The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (20 page)

It turned out that we weren’t going to have supper round the fire that evening after all – the grown-ups had booked a table at the local pub instead. But it also turned out that the chill in my body wasn’t going to go away any time soon. I really had allowed myself to get far too cold, and nothing seemed capable of warming me up – not even the two or three cups of boiling hot tea my mum made for me when we got back to the tents. After I’d drunk the tea, I went into our tent and snuggled down into my sleeping bag and just lay there, shivering. My mum told everyone that I wouldn’t be coming to the pub and there followed a short conference about what should be done. I could hear Max saying that he didn’t want me to stay behind on my own and that he would stay too, to keep me company, and of course that made me feel really happy. Whatever else you might say about him, Max had always been like that – thoughtful, I mean, and considerate. One of nature’s gentlemen. Then Chris said that he would stay behind too and I thought, Oh no, What a nuisance. But somehow Mr Sim managed to talk him out of it. I remember thinking how sad it was that Mr Sim went to such lengths to persuade Chris to come to the pub with them, and yet he was perfectly happy for his own son to stay behind. But I suppose that was just typical of the relationship between Mr Sim and his son. Anyway, I was very pleased with the outcome, as you can imagine.

After they had all gone to the pub Max popped his head around the flap of my tent and asked if I was feeling OK. I said I was fine but he could see that I was still very cold and asked if I wanted some more tea or some hot chocolate or something. I agreed that would probably be a good idea, and said I would put the kettle on the Primus stove and also make a few sandwiches or something for us both to eat. ‘OK then,’ Max said, rising to his feet. ‘I’ll get the fire started.’

Well, those were famous last words if ever I heard them.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Max’s attempts to light a fire that night, and keep it going, were nothing short of disastrous. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. The kindling was too damp (thanks to the rain earlier that afternoon) and he didn’t collect enough of it. The logs he collected for fuel were far too big, and he had no tools to cut them up with. He kept trying to hold them still with his feet and break them apart with his hands, but all he succeeded in doing was injuring himself: somehow he managed to tear half the skin off his left hand, and you should have heard the swearing when he did it! From then on he was trying to do everything with one hand wrapped up in a handkerchief, and of course that just made things even worse. I kept saying to him, Max, it really doesn’t matter, sit down, drink your cocoa, eat your sandwiches, for Heaven’s sake relax, let’s have a nice evening together while everyone is away – but it was no use. He wouldn’t sit still. He’d got it into his head that I wanted a fire – the kind of fire that Chris would have built – and a fire was what I was going to get. And then at first, after he’d created this ‘thing’ that to me just looked like a random pile of twigs, grass, logs and bracken, he couldn’t even get a match to light. It took him at least three or four matches to get the kindling started, after which the whole thing began giving off so much smoke that within a couple of minutes our whole corner of the campsite was smothered with the stuff, and people were coming over from their tents to complain and tell us to put it out. It was at this point that I started to laugh, but actually this was the worst thing I could have done: it just made Max look more miserable than ever, and he redoubled his efforts to make the thing work by running off to find even more damp firewood. When he came back I had been planning to say something overtly flirtatious to him, like, ‘There are other ways we could keep warm, you know, Max,’ but when I saw his face the words just froze on my lips. To say that the moment for saying that kind of thing had passed would be an understatement. I could tell that the evening was now completely ruined, for him and for both of us. There were tears of frustration in his eyes as he threw yet more useless damp vegetation onto the smouldering pile, and started fumbling with the matchbox and the matches through his bloodstained handkerchief. I knew this had started with a generous impulse – he was worried about me, and wanted to keep me warm – but it had gone way beyond that now. Maybe this sounds silly, but I thought I could tell what was going through his head, or at least through his subconscious. This was not about building a fire any more. This was about Max’s relationship with his father. Chris had been taught how to do this: Dad had made the time, and found the patience, to pass that lesson on from one generation to another: that was how their relationship worked. But Max didn’t have any of that. His father had abandoned him, years ago – perhaps never even made a connection with him in the first place. And that left him clinging to this placid, benign mother who also had nothing to teach him, nothing to pass on. He was alone in the world, and already he was struggling. It became too painful, watching him throw spent match after spent match on to that fire that was never going to take. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said, ‘I’m going inside. Call me when you’ve got it going.’ But when I looked outside again, about half an hour later, there was nothing but a faintly smoking heap of wood where the fire was meant to be, and Max was nowhere to be seen. He had gone off somewhere by himself.

