The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

– Right turn coming up, she insisted.

I ignored her, and turned left. In a few hundred yards I saw what I had been looking for: a grey, pebbledashed house, disorientatingly similar to all its neighbours, with a meagre expanse of asphalt in front of it where an ancient green Rover 2000 had been parked. I pulled up opposite the house, on the other side of the road.

– In two hundred yards, make a U-turn, Emma suggested.

Without turning the engine off, I got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door side. I stood there for a while, leaning against the passenger door, looking across at the house. This was where I had lived for thirteen years, starting in 1967. Me, Mum and Dad. It hadn’t changed, not in the slightest. I stood looking at it for another two or three minutes, shivering slightly in the March breeze, then got back into the car and drove on.

‘Well, what was I supposed to think?’ I said, easing the car back on to the main A38 towards the city centre. ‘What was I supposed to feel? I haven’t seen that house for more than twenty years. That was where I grew up. That was where my childhood took place and to be honest I come back and look at it now and I don’t feel that much. My childhood was nothing much to shout about. Like everything else about me, I suppose. Unexceptional. That’s what I should have on my gravestone. “Here lies Maxwell Sim. He was a pretty ordinary bloke really.” What an epitaph. No wonder Caroline got bored with me after a while. No wonder Lucy doesn’t want much to do with me. What did we do, the three of us, in that house for thirteen years that wasn’t done by millions of other families in identical houses up and down the country? What’s been the point of it all? That’s all I want to know, really. Not too much to ask, is it? What’s the point? What is the fucking point?’

– In half a mile, said Emma, bearing slightly left at the roundabout. Take first exit.

She had an answer for everything, that woman.

13

– Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

I was driving now past the old Longbridge factory. Or rather, I was driving now past the gaping hole in the landscape where the old Longbridge factory used to be. It was a weird experience: when you revisit the landscapes of your past, you expect to see maybe a few cosmetic changes, the odd new building here and there, the occasional lick of paint, but this was something else – an entire complex of factory buildings which used to dominate the whole neighbourhood, stretching over many square miles, throbbing with the noise of working machinery, alive with the figures of thousands of working men and women entering and leaving the buildings – all gone. Flattened, obliterated. And meanwhile, a big billboard erected in the midst of these swathes of urban emptiness informed us that, before too long, a phoenix would be rising from the ashes: a ‘major new development’ of ‘exclusive residential units’ and ‘retail outlets’ was on its way – a utopian community where the only things people would ever have to concern themselves with were eating, sleeping and shopping: no need to work any more, apparently, none of that tiresome stuff about clocking in at factory gates in order to do anything as vulgar as making things. Had we all lost our wits in the last few years? Had we forgotten that prosperity has to be based on something, something solid and tangible? Even to someone like me, who had done nothing more than skim the papers and the news websites over the last couple of weeks, it was pretty obvious that we were getting it badly wrong, that knocking down factories to put up shops wasn’t turning out to be such a great idea any more, that it wasn’t sensible to build an entire society on foundations of air.

– Proceed for about three-quarters of a mile on the current road.

I noticed that it was no longer necessary to drive through Northfield: they had found the money to build a new by-pass, so new in fact that even Emma didn’t seem to know about it. She became thoroughly confused as I weaved my way through its traffic lights and roundabouts, although once again, I had to admire the way that even as she gave contradictory pieces of advice and recalculated furiously, her tone remained completely unflappable. What a woman. Selly Oak provided her with no such problems, and she guided me expertly down Harborne Lane and Norfolk Road, all the way to the Hagley Road. I arrived there not long after three o’clock, and checked in to the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, where the single rooms cost little more than ?40 a night, well within Alan Guest’s budget. The room wasn’t very big, and it didn’t have a very nice view, but it was comfortable. I was on the first floor, at the back. There was a kettle and a couple of sachets of Nescafe so I made myself a coffee and lay on the bed for thirty minutes or so, recovering from my drive. I felt a bit lonely and thought about phoning Lindsay, but decided to leave it until the evening.

Mr and Mrs Byrne weren’t expecting me for another hour and a half. There was just time to drive to King’s Norton and visit the churchyard there, so that’s what I did. My mum’s grave was in good shape. I bought some flowers from the local Tesco Express and leaned them up against the headstone. I didn’t have a vase or anything like that. Barbara Sim, 1939–1985 was all it said. Dad had wanted to keep the wording simple, or so he had told me at the time. Forty-six years old. I was already older than that. I had outlived my own mother. And yet it seemed to me that it would take many more years before I ever felt as grown-up as my mother had always seemed to me. She had been twenty-two when I was born. Her final twenty-four years of life had been spent bringing me up, seeing me through into adulthood, and in that time she had devoted herself to me, selflessly. She had given me unconditional love. She may not have been that clever, she may not have had a fantastic education, she may not have understood my father’s poetry (neither did I, for that matter), but emotionally she had been wise beyond her years. Perhaps circumstances had forced her to be like that, or perhaps it was just that her generation, living always in the shadow of the war, somehow managed to grow up faster than mine did. Whatever the reason, I felt humbled now (yes, that really is the word – no other will do) to think what a great mother she had been. She made my own attempts at parenthood look pathetic.

1939–1985. It wasn’t enough. We should have written something else on her headstone, something more.

What, though?

‘She was a lovely woman, your mum. Donald and I always thought so. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t talk about her.’

Mrs Byrne finished pouring milk into my tea and added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, as requested. I noticed that her hands were shaking slightly. The onset of Parkinson’s, maybe? I picked up the tray of tea things and followed her back into the conservatory.

‘This is very intriguing,’ said Mr Byrne. He was examining the IP 009, holding it up to the failing afternoon light and scrutinizing it from every angle. ‘What’s your target? How many are you hoping to sell?’

‘She was always a delight to talk to. Made any social occasion go with a swing,’ said Mrs Byrne. She was still talking about my mother. I had noticed that it was difficult to keep a conversation going with Mr and Mrs Byrne, because they always talked about two completely different topics simultaneously.

‘Well, that’s not really the idea,’ I said (to Mr Byrne). ‘It’s not about how many I manage to sell. It doesn’t matter if I don’t sell any at all this week.’