The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  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’?

  My hands were shaking as I shuffled through the rest of the papers. It felt like I was about to have a panic attack or something. I had to find the missing pages and read the essay through in its entirety, however painful it turned out to be. As with Caroline’s short story, I felt myself being driven on by an appalling, self-destructive curiosity. Reading that story had been difficult enough. Was this going to be even worse?

  The missing pages were, it transpired, still mixed up with Alison’s other papers in the boot of the car. It took me about fifteen minutes to put the whole thing together. Then I said goodnight to Emma (‘Wish me luck,’ I murmured), locked up the car, and took the sheaf of papers with me up to my hotel room on the first floor. I made myself another cup of Nescafé, turned on the TV for company, muted the volume, then lay down on the bed and started to read.

  Fire

  The Folded Photograph

  The incident I’m going to describe took place more than three years ago. However, it is still very fresh in my mind. It had a big effect on me because it put some distance between myself and someone I was thinking of getting close to.

  It was the long hot summer of 1976. ‘Long hot summer’ in this case is not just a cliché because throughout the UK there was bright sunshine and very little rain for almost the whole of that summer – so much so that the government appointed a special ‘Minister for Drought’.

  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 Sims had once been our neighbours in the Rubery area of Birmingham. They had one son, whose name was Max, and he had been best friends with my younger brother Chris at primary school. However, at the age of eleven the two boys were sent to different secondary schools. Chris was accepted for a place at King William’s School in Birmingham (I was already going to the equivalent girls’ school). This was a selective school and you had to pass an exam to get in. Max had failed the exam and so he went to the local comprehensive school. A couple of years after this happened, we moved away from Rubery into a house with a big garden backing on to Edgbaston Reservoir. Despite this, Chris and Max stayed quite good friends and our parents continued to see a lot of each other.

  At the time of this incident, Chris and Max were both sixteen years old, while I was nearly eighteen. In many ways I felt too old to be going on holiday with my family, and in fact this was the last time I did so. I had already been away to France earlier in the summer with one of my girlfriends, but this camping holiday came right at the end of August and since the weather was still nice and I did not really fancy being left on my own for a whole week at home I decided to go along.

  Our campsite was by the side of Coniston Water. There were caravans on the site as well as tents, and there was a modern toilet block with shower etc. My family had a big family tent with two separate ‘bedrooms’ so we were quite comfortable really, even though I am not a great fan of living under canvas. The Sims pitched their tent (which was quite a lot smaller) a few yards from ours, but facing it, so that the space between the two tents became a sort of common area. This was the place where, every evening, we would light a fire and sit around it eating supper and talking amongst ourselves. Afterwards my brother Chris would sometimes get out his guitar but I’m pleased to say there was no singing or anything like that. He just used to strum these melancholy minor chords and stare into the distance. Both he and Max were at the age when boys get terrible crushes on girls and Chris was pining for one of the girls at my school. I had already told him he didn’t stand the slightest chance but he took no notice.

  As for Max, he was beginning to look slightly lovelorn as well – but, unless I’m very much mistaken, his crush was on me.

  Even though I had known Max for many years, I had only recently started to notice how grown-up he had become, and that in the process he was turning into rather a good-looking boy. The fact that he was almost two years younger than me ought to have put him strictly ‘off limits’ but I did find it flattering that he seemed to be smitten with me, and if I am to be perfectly honest with myself, one of my reasons for coming on this holiday in the first place was the fact that Max was going to be there. But the poor boy was very unsure of himself. I adopted a sort of ‘treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen’ approach, and pretty much ignored him for most of the week. I was hoping that this would force him to bring his intentions out into the open but I’m afraid he interpreted my behaviour very literally and probably just thought I didn’t like him very much.

