The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (23 page)

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.’

I waited for her to continue, but instead there was an electronic tinkle from somewhere inside her handbag. She took out a BlackBerry and glanced at the screen. Her face lit up, she laughed out loud and immediately began tapping something on to the keyboard. I poured myself some more wine and dipped a chunk of bread into the saucer of olive oil while she attended to this.

‘Is that your mother’s BlackBerry?’ I asked, when it looked as though she had finished.

‘No. I’ve had one for ages.’

‘Oh. Who was it?’ I asked, gesturing at the little screen.

‘Just someone I know.’

A silence fell between us, and I felt a mounting sense of frustration. Was this what it had come to, my relationship with my own daughter? Was this all she had to say to me? For God’s sake, we had lived together for twelve years: lived together in conditions of absolute intimacy. I had changed her nappies, I had bathed her. I had played with her, read to her, and sometimes, when she got scared in the middle of the night, she had climbed into my bed and snuggled up against me. And now – after living apart for little more than six months – we were behaving towards each other almost as if we were strangers. How was this possible?

I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was not going to give up on this evening, not just yet. I would get her to start having a conversation with me if it was the last thing that I did.

‘It must seem very different,’ I began, ‘living –’

At which point my own mobile phone started playing its little melody, announcing that a text message had arrived. I picked up the phone and held it at arm’s length (my eyesight is going, and I have to do things like this nowadays). The message was from Lindsay.

‘Read it if you want,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind.’

I opened the message, which said:

Hi there, you must be at sea by now hope its all going well get in touch when you can L

It wasn’t the most effusive message in the world, but I’d been waiting for some contact – any contact – with Lindsay for a day and a half now, so I read it with a relief which I couldn’t disguise. I put the phone back on the table almost immediately with a kind of mock-nonchalance, but this didn’t fool Lucy for a second.

‘Nice message?’ she asked.

‘It was from Lindsay,’ I said. Lucy’s eyes showed that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer, so I added: ‘Business colleague of mine.’

She nodded. ‘I see.’ Then, biting off the top inch of a breadstick, she asked: ‘I’m never sure about that name – is it a man’s name, or a woman’s?’

‘I think it can be both,’ I said. ‘In this case, it’s a woman.’

‘Aren’t you going to reply?’ she asked.

She picked up her BlackBerry, and I picked up my phone.

‘This won’t take a minute,’ I promised.

‘No worries.’

Actually it took much longer than a minute. I’m not very quick at sending text messages, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Eventually I settled on:

Not got as far as the ferry yet. Still in Kendal, taking lovely daughter out to dinner. Really sorry my progress has been so rubbish – don’t give up on me!

By the time I had sent this, Lucy seemed to have sent and received about four messages. We both put our phones down, slightly reluctantly, and smiled at each other.

‘So,’ I said, ‘it must feel very different –’

The waiter arrived with our food. Our table was pretty small and it took him a while to find space for everything. Then there was the palaver of grinding the black pepper and sprinkling the cheese, all of which he turned into quite a performance. By the time he had finished, another message from Lindsay had come through. I read it before starting to eat:

Max, enjoy the ride and dont worry about progress or lack of it, always remember its only a bit of fun x

I smiled to myself as I put down the phone, and Lucy noticed that I was smiling, but she didn’t say anything. Before trying my first mouthful of risotto, I took the opportunity to ask a question.

‘You do a lot of texting, don’t you, Luce?’ I began.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I maybe send about twenty or thirty a day.’

‘Well, that seems like a lot to me. An awful lot. What does it mean when somebody puts a kiss at the end of a text message?’

She began to look mildly interested.

‘Is this from your business colleague again?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Let me see.’

I passed her the phone and, after reading the message, she handed it back to me.

‘Hard to say,’ she admitted. ‘Depends on what kind of person she is, really.’

‘Is there no real … etiquette to this sort of thing?’

I was pleased with this question, I must say. I was pretty sure that I’d hit on a topic we could bond over, at last. If Lucy was texting at the rate of about twenty or thirty messages a day, she ought to be able to talk about it for hours.

