Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  ‘I can’t say that I saw it coming,’ says Mr Phillips. And this was true. One of his least favourite parts of the job, as deputy chief of accounts at Wilkins and Co., had been preparing breakdowns of the cost of making employees redundant. This was something he did in concert with Mr Somers, the deputy head of the legal department. You checked the contract and did the sums. Then, inevitably, you bumped into the person about whom you had just been preparing the figures. Once Mr Phillips had spent an hour stuck in a lift with a man from the marketing department whose sacking he had been costing that very morning. His contract meant he was due six months’ pay, so it wasn’t cheap – though as Mr Mill, the drunk, idle and unreliable head of accounts, was wont to point out, ‘There’s always money for redundancies.’ In the stationary lift they had talked about football for most of the hour, until some firemen came, apologizing for being so slow but saying they’d had to come via a chip pan blaze at a nurses’ hostel in Holborn.

  Someone in accounts must have run a ruler over his own dismissal, he realizes. It couldn’t have been Monroe, since they would have known that Monroe would have told him and in any case he couldn’t have kept it secret, given that they shared an office. It wouldn’t have been Mr Mill, who wasn’t up to anything more complicated than the two times table, and even that only before lunch. If they were looking for highish-level redundancies in accounts, Mill was lucky not to have been sacked himself. But as a director of the company he was on a year’s notice, and therefore prohibitively expensive to sack, notwithstanding his own rule. Mr Phillips’s old partner in crime Mr Somers must have known. Not that Mr Phillips would have been expensive or complicated to sack, with a straightforward three-month notice period and no tricky nonsense over bonus schemes or anything like that. They had promised to pay his pension contributions for two years or until he got another job, whichever was sooner. So this was it: redundancy.

  The interview or meeting or conversation with Mr Wilkins, the managing director, at which the news was broken, had been like a flashback to school and the time he was caned for being part of a group who smashed some windows in an after-hours throw-a-rock-over-the-gym competition. On that occasion the headmaster had not actually said the words ‘This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,’ but the sentiment was implicit in his pained, actorish demeanour. Mr Wilkins was like that too. Mr Phillips, once he realized what the purpose of the meeting was – which didn’t take long – was in a state of complete numbness and only heard the gist of what the company’s eponymous paramount chief had to say.

  ‘Unexpected lingering effects of recession among customers in our market sector –’

  Wilkins and Co. was a catering services supply company.

  ‘– gap between revenue and provisions – retrenchments called for – not a case of so-called “downsizing” for its own sake – company policy of exacting cuts department by department – accountancy’s turn to “give” – as always in these cases no question of any implied comment on the ability of anyone involved – he himself had once – best thing that ever – absolute confidence that – Wilkins and Co.’s settled policy of trying to act as generously as possible in these instances – one of the many ways in which the company tried to behave as a progressive, humane employer –’

  As with many energetic talkers Mr Wilkins seemed as keen to convince himself as the person to whom he was talking. The point about Wilkins and Co. being enlightened employers seemed especially important to him.

  ‘– not necessary to serve out full notice period – inevitable sense of gloom on these occasions – fresh fields and pastures new – better for all concerned – particularly keen that departing employees should get to keep their company cars at competitive terms – not a relevant factor in this particular case – these little and not-so-little things which make all the difference – Mr Phillips’s valuable contribution to Wilkins and Co. – once part of the team always part of the team – importance of team players like Mr Phillips to any company – regret and also sadness and also sense of new beginnings – not the least service he had performed the company his current bearing under difficult circumstances – was that the time – another meeting – thank you thank you.’

  When Mr Phillips had first gone to Wilkins and Co. in 1969, Mr Wilkins, the son of the founder, had then been young to be the managing director of a company of that size. He had one of those tanks full of heavy pink oil which slosh from side to side in a supposedly soothing way. It was what they used to call an executive toy. Nowadays his office was decorated with two abstract paintings. The photos of his family which sat on his desk were turned towards the visitor’s seat, either because Mr Wilkins was sick of the sight of them and/or because he wanted to show them off. So the last thing Mr Phillips saw as he left his now ex-employer’s office was a picture of his boss’s son wearing robes and smiling nervously in a graduation day studio portrait.

  Mr Phillips went back to his office and slumped into his chair, which wheezed out a puff of air, as if it and not he were making a physical effort. Neither Mr Monroe nor Karen was there. For some time he sat and didn’t do anything. No one came into his office and the telephone did not ring. Then he leaned forward, took a pencil out of the ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug he had bought himself one Father’s Day and began to do some sums.

  ‘You’re a what?’ asks the man in the park.

  ‘I’m not an anything now,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘That’s no way to think.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘Ah, “but what is truth?” I’ve always thought that wasn’t nearly as clever a remark as it’s supposed to be. It’s like those wankers who say “Define your terms” when you’re having an argument, like a record with a broken needle. There’s no excuse for anyone over the age of fifteen using that kind of trick in argument. So you’re a what?’