That’s not quite the end of the story. I wish it was, in a way, because I don’t like the actual end of the story very much at all. Nevertheless, I’m aware that I haven’t really addressed the essay topic yet, and in order to do that, I have to briefly describe what happened round at the Sims’ house a couple of weeks later.

I was feeling guilty about Max, I have to admit. That last evening had been such a fiasco, when it could have been so different, and I couldn’t help blaming myself, to a certain extent. True, he had behaved like a total idiot, but I could probably have made the situation better if I hadn’t lost my temper with him so quickly, and the truth of the matter was that I still felt fond of him, for all his uselessness. So I’d decided to give him one last chance.

I didn’t want to ask him for a drink, or anything like that, so in order to keep things casual I thought I would simply call in at his house one Sunday afternoon and suggest going for a walk somewhere – maybe on the municipal golf course, which was just across the road from where they lived. I didn’t call him on the telephone or anything: I wanted just to pretend that I was in the area anyway, and had dropped by on the spur of the moment.

It was a nice sunny afternoon, in mid-September. I walked up their little drive and rang the front door bell. It didn’t seem to be working but the door had been left on the latch and I was able to push it open.

The first thing I would normally do would be to shout, ‘Hello! Is anybody there?’ – but today I didn’t, because I could tell straight away that the house was quite empty and silent, apart from a gentle rhythmic snoring coming from one of the bedrooms upstairs. Not wishing to wake whoever was asleep, I tiptoed up the stairs and found that the noise was coming from the spare bedroom, which I remembered as being a sparsely furnished room with nothing much in it apart from a wardrobe and a single bed. Who would be in there, and why would they be sleeping?

The door was ajar. I silently pushed it further open and looked inside.

It was Mr Sim, and I can only imagine that he must have had a heavy Sunday lunch a couple of hours earlier – perhaps washed down with some red wine – because I cannot believe that he meant to fall asleep in the attitude in which I found him. He was lying on his side, facing the door. His trousers and pants were pulled halfway down his legs and in his right hand he held a crumpled tissue. His penis lay wrinkled and flaccid between his legs, and from its purple tip a little strand of semen dribbled down onto the pale-blue bedspread. Purple and pale blue – Aston Villa colours: that was the first silly thought that came into my head. Weird how the mind works. The only other thing I could see on the bedspread was a photograph: a glossy colour print of the picture he had taken on the small shingle beach next to Coniston Water. I noticed that he had folded it neatly and carefully in half, so that the figure of Chris was hidden and the only person you could see was me, all wet and cold in my skimpy orange bikini. It was almost as if the picture had been deliberately composed – the perfect symmetry of the two of us standing there, one on either side of the frame – in order to make this possible.

I could only have glimpsed Mr Sim in this position for a couple of seconds before I heard the front door open again, and voices coming from downstairs. Quickly I withdrew – only just in time, for I could hear him waking with a start, and hurriedly making himself decent.

I heard Max and his mother walking through into the kitchen. They had left the front door open so I went downstairs silently and slipped outside. I did not want to talk to them and I did not want them to see me. And I certainly didn’t want to come face to face with Mr Sim.

After that I made it my business to keep out of the way of Max and his family for a long time. I think I even managed to avoid seeing them at Christmas, somehow or other, even though in the normal course of events we always saw each other at Christmas, usually spending most of Boxing Day together. Nobody seemed to notice that I was avoiding them, so nobody asked me for an explanation. It was hard on Max, of course, but I knew that he would probably get a crush on some other girl, sooner rather than later. Things between us could have been very different, if he hadn’t been so fixated on the idea of starting a fire that last evening at the campsite. That had been our great opportunity, and once it had passed, maybe there was no going back anyway. What would I have said to him, that Sunday afternoon, if we had gone for our walk on the golf course together? I really don’t know. All I know is, after I had seen his father like that – after I had realized that he must have been watching me, and lusting after me, all week, and after I had realized what his reasons were for taking that photograph – I could not have got myself involved with Max, however much I liked him.

