Cyber Cinderella (12 page)

“You’re so right,” said Becksy, as I scooped them up. “I’ve never thought of that before. That’s really clever.”

“Hardly.” I scooted back to the table, not wanting to get stuck at the B-list end of it with Camilla’s friends all evening. “You’ll never guess who Elliot’s going out with now,” I said on my return to a captive audience. “Talitha.” A few blank stares. “You know, the one who was in that celebrity reality thing and poses in men’s magazines and red-tops.” Flashes of recognition.

“Urgh,” said Maggie. “She’s so plain.”

“Yeah right,” said Mick. “She’s hideous. Bollocks, Maggie, she is absolutely gorgeous. Out of two, I’d give her one.” All the other men mumbled agreement.

“She is so not,” said Camilla. “She’s completely nondescript.”

“Yeah right,” said Frank. “This is why when a woman is described to me, I always ask, is she female-pretty or male-pretty? They are such different concepts.”

“Well, I’ve just met Talitha,” I interjected. “And she’s both weirdly plain and weirdly sexy. And Elliot is looking like the adolescent geek who’s pulled the head cheerleader on prom night.”

“From you to Talitha in the space of a few years,” said Frank. “Elliot must be gutted with the progress of his life. He probably spends all his time writing stuff about you on the Internet.”

“Oh piss off, Frank.” This time very audibly. I looked at Maggie and she raised an eyebrow at me and shook her head. “Are we going to eat at some point tonight or are you beer-arians going to do your usual trick of surviving on Guinness alone?”

“Not me,” said Maggie. “Eating for two and all that. There’s a new-wave Chinese across the road. We call it Fung MSG.”

“Iz can order for us, can’t you, Iz?” Frank turned to everyone. “Izobel has so many talents, and one of them is that she speaks Chinese.”

Maggie raised both her eyebrows this time.

“Mandarin. I’m learning Mandarin,” I corrected. “That place is Sichuan, I think. Don’t speak that, sorry.”

*

I was eating a sandwich alone at my desk, dribbling chicken globules into my keyboard to mingle with the croissant crumble and splashes of coffee that already made a meal of it down there.

“Hello, Izobel.” I jolted. I hated people coming up behind me at my desk.

Ivan sat down on Mimi’s midget swivel chair at the desk next to mine. “I’ve been thinking about your site. It’s strange.” I hated people interrupting my lunch breaks too.

“You’re telling me.”

“I can’t imagine who’d do such a thing.”

“Me neither. That’s why I’m asking you for your help.”

“What else are you doing to find out who is behind it?” he asked. “Besides enlisting me?”

“A colleague and I have put into place a series of investigations.” I paused. “We’re starting from the premise that the perpetrator is most likely to be someone who has been, er, emotionally involved with the eponymous protagonist of the site. Aka Izobel Brannigan. Aka me. Since adopting this strategy we have instigated such investigations as to the likely responsibility of the respective candidates.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“We’re talking to those people who at some point have been intimate with Izobel Brannigan.”

“Your exes?”

“Indeed. As yet these investigations are proving inconclusive but informative.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know, Ivan, I don’t. That’s why I’ve got you on board.”

“And who are they, your exes? No, don’t tell me, I bet they’re all men who work in professions advertised in the
Guardian
on a Monday. Creative, Media and Marketing.”

“Rubbish. Frank’s an academic.” With a sideline in radio punditry. “And one of them’s unemployed.” Though William’s dole-queue status was mitigated by the fact of his father being Britain’s richest theatrical impresario.

“And the rest?”

“So. What’s wrong with working in the media?”

“Nothing, I suppose. It’s just that people who work in the media are so self-obsessed and superior. They think that it gives them license to bore the rest of us with stories about their jobs, when really all work tales are as interesting and relevant as the details of somebody’s dreams. Boring and meaningless.”

“And everybody else is so interesting?” I asked with irritation.

“More so, yes. We don’t feel that we can talk shop to people outside our worlds so we make an effort to cultivate other interests and observations. We don’t insist on only mating with others who work in the same sector and we don’t think we’re better than anybody else. Instead we strive to make ourselves better. That’s what your lot fails to do.”

“It’s not my lot.”

