Cyber Cinderella (18 page)

“Maybe.” This was how girls were supposed to act when with a potential boyfriend, all hard to get and elusive. Apparently drives men wild, though I wouldn’t know as I’d never managed it. Until now. I didn’t want to drive him wild. That had got us into trouble in the first place. “Yes, of course. Out of interest, do you know someone called…” I paused, what was Hot Bob’s surname? “Robert. He had a thirtieth in a club about seven or eight months ago. Works in academia. An economist I think.”

“Robert Ives? He’s my cousin. Why, do you know him?” Listen to the eagerness with which he sought coincidence and shared experience. I almost believed him.

“I went to that party. Did you?”

“Yes I did, I was there, of course I did. Robert and I are almost the same age. We grew up together.”

Hot Bob was his cousin. Made sense, they shared the same looks, though I had thought Ivan’s more attractive.

“I didn’t see you there. How annoying,” he continued. “There’s always something so bonding about bumping into work people outside work. Hang on, I wouldn’t have recognised you, I don’t think. It was about that time we took on this account. Did I know you then? Could we have met then? I was with my girl-friend. My then girlfriend.”

I think I may have been with my now boyfriend but that was not an issue that needed to be raised anymore. Listen to lies trot from his tongue. I had loved that tongue and now I hated it.

“What a coincidence,” he exclaimed.

Or not, I thought.

“Didn’t you realize,” I asked, “that it was the party in the photo?”

“What photo?”

Oh stop it, don’t patronize me. You’re not the one with all the knowledge anymore. “The photo on the site. In the first batch, there was the school one and the party one.”

“No, I hadn’t realized. It was pretty indistinct.”

“I worked it out, I knew which party it had been taken from.”

“But I hadn’t even known you were at that party so why would I have made the connection?”

Connection. How he bandies round these computer-related words with ease. I would stay calm. I had to pretend that I still didn’t know, that I didn’t suspect. Why, I wasn’t sure. Partly because it seemed so humiliating and embarrassing for both of us to accuse him of having done what I knew he had done.

“Look, Ivan, you know as well as I do that I’m on a warning from Tracy so I really had better go. Crap products to promote, horrible people to publicize, my life continues. My life goes on.”

I put the phone down and felt sicker than I had ever done before. I felt the taste of vomit in my mouth. The hangover and my shock collided with one another and mated to reproduce more and more bile.

My life goes on?

“Babe, you’re like a traffic light, your face keeps going from red to green and back again,” observed Mimi as I tried to stand up.

“I feel like rubbish. I’ve got to go. Sorry. A one-day bug, some sort of virus.” Still those evil computer words kept coming. “Tell Tracy for me. Tell her I looked really sick, please.”

Chapter Twelve

M
imi, hello, it’s me, Izobel,” I said weakly. It didn’t matter what your sickness sickie claim was, you always had to do the voice that made it sound like you were slipping in and out of a coma. “I can’t make it into the office today. I vomited all night. I think it must be food poisoning.”

If everybody who claimed to have food poisoning did have it, Britain’s kitchens would have to be the most unhygienic in the world.

Despite my warning from Tracy, I couldn’t face PR O’Create for a second day in a row. I didn’t even care about the prospect of being sacked. Just do it, I thought. Ivan was bound to be there, skulking. I wanted to confront him. That’s what all this detective work had been about, but I wasn’t ready yet.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I really did look ill. It was a rare occasion when a videophone would have been of some use to the malingerer. My hair was lank and I wore an old pair of glasses and an even older pair of tracksuit bottoms. The lips that had been moistened by kissing had now dried and chapped. I had prodded my raw stubble burn so much that it had become infected and there was a little bubble of suppurating sore dripping greenish gunk continually from my chin. From sex kitten to pus galore, I said to the mirror, a feeble quip aimed at cheering myself up. It didn’t work.

It was apt that I should have poisoned stubble burn from having kissed Ivan. He had contaminated me in a way as rancid as any computer virus infecting an e-mail address book. I hated him. I wanted to squeeze my chin’s festering discharge into a vial and dispatch it to his house anonymously. I wanted him to feel hunted and haunted as I had done.

