The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (12 page)

‘I haven’t been in for a few months, no.’

‘Well then! What’s to stop you?’

What, indeed, was to stop me? I told Trevor and Lindsay that I would sleep on it, but really there was no need to sleep on it. In any case, I hadn’t got over the jet lag yet, and I wasn’t sleeping much at night anyway. That night I lay awake and I thought about Poppy, and the fact that I would be seeing her again in a couple of days’ time, but I also found myself thinking about Lindsay Ashworth’s pale blue eyes and slender arms, and then I started thinking about random things like her description of the Toyota Prius as sleek, modern and radically innovative, and I wondered why that phrase seemed curiously familiar. I didn’t think too much about the proposal itself, though, because I had already made up my mind. The next morning I called Trevor from Starbucks on my mobile, and told him that I was in. The delight and relief in his voice were a pleasure to hear. And even I couldn’t suppress a little shiver of excitement at the thought that, two weeks from now, I would be on a ferry to the Shetland Isles.

10

Friday began on a note of high spirits and rare optimism. It ended in bitter disappointment.

I had arranged to meet the Occupational Health Officer at 10.30. I took the train from Watford Junction at 8.19 and arrived at London Euston seven minutes late, at 8.49. I took this train because Trevor was coming into central London today as well, and had suggested meeting for breakfast.

We met at a branch of Caffè Nero on Wigmore Street. I had a breakfast panini filled with eggs, bacon and mushroom. When I asked for this panini, the guy behind the counter, who was Italian, told me that ‘panini’ was a plural word and if I was only going to ask for one, I should ask for a ‘panino’. He seemed very insistent about this but I thought there was something slightly disturbed about him so I took no notice.

While we were eating our paninis, Trevor told me something interesting, which had a direct bearing on my meeting with the Occupational Health Officer.

There was something I should know, he said, about the current situation at Guest Toothbrushes. He had just learned that David Webster, the only full-time sales rep they employed at the moment, would shortly be handing in his notice. He had been headhunted by GlaxoSmithKline. This meant that they would soon be advertising for a new rep, and if I did a good job on the Shetland trip, Trevor couldn’t see why the post shouldn’t be mine for the taking. The final decision would be taken jointly by himself and Alan Guest, it seemed, so basically, as long as I made a favourable impression on Alan, it was in the bag.

Everything was just getting better and better.

I mulled over this news as I walked the few hundred yards towards the department store which had, until six months ago, been my regular place of work. The sun had finally put in an appearance and today it didn’t seem too fanciful to hope that spring might be around the corner. I could feel a new lightness in my step, which I did not associate with this part of the world at all. Not that I particularly minded seeing the Occupational Health Officer, a pleasant, mild-mannered lady who never treated me with anything other than sympathy and kindness. We’d had three meetings before this, the first one being some time in mid-August last year. A few weeks before that, Caroline had left home, taking Lucy with her. It had been coming for a long time, I suppose, but still – the shock of it, the awful knowledge that my worst fear – the one thing I’d been dreading most in all the world – had actually come to pass … Well, it flattened me completely, before very long. I struggled on for a week or two and then, one morning, I woke up and thought about getting out of bed and going into work and my body literally refused to move. It was that same feeling I described to you before: like that horror film I’d seen when I was a child, with the man trapped in a room and the ceiling bearing down on him relentlessly. I spent the whole of that day in bed, not getting out till about seven in the evening if I remember rightly, when I was desperate to have something to eat and relieve myself. And then I stayed home for most of that week, mainly in bed, sometimes slumped in front of the TV, and not dragging myself into work until Friday afternoon, when my supervisor called me into her office and asked what was going on and sent me straight down to see Helen, the Occupational Health Officer, for the first time. Not long after that I was seeing my GP and by the early autumn I was on all sorts of pills but none of it did anything to help. I couldn’t see the point any more, couldn’t see any way forward. Of course it was the departure of Caroline and Lucy that had triggered it but soon it had reached the stage where everything depressed me. Absolutely everything. The world seemed to be on the point of economic collapse and the newspapers were full of apocalyptic headlines saying that the banks were about to crumble, we would all lose our money and it would be the end of Western civilization as we knew it. I had no idea whether this was true or not, or what I should do about it. Like everybody else I knew, I had a big mortgage, massive credit card debts and no savings. Was this a good thing, or a bad thing? Nobody seemed able to tell me. So I just stared all day at the TV news, not understanding any of it except for the prevailing mood of anxiety and despair which everyone seemed to be trying to put across, and gradually fell prey to a sort of unfocused panic which fitted in all too easily with my general inertia. The prospect of returning to work receded further and further into the distance. Helen, the Occupational Health Officer, referred me to a psychiatrist, who interviewed me for a couple of hours and then came up with his diagnosis: I was depressed. I thanked him for his opinion, he sent his bill in to the department store, and I went back home. Weeks passed, and then months. I didn’t start to come out of it until I checked my emails one day and saw that there was one from Expedia, reminding me that my trip to Sydney was only a few weeks away. I hadn’t even known that I was supposed to be going to Sydney. As I said, Caroline had booked the trip for me just before leaving. In my current state I must say that the prospect of flying to Australia held precious little appeal; but Helen was convinced that it would do me good, and encouraged me to go through with it. So I flew to Sydney and saw my father, and everything else you know. Or at least, everything that I’ve chosen to tell you.

