Cyber Cinderella (5 page)

“Second year of college, early nineties, for about eighteen months, a couple of years maybe.”

“Long enough to gestate. Twice.”

“But we didn’t. Only stagnate and realize that we were always going to be better off as friends than lovers.” This was true, though there was that little part of both of us I liked to believe felt we could do a lot worse than end up with one another in our late thirties. “I don’t think he’s my cyber-stalker. He is besotted with Camilla.”

“I do think people should have arranged relationships,” said Maggie. “But arranged by their friends. I’m sure we’d do a lot better for him than her. She’s so Gwyneth, isn’t she?”

“I think Frank’s always favored those ethereal, barely-there girl looks. I think I was too fleshy, too earthy for him. He always used to clutch my thighs with the surprised look of a bachelor left holding a baby, like he couldn’t comprehend these rolls of fat. I was a chunky statue; he wanted a mere sketch of a girl, a watercolor woman.”

“Vapid.”

“Yes,” I said smugly, Camilla-bashing being one of my favorite games. “Straight hair, straight legs, straight attitudes. I really can’t see him holding a candle for me. I can’t even see him holding a bike light.”

“You were a good couple though,” said Maggie. “The four of us had a laugh together. Why did you chuck him?”

“I didn’t chuck him.”

“That’s what he says.”

“It suits Frank’s doomed romanticism to think that, but it’s not true. I always thought we’d get back together at a later date anyway, but I think he’s in it for the long haul with Camilla. Which means he’s not our cyber-man.”

“But now I think of it, he was definitely at Hot Bob’s party, wasn’t he?”

“He’s in the photo.”

“Exactly, that would explain how it came to be in his possession, wouldn’t it?”

“George was there too. I think. Free booze and all that.”

“Aha. Two very likely suspects. Who next? Spanish Artist?”

“Or Foreign Correspondent or Married Man or Toyboy?”

“You have gone out with a lot of nouns, not names.”

It’s true. Do I go out with caricatures or do I caricature those who I go out with? “I do it for you, Maggie. Where would you be without my sexual shenanigans? You’d never have stuck with Mick all these years if you hadn’t been able to live vicariously through my anecdotes. Or should I say anecdates? Romantic incidents experienced purely for the benefit of being able to turn them into a good story for you.”

Maggie laughed. “I do think I’ve had more pleasure from some of your stories than you got from the sex itself.”

“Undoubtedly,” I replied sadly.

“Speaking of which, let’s get on with the list.” She was irritatingly gleeful. “What was Picasso’s name, then? San Miguel or something?”

“Pepe,” I corrected. “My little Pepito. He was small of stature.”

“I knew it was the name of a drink. What about him? I did an episode once where the baddie was a Spaniard. Or maybe a Colombian, something like that. We got lots of viewer complaints about it afterward, though, saying it promoted the idea that all Hispanic people are drug dealers. Still, doesn’t mean it can’t be your Pepe.”

“Pepito, no, I can’t see it. His English was a bit rubbish for starters.”

Maggie reread the text on the screen. “But don’t you think the prose style of this is exactly like somebody who’s learned their English from bad pop songs? ‘Izobel rocks her world,’ can’t you just hear that in a Continental accent? I don’t think it’s enough to dismiss him.”

“He was playing around with electronic art and installations and stuff when we were going out. Last time I heard of him, he’d gone back to Barcelona on yet another obscure artistic scholarship.”

“He was funny, wasn’t he? What was his full name?”

“Pepe or Pepito Gomez Gomez.”

“So good they named him twice. Just his name alone is hilarious.”

“That’s the joy of funny foreign boyfriends. Every incident’s an anecdote. Ah, the paint-splattered sex, the Spanish-intonated orgasms, the Kennington squat. And the fact that he had green teeth and bones due to some bizarre TB-related calcium deficiency that his peasant mother suffered in the time of Franco.”

“Love it. He’s
so
a possibility then, especially with what you’re telling me about him doing electronic installations. Surely this is just the sort of postmodern rubbish he’d come up with.”

“I can’t see it.” I really wasn’t sure that any of my exes had even loved me at the time, let alone were composing computerized paeans to me years on. “I doubt it. We had what he referred to as a ‘
relación abierta,
’ an open relationship. It sounds better in Spanish, less car keys and seventies, but whatever way you look at it, it was license for him to shag every art-school floozy who dribbled paint and saliva in his direction.”

