The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  When I got back into the car, I turned on the ignition and pressed the ‘I Agree’ icon as soon as it flashed up on the map screen. Then I pressed the ‘Destination’ button and rather laboriously entered the address of Mr and Mrs Byrne on the touchscreen display. Within a couple of seconds the computer had located their house and was offering me a choice of three different routes from my current position. I chose what seemed to be the quickest one, straight up the M40 and then northbound into Birmingham along the Bristol Road. And then, as soon as I had made this selection, I heard a female voice say:

  – Please proceed to the highlighted route, and the route guidance will start.

  It wasn’t so much what she said, it was the way that she said it.

  Most people, I would say, are attracted to other people on the basis of their looks. And of course, I’m as susceptible to that as anybody else. But the first thing I find really attractive in a woman, nine times out of ten, is her voice. That was what I noticed about Lindsay Ashworth, the first time we met – her lovely Scottish accent. And, going back further than that, it was the first thing I’d noticed about Caroline, as well – her flat Lancastrian vowels, which were completely unlike anything I was expecting to hear from someone who in every other way appeared to be so elegant and posh and metropolitan. Now, this may sound ridiculous, but even those two women, even Lindsay and Caroline, did not have voices as appealing as the one that came out of this machine. This was, quite simply, a beautiful voice. Breathtakingly beautiful. Probably the most beautiful I had ever heard. Don’t ask me to describe it. You’ll have realized by now that I’m not great at this sort of thing. It was an English voice – not classless, exactly – more what used to be called Received Pronunciation or ‘BBC English’. There was something slightly haughty about it, I suppose. It had an undertone that might even be described as a little bit bossy. But at the same time, it was calm, measured and infinitely reassuring. It was impossible to imagine this voice sounding angry. It was impossible to imagine hearing it without feeling soothed and comforted. It was a voice that told you everything was right in the world – your world, at any rate. It was a voice without a single note of ambiguity or self-doubt: a voice you could trust. Perhaps that was what I liked about it so much. It was a voice you could trust.

  I put the car into Drive mode and made my way out of the car park. As I left the service station I passed a notice which said: ‘Thank you for visiting Oxford Services. Your visit and registration number have been captured on CCTV.’ More evidence, if any was needed, that I was not as alone as I’d thought.

  ‘What do you think of that, then?’ I found myself saying to the voice on the map. ‘Bit sinister, isn’t it?’

  And she answered:

  – Exit coming up. Then, two hundred yards later, straight on at the roundabout.

  For the time being, I forgot all about my desire to phone Lindsay.

  I continued to drive slowly, trying to save petrol, so it was another hour and a half before I reached Junction 1 of the M42.

  – In half a mile, exit left, towards Birmingham South.

  It was the first time she had spoken to me for about ten minutes. I had worked out, by now, that I could summon up her voice whenever I wanted by pressing the ‘Map’ button on my steering wheel. If you did that, she would usually tell you to carry on doing whatever you were doing at that moment. So every few minutes, I would press the button, and she would tell me to ‘Proceed on the current motorway’. I wasn’t listening to the radio. I had tried a bit of Radio 2 and a bit of Radio 4 but I didn’t want to listen to other people chattering away. I wanted to be left alone with my thoughts, and with Emma’s voice whenever I felt like hearing it.

  Oh – did I not tell you that she was called Emma? I’d spent most of the last hour trying to decide what I was going to call her. Finally I chose Emma because it had always been one of my favourite names. Partly it was a memory of having to read Jane Austen’s novel for English O-Level at school: I hated the book (which was one of Caroline’s favourites, by the way) and only got a ‘D’ in the exam, but for some reason the heroine’s name had stuck in my mind as a sort of emblem of classiness and sophistication. Also, I used to have a bit of a crush on Emma Thompson, the actress – going back a bit, to the late 1980s, when she looked really boyish and did that film where she had an amazing sex scene with Jeff Goldblum. So, what with one thing and another, Emma seemed an appropriate choice.

  – Exit left. Then, heading slightly right at the roundabout, take third exit.

  Our relationship was going to be put to its first test, now, because I had decided not to follow her instructions for the next few minutes. She wanted me to head down the A38, all the way to the Lydiate Ash roundabout, and then take a right turn towards Rubery. But I had other plans. I wanted to drive straight over the crest of the Lickey Hills and to rejoin the A38 via the B4120 at the bottom of the hill. It was a more scenic drive, and it would take me through some of the landscape of my early childhood. But how would Emma respond? Would she understand the nostalgic impulse that lay behind it?

  Feeling a little nervous at my own audacity, then, I ignored her insistent repetition of ‘Next left’ as I curved around the roundabout, and took the fourth exit rather than the third. I imagined what Caroline might have said if I’d ignored her directions in this way, on one of our family holidays. ‘No, not this one!’ There would have been a sigh of exasperation, and then her voice would tense, slipping into that awful register of angry resignation at my stubbornness and stupidity. ‘Fine. If you think you know better than I do, just carry on. I won’t bother looking at this any more.’ Then she would have thrown the road atlas into the back of the car, narrowly missing Lucy who would be sitting up on her booster seat, listening to the argument with wide-eyed bewilderment, her little brain probably asking itself whether this was how grown-ups always spoke to each other. Yes, that’s just how it would have been. I could remember countless scenarios like that.

