The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

2

My father was asleep when I got back from the restaurant, so we had to wait until the morning, over breakfast, to resume our argument about his flat in Lichfield.

Actually ‘argument’ is too strong a word for the kind of confrontations I have with my father. So is ‘confrontations’, for that matter. My father and I have never raised our voices to each other. If either of us disagrees with the other, or takes offence, we simply retreat into wounded silence – a silence which has been known to last, in some instances, for several years. This method has always worked for us, after a fashion, although I know that other people find it peculiar. Caroline, for instance, was forever taking me to task on this subject. ‘Why do you and your father never talk to each other properly?’ she used to ask me. ‘When was the last time you had a real conversation with him?’ I would remind her that this was an easy thing for her to say. She didn’t know what a difficult man my father was. In fact she barely knew him at all, having only met him once, the time we took Lucy out to Australia when she was about two. (My father had not come back to England for my wedding, or for the birth of his only granddaughter.) As it happened, both he and Caroline were aspiring writers – although my father’s preferred form of expression has always been poetry, if you please – so she’d been hoping that this shared interest would provide some common ground; but even she had to concede, after a few days, that he was not the easiest person to understand or talk to. All the same, it remained a bone of contention between me and Caroline, during the next few years, that my relationship with my father was so badly damaged. I was an only child, and my mother had died when I was twenty-four, so he was really all that I had in the way of family. And when Caroline finally left me, her parting gift (if you can call it that) was this trip to Australia, which she paid for without telling me anything about it: the first I knew being an email from Expedia one day just before Christmas, reminding me to apply for an online tourist visa. She had booked me on a flight which left Heathrow exactly six months to the day after her departure – sensing, perhaps, that I would not be ready for the journey before then, and that this was the earliest I could expect to have climbed out of the trough of depression to which she knew she was condemning me. And in this respect, her calculation (the word seems appropriate, somehow) proved to be accurate. Just goes to show, I suppose, that after all those years she really did know me inside out.

Well, Caroline, it was a charming thought. Cheer up your abandoned husband by sending him off to see his estranged father for three weeks and get them talking to each other again. The trouble is, it takes more than a bit of goodwill and a cut-price air fare to engineer a miracle like that. The next morning, as we ate our last breakfast together in near-silence, I realized that my father and I were as distant as we’d ever been. If the Chinese woman and her daughter were at one end of the scale of human intimacy, we were right at the other. In fact we were almost off the scale. Looking back, there were any number of things we could have bonded over. The fact that our partners had a habit of walking out on us, for instance. Since moving to Australia more than twenty years ago, my father had drifted in and out of any number of half-hearted relationships: I had only met one of the women involved, and she had given up on him five or six years ago. Since then he had been living with a retired pharmacist in the suburb of Mosman, but they’d split up just a few weeks earlier, and he’d now been obliged to find a new apartment, which at the moment was barely decorated or furnished. So we could have talked about that sort of thing; but we didn’t. Instead, we returned to the subject of his flat in Lichfield. He’d bought this flat back in the mid-1980s, just after Mum died – in response to some unspoken impulse, I imagine, to return to the city of his birth – and I’d always assumed that he’d sold it again before moving to Australia. But apparently not. Apparently it had been sitting empty for the last twenty years. Now, I realize that most sons would have got angry with their fathers when they learned that a potentially valuable family property had been allowed to sit empty for twenty years, falling into disrepair. But all I said was, ‘That seems a bit of a waste.’ And all he said was, ‘Yes, I should probably do something about it.’ Then he asked if I would go and look at the flat when I went back to England. I thought he meant that he wanted me to start the process of putting it on the market, and I began telling him that it wasn’t a good time to try selling property in the UK right now, the credit crunch was starting to bite, people were losing their jobs and their savings, everyone was in a state of financial uncertainty, and house prices were falling every month. To which my father answered that he had no intention of selling the flat. He said that he just wanted me to go there and look for a blue ring binder on one of the bookshelves, with the words Two Duets written on the spine, and send it back to him. I asked him what was so significant about this blue ring binder and he said that it contained some ‘important’ poems and other bits of writing, and he wanted it now because the only other copy had been thrown away by his former partner (the pharmacist from Mosman) a few weeks ago when they’d split up. Also, he said that I should read it before sending it to him because among other things it explained how I came to be born; and then he launched into a long and rather bizarre digression about how I would never have been born if there hadn’t been two pubs close to each other in London both called The Rising Sun back in the late 1950s. Again, other sons, probably, would have pressed their father on this point, but I suppose I just thought, ‘Oh God, there goes Dad again – rambling away, off on some strange tangent of his own,’ and instead I started asking him exactly where the ring binder could be found and precisely what shade of blue it was. So, we had an opportunity to delve into a potentially interesting byway of our shared history, and instead we ended up discussing stationery. The usual situation, in other words. And after that, I went into the spare bedroom to pack.

