The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

inside. I was even getting a little chilly myself, but still, I was glad that the Chinese woman and her daughter had chosen to stay out on the terrace, because it meant I could see them again just how I remembered them, with the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering in the background. I tried to watch them unobtrusively, just the occasional glance in their direction, not staring openly or anything like that. I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

At first I was simply glad to see them. I was happy to savour the overwhelming sense of rightness, and calm, that came over me when I first saw them walk on to the restaurant terrace. After all, even though the waiter had assured me, not so long ago, that they came to this restaurant regularly on the second Saturday of every month, I’d still not quite been able to bring myself to believe that they would be here tonight. So my first reaction had been one of relief, pure and simple. This was rapidly succeeded, all the same, by a growing sense of anxiety. The fact was that, even after thinking about it for hours, I’d still not been able to come up with an appropriate way of introducing myself to them. Coming out with a tired old line like, ‘Excuse me, but haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ would get me nowhere. If I said that the prospect of meeting them had been one of my main incentives for flying all the way over from London, on the other hand, it would probably freak them out. Was there anything I could tell them that might steer a middle ground between these two approaches? Perhaps if I were to tell them the truth: that I had first seen them at this restaurant two months ago, and ever since then they had become, for me, a sort of totem, a symbol of everything that a real relationship between two human beings should be, at a time when people seemed to be losing the ability to connect with one another, even as technology created more and more ways in which it ought to be possible … Well, I was going to get bogged down if I pursued that line of argument too far, but still, I reckoned that – with a bit of luck, if the right words managed to come to me somehow – this might just about be a feasible way of tackling it. And I had better hurry up, if I wanted any chance of speaking to them this evening. It was getting late, and the little girl was beginning to look tired, and any minute now they would probably be leaving. Already their card game seemed to be over and they were talking and laughing together again, having a friendly little quarrel about something or other while the Chinese woman looked around to see where the waiter was, presumably to ask for the bill.

So – this was it. My heart pounding, I was just on the point of rising out of my seat and walking over to their table when something stopped me. Someone, I should say. For just at that moment, quite unexpectedly, my father walked out on to the restaurant terrace, and came over to my table.

Yes, my father. The last person I was expecting to see, at that moment. He was supposed to be in Melbourne with Roger Anstruther.

All right, I admit that I’ve left out some important parts of the story. It’s probably time to do a little back-tracking.

It was Saturday afternoon when I finally woke up in the hospital ward in Aberdeen. I woke up to find that there were two people sitting by my bedside: Trevor Paige and Lindsay Ashworth. They had come to bring me home.

The next day, Trevor and I travelled back to London together, by train. Lindsay drove down in the Prius. On the train to London, Trevor told me the news about Guest Toothbrushes: they had been forced into liquidation on Thursday morning, after the bank had refused to extend their lines of credit any further. The announcement had been made round about the time I was skirting the edges of Dundee, but nobody from the firm had been able to make contact with me. All ten members of staff had been made redundant, and the project to launch the new range at the British Dental Trade Association fair had, of course, been aborted. All Lindsay’s plans had come to nothing.

Back in Watford, it took me a few days to recover from my journey. I spent most of the next week in bed. Plenty of people came to visit me, I must say. Not just Trevor and Lindsay, but even Alan Guest himself, which I thought was a nice touch. He seemed to feel quite guilty about the way my part in the campaign had turned out, almost as if it was his personal responsibility. I told him that he should have no worries on that score. Poppy came to see me twice, bringing her uncle with her the second time. And at the weekend, things got even better, when I was lucky enough to witness a true miracle in the form of a visit from Caroline and Lucy. They didn’t stay the night, or anything like that, but even so: it was the first time they had been down to Watford since our separation, and Caroline promised me that it wouldn’t be the last.

As soon as I felt well enough, I contacted my old employers and made another appointment to see Helen, the Occupational Health Officer. I told her that I had reconsidered my position at the department store, and if there was any possibility that my old job might still be open, I would like to start working there again. Helen seemed taken aback by this request, and told me that she would have to consult with the personnel department, and would contact me again within a few days. She kept her word. They had already taken on another After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer, she said, but she would email me a list of the vacancies currently available in other parts of the store, and she assured me that any application I might make for one of these posts would be looked upon favourably. The list arrived, and after some deliberation, I applied for a job in soft furnishings. I’m pleased to say that I got the job, and agreed to start work there on Monday, 20 April.

In the meantime I’d made a resolution, and now realized that I didn’t have long to carry it out. One morning I sat down at the kitchen table with the plastic bin liner full of Roger Anstruther’s picture postcards. I tipped them all on to the table and began sorting through them. I wanted to put them in chronological order, first of all. It wasn’t easy, because not all of them were dated, and of those which were undated, many had postmarks which were now illegible. A certain amount of guesswork was involved. After a few hours, however, I had made enough progress to be able to sketch out a rough map of his itinerary over the last few years. Since January 2006 he had travelled down from Southern China, through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia, and had then spent almost a year on the island of Palau, about 600 miles west of the Philippines. This was about as remote a spot as anyone could possibly find, and the thought that Roger might have settled there, at least for the time being, made my scheme look even more fantastic and impractical than it had seemed in the first place. My plan was …Well, have you guessed it by now? Of course. My plan was to effect some sort of reconciliation between Roger Anstruther and my father. To contact Roger, in the first instance, and suggest that he and my father meet again: meet in person, that is – not by email, or over the telephone. However, now that I considered the geographical distance between them, this idea began to appear ridiculous. They were in the same hemisphere, admittedly, but that was about it. And yet …The more I thought about my plan, the more it started to feel, not like an idle fantasy, but a necessity. My father’s and Roger’s story had to end this way. In my very bones I felt that there was something more than chance operating here – that their reunion was also their destiny, and that bringing it about was the task that I had been born to perform. Does that sound to you as though I had not fully recovered my wits, after the disastrous end to my journey? Well then, just consider this. There were still a couple of dozen unsorted postcards in the bin liner, at this point, and when I took them out I discovered that although most of them seemed to date from the early 1990s, there was one that was much more recent. It bore a picture of the waterfront at Adelaide, and it was dated … January 2009.

Roger was in Australia, now. He and my father were living less than a thousand miles apart. Breathlessly, I read and reread the message on the back of the postcard.

Got tired of living in the back of beyond at last, he had written. Have started yearning for some Western comforts again. Also occurred to me – though this is a morbid thought – that I should start looking for somewhere to end my days. So, here I am, for the next few months at least. My boarding house marked with an arrow – must have had a nice view of the bay, in days gone by, but all the new condo’s seem to have put paid to that …

Now, tell me – does that not seem like destiny to you?

Often, as I’d come to realize over the last few weeks, the internet is something that puts up barriers between