The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Those really nice ones, about time past being contained in time present.’

My father considered this. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

But I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

‘Have you got a better idea?’

‘Not really. But the trouble is, your mother couldn’t stand poetry. She would have hated to have T. S. Eliot on her gravestone.’

‘All right, then. What did she like?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. She liked Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard …’

‘OK, let’s go with Cliff. A few lines from one of his songs.’

‘“Living Doll” …’ mused my father, and shook his head. ‘Not very appropriate for a gravestone, really.’

‘What about “Devil Woman”? Maybe not.’

‘“Congratulations”? I don’t think so.’

‘“We’re all going on a summer holiday”?’

‘No, those don’t work as epitaphs. None of them.’

Our eyes met again, and suddenly we burst out laughing: then continued to swirl the two glasses of amaretto around in our hands before drinking them down to the last drop.

22

Donald Crowhurst started to contemplate the insoluble mystery of the square root of minus one and before long found himself entering a ‘dark tunnel’ from which he was never to emerge. Most of us, thankfully, are luckier than that. Few people are able to avoid those tunnels altogether, but usually something brings us out the other side. The one I was in … well, actually it turned out to be longer and darker than I could ever have imagined. I realize now that I had been lost in it for most of my life. But the important thing is that I escaped in the end: and when I did finally step out into the sunlight, blinking and rubbing my eyes, it was to find myself at a place in Sydney called Fairlight Beach.

I arrived there at nine o’clock in the morning, having taken one of the earliest ferries from Circular Quay to Manly. From Manly Wharf to Fairlight was a walk of perhaps fifteen minutes. The skies were grey and puffy with rainclouds, but despite this there was a moist, dense heat in the air. It was certainly warm enough to go swimming. The dozens of joggers I passed on the coastal walk from the Wharf to the beach were covered in sweat. I’d imagined that I would be conspicuous, that I would have the place to myself and would cut a suspicious-looking figure sitting above the beach all alone, but no: there was a continual flow of passers-by. Not just the joggers but the dog-walkers and the sight-seers and people who were just out for a morning stroll, wandering down to the shops to buy their Sunday papers. I felt at home here: felt myself to be part of a community that was genial and relaxed and accepting.

Three hours, though, is a long time to sit by yourself on a bench overlooking the sea, waiting anxiously for someone to appear. I’d picked up a copy of the Sun-Herald on the way, but that only kept me occupied for about an hour. The only other item I’d thought to bring was a small bottle of water, and I didn’t even like to drink too much of that in case it made me want to go to the toilet. The view was spectacular: at the edge of the sandy beach there was a saltwater swimming pool built into the rock, an iridescent rectangle of blue- green water, and beyond that the sea, calm and grey this morning, stretched out towards the horizon, dotted with yachts, and then further still, far off in the distance, implied rather than glimpsed, lay the gorgeous immensity of Sydney itself. You would have thought it was impossible to get tired of this view. Perhaps on another occasion, when I wasn’t looking out so hungrily for the arrival of the Chinese woman and her daughter, I could have been happy to spend the whole day sitting on that bench looking out over the beach and the water. But today, this prospect quickly began to lose its charm.

Anyway, I don’t want to make you wait for as long as I did. They came. They came shortly after midday. The Chinese woman, her daughter, and another little girl of about the same age. A friend of the daughter’s, obviously. Blonde and Caucasian. The three of them walked right past my bench and then down on to the beach, where the Chinese woman spread out a picnic rug on the sand and the two little girls immediately undressed down to their swimming costumes and ran off towards the rocks to play. The Chinese woman – who was wearing a white T-shirt and navy-blue slacks, flared at the ankle – sat on the rug and poured herself something hot to drink from a thermos flask while looking out towards the opposite side of the bay.

So, here was my chance. The moment had come at last. But could I really do it? Could I really walk over to a complete stranger, a single woman who had come for an afternoon at the beach with her little daughter and her friend, and break in upon her world, invade her privacy, with some clumsy phrase like, ‘Excuse me – you don’t know me, but … ?’

I was just preparing to admit to myself that I couldn’t go through with it after all when there was a sudden scream of pain and distress from the direction of the swimming pool.

I looked up. It was the little Chinese girl’s friend. She had slipped and fallen. She had been standing right on the edge of the swimming pool, balancing on the stone wall, and she had lost her balance and fallen over the edge, into the sea. Instinctively, I ran to her aid. Coming from a different direction, coming from the beach where she had laid out her picnic rug on the sand, the Chinese woman was running towards her too, and we both reached the same spot at the same moment.

‘Jenny!’ she called. ‘Jenny, are you all right?’

The water here was quite shallow, and Jenny was standing upright now, in floods of tears. The drop from the wall to the sea was about four feet, too high for her to climb, so the first thing to do was to pull her back up towards us. I held out my arms.

‘Here you are,’ I said, ‘hold on to me. I’ll pull you up.’

The little blonde girl seized both of my hands and I lifted her easily back on to the edge of the pool. We could see now that her left shin and ankle were badly grazed where she had fallen against the rocky sea floor. They were bleeding profusely. She flung herself into the Chinese woman’s arms and cried there for a few moments, and then all four of us made our way around the edge of the pool and back towards the picnic rug.

‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ the Chinese woman was saying. She was even more beautiful now that I could see her close up.