Cyber Cinderella (2 page)

“Well, hello…”

“I put my name into a search engine and a site came up.”

“Hmmm.” He had graduated to thigh-fondling.

“Don’t you think that’s weird? There’s a site devoted to me. To
me.
”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“A Web site. I put my name into an Internet search engine—you know, it’s like a directory of the Web—and there’s a Web site about me.”

“Sexy girl that you are, was it a porn site?” he asked while pushing my bra up so I achieved that attractive four-breasted effect, with the real ones squashed by the empty cups of my north-migrating lingerie.

“Seriously, George.” I wriggled away. “It’s freaking me out. It’s a site. For me, about me, done by someone for me, and I’ve no idea who or why.”

He looked bored. We had the symbiotic relationship of a PR person and a journalist so that when I demanded rather than gave attention, it transcended the rules of our professional lives. “What did it say, then? What did it say about you?”

“It said ‘under construction.’ ” That means it hasn’t been built yet, but it’s going to be. Someone’s bought the address of my name and everything.”

George laughed. “Silly sausage, it’s probably not about you at all. What a delightful little idiot you are.”

“But it is, it must be. Why would there be a site registered with my name, with the funny spelling and everything, as the URL?”

“You what?”

“The URL, the address of a Web site.”

“You mean its e-mail number?”

“Don’t be disingenuous, George, it doesn’t suit you. Do you have to be such a Luddite? Or should I say ‘laddite,’ given that you’re happy to indulge in most things that lads do, pubs and women and the like?”

“Laddite, I like it. Masculine men who rather than going for gadgets and all things electronic are maintaining a stand against the tide of technology. You are clever; I can feel an article coming on.” He scribbled the word “laddite” across a gas bill that was my responsibility to pay.

“You’re not answering my question,” I whined. “Why on earth would there be a site with my name as the address?”

“And you’re not answering mine. Why on earth would anyone create a site dedicated to you?”

Why indeed?

*

George was right, of course, it had to be a coincidence. There must be someone who did spell their name the same as I did and who had the same surname. I had heard there was a trend in America for giving your children normal names with abnormal spellings, Emalee, Aleksandra, Rayshelle, that type of thing. Maybe Izobel was now one of them and the site was just something whipped up by some expectant parents in the Midwest. It was a more logical conclusion.

“Phew,” I said to George. “What a relief. I was really spooked. I thought I might have a stalker or something.”

“My poor angel-girl, you’re a bit upset that there’s no site about you.”

“No, of course not. I was really freaked. It would have been terrible, having someone think so much of you as to create a site all about you. God no. Like getting an anonymous Valentine card, should be flattering but it’s just annoying and weird. I’d hate it, really I would.”

“Well, my darling, you may not have some stupid little site,” he said. “But I can give you something so much better.” Here we go, I thought, sex as the answer to all, but he surprised me. “Instead of a site, a spa!”

“A what?”

“A spa weekend at Britain’s finest luxury hotel, courtesy of yours truly. With a Michelin-starred restaurant attached.”

“You can’t afford that, surely?” I said clapping my hands together with excitement. “When? How are you paying?”

“Aha, there’s the rub. I’m doing a piece on it for the travel section. Well, I might do, if I can be bothered.” He looked at me proudly.

Aha, I thought, courtesy of some poor sap of a PR girl like me who will have proudly announced her coup to her clients. He’d get all this for free and I’d pay for the extras like the bar bill, which would come to as much as I’d ever spent on a mini-break anyway.

“Great. Thanks, George. Much better than a creepy stalky site thing.”

*

I had thought a site dedicated to me might make George reappraise me. We’d been together for both too long and too short a time to make grand gestures. I was even almost tempted to hire a Web geek to make up a site for me so that I could pretend someone worshipped me, that I had one fan, and to show this to George, to prove him wrong and to whip up his ardor. This being, I suppose, the twenty-first-century version of sending flowers to yourself to make the boyfriend jealous.

“George,” I asked one evening soon after. “Am I your num ber one? The most important person in your life?”

“Naturally, darling, my number one grown-up girl anyway. Of course, Grace is my number one number one. I’d be a monster if it were any other way.”

