Authors: Christina Hopkinson
Had I imagined it all along? No, George had viewed it, albeit in a perfunctory fashion.
I sank back, disheartened. My little time of celebrity was over as soon as it had begun. “Phew,” I practiced saying, in readiness for seeing George, “what a relief the site’s disappeared. Now I don’t have to worry anymore.” And he would draw me to him and tell me what a silly bunny I’d been to make such a big fuss about it in the first place and then we’d have sex or go to the launch of another restaurant doomed to the lifespan of a fruit fly.
If only I had at least saved the page or printed it out. Now I had nothing except the fact that George would feel like he’d been proved right and the disappointment of having gone from nonentity to notoriety back to nonentity again in but a week.
The phone went.
“All gone now,” he boomed.
“Hello, George.”
“What a lot of fuss about nothing. I’ll make it all better tonight. What are we doing?”
“Fiona’s company’s doing a launch for a cigarette company. In Soho.”
“Free fags?”
“I guess so. It did exist, didn’t it? The site, I mean, I didn’t just imagine it.”
“What site?”
“Don’t be a jerk, George. It’s still weird and there still is a stalker person out there who made it even if I can’t see it anymore.”
“I really think you ought to stop worrying about it and tell me where the party is. What kind of fags anyway?”
I looked at the screen and with my free hand went to refresh the page once more in a pathetic gesture of hope. Control R. Refresh. If only I could do that to my life.
I couldn’t refresh my nonvirtual life, but it had worked a miracle on the site. It was back. And with a new addition to the ticker: “We’re sorry for any inconvenience to Izobel fans who may have been trying to view this site today. We’ve had technical difficulties that are now fully resolved. Izobel and her site can now keep on rolling!”
“George, the site. It’s back. It’s working again.”
I could hear a sigh on the other end of the phone mutate into a cough. “Fantastic news,” he said in a voice that suggested it was anything but.
L
ife ground on in its dull and dulling way: frottaged by flesh on the Underground, shocked at the price of a frothy coffee and slumped in the office. Every day was the same, yet every day more irritating than the last.
Every day, I’d be struck by the way that my place of work was like one of those grand houses whose perfect Georgian facade only conceals chaos and architectural incoherence beyond. The clients saw shiny flagstones and meeting rooms with flowers in. I dwelt in the back room of the overcrowded offices covered in redundant piles of newspapers like the house of a crazy person. There mobiles would make their unharmonious chorus of tunes distorted into an indistinguishable blur of grating sound.
In the office, I’d flick through the papers, skipping the politics and getting straight onto the gossip and “Your Life Is Incomplete Without…” sections and would discuss how fit/unattractive various celebrities were and which of them were sporting collagen/breast implants. After that I would get down to the real business of reading the horoscope that appeared in the paper George worked for. I’d sigh as Pisceans were once more advised to show financial prudence and were never promised love or luck.
Every day these things would irritate me anew and yet nothing was ever fresh to me. The only things that could penetrate my jaded self were those that depressed, never those that delighted.
Except for my site. It didn’t gladden, exactly, but it had excited me, piqued me, intrigued me. It was the first time something different had happened in the two years since I had got together with George. Curiosity expanded and swelled inside me, filling my brain like one of those new foaming cleaners that billow down drains.
My PR missions of getting a plug in a daily or sucking up to the junior fashion features accessories editor at
Vogue
were even more desiccated of their meaning. My relationship with George was still lubricated by drink and sexual pleasure, but dehydrated of the sap of emotions.
The only thing that meant anything to me was finding out who was my cyber-admirer. Or virtual stalker. Whatever you wanted to call it. I didn’t even know where to begin in my quest and was convinced I needed to call in an expert. Not a real live policeman, but the next best thing: someone who had worked on TV police dramas.
I invited Maggie round for supper.
“Mags, can I just show you something on my PC?” I asked her before she’d even got her coat off but after I’d poured us both a glass of wine, a marginally smaller one for her in deference to her distended belly. She held it protectively, the belly rather than her glass of wine, in a gesture that I guessed she had copied off actresses playing pregnant women, who’d stroke their fake bellies and fake babies, rather than as a prenatal instinct.
