The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

they made you want to drive faster, they obliged you to drive faster, because driving on them was such a boring experience. I had only been on the M40 for about fifteen minutes, but already I was bored. There was absolutely nothing to see, nothing to look at, apart from the little punctuation marks that broke up the motorway itself – roadsigns, chevrons, gantries, bridges, all of which merged into one indecipherable, meaningless sequence after a while anyway. There was countryside on both sides, but it was featureless: the occasional house, the occasional reservoir, the occasional glimpse of a distant town or village, but apart from that, nothing. It occurred to me that the areas bordering our motorways must make up a huge proportion of our countryside, and yet nobody ever visits them or walks through them, or has any experience of them other than the monotonous, regularly unfolding view you get through the car window. These areas are wastelands; unaccounted for.

‘Welcome Break, 3 Miles’, one of the signs said; so I decided to come off the motorway here, and have some lunch. The next services – operated by Moto – were another twenty miles away, and the ones beyond that were more than forty miles. I didn’t want to wait that long. Besides, even though I didn’t fancy Kentucky Fried Chicken at the moment, the face of Colonel Sanders beaming out at me from the welcome sign was somehow reassuring. So I entered the slip road at Junction 8A, negotiated the network of mini-roundabouts, and found myself looking for a parking space in a car park that was, at this time of day, full almost to bursting point. Eventually I slotted my Prius between a Ford Fiesta and a Fiat Punto, and turned off the ignition with a sense of relief.

It was 1.15, and I was hungry. All around me, people were heading for the main food hall – business people like me, mainly, wearing dark suits, collar and tie, sometimes with the jackets slung over their shoulders (although it was cold, today, and I for one was going to keep mine on). I felt a surge of well-being at the thought that I was part of something again: part of a nationwide process, part of a community – the business community – that was doing its bit, day in and day out, to keep Britain ticking over. We all had a part to play. Everybody here was involved in selling something, or buying something, or servicing or checking or costing or quantifying something. I felt connected again: back in the mainstream.

The services themselves were a perfect microcosm of how a well-functioning Western society should operate. All the basic human needs were catered for here: the need to communicate (there was a shop selling mobile phones and accessories) and the need to amuse yourself (there was a gaming area full of slot machines); the need to consume food and drink, and the need to shit or piss it out again; and, of course, the eternal, fundamental need simply to buy a whole load of stuff: magazines, CDs, cuddly toys, chocolate bars, DVDs, wine gums, books, gadgets of every description. What with the Days Inn located just across the car park, with its offer of cheap beds for the night, you could theoretically move into this service station and never need to leave. You could spend your whole life here, if you wanted to. Even the design was good. I’m old enough to remember what service stations used to be like in the 1970s and early 1980s. Horrible cheap plastic tables and unspeakable food outlets selling runny eggs and burgers swimming in grease. Here we had big picture windows looking out over a paved area with fountains tinkling away attractively; the tables were clean and modern-looking and some of them even had individual table lamps mounted on elegantly curved supports. Some thought had gone into all this. And the choice of food! There was Burger King, of course, and KFC, but if you were a bit more health-conscious than that, a big sign announced that ‘I ¦ Healthy Food’, and directed you towards counters where all manner of salads and fresh-looking sandwiches were available. Not to mention an outlet called Coffee Primo, which offered latte, cappuccino, mocha, hot chocolate, espresso, americano, vanilla cream frappe, caramel cream frappe, Twinings teas, a couple of dozen other caffeine- laden options, and of course the ubiquitous paninis.

Despite this plethora of choice, unimaginable (when you think about it) a generation ago, before Thatcher and Blair set about transforming our society, I decided to have a hamburger. Sometimes a burger is exactly what you need. No extras, no frills. What’s more, at this place, you didn’t even have to talk to anyone to get your hamburger. You did it all on your debit card, selecting your order on a machine, putting your card into the terminal and then taking the receipt to a collection point. Worked very well, too. My burger was ready within about thirty seconds. When I saw it, though, I felt a bit guilty for not ordering something a bit more healthy so I went and stood in the queue at the sandwich counter and bought myself a bottle of pomegranate- and lychee-flavoured spring water, which cost ?2.75. Then I took my dinner over to one of the tables next to the big picture windows.

I had brought a fair amount of reading matter with me. First of all there were the manuals for the Prius – one for the car itself, and one devoted entirely to the onboard SatNav. There were also the instructions for the bluetooth headset I had been provided with, which connected up to the car somehow and could be controlled from the steering wheel. Trevor and Lindsay had been especially keen that I should get this up and running as soon as possible, because they wanted to be able to keep in regular contact. I wondered, in fact, if it was too early to phone Lindsay right now. Perhaps it was. There was hardly an urgent need for her to know that I had reached Oxford Services after an hour and a quarter’s driving. And then I had to study the manual for my video camera, which looked pretty complicated too. I would keep that for later, probably. Best to concentrate on the SatNav for the time being. I sat and read the manual for about ten minutes, until I felt reasonably sure that I had grasped all of the essentials. I felt confident now that I understood enough to use it on the next stage of the journey, as far as Birmingham.

When I got back into the car, I turned on the ignition and pressed the ‘I Agree’ icon as soon as it flashed up on the map screen. Then I pressed the ‘Destination’ button and rather laboriously entered the address of Mr and Mrs Byrne on the touchscreen display. Within a couple of seconds the computer had located their house and was offering me a choice of three different routes from my current position. I chose what seemed to be the quickest one, straight up the M40 and then northbound into Birmingham along the Bristol Road. And then, as soon as I had made this selection, I heard a female voice say:

– Please proceed to the highlighted route, and the route guidance will start.

It wasn’t so much what she said, it was the way that she said it.

Most people, I would say, are attracted to other people on the basis of their looks. And of course, I’m as susceptible to that as anybody else. But the first thing I find really attractive in a woman, nine times out of ten, is her voice. That was what I noticed about Lindsay Ashworth, the first time we met – her lovely Scottish accent. And, going back further than that, it was the first thing I’d noticed about Caroline, as well – her flat Lancastrian vowels, which were completely unlike anything I was expecting to hear from someone who in every other way appeared to be so elegant and posh and metropolitan. Now, this may sound ridiculous, but even those two women, even Lindsay and Caroline, did not have voices as appealing as the one that came out of this machine. This was, quite simply, a beautiful voice. Breathtakingly beautiful. Probably the most beautiful I had ever heard. Don’t ask me to describe it. You’ll have realized by now that I’m not great at this sort of thing. It was an English voice – not classless, exactly – more what used to be called Received Pronunciation or ‘BBC English’. There was something slightly haughty about it, I suppose. It had an undertone that might even be described as a little bit bossy. But at the same time, it was calm, measured and infinitely reassuring. It was impossible to imagine this voice sounding angry. It was impossible to imagine hearing it without feeling soothed and comforted. It was a voice that told you everything was right in the world – your world, at any rate. It was a voice without a single note of ambiguity or self-doubt: a voice you could trust. Perhaps that was what I liked about it so much. It was a voice you could trust.

I put the car into Drive mode and made my way out of the car park. As I left the service station I passed a notice which said: ‘Thank you for visiting Oxford Services. Your visit and registration number have been captured on CCTV.’ More evidence, if any was needed, that I was not as alone as I’d thought.

‘What do you think of that, then?’ I found myself saying to the voice on the map. ‘Bit sinister, isn’t it?’