The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe

Author:Jonathan Coe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 0307594815
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

That’s not quite the end of the story. I wish it was, really, 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 doorbell. 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 straightaway 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.

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