In conclusion, therefore, what has writing this essay taught me? I suppose it has reinforced my conviction that the consequences of privacy violation can be very destructive and hurtful. In this case, they destroyed the possibility of my ever having a relationship with Max, despite the fact that, prior to these events, I had liked him very much, and even found myself attracted towards him.

Alison Byrne

February 1980

14

– Straight on at the roundabout – take second exit.

‘Well, Emma, this is just a great situation, isn’t it?’

–
Exit coming up.

‘I now have a mental image of my father which I’m probably never going to be able to get out of my head.’

– In two hundred yards, right turn.

‘And just to cap it off, tomorrow night I’m going to be having dinner with the woman who put it there.’

–
Right turn coming up.

‘I really didn’t think I could get any more angry with my father. I really couldn’t see how he could sink any further in my estimation. But – well done, Dad. You’ve managed it! Not just tossing yourself off over a picture of one of my friends, but managing to get caught doing it! Way to go, Dad. Way to
fucking
go. Are there any other ways you’d care to fuck up my life? Because you might as well finish the job off now that you’ve made such a good start.’

I pulled furiously on the steering wheel as I made the right turn, and took the curve much too fast. In the process I nearly clipped the bumper of a four-wheel-drive that was waiting to pull out from the road I was turning into. The driver tooted her horn at me. I glared back.

–
Proceed for about four miles on the current road.

I had left Walsall behind, by now, and was making my way north-east along the A461. According to Emma, I was about eight miles away from Lichfield: nineteen minutes’ driving, at my current speed. It was another grey morning, slightly windy, slightly wet. The onscreen display told me that the temperature outside was 5 degrees Celsius. There was not much traffic on the roads. I had avoided the motorways so far this morning. Motorways, I realized, made you feel disconnected from the landscape around you. This morning I wanted to drive through real places: I wanted to see shops and houses and office blocks, I wanted to see old ladies pulling shopping trolleys along the street and clusters of surly teenagers gathered around bus shelters. I didn’t want to be like my father any more: hiding away from life and pleasuring himself in shameful secrecy while his wife and son were out taking a Sunday-afternoon walk. I wasn’t prepared to think of myself as a pathetic figure: not just yet.

I was driving too fast. I couldn’t keep my foot from pressing down on the accelerator. I had only averaged fifty-two miles to the gallon so far today.

–
Proceed for about three miles on the current road
.

What was I going to find when I opened the door to this flat, anyway? My father hadn’t been there for more than twenty years. Had anybody else been inside it in that time, apart from Mr and Mrs Byrne? All I knew was that somewhere in there I would find a blue ring binder, with the words
Two Duets
written on the spine, containing a bunch of incomprehensible poems and a story which would apparently explain why I wouldn’t have been born if it hadn’t been for the proximity of two London pubs both called The Rising Sun. Did I really want to discover any more, at this stage, about the circumstances of my birth or, worse still, my conception? I wasn’t sure that I did. I had already learned quite enough about my father and what he did with his bodily fluids to be going on with.

–
Proceed for about two miles on the current road
.

I glanced down at the map screen. There I still was, a little red arrow, pluckily making its way along the A461. Advancing upon my destination inch by inch. How insignificant it made me look, and feel. I thought of those satellites, thousands of miles up in the sky, looking down upon me and millions like me, looking down upon all those people rushing around here and there on their individual, everyday, ultimately pointless errands. The incomprehensibility, the horror of it suddenly came over me and made me shiver: I felt a momentary hollowness in my stomach, as if I was standing in a lift that had started to plummet.

‘Steady on there,’ I said – partly to Emma, partly to myself. ‘Don’t go down that route. You can go crazy thinking about stuff like that.’