Grace. The divine Grace. Beauty, intelligence and saintliness in a pert six-year-old package accessorized by Gap Kids. He’d once said he’d kill himself if anything were to happen to her. “I’d get over you dying,” he had said to me, “but one never gets over the death of a child.”

That’s the trouble with going out with a man with offspring by another woman. The one person who should put you above all others has the most horribly valid excuse not to. And even to question this principle is to be the wickedest common-law stepmother in the history of fairy tales. Stepmothers are very much maligned, generally, I would think, as I’d read another bloody boring story to a demanding child who was not only not mine, but belonged to Catherine, the woman I most resented in the world.

I phoned Maggie.

“Do you think you’re number one in Mick’s life?”

“I suppose so, though I don’t know for how much longer. When the baby’s born, I’m sure he or she will be my number one. And Mick’s. Are you asking who you’d pull out of a burning building first or who you like best?”

“I don’t know. It would just be nice to feel like you’re number one in somebody’s life.”

“It’s not the charts, you know. It’s not that simple. And this week’s number one in Mick’s life, pop pickers, is Maggie, closely followed by Mick’s mum, but with the six-month-old fetus poised to make the highest new entry.”

“I know, I just don’t think I’m anybody’s.”

“Could be a good thing,” she said. “Christ, I’m my mother’s and I’d give anything not to be. The top of her hit parade should be my father. More like the top of her hit list. It’s horrible being her number one best friend, daughter, quasi-lover, receptacle for all her hopes and dreams. Every morning she phones me. I told her not to use my work number as that was for work calls so now she phones me on my mobile, or ‘portable telephone’ as she calls it. I told her only to use that for emergencies, so now she prefaces every message with ‘It’s nothing important’ in this really sad and passive-aggressive way.”

I couldn’t see Maggie’s mother creating a Web site devoted to her daughter. She was of the generation that still talked to answer-phones in the third person: “This is a message for Maggie, tell her that her mother rang and that I miss her very much.”

“At least you’ve got two people who put you top, and a third on the way,” I retorted.

“Izobel, we are all the protagonists in the movie of our own lives.” Maggie was a TV drama script editor both professionally and emotionally. “In everyone else’s you’re just a bit part—the wisecracking best pal, the mother figure, the girlfriend, the nemesis, doesn’t really matter. You’re only your own number one.”

“But shouldn’t I be surrounded by best supporting actors?”

“Yes, but supporting, secondary. There’s only one star in your life and that’s you. Don’t rely on anybody else to give you applause.”

“But as I’m going out with someone, though,” I asked, “shouldn’t I expect George to have me played by Julia Roberts in the biopic of his life? At least, have almost equal billing?” I decided not to tell her about the Web site. Not yet anyway.

“Yes, but would she be in a cameo? Or do you really think that George thinks as much about you as you think about yourself? We’re all pretty solipsistic in the end, aren’t we? In George’s film would the actress playing you get nominated in the best actress or best actress in a supporting role category?”

“I’d be below the barmaid in the credits.”

Maggie laughed, though I wasn’t actually trying to be funny.

*

I felt that my life was far from being an epic. It was a low-budget short, made by students and lacking real plot or narrative arc; one of those ones where amateur actors shuffle around bemoaning the state of the world without anything really happening. All the audience would be talking through it just waiting for the arrival of the main attraction.

Chapter Two

I
checked the under-constructed
www.izobelbrannigan.com
intermittently, but then I checked a lot of sites at work. I saw
The Apartment
recently and I wondered what work there had been to do in an office before the advent of computers and e-mail.

One day, though,
www.izobelbrannigan.com
was different. It was there. My site had flickered into life, dormant but now animated, a fairy-tale princess awoken with a kiss marked “Put Live.”

And it was
my
site. There was no doubt anymore. It was my site and it was all about me. In the center of the screen in Arial 24pt bold, a couple of paragraphs about my life. Or at least my life as imagined by a
Hello!
features writer crossed with an adulatory adolescent boy.

