and I’m so bored listening to it and watching rubbish on television. They must assume that anyone not in a ‘proper’ job is a halfwit.”

I now understood why she had so recklessly let us into her home.

“It’s not like I’m not busy. I’m boring busy. I’m really busy, emptying the washing machine, filling the washing machine, emptying the baby, filling the baby. But I’m so bloody bored, I’ve started talking to the neighbors.”

“Really?” Ivan and I said with one voice.

“Worse than that, I watch them.” She pointed at the bay window of the house opposite. “That man, he’s weird.”

“Yes?”

“He cleans the house all day, all those knickknacks, dusting, airing, old-fashioned things like that.”

“Does he have a computer?” I asked, to which Ivan shook his head and made a face in return.

“Can’t see it.”

“What about your neighbors on this side of the street?” Ivan asked. “Do you have any contact with them?”

“A bit. They’re almost all people like me but without the baby, you poll people would call them young professionals. Going out, careers, having fun, friends coming round with bottles of wine from that off-license. They’re not around during the day.”

“Why did you stop me asking her more about the weirdo man opposite?” I hissed at Ivan as we left.

“Because he’s not in the right postcode, he’s on the wrong side of the street.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And it’s half past four and we’ve managed to do a mere two out of the twenty houses on the list.” I must have looked chastened. “But nice move with the market research line.”

“And we found out that most of the people who live around here are young people with jobs, which fits site perp profile.”

“Which we would never have guessed by the area,” he said, looking at the latte bar and deli stuffed with ready-made meals.

He needn’t have worried about getting through the next eighteen houses in time. We peered through basement windows and we knocked and we rang. We got one bloke who claimed to have the flu, an old woman who said, “I’ve been expecting you,” and some posh stoner students in number twenty-two. Other than that, our bell-ringing was unanswered. Serena Whittaker was right—residential London’s a lonely place between the hours of eight in the morning and six in the evening. Its daytime inhabitants feel themselves to be a separate species from their commuting colleagues.

We retired to the bistro with our notes and dimmed enthusiasm.

“What have we got?” I asked Ivan.

He spread out his notes—scraps of addresses, names from pieces of junk mail, the Excel spreadsheet. He had nice handwriting, I noticed again, more feminine that I would have expected.

“Not a lot.”

I sighed. “This is a wild-goose chase. We’re never going to find them. Who’s to say that it’s not a false postcode anyway?”

“Come on, Izobel, don’t be defeatist. We’ll sit here and we’ll see everyone coming back from work and we’ll catch them, won’t we?”

I shrugged.

“So,” he said brightly. “What did you get up to last week?”

I went a bit mad, started wearing an anorak and tracksuit bottoms, gave your name to the police, didn’t wash my hair for four days, converted my boyfriend from live-in to live-out, hated you passionately and my biggest achievement was filing the hard soles of my feet.

“Oh, you know, was a bit ill so didn’t go to work. Food poisoning or something. Not a lot.”

“I didn’t have a brilliant time either, stewing away, thinking about you thinking I could be behind the site. And my week had begun so well.”

I looked away from the street for a second to look at him. “Mine, too.” I glanced back to the houses. It was difficult to have a meaningful conversation while having to remain vigilant, like trying to declare yourself to someone who’s got a football match on in the background. The street, however, was boring. Ivan’s face seemed infinitely interesting.

I continued to force myself to look at the houses. Only one person had returned to their home, a middle-aged woman with a dog. As I stared out of the window, Ivan held my hand and started stroking between my fingers, nuzzling the joint and then bringing his finger up to my tips. It was most distracting.

“That’s nice,” I said, with bland understatement.

“You should feel what I can do to feet.”

I knew that the foot-filing would pay off. It had been like grating Parmesan, but now they were soft and ready to be stroked. I was ready to be stroked. My body was ready to be stroked.

“I’m sorry about everything, Ivan.”

“Don’t be. Actually, do be. You’re awful, Izobel, you assumed I must be dodgy because I work with computers.”

“It wasn’t that, really. Well, a bit. I was snooty about it, but I’m not now. I’ve changed. Everything’s different. I don’t want to work in PR anymore and I…” I paused and looked out of the window, wondering how far to declare myself. I stopped and watched the only figure in the street. “Oh my God!”

“It’s not that good,” he said, but continued to rub the soft breasts of the palm of my hand.

“No.” I snatched my hand away. “I know that person. I know them.”

Chapter Nineteen

I
had never recognized her before. She still had that air of insignificance. I wouldn’t have noticed her then had I not been forcing myself to notice everyone who walked past. I still almost couldn’t place her, having only been able to recognize her previously by her proximity to her shinier friends. Until now I had never seen her alone.

She seemed to make a deliberate effort to blend into the background, but on this occasion it only made her stand out more as she wore a heavy brown coat, while the rest of London’s flesh flashed in spaghetti straps and shorts.

“Who is it?” Ivan asked as I continued to stare out of the window, not even thinking to disguise myself with dark glasses. I pressed my nose toward the glass, leaving breath marks upon it.

“Alice, it’s Alice.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Alice, she’s just this girl.”

“Which girl?”

“This girl.”

“You don’t think she can have anything to do with the site, do you?”

