The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Kendal–Braemar

16

‘OK, Emma, it’s all starting to become clear now. It’s all falling into place.’

– Proceed on the current road.

‘I don’t know how it’s happened, but I seem to be turning into Donald Crowhurst. That’s who I’m about to become. Call it fate, call it predestination – call it whatever you like – but it looks like I have no choice in the matter. It’s going to happen whether I like it or not.’

– In three-quarters of a mile, right turn.

We had left Kendal about ten minutes ago, and were now driving along the A6 in the direction of Penrith. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and the windscreen was splattered with heavy drops of something between rain and sleet. The road was climbing steadily in a series of curves through wild, verdant countryside.

‘Here I am, after all, driving a car which is meant to be new and innovative and a radical step forward in design – just like Crowhurst’s trimaran. It’s a sort of modern version of the Teignmouth Electron, and I’m at the helm.’

As we turned off the A6 towards Junction 39 of the M6, on our left we could see the vast chimneys of the Corus limestone works, hidden away at the bottom of a long, somehow intimidating private road which gave it the look of a secret military installation. In a few minutes we had reached the motorway junction.

– Heading left at the roundabout, take first exit.

‘And just think who the other characters in his story were. Rodney Hallworth, Stanley Best – do those names remind you of anyone? It all makes sense.’

– Exit coming up.

‘So what’s going on? Have I become sort of … possessed by him, or am I going mad? And if I am going mad, does that really change anything? Because that could be all part and parcel of me turning into him, couldn’t it? What do you think, Emma? What’s your advice?’

– Proceed on the current motorway.

Well, yes, that was sensible enough, I suppose. There seemed to be little else I could do, at any rate.

It was getting on for 12.30. After a long bath and a late breakfast at the Travelodge, I had driven back into Kendal itself and wandered around the town for a little while, trying to enjoy the experience of being in a different part of the country, and to shake off the unaccountable feeling of strangeness, of foreignness, that had been creeping up on me for the last couple of days, ever since leaving Watford. I had spent three weeks in Sydney and never noticed this sensation, so why did it now feel as though every new English town that I found myself in was slightly more unreal than the last? Perhaps it had something to do with my growing Crowhurst fixation. I was beginning to feel disconnected from myself: I sometimes had the feeling that I was standing outside my own body, looking down on it, and even that morning in Kendal there was a moment when it seemed as though I was looking down on the High Street from above, and watching myself walking along it with all the other shoppers, like extras in a perfectly composed shot from a film, with these hundreds of insect-like people in the foreground and the huge sweep of the hills forming a distant, painted-in, not-quite-believable backdrop.

Late in the morning I saw Caroline again. She wasn’t expecting me, but I decided to surprise her. I knew that she was working as the manager of one of the charity shops in the High Street, so I dropped in, unannounced, not expecting much more than a curt rebuff but in fact finding myself made far more welcome than I might have hoped. She made me some coffee and took me into the back office and we talked for about half an hour or more – mainly about Lucy – and this morning Caroline seemed warm, and kind, and interested in what I was doing, and when I left it wasn’t because she wanted me to but because I wanted to. Because having her being nice to me like this just made me want to be with her more than ever, and I knew that could never happen again and in that case the only thing to do was to get out and move on.

– Proceed on the current motorway.

Now we were somewhere between Junctions 41 and 42. We were heading north, and the further north we went, the thinner the traffic seemed to get. We were averaging 68 miles to the gallon, because here it was easy to drive at a comfortable 55 miles per hour without people tailgating you and flashing their lights to make you hurry up. And oddly, despite the fact that it would have been safer to drive fast here than it would 100 miles south, there didn’t seem to be so many cars exceeding the speed limit. Everybody seemed more relaxed. Are there statistics to show that drivers in the north of England consume less petrol than drivers in the south? It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

– Proceed on the current motorway.

There’s not much you can do when you’re driving for hours at a moderate speed, other than to notice the few distractions that the motorway throws up – a yellow police notice reporting a ‘Possible Homicide’, exit signs pointing to Penrith, Keswick, Carlisle, a big blue sign saying ‘Welcome to Scotland / Fàilte gu Alba’, a large pine forest planted on a hillside in the shape of a ‘T’, with the shadows of dark rain clouds drifting across it – and to let your thoughts start drifting. Funny how, when you do that, memories pop into your head, things that you’d forgotten or perhaps suppressed for forty years or more. It was thinking about Francis Chichester that did it, today. I could remember watching the TV coverage of his homecoming with my mother, but couldn’t remember whether my father had been with us or not. And then it came back to me: something odd had happened that night. My father had been watching the television with us, at first, but then the doorbell rang, and he went to answer it, and a few seconds later this strange man came into our house. I say ‘strange’ not just because Mum and I didn’t recognize him but because he was … well, strange. He was wearing a fancy wide-brimmed hat, for one thing, and was dressed in the kind of clothes that people might have been wearing in Carnaby Street in 1967 but had certainly never been seen within fifty miles of Rubery. He had a thin, reddish beard, too – that’s the only other thing I can picture about him. The man didn’t come into our living room and I saw no more of him than the glimpse I caught through the open living room door as Dad led him towards the back of the house. The two of them went into the dining room and started talking while Mum and I carried on watching the television. The man must have left after I’d been put to bed, because I don’t remember him leaving at all. In fact, as I say, I had forgotten all about his bizarre, unexpected appearance in our house until this very moment, when the memory of it came back to me vividly as I drove with Emma across the border into Scotland and the M6 shaded into the A74(M). And the question that I immediately asked myself was this: who could it possibly have been, other than the mysterious ‘Roger’, who had sent my father monthly postcards from the Far East all through the 1970s, and apparently continued to do so even now? I had never been told the visitor’s name – of that I was certain; but I was equally certain that it could only have been Roger.

