The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (9 page)

8

A few minutes later, I went to bed. I’d been planning to fight the jet lag, if I could, but I was way too tired. I fell asleep straight away but the sleep itself was fitful, disturbed.

Do you know the kind of dream that is halfway between being a dream and being something else? As if your waking mind refuses to lie still, and despite being exhausted it won’t quite allow your unconscious to take over. Well, it was like that at first. I kept seeing images of my old schoolfriend, Chris Byrne, and his sister, Alison, but I couldn’t tell if these images were from a dream or a memory. We were teenagers, and I was with them both in a place I didn’t recognize, somewhere in the country, surrounded by woodland. Chris had long hair, 1970s-style, and looked as though he had already reached shaving age: there were the beginnings of a beard growing in wisps around his face. He was sitting cross-legged on a carpet of leaves, playing his guitar and not taking any notice of Alison or me. There was an expanse of sparkling water at the edge of the wood and Alison was walking towards it. As she walked, with her back towards me, she took hold of the bottom of her T-shirt and pulled it off over her head slowly, seductively, with a teasing glance back in my direction. Underneath she was wearing an orange bikini top. Her skin was smooth, flawless and tawny brown.

My next-door neighbour took some rubbish out to her dustbin and the clanging of the lid woke me up sharply. I sat up in bed and looked at the clock: two-thirty in the afternoon. I sank down against the pillows and gazed at the ceiling, feeling suddenly wakeful. Why had I been dreaming – or thinking – about Chris and Alison? Presumably it was because for the last three weeks, along with all the other annoying things he had been doing, my father had kept asking me how Chris was doing and whether I was seeing much of him these days. How typical of him to insist upon this; how typical of him to seize (unknowingly?) on one of my sorest points and tweak it until I was on the verge of losing my temper every time he mentioned it. By the way, I should have explained this before now, but Chris was my oldest friend, from way back in our days at primary school in Birmingham. I’d kept in touch with him pretty consistently ever since then, until five years ago, when Caroline, Lucy and I had gone on holiday with Chris and his family to Cahirciveen, in County Kerry. It had been a disastrous holiday – disastrous because of an accident that happened to his son, Joe, who had ended up with quite nasty injuries. A lot of blame was flung around in the wake of this accident, in various directions, a lot of things were said that shouldn’t have been said, and the upshot had been that Chris and his family had left early, and flown back to England. Since then, he hadn’t contacted me once. Presumably he was waiting for me to contact him, but I didn’t feel able to do that, because … well, now is probably not the time to explain. It all gets very complicated. As for why the ins and outs of my friendship with Chris should be of any interest to my father (‘How is he?’ he kept asking, ‘When did you last see him? Who did he get married to?’), it seemed that this would remain one of life’s unsolved mysteries.

I lay in bed a little while longer, thinking about that image of the three of us together in the woods. Then I realized where it came from: in the long, hot summer of 1976 (the summer of the drought, as it will always be remembered by people of my age) our two families had gone camping together in the woods near Coniston Water, up in the Lake District. I couldn’t remember much else about it, except that my father had taken a lot of photographs that week, and I still had them in an album somewhere. Yes, in the dreaded back bedroom, unless I was much mistaken.

I fetched the album and got back into bed with it, turning the bedside lamp on and propping myself up against the pillows. The album was bound in dark-blue imitation leather, and the prints inside had seen better days, their once vivid colours now badly faded. Also, I’d forgotten what a lousy photographer my father was. That’s to say, I’m sure his pictures were good, if you liked nature photography, or extreme close-ups of weird pieces of rock whose exposed textures happened to have caught his fancy, but if you wanted to be reminded of what your family holiday had been like, you were wasting your time looking at them. I flicked through the pages impatiently, wondering why on earth he had not seen fit to take a single picture of me or my mother. Or any other human being, for that matter. But I knew that there was at least one picture of Chris and Alison in here – a picture I had once known well, although I hadn’t looked at it for at least ten years – and when I eventually found it, on the very last page of the album, I realized that the images that had been coming to me in bed that morning had been strange hybrids: half-memory, half-dream. In this photograph, Chris and his sister were standing up to their knees in the water, on a grey, sunless afternoon. Their hair was wet from swimming and Alison in particular looked extremely cold. She was wearing that orange bikini, and her young, evenly tanned body was topped off by auburn hair cut into a boyish short-back-and-sides.