  One thing I quickly noticed was that the family dynamic among the Sims was quite different from the dynamic in our family. Max and his mother were extremely close. In fact she sort of babied him and was always feeding him up – giving him extra helpings of food at meal times, buying him treats such as chocolate bars and packets of Fruit Gums from the local shop, and so on. (Despite this he was extremely skinny. He was at that age when boys can stuff their faces with food all day and it doesn’t seem to put an ounce of fat on them.) On the other hand Max did not appear to be close to his father at all. In fact Mr Sim did not appear to be close to either his son or his wife. He was a quiet man, very introspective and rather difficult to talk to. He worked as a librarian at one of the local technical colleges in Birmingham but Max once told me that his father had always really wanted to be a poet. One of the things I noticed about him that week was that he always carried a notebook with him and could often be seen writing in it. One evening when we were all sitting around the fire my father even persuaded him to
read us one of his poems from the notebook. I went stiff with embarrassment when I heard this and was expecting him to read some terrible bit of doggerel in rhyming couplets about the birds and the flowers and the sunshine and all that sort of nonsense. But instead, the poem that he read out was rather good. At least, I don’t really know very much about poetry, and this one was quite hard to understand at times, but at least it wasn’t bland or banal or anything like that. I couldn’t say what it was about exactly, but it conveyed this atmosphere – this atmosphere of loss and regret and something to do with the past that was somehow sinister and frightening. I remember that we all sat in slightly surprised silence when it was finished. We were all quite impressed, I think – apart from Mrs Sim, who just looked mortified. I don’t mean to be rude when I say this, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that she didn’t have the faintest idea what her husband was going on about when he wrote his poetry. I don’t think she had had much of an education and I don’t even think she was especially bright. She worked part-time as a doctor’s receptionist in Moseley, and although she was a very kind person, and very down-to-earth – as well as being extremely pretty – it did make you wonder why on earth she and her husband had got married or what they had in common. Other people’s relationships are a mystery, though, and perhaps they should stay that way.

  As well as his notebook, the other thing that Mr Sim never failed to carry with him was his camera. He had a chunky, complicated, antique-looking camera that was probably worth a lot of money and which he always stowed away carefully in its battered leather carrying-case. He mainly took photographs of landscapes, or extreme close-ups of tree trunks or fungus or stuff like that. Not holiday snaps, in other words. But of course, like his poetry-writing, his photography was very much a solitary pursuit. He never took Max with him, as far as I can remember, to give him a lesson in how to frame a picture or what exposure to use: there generally seemed to be very little flow of information from father to son. I found this difficult to relate to because my father was always talking to us, and always teaching us how to do things. On the first night of the holiday, for instance, I remember him disappearing off with Chris into the woods at the side of the lake, and returning with lots of twigs and branches to start building the fire. He asked me if I wanted to help but I was too busy reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. Max also didn’t seem very interested, and in any case he was helping his mother peel the potatoes, although I seem to remember he sliced his finger open while he was doing it and had to wear a plaster for the next few days. Anyway, my dad went about building the fire with his usual thoroughness, and talked Chris through the process step by step. He said that it wasn’t enough just to chuck a pile of sticks on the floor and light them with a match. You would never get a long-lasting fire that way. First of all you had to clear an area of ground and preferably enclose it with a ring of stones because that would provide insulation. Then you built a pile of kindling, using dry twigs and small pieces of wood, along with bits of old cardboard and egg boxes and suchlike if you had them. It was important, Dad said, not to pack the kindling too tightly together – there had to be room for the air to circulate. Of course there was plenty of good dry wood around to use as kindling and fuel because it had not rained in that part of the world for weeks. There were several ways you could arrange the larger pieces of wood on top of the kindling, Dad said: he and Chris experimented with different shapes during the course of the week (pyramid-shaped, star-shaped, ‘log cabin’ style, and so on) but ended up deciding that making a kind of wooden tepee was best, because that way the kindling burned really well at the centre, and the outside logs would fall inward and feed the fire when they were ready. To get the fire started they used all sorts of things as tinder – moss, dry grass, pine needles, bark shavings – and Chris always did a good job collecting it, because for the next few days he had the responsibility of building the fire by himself and every night he only needed one match to get it started and we always had a really good blazing fire which lasted for a couple of hours or more. It was very cheering to have such a good fire going every night because, although the days were still pretty warm, the evenings were starting to grow chilly. The best thing was when the fire had been burning for quite a while and the heart of it was really hot; by then we would have had our supper and we would get out a packet of marshmallows and roast them at the centre of the fire for dessert. Delicious.

