The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Fire

The Folded Photograph

The incident I’m going to describe took place more than three years ago. However, it is still very fresh in my mind. It had a big effect on me because it put some distance between myself and someone I was thinking of getting close to.

It was the long hot summer of 1976. ‘Long hot summer’ in this case is not just a cliché because throughout the UK there was bright sunshine and very little rain for almost the whole of that summer – so much so that the government appointed a special ‘Minister for Drought’.

Towards the end of August that year we went on a camping holiday to the Lake District for one week with our friends the Sim family.

The Sims had once been our neighbours in the Rubery area of Birmingham. They had one son, whose name was Max, and he had been best friends with my younger brother Chris at primary school. However, at the age of eleven the two boys were sent to different secondary schools. Chris was accepted for a place at King William’s School in Birmingham (I was already going to the equivalent girls’ school). This was a selective school and you had to pass an exam to get in. Max had failed the exam and so he went to the local comprehensive school. A couple of years after this happened, we moved away from Rubery into a house with a big garden backing on to Edgbaston Reservoir. Despite this, Chris and Max stayed quite good friends and our parents continued to see a lot of each other.

At the time of this incident, Chris and Max were both sixteen years old, while I was nearly eighteen. In many ways I felt too old to be going on holiday with my family, and in fact this was the last time I did so. I had already been away to France earlier in the summer with one of my girlfriends, but this camping holiday came right at the end of August and since the weather was still nice and I did not really fancy being left on my own for a whole week at home I decided to go along.

Our campsite was by the side of Coniston Water. There were caravans on the site as well as tents, and there was a modern toilet block with shower etc. My family had a big family tent with two separate ‘bedrooms’ so we were quite comfortable really, even though I am not a great fan of living under canvas. The Sims pitched their tent (which was quite a lot smaller) a few yards from ours, but facing it, so that the space between the two tents became a sort of common area. This was the place where, every evening, we would light a fire and sit around it eating supper and talking amongst ourselves. Afterwards my brother Chris would sometimes get out his guitar but I’m pleased to say there was no singing or anything like that. He just used to strum these melancholy minor chords and stare into the distance. Both he and Max were at the age when boys get terrible crushes on girls and Chris was pining for one of the girls at my school. I had already told him he didn’t stand the slightest chance but he took no notice.

As for Max, he was beginning to look slightly lovelorn as well – but, unless I’m very much mistaken, his crush was on me.

Even though I had known Max for many years, I had only recently started to notice how grown-up he had become, and that in the process he was turning into rather a good-looking boy. The fact that he was almost two years younger than me ought to have put him strictly ‘off limits’ but I did find it flattering that he seemed to be smitten with me, and if I am to be perfectly honest with myself, one of my reasons for coming on this holiday in the first place was the fact that Max was going to be there. But the poor boy was very unsure of himself. I adopted a sort of ‘treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’ approach, and pretty much ignored him for most of the week. I was hoping that this would force him to bring his intentions out into the open but I’m afraid he interpreted my behaviour very literally and probably just thought I didn’t like him very much.

