Cyber Cinderella (3 page)

I rang Maggie. “Whose party was it, you know the one where you wore a boob tube thing that kept on slipping down? The thirtieth. Some bloke.”

“That narrows it down,” she replied. “I no longer go to many thirtieths anymore. Do you know, I’ve been invited to a fortieth. A fortieth! Can you imagine? I can’t believe we’re entering the age of
Big Chill
and no longer
St. Elmo’s Fire.
This year marks the specific point at which we become nearer to forty than our teens.”

“I suppose so.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes, amazing, how strange, we’re so old, but whose party was that thirtieth? The one in the club place where we only had a cordoned-off bit and all the other normal punters looked at us as if we were cattle at an agricultural show?”

“Friend of Frank’s, wasn’t it? Some bloke from the university who he works with. Economist, I think. It must have been around seven months ago as I was worried that I might have already been pregnant then, but the scans reckon it was about a week or so after. I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t pregnant. It seems like a different age. How I miss drinking. And the rest.”

“That’s right.” I remembered now. The host was a goodlooking man called Robert who I would have lunged at had I not been conscious of the fact that he was having a party in a club, was far too pretty and wore a very tight T-shirt. “Bob was his name.”

“Hot Bob, we liked him.”

“But he doesn’t like us, does he? I remember thinking he was hot but maybe no ladies’ man. I think he was wearing lip gloss.”

“No, don’t be old-fashioned, Iz. He’s straight. I think I remember Frank telling me about some dodgy business with one of his female students.”

Would I want Hot Bob to be my stalker? I wouldn’t mind, though I thought it unlikely. But whoever had created the site must have been at the party and must have taken a photo of me. I needed to get the list of invitees from Hot Bob. Not that this would be definitive. After all, I had been there and I had not been invited directly.

I e-mailed George triumphantly.

Subject: Me.

Hurrah, I was the subject of an e-mail to George. Now there was a first.

“Please look at
www.izobelbrannigan.com
. Let’s discuss later. Love you, I.”

Ha, I thought, he said no one would devote a site to me, that I was unworthy of a stalker, but he was wrong.

A stalker. I felt my face flush and bright red hives slide down from my cheeks across my chest.

“You all right, babe?” my colleague Mimi asked without bothering to hear the stammered reply.

“Fine, fine, yeah, fine.”

I wasn’t. A stalker, I had a stalker. I was like a weathergirl or newsreader without the blonde highlights, cropped Meg Ryan haircut or perky personality; just the creepy man watching me, taking photos of me, devoting a site to me. George was right: why would anybody devote a site to me in an adoring way? It had to be malevolent.

I felt my cheeks. They were still hot, as was my forehead. I knew that I’d look terrible; I always did when I got this sort of reaction, piebald in pink and purple hues. I breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth in a yoga-type way in a hopeless attempt to calm myself, before going into a meeting with a new client.

I’d find my stalker. Or was it my admirer? When did one become the other?

*

I switched on my ancient desktop computer when I got home and watched it crank up in its decrepit fashion. At every command, it would whir alarmingly in a way that I think my brain does when asked to do anything logical. I could feel my head making those sort of strained noises once again as I attempted to compute the odd events of the day.

It was my flat and my computer, but George’s mess. He maintained that it was bohemian and I was bourgeois, yet his wardrobe was always kept as immaculately as an expensive boutique. The rest, with its ashtrays and saucepans, with its blurring of kitchen, living room and bathroom, was the student accommodation that George might have lived in if he had ever bothered to go to university two decades previously. I suspected he would feel differently about the tangle if it had been his flat. Or our flat, perhaps. Moving to somewhere bigger was on my list of things to do, but the set-up with George had never seemed permanent enough to merit a conversation about our arrangements. Instead of living together, we were living in layers, with my stuff at the bottom and his possessions floating on the surface, like scum at the seaside.

My computer finally blossomed and I looked at izobelbrannigan .com. The site hadn’t changed in the hour and a half since I had last looked at it. A little less professional-looking, transposed away from the flat monitor of my office computer and now framed with the ugly off-white of a cheap PC. The ticker still ran and the Izobel logo still flashed hypnotically. I was still flanked by friends with black strips in place of eyes.