I tried to concentrate on something more immediate – the landscape around me. Emma and I were entering Staffordshire now. We had left the urban dreariness of Walsall behind, and had entered upon more restful, leafier territory. The occasional houses dotted on either side of the road were built of that distinctive Staffordshire red brick, and every so often the road would rise gently and pass over a canal, its walls built of the same brick, part of an elaborate network which testified mournfully to a now vanished industrial past. My grandparents – that is to say, my dad’s mother and father – had lived in this area right up until their deaths (within a few months of each other) in the late 1970s, so I was dimly familiar with it. It was part of the lost landscape of my childhood. Not that we’d ever visited my grandparents very much. My father had never been close to his parents. He had kept them at a distance, just as he did with everyone else.

–
Heading slightly right at the roundabout, take second exit
.

I wouldn’t go through Lichfield itself, not through the centre. I would skirt the city on its eastern side. In days gone by, before motorways, before by-passes, travelling through England must actually have involved visiting places. You would drive along high streets (or ride your horse along them, if we’re going to go way back) and stop at pubs in the town centre (or staging posts or coaching inns or whatever they used to be called). Now, the entire road network seemed to be set up to prevent this from happening. The roads were there to stop you from meeting people, to ensure that you passed nowhere near any of the places where humanity congregates. A phrase came to me, then – a phrase that Caroline was fond of repeating. ‘Only connect.’ I think it was from one of the fancy writers that she was always trying to get me to read. It occurred to me now that whoever designed England’s roads had precisely the opposite idea in mind: ‘Only disconnect.’ Sitting here in my Toyota Prius, with only Emma for company, I was cocooned from the rest of the world. Not only did I not have to interact with other people, the roads saw to it that I didn’t even have to see them if I didn’t want to. Just how my father would have liked it – the sad, miserable bastard.

‘Not that I give a flying fuck about him any more,’ I said to Emma. ‘Why should I waste any more energy thinking about him? The only thing that makes me angry is that he frightened Alison off. Supposing she and I
had
gone out together that afternoon? What would that have led to? She might have been my girlfriend. We might have got engaged. We might have got married and had children. My whole life might have been different.’

–
Proceed for about half a mile on the current road
.

‘Still, what’s the use? “
Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve
. The most painful words in the language.” That’s another quotation, isn’t it? Where did I get that one from?’

–
In two hundred yards, left turn
.

‘I remember – it’s from Caroline’s story. Christ, now I’ve even started quoting my own wife’s fiction back at myself. Although why I call it fiction I don’t know, since all the treacherous cow did was to take something from our life together – our
shared
life – something personal, something
private
, for fuck’s sake – and turn it into some nice bit of writing that all her friends at the Kendal creative writers’ group can ooh and aah over before they start knocking back the Pinot Grigio.’

My voice had risen to a shout. I knew it was wrong to have lost my temper in this way in front of Emma, so I pressed the map button and allowed her calming voice to take over for a while, guiding me with no fuss or difficulty to the road where my father’s flat was located. It was on the outskirts of Lichfield. Occasionally, out of my passenger window, I saw distant glimpses of the famous cathedral, but otherwise there was nothing to remind me that I was skirting around one of England’s more picturesque cities, the birthplace of Dr Johnson if I remember rightly. We had to drive for a long time down a monotonous, single-carriageway road, lined on both sides with terraced houses from the interwar years, until we reached a busy junction where Emma told me to go ‘
Sharp left at the roundabout – take first exit
’. This took you into a quiet backwater of residential streets, dominated by three imposing, eight-storey apartment blocks overlooking the main arterial Eastern Avenue. It was hard to say when these might have been built: postwar? They looked like council blocks, but good-quality council blocks. There were balconies on every floor and the buildings looked clean and well maintained. ‘
Your destination is ahead
,’ Emma told me, so I thanked her and parked the car in a bay at the side of the road and turned off the ignition. Then I looked up at the middle of the three apartment blocks. This was where my father’s flat was supposed to be. I felt a tightness in my whole body. I was stiff with apprehension.