‘Well, there isn’t really, like, an etiquette,’ she answered. I was disappointed to hear that her tone of voice sounded bored, even disdainful. ‘You know, it’s just a little kiss at the end of a message. It probably doesn’t mean anything. In fact, how am I even having this conversation with my own dad? This is too … sad for words. This is lame, Dad. It’s a kiss, that’s all. Take it any way you want.’

She fell silent and picked at her lasagne.

‘OK, I’m sorry, love,’ I said, after a short, unhappy interval. ‘I was just trying to find something to chat about, that’s all.’

‘That’s all right. I’m sorry too. I didn’t want to sound mean.’ She sipped her Diet Coke. ‘Why didn’t Mum come out with us tonight, anyway? Are you two not even talking to each other?’

‘Of course we’re talking to each other. I don’t know why she didn’t want to come. I think she said she had something on.’

‘Oh, yeah. Tuesday night. That’s writers’ night.’

‘Writers’ night?’

‘She goes to this writing group. They write stories and stuff and read them out to each other.’

Great. So right at this very moment Caroline was wowing an enraptured audience with the hilarious story of Max, Lucy and the nettle pit. She’d probably just got to the bit where I had no idea why the grass was green. I could already hear their smug, appreciative laughter, as clearly as if they were right here in the restaurant with us.

‘She’s serious about this writing business, then, is she?’ I asked.

‘I think so. The thing is …’ She smiled, now, in a way that was almost conspiratorial. ‘You see, there’s this bloke who goes to the writers’ group as well, and I’m beginning to think that she –’

Beginning to think that she what? I could guess, but would never know for certain, because at that moment her BlackBerry started tinkling again.

‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I have to look at this.’

The message made her scream with laughter, whatever it was.

‘It’s from Ariana,’ she told me, as if this explained everything. ‘She’s photoshopped this picture – look.’

She showed me the screen, which had a picture on it of a perfectly ordinary-looking girl.

‘Very good,’ I said, handing it back. What else was I supposed to say?

‘No, but she’s put Monica’s head on to Jess’s body.’

‘Ah, OK. That’s clever.’

Lucy started writing her reply, and in the meantime, I took out my phone and began tapping out another message to Lindsay. It was probably for the best that I never got around to sending it. What stopped me? It was the look on the face of a woman sitting at the table next to ours. I don’t know quite how to describe the look. All I know is that she took in the scene that she saw at our table – a weary middle-aged father taking his daughter out for dinner, the two of them sitting opposite each other, nothing to say, one of them sending a text, the other one playing with her BlackBerry – and she responded with a toe-curling mixture of amusement and sympathy, all contained in one expressive glance. And in that instant an image came into my mind, again: the Chinese woman and her daughter, sitting opposite each other at that restaurant in Sydney harbour, laughing together and playing cards. The connection between them. The pleasure in each other’s company. The love and closeness. All the things that Lucy and I never seemed to have. All the things that I had never been taught how to create between us, by my sad fuck-up of a father.

I sent one more text message that night. Not to Lindsay, though. In fact you’ll never guess who I sent it to – so I’ll tell you. I sent it to Poppy’s uncle, Clive.

I dropped Lucy back home at about 9.30. Caroline wasn’t back yet. Lucy took me inside and made me a cup of coffee and sat talking to me (after a fashion) in the kitchen for half an hour or so. When it became obvious that Caroline was not exactly going to rush home to see me, I decided to call it a day and I got back into the car and drove to my Travelodge, which was about ten minutes out of town.

So much for my family reunion, then.

Back in the hotel room I knew that, although I was tired, I was too agitated to go straight to sleep. There was nothing on TV so I got Clive’s DVD of
Deep Water
out of my suitcase and slotted it into my laptop. I had a weird notion that watching it might somehow cheer me up. You know that cliché that ‘There’s always someone worse off than yourself’? Well, I figured that, in my case, it would be hard to find that someone right now. But there was always a chance that it might be Donald Crowhurst.