The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  Without really meaning to, I found myself at the back of the group, walking alongside Lindsay Ashworth. Sometimes things just happen that way, I’ve noticed, when there’s an unspoken chemistry between two people. It’s like invisible choreography: you don’t plan to fall into step with the other person, but somehow, everyone else around you moves aside and you realize that you have found each other, without even meaning to. That’s how it had been with Caroline, the first time we spoke to each other over the Formica-topped tables in that gloomy staff canteen all those years ago, and that’s how it was that morning, with me and Lindsay. When she saw that I was walking beside her she turned and smiled at me. Her smile was full of warmth and encouragement, but also with something more troubling behind it: a certain nervousness, perhaps.

  ‘So – are you ready for this?’ she asked me.

  ‘Ready for what?’ I asked.

  ‘Ready to take the IP 009 to places it’s never been before.’

  I nodded. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t let you down.’

  ‘Good.’

  Something in the way she said this prompted me to remark:

  ‘Funny atmosphere in there this morning. Everybody seemed a little bit on edge.’

  ‘Oh, you noticed that, did you?’

  ‘Is everything OK?’

  We had already been talking in undertones, but now Lindsay brought her face even closer to mine.

  ‘Keep it to yourself, but Alan had a meeting with the bank today. It didn’t go well.’ She stopped walking so that the others could get further ahead (we were on the staircase between the first and second floors), and added: ‘They’re refusing to offer him any more credit. And he’s furious about it, because he only switched the account to these guys a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Which guys?’ I asked – and when Lindsay told me the name of the bank, I recognized it at once. It was the same one that Poppy’s obnoxious friend Richard used to work for. ‘But … the firm is all right, yes? I mean, everything’s solid, and secure?’

  ‘I don’t think there are any long-term problems,’ said Lindsay. ‘I think it’s more of a short-term cashflow thing.’ She added: ‘That’s why Alan’s mad at me, as well.’

  ‘At you? Why would he be mad at you?’

  ‘I sprung this idea of the prize for petrol consumption on him this morning. He said we couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘It’s only five hundred quid, though.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I thought. Anyway, we can’t even stretch to that, at the moment, apparently. So he’s making a big deal of putting up the money himself.’

  ‘His own money?’

  ‘Yep.’

  We started to walk on again.

  ‘All this,’ I said, ‘puts a bit of pressure on you, I suppose.’

  ‘You could say that. I think he’s started to feel that this whole stunt is a bad idea. So if it goes wrong …’

  ‘… You’ll get the blame?’

  She nodded, and I said: ‘Don’t worry. It won’t go wrong. It’s a brilliant idea, anyway.’

  Lindsay gave me a brief smile of gratitude. We had reached the ground floor, and she held the heavy door open for me as we left the draughty staircase behind, and stepped out into the grey, feeble sunlight. Everyone else was already halfway across the car park, on their way to the row of waiting black Priuses. Once we were outside, Lindsay stopped to light a cigarette.

  ‘You know, this is the first month,’ she said, ‘that we’ve not been able to pay our mortgage. Martin hasn’t worked so far this year.’

  Trevor had told me that Lindsay’s husband worked in the building trade. That was all I knew about him, and I didn’t enquire further.

  ‘Tough times, Max,’ she said. ‘Nasty times. Somebody’s screwed up, haven’t they? Somebody near the top. But no one’s going to admit it.’ She glanced across at the little crowd gathered around the four black cars. ‘Come on, anyway. The paparazzi are waiting to meet you. You don’t want to miss out on your fifteen minutes of fame.’

  It turned out to be rather less than that. The photographer took a picture of the four of us standing in front of one of the cars, and the journalist asked us some vague questions about what sort of toothbrushes were most useful to people who lived in remote parts of the country: he didn’t seem to have quite grasped the point of the exercise. Their work was done in just a couple of minutes, but instead of leaving they hung around to watch our departures, all the time maintaining a slightly amused and disdainful air which I think the rest of us found off-putting, to say the least.