In the taxi on the way to the airport, I didn’t think about my father. I found myself thinking about the Chinese woman and her daughter, and what a shame it was that they’d left the restaurant before I’d had the chance to speak to them. All was not entirely lost, it’s true, because I had managed to corner the waiter after I came back upstairs, and he told me something about them, something that was potentially useful. He didn’t know who they were, or where they came from, but he did know this: that they came to the restaurant regularly, on the second Saturday evening of every month, without fail; and that they were always alone: they never brought a man with them. And for some reason – although I know it sounds crazy – I was comforted by both of these things. That restaurant may have been 10,000 miles from where I lived, but the world is a small place, these days, and getting smaller all the time, and at least I knew that, whenever I wanted to, I could always get on a plane, and fly to Sydney, and go to that restaurant on the second Saturday of any month, and there they’d be, playing cards and laughing together. Waiting for me. (I know that sounds fanciful, but that was how I’d already started to think of it.) And, what’s more, they would be alone. There was no one else, no rival for their attentions. I’d guessed as much, actually, from the way they behaved towards each other. There was no room for another person in that relationship. The presence of a man would have polluted it. Unless, of course, that man happened to be me.

OK, so I was letting my imagination run away with me. I was surrendering to fantasies. But maybe that in itself was a good sign. For six months now I had barely spoken to anybody. I had been off work for nearly all of that time, and had spent most of it alone at home, mainly in bed, occasionally in front of the television or the computer. As for human contact, I’d lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other, and I’d been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I’d got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let’s-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. Forgotten, at least, until the Chinese woman and her daughter had reminded me. It may sound like a strange thing to say, but their closeness, their intimacy had been the first thing I’d seen in six months which had given me hope. Had made me feel, even, that my luck might be about to turn.

And then, that very next day at the airport, something else happened that gave me exactly the same feeling. I was standing in the queue, waiting to check in, and hoping that I would be checked in at a particular desk, which was being staffed by a friendly-looking woman, a brunette with hazel eyes and an unforced smile. I wanted it to be her because she looked like the kind of person who might – just might – offer you an upgrade if you asked nicely enough. Anyway, I didn’t get her. Instead I found myself dealing with a grey-haired, overtanned guy of about my own age, or perhaps even older, who had no interest in making small talk and rarely looked up from his work to make eye-contact. It seemed pretty clear that I was on a hiding to nothing here. But I couldn’t stop myself from trying, all the same.

‘Busy flight?’ I heard myself ask.

‘Pretty busy,’ he answered.

‘No chance of an upgrade, then?’ I said, and he grunted with laughter.

‘If I had a dollar for everybody who asked me that …’

‘Happens a lot, does it?’

‘All the time, mate. All the time.’

‘So how do you decide?’

‘What?’ he said, looking up.

‘How do you decide who gets an upgrade, and who doesn’t?’

‘I guess,’ he said, staring at me directly and appraisingly, before lowering his eyes again, ‘I have to like the look of whoever’s doing the asking.’

He said nothing more, and I felt crushed into silence. It wasn’t until I had finished checking in, watched my suitcase sway off into oblivion and walked a few yards away from the desk that I thought to check my two boarding cards (one for each leg of the journey) and realized that he had upgraded me – to something called Premium Economy class. I looked back at the man to show my gratitude. He was busy with the next passenger, but he still found time to glance across at me. His expression remained blank – even surly – and yet he winked at me before returning his gaze to the computer screen in front of him.

Two hours later, at about four-thirty in the afternoon, Sydney time, I was sipping my second glass of champagne, waiting for take-off, and contemplating the delights of the journey ahead.