My meeting with Helen lasted for twenty minutes.

She reminded me that I was coming up to the end of the six months’ fully paid leave that I was allowed on medical grounds, and asked me what I had decided to do next. Was I ready to come back to work? I told her that I didn’t want to come back to work. I didn’t tell her anything about the new life I was proposing for myself, as a toothbrush salesman. It seemed more prudent, somehow, to keep that to myself. Helen looked genuinely upset that I did not wish to return to the department store. She assured me that my supervisor had told her, in a written memo, that I had been widely regarded as a first-class After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. I would be a great loss to the company, she said. I told her that my mind was made up, and my decision was final. We shook hands. She promised to set the necessary paperwork in motion. We said goodbye.

I thought about visiting my old department on the fourth floor, and saying goodbye to my former colleagues; but I decided, in the end, that if I did that there would be too many embarrassing moments to get through, and too many awkward explanations to make. It was better to make a clean break. So I took the escalator down to the ground floor, and left the department store by one of the main front doors, rather than the staff exit. To tell the truth, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place.

Poppy’s mother lived in a wealthy part of London. Her postcode was SW7. I had the whole afternoon ahead of me, so I took my time, and spent an hour or two wandering those rampantly posh, absurdly prosperous streets. I looked at the grand, aloof, imperturbable façades of those solid Georgian terraces, and could tell that it would be years – decades – before this recession had any impact round here. These people had built a solid wall of money around them, and it wasn’t about to fall down any time soon.

A mile away, in High Street Kensington, where I spent much of the afternoon, things were not so comfortable. I counted half a dozen shops which had closed for business and boarded up their windows. The ones that were left were usually part of big national or global chains. People didn’t seem to want to buy shoes or stationery any more, although they seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for mobile phones, and were happy to spend £3.50 on a cup of coffee. So was I, for that matter. I went to Starbucks and ordered a tall peppermint mocha and – by way of a late lunch – a toasted panini with tomato and mozarella. The barista who served me was from the Far East and didn’t correct me when I asked for the panini. While I ate the panini and drank my coffee, I thought about the decision I had made today. Was I doing something foolish? These were uncertain times. Trevor assured me that Guest Toothbrushes was on a secure footing, but small companies were going to the wall every day. The department store, on the other hand, was a long-established business, commanding huge customer loyalty, with a name that was recognized all over the UK. And here I was, giving all that up, on the basis of a potential offer (no more than that) of a permanent job with a company I knew almost nothing about. But I did trust Trevor. And the salary he had mentioned was better than the one I’d been getting. It was so hard to know what was the right thing to do. Too many unknown quantities.