“All right, everyone you work with, hang out with and go out with. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you’re not prejudiced against those who work in banking, or the law, or, God forbid, IT?”

“No, of course not. Now, if you don’t mind excusing me, mere technical minion, I have some high-level phone calls to make to journalists, TV producers and editors to discuss glamorous celebrity evenings and the launches of new lifestyle magazines.”

Ivan laughed and I smiled.

“And I’ll get back to you if the analysis of a technical nature pursued by your IT consultant yields any evidence beyond the merely circumstantial,” he said. “Ditto, if your probe of previous emotional involvements proves fruitful.”

“Thanks,” I said turning back to the celebrity gossip message board I was currently investigating in depth.

Chapter Nine

G
eorge was in repose on the sofa, quaffing a lager and watching a James Bond repeat.

“Let’s get out,” I said. “It’s a nice day. Let’s go for a walk or to an art gallery or a street market.”

“Or one of those other activities as prescribed in listings magazines that nobody but tourists actually does.”

“Let’s do it, go on, George. It’ll be fun.”

He faked a snore and continued watching the television. I stood up and he looked at me with interest for the first time since we’d got out of bed.

“You couldn’t be a love and get me an ashtray.” I ignored him, but he lit up anyway.

I fired up my computer in response to his indifference. I was just like any sad old man chatting to Lithuanian lovelies online because his wife won’t put out.

There hadn’t been a change since the new photo and the link. I still hadn’t heard any more back from Mr. Contact Us via e-mail, despite repeated cyber-entreaties from me. Yet I always opened the site up with a sense of expectation, a hope that this time the mystery would be solved.

“Oh my God,” I said on viewing izobelbrannigan.com. “Shit.”

George grunted and turned the television up.

“The site, it’s changed. My God.”

He continued his recital of farmyard animal noises with a snort of derision. “Site, site, shite. That’s all you talk about these days. Christ, you’ve become dull.”

“But really, please George, take a look at this.”

“You’re obsessed with the bloody Internet. It will never replace newspapers, never.”

“I’m not saying it will.”

“Yes you bloody are.”

“Of course not, you can’t wrap fish and chips in a computer. Please, George, come and look at this.” I dragged him from the sofa. He sat in the chair in front of the computer as I leaned over him.

“Yes, yes, it’s your site. Now what?”

“For God’s sake at least put your specs on, your reading glasses.”

“It’s your site, I don’t know what else to say about it. I’ve already admired it and talked about it ad nauseam. Darling.” He spat out the last word and replaced it in his mouth with a gulp of his beer.

“But it’s different. Look. I’ve been papped,” I said, clicking on the link off the home page that read
photo gallery
and which led to a display of paparazzi-style photos, images of ordinary situations that are usually made extraordinary by those embroiled in them. The page showed familiar papping situations taken with a long-lensed camera, but with an unfamiliar protagonist: me. Me at the supermarket with ten items or less in my basket. Me in tracksuit bottoms blinking blearily, coming out of the flat, not celeb-style on my way to yoga, but wearing comfy clothes in lieu of getting dressed properly. Me at the bus stop, instead of unlocking the doors of a four-by-four as is more common in this genre. Me coming out of the bookshop. Me picking my nose. If that one had been published in a magazine, it would have been in the “Celebrities, they’re disgusting like the rest of us” section.

Each had a caption, characterized by the cheery inanity of the magazines I loved to read and the style already pioneered in the rest of the site: “Izobel tries to make sure she eats her five portions of fruit and veg by stocking up on spinach”; “Izobel’s not above using public transport”; “Hot picks—sometimes life gets right up Izobel’s nose.”

What I hated about my life was that it was always the same. The site changed, yet just served as proof of the unchanging nature of my life. It had pap shots of the shopping trips and taking out the rubbish, but not the leading features of marriage, birth or a shiny new home.

“Look, there’s me,” said George, pointing to a picture of us, not emerging from an upscale restaurant but from a gastro-pub, leaning on each other, physically if not emotionally. As a new trick, his face had been pixelated to become unidentifiable rather than sporting the low-tech black strip across his eyes. “I look like I’ve got a gut. Do I have a gut?” He sucked in his stomach. “I don’t have a gut, do I?”