I could barely remember what he looked like, only those devilish jade-colored teeth and the fact that he’d say words like
“cojones”
a lot, which gave the sordidness an exotic glamour. “If Pepito was going to build a site, it would be to all the girls he’s loved before, not to just one of them. Least of all me.”

“I like it, a sort of Tracey Emin’s tent crossed with Julio Iglesias crossed with the Internet. Perhaps he’s doing that and yours is just one in a sequence of electronic installations to all his lovers. I’m putting him on the list. I think you should Google him and see if he’s still doing cyber-stuff. It’s the best lead we’ve got so far. Virtual art.”

“Virtual arse more like.”

“I am trying to help you, Izobel,” she said sternly and then did that stomach-rubbing thing again, as if to emphasize her emotional maturity. “Where’s the Foreign Correspondent these days?”

“Wherever war and pestilence lurk.”

“Does he merely follow misery or actually bring it with him?”

“I don’t know. Either way you’d fear for your life if he ever rocked into your neighborhood press club.”

“And Married Man?”

“MM is still MD, though no longer of my heart. I’ll find out what he’s up to as he’s about the only one of them who’d have the finances to do my site. Though I can’t see a motive.”

She sat up with a jolt and exhaled as if baby Maggie-Mick had just given her a penalty shoot-out winning kick. “Of course, what about Elliot?”

Elliot Edwards. He was someone who wouldn’t be at all shocked to Google himself and find that there was a site devoted to him. In fact, there are dozens. The sort of fans he collected would be just the sort to do fan sites. That’s what comes of having a certain obscure (or at least it had seemed to me when we were together) nerdish charm and presenting a television program in which contestants played outsize versions of board games with deviant twists (Snakes and Ladders with real vipers, Scrabble with scrambling, Monopoly with the chance of a night in Mayfair or the threat of a spell in a cell).

“I think he’s probably too busy answering all the fan queries on his own sites to worry about creating one for me, don’t you?” I replied.

Elliot Edwards, now there was someone whose MQ shot up dramatically after the time we were together. One minute he was the lowly runner in an independent TV production company, the next he was the man behind the format for
Board Stupid
and then the man in front of it (or a giant replica of Dungeons and Dragons cutouts, as the case may be). He was one of those people I prided myself on fancying, thinking that his attraction was far too quirky for normal girls to get and only someone of my kooky tastes would ever favor. Then tarnation, it appeared that all girls think like that and every one of them loves a nerd. My nerd to be precise. I’m always reading about him in articles about unlikely sex symbols. And if I hadn’t dumped him then maybe I’d be “the lucky lady who’d bagged Britain’s favorite geek.” Girls would envy me, people from my past would gasp as they saw me pictured at premieres in long slinky dresses slashed up to the thigh. I’d attend launches without having to organize them myself. I might even have to hire my own PR person…

“Yes,” replied Maggie, interrupting my reverie. “But it would be ironic if all this groupie adulation had left Elliot feeling bereft and more adoring of you than ever.”

Another snort of objection from me.

“Or that because he has fan sites of his own, he wanted to reverse that and place the burden of being fanned onto somebody else, the hunted becomes the hunter type of thing. The way that some celebrities take photos of the paparazzi.”

“It’s a theory.”

“Which is all we’ve got so far. Anybody else?”

I trawled the mental filing cabinet of scrap that was my previous loves. “William.”

“How could I forget? He’s super-weird.”

“And wired, both drugs and computer-wise.”

“Yes, he is. He might be shooting straight to the top of our hit parade.”

“Again, not happy with the use of the word ‘hit,’ Mags.”

She ignored me. “What’s he up to?”

“The usual—living off his trust fund, playing computer games, taking drugs, living in an expensive mews house. I think he’s still nominally doing that PhD in medieval philosophy of science or whatever it was.”

“You do pick them.”

“Ah, the self-satisfaction of the cozily coupled-up. You have no idea what it’s like out there, Maggie.”

She laughed, in a frankly self-satisfied way. “Let’s recap. George, still number one. It sounds incongruous, I grant you, but love does strange things to people and he does drink too much.”

“He can take it.”

“Yes, of course.”

“He doesn’t have a problem.”