  It was all very confused and hectic. Alan Guest presented us with the video cameras on which we were to record our diaries. (Lindsay had one as well, and was wandering around from car to car, already shooting footage at random.) The instruction manuals, he told us, were in our glove compartments – along with the instruction manuals for the cars themselves, which seemed to come in two volumes and to total more than 500 pages. He told us not to be alarmed, assuring us that we didn’t need to look at these manuals immediately and that we would find the cars very simple to drive. I wasn’t entirely convinced by this, because not only couldn’t I get my car to start, but I didn’t even know where to insert the little cuboid of plastic that I’d been presented with in lieu of what would, in days gone by, have been a set of keys. Finally Trevor came over and explained to me that there was a button you had to press while holding down the brake pedal with your foot. It all seemed very complicated, and there was no satisfying throaty response from the engine when I followed his instructions. But then I put the car into drive mode, and it did indeed start to move – so unexpectedly, in fact, that it edged forward a couple of yards and ran into one of the bollards at the edge of the car park. It was only a gentle nudge – didn’t do any damage to the bumper, or anything like that – but I suppose it wasn’t too auspicious, in retrospect. Alan Guest did not look especially pleased.

  Finally, on the stroke of midday, we drove off in convoy. Behind the fleet of four intrepid salesmen, Lindsay and Alan followed in Alan’s BMW. Lindsay was still filming us. When we reached the largest of the mini-roundabouts on the periphery of the trading estate, we all pulled over: this was our official starting-point. The roundabout had four exits, and we were each to peel off on to a different one. Lindsay and Alan got out of their car and stood in the centre of the roundabout. A keen March wind was blowing, and rain had started to drizzle down. Alan, well wrapped up in his coat and scarf, put his hands together to make a kind of megaphone, and shouted: ‘This is it, chaps! Good luck!’ Lindsay was still capturing everything on camera.

  Tony Harris-Jones went first, taking the eastern exit. Then it was Trevor: he performed a 360-degree turn on the roundabout, doubling back the way he had come and heading south. David Webster took the western exit. And then it was my turn. All I had to do was head straight on, taking the second exit, which led north. I had my window open to say goodbye to Alan and Lindsay and as I passed beside them, Alan gave me a formal wave but Lindsay, I noticed, looked up from her filming (she had not done this for any of the others) and blew me a discreet kiss with her left hand as I drove by.

  When I saw her gesture, my heart lifted, and I experienced a new, curious sensation: a glow of happiness spreading through my body, starting at my feet and rising all the way up until even my scalp was tingling.

  And then, as soon as she was out of sight, I felt suddenly, terribly alone.

  Reading–Kendal

  12

  This message had been displaying on my screen for about fifteen minutes. I was on the M4, eastbound, heading back towards London but about to turn off north on to the A404(M) towards Maidenhead. Traffic was light, and I was currently doing about seventy-six miles an hour on the inside lane. I was beginning to get used to the car, now, but the number of buttons located on either side of the screen was intimidating. I was going to have to pull over somewhere and have a proper look at them. In the meantime, surely it would be safe to touch the ‘I Agree’ icon?
I couldn’t just stare at this message for the whole journey. It was like those boxes you have to tick when buying something online, agreeing to the terms and conditions which nobody bothers to read. You have no choice but to agree. Or at least, you’re given the illusion of choice, but that’s all. Maybe that’s how things usually are.

  When I pressed the button, anyway, a map appeared. It showed the motorway I was driving on, and it showed me – or at least my car – as a little red arrow heading determinedly forward in an eastbound direction. How many satellites were trained on me at that moment, I wondered, in order to calculate this ever-changing position? I’d read somewhere that it was always about five: five pairs of eyes keeping me under constant surveillance, from their vantage point high up in the sky. Was this a reassuring thought, or a frightening one? As usual, I couldn’t quite decide. There are so many new facts of life that we just don’t know what to think about. All I knew for certain was that it had been different, very different, back in Donald Crowhurst’s day, when he had drifted unobserved for months in the mid-Atlantic, and had believed that he could fool the world, with the help of some bogus calculations pencilled into a logbook, into thinking that he had spent that time battling with storms in the Southern Ocean. Not much chance of pulling off a deception like that nowadays.

  The motorway traffic was getting heavy, and it was a relief when I saw the exit for Junction 8/9 (Maidenhead and High Wycombe) signed up ahead. As I turned off and drove up the slip road, I soon found myself braking too sharply. The brakes on this car seemed ultra-sensitive: you only had to give them the lightest of touches. There were two lanes of traffic backed up towards the roundabout, with about ten cars in each. I came to a halt, and took advantage of this temporary stillness to press one of the other buttons alongside the screen.

