Authors: Christina Hopkinson
He looked skeptical. “My name is Ivan.”
Ivan, of course, IT Ivan or Ivan the IT man. That was his name, though one of the assistants called him it-boy on account of him being passably attractive. For a techie.
“Ivan, yes, of course. Ivan, can I buy you a coffee?”
He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got fifteen minutes between appointments. I need to get over to one of my other clients.”
“I thought you just worked at our office.”
He looked like it was his turn to hit my forehead in a “duh” move. “PR O’Create wouldn’t keep me in chewing gum; my business services about forty companies that size.”
“Oh, I see.” I feigned interest as we walked to the incongruously greasy spoon that nestled amid the chains of latte purveyors lately embedded in the West End. “What does your business do exactly, Ivan?”
“Systems administration.”
Two such dull words, like “mechanical engineering” or “natural sciences.” “Really, how interesting. What does that mean?”
“My company makes sure computer systems run efficiently— we install hardware and software, solve problems, make sure there’s appropriate server capacity. That sort of thing.” He raised an eyebrow. “You probably think that sounds terminally dull...”
“Terminal dull,” I attempted to quip.
“But without me, well, me and my team, you wouldn’t be able to e-mail or look at the Internet and you’d all be up in arms.”
“You’re absolutely vital, I can see that.” We ordered our teas, both black with sugar. “What do you know about the Internet?”
“What do you know about public relations?”
“Not a lot actually. I see what you mean, that is a bit of a big question, isn’t it?”
He grinned. “Well, it’s not exactly ‘is there a God?’ and ‘what are we here for?’ but yes, it’s a difficult one to answer. Can you be more specific?”
“Say there’s a Web site on the Net. What would you be able to tell about its creator from its address?”
“What sort of things?”
“Could you find out a name of the person who owned the Web site or where they lived or anything?”
“I could find the DNS servers in Whois and from that the ISP and then maybe a registered name. Or another route would be via the IP address I suppose. Yes, either, although there are no guarantees that it wouldn’t be registered under a false name or business name once you’d got there.”
“Stop, stop, too many TLAs,” I said. “Three-letter acronyms. I have no idea what you mean by IBS unless you’re referring to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.”
“ISP,” he corrected.
“Isn’t that when you’re psychic?”
“Internet Service Provider. The people who provide access to the Web for users, but also host the sites themselves.”
“If the Internet is a town, these are the landlords,” I posited.
“Exactly. And IP stands for Internet Protocol and an IP address is a thirty-two-bit numeric address.”
I looked blank again. He looked pained.
“That means it’s a binary number of thirty-two digits. But that would be difficult for humans to process, although machines would have no problem with them, so it’s expressed in a decimal form with dots separating each bit of what would have been the eight-figure binary number. So you’re left with something like two-one-seven dot one-seven-three dot two-six et cetera to identify a particular host on that network. It’s called dotted quad notation.”
I nodded in a way that I hoped communicated understanding. I was trapped in a BBC Schools Science program and I understood it no better than the ones I saw in fifth year.
“So if you get the IP address of a site,” he continued, “you can find out who’s hosting the site and that might bring you closer to identifying its owner.”
“And the D one, DNA or something?”
“DNS, Domain Name System. You’ve got your IP addresses, but they’re totally unmemorable as they’re made up of a series of numbers.”
“Like phone numbers?” I asked in an attempt to involve myself in this conversation.
“But with periods in. Domain names are made up of words, lastminute.com or whatever, so they’re easier to use. So again, if we find the DNS entry we can get the IP address and then the ISP. Then we might find out who’s registered the URL.” Ivan looked at his watch. It probably had lots of computer data stored in it or something, or a 3D game that he could play across wristwatch networks. “Look, I’m sorry, Izobel, but I’ve got to go.”
“Right, fine, of course.” I must have looked disappointed.
“I’m coming into your offices next week—why don’t you show me the site you’re interested in and I’ll see how I can help?”
I thought for a second. Was IT Ivan really the person I wanted to entrust with the quest for the site perp? “That would be great, thanks so much, Ivan.” I gave him one of those flirty smiles again and contrived to move from hair twiddling to a coy wave bye-bye. “I’ll show you all then.”