  Towards the end of the week, the weather began to change. All week it had been so warm that most of us had been swimming in the lake every day. There was a little shingle beach down at one end of the campsite, but if you walked a bit further through the woods you eventually came to another one, even smaller – in fact you could hardly call it a beach, it was so tiny – just a scrap of shingle, really, enclosed by trees – wide enough for two or three people to sit, at a pinch – and this had become our favourite spot. None of the other campers seemed to use it. And this was where we came, on the last full day of the holiday, late on Friday afternoon – my brother, Max and me. The sky had clouded over and was now hanging heavy and slate-grey over Coniston Water. The temperature must have fallen by seven or eight degrees since the day before. Every day we had swum in the lake off this beach and that’s what we had come for today, but when we got there, the prospect didn’t seem so appealing. In fact Max immediately sat down on the grass above the beach and announced that he wasn’t going to go in today. Chris called him a wimp and promptly stripped down to his swimming trunks. He waded knee-deep into the water and then came to an abrupt halt: it was clearly much colder than he’d been expecting. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, exactly, but I started to undress anyway. Underneath my T-shirt and jeans I was wearing a little orange bikini that I hadn’t worn on this holiday so far. I had bought it in France earlier that summer with my girlfriend. It was rather skimpy and revealing and I knew – mainly from the effect it had had on all the French boys! – that I looked pretty good in it. The week was nearly over now and I was getting a bit tired of playing hard to get with Max so I thought if he saw me in this bikini it might spur him into action. As I slipped out of my jeans and pulled my T-shirt over my head I could feel that his eyes were on me, although when I turned to smile at him he just looked away quickly. ‘Are you sure you’re not going to come in?’ I said, but he shook his head. He was smiling back at me but, as always with Max, it was impossible to say what the smile meant or what he was thinking. I stood there for a few seconds, regarding him with enquiring eyes, my hands on my hips – making sure he got a damn good look at me in that bikini – but still he didn’t respond, so I turned with a sigh and started to walk out into the water.

  God, it was cold. Perhaps it was just the psychological effect of the grey skies and the lack of sunshine, but the lake felt icy compared to the previous days. Positively Arctic. What’s more, as Chris and I waded in, we could feel a few slow, fat raindrops beginning to splash on the surface of the water. The first rain for weeks! ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I asked Chris, but a few seconds later he was under, and straight after that he swam over to me, grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me under as well. I screamed and kicked at first, but then I gave in and started swimming alongside him, thinking that my body would get used to the cold in a moment or two.

  It was no use, though. The water had me in its freezing grip and after five minutes or so I realized that I wasn’t going to warm up and I wasn’t really enjoying myself. ‘This is too cold,’ I said. ‘I’m freezing to death.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ Chris answered, but then he saw how violently I was shivering. ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get frostbite or something,’ and I started to walk back to the shore. Chris came with me, and we waded back side by side. Max was waiting on the beach with our towels but I realized now that he had been joined by his father as well. Mr Sim was standing on the beach looking at us both, but before we’d had time to reach dry land he shouted out: ‘Stop!’ and took his camera out of that leather carrying-case. ‘Hold
it right there,’ he said. ‘That looks absolutely perfect.’ So we both remained stock still, up to our knees in freezing water, while he stood there, fiddling with his lens and getting us into focus.

  I felt a little bit uneasy about it, even at the time. I don’t know why that should be: it was just a family friend, taking a picture of me and my brother on holiday – what could be more innocuous? But there was something about the deliberation with which he took the photo – making us stand shivering for ages while he got the composition exactly right, and something about the commanding (almost bullying) way he had shouted, ‘Stop!’ that gave me a nasty feeling. For one thing, he didn’t normally take this kind of photograph: arty shots of dandelions and tree trunks, yes, but not people – so why me and Chris? Why now? And for another, all of a sudden I really wished that I hadn’t been wearing that bikini. It was skimpy enough to start with, but with the wet and the coldness it had gone almost see-through and my nipples were probably standing out like cherries. It was all very well Max seeing me like that, but his father … Well, that was quite creepy, in my opinion. So as soon as he’d taken the picture I dashed back on to the shore without meeting his eye and grabbed my towel from Max and wrapped myself up in it. I was shivering uncontrollably and my teeth were chattering so much I could barely talk. Meanwhile, Mr Sim packed his camera away in a manner that was almost too casual and said, in a tone of forced joviality, ‘That one’s going to come out really well. So – who’s coming with us all to the pub tonight?’