I waited for George to come back. Where was he? I phoned his mobile and it clicked into its familiar voice mail. “Hello, darling, leave me a message.” Everyone was “darling” to him. I waited for my phone to ring back with news of where he was, for the computer screen to flicker in recognition of a mobile sounding nearby. I got bored with watching the endless groundhogging of the ticker going round and round and eventually switched on the TV for some trash that was little more interesting. The site had ceased to exist for me until I could discuss it with George, to get his appraisal, approbation and, I hoped, his appalled reaction that someone could be covertly threatening his beloved.

There’s that old philosophical question about whether a tree falling in the forest has to be heard by someone to have truly happened. If I were that person hearing the tree fall, it wouldn’t have happened until I’d exaggerated the story of its demise, found a punch line, practiced the anecdote, dressed up in a new top that was appropriate for its content, told at least three friends and then e-mailed a couple more about it.

If the site was that poor unfortunate tree, then it was live but had not yet come to life. Not until I’d shown it to George. Where was he? I felt like I was that tree falling with no one around to catch me.

I left him another message; no response followed so I resorted to desperate measures with my third call. “George, ring me quick. I’m in a bar with free cocktails; they’ll have run out in an hour.” Even the promise of a sponsored event did not induce him to ring me back. He must really have been in a place with no network coverage.

I didn’t get to show it to him, at least not that night. He didn’t ring but came back after I’d gone to bed, with the tinny tomato smell on his breath that showed he’d been drinking to excess. I always think of George when I smell a past-its-use-by-date tube of tomato puree.

“I rang you,” I said sleepily, grumpily, turning my back to him.

“Sorry, sweetheart, the batteries had gone on my phone. Damn annoying to have missed out on the jamboree. What sort of free cocktails? Gin- or vodka-based?”

“Seriously, I was worried. I called you again after that. I thought something awful must have happened to you.”

“What is this?” He picked up the phone set by the bed. “Your umbilical cordless phone?” Then he laughed at his joke. “Oh, that’s good. I think I can feel an article coming on. The way women use new gadgets and new technology to be ever more old-fashioned and clingy with their menfolk.”

I couldn’t be bothered to discuss the new technology that was my site.

The next night was his visit to “Gracelands,” as we euphemistically referred to his Saturday and one-weekday dadly duties with his daughter. For some reason, the trip with her and her friend Phoebe on a press freebie to
The Lion King
entailed everybody sleeping over at Phoebe’s mother’s house. A slinky single mother at that, with the embroidered-cashmere-cardie sort of name of Lulu. There was a production line of women like that at Grace’s private day school, flinging out mummies called Minty and Cressie and other edible names at the gates. They lionized George whenever he went to pick up Grace from school, as if he were the priest in a convent or the jumbo-jet pilot amid a giggle of air hostesses.

By the time I eventually showed the site to him it no longer seemed either significant or sinister. Needless to say, he had ignored my e-mail entreaty to check it out.

“Look,” I said, trying to retain the triumph of being vindicated that I had felt on first seeing it. “Can you still deny that it’s a site about me?” I watched as its photos filtered down into view, the slowness of my home computer artificially creating suspense and the sense that something momentous was being unveiled.

He scanned it quickly. “Nice schoolgirl photo, darling, wish I’d known you then.”

“Don’t be disgusting. You’d have been in your mid-twenties.”

He glanced at the screen again. “They don’t see fit to talk about the love of your life now, though. Where’s the stuff about Izobel’s handsome gentleman caller? And it’s really badly written, isn’t it? ‘She rocks her world.’ I think we need to find a half-wit illiterate American teenager and then we’ve got our man.” He chortled at his own wit. The crime of the perpetrator lay in his poor use of English rather than in his creepy intrusive tendencies.

“But don’t you think it’s odd?”

“To use rock as a verb, yes terribly.”

“Don’t be annoying, George. That it exists. That there’s a site devoted to me. Your girlfriend. If anybody should be creating a cyber-paean to me, it should be you.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I wasn’t going to, because if I held my breath until you praised me I’d die.”