What a busy day and none of it work-related. The best sort of day, the one that would go quickest. Now it was the weekend. And next week, my new friend IT Ivan would sort it all out for me. I felt optimistic for the first time in months.
George and I never went out on Friday nights; we were too out of drink-sync by then after his mammoth lunchtime session. I was counting on that to delete any memories of Hettie having told him about my forage through his in-box.
I smiled to myself. I’d done that well. I had eliminated him from our inquiries, whatever Maggie said, and I’d done it with almost professional levels of subterfuge. Now I’d recruited a technical consultant for the investigation. I was good, I was damned good. I swung my handbag in the manner of a sixties starlet trotting down the King’s Road and being whistled at by men in MGs. I was hot. If site stalkie person were looking at me now, which wasn’t improbable, he’d see that he’d failed to crush me. I was strong.
T
he phone by my bed woke George and me the following morning. Through the hiss of a bad connection I could make out a familiar voice.
“It’s me, Jonny.”
“Jesus, Jonny, where are you calling from? It sounds like you’re in Beirut.” The line had the romantic snap and crackle of an old telegraph wire. I could imagine the Foreign Correspondent wearing khaki shorts and a linen shirt holding one of those phones that come in two pieces, in a dusty bar with an overhead fan. Conchita the local whore would walk past and offer her services.
“Coming into Paddington…” He disappeared again. “We keep going through tunnels.”
The romance was quashed. He was annoying. Why did he always do this? Ring when actually in London rather than giving a couple of days’ notice? And then expect us all to drop what we were doing and rush to him. He seemed to think that we were those dancing plastic flowers, standing still until he animated us into undulating to his tune.
“You’re in London. For how long?”
“I’m only in the UK for a couple of days—what are you doing tonight?”
I knew the score. I’d reorder my life to meet up with him only to find that he’d also arranged to meet seven other people and I’d spend the evening talking to a poor sap who’d been at school with Foreign Correspondent about how exciting Foreign Correspondent’s life was and how much we all admired him. Meanwhile Foreign Correspondent would only talk to other foreign correspondents and they’d say things like “Eddie! But I haven’t seen him since Tora Bora. Didn’t he look fabulous in a burka?” and they’d look disparagingly at us civvies, while we tried to pity them their inability to maintain long-term relationships.
Could Foreign Correspondent be cyber-stalker? This could be my only opportunity to find out.
“I can’t see you tonight,” I said, perhaps for the first time. “But, look, I can be in Paddington in half an hour. Let’s have a coffee somewhere near there.” I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was a sight. “Make that three-quarters of an hour. See you.”
“Are you going out?” asked George from beneath the duvet.
“Yes, that was—”
“You couldn’t be a darling and nip back with a couple of cans of Coke. No make that a bottle.”
“That was Jonny. Just flying in from the Gulf on his way to Korea or something. Now that’s journalism, don’t you agree?”
George snorted. “The features desk is the new foreign desk. Hasn’t he realized that? Nobody cares about newspaper foreign reports in the age of CNN,” he said, mummifying himself further in the Egyptian cotton bed linen. “Make it a family-size bottle would you, my poppet.”
“Big night?”
“Hardly,” he said.
*
At the appointed venue I saw him. He probably did look very dashing at some foreign press club, but here in a London coffee shop he just looked unfashionable. Living abroad for the past decade had contrived to make sure that his wardrobe was preserved in aspic as that of the generic media man circa 1993—black-zipped, mildly blouson leather jacket, chinos, a pale blue denim-appearance shirt and desert boots. This period piece was topped by a floppy fringe that would have been replaced by a number one crop had he been living in London, especially given the state of his hair recession. Two competing entrances of fore-head tunneled into his crown. These A-roads were perilously close to meeting and becoming a great big divided highway of baldness across his pate.
The Foreign Correspondent had once said that his eyes had seen too much destruction. I don’t know about that, but his skin had seen too much sun. He had the mottled look of a junk-store mirror, as the boyish freckles became full-blown liver spots.