“This site is dedicated to the life of Izobel Brannigan, who rocks her own world and that of those around her. Born 1973 (she’s a Pisces), she went to St. Teresa’s Grammar and then to the University of Sussex, where she read European Studies and Good Times. She’s now cutting a swath through the glamorous world of the capital’s public relations industry.”

It went on: “Enough of the past. But what next for Izobel and
www.izobelbrannigan.com
? We want to make a site that’s every bit as crazy and dynamic as the woman herself. Over the coming months, we’ll keep you informed of all her antics and her ever-changing world. And we’ll be throwing in a few secrets that maybe she wouldn’t want out there! Keep logging on!”

Nobody described me as “cutting a swath” through anywhere these days. Not even me in the third-person commentary about my life I’d run through my head to a John Barry soundtrack when trying to cheer myself up.

The site was nice-looking; the stalker knew his stuff when it came to the Web. It was only a one-pager, but professionally exe-cuted. The background was an attractive shade of blue and the logo “Izobel” in large squashy letters, like comfy sofas, ran across the top of the page. That was nice of them, I thought, to have taken the trouble to fashion a logo out of my name. It looked like it was underlined in navy, but on closer inspection I made out the words “her site her world” in an angular script, like the border on an Egyptian tomb.

Eliminating all doubt about which Izobel the site was devoted to, there were a couple of photos set at jaunty angles and with fake crinkled edges, as if this was not the Internet but a page from an old-fashioned scrapbook or photo album. The text was in a yellow box, to look as though a Post-it note had been randomly affixed to this commonplace book.

One photo was of me from school, a blurred thumbnail from a group shot. My face was so fat in those days. When people try to flatter women by saying they’ve the body of a sixteen-year-old, they’re clearly not referring to mine at that age. And the hair. Why did I ever think it was cool to have a bleached spiky fringe? I remember how I used to tie it up in a sausage of elastic bands each night, like a unicorn’s horn, and then release the vertical plumage in the morning.

Then there was another photo, a more recent one. I couldn’t work it out at first; eventually, by looking at the clothes I was wearing and the background, illuminated by a flash, I realized that it was taken at a party to celebrate somebody’s thirtieth I’d been to about six months before, held in a club. I was wearing a one-shouldered top and a pair of satin combats with heels in an effort to practice what PR people and magazine editors were encouraging mortals to sport. I like to think I’m quite street: High or Bond, depending on the mood. You could see my nipples. I’m sure you couldn’t on the day, so at a guess they had been digitally enhanced.

It was a typical party picture: I had my arms around two friends and was doing that glowing overarching smile of the mildly tipsy while my eyes had been flashed up into a demonic red. My chin was tipped downward, as it was in all photos taken since I had realized as a teenager that if I didn’t do that, it looked like I had a goiter. Of course, the flip side was that it meant that the dark rings around my eyes were more prominent, but this was the lesser of two evils.

Dark rings around the eyes were not something that Maggie and Frank, the friends I was embracing and learning on, had to worry about in this photo, for they had little black strips across their eyes to protect their anonymity. The effect was sinister, as if they were MPs partaking in an orgy splashed across a tabloid newspaper, or the innocent victims of a kiddie porn ring, while I was the leering perv they’d been taught to call “Uncle Tommy.” Stalker–Web site maker clearly didn’t see why my anonymity should be protected in such a way. Instead the bare facts of my life were broadcast across the whole wide world.

Whose party had it been? Some friend of Frank’s? Must ask Maggie, I thought, not that she’d be able to remember any better than me. I’m sure if her eyes had been visible they’d have had the enlarged pupils of the totally boxed, her irises like the glow of the sun being eclipsed by the full moon of her pupils. It must have been before she was pregnant. Or at least before she knew she was.

There was a ticker running along the bottom of the site. “Coming soon: a message board where you can talk about what Izobel means to you. Live chat too.” I waited for the next installment to shuffle across the screen, very slowly, for it was an arthritic ticker. “Sections on her family and friends.” All with blacked-across eyes, no doubt. “E-mail alerts for her birthday and breaking news.” It continued to meander. “Future attractions: Izobel-themed ring tones and faceplates. Comps and prizes galore!”