And yet, I didn’t. I wanted him. To be denied him at this point, the moment between kiss and sex, was too frustrating. To think of all that anticipation and to feel that kiss once again still made me tingle and dampen. I felt like I was dripping from all orifices. I disgusted myself.

My mobile was like a Post-it note with the word “Ivan” scribbled across it, stuck at every point in my world as it rang and flashed his name up three times throughout the day. Sometimes he left messages, sometimes not. He never disguised his number though, which surprised me, since anonymity appeared to be his modus operandi in other areas of his pursuit of me.

It is wonderful to be pursued, in theory, but in practice the way that pursuers choose to go about their business negates any succor an object of affection could derive from it.

I put the baseball cap on once again and went to the newsagent’s. The nice man in the shop and George would be my only points of contact that day, I had already decided.

George had been good to me the night before, threatening to go round and sort Ivan out, once I had given him a carefully edited version of events.

“What did I tell you? That no good will come of technology,” he said. “Who is this geek anyway? My poor darling, what’s he like?”

“Like you say, a geek. Nobody, nothing.”

“Creep.”

“Yes, creep.”

“I could expose him in the paper. What’s his name?”

I paused. “Ian, his name is Ian Jones.”

“Common little name for a common little man. Let me and a few colleagues onto him. Have you reported him to Tracy? Where’s his office?”

“Hounslow, I think, but please don’t go round. Let me talk to him, let me sort it out.”

And we’d had sex that night and I thought that it would sate the desire I had worked up for Ivan but it didn’t. It’s like when you’re at the gym, the way that the instructor says it won’t work unless you’re concentrating hard on pulling your stomach in or “sucking your belly button to your spine” in their anatomically disgusting phrase. Sex is the same, at least for me. If I don’t engage, if I don’t think about it really hard and concentrate on the muscles I’m working, it doesn’t work. George, in contrast, was even more enthusiastic than normal. He didn’t seem to notice that my chin was ejaculating bodily fluids, but had stroked me and called me his sexy girl and his angel-girl. All lips were dry.

That morning, I rejected George’s offer of a sympathy sickie and had the flat to myself. I was the Lady of Shalott, but instead of being able only to view the world reflected through a mirror, I would look through izobelbrannigan.com. I fired up the computer in anticipation of a sign from Ivan.

I overcame the labors of passwords and connecting it up to the ancient modem. The site was now my home page, reached automatically whenever I got onto the Internet.

It was now so familiar to me in its Swedish colors that I almost didn’t register it anymore. It all looked the same, I thought, and then I noticed.

There was a change.

My stomach made a yelping gurgle, but no noise came from my mouth. I started swaying.

A change had occurred, technically a very small one, emotionally a giant one.

In the middle of the page, where the introduction to Izobel had originally floated, there it was. Two words and two dates that horrified me. I touched the screen with my sweaty fingers as if the letters and numbers were in Braille. I felt blind to their true meaning.

But it was clear.

Izobel Brannigan, 1973–2003.

I fell onto my hands and knees and crawled away from the computer avoiding its range of vision, as if it could see me and were the instrument to ensure that those dates came true. My birth date and my death date? The PC monitor was a Cyclopean eye trained on me, it was a heat-seeking missile. I’m sure I even saw it move as I moved.

I curled up into a ball on my bed and covered myself in the duvet. It couldn’t get me there.

*

The home phone woke me and I answered it, hoping that I’d never been so stupid as to give Ivan that number to join his armory.

“Oh, hello, Maggie.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Couldn’t face it. Didn’t want to bump into him.”

“You can’t let him get to you like this. He’s winning if you do. It’s only a Web site, not a loaded gun.”

I gave a wry laugh. Well, it started that way and mutated into a hysterical screech. “It is.”

“Is what?”

“A loaded gun.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you in the office? Log onto it now,” I instructed. I pulled my knees into my chest as I waited for her response.

