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

stillness and had no awareness, none at all, of what was going on around me. Finally, I noticed that a stewardess, once again (it was even the same stewardess, I believe) was shaking me gently by the shoulder. ‘Sir?’ she was saying, in a kindly undertone. ‘Sir, we must ask you to leave the plane now. The cleaning staff are waiting to come on board.’
    Sleepily I tilted my head towards her and, without a word, rose to my feet in a slow and I suppose trance-like movement. I made my way down the aisle, through Business Class and then out along the walkway towards the arrivals lounge. For some of the time I think the stewardess must have been walking alongside me. She said something like: ‘Are you OK, sir? Would you like someone to come with you?’, but the reply I gave must have been reassuring enough for her to trust me to my own devices.
    A few minutes passed. I can’t say for certain where I would have spent them, but after a while I became aware that I was sitting at a café table, conscious of an oppressive, sticky heat and surrounded by shops bearing the names of familiar global brands, through which crowds of jetlagged passengers wandered in their own kind of daze, their eyes glazed and sightless, each one threading between the racks and stands and revolving displays with the thoughtless tread of a sleepwalker. I looked down at the liquid in my coffee cup and saw that it appeared to be some sort of cappuccino. Presumably I had ordered it and paid for it. I inserted a finger between my neck and the collar of my shirt in order to wipe away a ring of sweat that had gathered there. As I did so my eyes were drawn to one figure in particular amidst the crowd of somnambulant shoppers. She was a young woman of about twenty-five and my first impression of her was curious. I am not a particularly spiritual person but the first thing I noticed about this woman – or thought that I noticed – was that she was wearing a very colourful blouse. In fact it was probably this burst of colour, making her stand out like a fiercely burning beacon, that had first caught my attention and startled me out of my latest trough of depression. But actually, when I looked at her more closely, her clothes were of quite an ordinary colour and what I must have sensed, instead, was something else about her that was colourful, something internal, some kind of bright and luminous aura. Does that make any sense? As I continued to watch her this aura slowly flickered out and faded away but still there was something compelling and irresistible about her. For one thing, while the surrounding crowds seemed to be drifting ever more slowly, as if in a state of deep hypnosis, this woman had a sense of purpose. A rather furtive sense of purpose, admittedly. She wandered from shop doorway to shop doorway, trying to appear nonchalant but unable to stop herself from looking around her so frequently and so warily that at first I thought that she might be a shoplifter. Since she never actually went into any of the shops, however, I had to discount this theory. She was dressed in a rather masculine way, with a blue denim jacket which seemed quite unnecessary in this kind of heat, and had the sort of short hair and boyish looks which I’ve always found particularly sexy. (Alison used to have the same looks, for instance – Chris’s sister, Alison Byrne – although the last time I saw her, about fifteen years ago, she had started to wear her hair long.) I suppose you would call this woman’s hair reddish, or perhaps strawberry blonde. It looked as though she might have used henna on it. Anyway, the jacket is the important thing, because after a while I began to suspect that she might only be wearing this jacket in order to conceal something underneath it. I came to this conclusion after watching her, I suppose, quite brazenly, for a minute or more, during which time she noticed me and flashed me one or two anxious and irritated glances. Embarrassed, I