The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

‘So you’re Rochester, are you?’ I asked, stroking his head as he nuzzled against me eagerly. ‘What a cute little thing you are, eh?’

‘How did you know he was called Rochester?’ Caroline asked, putting my cup of tea down on the kitchen table next to me.

‘Pardon?’

‘How did you know he was called Rochester? We only got him a couple of weeks ago.’

Of course, I had made a stupid mistake: the acquisition of this new pet was something Caroline had only mentioned to me in my guise as Liz Hammond. In the circumstances, there was only one lie I could tell. ‘Oh, I heard it from Lucy. She told me in an email.’

‘Really? I didn’t know Lucy had been emailing you.’

‘Well, you don’t know everything, do you?’

‘No, that’s true.’ She scraped the two used tea bags off a saucer and into the compost bin. ‘I don’t even know what you’re doing up here. Did you say you were on your way to Scotland?’

‘That’s right. Shetland, actually.’

‘Selling toothbrushes?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You’ve moved on a bit, then. I thought you’d never leave that job.’

‘Well, I suppose you need to get a kick up the arse every so often. Which is exactly what you gave me. When you and Lucy went, it … well, it brought a few things into focus, shall we say.’

Caroline looked down into her teacup. ‘I know I hurt you.’

I looked down into mine. ‘You were within your rights.’

We said no more on the subject. ‘Where are you taking her tonight?’ Caroline asked, more brightly.

‘I booked that Chinese in the centre of town,’ I said. (Lucy had always liked Chinese food.)

‘It’s supposed to be good. We haven’t tried it yet.’

‘I’ll let you know.’

We were distracted at this point by the arrival in the kitchen of a tall, willowy teenage girl, with dark tousled hair, slightly too much make-up, the obligatory surly pout and a seductive womanly figure insinuated beneath her sprayed-on jeans and midriff-revealing stripey top. It took me two or three seconds to realize that this was my daughter. She came over and kissed me brusquely.

‘Hi, Dad.’

‘Lucy? You look …’ I struggled for the right word, then decided there wasn’t one. ‘You look – wow. You look amazing.’

I could see that, since coming here, my daughter had transformed herself. If her mother seemed to have lost ten years, Lucy seemed to have gained at least four or five. She was unrecognizable as the little girl I had last seen one terrible Saturday morning when (could I think of this again? I had not tried to picture the scene once since it happened. It had been too painful to contemplate, and human beings have mechanisms for dealing with that kind of thing – the mind has fuses), since one terrible Saturday morning when Lucy and Caroline had driven away in that rented transit van, all their possessions packed away in the back, Cumbria-bound, both of them staring ahead in resolute silence, glassy-eyed, not returning my final wave …

There: I had thought of it again, at least. And now, as I realized how much Lucy seemed to have changed since that day, it was with a dawning sense of dread that I reached for the present on the kitchen table, and handed it over to her, unwrapped, still in its plastic carrier bag.

The memory of her response still pains me, even now. I still cringe whenever I think of it. Opening the plastic bag and seeing the colouring book and the felt-tip pens, she did a momentary, barely noticeable double take, then said, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ and gave me a hug; and then her eyes flickered briefly over to Caroline’s, and they exchanged a glance – a tiny, slightly amused, despairing glance, that said – far more eloquently than if they had put it into words – ‘Poor old Dad: he doesn’t have a clue, does he?’

I glanced away and said, for no other reason than to fill the silence: ‘Come on out and have a look at my car before we go and eat. It’s got a built-in SatNav and everything.’

As if that would impress her.

Lucy told me that she didn’t like Chinese food any more, because it was full of monosodium glutomate, so I cancelled that booking and we went to an Italian restaurant in the same street instead. I noticed apprehensively that it wasn’t part of a chain, which of course meant a leap into the unknown. Apparently Lucy was a vegetarian now, so she ordered a vegetable lasagne and I resisted the temptation to go for a meat feast pizza and had mushroom risotto. It sounded pretty boring, but I didn’t want to upset her or make her feel that I had no sensitivity towards her convictions. Maybe if I smothered it with spoonfuls of parmesan cheese it wouldn’t taste too bad.

‘Well then,’ I began. ‘What’s it been like, moving up north?’

‘Good,’ said Lucy.

I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

‘The house looks nice,’ I ventured. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’

I waited for her to expand upon this. She didn’t.

‘And school?’ I said. ‘Have you made lots of new friends?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A few.’