Tangled Web

I'm the worst kind of FaceBook Friend you can imagine. Yup, you heard me, I'm a devil. I have multiple identities and they are all complete lies. I am not at all what I appear to be; shock, horror, I hear you say. Every identity, every address, everything I assert is a fake. I lie about everything, literally everything.

I can be controlling through my pretence but let's be honest, you can never truly control people remotely through social network sites, unless they are willing victims. Some people are so desperate for friendship that they just want to believe you even if the story you weave is pure fantasy.

So, why would I do such a thing?

Simple, Mrs Doubtfire made me do it.

Not the fictional character played wonderfully comically by the inimitable but tragic Robin Williams exactly, but "she" gave me the idea in the first place.

OK, we'll start off with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, shall we?

I'm a single guy, a Londoner, but nearly twenty years ago I moved away into a small commuter town, Addlestone, Surrey, when my wife (sorry, make that ex-wife) first fell pregnant. It was her idea, so we could raise the kids in the country rather than the city. I agreed at the time and went along with it.

Yeah, raising my kids in the country they were born in would have been really nice, and they would have been if it wasn't for that bitch!

Yeah, my marriage produced two beautiful kids, but neither of them live with me and I haven't seen them together or apart in seven years, until today.

My son Danny, well, he's 18 now. He's a real mixed up kid and thinks he's gay. Well, he could be for all I know, I just think that he is still too young and far too confused and lacking in self-confidence to tell right now. You could say it was my fault that he is still so uncertain, partly at any rate, but mainly it's because there's no concerned parent at home that he can willingly turn to. He's sleeping alone tonight in a local hotel, right now while I write down this little confession. He waits for his Mom to collect him, maybe tomorrow or the next day.

My other angel, that's my darling daughter Lily-Ann, is only 12. I haven't seen her at all for seven years. I don't think she's coming over with my ex-, her name's Sandra by the way, but I don't really know for sure, because nobody's talking to me right now.

Well, Kyle Rockerfelt is still trying to talk to me.

Kyle is Sandra's current husband, but he doesn't quite know who he's actually talking to. Go figure, as he would say in his own inimitable way.

Yup, I'm full of stories. All of my FaceBook Friends think I live in mansions or at least comfortable houses or apartments, be they in Winnipeg, Norfolk, Addlestone, Athens, Rome or even downtown Reno. When you lie about where you come from, hey, the Moon's the limit.

I tell some of my FB 'friends' that I am a banker, others that I am a Personal Assistant, or a body builder, maybe a retired stockbroker, or waiter, carpenter, casino croupier, a mother, or a divorcee. Whatever floats my so-called friends' boats, I can be whoever they want me to be, or I want them to believe I am.

It's life, Jim, but not as you know it.

Do you want some more truth instead of lies? OK, here goes with a few essential facts.

Currently I only work two nights a week, filling supermarket shelves, for which I get minimum wage. I work with a bunch of social misfits, mostly non-British illegal immigrants, and many like me using forged ID.

So what? To get to where I am, in a position to manipulate the people in my life, I've had to break the law, I'm a violent criminal with a record, who's dropped under the radar. I live in a caravan, on wasteland behind a derelict and vandalised factory, a recession eyesore, owned by an offshore company who haven't deemed it ready to redevelop or consider it economic sense to chase me off, yet. It helps that 'I', in one of my many guises, am a friend of the CEO of the developers, so I know what their plans are and can move when I need to.

Despite the apparent power that my identities imply I possess, in reality I'm a broken man. And furthermore I am beyond redemption.

My life first started to fall apart when my wife decided to go back to work as a legal secretary, just after our youngest, Lily-Ann, started school. Sandra worked for a firm of lawyers specialising in international corporate finance, advising corporations how to work the system, where to make the profits and pay less tax, obtain state funding to maximise rake off. While she was there, Sandra fell for the suave American lawyer over here learning the European legal ropes, before going home, taking Sandra and my kids with him.

I got the "Dear John" letter, addressed to the real me, Mark Andrews. Guess what? "Mark Andrews", from Addlestone, Surrey, United Kingdom, has never had a FaceBook page ... and I mean to keep it that way. It's a jungle out there.