I had a seat next to the aisle; there was one other seat next to mine, a window seat, currently empty. The seats were wide and well-padded, and I had plenty of leg room. I felt an almost sensual glow of pleasure at the thought of the pampering I could look forward to. Thirteen hours to Singapore, which would include dinner, a few more glasses of champagne to wash it down, a choice of more than 500 movies and TV shows on the entertainment console in the seat-back, and perhaps a light snooze somewhere along the way. Then a couple of hours’ stopover at Singapore airport, back on to a different plane, a large whisky, some sleeping pills, and I would be out like a light until we reached Heathrow the following morning. Couldn’t be better.

At least, that’s how it should have been. The trouble was, as I said, that seeing the Chinese woman and her daughter had unexpectedly reawakened my need for human contact. I wanted to talk. I was desperate to talk.

No surprise, then, that when a pale, overweight businessman in a light grey suit squeezed past me with the most cursory nod of apology, and settled into the adjacent window seat, I felt an overwhelming urge to engage him in conversation. It was a misguided urge, I have to say. If my experience in sales had taught me anything, over the years, it was how to read people’s faces, so it should really have been pretty obvious that this aloof and weary-looking stranger had little interest in talking to me, and would have much preferred to be left alone with his newspapers and his laptop. But I suppose the truth is that I did notice it, and purposely chose to ignore the fact.

The businessman took a minute or two to settle into his chair and get comfortable. Once settled, he realized that he had left his computer in a bag in the overhead locker, so then he had to get up again and there was some more slightly breathless tugging and manipulating to be done before we were both back in our places. Then he flipped open the laptop and almost at once started typing furiously. After about five minutes he stopped typing, glanced quickly over the words on the screen, pressed a final button with a firm, almost theatrical gesture, then sighed and sat back in his chair, panting a little bit as the computer shut itself down. He turned his head towards me, not really looking at me; but the gesture was enough. I took it as my doorway into conversation, even if he hadn’t meant it that way.

‘All done?’ I said.

He looked blankly at me, obviously not expecting to be addressed. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but then he managed: ‘Uh-huh.’

‘Last-minute emails?’ I ventured.

‘Yep.’

His accent seemed to be Australian, although it was pretty hard to tell just from the words ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘Yep’.

‘You know what I love about aeroplanes?’ I asked, undaunted. ‘They’re the last place left to us where we can be totally inaccessible. Totally free. No one can phone you or text you on an aeroplane. Once you’re in the air, nobody can send you an email. Just for a few hours, you’re away from all of that.’

‘True,’ said the man, ‘but not for much longer. There are already some airlines where you can send emails and use the net from your own laptop. And they’re talking about letting passengers use their mobiles soon. Personally, I can’t wait. What you like about flying is just what I hate about it. It’s dead time. Completely dead.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It just means that if we want to communicate with someone during a flight, it has to be done directly. You know, like – talking. It’s a chance to get to know other people. New people.’

He glanced across at me as I said this. Something in his glance told me that the chance of getting to know me was one that he might have passed up without too many spasms of regret. But the rebuff that I was expecting didn’t come. Instead he held out his hand, and said gruffly: ‘The name’s Charles. Charles Hayward. Friends call me Charlie.’

‘Maxwell,’ I returned. ‘Max, for short. Maxwell Sim. Sim, like the actor.’ I always said this when introducing myself, but usually, unless I was talking to a British person of a certain age, the reference would go over their heads, and I would have to add: ‘Or like a SIM card.’

‘It’s good to know you, Max,’ said Charlie; then picked up his newspaper, turned away from me, and began reading it, starting at the financial pages.

Well, that wouldn’t do. You can’t sit right next to someone for thirteen hours and ignore them completely, can you? In fact, not just thirteen, but twenty-four hours – because I noticed from the boarding card lying on his table that Charlie and I had been seated together on the second leg of the flight as well. It simply wouldn’t be human to sit in silence for all that time. I was pretty sure, anyway, that, if I made a big enough effort, I would manage to draw him out. Now that we’d exchanged a few words, I realized that he didn’t look unfriendly, as such – just rather stressed out and overworked. He must have been somewhere in his mid-fifties: over dinner he told me that he’d grown up in Brisbane and now held a fairly high-powered position in the Sydney office of a multinational corporation which was starting to experience financial difficulties. (This, I suppose, was the reason he wasn’t flying Business Class.) He was on his way to London for crisis talks with some of the other senior figures: he didn’t specify what the financial difficulties were, of course (why would he, to someone like me?), but apparently it was all to do with leverage. His company had taken out loans which were over-leveraged, or under-leveraged, or something like that. At one point when he was trying to explain this to me he started to look quite animated, and I thought there was a chance he might become positively chatty, but when he realized that I knew nothing about leverage, and had no real understanding of any financial instrument more complicated than an overdraft or a deposit account, he seemed to lose interest in me, and from then on, it became increasingly difficult to get more than a few words out of him. It didn’t help that he’d drunk several glasses of champagne and a number of beers with his lunch, and was beginning to look even more tired than he did before. The other problem was that, as he grew more and more taciturn, I did the opposite, and – as if terrified by the possibility of silence between us – started to turn garrulous, over-talkative, and began pouring out confessions and confidences to this new acquaintance which I’m sure he must have found boring, if not a little embarrassing.