  ‘I’m an accountant,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘I’m good at sums myself,’ says the man. ‘Not like these days with the calculators at school, you’d wonder if they can even add up.’

  ‘I use, used, a calculator all the time at work.’ Mr Phillips has a twinge of romantic feeling about the calculator that prints out the figures fed through it, keeping track of any errors in the calculation. He has always privately thought of the calculator as surrounded by a nimbus of professional glamour, as much a symbol of the accountant’s mystery as a stethoscope is a doctor’s.

  ‘What sort of accountant? City firm, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I used to work for a catering supply company,’ says Mr Phillips.

  The man nods sympathetically. ‘Wrong game. Can happen to anyone. Dual streams of revenue, that’s the beauty of the magazine business. You’ve got your income from cover sales as well as your money from advertising. As an accountant you’ll appreciate the elegance of that. Plus, the business is based on masturbation, which is the steadiest source of revenue imaginable. People buy the magazine to have a wank, and people advertise in the magazine to get in touch with people who wank, and it’s all the best business in the world, since everybody wanks. You don’t often hear it discussed, but it’s true. People always say the great taboo is death, but in my experience you hear death discussed a lot more than you do wanking. Perhaps older people don’t do it quite so much but you can bet that even they do it every now and again. Probably even the Queen does it. Mind you, you’ve got to watch the demographics. Older women, for instance, appeal mainly to very young men – I dare say you remember. But very young men haven’t got any money, have they? Bad demographic. I’ve heard it said that lesbians go for older women too,’ the man added in a more thoughtful tone, ‘but that’s a bit off my patch. You have to stick with what you know.’

  There’s some truth in all this, Mr Phillips has to admit. He himself does it never less than once a week and often as much as three times: at home in bed, or upstairs in his den, which is his favourite because he can lock the door and get a magazine out, though it’s true that he prefers
the fully prone position available in bed to the semi-recline he can get with his beloved den Barcalounger. This would of course affect the 96.7 per cent figure for not having sex, if you included all forms of sex including with yourself. He sometimes used to masturbate in the toilet of his office at Wilkins and Co., when seized by an irresistible impulse or when Karen was looking particularly attractive – though it was less a spur of the moment thing than a question of the need building up over a couple of days, a familiar and pleasant pressure around his prostate, a warmth in the balls, which eventually reached the point where it demanded release. Women probably don’t masturbate in the toilet at work, Mr Phillips feels. He is quietly confident about that one. He once even masturbated in the toilet at Thomas’s school during a PTA meeting (his cock had been hard, he had come with appropriately teenage speed).

  There must be lots of evidence of Martin and Tom’s masturbating, to be found in their sheets and in the bins, not to mention pornography stashed in drawers and under mattresses, but Mr Phillips doesn’t want to know about it, and anyway can’t imagine formulating the detective procedures by which he might find out for himself. No, he definitely doesn’t want to know. Would it be different if he had daughters? Probably – Mr Phillips has no difficulty in imagining himself as a knicker-sniffer and injuncter of boyfriends. With his sons he feels a systematic, deliberate incuriosity. He authoritatively shirked the task of educating them about sex. In Mr Phillips’s view this was not news anyone wanted to hear from their parents. Leave it to school and to porn mags. After all, what does he know? His own father’s instructions about sex had been a late-night five-minute monologue about ‘the strength being sapped’ – a highly cryptic allusion to the subject of wet dreams, as Mr Phillips realized about a decade later. At the time of this chat he had already been having wet dreams for over a year.

  ‘I have to go now,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘It was good meeting you.’ He thinks about offering to shake hands but the moment seems subtly wrong. He has had enough of the park. They have walked as far as the giant gilded Buddha on the embankment; there are four Buddhas up the stairs on the square plinth, three of them very bright in the morning sunlight. Mr Phillips looks up past the man at the nearest of the Buddhas. He is fast asleep while attendants gaze fondly down at him. He looks like a man who enjoys his sleep. Mr Phillips tries to think of any pictures of God or Christ asleep, but the only ones he can come up with concern the disciples panicking during the storm on Lake Galilee while Christ has a zizz.

  ‘Cheerio,’ says the man. ‘I’m sorry you lost your job. You’ve got my number. Give me a call if you want to have another chat, or if you have any ideas for magazines.’ As Mr Phillips wanders away he calls after him, ‘And thanks for your input on the tennis thing.’

  2.1

  Mr Phillips stands on Chelsea Bridge and looks down at the Thames. Across the road, next to the ruins of Battersea Power Station, a man tied to an enormous rubber band is jumping from a crane.

  Presumably the less safe you felt in your everyday life, the less need you had for ‘dangerous sports’. They hold no appeal whatsoever for Mr Phillips. You would have to see gravity as a joke or as a benign force or at the very least as something you could trifle with, play games with, not take too seriously – whereas all that Mr Phillips has to do is look downwards, at his sagged and weighted flesh, to feel differently.