It was just a turn of phrase, but I felt sick talking about death, now that I had a stalker. I imagined the site perp to have a grotty bedsit somewhere plastered with blurred photos of me and cuttings from the
Arlington Crow,
my parents’ local paper, where the fact that I had been in Knightsbridge with my mum one hour before the Harrods bombing was considered worthy of the front page.

I sat down, defeated, while George started surfing the Net.

“So how did you find the site?” he asked.

“I Googled myself.”

“Hmmm, sounds kind of kinky,” he slobbered. “Can we have some mutual Googling later?”

“I went to the search engine page like this.” I waited as the site flickered into view. “Then put in my name.” I began typing I-Z-O-B—when George interrupted.

“Put in my name, go on, put in my name. Google me, baby.”

“I’ve done it before; it’s not that interesting.”

“Go on, Google your one and only.”

I typed in George Grand and hit “search.” “Have you ever thought, George, that this isn’t about you?”

He watched the screen, rapt, as he never normally was by the “thing they call the World Wide Web” as he insisted on referring to it.

“This isn’t very good,” he judged as links to a few desultory articles by him chugged into view. “This is no better than the cuttings system at work. I don’t want stuff
by
me, I want stuff
about
me. This is all about some Victorian actor, not me. Why not? This person was born in eighteen seventy-four—I’m not that bloody old. Look here.” He shoved a clammy finger onto my screen, leaving a moist smudge as his footprint in the sand. “This is about someone who isn’t even called George Grand. It’s about someone called George and someone else called Henry Grand. It’s just stupid. Stupid Internet thing, World Web rubbish.” He flounced off the chair and threw himself onto the sofa and the waiting TV remote control.

“George, for fuck’s sake.” He lifted his head to look at me quizzically. “It’s not about you. It’s about me. There’s some nutter out there who clearly thinks about me more than you do and you’re worrying about your Internet profile. What are we going to do about it?”

“Create a site about me. That would raise my profile.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“I was joking,” he said grumpily.

“This is not a laughing matter. We’ve got to find out who’s behind this site. Someone has taken the trouble and taken the photos to make a Web site devoted to me. Don’t you think it’s a bit odd? Don’t you see, we’ve got to find out who it is and to stop them. It starts out innocently enough but what if I don’t respond? How will they react? By following me? Attacking me? Killing me?” My voice was squeaking.

“I think you’ve watched too many women-in-peril films. Or been talking to that bloody Maggie again.”

“George,” I screamed. “We’ve got to do something.”

“
We
,” he emphasized the word, “don’t have to do anything.”

“Too bloody right,” I replied, calmer or exhausted, I wasn’t sure which. “But
I
do.”

And that was that. We then had more to drink followed by sex, our twin hobbies, the panacea for all ills of the world. George was very lazy except when pouring drinks and pawing me.

It might seem strange that we should make love when I produce so much bile and fury toward him, but that was our way. I never understood why relationship experts said that sex was a barometer of the health of a relationship. If that were the case, then George and I would be the Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman of coupledom. But we weren’t. Sex was not the barometer of our relationship, it was the Band-Aid. Have an argument, have sex. Have a problem, have sex. Get bored, have sex. It was the grout that kept the tiles of our relationship together and without it they would come tumbling down. I could not help but suspect that behind those slabs of physical intimacy there lurked some major subsidence. For now it was hidden, storing up its problems for later.

*

I was still irked by George’s indifference to my little tribute site when I got an e-mail from him at work.

“Check out
www.izobelbrannigan.com now
.”

I smiled. George was now sexy, fun, life-enhancing George once again and I forgave him the fact that he had reacted to my site as if it were no more than spam e-mail.

I logged on.

I was surprised by what I found.

I logged on again. Same response: “The page cannot be displayed.” Page can’t be displayed? That was worse than being “under construction.” I was no longer “found.” I was lost. I could hear George’s sneers about the supremacy of print media. “You don’t turn over the pages of a newspaper to find a blank page with ‘the page cannot be displayed’ across it, well do you?”