“What Internet delight? Woman eating her own feces, man having sex with a chihuahua, George Dubya…” she posited.
“Not exactly.”
I clicked the mouse so that the screen saver of George and me on holiday melted away to unveil my site.
Maggie frowned, then giggled, then frowned again. “Bizarre bizarre bizarro. What a funny home page or is it called blogging these days? This is your Web log. Why have you done that to Frank’s and my eyes? And I’m sure my nipples didn’t show as much in that top. When did you do this? Can you do one for us? Mick’s on about creating one for the fetus and putting photos of the birth on it and stuff. Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?”
“Because I didn’t create it. What do you take me for?”
“You did once send yourself a Valentine.”
“One, I’m not weird enough to create my own tribute site. Two, I’m not technically capable of creating one. And three, I never sent myself a Valentine.”
“True to the first two of those statements.” Maggie folded her arms around her chest. “So if you didn’t make it, who did?”
I shrugged and my stomach cramped. She read the text that floated in the middle of the screen.
“It’s anonymous? That is so creepy.”
“Is it? Or is it flattering?” I asked hopefully.
“No, it’s creepy. It’s weird and stalkie and strange. We’ve got to find out who’s behind it.”
“We?”
“Of course. I haven’t script-edited two dozen episodes of Britain’s favorite midweek long-running police drama for nothing, you know. I bet I can work out who’s behind it.”
I hate myself. For being the sort of person to auto-Google and for being the sort of person to cry when anybody’s nice to me.
“Iz darling, don’t cry.” Maggie never did. She was one of the people who’ll jab you in the cinema and say loudly, “You’re crying, I can’t believe you’re crying,” as you snuffle at the bit when John McClane meets his radio buddy at the end of
Die Hard.
“Really not a crying matter,” she said on seeing me dripping from both my eyes and nose. “You’re only letting them get to you with this site if you cry. This is so weird. I can’t get my head round it.”
I wasn’t upset. I was relieved. Maggie was taking me and it seriously. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For thinking it’s important.”
“But it
is
important.”
At that moment, I heard the familiar jangle of the wrong keys being put in the slot by George. He took the kitchen exit off the hall before coming into the sitting room, vodka in one hand, cigarette in the other. This left none free for giving us the finger on seeing us hunched at my computer.
“For Christ’s sake, you’re not still banging on about that bloody Web site.”
“Piss off, George,” said Maggie, whose spleen was undiluted by the fear that George would leave her and she’d be left alone for the rest of her life and never have sex again, as mine was. “And don’t put that filthy fag near me.”
“You can piss off, poacher turned gamekeeper, it’s my house,” he replied.
“No, it’s not. It’s Izobel’s.”
He was derailed by the truth of her comment and retreated into the tiny Formica-covered cave that passed as a kitchen in order to avoid us and to shout at Radio Four.
“It’s always the boyfriend,” hissed Maggie to George’s departing back and the whiff of exclusive gentleman’s cologne that he left in his wake.
“Always the boyfriend what?”
“You know, when they have these appeals on the news and the reconstructions on
Crimewatch
and the boyfriend cries and says, ‘Please, please, if you know anything about my girl, then for God’s sake come forward,’ and you’re like, ‘poor chap,’ and he’s the murderer all along. Do you remember that couple in the Scottish Highlands, when he claimed a big dog had come and mangled her, the beast of Glenbogus or something? Of course, it turned out that he’d insured her about a week before and done away with her. He even faked fang marks on her flesh.”
“I’d rather you didn’t compare this to a murder.”
“Or like with that French woman,” she continued in a whisper. “First suspect was that nice banker fiancé, then all her exes.”
“I’m really not happy with that analogy either. Anyway, it wasn’t any of them in the end. It was someone completely unconnected, a random stalker man.”
“So they say. Still, unlikely in your case, unless you’ve noticed one?”
I often have the sense of being watched and often I am, but only by me, Izobel Brannigan, who catches sight of my reflection in shop windows and captions the look with a series of flattering phrases. “No, I don’t think so.”