  The man falls with his body held in a dramatic cruciform shape, initially accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second, beginning to slow when the band goes taut after a drop of about eighty feet, then slowing further until he comes to a momentary stop another fifty feet further down; and then the rubber coils and scrunches as the man bounces back upwards, and the cage at the end of the crane comes down to collect him. It makes Mr Phillips feel funny even to look at it. How often are there accidents? The unspoken possibility of seeing someone’s death must be part of the appeal, as for the spectators at car races or air shows. A hundred thousand people go to see the British Grand Prix at Silverstone every year, paying £95 each. It’s a great, though unnecessary, compliment to death.

  Mr Phillips suffers from, not vertigo, but the thing that makes people unable to stand next to a height without imagining jumping or falling off it. It is as if the idea of this kind of suicide presses in on him whenever he stands in a high place. And Chelsea Bridge is the sort of elegant suspension bridge he can imagine choosing for that final jump. Why on earth would anyone throw themselves under a train when they could chuck themselves off a bridge instead?

  Granted, the fall from here might not kill him, even though water is harder the faster you hit it – for some reason Mr Phillips once heard on a TV science programme but could feel himself forgetting even as he was listening to it. Say it’s 100 feet up, with the tide at this lowish ebb. At 32 feet per second per second, that’s 32 + (32 + 32) = 96 = 2 seconds at a climactic speed of 64 feet per second. You multiply by 15 and divide by 22 to get miles per hour which comes to 43 miles per hour, so if it is true that hitting water at speed is like hitting concrete you would be hitting concrete at 43 miles per hour, which ought to do it. But there are other, more certain places. Clifton Bridge, another elegant piece of suspension work, is 250 feet which would take 4 secs, which means that you would in theory hit at 32 + 32 + 32 + 32, which is 128 feet per second, which is 87 miles per hour, which would certainly do it. It’s worth remembering that in practice you can’t fall any faster than terminal velocity, which for a human being is about 130 mph which is, history shows, fast enough. Beachy Head, another popular spot, 535 feet, 5.6 seconds, close to terminal velocity. Severn Bridge, another classic, 200 feet, 3.6 seconds.

  They say that you have a moment of fear and then you go all calm, or even pass out. But how on earth do they know that? And of course you would be beyond fear anyway, to do it in the first place. Otherwise the thought of your shins being driven upwards into your pelvis would put a stop to it. The moment of contact, however quick, must surely leave you with a split second of awareness of what was happening. It was like the guillotine, there had to be a fraction of a second while the head knew it was leaving the body. Even if the fall didn’t kill him, the cold Thames, flowing far more powerfully and faster than anyone could swim, certainly would. Unless he went in at the turn of the tide, or landed on a boat that was carrying something soft on top or had a big canopy. What an idiot you would feel if that happened! You would have to come up with something really good to pacify the amazed bargemen. I was just looking at the paintwork and next thing I know here I am. Sorry for any alarm or inconvenience. I expect you get quite a lot of this. You couldn’t drop me off at the next pier by any chance? Or, not going too far, I hope? Jolly good, I’ve never been to Amsterdam. They say the red light district is quite something!

  Mr Phillips stands and looks down at the water for what feels like a long time.

  2.2

  Mr Phillips is not a well-informed bus passenger, and the only route he knows well is his standard one from Waterloo to the office. As he waits at the bus stop beside Chelsea Bridge he has no particular plans about where he wants to go. Whatever comes along first and has seating room will be fine with him. The only other aspiring passenger is a middle aged Caribbean woman in an unseasonal brown mackintosh; she looks a little like the people who come to the door in Wellesley Crescent on weekend evenings selling copies of the Jehovah’s Witness newspaper. Mr Phillips thinks about getting his own reading matter out of the briefcase but before he can do anything about it a double decker bus appears.

  It is one of the modern buses where you get on at the front and give your money to the driver; much slower and harder to love than the old Routemasters with the conductor. The new ones must be cheaper to run, though – less manpower. The world looks different, more fragile, when you have in mind that everyone everywhere tries to employ as few people as possible. Mr Phillips had always been impressed by the way conductors used to know exactly who had got on and off and who hadn’t paid their fare, as
if they had a constantly updated map of the bus in their heads. On the occasions he tried to sit still and not admit to not having paid he always found a conductor hovering at his shoulder demanding the fare. Perhaps they were trained to detect guilty body language. If a bus conductor’s wife cheated on him he would know within seconds of getting home.

  Mr Phillips climbs on to the step of the bus behind the supposed Jehovah’s Witness. He has a good view of her big, strangely high bottom. She peremptorily flashes a bus pass at the driver. Simultaneously, as if the sight has put the thought of money in his mind, he realizes that he has no coins. His ticket from Clapham Junction to Waterloo has cleared him out of change. Mr Phillips fishes his wallet out of his jacket pocket, takes out a £10 note and says:

  ‘I’m sorry about this.’

  The driver looks at the note, where it sits in the little metal dish by his compartment.

  ‘You’re winding me up,’ he says without moving. The bus thrums loudly at its standstill.

  ‘I don’t mean to. I just don’t have any change,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘You’d like me to believe that, wouldn’t you?’ says the driver.