The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim Read Online Free PDF

at me; but the gesture was enough. I took it as my doorway into conversation, even if he hadn’t meant it that way.
    ‘All done?’ I said.
    He looked blankly at me, obviously not expecting to be addressed. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but then he managed: ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Last-minute emails?’ I ventured.
    ‘Yep.’
    His accent seemed to be Australian, although it was pretty hard to tell just from the words ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘Yep’.
    ‘You know what I love about aeroplanes?’ I asked, undaunted. ‘They’re the last place left to us where we can be totally inaccessible. Totally free. No one can phone you or text you on an aeroplane. Once you’re in the air, nobody can send you an email. Just for a few hours, you’re away from all of that.’
    ‘True,’ said the man, ‘but not for much longer. There are already some airlines where you can send emails and use the net from your own laptop. And they’re talking about letting passengers use their mobiles soon. Personally, I can’t wait. What you like about flying is just what I hate about it. It’s dead time. Completely dead.’
    ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It just means that if we want to communicate with someone during a flight, it has to be done directly. You know, like – talking. It’s a chance to get to know other people. New people.’
    He glanced across at me as I said this. Something in his glance told me that the chance of getting to know me was one that he might have passed up without too many spasms of regret. But the rebuff that I was expecting didn’t come. Instead he held out his hand, and said gruffly: ‘The name’s Charles. Charles Hayward. Friends call me Charlie.’
    ‘Maxwell,’ I returned. ‘Max, for short. Maxwell Sim. Sim, like the actor.’ I always said this when introducing myself, but usually, unless I was talking to a British person of a certain age, the reference would go over their heads, and I would have to add: ‘Or like a SIM card.’
    ‘It’s good to know you, Max,’ said Charlie; then picked up his newspaper, turned away from me, and began reading it, starting at the financial pages.
    Well, that wouldn’t do. You can’t sit right next to someone for thirteen hours and ignore them completely, can you? In fact, not just thirteen, but twenty-four hours – because I noticed from the boarding card lying on his table that Charlie and I had been seated together on the second leg of the flight as well. It simply wouldn’t be human to sit in silence for all that time. I was pretty sure, anyway, that, if I made a big enough effort, I would manage to draw him out. Now that we’d exchanged a few words, I realized that he didn’t look unfriendly, as such – just rather stressed out and overworked. He must have been somewhere in his mid-fifties: over dinner he told me that he’d grown up in Brisbane and now held a fairly high-powered position in the Sydney office of a multinational corporation which was starting to experience financial difficulties. (This, I suppose, was the reason he wasn’t flying Business Class.) He was on his way to London for crisis talks with some of the other senior figures: he didn’t specify what the financial difficulties were, of course (why would he, to someone like me?), but apparently it was all to do with leverage. His company had taken out loans which were over-leveraged, or under-leveraged, or something like that. At one point when he was trying to explain this to me he started to look quite animated, and I thought there was a chance he might become positively chatty, but when he realized that I knew nothing about leverage, and had no real understanding of any financial instrument more complicated than an overdraft or a deposit account, he seemed to lose interest in me, and from then on, it became increasingly difficult to get more than a few words out of him. It didn’t help that he’d drunk several glasses of champagne and a number of beers with his