I continued my snapshot full-frontal attack on his appearance. I had to before we spoke; it made me feel better. It was always the same routine on meeting the brave war reporter: shock at his appearance, awe at his glamour. His personality would make you forget the reality of his face and force you to believe that he was every bit as handsome and airbrushed as the byline photograph beneath his articles on the horrors of war.
His teeth were bad, yellowing and withering, with gums eroding like chalk face. I knew this from having studied them before, not from looking at them anew. Today I couldn’t muse on his molars because a surgical mask covered his mouth and nose.
“What on earth are you wearing that for?” I asked by way of a greeting.
He glanced around the coffee room and then leaned forward. “Don’t tell anyone this, classified info, but there’s a virulent virus that’s going to explode in Europe. Of course, you may survive it, but I won’t have your Western immunity. I’d sooner jump in a pool full of lepers than walk around London with my mask off.”
“I thought these diseases all came from the East, not here?” I said, remembering the last really-severe-terrible-chronic syndrome to have infectiously spread through the newspapers’ health pages and plagued their leader columns.
“That’s what they tell you,” he said knowingly.
“You’re such a scaredy-pants,” I said and sat down, watching his mask stain yellow as he puffed a tab through it, like that school experiment when we had to examine the nicotine left on a tissue by a mechanically smoked cigarette. He kissed me on the cheek, again with mask intact. It was really rather touching, like we were in one of those pioneering HIV films. “You always have been.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d been there at the fall of Kabul,” he replied.
I had never been able to reconcile Jonny’s swinging-dick professionalism with his cowardy-custard demeanor. He once refused to go for a walk with me as it was drizzling and he had failed to bring any waterproofs. Forget those men who claim to have flu when they’ve only a cold—with Jonny it was SARS or pneumonia that was causing his nose to dribble. His paranoia extended to contraception over the two years we’d had sex together whenever he stopped over in London and slept over in my bed. It had been hard to enjoy sex while he wore a condom and I wore a diaphram. He used to try to withdraw on time too, just to make certain. How could someone so internationally brave be such a domestic wuss?
“It must have been amazing,” I said on cue. “Is the paper pleased with your coverage at the moment? I’m not quite sure where you are right now, though.”
“Journalist of the world. I presume the powers-that-be at the paper are pleased. I felt like I colonized a small corner of the foreign pages and I got a few congratulatory e-mails from the editor. The owner knows who I am, too, especially now that I’ve been nominated for Foreign Correspondent of the Year. Fifth time running, actually.”
“That’s brilliant.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s brilliant,” I shouted.
“You’ll have to enunciate, I’m afraid. Bullet whistled this far from my ear. Gone deaf, you know.” Cue much exaggerated cupping of the good one. “The bullet actually whistled. That’s not a figure of speech. Bullets whistle.”
“Like milkmen.”
He chortled and showed me photos of himself in his new state-of-the-art bulletproof ensemble, which made him look like one of those evil riot cops who batter anti-capitalist protesters at G8 summits. I said “wow” a lot.
I had slept with him on and off for all that time, despite the lack of pleasure involved in the layering of contraception and the fact that our relationship would never go anywhere while he was traveling to everywhere. I had been a stationary point while he had moved around me, yet he had been the sun and my life had revolved around his. The sex wasn’t great, the emotional succor was nonexistent, he wasn’t an Adonis, and yet I had never questioned why I had been prepared to put up with being somebody’s fly-by lay, his woman of the connecting-flight night.
“It might sound really brave, Izobel, but when you’re out there, you just don’t stop to think. I knew I had to go out and get the story and cop whatever was thrown in my direction.”
Jonny never looked so pleased as when there were rumors of a good old war about to start.
“You just do what you have to do, really.”
“Well done. If you die, though, whose fault is that?”
“The fault of these damn conflicts,” he sighed. “It makes me weep to see small children with their legs blown off. And if we have to die to show the world their plight, then we do it in their service. I’m starving.” He looked around. “Is bacon all right to eat in Britain these days? Are pigs affected by foot and mouth? Maybe I’d better just have some crisps.”