The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

7

As I pushed open the front door of my house, I expected to feel the dead weight of piles of junk mail behind it. But there wasn’t that much. Maybe a dozen envelopes. To be honest, I would have expected more than that, after an absence of three weeks.

Leaving my suitcase in the hall, I scooped up the letters and carried them into the sitting room. It was freezing in there. Needless to say, there was no sound of a radio drifting in from the kitchen, no smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting through the hall. Caroline and Lucy were – as I’d known they would be – more than 200 miles away. Maybe they had written one of these letters, all the same. When they first went away, Lucy used to write to me quite often – every couple of weeks or so – usually enclosing some drawing, or collage, or piece of writing that she’d done at school. But the letters had been slowing down lately. I think the last time I’d received one had been in November. Let me see … I skimmed through the envelopes, and could quickly see that there was nothing from her. Three credit card bills. Letters from gas and electricity suppliers touting for business. Bank statements, mobile phone bills. The usual crap. Nothing of interest there at all.

I went into the kitchen to turn the heating on, and boil the kettle, and while I was there I glanced at the answering machine mounted on the wall. It blinked a number back at me. ‘Five’. Five phone messages, while I’d been away for almost a month? This was ridiculous. Did I dare to listen to them?

While I was plucking up courage, I went upstairs and into the back bedroom to boot up my computer. The trick, as always, was to walk into the room and do whatever I had to do there without really looking around me. I’d become quite good at it by now. It had to be done this way, because this bedroom used to be Lucy’s. The sensible thing would have been to redecorate it after she and Caroline had moved out, but I hadn’t been able to face doing that – not just yet. In the meantime, it still had the pink girly wallpaper that she used to like, and the Blu-Tack marks on the wall where she used to stick all the posters from her animal magazines – big close-ups of sleeping hamsters and impossibly cute wombats and things like that. Luckily the posters themselves were gone. But the wallpaper itself was a painful reminder. Maybe this was the week I should do something about it. There was no need to strip it off, I could just paint over it – three or four coats of brilliant white emulsion ought to be enough to hide the flowery pattern. In the meantime, I just looked straight ahead of me, limited my field of vision to the things I was meant to be concentrating upon. It was easier that way.

Back in the kitchen, I made a mug of strong tea and took a couple of sips before pressing the ‘Play’ button on the answering machine. But my mood of trembling anticipation was short-lived. There was a message from my employer, reminding me to come in for a final meeting with the Occupational Health Officer in a few days’ time. There were two messages from my dentist: an automated one, reminding me of my appointment for a check-up two weeks earlier (which I had forgotten all about) and one from a real person, left the following day, asking me why I’d failed to turn up, and reminding me that I would have to pay for the check-up anyway. Then there were two blank messages, consisting simply of long electronic beeps followed by the noise of somebody hanging up. One of these might have been from Caroline, of course, but I couldn’t dial 1471 to find out, because both of these calls pre-dated the messages from my dentist.

So much for the telephone.

Well, maybe Facebook would cheer me up. I had more than seventy friends on Facebook, after all. Surely that must have created some activity while I’d been away. I took my tea upstairs, settled down in front of the computer and logged in to my home page.

Nothing.

I stared at the screen in shock. Not a single friend had sent me a message or posted anything on my wall in the last month. If the evidence was to be believed, in other words, not one of those seventy people had thought of me once during my absence.

My stomach felt suddenly hollow. My eyes started to sting: I could feel tears coming. This was worse than I could possibly have imagined.

There was only one thing left: email. Could I bear to open Outlook Express? What if my inbox told the same story?

My fingers moved mechanically, robotically across the keyboard. I clutched the mouse in my right hand and never took my eyes off the screen as it filled first with the programme’s welcome message, and then with the subject headers of emails previously received. Slowly, my heart thumping, a pit of dread opening up in my abdomen, I moved the cursor across the screen and clicked on the fateful button: ‘Send/Receive’.

The dialogue box appeared. The progress messages flashed up: Finding Host. Connected. Authorizing. Connected. Then a few seconds’ pause, while the computer seemed to be teasing me, relishing my torment, until – YES! – joy, oh, joy – ‘Receiving list of messages from server’, and – I could hardly believe this – the first message came flagged with the astonishing announcement, ‘Receiving Message 1 of 137’.

