The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

I wasn’t sure that I did. I had already learned quite enough about my father and what he did with his bodily fluids to be going on with.

– Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

I glanced down at the map screen. There I still was, a little red arrow, pluckily making its way along the A461. Advancing upon my destination inch by inch. How insignificant it made me look, and feel. I thought of those satellites, thousands of miles up in the sky, looking down upon me and millions like me, looking down upon all those people rushing around here and there on their individual, everyday, ultimately pointless errands. The incomprehensibility, the horror of it suddenly came over me and made me shiver: I felt a momentary hollowness in my stomach, as if I was standing in a lift that had started to plummet.

‘Steady on there,’ I said – partly to Emma, partly to myself. ‘Don’t go down that route. You can go crazy thinking about stuff like that.’

I tried to concentrate on something more immediate – the landscape around me. Emma and I were entering Staffordshire now. We had left the urban dreariness of Walsall behind, and had entered upon more restful, leafier territory. The occasional houses dotted on either side of the road were built of that distinctive Staffordshire red brick, and every so often the road would rise gently and pass over a canal, its walls built of the same brick, part of an elaborate network which testified mournfully to a now vanished industrial past. My grandparents – that is to say, my dad’s mother and father – had lived in this area right up until their deaths (within a few months of each other) in the late 1970s, so I was dimly familiar with it. It was part of the lost landscape of my childhood. Not that we’d ever visited my grandparents very much. My father had never been close to his parents. He had kept them at a distance, just as he did with everyone else.

– Heading slightly right at the roundabout, take second exit.

I wouldn’t go through Lichfield itself, not through the centre. I would skirt the city on its eastern side. In days gone by, before motorways, before by-passes, travelling through England must actually have involved visiting places. You would drive along high streets (or ride your horse along them, if we’re going to go way back) and stop at pubs in the town centre (or staging posts or coaching inns or whatever they used to be called). Now, the entire road network seemed to be set up to prevent this from happening. The roads were there to stop you from meeting people, to ensure that you passed nowhere near any of the places where humanity congregates. A phrase came to me, then – a phrase that Caroline was fond of repeating. ‘Only connect.’ I think it was from one of the fancy writers that she was always trying to get me to read. It occurred to me now that whoever designed England’s roads had precisely the opposite idea in mind: ‘Only disconnect.’ Sitting here in my Toyota Prius, with only Emma for company, I was cocooned from the rest of the world. Not only did I not have to interact with other people, the roads saw to it that I didn’t even have to see them if I didn’t want to. Just how my father would have liked it – the sad, miserable bastard.

‘Not that I give a flying fuck about him any more,’ I said to Emma. ‘Why should I waste any more energy thinking about him? The only thing that makes me angry is that he frightened Alison off. Supposing she and I had gone out together that afternoon? What would that have led to? She might have been my girlfriend. We might have got engaged. We might have got married and had children. My whole life might have been different.’

– Proceed for about half a mile on the current road.

‘Still, what’s the use? “Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. The most painful words in the language.” That’s another quotation, isn’t it? Where did I get that one from?’

– In two hundred yards, left turn.

‘I remember – it’s from Caroline’s story. Christ, now I’ve even started quoting my own wife’s fiction back at myself. Although why I call it fiction I don’t know, since all the treacherous cow did was to take something from our life together – our shared life – something personal, something private, for fuck’s sake – and turn it into some nice bit of writing that all her friends at the Kendal creative writers’ group can ooh and aah over before they start knocking back the Pinot Grigio.’

My voice had risen to a shout. I knew it was wrong to have lost my temper in this way in front of Emma, so I pressed the map button and allowed her calming voice to take over for a while, guiding me with no fuss or difficulty to the road where my father’s flat was located. It was on the outskirts of Lichfield. Occasionally, out of my passenger window, I saw distant glimpses of the famous cathedral, but otherwise there was nothing to remind me that I was skirting around one of England’s more picturesque cities, the birthplace of Dr Johnson if I remember rightly. We had to drive for a long time down a monotonous, single-carriageway road, lined on both sides with terraced houses from the interwar years, until we reached a busy junction where Emma told me to go ‘Sharp left at the roundabout – take first exit’. This took you into a quiet backwater of residential streets, dominated by three imposing, eight-storey apartment blocks overlooking the main arterial Eastern Avenue. It was hard to say when these might have been built: postwar? They looked like council blocks, but good-quality council blocks. There were balconies on every floor and the buildings looked clean and well maintained. ‘Your destination is ahead,’ Emma told me, so I thanked her and parked the car in a bay at the side of the road and turned off the ignition. Then I looked up at the middle of the three apartment blocks. This was where my father’s flat was supposed to be. I felt a tightness in my whole body. I was stiff with apprehension.

Before walking over to the main entrance, I took out my video camera and filmed for about twenty seconds, panning all over the building, left and right, up and down. It was the first time I’d used the camera, but it seemed pretty easy to operate. I’m not quite sure why I did it, though: partly to calm my nerves, perhaps, and partly because I thought my father might like to see the footage the next time we met, whenever that would be. At any rate, it was hardly going to be of much use to Lindsay or Alan Guest for their promotional video. Afterwards I put the camera back in the glove compartment and locked the car.

It’s odd that when I think back to that morning, now, and remember myself walking across the expanse of asphalt in front of the tower block, it feels as though it was all happening in complete silence. And yet, obviously, there is no such thing as complete silence any more. Not in England. So there must have been the rumble of traffic from the Eastern Avenue, or the distant wail of police sirens, or the crying of a baby in a pushchair two streets away, but that’s not how I remember it. All was stillness. All was mystery.

I took the lift up to the fourth level and emerged into a dark, featureless corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and walls painted an intimidating shade of deep brown. The little windows at either end of the corridor admitted just a hint of the grey, late-morning light: two feeble glows in the distance to my left and my right, as I walked over to the doorway of my father’s flat, full of trepidation, my footsteps so light and measured that they barely made a sound. I took the keys that Mr Byrne had given me and tried to fit one of them into the lock – which in itself was quite hard to locate, in this gloom. The key didn’t seem to fit. Nor did the other two on Mr Byrne’s key ring. I tried each of them again, one after the other, but two of them didn’t fit at all, while the other one did – with a fair amount of forcing – but refused to turn.

I remembered Mrs Byrne’s comment, as we’d said goodbye yesterday evening, that she didn’t think I’d been given the right keys. I had taken no notice at the time, taking it simply to be the wittering of a confused old woman,