“You must go to the police,” she said. “Tell them who you think it is and show it to them. Take a printout with you in case they don’t have Internet connection. You never know. Tell them about Ivan and show them the dates.”

“They won’t do anything. I’ve seen the television version. They’ll just say they can’t do anything until he actually attacks me.”

“Don’t believe everything you see on television,” Maggie said. “And no, you can’t have that in writing.”

*

I wasn’t so depressed that I couldn’t get dressed. Things would have to be really bad for me not to be able to theme-dress for a visit to the police station. I even put in my contact lenses. I had taken to wearing an old hiking anorak with big pockets instead of carrying a handbag, but I wanted the police to take me seriously. They must be as susceptible to theme-dressing as anyone. I tried to wodge some concealer onto the infected stubble burn but it was carried out on a wave of weeping pus. I put on a suit, my only suit, the one I had worn for the pitch in the photo on the site.

It had impressed Ivan the site-writer, who had after all described my besuited appearance at the conference as “slick.” I shivered to think of it. I was trying to reconcile Ivan the artist with Ivan the sycophant whose prose style was that of
OK!
magazine without the wit.

I had never been inside a real police station before. I had expected it to look more like a doctor’s waiting room, but there were no magazines for me to read or toys for kids to play with. There seemed to be a lot of pine, and it felt like a grotty Scandinavian holiday home. My rubber-soled shoes squelched across the lino floor as I read the notices that covered the walls as enthusiastically as boy band posters in a teenager’s bedroom. A picture of handcuffs was emblazoned “streetwear for robbers.” The public were warned not to leave their mobiles visible to thieves, but one poster later were warned more strictly still not to make false claims of mobile phone theft. The happy smiling faces of now-missing persons were brightly color-photocopied onto posters to form a gallery of misery.

One notice told us to report crime via the Internet. I was reporting a crime on the Internet.

There was no one waiting so I stepped forward to the counter. No glass separated me from the police officers and I could see into their offices, where a helmet sat picturesquely by a computer, as if placed there by an art director.

Aren’t policemen supposed to look younger every day? This one was well beyond retirement age. He was the oldest, most wiz-ened man I’d seen outside of a retirement home. He looked like he should be an oracle of wisdom in a science-fiction film.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but have you got five minutes?” I pay my taxes, but I felt like a fraudulent time-waster. They probably had murders to deal with. But then, I shivered, mine could become a case of murder.

The old-timer looked around the empty station as if it was evident. I leaned forward, clutching the printout of the home page.

“I’d like to report what I believe to be a death threat.”

He looked more interested. I unfolded my evidence. “How would I go about doing that?” I asked.

“You tell me how and where and I compile a report. Come through to the computer.”

I shuddered as he ushered me through to a glass section in the corner, where he stood behind a computer and I in front. There was no getting away from them.

I stood tall as I gave him my personal details.

“About four weeks ago, this site came into being.” I slammed down the A4 sheet with my hand splayed across it. “It’s called izobel brannigan dot com. As I said, I’m Izobel Brannigan.” He remained impassive. “This morning when I looked at it, these dates had appeared. See, it says nineteen seventy-three to two thousand and three. It didn’t do that before.”

He frowned. I wasn’t sure whether at me or at the site. “And?”

“I was born in nineteen seventy-three...”

“I see. Four weeks, you say.”

“Yes.”

“And these dates only appeared this morning.”

“Yes.” I felt as though I were reporting a leaky roof rather than my own imminent demise.

“And the address of the site is?”

“www dot izobelbrannigan dot com, my name dot com and my name dot co dot uk. It’s spelled I-Z-O-B…” Do you even know how to log onto the Internet, Granddad?

“What is the tone of the rest of the site? Could it be perceived as threatening?”

I sighed. “No, it’s flattering. A bit weird, maybe. Photos of me and stuff.”

“And have you been verbally threatened or is there a more explicit threat on the site?”

“No.” I was ashamed. At that moment, I almost wished that I had been, like I had wanted proof of George’s infidelity rather than merely the suspicion of it.

“Are you known to us for any reason?”

“What on earth do you mean?” Nutty police botherer?