One thing I quickly noticed was that the family dynamic among the Sims was quite different from the dynamic in our family. Max and his mother were extremely close. In fact she sort of babied him and was always feeding him up – giving him extra helpings of food at meal times, buying him treats such as chocolate bars and packets of Fruit Gums from the local shop, and so on. (Despite this he was extremely skinny. He was at that age when boys can stuff their faces with food all day and it doesn’t seem to put an ounce of fat on them.) On the other hand Max did not appear to be close to his father at all. In fact Mr Sim did not appear to be close to either his son or his wife. He was a quiet man, very introspective and rather difficult to talk to. He worked as a librarian at one of the local technical colleges in Birmingham but Max once told me that his father had always really wanted to be a poet. One of the things I noticed about him that week was that he always carried a notebook with him and could often be seen writing in it. One evening when we were all sitting around the fire my father even persuaded him to read us one of his poems from the notebook. I went stiff with embarrassment when I heard this and was expecting him to read some terrible bit of doggerel in rhyming couplets about the birds and the flowers and the sunshine and all that sort of nonsense. But instead, the poem that he read out was rather good. At least, I don’t really know very much about poetry, and this one was quite hard to understand at times, but at least it wasn’t bland or banal or anything like that. I couldn’t say what it was about exactly, but it conveyed this atmosphere – this atmosphere of loss and regret and something to do with the past that was somehow sinister and frightening. I remember that we all sat in slightly surprised silence when it was finished. We were all quite impressed, I think – apart from Mrs Sim, who just looked mortified. I don’t mean to be rude when I say this, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that she didn’t have the faintest idea what her husband was going on about when he wrote his poetry. I don’t think she had had much of an education and I don’t even think she was especially bright. She worked part-time as a doctor’s receptionist in Moseley, and although she was a very kind person, and very down-to-earth – as well as being extremely pretty – it did make you wonder why on earth she and her husband had got married or what they had in common. Other people’s relationships are a mystery, though, and perhaps they should stay that way.

As well as his notebook, the other thing that Mr Sim never failed to carry with him was his camera. He had a chunky, complicated, antique-looking camera that was probably worth a lot of money and which he always stowed away carefully in its battered leather carrying-case. He mainly took photographs of landscapes, or extreme close-ups of tree trunks or fungus or stuff like that. Not holiday snaps, in other words. But of course, like his poetry-writing, his photography was very much a solitary pursuit. He never took Max with him, as far as I can remember, to give him a lesson in how to frame a picture or what exposure to use: there generally seemed to be very little flow of information from father to son. I found this difficult to relate to because my father was always talking to us, and always teaching us how to do things. On the first night of the holiday, for instance, I remember him disappearing off with Chris into the woods at the side of the lake, and returning with lots of twigs and branches to start building the fire. He asked me if I wanted to help but I was too busy reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. Max also didn’t seem very interested, and in any case he was helping his mother peel the potatoes, although I seem to remember he sliced his finger open while he was doing it and had to wear a plaster for the next few days. Anyway, my dad went about building the fire with his usual thoroughness, and talked Chris through the process step by step. He said that it wasn’t enough just to chuck a pile of sticks on the floor and light them with a match. You would never get a long-lasting fire that way. First of all you had to clear an area of ground and preferably enclose it with a ring of stones because that would provide insulation. Then you built a pile of kindling, using dry twigs and small pieces of wood, along with bits of old cardboard and egg boxes and suchlike if you had them. It was important, Dad said, not to pack the kindling too tightly together – there had to be room for the air to circulate. Of course there was plenty of good dry wood around to use as kindling and fuel because it had not rained in that part of the world for weeks. There were several ways you could arrange the larger pieces of wood on top of the kindling, Dad said: he and Chris experimented with different shapes during the course of the week (pyramid-shaped, star-shaped, ‘log cabin’ style, and so on) but ended up deciding that making a kind of wooden tepee was best, because that way the kindling burned really well at the centre, and the outside logs would fall inward and feed the fire when they were ready. To get the fire started they used all sorts of things as tinder – moss, dry grass, pine needles, bark shavings – and Chris always did a good job collecting it, because for the next few days he had the responsibility of building the fire by himself and every night he only needed one match to get it started and we always had a really good blazing fire which lasted for a couple of hours or more. It was very cheering to have such a good fire going every night because, although the days were still pretty warm, the evenings were starting to grow chilly. The best thing was when the fire had been burning for quite a while and the heart of it was really hot; by then we would have had our supper and we would get out a packet of marshmallows and roast them at the centre of the fire for dessert. Delicious.