One hundred and thirty-seven messages! How was that, then? Who said that nobody cared about Maxwell Sim any more? Who said that I didn’t have any real friends?

Next to my ‘Inbox’ icon, the numbers quickly started to mount up. Twenty messages, sixty, seventy-five – they were piling in. It was going to take me all day to read these. Who might they be from – Chris, Lucy, Caroline? Or perhaps even my father, trying to make amends for the way my visit to Australia had fizzled out?

I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and then got started on the first few messages, which read:Your manhood is under construction? Try the blue magic pill.The vigor in your pants will be unbreakableWhen your tool is big, the rest of the world Seems so little for youYour powerful uprise will excite womenThe things are really bad when your male friend is deadRock hard erect monsterThe fastest way to success is to restore your manlinessA fabulous instrument will give you a fabulous reputationGive yourself the edge over the other guysPush your banger inside lady

Well, never mind, that was only the first ten. It looked like the spam filter must have been turned off, for some reason. But there were bound to be some proper messages in there somewhere. What was next?The friend in your pants will be dancing like at a partyHere to help you leave the pain of smallnessYour gun stands to attention – everybody shocked!Wind joystick round leg!You can renew and restore your youth conditionThe truth behind 9 inchesNever disappoint her again!Make your stick voluminousYou’ll call it Peter the GreatTake part in a sexual marathon with our qualified helpThe hard friend in your pants will look up into the skyUpgrade your apparatusGive your rocket best fuel

Oh God. There couldn’t be many more of these – could there?Life with a small tool is pathetic and miserable

That was a bit harsh, surely. Amidst all the other problems in my life, it had never really occurred to me that I might have a ‘small tool’ before. I’d always considered myself pretty average in that department, I suppose. And yet now, in the face of this onslaught, my ‘male friend’ – as I would henceforth think of it – was beginning to feel as puny and wizened as a button mushroom.Tired of your little friend staring at the floor?Tired of ending the night with just a kiss?Fornicate like a macho!Now you don’t have to turn off the lights when you take off your pantsWomen will give you stars from the sky to sleep with youKnow her from the sexual side how is she inside completelyWomen want to be penetrated hardOnly huge boners can reach g-spotYou must be The Real Man with huge dignityGet the longest bananaHelp her find happiness! Rid her of pain!

Rid her of pain…? That was an interesting one. As these headers scrolled by in a kind of blur, as it became obvious that these were the only messages anyone had sent me in the last three weeks, my mind began to wander and I started wondering if these really were strangers writing to me, if I really was just the random recipient of advertising from drug companies and porn sites. Some of these phrases were beginning to sound quite philosophical, almost. I found myself wondering if there might even be a kind of wisdom buried within them – a wisdom intended for me, personally.Recapture a bit of your youth again

Yes, I would certainly like to do that.What else do you need to be a perfect man?

That was a question I had also asked myself, many times. Did these people have the answer?Learn how to be really inside her

That was something I’d never learned, with Caroline. How true. How much better if I’d learned to be really inside her.Give her concrete firmness

Again, was that where I’d gone wrong? Was that why I’d allowed her to walk away from me? Not enough concrete firmness?

I was up to about a hundred, now. And still they kept coming.Your rigid friend will keep his head straight upWomen will be singing odes to the majestic monster in your pantsFinally get the attention you deserve!Forget the past and focus on the future – get bigger todayNo woman will dare turn her back on youNobody can be blamed for your pitiful member but you can change itHello MaxFlaccidity won’t be your rod’s troubleEnlarging your male tool means winning a warSize matters in this real world

Wait a moment, though – ‘Hello Max’? That didn’t sound like spam.

Frantically I scrolled back up to the rogue message and looked at it again. It was from Trevor – Trevor Paige. It was a real email, from a real person. I clicked on it and with a surge of relief and happiness read the words which, to me, at that moment, seemed as eloquent, as moving, as pregnant with grace and meaning as anything that Shakespeare or any other poet had ever written.hi max will be in watford this wed how about a beer regards trev

And after reading this message over and over until it was burned on to my memory, I laid my arms across the computer keyboard, rested my head on them and sighed with heartfelt gratitude.