The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

from one of the bedrooms upstairs. Not wishing to wake whoever was asleep, I tiptoed up the stairs and found that the noise was coming from the spare bedroom, which I remembered as being a sparsely furnished room with nothing much in it apart from a wardrobe and a single bed. Who would be in there, and why would they be sleeping?

The door was ajar. I silently pushed it further open and looked inside.

It was Mr Sim, and I can only imagine that he must have had a heavy Sunday lunch a couple of hours earlier – perhaps washed down with some red wine – because I cannot believe that he meant to fall asleep in the attitude in which I found him. He was lying on his side, facing the door. His trousers and pants were pulled halfway down his legs and in his right hand he held a crumpled tissue. His penis lay wrinkled and flaccid between his legs, and from its purple tip a little strand of semen dribbled down onto the pale-blue bedspread. Purple and pale blue – Aston Villa colours: that was the first silly thought that came into my head. Weird how the mind works. The only other thing I could see on the bedspread was a photograph: a glossy colour print of the picture he had taken on the small shingle beach next to Coniston Water. I noticed that he had folded it neatly and carefully in half, so that the figure of Chris was hidden and the only person you could see was me, all wet and cold in my skimpy orange bikini. It was almost as if the picture had been deliberately composed – the perfect symmetry of the two of us standing there, one on either side of the frame – in order to make this possible.

I could only have glimpsed Mr Sim in this position for a couple of seconds before I heard the front door open again, and voices coming from downstairs. Quickly I withdrew – only just in time, for I could hear him waking with a start, and hurriedly making himself decent.

I heard Max and his mother walking through into the kitchen. They had left the front door open so I went downstairs silently and slipped outside. I did not want to talk to them and I did not want them to see me. And I certainly didn’t want to come face to face with Mr Sim.

After that I made it my business to keep out of the way of Max and his family for a long time. I think I even managed to avoid seeing them at Christmas, somehow or other, even though in the normal course of events we always saw each other at Christmas, usually spending most of Boxing Day together. Nobody seemed to notice that I was avoiding them, so nobody asked me for an explanation. It was hard on Max, of course, but I knew that he would probably get a crush on some other girl, sooner rather than later. Things between us could have been very different, if he hadn’t been so fixated on the idea of starting a fire that last evening at the campsite. That had been our great opportunity, and once it had passed, maybe there was no going back anyway. What would I have said to him, that Sunday afternoon, if we had gone for our walk on the golf course together? I really don’t know. All I know is, after I had seen his father like that – after I had realized that he must have been watching me, and lusting after me, all week, and after I had realized what his reasons were for taking that photograph – I could not have got myself involved with Max, however much I liked him.

In conclusion, therefore, what has writing this essay taught me? I suppose it has reinforced my conviction that the consequences of privacy violation can be very destructive and hurtful. In this case, they destroyed the possibility of my ever having a relationship with Max, despite the fact that, prior to these events, I had liked him very much, and even found myself attracted towards him.

Alison Byrne

February 1980

14

– Straight on at the roundabout – take second exit.

‘Well, Emma, this is just a great situation, isn’t it?’

– Exit coming up.

‘I now have a mental image of my father which I’m probably never going to be able to get out of my head.’

– In two hundred yards, right turn.

‘And just to cap it off, tomorrow night I’m going to be having dinner with the woman who put it there.’

– Right turn coming up.

‘I really didn’t think I could get any more angry with my father. I really couldn’t see how he could sink any further in my estimation. But – well done, Dad. You’ve managed it! Not just tossing yourself off over a picture of one of my friends, but managing to get caught doing it! Way to go, Dad. Way to fucking go. Are there any other ways you’d care to fuck up my life? Because you might as well finish the job off now that you’ve made such a good start.’

I pulled furiously on the steering wheel as I made the right turn, and took the curve much too fast. In the process I nearly clipped the bumper of a four-wheel-drive that was waiting to pull out from the road I was turning into. The driver tooted her horn at me. I glared back.

– Proceed for about four miles on the current road.

I had left Walsall behind, by now, and was making my way north-east along the A461. According to Emma, I was about eight miles away from Lichfield: nineteen minutes’ driving, at my current speed. It was another grey morning, slightly windy, slightly wet. The onscreen display told me that the temperature outside was 5 degrees Celsius. There was not much traffic on the roads. I had avoided the motorways so far this morning. Motorways, I realized, made you feel disconnected from the landscape around you. This morning I wanted to drive through real places: I wanted to see shops and houses and office blocks, I wanted to see old ladies pulling shopping trolleys along the street and clusters of surly teenagers gathered around bus shelters. I didn’t want to be like my father any more: hiding away from life and pleasuring himself in shameful secrecy while his wife and son were out taking a Sunday-afternoon walk. I wasn’t prepared to think of myself as a pathetic figure: not just yet.

I was driving too fast. I couldn’t keep my foot from pressing down on the accelerator. I had only averaged fifty- two miles to the gallon so far today.

– Proceed for about three miles on the current road.

What was I going to find when I opened the door to this flat, anyway? My father hadn’t been there for more than twenty years. Had anybody else been inside it in that time, apart from Mr and Mrs Byrne? All I knew was that somewhere in there I would find a blue ring binder, with the words Two Duets written on the spine, containing a bunch of incomprehensible poems and a story which would apparently explain why I wouldn’t have been born if it hadn’t been for the proximity of two London pubs both called The Rising Sun. Did I really want to discover any more, at this stage, about the circumstances of my birth or, worse still, my conception?