The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (18 page)

‘Well, that would be … that would be terrific, actually. Yes, why not? I’d love to see Alison again.’

‘And I’m sure she’d love to see you. Splendid. That’s all arranged, then.’

She beamed at me happily, and passed me another scone. I saw my own reflection leaning across to take it from the offered plate, reflected in the glass panels of the conservatory. Outside it was now almost dark. A bleak evening lay ahead of me, alone in my room in the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, yet I couldn’t bring myself to accept the Byrnes’ offer of dinner at their house. There was still a limit on how much human company I could tolerate in one day. I ate the scone in silence while Mrs Byrne talked to me soothingly, filling me in on news about friends of hers who I’d either never met or couldn’t remember meeting. Then, after a few minutes, Mr Byrne returned, huffing and puffing and carrying a big cardboard box.

‘There!’ he said, depositing it on the floor of the conservatory with an air of triumph.

‘Oh, Donald!’ said his wife. ‘
Now
what are you doing?’

‘This is from the attic,’ he explained.

‘I know where it’s from. What’s it doing down here?’

‘You said you were sick of the sight of it.’

‘So I am. That’s why I took it up to the attic. What have you brought it down again for?’

‘It doesn’t belong in our attic. We’ve got enough clutter up there. It’s Alison’s.’

‘I know it’s Alison’s. I keep asking her to take it away with her, and she keeps forgetting.’

‘She doesn’t forget. She deliberately doesn’t remember.’

‘Well, all right. No need to quibble. What of it?’

‘Max can take it up to her.’

‘Max?’

‘He’s going to visit her, isn’t he? Well, he can take this with him.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

I looked at the box, which was so large that Mr Bryne had had difficulty carrying it by himself, and which was so full of papers that it was almost overflowing. Still, it would fit in my boot easily enough, and I could see no reason why I shouldn’t take it.

‘No, that won’t be a problem,’ I said. ‘What’s in here?’

‘All of Alison’s coursework. Nearly thirty years old, I should think.’

‘We should throw it out,’ said Mrs Byrne, ‘that’s what we should do. Burn it.’

‘We can’t do that,’ her husband said. ‘She sweated blood over this.’

‘A lot of good it did her. She never even qualified.’

‘Sue, if you remember, she
did
qualify. She never
practised
. Not the same thing at all. And she still might, now that the children are almost grown up.’

‘Practised what?’ I asked. It was so long ago now, I couldn’t even remember what Alison had been studying.

‘Psychology,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘She always wanted to be a therapist.’

This rang a distant bell. But it only served to remind me that, when all was said and done, I barely knew Alison, and had precious little shared history with her. Did I really want to spend the whole of Wednesday evening having dinner with a virtual stranger? Well, it was too late to backtrack now. Mr and Mrs Byrne were both completely sold on the idea – one of them, apparently, for weird sentimental reasons, and the other because he was itching to get shot of this cardboard box.

‘There you are – takes up no space at all,’ I said a few minutes later, lifting it carefully into the boot of the Prius. My suitcase and laptop were back at the hotel, so the only other items in the boot were two small boxes of toothbrush samples. Mrs Byrne had come out to see me off. The night was chilly and our breath steamed in the air as we stood on the front drive. I said goodbye hastily – almost rudely, perhaps – partly because I didn’t want her to catch cold, but mainly because I can’t be doing with protracted farewells. Just as I had climbed into the car and was about to start it, though, Mr Byrne came running out of the house.

‘Don’t forget these!’ he said, holding up the set of keys to my father’s flat.

Somehow I had managed to leave them inside. I wound down the window and took them from him.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That was a close one.’

‘Are you
sure
those are the right keys?’ Mrs Byrne asked.

‘Of course they are,’ said Mr Byrne.

‘They don’t look like the keys to Harold’s flat to me.’

Her husband ignored her. ‘Look after them,’ he told me. ‘It’s the only set.’

‘No it isn’t,’ said his wife.

He turned back to her and sighed. ‘Pardon?’

‘I said it’s not the only set. Miss Erith has one.’

‘Miss Erith? What are you talking about? Who’s Miss Erith?’

‘The old lady who lives in the flat opposite. She has a set of keys. She still collects the post, doesn’t she? You know – all those postcards.’

‘Postcards? You’re talking nonsense.’

‘I am
not
talking nonsense. He still gets dozens of postcards every year, all from the same man.’ She leaned down through the window and said to me, ‘
I
know what I’m talking about, even if he doesn’t. Ignore him. Have a lovely evening with your daughter tomorrow. And give our love to Alison, won’t you.’

‘Not just our love – those papers as well!’ said Mr Byrne. ‘Don’t forget those papers! Don’t let her fob you off.’

‘I won’t.’

‘And thanks for the toothbrushes!’

‘Not at all. Thanks for the tea.’

I waved goodbye and closed the window before they had the chance to say anything else. Otherwise we could have been there all night. Talking to them was beginning to wear me out, frankly – especially Mrs Byrne, who I was beginning to think might be getting a little eccentric. Her remark about postcards seemed very peculiar, for one thing. It seemed highly unlikely that anybody would still be sending postcards to my father in Lichfield, after he had been away for more than twenty years.

So – now where?

I drove into the centre of town first of all. I had Emma to keep me company, of course, but I hadn’t given her a new destination to find so she thought we were still going to Mr and Mrs Byrne’s house and her directions were rather confused. I didn’t mind. I was happy just listening to her voice.