Sandra briefly wrote her last-ever post-it to me, to confess that she was in love with another man and had already permanently moved to the States that morning for a new life, taking my 5- and 11-year-old children with them. She wrote that she couldn't leave them behind and her new lover was prepared to adopt them as his own, whether I liked it or not, and that he was rich enough to reduce me to penury if I tried.

I found out who she had been seeing from someone at her old company. I discovered one of her friends prepared to speak to me and put me out of my misery, after the others gave me the runaround for a heart-wrenching fortnight.

Kyle Roman Rockerfelt the Third was easy to track down: Ivy League, wealthy family, all of them lawyers. A big splash in the online version of a specialist magazine disclosed that, following his successful two years' international corporate law experience in London, he was taking charge of the Dallas office. He was in his mid-forties, twelve years older than us, appeared clean cut in the photos, with a supercilious grin on his face that an impressionable woman probably thought handsome. More searching found he'd been married and divorced three times, so Sandra wasn't the only moth attracted to the flame. Apparently, he could afford the alimony and the trust funds for his own four kids, maybe with enough over to pay my kids through college.

I flew out to Dallas as soon as I could, hired a car at the airport, and scouted out their love nest. It was early Saturday morning and he was cutting the lawn in front of his beautiful ranch-style house. Then I saw my even more beautiful wife call him in, for coffee and French toast, I found out later. She was wearing a light robe, which revealed her flimsy underwear as she walked across the lawn to kiss him passionately 'good morning', then skipped back indoors while he rolled his mower towards the back yard gate.

I was incensed, my plans to go softly softly and win my family back using reasonable argument, went out of the car window. I slammed the car door shut, ran over the lawn, knocked him to the floor and began punching him continually. Everything was happening so fast, I think I was just going to keep on hitting him until he stopped breathing.

Then on the backstroke my elbow struck something soft. I stopped and turned. Time slowed down to a snail's pace in my awareness on events. Sandra was falling onto the lawn behind me, her nose broken, blood everywhere. She bounced in slo-mo, her gown flapping open, one tit tumbling out of her lacy bra. I could hear the police sirens. Mostly, though, I remember vividly the image of my kids in their nightwear, crying piteously. I was pinned to the floor by police officers while being tasered, then cuffed, their mother and new 'father' stretchered away in ambulances. Well, they might have been my kids before, they were not mine any more.

A five year sentence is five years minimum in the Correctional Institutions Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, with no time off for good behaviour. Tough place, too, the French M Robertson Correctional Unit.

I lost three teeth defending my honour the first time. Later forced to be some big dude called Bubba's bitch, I clamped my jaws down hard on his erect member and both testicles. They had to break my jaw in two places and fracture three ribs to get me off. I lost consciousness before I let go. I assured the paramedics, when I came to, that I never swallow on a first date and, apparently, they declined to sew back on the mincemeat I spat out. Bubba was a lifer and so the procreation of his genes did not come into the equation. I lost the sight in my left eye and my eyelid only opens halfway whenever I'm really tired, but Bubba's someone else's bitch now.

I lost a few more teeth, in another incident, so was not looking very presentable for any visiting relatives, not that they ever visited or even answered the mail I posted. In the end I just sent my kids letters within cards at Christmas and birthdays. Never had a reply in the last seven years.

I was repatriated back home to spend my last two years at Her Majesty's Pleasure. It was like Butlins in comparison, and I was out under licence twelve months later. I wasn't allowed to work in Reinsurance again though. Hell, I couldn't sell insurance or solar panels or anything; they don't give jobs to criminals when there's a recession on, despite what they say about rehabilitation. My hot head has left me permanently out in the cold.

So I disappeared under the radar. I needed a laptop, so I stole one. Hey, it's not really stealing, it's redistribution, the insurance company buys the victim a better one; I burgle the same place a month later, so I get an upgrade and eventually he does too. It's capitalism at work, supply and demand, followed by supply again.

The same system worked for Kyle Rockerfelt the Third; he wanted my wife's pussy, she wanted a better life than she thought my career in Reinsurance could provide, so she supplied herself to him on demand.

Later, I was the banker who paid for Kyle's dental work and Sandra's nose job. The amount that lot came to I reckon I must have paid for new boobs and Sandra's new smile, too. I had no choice but to declare bankruptcy, as I was left with less than nothing. No plastic surgery for me, so my face retains ... shall we say the character of an interesting existence, I'm too bitter to call my time on earth a life any more.

