The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

passengers were asleep, and the cabin lights were giving out a strange, muted sort of twilight glow. On the screen in front of me, a perpetually shifting map showed the plane’s progress towards London: it told me that we were, at that moment, somewhere over the Arabian Sea, a few hundred miles west of Bangalore. As with anything technological, I had no idea how this miraculous device worked. Forty years ago, it seemed Donald Crowhurst could hide out for months in the mid-Atlantic, a speck in the ocean, surrounded by limitless miles of open sea but somehow hidden from everyone else on the planet. Nowadays, any number of orbiting satellites were trained on us every minute of the day, pinpointing our locations with unimaginable speed and accuracy. There was no such thing as privacy any more. We were never really alone. That should have been a comforting thought, really – I’d had enough of loneliness, more than enough, over the last few months – but somehow it wasn’t. After all, even when he’d been thousands of miles out to sea, even when there had been whole oceans lying between them, Crowhurst had still been bound to his wife, by invisible cords of feeling. He could have been certain, at almost any time of the day or night, that she would have been thinking of him. Yet here I was, with a kind, affectionate young woman sitting right next to me, sleeping by my side (the most trusting and intimate thing you can do with another person, I sometimes think) and the sad truth was that any closeness I felt between us was likely to be temporary. At the end of the flight, it would probably be gone.

I read the letter from Poppy’s uncle again, during those wakeful hours, and then a third time. It left me with far more questions than answers. Had Donald Crowhurst been a coward to do what he did? I found it hard to see it that way. He’d been only thirty-six when he set out on his voyage, and for my own part I still felt like a child by comparison, even though I was now forty-eight (having celebrated my birthday in Australia two weeks earlier, at a budget-priced Greek restaurant in Sydney, struggling to keep a conversation going with my father as usual). To be the master of a boat like that – let alone to convince yourself (and others) that you could pilot it single-handed around the globe, through the most dangerous seas on earth – suggested … what? Self-delusion? No, I didn’t think that Crowhurst had been deluded. Quite the opposite: by today’s standards, he seemed almost inconceivably mature and self-confident. Thirty-six years old! When I’d been in my mid-thirties, I was – like most of my friends – still agonizing over whether I was ready to have kids or not. Crowhurst had tackled that one long ago: he already had four. What was it about my generation? Why were we so slow to grow up? Our infancy seemed to stretch into our mid-twenties. At the age of forty we were still adolescents. Why did it take us so long to assume responsibility for ourselves – let alone for our children?

I yawned and felt my eyelids beginning to weigh heavy. The battery on Poppy’s computer was almost exhausted, too – about eight minutes to go, the meter said. I pressed the forward button in Picture and Fax Viewer and looked for one last time at the pictures of Donald Crowhurst she had scanned in. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about them that bothered me; something that gave me a little shiver of unrest. Besides the photo of the abandoned yacht, there were three other pictures: Crowhurst in his weatherproofs, setting sail from Teignmouth – the scene Poppy’s uncle had witnessed himself; Crowhurst towards the end of his voyage, a self-portrait, with moustache, and a new, sun-hardened look to his face; and a startlingly younger-looking Crowhurst on dry land, in front of the BBC cameras, being interviewed prior to his departure.

This last one was a close-up, and was the most unsettling. His face was turned partly away from the camera, looking downwards, lost in anxious thought. He was chewing nervously on the knuckle of his thumb. Here, already, he looked like a man in torment, as if all too aware that the image he was presenting to the world was a false one; that the truth behind it was darker, more dangerous, and too painful to confront. This was definitely the one – this was the picture that I found so disturbing. But why should it affect me that way?

Then it dawned on me. Of course – it was obvious, now that I’d noticed it.

He was the spitting image of my father.

Watford–Reading

6

I missed her.

Already I missed her.

Poppy had gone fifteen minutes ago and already I missed her dreadfully.

Should I read anything into the fact that she hadn’t wanted to come and have a coffee with me? Of course not. She’d had a long flight, and she was tired, and she wanted to get home. We’d said goodbye in the baggage reclaim area. A bad place to say goodbye. Noisy, chaotic, oppressive. But she only had hand luggage, and I had to wait for my case to come up on the carousel, so that was where it had to be, our goodbye. After that, I collected my case, wheeled it outside, saw the queue for taxis (which was at least fifty-strong) and wheeled it back in again.

I took the escalator up to the departures lounge and bought myself a cappuccino. I think it was the hottest drink I had ever been served in my life. Twenty minutes passed before I even dared to put my lips to it. In the meantime I watched the comings and goings of the other passengers. Nobody, apart from me, seemed to be travelling alone. This can’t have been true, objectively speaking, but it was how things appeared that morning. After about ten minutes a man sat at the table next to mine. He looked roughly my age, apart from the fact that his hair was grey, almost white; and he was alone, so I was almost on the point of saying something to him, just for the relief of talking to someone again, but then his wife and two daughters turned up. The two daughters were very pretty. I guessed that the younger one was about eight, the older one twelve or thirteen – close to Lucy’s age. His daughters were very pale; in fact the whole family was very pale. I listened in to their conversation for a little while. He was going to Moscow for a few days, and his family had come to see him off. He sounded quite nervous about this trip, for some reason, but his wife was trying to be reassuring about it, and kept saying things like, ‘You’ve done this sort of thing dozens of times before.’ He mentioned that he was going to have to give lots of interviews, and I wondered if he might be famous, but I didn’t recognize him. They left after another ten minutes or so.

My cappuccino was still too hot to drink. I picked up my mobile phone and retrieved Poppy’s number from the memory and looked at it. I wished I’d been able to take a picture of her before she left, but I knew that it would have felt like a weird favour to ask. It would have put her off. So instead, all I had was her mobile number. A face, a personality, a pair of lively eyes, a body, a human being, all reduced to eleven digits on a screen. All somehow contained in that magical combination of numbers. Better than nothing, at any rate. At least I had a means of contacting her. At least Poppy was in my life, now.

I took a tentative sip of my cappuccino, which had been served to me twenty-five minutes earlier, recoiled as the still-scalding liquid sent scorching needles of pain through my lips, tongue and the roof of my mouth, and gave it up as a bad job. I dragged my suitcase out from under the table and went to try my luck with the taxi queue again.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning as I approached home. I was slumped in the back of a taxi, looking out at the monochrome grimness of urban Hertfordshire through sleepy eyes. It was the third week of February 2009, the skies were thick with cloud and to me, that morning, the world had never looked greyer, or felt chillier. I thought about the country I had left behind: so full of warmth, colour, vitality. The rich blue of the summer skies over Sydney; the dazzling play of light on the harbour waters. And now this. Watford, windswept and rainy.

‘Just drop me here, will you?’ I said to the taxi driver.

He looked at me in some puzzlement as I hauled my suitcase out of the front of the cab, and paid him his fare