I yawned loudly, and let the photograph album drop on to the bedspread. When I did this, and the light from my bedside lamp caught the picture of Chris and Alison at a new angle, I noticed something odd: if you looked at it closely, you could see that the photograph had once been folded in half: there was a faint crease, running in a vertical line exactly down the middle. Why would that have been? I yawned again, turned away from the album, and reached out to turn off the lamp. It was no good trying to think straight while I was feeling like this. I could tell that I still needed lots more sleep. My last waking thought was not of my broken friendship with Chris Byrne, or my once-complicated feelings towards his sister, but of Poppy. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t have her number any more. And she had never even told me her second name.

I woke up again just before seven, and shortly afterwards, did something I’m rather ashamed of, involving my computer, and the internet. I wasn’t going to talk about it here but, well, I suppose the idea is that I tell you the whole story, warts and all, so I can’t very well leave it out.

How shall I explain this?

It’s to do with Caroline. It’s to do with Caroline and how much I still missed her.

The thing is that – besides email and the telephone – I did have another means of contacting Caroline: one which I only used very occasionally, though, because using it made me feel a bit cheap, and a bit dirty, and a bit angry with myself. Nevertheless, there were still times – times when I missed her really badly, and wanted more than a polite, quickly curtailed chat, or a couple of functional sentences about Lucy’s progress at school – when using this method seemed like my only option.

It began like this.

When we were married, and Lucy was, I suppose, about five or six, Caroline started using the internet a lot more than she had been. I think it happened when Lucy developed a nasty rash around the base of her neck one time and Caroline went online to see what she could find out about it. Sooner or later this led her to a site called Mumsnet, which was full of mothers discussing just this kind of problem, comparing experiences and offering solutions. Anyway, the rash came and went but clearly they were discussing a whole lot of other things on Mumsnet because soon Caroline was spending half of the day on there. After a while I seem to remember asking her something sarcastic like how many hours a day could you spend having online conversations about MMR injections and breast pumps, and she told me that actually she was contributing to threads about books and politics and music and economics and all sorts of other things, and she had made a lot of friends online already. ‘How can they be your friends?’ I asked, ‘if you’ve never met them?’ and she told me that this was a very old-fashioned thing to say, and that if I was going to come to terms with the twenty-first century I was going to have to keep up with ways in which the concept of friendship was evolving in the light of new technologies. I couldn’t think of an answer to that one, I have to admit.

Well, maybe Caroline had a point after all. That’s to say, looking back, I can understand why she needed to go online to find all these friends and have all these discussions. She certainly wasn’t finding them at home. She’d tried making friends with the other mothers at Lucy’s school, and had even tried, at one point, to get a local Writers’ Group started, but somehow none of this ever seemed to quite work out. Thinking about it, she was probably really lonely. I always hoped that she’d become best friends with Trevor’s wife, Trevor’s wife Janice, but I suppose you can’t force these things. It would have been good if we could have done things together as a foursome but Caroline was never especially keen. And I was no help, to be honest. I know perfectly well that I wasn’t in Caroline’s league, intellectually. I never read as many books as she did, for instance. She was always reading. Don’t get me wrong, though – I like books as much as the next man. When you’re on holiday, for instance, down by the swimming pool, baking yourself in the sun, there’s nothing I like better than putting my nose into a book. But with Caroline, it was more than that. Reading seemed to become her obsession. She would regularly get through two or three books a week. Novels, most of them. ‘Literary’ or ‘serious’ novels, as I believe they’re called. ‘Don’t they all start to seem the same after a while?’ I asked her once. ‘Don’t they all seem to blend into one?’ But she told me that I didn’t understand what I was talking about. ‘You’re the kind of person,’ she used to say, ‘who will never have his life changed by a book.’ ‘Why should a
book
change your life, anyway?’ I said. ‘The things that change your life are things that are real. Like getting married, or having children.’ ‘I’m talking about having your horizons expanded,’ she said. ‘Your consciousness raised.’ It was something we were never going to agree about. Once or twice I tried to make a bit more of an effort, but I could never really see what she was getting at. I remember asking her for some pointers about books I should read: books that might potentially change my life. She told me to try some contemporary American fiction. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Try getting one of the Rabbit books,’ she told me, and a few hours later, when I came back from the bookshop and showed her what I’d bought, she said, ‘Is this meant to be some sort of joke?’ It was
Watership Down
.