  The button I chose was labelled ‘INFO’. When I pressed it, three green columns appeared on the screen. It took me a few moments to work out what they signified. Apparently, each one represented five minutes’ driving time, and told you what your petrol consumption had been during this period. During my first five minutes I had been averaging 34 miles to the gallon; in the second, 49, and in the third, 51. Not bad, but it wasn’t going to win me any prizes. I had been hoping for an average of 65 or more. Was I doing something wrong?

  After negotiating the roundabout and joining the High Wycombe road, I slowed right down to 45 miles an hour, and immediately my fuel efficiency began to rise. I seemed to be averaging between 75 to 80 miles to the gallon now, so I drove at this speed for a mile or so, until the driver stuck in the lane behind me started flashing his lights angrily. I speeded up, feeling obscurely guilty even though I had been engaged (looking at it from one point of view) in an environmentally friendly act. It would be difficult to drive at that speed all the way to Aberdeen, I realized, even though I was bound to win Lindsay’s £500 prize if I did.

  Ten miles later, the A404 joined the M40 and I took the first exit at the roundabout, swinging on to the motorway and heading north-west. On either side of me England – or what little you could see of it from the perspective of the motorway – lay stretched out, reposeful and inviting, dressed modestly in muted greens and greys. I could feel my spirits beginning to rise. I was in the mood for adventure after all.

  My plan was this: today, I would drive to Birmingham, at a careful, unhurried pace, consuming as little petrol as possible. I would arrive mid-afternoon, check into a hotel, and then pay a visit on Mr and Mrs Byrne, the parents of my old schoolfriend Chris Byrne and his sister Alison. They still lived in Edgbaston, in a house backing on to the reservoir, and I had already spoken to Mr Byrne over the weekend: I’d phoned him to ask if he still possessed (as my father believed he did) a spare set of keys to the flat in Lichfield. To which Mr Byrne had answered, Yes, we’ve definitely got them here somewhere. (Although he didn’t seem to know where, exactly.) So I intended to pick up the keys, and visit the flat itself the next morning. All of this would mean a very slow start to my journey; but it still gave me plenty of time to reach Shetland, and in any case, there was no point in driving all the way to Kendal tonight, because Lucy would not be able to see me. I’d already been in touch with Caroline about that, and she’d told me that Lucy was going round to a friend’s house that night, for a birthday tea and sleepover. So, I would have to take her out to dinner on Tuesday evening. That was fine. I could still get to Aberdeen on Wednesday afternoon in plenty of time to make the five o’clock ferry. In the meantime, visiting Mr and Mrs Byrne might be a pleasantly nostalgic way to spend a couple of hours.

  I settled down to a steady 55 miles per hour. Every other vehicle on the motorway was going faster than this, even the heaviest lorries. My petrol consumption was back down to 70 miles per gallon, and I began to think of all the petrol that people would save if they drove at this speed all the time. Why was everybody in such a hurry? What difference did it make if you arrived at your destination half an hour later than you could have done? Perhaps it was motorways themselves that were the problem. Motorways allowed you to drive faster, yes, but more than that, they made you want to drive faster, they obliged you to drive faster, because driving on them was such a boring experience. I had only been on the M40 for about fifteen minutes, but already I was bored. There was absolutely nothing to see, nothing to look at, apart from the little punctuation marks that broke up the motorway itself – roadsigns, chevrons, gantries, bridges, all of which merged into one indecipherable, meaningless sequence after a while anyway. There was countryside on both sides, but it was featureless: the occasional house, the occasional reservoir, the occasional glimpse of a distant town or village, but apart from that, nothing. It occurred to me that the areas bordering our motorways must make up a huge proportion of our countryside, and yet nobody ever visits them or walks through them, or has any experience of them other than the monotonous, regularly unfolding view you get through the car window. These areas are wastelands; unaccounted for.