“So, George is still our first and top suspect.”
We looked toward the sound of a radio comedy show being berated by George.
“No,” we said in unison. What was it about my boyfriend that made him the last person to be first suspect?
“Well, maybe he is,” said Maggie as if sensing my dejection.
“George can’t connect to a site, let alone create one.”
“He might have paid someone to produce it.”
“Ha,” I hissed back. I was about to retort that I’d have known if that was the case since he’d have to have borrowed the money from me in order to do so, but I stayed silent. The moneylending would remain my guilty secret. The sub-editors at the paper had a joke that they were thus named because of the amount of money they had to sub the editor of the “Life Itself” section. They would at least be paid back eventually, though. With money “borrowed” from me. “Anyway, why would George do it?”
“He’s planning on proposing and one day you’re going to fire it up and it will say ‘Izobel will you marry me love George’? Or something.”
“But it’s not his style. George is all about extroverted, crowd-pleasing gestures, ‘public relationships’ if you like. He’d never do anything covert or secretive like that.” Or costly.
“Good point. We need to do a psychological profile of the person behind it, our site perpetrator, henceforth known as the perp.” Maggie grabbed a piece of paper from the printer and wrote “Suspects” in her overblown italic calligraphy at the top. “What do we know about the perp? First that he’s a stalker, which means he probably already shows some obsessive-compulsive tendencies and sociopathic leanings…”
“Such as?” I asked. “You don’t even know what that means.”
“Yes I do, it’s stuff like collecting train sets, heavy drug use, drinking, violence toward women, washing hands a lot, switching lights on and off. Probably got mother issues, we should check out anyone whose parents divorced or whose mum bolted as a child. Or whose mother is overbearing and loves them too much. Also anyone with a history of unstable relationships with women. Which, given that our first suspects are anyone you’ve gone out with, figures.”
“Thanks.”
“Second thing we can assume is that they know something about computers and new media. Either that or they know someone who does. Or can pay for their services.”
“I don’t feel we’re really narrowing it down here.”
It was as if Maggie had pressed the button on the remote control that made my voice mute as she ignored my comments. “Number one as previously discussed,” she intoned, returning to her list, “George Grand.” She pulled a face as she wrote down his name. “Sociopathic tendencies? Heavy drinking, some drugs too, addictive personality, can’t give up smoking.”
“Hasn’t tried.”
“Issues with mother…”
“No he doesn’t, he’s lovely to his mum.”
“Like a Kray twin,” Maggie remarked. “What I was going to say was issues with mother of his child. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Wouldn’t he create a site about her then, I mean Catherine, rather than me?” I felt sick to even think it. I’d always suspected that George thought more about Catherine than he ever had about me. I caught him once with photos of her and Grace spread out across the table while he dripped tears and vodka over them.
“Possibly,” said Maggie. “If it’s not the boyfriend, then it’s someone who was a boyfriend, so now it’s on to the ‘ex files,’ to use a crappy magazine-style headline the likes of which George is inexplicably paid good money to come up with.”
Now it was my turn to pull a face, both at the lameness of her pun and the thought of having to trawl through the motley crew of past boyfriends, a group of men whose arrogance outstripped their eligibility.
I always wondered whether there was a sexual and marital IQ, made up from a series of calculations based on a person’s physical attractiveness, ability to quip, status of job, baggage and finances. I thought mine was mildly above average but decreasing all the while (age, disillusionment, professional failure). The MQs (marital quotients) of my partners, on the other hand, bordered on the subnormal. If ever a sudden burst of fortune sent them soaring, then we’d always split up soon after. Either I was always down-dating MQ-wise, or my MQ was a lot lower than I supposed.
“Suspect number two, Frank,” continued Maggie.
“No,” I said. “Really, such a long time ago, surely he doesn’t count?” Although his MQ was at least quite high, subsequent boyfriends had shown a marked depreciation over the years. “I’d call him a present friend rather than an ex-boyfriend.”
“They all count,” she said firmly. “How long ago, how long for?”