(Bloody good book, actually, if you ask me. Didn’t change my life, though.)

I’m digressing so much, I suppose, in order to put off telling you the really shameful thing, which is this: after we’d split up, and after Caroline and Lucy had gone back up to Cumbria, I joined Mumsnet myself. I logged on with the user name ‘SouthCoastLizzie’ and pretended to be a single mother from Brighton with her own little business making items of jewellery and suchlike. Of course I knew what Caroline’s user name was and I made a special point of following the threads where I could see that she was taking part in the discussion. Gradually I made it my business, whenever she made a post, to be the next poster in the thread: I would follow up her point, sometimes adding a little qualification or correction just for form’s sake, but usually agreeing with her. Sometimes this was difficult, especially if the thread (as it often was) was about a particular book or a writer, but in these cases I would basically confine myself to generalities, and try to bluff my way through. After I’d been doing this for a few weeks, so that Caroline would definitely be aware of the existence of SouthCoastLizzie, and might even be curious about her, I sent her a PM saying that my real name was Liz Hammond, and I really liked her posts, and felt that we had a lot of interests in common, and how would she feel if we started writing to each other a bit more directly, by email? I wasn’t even sure that I would get a reply: but I did. And when it came, it really astonished me.

Caroline and I were together for about fourteen years. In all that time, I can honestly say that she never,
ever
wrote to me – or even addressed me – with the kind of affection she showed to ‘Liz Hammond’ in that first email. I won’t quote it – even though I can remember most of it by heart – but I can promise you that you would not believe the warmth, the friendliness, the
love
she put into those words, those words addressed to a complete stranger – a complete stranger
who didn’t even exist
, for Christ’s sake! Why had she never written to me – why had she never
spoken
to me – like that? I was so shocked, and just so …
wounded
, that I couldn’t even reply to her for a few days. And when, finally, I did manage to write back, I have to admit that I was a little scared. Clearly I was going to see another side of Caroline if I carried on with this correspondence – a side I’d never been allowed access to during our marriage. I would have to get used to that. Anyway, I decided not to rush things. If Caroline and the non-existent Liz Hammond got too close, too quickly, then everything would soon become very complicated. I didn’t want to turn into her best friend, or anything like that, I just wanted to be kept up to date with the sort of day-to-day stuff that I was never going to learn in my guise as her ex-husband. And that was more or less what happened. I learned to ignore the jealousy I felt every time that Caroline sent a message – the sense that it was me, the man who’d been married to her for twelve years, who had always been the real stranger as far as she was concerned – and instead just concentrated on the bits of news I learned this way: the fact that Lucy had taken up the clarinet, or was turning out to be good at geography, all that sort of thing. In return I drip-fed Caroline pieces of information about my fictional self, while half-regretting that I had ever started the whole business. We swapped photographs a few times, and in return for the picture of her and Lucy standing in front of their Christmas tree (which I’ve framed, as it happens, and put on the mantelpiece) I plucked a random photo of somebody’s children from the internet and told her that this was my son and daughter. There was no reason why she shouldn’t believe me.