“What’s that,” George said on coming through to the living room.

“Izobel doesn’t think you’ve got a drink problem.”

“No, of course not, I live right next door to the off-license.” Chuckling at his own joke, he retreated to the kitchen once more. Maggie snorted and looked back to her list in disgust.

“Number one suspect, the man without a drink problem, George. Number two has to be William. He’s weird, he’s wired, he’s loaded. Number three Pepito, he’s interested in computer art and he’s got green teeth, which is kooky. Then Elliot, it’s a nice theory and would make the best drama, but I’m not convinced that he sees anything beyond himself these days. Foreign Correspondent and Married Man, search me, I never met the latter anyway, but maybe they’re in the running. And lastly, Frank. It does seem most unlikely, although that probably means he’s the guilty one.”

“Life doesn’t follow the precepts of TV drama, Maggie.”

“Oh, but it does. It does.”

“What now though, Ms. Director? How do I follow this up?” I asked. I now knew how actors feel when they complain of feeling like a powerless cipher for somebody else’s vision.

“We investigate our suspects. We Google them, we get in touch with them, we ask them what they’re up to, pick up some clues. Have a think about boyfriends you had at school too or anybody else you’ve been involved with. I mean, you’re not seriously telling me that you’ve only been out with seven men. Then you need to meet up with them and see how they react when you probe them. Find out about their Internet usage and see if they react differently or behave oddly when you do. Also, give them a piece of false information.”

“Like what?”

“Something untrue so that only they will think it. Like you’re a hermaphrodite or you’re pregnant or something. A different piece of information each. Then if it appears on the site, we’ll know who’s behind it.”

“We should also try to get a guest list for Hot Bob’s party. That might narrow it down a bit too.”

“Will that be shorter than the list of men you’ve shagged?”

“Ha, ha.”

“No, seriously, that’s a good idea.”

“Thanks. What about school boyfriends? I didn’t sleep with any of them.”

“Really?”

“It was a long time ago; we grew up later in the country. We were still making wedding veils for our Barbies out of loo paper when I was fifteen.” I had always been intimidated by Maggie’s tales of clubbing at fourteen and moving in with a boyfriend three years after that. She got it all out of the way quickly, I suppose.

“You don’t have to have had sex with them for them to be a suspect, in fact quite the contrary. List the possible school perps. Smart thinking, partner.”

Junior partner, I presumed, the rookie cop to her seasoned maverick of a detective.

“Here we go. What do you want?” Maggie asked of George as he came back into the sitting room.

“To see my girlfriend,” he replied and rather flamboyantly groped me.

“Can’t you see we’re busy?” she snapped.

I wriggled away to the kitchen, leaving them to stew as I marinated chicken breasts and the ideas that Maggie had planted in my head.

Chapter Four

I
couldn’t face calling up exes, even those who were currently friends like Frank, so I began with George. He seemed a fairly unlikely prospect and one whose movements were as predictable as a daytime soap, with all the shouting and sexual shenanigans included.

Fridays, for example, always followed the same pattern. Having finalized the weekly section he edited (or “put to bed” in journalese; all their parlance seemed to involve sexual metaphors, talk of straps, heads and body copy), he’d go for lunch with his cohorts. The more his newspaper churned out right-wing, anti-drug and moralistic stories, the more he and his colleagues would indulge in all the vices most berated. While the paper raged against asylum seekers, George would score narcotics off illegal immigrants. As female family lawyers wrote of how women are to blame for high divorce rates, the paper would house their adulterous husbands as columnists. Every detox diet displayed was displaced in the offices by the real-life re-toxing of its inhabitants.

Playtime at the newspaper’s offices was the laws of the school playground revived. Cocaine had replaced sherbet, and sex in the disabled toilets was in lieu of kiss chase, but there still existed the cool gang (those in features, the columnists and the critics) and the bullied (subs, work-experience girls and admin support staff).

George was in the former and didn’t he know it. The disdain which they held for anyone in life who had to pay for restaurants, holidays or toiletries was comparable to an aristocrat’s snobbery about anyone who had bought rather than inherited their furniture. The arrogance of George and his entourage masked their jealousy that others could afford to buy what they had to beg for as freebies. And just how useful was a new lipstick-fixing formula to George anyway, other than as a free present to offload onto me on my birthday?