Birmingham had changed a lot since I’d last been there. So many new buildings had gone up – shopping malls, most of them – that I couldn’t get my bearings half of the time. Eventually I found a multi-storey car park and then walked up to the new development of shops and cafés in the old canal basin. There were quite a few restaurants whose names I didn’t recognize but in the end I went to Pizza Express because it felt familiar and comforting. You always know where you are with Pizza Express.

The restaurant was busy. Everyone looked about twenty years younger than me and as usual I felt self-conscious sitting there eating by myself. I’d brought nothing to read, so I took out my mobile phone and while I was waiting for my pizza I sent a text message to Trevor. He called me back a few seconds later, using the hands-free set we had all been given to use in our cars, but which I hadn’t got around to setting up yet. The accoustics in the restaurant were pretty bad so it was hard to hear what he was saying, but I gathered that he was only about half an hour away from Penzance already, and he seemed very amused to hear that I had only got as far as Birmingham. ‘Ah well,’ he said, before we lost reception altogether, ‘as long as you’re enjoying yourself.’

I’m not sure that I was enjoying myself, exactly. When I left the restaurant it was about eight-thirty and I found a quiet corner beside one of the canals in order to make my phone call to Lindsay – the treat I had been promising myself for the last few hours. But she didn’t answer. I left a message but maybe she didn’t get it because for some reason I never heard from her that evening.

Of course I could have driven up to Lichfield there and then, stayed the night in my father’s flat and saved Guest Toothbrushes the price of a night’s hotel accommodation. But I had a feeling that visiting my father’s flat wasn’t going to be the most cheering of experiences. I thought it was probably best to see it in the daylight. Meanwhile there was nothing much else to do but drive back to the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, and watch TV or maybe (on my laptop) the DVD of
Deep Water
which Clive had given to me.

On my way there, I must say, Emma and I got on famously. Especially when, as we approached the roundabout at Holloway Circus, I thought it would be funny if I tried to confuse her by driving round and round in a circle. What a laugh! ‘
Next left
,’ she kept saying. ‘
Next left. Next left
.’ Over and over, at shorter and shorter intervals, as I sped up and whizzed round the roundabout one more time. I still couldn’t get a rise out of her, though. However fast I went, however many circuits I completed, she never lost her cool. I must have gone round about six or seven times before I noticed a police car approaching from the direction of New Street Station, up Smallbrook Queensway. I made a hasty exit up towards Five Ways and from there I drove back to the hotel at a very sensible twenty-eight miles per hour.

Once I’d parked the car I checked in the boot, because while I’d been using Holloway Circus as a carousel I’d heard some strange noises coming from there. Sure enough, my antics on the roundabout had caused Alison’s cardboard box to slide about from end to end, and most of the papers that had been sitting precariously on top were scattered all over the place. The wind was now quite strong and as soon as I opened the boot some of these papers even blew out and started flying around the car park. Swearing loudly, I ran backwards and forwards in every direction trying to catch them all, but while I was doing this another gust blew up and even more of them started to scatter. I slammed the boot shut and finally succeeded, with a great deal of effort and a certain amount of help from a rather bemused passer-by, in gathering them all together again. I scrunched them up in a bundle clutched tightly against my chest and got into the back of the car to try to straighten them out and put them in some sort of order. I was out of breath and strangely disturbed by the whole episode. As far as I knew these were just ancient college essays of Alison’s, of no particular value, but at the same time I felt I had been entrusted with an important task in returning them to her, and I didn’t want to mess it up.

However, this thought went clean out of my head when I glanced at the top sheet of paper as I laid it out on the back seat of the car. What do you think was the first word to catch my eye?

It was ‘Max’.

Not just once, either. The word ‘Max’ occurred four or five times on this page alone.

I seemed to be looking at the middle of an essay of some sort. I started rooting around in the random pile of papers on my lap to try to find other pages from the same essay. Most of them were still together, and still in sequence, but some appeared to be missing. I found what was obviously the last page of the essay, which was number 18. Then I found the first page, which was headed ‘PRIVACY VIOLATION – Alison Byrne, 22nd February 1980’.
Privacy Violation?
What was all that about? There was also a note paperclipped to this first page. It was in different – more masculine – handwriting, and after I’d read a few lines I realized that it must have been written by her tutor.

Dear Alison

I think it is clear from the seminar on Thursday and our chat afterwards that you have a particular interest in the issue of privacy violation and the way that it impacts on relationships with the people involved. As everyone this term is required to write a ‘self-reflective’ essay drawing on some aspect of their own experience, I wondered whether this might be something you’d like to write about? Perhaps there is a particular incident from your own past that might be germane to this topic.

Please rest assured that the self-reflective essays are NOT for marking and will not be seen by the tutors unless you specifically request it. The idea is that we trust you to complete them in your own time, and the value of the essays is considered to lie in the exercise of writing them and the opportunity for heightened self-awareness that they might bring.

Anyway, it is up to you what you write about, I merely throw this out as a suggestion.

Best regards,

Nicholas.

After reading this, I looked at the beginning of the essay. The first paragraph just seemed to give a few words of introduction but the second paragraph began with the words, ‘It was the long hot summer of 1976’, and a few sentences later, ‘Towards the end of August that year we went on a camping holiday to the Lake District for one week with our friends the Sim family.’

The Lake District? She’d written an essay about our holiday in Coniston? Why? What had happened that week that had anything to do with ‘privacy violation’?