  But with Emma, it was different. She said nothing at all, at first. The only sign that she had taken any notice of my decision was a message on the screen that said ‘Calculating Route’. Then, after a few seconds, her voice returned. There was no change in her tone at all. Still calm, still measured. Totally unflustered by my little act of rebellion. ‘Proceed for about two miles on the current road,’ she said. And that was it. No disputes, no sarcasm, no questions asked. She accepted my authority, and responded accordingly. God – how easy life would have been, if only Caroline could have behaved more like that! I was already beginning to think that, in Emma, I had found something like the perfect partner. I pressed the ‘Map’ button, just so I could hear her say it again.

  – Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

  Beautiful. I loved the little pause she put in, after the word ‘miles’. She spoke it as if it was a line of poetry.

  I was now driving up the Old Birmingham Road. On my left was the entrance to the primary school where Chris and I had met each other, becoming friends on our very first day, at the age of five. We had been inseparable after that – best friends for the next six years. And then, at the age of ten, we had been the only children from our year to sit the entrance exam for King William’s School in the centre of Birmingham. Chris passed the exam. I didn’t, and ended up going to Waseley Hills Comprehensive with all my other primary-school friends.

  ‘And that was probably it, wasn’t it?’ I said to Emma. ‘That was the turning point. So many things followed from that.’

  – Proceed for one mile on the current road.

  Of course, Chris and I continued to see each other. But the real reason for that, I suspected, was that our fathers had by now become such good friends, after meeting at various school-related social occasions. Chris’s Dad was a lecturer at Birmingham university and my father, who liked to think of himself as an intellectual as well as a poet, was not going to let that friendship die, even after Chris started going to a much posher school and his fam
ily had moved out of Rubery and into the leafier, more middle-class enclave of Edgbaston. So Chris and I kept our own friendship going, mainly out of genuine liking for each other but also out of our youthful intuition that it was what both of our families wanted and needed from us. And yet I’d always been conscious of the differences between us, from that point on. As I drove past the school drive, and on towards the summit of the hill, a memory came back to me. Chris and I were eleven years old; we had been at our new schools for a few weeks. He had come round to our house and we were talking in the back garden and he was asking me about Waseley and he said, ‘What are the masters like?’ And I didn’t know what he was talking about, at first. It took me a few seconds to work it out. ‘Is that what you call them, then, the teachers?’ I said. ‘You call them masters?’ A sudden image came to my mind and I could see a white-haired authority figure pacing up and down between the old wooden desks, wearing a gown and lecturing his attentive pupils on Latin declensions: a figure straight out of Goodbye, Mr Chips or a Billy Bunter novel. And I felt a ripple of shame – inferiority – pass through me as I realized what different worlds Chris and I now inhabited.

  – At the next roundabout, take a left turn. First exit.

  I did what Emma told me at this point. But then I decided upon another little detour to test her patience. Just past The Old Hare and Hounds pub, I took a spontaneous left turn into Leach Green Lane. She went quiet for a few seconds while the computer tried to get its head around what I was trying to do, then she said:

  – In two hundred yards, right turn.

  ‘I see where you’re coming from,’ I told her, ‘but we’re going to deviate from the route for the time being. Hope that’s OK. The thing is, we’re going on a sentimental journey. And I don’t believe you have a setting for that.’

  – Right turn coming up, she insisted.

  I ignored her, and turned left. In a few hundred yards I saw what I had been looking for: a grey, pebbledashed house, disorientatingly similar to all its neighbours, with a meagre expanse of asphalt in front of it where an ancient green Rover 2000 had been parked. I pulled up opposite the house, on the other side of the road.

  – In two hundred yards, make a U-turn, Emma suggested.

  Without turning the engine off, I got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door side. I stood there for a while, leaning against the passenger door, looking across at the house. This was where I had lived for thirteen years, starting in 1967. Me, Mum and Dad. It hadn’t changed, not in the slightest. I stood looking at it for another two or three minutes, shivering slightly in the March breeze, then got back into the car and drove on.

  ‘Well, what was I supposed to think?’ I said, easing the car back on to the main A38 towards the city centre. ‘What was I supposed to feel? I haven’t seen that house for more than twenty years. That was where I grew up. That was where my childhood took place and to be honest I come back and look at it now and I don’t feel that much. My childhood was nothing much to shout about. Like everything else about me, I suppose. Unexceptional. That’s what I should have on my gravestone. “Here lies Maxwell Sim. He was a pretty ordinary bloke really.” What an epitaph. No wonder Caroline got bored with me after a while. No wonder Lucy doesn’t want much to do with me. What did we do, the three of us, in that house for thirteen years that wasn’t done by millions of other families in identical houses up and down the country? What’s been the point of it all? That’s all I want to know, really. Not too much to ask, is it? What’s the point? What is the fucking point?’