Anyway, I learned about social networks two or three years ago. I had never used them, until I saw June Masefield in Primart one Wednesday afternoon. I barely recognised her, struggling with her three kids, one of them chocolate-black, while picking over sales clothing. I invited her and the brats for coffee and whatever sugary drink drove those kids absolutely insane. June accepted, thinking I was romantically or otherwise interested in a single mother. I wasn't.

June Masefield had been Sandra's best girlfriend back in the day when Sandra was plain Sandy Abrehart. June was the girl most likely to succeed: lively, beautiful, she married an oilman who took her out to Lagos, where he managed an oil refinery. She cut off contacts with her old friends, living the high life. Now divorced and living in sheltered accommodation, through a 'misunderstanding' she said. She couldn't leave a phone number but borrowed my pen to write down her address for me; I wrote a phone number on the coffee shop till receipt that was made up of random numbers mostly copied off the till roll. I didn't have a phone either.

I was driving taxis at that time, using a national insurance number and name I'd 'borrowed'. My first laptop was left in the cab, so I claimed it. I signed up for FaceBook as 'June Smith', using a free email address in the same name. Then I built a 'history', uploading images of 'my children' from the net, nicely-furnished rooms from Right Move, and holiday snaps from exotic locations.

As plain 'June Smith' I joined FB groups, requesting friendships from all over. I got turned down a lot, but some accepted my new persona: a middle aged woman, with time on her hands, happily married to a successful businessman, three lovely kids ("this is my Darren, he's 12, isn't he Mum's pride and joy? and this is my sweet new dog, Taffy"). I gained valuable experience in FB use, learning who to target and how best to make 'friends'.

Then I mothballed 'June Smith's' first FB page and started a new one, reverted to 'June Masefield', contacting selected people, including old school friends, bemoaning that my old site had been 'hacked'. Soon June had a new, selective history, even more envious than the one the original June Masefield had lost.

Sandra Rockerfelt readily accepted 'June's' friendship. She confessed to 'June', in a personal message, that she was lonely, her lawyer husband busy at work, kids were growing up, and her youngest Kyle Junior the Fourth just starting first grade. We swapped stories, 'mine' were particularly entertaining, betraying an envious lifestyle, while openly rejoicing in Sandra's comparatively humdrum Texan life. Sandy and 'Junie' were best-est friends again in no time.

I told you the truth earlier, remember? I'm really living in a caravan. I cook on a Primus stove and use butane gas for lighting, no electricity. I work Friday and Saturday nights stacking shelves and sleep all day weekends. Monday to Friday I spend all day in various libraries. No more laptops for me anymore though, too cumbersome. I use a different tablet or PDA for each main identity, which I carry round in a backpack. I charge the batteries up at libraries, and use their free wifi whenever I can.

'Aaron', an older male uncertain in his sexuality, set up a dialogue with my son Danny eighteen months ago, after checking the youth's posts. Danny felt he didn't fit in and was unloved at home. He was reaching out for male friends, my female aliases asking to be friends over a six month period were continually ignored ot ejected. Danny was tentative about opening up, until made aware that friendly 'Aaron' was from his old home town of Addlestone, with the up-to-date photos to prove it. 'Aaron' was then in.

As 'Aaron' I tried to convince Danny that he was loved, asking had he, for instance, tried to contact his father? No, Danny was not interested, his father was a raging beast, who he wanted nothing from. I contented myself with being his FB friend, in regular contact, offering advice, and trying to get him more involved with his family.

I was particularly worried about his sister, Lily-Ann. She was on BeBo when I first made contact. She told her new best friend 'Betsy' from Utah (that's me), that she was really into boys in a big way, but not yet made the first tentative step. Lily-Ann's only 12, for crying out loud! It was only Betsy's Mormon sense of propriety that was keeping her in check. Her other best friend, 'Celine', a Canadian Presbyterian (it's amazing the fantastic shots of Winnipeg you can find online) was also a restraining influence. 'Deidre', a friend request from Des Moynes, was still pending, but in the long term I felt I was losing her.

Danny needed to man up and be more involved in his family, if only for Lily-Ann's sake. Their parents were selfish disasters, and I could only do so much from a distance.