  ‘Welcome Break, 3 Miles’, one of the signs said; so I decided to come off the motorway here, and have some lunch. The next services – operated by Moto – were another twenty miles away, and the ones beyond that were more than forty miles. I didn’t want to wait that long. Besides, even though I didn’t fancy Kentucky Fried Chicken at the moment, the face of Colonel Sanders beaming out at me from the welcome sign was somehow reassuring. So I entered the slip road at Junction 8A, negotiated the network of mini-roundabouts, and found myself looking for a parking space in a car park that was, at this time of day, full almost to bursting point. Eventually I slotted my Prius between a Ford Fiesta and a Fiat Punto, and turned off the ignition with a sense of relief.

  It was 1.15, and I was hungry. All around me, people were heading for the main food hall – business people like me, mainly, wearing dark suits, collar and tie, sometimes with the jackets slung over their shoulders (although it was cold, today, and I for one was going to keep mine on). I felt a surge of well-being at the thought that I was part of something again: part of a nationwide process, part of a community – the business community – that was doing its bit, day in and day out, to keep Britain ticking over. We all had a part to play. Everybody here was involved in selling something, or buying something, or servicing or checking or costing or quantifying something. I felt connected again: back in the mainstream.

  The services themselves were a perfect microcosm of how a well-functioning Western society should operate. All the basic human needs were catered for here: the need to communicate (there was a shop selling mobile phones and accessories) and the need to amuse yourself (there was a gaming area full of slot machines); the need to consume food and drink, and the need to shit or piss it out again; and, of course, the eternal, fundamental need simply to buy a whole load of stuff: magazines, CDs, cuddly toys, chocolate bars, DVDs, wine gums, books, gadgets of every description. What with the Days Inn located just across the car park, with its offer of cheap beds for the night, you could theoretically move into this service stati
on and never need to leave. You could spend your whole life here, if you wanted to. Even the design was good. I’m old enough to remember what service stations used to be like in the 1970s and early 1980s. Horrible cheap plastic tables and unspeakable food outlets selling runny eggs and burgers swimming in grease. Here we had big picture windows looking out over a paved area with fountains tinkling away attractively; the tables were clean and modern-looking and some of them even had individual table lamps mounted on elegantly curved supports. Some thought had gone into all this. And the choice of food! There was Burger King, of course, and KFC, but if you were a bit more health-conscious than that, a big sign announced that ‘I ♥ Healthy Food’, and directed you towards counters where all manner of salads and fresh-looking sandwiches were available. Not to mention an outlet called Coffee Primo, which offered latte, cappuccino, mocha, hot chocolate, espresso, americano, vanilla cream frappe, caramel cream frappe, Twinings teas, a couple of dozen other caffeine-laden options, and of course the ubiquitous paninis.

  Despite this plethora of choice, unimaginable (when you think about it) a generation ago, before Thatcher and Blair set about transforming our society, I decided to have a hamburger. Sometimes a burger is exactly what you need. No extras, no frills. What’s more, at this place, you didn’t even have to talk to anyone to get your hamburger. You did it all on your debit card, selecting your order on a machine, putting your card into the terminal and then taking the receipt to a collection point. Worked very well, too. My burger was ready within about thirty seconds. When I saw it, though, I felt a bit guilty for not ordering something a bit more healthy so I went and stood in the queue at the sandwich counter and bought myself a bottle of pomegranate- and lychee-flavoured spring water, which cost £2.75. Then I took my dinner over to one of the tables next to the big picture windows.

  I had brought a fair amount of reading matter with me. First of all there were the manuals for the Prius – one for the car itself, and one devoted entirely to the onboard SatNav. There were also the instructions for the bluetooth headset I had been provided with, which connected up to the car somehow and could be controlled from the steering wheel. Trevor and Lindsay had been especially keen that I should get this up and running as soon as possible, because they wanted to be able to keep in regular contact. I wondered, in fact, if it was too early to phone Lindsay right now. Perhaps it was. There was hardly an urgent need for her to know that I had reached Oxford Services after an hour and a quarter’s driving. And then I had to study the manual for my video camera, which looked pretty complicated too. I would keep that for later, probably. Best to concentrate on the SatNav for the time being. I sat and read the manual for about ten minutes, until I felt reasonably sure that I had grasped all of the essentials. I felt confident now that I understood enough to use it on the next stage of the journey, as far as Birmingham.