Towards the end of the week, the weather began to change. All week it had been so warm that most of us had been swimming in the lake every day. There was a little shingle beach down at one end of the campsite, but if you walked a bit further through the woods you eventually came to another one, even smaller – in fact you could hardly call it a beach, it was so tiny – just a scrap of shingle, really, enclosed by trees – wide enough for two or three people to sit, at a pinch – and this had become our favourite spot. None of the other campers seemed to use it. And this was where we came, on the last full day of the holiday, late on Friday afternoon – my brother, Max and me. The sky had clouded over and was now hanging heavy and slate-grey over Coniston Water. The temperature must have fallen by seven or eight degrees since the day before. Every day we had swum in the lake off this beach and that’s what we had come for today, but when we got there, the prospect didn’t seem so appealing. In fact Max immediately sat down on the grass above the beach and announced that he wasn’t going to go in today. Chris called him a wimp and promptly stripped down to his swimming trunks. He waded knee-deep into the water and then came to an abrupt halt: it was clearly much colder than he’d been expecting. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, exactly, but I started to undress anyway. Underneath my T-shirt and jeans I was wearing a little orange bikini that I hadn’t worn on this holiday so far. I had bought it in France earlier that summer with my girlfriend. It was rather skimpy and revealing and I knew – mainly from the effect it had had on all the French boys! – that I looked pretty good in it. The week was nearly over now and I was getting a bit tired of playing hard to get with Max so I thought if he saw me in this bikini it might spur him into action. As I slipped out of my jeans and pulled my T-shirt over my head I could feel that his eyes were on me, although when I turned to smile at him he just looked away quickly. ‘Are you sure you’re not going to come in?’ I said, but he shook his head. He was smiling back at me but, as always with Max, it was impossible to say what the smile meant or what he was thinking. I stood there for a few seconds, regarding him with enquiring eyes, my hands on my hips – making sure he got a damn good look at me in that bikini – but still he didn’t respond, so I turned with a sigh and started to walk out into the water.

God, it was cold. Perhaps it was just the psychological effect of the grey skies and the lack of sunshine, but the lake felt icy compared to the previous days. Positively Arctic. What’s more, as Chris and I waded in, we could feel a few slow, fat raindrops beginning to splash on the surface of the water. The first rain for weeks! ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I asked Chris, but a few seconds later he was under, and straight after that he swam over to me, grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me under as well. I screamed and kicked at first, but then I gave in and started swimming alongside him, thinking that my body would get used to the cold in a moment or two.

It was no use, though. The water had me in its freezing grip and after five minutes or so I realized that I wasn’t going to warm up and I wasn’t really enjoying myself. ‘This is too cold,’ I said. ‘I’m freezing to death.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ Chris answered, but then he saw how violently I was shivering. ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get frostbite or something,’ and I started to walk back to the shore. Chris came with me, and we waded back side by side. Max was waiting on the beach with our towels but I realized now that he had been joined by his father as well. Mr Sim was standing on the beach looking at us both, but before we’d had time to reach dry land he shouted out: ‘Stop!’ and took his camera out of that leather carrying-case. ‘Hold it right there,’ he said. ‘That looks absolutely perfect.’ So we both remained stock still, up to our knees in freezing water, while he stood there, fiddling with his lens and getting us into focus.

I felt a little bit uneasy about it, even at the time. I don’t know why that should be: it was just a family friend, taking a picture of me and my brother on holiday – what could be more innocuous? But there was something about the deliberation with which he took the photo – making us stand shivering for ages while he got the composition exactly right, and something about the commanding (almost bullying) way he had shouted, ‘Stop!’ that gave me a nasty feeling. For one thing, he didn’t normally take this kind of photograph: arty shots of dandelions and tree trunks, yes, but not people – so why me and Chris? Why now? And for another, all of a sudden I really wished that I hadn’t been wearing that bikini. It was skimpy enough to start with, but with the wet and the coldness it had gone almost see-through and my nipples were probably standing out like cherries. It was all very well Max seeing me like that, but his father … Well, that was quite creepy, in my opinion. So as soon as he’d taken the picture I dashed back on to the shore without meeting his eye and grabbed my towel from Max and wrapped myself up in it. I was shivering uncontrollably and my teeth were chattering so much I could barely talk. Meanwhile, Mr Sim packed his camera away in a manner that was almost too casual and said, in a tone of forced joviality, ‘That one’s going to come out really well. So – who’s coming with us all to the pub tonight?’

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