That’s not quite the end of the story. I wish it was, in a way, because I don’t like the actual end of the story very much at all. Nevertheless, I’m aware that I haven’t really addressed the essay topic yet, and in order to do that, I have to briefly describe what happened round at the Sims’ house a couple of weeks later.
I was feeling guilty about Max, I have to admit. That last evening had been such a fiasco, when it could have been so different, and I couldn’t help blaming myself, to a certain extent. True, he had behaved like a total idiot, but I could probably have made the situation better if I hadn’t lost my temper with him so quickly, and the truth of the matter was that I still felt fond of him, for all his uselessness. So I’d decided to give him one last chance.
I didn’t want to ask him for a drink, or anything like that, so in order to keep things casual I thought I would simply call in at his house one Sunday afternoon and suggest going for a walk somewhere – maybe on the municipal golf course, which was just across the road from where they lived. I didn’t call him on the telephone or anything: I wanted just to pretend that I was in the area anyway, and had dropped by on the spur of the moment.
It was a nice sunny afternoon, in mid-September. I walked up their little drive and rang the front door bell. It didn’t seem to be working but the door had been left on the latch and I was able to push it open.
The first thing I would normally do would be to shout, ‘Hello! Is anybody there?’ – but today I didn’t, because I could tell straight away that the house was quite empty and silent, apart from a gentle rhythmic snoring coming from one of the bedrooms upstairs. Not wishing to wake whoever was asleep, I tiptoed up the stairs and found that the noise was coming from the spare bedroom, which I remembered as being a sparsely furnished room with nothing much in it apart from a wardrobe and a single bed. Who would be in there, and why would they be sleeping?
The door was ajar. I silently pushed it further open and looked inside.
It was Mr Sim, and I can only imagine that he must have had a heavy Sunday lunch a couple of hours earlier – perhaps washed down with some red wine – because I cannot believe that he meant to fall asleep in the attitude in which I found him. He was lying on his side, facing the door. His trousers and pants were pulled halfway down his legs and in his right hand he held a crumpled tissue. His penis lay wrinkled and flaccid between his legs, and from its purple tip a little strand of semen dribbled down onto the pale-blue bedspread. Purple and pale blue – Aston Villa colours: that was the first silly thought that came into my head. Weird how the mind works. The only other thing I could see on the bedspread was a photograph: a glossy colour print of the picture he had taken on the small shingle beach next to Coniston Water. I noticed that he had folded it neatly and carefully in half, so that the figure of Chris was hidden and the only person you could see was me, all wet and cold in my skimpy orange bikini. It was almost as if the picture had been deliberately composed – the perfect symmetry of the two of us standing there, one on either side of the frame – in order to make this possible.
I could only have glimpsed Mr Sim in this position for a couple of seconds before I heard the front door open again, and voices coming from downstairs. Quickly I withdrew – only just in time, for I could hear him waking with a start, and hurriedly making himself decent.
I heard Max and his mother walking through into the kitchen. They had left the front door open so I went downstairs silently and slipped outside. I did not want to talk to them and I did not want them to see me. And I certainly didn’t want to come face to face with Mr Sim.
After that I made it my business to keep out of the way of Max and his family for a long time. I think I even managed to avoid seeing them at Christmas, somehow or other, even though in the normal course of events we always saw each other at Christmas, usually spending most of Boxing Day together. Nobody seemed to notice that I was avoiding them, so nobody asked me for an explanation. It was hard on Max, of course, but I knew that he would probably get a crush on some other girl, sooner rather than later. Things between us could have been very different, if he hadn’t been so fixated on the idea of starting a fire that last evening at the campsite. That had been our great opportunity, and once it had passed, maybe there was no going back anyway. What would I have said to him, that Sunday afternoon, if we had gone for our walk on the golf course together? I really don’t know. All I know is, after I had seen his father like that – after I had realized that he must have been watching me, and lusting after me, all week, and after I had realized what his reasons were for taking that photograph – I could not have got myself involved with Max, however much I liked him.
In conclusion, therefore, what has writing this essay taught me? I suppose it has reinforced my conviction that the consequences of privacy violation can be very destructive and hurtful. In this case, they destroyed the possibility of my ever having a relationship with Max, despite the fact that, prior to these events, I had liked him very much, and even found myself attracted towards him.
Alison Byrne
February 1980
14
– Straight on at the roundabout – take second exit.
‘Well, Emma, this is just a great situation, isn’t it?’
– Exit coming up.
‘I now have a mental image of my father which I’m probably never going to be able to get out of my head.’
– In two hundred yards, right turn.
‘And just to cap it off, tomorrow night I’m going to be having dinner with the woman who put it there.’
– Right turn coming up.
‘I really didn’t think I could get any more angry with my father. I really couldn’t see how he could sink any further in my estimation. But – well done, Dad. You’ve managed it! Not just tossing yourself off over a picture of one of my friends, but managing to get caught doing it! Way to go, Dad. Way to fucking go. Are there any other ways you’d care to fuck up my life? Because you might as well finish the job off now that you’ve made such a good start.’
I pulled furiously on the steering wheel as I made the right turn, and took the curve much too fast. In the process I nearly clipped the bumper of a four-wheel-drive that was waiting to pull out from the road I was turning into. The driver tooted her horn at me. I glared back.