It all began when I told him: ‘You’re so lucky, you know – living in Sydney. What an amazing city. So different to where I live … ’

I left a short silence, which he finally broke with the dutiful question: ‘Don’t you live in London, then?’

‘No, not London exactly. Watford.’

‘Ah, Watford,’ he repeated. It was hard to tell whether he was investing the word with curiosity, disdain, sympathy or anything else.

‘Have you been to Watford?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe I have. I’ve been to some great cities. Paris. New York. Buenos Aires. Rome. Moscow. Never Watford, for some reason.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for Watford,’ I insisted, with a defensive edge to my voice. ‘Not many people know that it’s twinned with Pesaro, an extremely attractive Italian town, on the Adriatic coast.’

‘I’m sure it’s a marriage made in heaven.’

‘Sometimes,’ I continued, ‘I do ask myself why I ended up living in Watford. I’m from Birmingham, originally, you see. I suppose it came about because I got this job a few years ago with a toy company, based in St Albans, and Watford’s pretty close to there, as you probably know. Or perhaps you don’t. Anyway, they’re right next to each other. Couldn’t be handier, really, if for any reason you wanted to go from one to the other. Mind you, I stopped working for that company pretty soon after moving to Watford, which is ironic, when you think about it, because after that I started working at a department store in Ealing, which is actually further from Watford than St Albans is. Not much further, you understand, just another .… well, ten or fifteen minutes, if you’re driving. Which I usually was, because it’s quite hard to get from Watford to Ealing by public transport. Surprisingly hard, as a matter of fact. But I certainly don’t regret taking that job – the job in Ealing, I mean – because that was how I met my wife, Caroline. Well, my ex-wife Caroline, I suppose she will soon be, because we separated a few months ago. I say separated, but what happened, really, was that she told me she didn’t want to be with me any more. Which is fine, you know, that’s her prerogative, you’ve got to respect that kind of decision, haven’t you, and she’s … you know, she’s very happy now, she’s with our daughter Lucy, they’ve moved back up north, and that seems to suit them, because for some reason, I don’t know why, Caroline never really seemed to take to Watford, she never seemed entirely happy there, which I think is a shame, because, you know, there’s something good to be found everywhere, isn’t there?, which isn’t to say that, living in Watford, you wake up every morning and think to yourself, Well, life may be a bit shit, but look on the bright side, at least I’m in Watford, I mean it’s not as if Watford is the sort of place where the very fact that you’re living there gives you a reason to go on living, that would be overegging the pudding a bit, Watford just isn’t that sort of place, but it does have an excellent public library, for instance, and it does have The Harlequin, which is a big new shopping centre with some … terrific retail outlets, actually, really terrific, and it does also – now I come to think of it, and this will amuse you actually – well …’ (noticing his frozen expression, I wasn’t so sure) ‘… it might amuse you, anyway, it does also have Walkabout, which is a big, sort of themed bar, which has a big sign outside it offering to give you “The Awesome Spirit of Australia”, although, thinking about it, when you’re in there, it never really feels as though you’re in Australia, you never really forget that you’re in Watford, to be perfectly honest, but then if you’re like me, and you like living in Watford anyway, what’s wrong with that?, I mean, some people are just happy with what they’re given, aren’t they, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, I mean, I wouldn’t say it had ever been my ambition to live in Watford, I don’t ever recall my father sitting me down on his knee and asking me, Son, have you ever thought about what you want to do when you grow up, and me saying back to him, Well, Dad, I don’t really mind, just as long as I end up living in Watford – I don’t remember any occasions like that, it’s true, but then, for one thing, my father just wasn’t that sort of person, he never did sit me down on his knee, as far as I can remember, he was never very tactile, or affectionate, or very … present really, in my life, in any meaningful way, from the age of about – well, for about as long as I can remember, I suppose – but anyway, my point is that just because Watford isn’t the sort of place you dream of moving to all your life, that doesn’t make it the sort of place you can’t wait to move out of, in fact I had a conversation along these lines a few years ago with my friend Trevor, Trevor Paige, who is one of my oldest friends actually, we go right back to the 1990s, right back to when I used to be a sales rep for this toy company that I was telling you about, he used to cover Essex and the East Coast, and I was doing London and the Home Counties, but I left that job after a year or two, as I said, to go to this department store in Ealing, but Trevor stayed on, you see, and we carried on being friends, mainly because he only lived a couple of streets from me in Watford, until about two years ago that is, because about two years ago we were having a drink together in Yates’s Wine Lodge in the precinct, and suddenly, he said, You know what, Max, I’m fed up, I am, I’m really pissed off, and I said, Pissed off?, what are you pissed off with, and he said, Watford, and I said, Watford?, and he said, Yes, I am, I am well and truly pissed off with Watford, I’ve had it up to here with Watford, I’ve lived in Watford for eighteen years now and to be perfectly frank I really think I’ve seen everything that Watford has to offer and it can truly be said that Watford holds no further delights or surprises in store, and I’ll go further than that and say that if I don’t get out of Watford soon I shall probably kill myself or die of boredom or frustration or something, which was a huge surprise to me I must say, because I’d always thought that Watford suited Trevor and Janice – that’s his wife’s name, Janice – down to the ground, and in fact that was one of the things that Trevor and I had always had in common, really, the fact that we were both quite partial to Watford and more than partial, actually, we were both quite fond of Watford, you know, a lot of our best memories and the most treasured … shared moments in our friendship were associated with Watford, like for instance the fact that we’d got married in Watford and our children had been born in Watford, and to be honest I thought that Trevor had really just lost it that night and it was the alcohol talking, and I can remember thinking to myself, No, Trevor will never leave Watford, he can talk the walk but he can’t walk the … talk, or take the walk or something, anyway, I thought he’d never go through with it, but credit where it’s due, there was more to Trevor than I thought, and it hadn’t all been bluster, he wanted a clean break with Watford and a clean break with Watford was what he got, and six months later he and Janice moved to Reading, where he got this new job – a very good new job, by the sound of it – with a company that makes toothbrushes, or imports them anyway, I think they import them from overseas, but they distribute them all over the UK, and not just regular toothbrushes but specialist toothbrushes with quite, you know, innovative designs, and also dental floss and mouthwash and a number of other oral hygiene products, which is actually quite a fast-growing … Erm, excuse me?’