Unable to resolve these difficulties, I thought instead about the journey I would be making in just over a week’s time. The retail outlet I would be visiting was a chemist’s shop in the village of Norwick, at the northernmost end of Unst. Trevor had already made contact with them so they were prepared for my visit. Apparently, getting them to buy some of the company’s products was more or less a formality. That had been prearranged over the telephone, so there would be very little actual selling involved. He told me that my main task was simply to relax, enjoy the journey, and make my video diary as interesting as possible. The ferry for Shetland left Aberdeen every day at five in the afternoon, so I had plenty of options. If I wanted to do it quickly, I should arrange only one overnight stop, on the Monday night, somewhere between Reading and Aberdeen. The obvious place, from my point of view, was Cumbria. It gave me the perfect excuse to call on Caroline, possibly even take Lucy out for a meal. (I doubted if Caroline herself would want to come.) I should start thinking about buying her a present, something nice to take up with me …

Thinking of presents made me realize that I really ought to buy a gift for my hosts tonight. I left Starbucks and went into a shop selling outrageously priced bars of chocolate, cut into elegant slimline blocks and wrapped up in minimalist packaging: as if the designers at Apple had started making confectionery. I bought one for Poppy – a sheet of milk chocolate, subtly marbled with whiter and darker blends – and then decided to get something similar for her mother as well. I emerged from the shop feeling well pleased with my purchases. It was only later, on my way back to SW7, that I started to feel a bit foolish. I had just exchanged twenty-five pounds for two bars of chocolate. Had I started to forget the value of things, like everybody else?

‘In any case,’ Clive said, ‘one of the things we’re all starting to realize is that the value of any object, be it a house or –’ (glancing in my direction) ‘– a toothbrush, for instance, is in fact … nothing! Just the amalgam of different valuations which different members of society put upon it at any one time. It’s entirely abstract, entirely immaterial. And yet these completely non-existent entities
–
we call them
prices –
are what we base our whole society upon. An entire civilization built on … well, on air, really. That’s all it is. Air.’

There was a short silence.

‘That’s hardly an original observation,’ Richard said, reaching for another olive.

‘Of course not,’ said Clive. ‘I never said it was. But until now, most people have never really appreciated it. Most people have gone about their daily business on the comfortable assumption that something real and solid underpins everything we do. Now, it’s no longer possible to assume that. And as that realization sinks in, we’re going to have to adjust our whole way of thinking.’ He smiled a combative smile at Richard. ‘Naturally, I realize that in your line of business this is old news. You’ve known for years what the rest of us have only just begun to work out. And done very nicely out of it into the bargain, I might say.’

Richard’s line of business was investment banking, of one sort or another. I hadn’t really been concentrating when it was explained to me. I had taken an instinctive dislike to him, the moment we were introduced, and suspected that the feeling was mutual. He was there, it seemed, because his girlfriend, Jocasta, was Poppy’s oldest friend from university. Jocasta seemed perfectly nice but it was clear that she intended to monopolize Poppy for most of the evening. Name-cards had been laid out on the dinner table, and we had been split up, I realized, along generational lines. I had been stuck at one end of the table, with the oldies – Poppy’s mother, Charlotte, and her Uncle Clive – with this obnoxious bloke Richard sitting next to me, Jocasta opposite him, and Poppy at the far end, almost as far away from me as it was possible to be. I was sitting opposite Clive, who I must say seemed every bit as friendly and engaging as Poppy had made him out to be. Her mother struck me as being inscrutable. She was what I suppose proper writers describe as a ‘handsome’ woman, meaning that she might well have been quite a beauty, ten or fifteen years ago. It didn’t sound as though she had a job, but clearly subsisted on independent means of some sort; but it was hard to find out any more than that, because she didn’t talk about herself much, just pumped me for information about how I had met her daughter and (without asking me this directly) what my intentions towards her were. It was hard going, sitting next to Charlotte. I noticed that she was hitting the red wine fairly heavily even before the first course was served, and I must say that I felt like joining her. The evening wasn’t going to be as much fun as I’d hoped.

‘Come on, Clive,’ said Jocasta, bridling at his last comment. ‘That’s well below the belt. You shouldn’t kick a man when he’s down, you know.’

‘Down?’

‘Richard lost his job a couple of weeks ago,’ said Poppy. ‘Didn’t anybody tell you?’

‘Oh,’ said Clive. ‘No, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’

‘Unceremoniously booted out of the office,’ said Richard. ‘Cardboard box full of belongings and all that. No surprise, really. It’s been coming for weeks. I was one of the last to go in my department, in fact.’