  – In half a mile, said Emma, bearing slightly left at the roundabout. Take first exit.

  She had an answer for everything, that woman.

  13

  – Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

  I was driving now past the old Longbridge factory. Or rather, I was driving now past the gaping hole in the landscape where the old Longbridge factory used to be. It was a weird experience: when you revisit the landscapes of your past, you expect to see maybe a few cosmetic changes, the odd new building here and there, the occasional lick of paint, but this was something else – an entire complex of factory buildings which used to dominate the whole neighbourhood, stretching over many square miles, throbbing with the noise of working machinery, alive with the figures of thousands of working men and women entering and leaving the buildings – all gone. Flattened, obliterated. And meanwhile, a big billboard erected in the midst of these swathes of urban emptiness informed us that, before too long, a phoenix would be rising from the ashes: a ‘major new development’ of ‘exclusive residential units’ and ‘retail outlets’ was on its way – a utopian community where the only things people would ever have to concern themselves with were eating, sleeping and shopping: no need to work any more, apparently, none of that tiresome stuff about clocking in at factory gates in order to do anything as vulgar as making things. Had we all lost our wits in the last few years? Had we forgotten that prosperity has to be based on something, something solid and tangible? Even to someone like me, who had done nothing more than skim the papers and the news websites over the last couple of weeks, it was pretty obvious that we were getting it badly wrong, that knocking down factories to put up shops wasn’t turning out to be such a great idea any more, that it wasn’t sensible to build an entire society on foundations of air.

  – Proceed for about three-quarters of a mile on the current road.

  I noticed that it was no longer necessary to drive through Northfield: they had found the money to build a new by-pass, so new in fact that even Emma didn’t seem to know about it. She became thoroughly confused as I weaved my way through its traffic lights and roundabouts, although once again, I had to admire the way that even as she gave contradictory pieces of advice and recalculated furiously, her tone remained completely unflappable. What a woman. Selly Oak provided her with no such problems, and she guided me expertly down Harborne Lane and Norfolk Road, all the way to the Hagley Road. I arrived there not long after three o’clock, and checked in to the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, where the single rooms cost little more than £40 a night, well within Alan Guest’s budget. The room wasn’t very big, and it didn’t have a very nice view, but it was comfortable. I was on the first floor, at the back. There was a kettle and a couple of sachets of Nescafé so I made myself a coffee and lay on the bed for thirty minutes or so, recovering from my drive. I felt a bit lonely and thought about phoning Lindsay, but decided to leave it until the evening.

  Mr and Mrs Byrne weren’t expecting me for another hour and a half. There was just time to drive to King’s Norton and visit the churchyard there, so that’s what I did. My mum’s grave was in good shape. I bought some flowers from the local Tesco Express and leaned them up against the headstone. I didn’t have a vase or anything like that. Barbara Sim, 1939–1985 was all it said. Dad had wanted to keep the wording simple, or so he had told me at the time. Forty-six years old. I was already older than that. I had outlived my own mother. And yet it seemed to me that it would take many more years before I ever felt as grown-up as my mother had always seemed to me. She had been twenty-two when I was born. Her final twenty-four years of life had been spent bringing me up, seeing me through into adulthood, and in that time she had devoted herself to me, selflessly. She had given me unconditional love. She may not have been that clever, she may not have had a fantastic education, she may not have understood my father’s poetry (neither did I, for that matter), but emotionally she had been wise beyond her years. Perhaps circumstances had forced her to be like that, or perhaps it was just that her generation, living always in the shadow of the war, somehow managed to grow up faster than mine did. Whatever the reason, I felt humbled now (yes, that really is the word – no other will do) to think what a great mother she had been. She made my own attempts at parenthood look pathetic.

  1939–1985. It wasn’t enough. We should have written something else on her headstone, something more.

  What, though?

  �
��She was a lovely woman, your mum. Donald and I always thought so. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t talk about her.’

  Mrs Byrne finished pouring milk into my tea and added a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, as requested. I noticed that her hands were shaking slightly. The onset of Parkinson’s, maybe? I picked up the tray of tea things and followed her back into the conservatory.

  ‘This is very intriguing,’ said Mr Byrne. He was examining the IP 009, holding it up to the failing afternoon light and scrutinizing it from every angle. ‘What’s your target? How many are you hoping to sell?’

  ‘She was always a delight to talk to. Made any social occasion go with a swing,’ said Mrs Byrne. She was still talking about my mother. I had noticed that it was difficult to keep a conversation going with Mr and Mrs Byrne, because they always talked about two completely different topics simultaneously.

  ‘Well, that’s not really the idea,’ I said (to Mr Byrne). ‘It’s not about how many I manage to sell. It doesn’t matter if I don’t sell any at all this week.’