I’d become aware that somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned round and saw that it was one of the stewardesses.

‘Sir?’ she said. ‘Sir, we need to have a word with you, about your friend.’

‘My friend?’

I didn’t know who they meant at first. Then I realized that she must be talking about Charlie Hayward. There was another stewardess standing beside her, and a male flight attendant. They didn’t look happy. I remembered that there’d been a bit of fuss a few minutes earlier, when one of them had come to take his tray away, but I’d been busy talking, and hadn’t taken much notice. Anyway, as they now informed me, it was impossible to be sure of the exact timing – not until they’d found out if there was a doctor on the plane – but apparently he’d been dead for at least five or ten minutes.

It was a heart attack, of course. It usually is.

The airline handled it all very delicately, I must say. A week after I’d got home, they sent me a letter, letting me know a few extra details which I have to say were comforting, very comforting. They told me that Charlie Hayward had suffered from heart problems for some time – this was his third attack, they said, in the last ten years – so the news hadn’t come as a complete shock to his wife, although of course she was devastated. He had two daughters, both in their twenties. The body was flown back home from Singapore and he was cremated in Sydney. On the way out to Singapore, though, they’d had no choice but to keep him in the same seat, right next to me. They put a blanket over him and said that I could come and sit with them if I liked, on one of the staff seats near to the galley, but I said no thanks, it was OK. Somehow I thought that would have been rude, disrespectful. Call me fanciful, if you like, but I felt he would have appreciated the company.

Poor old Charlie Hayward. He was the first person I’d really managed to speak to, after taking my decision to reconnect with the world. Not a very auspicious start.

However, things were about to get better.