Read The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim for Free Online Page A

toothbrushes, or imports them anyway, I think they import them from overseas, but they distribute them all over the UK, and not just regular toothbrushes but specialist toothbrushes with quite, you know, innovative designs, and also dental floss and mouthwash and a number of other oral hygiene products, which is actually quite a fast-growing … Erm, excuse me?’
    I’d become aware that somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned round and saw that it was one of the stewardesses.
    ‘Sir?’ she said. ‘Sir, we need to have a word with you, about your friend.’
    ‘My friend?’
    I didn’t know who they meant at first. Then I realized that she must be talking about Charlie Hayward. There was another stewardess standing beside her, and a male flight attendant. They didn’t look happy. I remembered that there’d been a bit of fuss a few minutes earlier, when one of them had come to take his tray away, but I’d been busy talking, and hadn’t taken much notice. Anyway, as they now informed me, it was impossible to be sure of the exact timing – not until they’d found out if there was a doctor on the plane – but apparently he’d been dead for at least five or ten minutes.
    It was a heart attack, of course. It usually is.
    The airline handled it all very delicately, I must say. A week after I’d got home, they sent me a letter, letting me know a few extra details which I have to say were comforting, very comforting. They told me that Charlie Hayward had suffered from heart problems for some time – this was his third attack, they said, in the last ten years – so the news hadn’t come as a complete shock to his wife, although of course she was devastated. He had two daughters, both in their twenties. The body was flown back home from Singapore and he was cremated in Sydney. On the way out to Singapore, though, they’d had no choice but to keep him in the same seat, right next to me. They put a blanket over him and said that I could come and sit with them if I liked, on one of the staff seats near to the galley, but I said no thanks, it was OK. Somehow I thought that would have been rude, disrespectful. Call me fanciful, if you like, but I felt he would have appreciated the company.
    Poor old Charlie Hayward. He was the first person I’d really managed to speak to, after taking my decision to reconnect with the world. Not a very auspicious start.
    However, things were about to get better.

3
    I was the last person to leave the plane after it landed at Singapore. While they lifted Charlie’s body and carried it off, I moved over to another seat, and sat there for a while after the other passengers had gone. Depression came over me. I could feel it. I was used to it by now, and knew how to recognize it. It reminded me of a horror film I had seen once on TV when I was a little boy. This man was trapped in a secret chamber in a big old castle, and the villain of the story pulled a lever which made the roof of the chamber start coming slowly down on top of him. Closer and closer, until it threatened to crush him. That’s what it felt like. It never quite crushed me, of course, but it got close enough that I could feel it, weighing down on my spine, cutting off my freedom of movement, paralysing me. Whenever this happened, I would for some time be physically unable to raise myself, will myself into motion. You could never really tell what was going to bring it on, either. It could be anything. In this case I suppose it was a sort of relapse: having said so much to Charlie, having unburdened myself so shamelessly of so many words, a tidal wave of words finally breaking through the floodgates, after months and months of withdrawal from the world, months made long by silence, by lack of human contact (contact, that is, unmediated by technology) – after all that, and the disaster it had just led to (indirectly or otherwise), I was already suffering something like a nervous reaction. I lapsed into immovable