– Proceed on the current motorway.

I held on to this peculiar memory for a few moments but found that it was quickly supplanted by more random thoughts. The miles slipped by as we travelled further into Scotland, and I continued to drive in an almost dreamlike state, miraculously failing to collide with any other cars. At least ten minutes must have gone by before I snapped out of it and realized, with a start, what it was that I’d just been thinking about.

I had been trying to work out the square root of minus one.

This wouldn’t do at all.

Another solitary lunchtime, another motorway service station, another panino. Mushroom, prosciutto and green leaf salad, this time.

Abington Services. Welcome Break. I can’t help it, I like these places. I feel at home in them. I liked the dark-wood chairs and the light-wood tables, the Habitat look. Very 1990s. I liked the two enormous yucca plants sitting between the tables. I liked the windswept decking area outside, the folded-up sun umbrellas flapping in today’s wet breeze. I liked the way that here, in the midst of such a spectacular rural landscape, somebody had contrived to create this little oasis of urban ordinariness. I liked the look of pleased expectancy on people’s faces as they carried their trays of pizza and fish and chips away from the counter of ‘Coffee Primo’, confident that they were about to enjoy tucking in to something special. This was my sort of place. The sort of place where I belonged.

None the less, my feeling of slight, palpable unease wouldn’t shift. Was it because I was nervous of seeing Alison? I could always phone her and call it off, although I’d still left it too late to catch that day’s ferry from Aberdeen, however fast I drove from here. But anyway, that wasn’t it. Something else was bothering me. Perhaps the weight of all these resurfacing memories.

After I’d finished eating, I booted up my laptop and inserted the little gadget that connected me to the mobile broadband network. I checked my emails, and checked Facebook. Nothing. As I turned the laptop off again I noticed that the battery was almost empty.

Feeling guilty that I had barely used it so far, I took the digital video camera outside and shot some footage of the service station and the surrounding mountains. Only about thirty seconds’ worth. As before, when I’d taken some film of my father’s apartment block in Lichfield, I could sense that this wasn’t at all what Lindsay would be wanting, and it would probably never make the final cut.

*There are also delays on the northbound side of the M6 – the problem is a stranded lorry between Junctions 31 and 31a, it was in Lane 3 and there are queues back to Junction 29. Stranded lorry in the roadworks on the M1, northbound after Junction 27 north of Leicester – that’s now been recovered, but our problems continue on the M1, which is blocked southbound at Junction 11, which is at Luton – being diverted via the sliproads, queues though – thanks to Mike and Fiona for this one – those folks say it’s back to Junction 14, which is Milton Keynes, loads of traffic using the A5 into Dunstable which is now very heavy on that southbound side. Northbound the M1 was closed for a while, it was to allow an air ambulance to land – that has landed and taken off, so that road is fully open again. There was a vehicle blocking the M25, Junctions 18–17, that’s anti-clockwise from Chorleywood to Rickmansworth – that’s all been cleared but it’s left quite a long delay, in roughly the usual place but it seems heavier today – this is anti-clock from Junction 23, which is the A1(M) to Watford at Junction 19. There’s also an accident which has just been picked up from the M25 anti-clockwise, from Junction 5, which is the M26 turn. Cambridge, there’s an accident on the northbound A11, it’s closed northbound at Papworth Everard, that’s north of the A428 at Caxton Gibbet …

‘Sorry about that, Emma,’ I said, turning the radio off. ‘It’s not that I’m getting bored of listening to you, it’s just that – you know, sometimes a man needs a change of scene, some different company …’

– In three-quarters of a mile, slight left turn.

‘I knew you’d understand,’ I said, gratefully. Emma’s voice sounded gracious and calming after the traffic announcer’s strident, hectoring monologue.

We were just a few miles from Edinburgh now. According to the car’s information screen, we had travelled only 410 miles since setting off from Reading two days earlier, but somehow, hearing all those familiar names – Rickmansworth, Chorleywood and (of course) Watford – it felt as though we were about to arrive at a place that was unimaginably remote. Darkness had already closed in and we were a part of a long line of cars threading steadily along the A702, a funeral cortège of tail-lights and occasional brake-lights as far as the eye could see. A few minutes ago we had passed a sign saying ‘Welcome to Scottish Borders’, and now we passed another saying ‘Welcome to Midlothian’. It was nice to know that we were welcome. I wondered if I would be made equally welcome at Alison’s house.

Soon we had crossed the ring road and were driving into the outer suburbs. Alison lived in an area of Edinburgh known as The Grange, which I had already guessed would turn out to be quite wealthy. I didn’t know what her husband did for a living, exactly, but I knew that he ran a large, successful company with offices in many different parts of the world, and that he spent a lot of his time travelling. All the same, I was surprised when Emma continued to guide me – as though she had known this city all her life – into ever wider, quieter, more sequestered and more exclusive streets. Most of the sandstone properties here seemed to be more like mansions than houses. And Alison’s, when we pulled up outside it, was by no means the smallest.

– You have arrived at your destination, said Emma, betraying no sense of triumph, or boastfulness; just quiet satisfaction in a job well done. The route guidance is now finished.