I stood up and made my way to the door, watching her all the while as she walked into number twelve. Smith in the basement, of course, Alice Smith, she’d given me her business card the first time we had met with Camilla. She was still working full-time as a programmer in a software company round the corner from my office while they set up OnLove. I heard Ivan talk to the waiter and pay for our coffees and I couldn’t focus on his question. I turned to look at him quizzically. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t.

I stared at number twelve. It was a spindly redbrick building that looked as though it had always been divided into separate dwellings. It was the sort of place where strange loners had digs in the 1950s, cooking disgusting food on one-ring gas cookers. It once would have had a slum landlord, but now it would feature beige-painted walls and oatmeal-colored carpets. It was the sort of place anybody could live in and everybody would. Every second building on the street had an estate agent’s sign outside. This was a place that people passed through anonymously. People like Alice.

“Shall we go?” I said to Ivan.

“Wait, let’s make a plan. Do you think she’s got anything to do with the site? How are we going to approach this? Believe me, you can’t just go around making accusations. And anyway, she’s a girl.”

I ignored him and crossed the road and rang the bell to the basement, which had its own entrance. A hand inside twitched the drawn curtain to my right, but there was no answer. The windows were open but guarded with latticed bars. I put my hand in and drew back the curtain.

“Alice,” I shouted. I felt calm. “Hello, it’s Izobel, Izobel Brannigan. I just saw you on the street. What a coincidence that you should live here and that we should just be having a coffee across the road. Do you want one?” Behind the curtains the room was dark, while the street pinged with the pyrotechnic sunlight. The interior began to get clearer as my sight adjusted, while Ivan became more bleached out behind me. I pulled the curtain back further to admit more light as I peered in, before hearing a voice at the door.

“Hello,” said Alice. “What a coincidence.”

“Coffee?” I said as I came face to partial face with her through the small crack in the door that she had conceded.

“I’m just on my way out, actually.”

“That’s a shame. Oh well, let’s have a quick chat inside then, shall we?” I pushed the door and she pushed back. It was a tussle that I was determined to win, while at the same time we both had to pretend that we weren’t competing at all, as if an arm wrestle had segued out of merely shaking hands. I forced my way in, with Ivan following.

“Nice flat,” I said on coming into the sitting room. It wasn’t, particularly. It was a set decorator’s version of a typical young middle-class flat: the lampshade was a Habitat paper ball, the carpet burlap, the low coffee table from Ikea. Along one side was a galley kitchen, which was empty but for a packet of supermarket own-brand cornflakes. Like her face, Alice’s dwelling had almost no character or distinguishing features. It was an unliving room. “Have you lived here long?”

“A year or so.” She stood in one corner of it. Although it was low-ceilinged, she was diminishing all the while. Beside her was a monstrous computer, along with a scanner, color printer, speakers and the biggest flat monitor I’d ever seen.

“You haven’t met Ivan, have you? Ivan, this is Alice. Alice, this is Ivan.” He crossed the room and they shook hands.

“I want one of these,” he said, pointing at the computer screen.

“I got it in the States. Same price in dollars as it would have been in pounds here.”

“Fabulous,” I said. “Can you show us what a page of the Internet looks like on it? We’d like that, wouldn’t we, Ivan?”

“It’s not working. My processor’s bust at the moment.”

“Really? Don’t you need it for your work, though?”

“No, I do all my work in the office.”

“What do you need such a powerful computer at home for then?” I asked.

“Stuff.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“OnLove stuff, developing that.”

“So you do need it for work.”

She moved protectively in front of the desk, revealing the wall and bookshelf behind her. There hung a framed print of the Doisneau kiss and a cinema poster for
The Italian Job.
There were no knickknacks in the flat, no birthday-present vases or pebbles from foreign beaches. There were no photos, either, no blowups of me going about my daily business as I might have suspected of site perp. I walked a couple of paces toward her and she moved to cover the computer completely. I scanned the shelves, where all the manuals and books were ordered so that their heights and spines matched their neighbors and became smaller in a series of subtle gradations, like children in a well-organized school photo. This pattern was broken by a snapshot, unframed, curled up at the edges on the third shelf down. It was the photo of me with Frank and Maggie, the one taken at Hot Bob’s party, and it nestled by a full set of the novels in the
Dune
series.

I stared. Of course her living in this street was an indication that she might be the one, but a clue that I had chosen not to truly believe. She was such a nonentity, a negative presence. It could not be that I had been made to feel a somebody by such a nobody. I felt an odd sensation of disappointment.

“Look,” I said. “It’s me.” She moved to block it, only confirming her guilt. “Where did you get that photo from?”

“Camilla didn’t want it.”

That didn’t surprise me.

I looked at Ivan, who gave me a smile. That was all I needed. “Alice, we know what you’ve done.”

“What do you mean? Why are you here?”

We’re here to accuse you of creating a Web site in my honor, you random person I was once at school with and hadn’t seen for thirteen years, if I’d ever seen you in the first place. I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t quite believe it. “We know you registered a domain name. The registrant confirmed it.”

“Registrar,” corrected Ivan.

“Piss off.” I felt fury froth within me. At Alice, but I channeled it toward Ivan. “The registrar confirmed that you bought,” I paused, “Izobelbrannigan dot co dot uk. And there’s dot com too. They gave us your name and address.”

“That’s impossible. That’s not true, they don’t give away names and addresses. They don’t even have them,” she replied quietly, while edging toward the door. I moved toward it while Ivan stayed by the computer, making her piggy in the middle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”