The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

branch of Spaghetti House (one of my favourite chains, back in those days, though you don’t see so many of them any more) and while Caroline picked at her tagliatelle carbonara she told me that, when she was at university in Manchester, she’d got quite deeply involved with this man who was studying English in the same year as her. Then he’d got a job in London, working in a TV production company, so they’d both moved down and found themselves a flat in Ealing. Caroline’s real ambition was to write books – novels and short stories – so she took this job in the department store as a temporary thing, trying to get on with her writing in the evening and at weekends. Meanwhile, her boyfriend started an affair with someone he’d met at the production company, and fell madly in love with her, and within a couple of weeks he’d dumped Caroline and moved out, and she was left all by herself, living somewhere where she had no friends and doing a job in which she had no interest.

Well, the truth is obvious enough now, isn’t it? There’s a phrase, a cliche, for the state Caroline was in, back then: on the rebound. She liked me because I was being kind to her, and because I’d caught her at a low ebb, and because I probably wasn’t quite as crass and insensitive as the other guys in the canteen. But there’s no denying, in retrospect, that I was out of her league. In a way it’s amazing that we lasted as long as we did. But of course, you can’t see into the future. I usually have trouble seeing a couple of weeks ahead, never mind fifteen years. Back then, we were young and naive and at the end of that evening in the Spaghetti House, when I asked her if she’d like to drive out into the country with me at the weekend, neither of us had the slightest idea where it would lead and all I can remember now is the shining light of gratitude in her eyes as she said Yes.

Fifteen years ago. Is fifteen years a long time, or a short time? I suppose everything is relative. Set against the history of mankind, fifteen years is just the blink of an eye, but it also seemed that I had travelled a long way, an unimaginably long way, from the hope and excitement of that faraway first date in the Spaghetti House to the evening a few months ago, 14 February 2009, when (at the age of forty-eight) I found myself sitting alone at a restaurant in Australia, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind me, and I couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful Chinese woman and her little daughter who were playing cards together at their table. Caroline had left home by then. Walked out, I mean. She had been gone six months and she had taken our daughter, Lucy, with her. They had moved up north, to Kendal in the Lake District. What was it, finally, that drove her away? Just a long-standing build-up of frustration, I suppose. Apart from the birth of Lucy, it seemed that the last fifteen years hadn’t brought Caroline any of the things she’d been hoping for. The great novel remained unwritten. She hadn’t even managed to finish a short story, so far as I knew. Lucy’s arrival had put paid to a lot of that. Motherhood is pretty demanding, after all. I certainly couldn’t see why being married to me should stop her from writing anything, if that’s what she really wanted to do. Another thing that occurs to me is that Caroline might, deep down (and this is a painful thing to admit) have been a little bit ashamed of me. Of my job, to be more precise. I’d moved on, by now, to one of the biggest and most prestigious department stores in central London, where I was employed as an After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. It was an excellent job, as far as I could see. But maybe there was a part of her that thought the husband of an aspiring writer should do something a bit more … I don’t know – artistic? Intellectual? You’d think we might have discussed some of these issues but the saddest thing about our marriage, during the last few years, had been the almost complete lack of communication. We seemed to have forgotten the art of talking to each other, except in the form of screaming rows accompanied by the swapping of painful insults and the hurling of household objects. I won’t rehearse all the details but I do remember one of our exchanges, from the penultimate squabble or perhaps the one before that. We had begun by arguing over whether to use an abrasive scourer or a soft sponge to clean off the stainless steel surface of our cooker, and within about thirty seconds I heard myself telling Caroline that it was clear she didn’t love me any more. When she failed to deny it, I said, ‘Sometimes I don’t even think you like me that much,’ and do you know what she said to that? She said, ‘How can anybody like a man who doesn’t even like himself?’

Well, if she was going to talk in riddles, we were never going to get anywhere.

The Chinese woman and her daughter stayed at the restaurant for a long time. Considering how young the daughter was, it was surprising that they were still there at about ten-thirty. They’d finished eating ages ago and all that was keeping them there now was the card game. Most of the tables were empty, and soon it would be time for me to go back to Dad’s flat, as well. There were some things we needed to talk about before I caught my flight home the next afternoon. I needed a pee before leaving, though, so I stood up from my table and made my way to the gents’ in the basement.

I don’t like to pee standing up. Don’t ask me why. As far as I know, there was no traumatic incident when I was a child, getting molested in a public toilet or anything like that. In fact I don’t like to pee standing up even when there is no one else in the gents’, in case someone walks in when I’m halfway through, causing me to stop in mid-flow and turn myself off like a tap, and then have to walk out in a fury of frustration and embarrassment, with my bladder still half-full. So I sat down in one of the cubicles – after making the usual preparations, wiping the seat and so on – and that was when it really hit me. The loneliness. I was sitting, underground, in a tiny little box, tens of thousands of miles from home. If I were to have a sudden heart attack sitting on that toilet, what would be the consequence? Some member of the restaurant staff would probably find me just before they locked up. The police would be called and they would look at my passport and credit cards and somehow, I suppose, through the use of some international database, they would work out my connections to Dad and to Caroline, and they would phone them up and tell them. How would Caroline take the news? She’d be pretty upset, at first, but I’m not sure how deep that would go. I didn’t play much part in her life any more. It would be worse for Lucy, of course, but even she was growing steadily more distant: it was more than a month since I’d heard anything from her. And who else was there? There might be one or two passing tremors of feeling from friends or work colleagues, maybe, but nothing major. Chris, my old schoolfriend, might feel … well, something, some spasm of regret that we’d become estranged and hadn’t seen each other for so long. Trevor Paige would be sorry, genuinely sorry. So would Janice, his wife. But my passing wouldn’t send out many ripples, beyond that. A Facebook account gone inactive – but would any of my Facebook friends really notice? I doubted it. I was alone in the world, now, terribly alone. I would be flying home the next day, and pretty much all that would be waiting for me when I got there was an unlived-in flat full of Ikea furniture and three weeks’ worth of bills, bank statements and pizza delivery adverts. And now I was sitting by myself in a little wooden box, underground, in the basement of a restaurant beside Sydney harbour, and upstairs, just a few feet above my head, were two people who – however much they might be alone in the world, in other ways – at least had each other; at least were bonded to each other, with a strength and an intensity that was obvious to anyone who so much as glanced at them. I envied them for that, fiercely. The thought of it filled me with a sudden, overwhelming need to get to know this beautiful Chinese woman and her beautiful daughter, who loved each other so much. The prospect of walking away from this restaurant without attempting to introduce myself to them – to make them aware, somehow, that I existed – seemed intolerable.

And the amazing thing was that the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no reason why I shouldn’t actually do it. Why was I even hesitating, in fact? This was the very thing I was supposed to be good at. Before Caroline and Lucy left me, knocking me for six and turning me into a sort of involuntary hermit, I had built an entire career on my ability to get on with people. What else do you think an After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer does, after all? It’s more or less the very definition of the job. I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I knew how to put a woman at her ease. I knew that politeness, good manners and an unthreatening tone of voice would usually disarm even the wariest stranger.

And so that night – for the very first time since Caroline had walked out on me, six months earlier – I finally came to a decision: a strong one. Without even bothering to work out what I was going to say, I left the cubicle, gave my hands a cursory rinse, and climbed back upstairs with quick, resolute steps. I was breathing heavily and tense with nervousness but also a sense of freedom and relief.

But the Chinese woman and her daughter had paid their bill and gone.

2

My father was asleep when I got