The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Oh, shit!’ I shouted out loud.

  – Proceed on the current motorway, said Emma.

  ‘I haven’t got her a present!’

  And it was true: my morning adventure in Lichfield had driven paternal obligations clean out of my mind. But I couldn’t possibly turn up empty-handed. I would have to come off at the next service station, in about eight miles’ time.

  Once I’d parked the car and dashed inside, I began to look around frantically. At first I could see very little that would impress her. There was the usual shop selling mobile phone accessories but somehow I didn’t think she would be too excited to be presented with an in-car charger or a bluetooth headset. (Which reminded me: I really would have to get the headset on my car working, as soon as possible. Maybe tonight.) Probably my best bet was W. H. Smith, but even there …Was she really likely to get much use out of fold-up garden chairs, even if they were on sale at two for £10? There were plenty of cuddly toys but even I could see that they looked horrendously cheap and ugly. A continental power adaptor, suitable for both Northern and Southern European countries, was practical but still not calculated to bring a grateful sparkle to a young girl’s eyes. What about a colouring pad? They had plenty of those, and she was keen on art, as I knew from the school pictures that she’d until recently been in the habit of sending me. They had pens to match, as well. Surely that would be fine. All children liked drawing, didn’t they?

  I went over to pay, didn’t attempt to engage in any banter with the terrifyingly bored-looking guy in a turban sitting behind the till, and was back on the motorway within a few minutes.

  – In two miles, exit left, towards South Lakes, said Emma, before very long.

  The countryside was rugged and interesting, by now. Brown heritage signs had started to appear, reminding me that the delights of Blackpool were mine for the sampling, a few miles to my west, and hinting subtly that the nearby Historic City of Lancaster was well worth a short detour. We were emphatically in the North, at last. We had left Middle England far behind.

  – In one mile, exit left, towards South Lakes.

  ‘God, I’m nervous, Emma. I won’t try to hide it from you. Well, I can’t hide anything from you, really, can I? You know everything there is to know about me. You’re the all-seeing eye.’

  – Next exit left, towards South Lakes. Then a quarter of a mile later, heading slightly left at the roundabout.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m so nervous, though. Caroline’s been quite friendly, recently, when I’ve spoken to her on the phone. I suppose the problem is that it’s not friendliness I want. It’s not enough. In a way, it hurts even more when she’s nice to me.’

  – Heading slightly left at the roundabout, take first exit.

  ‘And I really hope that Lucy hasn’t changed too much. She’s always been an affectionate girl. We were never as awkward together – nothing like as awkward – as Caroline makes out in that … rotten story of hers. Lucy’s simple, uncomplicated. You’ll like her – I know you will.’

  – Proceed on the current road.

  Dusk was falling as we drove along the A684 together. We passed a roadside café which consisted of little more than a Portakabin with a flag of St George flying above it, and numerous brown heritage signs inviting us to visit The World of Beatrix Potter, which would have to wait till another day, as far as we were concerned. Soon enough, through the rain and the encroaching dark, the lights of Kendal itself flickered up ahead.

  ‘Hello, Max,’ said Caroline.

  On the doorstep, she leaned forward, put one arm around me, and kissed me on the cheek. I held the kiss for as long as I thought I could get away with, breathing in her scent, hugging the contours of the body I had once known so well.

  ‘Ooh – is that your car?’ she said, breaking free and wandering down the front garden path to get a closer look. ‘Very nice. You don’t see many of those round here.’

  ‘It’s the company’s, actually,’ I said.

  She nodded her approval. ‘Impressive. You must be coming up in the world.’

  The rain had stopped now, more or less. I turned to get a closer look at the front of the house. It was small, bijou, semi-detached and built of local stone. I suddenly wished with all my heart that I was staying the night here, and not at the local Travelodge, where I was already checked in. But no such invitation had been forthcoming.

  ‘Brr. Let’s get out of this cold,’ said Caroline, and led me inside.

  ‘Nice haircut, by the way,’ I said, risking a compliment as I followed her into the kitchen. For years, her hair had been a disaster area. She had never known what to do with it – the way she wore it was always not quite long, not quite short; not quite curly, not quite straight; not quite blonde, not quite brown (even the colour was indeterminate). But now, somebody had given it a serious going-over, and she looked more stylish than I’d ever seen her. Brown with blonde highlights – such an obvious way to go, when I thought about it. Following her retreating back, I could see that she had lost quite a bit of weight, too: maybe a stone, maybe a stone-and-a-half. She was wearing a tight cashmere top and skinny jeans that hugged the curve of her hips and buttocks. She looked great. She looked about ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. She could easily have passed for someone in her mid-thirties. I felt flabby, old and unfit by comparison.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said.

  ‘Great.’ I’d been hoping that she might offer me a glass of wine or something, but it was going to be tea, apparently. ‘Where’s Lucy?’

  ‘She’s upstairs. Beautifying herself. She’ll be down in a minute.’

  ‘Great.’

  In the car on the way over, I’d been building up a mental image of Lucy rushing down the stairs to throw herself into her dad’s arms. Looked like I was wrong about that one, as well. In fact the warmest welcome I seemed to be getting was from the little brown Dachshund puppy who now ran over from the other side of the kitchen, yelping at me and trying his best to jump up as high as my knees. I caught him in the middle of one of his jumps and held him to my chest.

  ‘So you’re Rochester, are you?’ I asked, stroking his head as he nuzzled against me eagerly. ‘What a cute little thing you are, eh?’

  ‘How did you know he was called Rochester?’ Caroline asked, putting my cup of tea down on the kitchen table next to me.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘How did you know he was called Rochester? We only got him a couple of weeks ago.’

  Of course, I had made a stupid mistake: the acquisition of this new pet was something Caroline had only mentioned to me in my guise as Liz Hammond. In the circumstances, there was only one lie I could tell. ‘Oh, I heard it from Lucy. She told me in an email.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know Lucy had been emailing you.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know everything, do you?’

  ‘No, that’s true.’ She scraped the two used tea bags off a saucer and into the compost bin. ‘I don’t even know what you’re doing up here. Did you say you were on your way to Scotland?’

  ‘That’s right. Shetland, actually.’

  ‘Selling toothbrushes?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You’ve moved on a bit, then. I thought you’d never leave that job.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you need to get a kick up the arse every so often. Which is exactly what you gave me. When you and Lucy went, it … well, it brought a few things into focus, shall we say.’

  Caroline looked down into her teacup. ‘I know I hurt you.’

  I looked down into mine. ‘You were within your rights.’

  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 t
hing?’

  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 –’