Not all my FB identities have been as fruitful as I wanted. Using photos of a bronzed Greek show-off (to another of my inventions), my 'Nikko', 'Alex', 'Theo' and 'Giani' (the last one Italian, I explained the Greek ruins in the background as a holiday), were popular with Kyle's mother Agatha, sister Julienne, his office PA and Alison, the desk clerk at the hotel where I found out that Kyle was taking his mistresses.

Agatha is a sweet and lonely rich widow who seems to be falling for 'Nikko' in a big way, especially as he appear so genuine and doesn't want anything from her, despite the nude pictures they each exchange in PM.

The Greek God I use for supplying photos is actually a gay male model who poses on nightly cam recorder, although the nude stills which he sets against classical backdrops are perfect for my purposes, I just have to keep stealing credit cards to pay for it, mostly by mugging drunks. The things I do to play Mrs Doubtfire.

Kyle's sister Julienne is a bitter divorcee who has already booked next summer vacation in Santorini; she didn't take anywhere near as long to be persuaded to send her nude pics to 'me' as her mother did.

Now, Kyle's PA Helen, was very useful loading up an encrypted file of images which Alison sent from Kyle's hotel with a message saying his laptop wasn't talking to his office PC and could she just copy them over for him?

Alison enjoyed looking at the nude pictures of 'Giani', so when Kyle's sister 'Gulienne', who was also a friend of 'Giani', sent a friend request, she accepted. Once 'Gulienne' was an established friend, she admitted to Alison that she was worried about her brother Kyle, knowing that he was bringing mistresses to Alison's hotel and was concerned that PIs might be sniffing around, sent by his fourth wife. Naturally, 'Gulienne wanted to protect him. Alison enjoyed the banter of all three friends and agreed to help keep Kyle safe. So when 'Gulienne' sent her an encrypted file to pass onto to Kyle's PA, she carried out the request without hesitation.

Those encrypted files, password Kyle's birthday, are selected images of his naked mother and sister, some of which show them masticating for 'him'. Also a number of draft letters referring to incest trysts with his closest blood relatives, relating to hotel nights booked in his name, including his wish to introduce his step-daughter to premature adulthood whenever the opportunity presented itself. All forgeries, all circumstantial, but would you want him heading up one of the premier offices in your business? And mud sticks.

Sandy was in tears the other day, envying her friend 'Junie's' perfect life. The Daily Mail did a brilliant Ideal Home exhibition feature, so I couldn't resist remodelling 'Junie's' Norfolk Broads holiday home. Only yesterday, Sandy admitted to 'Junie' that hubby Kyle had run off to live with his girlfriend, a casino croupier in Reno, so she'd changed all the door locks and started divorce proceedings.

Do you know how difficult it is to download pornographic material from a public library wifi? Neither did I.

It's not for me, I wouldn't touch that stuff with a barge pole. No, it was for Kyle, the dirty-minded sod. You know, I had to hot-wire a car and drive around a council housing estate until I found an unprotected wifi, without parental control. I contacted FiFi-Lamore-dot-com 'extrovert web cam artiste' to do some posing, recorded her calling me 'her lover Kyle', plus I bought lots of stills. The best 300 bucks of someone's stolen credit card, I ever downloaded. I fed Kyle those stills and promises of what a bodacious 25-year-old casino croupier could do for him, over a seven-month period, before 'Ruby' from Reno sealed the deal with the tour-de-force video and Kyle came hotfoot for live action.

Unfortunately for Kyle, an email containing embedded files of every exchanged email, PM and including hilarious images of Kyle's self-abuse, was sent to Sandra by 'Ruby'. That was followed up within seconds by a message asking her to destroy the files, which had clearly been sent to her in error. Well, I mean, 'Ruby' had to try and stop Sandra looking, but you can't trust anyone not to look anymore, can you?

So, now Sandra's flying over here to collect lovelorn Danny, who is devastated that his Dad loves him, but not in the way he wanted from 'Aaron'. She's also hoping to see her long-lost best friend for consolation in her hour of need but is going to be as disappointed as Kyle, who is presently bombarding me, well not 'me' exactly, with PMs and emails trying to find which Reno casino I don't, and never actually did, work in.