“No, you’re perfect. I don’t remember these photos being taken.”

“That was on Wednesday,” said George, pointing to the one in which he costarred. “Doesn’t mention me in the caption, though.” He read it out in a soppy voice. “The night before the morning after for Izobel!”

“It never mentions other people. Only me, in fact. I knew it was Wednesday, I just don’t remember seeing a camera flashing. Do you?”

“I am a fine figure for a man of my age, aren’t I?”

“Don’t you remember anything odd about that evening?”

“I barely remember anything about that evening at all, sweet-heart.”

“Nobody flashed us then.”

“I may have flashed you later.”

“Think, George, can’t you remember anything?”

“I recall having pan-fried calves’ liver as a main and a very fine bottle of Barolo.”

“Don’t you see what this means, George?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“It means that they’re following me. It means that they know where I live, where I go, what I do. They’re stalking me, staking me. Scaring me.”

“I suppose it does,” he said, while continuing to stroke the convex planes of his stomach. “I’m sorry, poppet. Let me make it better for you.” He tried to pull me onto his lap.

I shook him off and walked out of the flat. As I stood on the doorstep I looked around, trying to catch a photographer in the bushes or in the building opposite, pointing a long-range camera at me. There was nobody. I was alone. “Izobel emerges from her flat in the fashionable fringes of the throbbing metropolis. What exciting event are you off to, Izobel?” the caption would read.

I went to a café. Those photos, they were my life. A life that involved going to the pub, to work, to the supermarket, to a party. Where was the snatched shot of me giving up my time to work in a soup kitchen or delivering leaflets for a worthy cause? There were no pictures of me holding a placard on a march or helping an old lady cross a road. I did nothing for anybody but myself.

I felt overwhelmed by self-pity, exacerbated by the knowledge that I couldn’t let my tears leak for fear of them being snapped with a caption reading: “The secret sadness—we’re sure you’ll feel better soon, Izobel.”

*

I flopped out at Maggie’s, while she busied herself around me. I was aware that she was the one who ought to be supine, but I was pregnant with worry. I saw myself as if through a camera’s eye, splayed out and pulling ugly, blotchy faces. Every pose I made was now captioned by myself, as if I were a new-wave photographer, turning my life into an installation. This one read: “Izobel gets tired just like the rest of us.”

“I feel like it’s mocking me, Maggie.”

“He, she or they are mocking you.
It
can’t do anything.
It
is inanimate.”

“Much like Izobel Brannigan herself,” I said.

“Come on, Iz, don’t be so lumpen,” said Maggie, as she plumped up cushions around me. “I’m so nesty nowadays.” She flashed the roll call of suspects she had written weeks previously. “You haven’t done half the people on this list. Get onto them. This site is making you feel powerless. Well, empower yourself.”

I sighed. “I feel like my life is in abeyance until I find out who’s behind it. I’m preserved. Or pickled, thanks to George, most of the time.”

“You’re only stuck if you let yourself be. Pull yourself together.” If she’d written that in an e-mail to me she’d have inserted an exclamation mark to convey jocularity. As she was saying it to me in the flesh, there was none. “Elliot you’ve done, albeit by accident, and we’ve agreed that going out with Talitha probably keeps him busy enough. Frank is not fully eliminated, nor is George.”

I shook my head.

“What about Foreign Correspondent?” she asked. “It’s a bit odd that he turns up out of the blue and asks you to have his children just after this site appears, don’t you think? Did you even find out which war zone he’s on his way to?”

“It’s not him. I just know it’s not him. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. Neither does George, nor does Frank, nor does anyone. I’m all alone, bar stalkie photographer person.”

“No, you’re not. Don’t be stupid. You’ll feel better if you do something about it.” She looked at her list. “Get in touch with Married Man and Spanish Artist for starters. And William, didn’t I say it was likely to be him? You split up with Frank for him, don’t tell me he’s meaningless.”

“You’ve never forgiven me for splitting up with Frank, have you? For messing up our cozy foursome.”

“For God’s sake, I don’t give a monkey’s about that, I just want you to be happy. And to find out who’s behind the site. Perhaps whoever it is wants you to find them.”

“What do you mean?”