Before walking over to the main entrance, I took out my video camera and filmed for about twenty seconds, panning all over the building, left and right, up and down. It was the first time I’d used the camera, but it seemed pretty easy to operate. I’m not quite sure why I did it, though: partly to calm my nerves, perhaps, and partly because I thought my father might like to see the footage the next time we met, whenever that would be. At any rate, it was hardly going to be of much use to Lindsay or Alan Guest for their promotional video. Afterwards I put the camera back in the glove compartment and locked the car.

It’s odd that when I think back to that morning, now, and remember myself walking across the expanse of asphalt in front of the tower block, it feels as though it was all happening in complete silence. And yet, obviously, there is no such thing as complete silence any more. Not in England. So there must have been the rumble of traffic from the Eastern Avenue, or the distant wail of police sirens, or the crying of a baby in a pushchair two streets away, but that’s not how I remember it. All was stillness. All was mystery.

I took the lift up to the fourth level and emerged into a dark, featureless corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and walls painted an intimidating shade of deep brown. The little windows at either end of the corridor admitted just a hint of the grey, late-morning light: two feeble glows in the distance to my left and my right, as I walked over to the doorway of my father’s flat, full of trepidation, my footsteps so light and measured that they barely made a sound. I took the keys that Mr Byrne had given me and tried to fit one of them into the lock – which in itself was quite hard to locate, in this gloom. The key didn’t seem to fit. Nor did the other two on Mr Byrne’s key ring. I tried each of them again, one after the other, but two of them didn’t fit at all, while the other one did – with a fair amount of forcing – but refused to turn.

I remembered Mrs Byrne’s comment, as we’d said goodbye yesterday evening, that she didn’t think I’d been given the right keys. I had taken no notice at the time, taking it simply to be the wittering of a confused old woman, but maybe she knew what she was talking about.

‘Shit!’ I said, out loud, and started trying the keys again. But it was no use. However hard I twisted the one key that seemed almost to fit, the lock refused to yield. After two or three minutes, there was no point in pursuing the attempt any further. I wrenched the key out of the recalcitrant lock, and threw it on the floor in frustration.

‘Shit!’ I said, again. Why was it that everything I tried to do, whenever it had anything to do with my father, always ended in disappointment and frustration? I thumped the locked door of his flat so hard that it hurt my fist and then stood in the darkness of the corridor for a few seconds, wondering where I could go from here. Surely it would be too anti-climactic just to give up, return to the car, and continue with my journey north?

Then I remembered the other thing that Mrs Byrne had mentioned: that there was another set of keys, belonging to a woman called Miss Erith who lived in the flat opposite. That had to be worth trying, surely.

I approached the door of the flat, and hesitated for a moment before ringing the bell. Supposing there was no one at home? Well, that would be the end of it, then. But no – I could hear voices, distantly, coming from inside. A man’s voice and a woman’s.

Quickly, before I had the time to tell myself that I was doing something foolish, I rang the bell. Almost immediately I regretted it, but there was nothing I could do about that now. After a couple of seconds I could already hear footsteps coming towards the door.

The door opened and I found myself looking at a small man of Pakistani origin, who seemed to be in his late sixties.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry – I think I must have called at the wrong flat.’

‘Who were you looking for?’

‘Miss Erith.’

‘No, this is right. Come on in.’

I followed him inside, down a short corridor and then into a bright but small sitting room, full of clutter. There were three free-standing mahogany bookcases, crammed with old hardback books and a few battered paperbacks, an ancient stereo system (dating from the 1970s, I would say, or maybe even the 1960s) with a whole lot of vinyl records and cassettes ranged around it (no CDs), at least a dozen pot plants, and a number of pictures on the walls, most of which even I recognized as reproductions of old masters. There were two armchairs placed opposite each other, and in one of them sat an elderly figure who I took to be Miss Erith. I guessed that she was at least ten years older than the man who had let me into the flat, although there was a liveliness in her eyes which belied her physical frailty. She was wearing brown slacks, and a navy-blue cardigan over her blouse, but the left sleeve was rolled up at the moment and, judging from the equipment on the table beside her, she was on the point of having her blood pressure taken.