‘Is my money not good enough for you?’ says Mr Phillips, consciously choosing to go over to the attack.
‘What was that jingling sound when you got on?’ demands the driver. ‘You’ll tell me it’s your keys. That’s what you lot always say.’
‘I don’t have a “lot”. I have ten pounds,’ says Mr Phillips.
The driver looks at him without speaking for a few seconds. Then, apparently without any exertion on his part, a cascade of coins falls into a second metal dish below the first one. The driver reaches out and takes the note between thumb and first finger with an air of aggrieved delicacy. There is a chattering sound and a printed ticket extends itself from a slot.
‘Eight pounds sixty change,’ says the driver.
Mr Phillips takes his change and puts it into his baggy pocket – which, like everyone else’s, has suffered a battering since the abolition of the pound note in favour of the chunky squid. Even if you like the pound coin, as he does, you have to admit it’s hard on the old trousers. His favourite among the coin’s designs is also the most common, the one with DECUS ET TUTAMEN EST cut into the rim of the coin. An ornament and a safeguard. The words are supposed to refer both to the monarchy and to the lettering itself, because it made the coins harder to forge. Mr Monroe is particularly keen on this coin. ‘Amazing language, Latin,’ he says. ‘Just four words and it means The Holocaust Could Never Happen Here Because We’ve Got the Queen and Piss Off You Forgers all at the same time. I have to say that I find the Scottish motto to be in relative terms a disappointment. The design a thistle, the motto Nemo me impune lacessit, No One Wounds Me With Impunity. It’s a prison sentiment by comparison.’
Without meeting any eyes inside the hot ground floor of the bus, Mr Phillips heads for the upper deck. As a child he loved the staircase on double decker buses. He and his parents and his sister had once stayed in a holiday cottage where the wooden spiral staircase was carved out of a ship’s mast. The way the stairs twisted half-way around, like an attempt at a spiral, made him think of ships and secret passageways, shivering guards standing watches in high battlements, dragons, romance …
After climbing the ten feet and making two right turns Mr Phillips heads for the front of the bus, sees that there are no seats there, and then turns towards the back. It is a point of commuting and urban etiquette to take an empty double seat wherever possible rather than squeezing in beside someone already seated. Most of the passengers look as if they are on the way to work. He squeezes in beside a smartly dressed, cross-looking woman who has the air of an important person’s trusted secretary.
Mr Phillips leaves his book in his briefcase. Reading it as the bus bumps and jogs would make him nauseated. Thomas has inherited this gene for motion sickness, and needs to be soothed and distracted and given breaks on journeys of any real length, whereas Martin would sit in the back happily rereading comics, and occasionally taunting his younger brother by offering to lend them to him. It is one of those issues where the difference between the two siblings seems planned and structured, as if the gene for confidence in Martin triggered the gene for shyness in Thomas, and so on with loud/quiet, liking girls’ company/preferring boys’, getting on better with father/mother, favourite colour purple/black, wanting a dog/wanting a cat. It was as if they took readings off each other and used them to calibrate their own whereabouts.
The bus moves half-way across Chelsea Bridge and comes to a halt. A vista opens up towards Canary Wharf in the east and past Battersea Bridge towards Hammersmith in the other direction. There isn’t much traffic on the river today. There never is. Mr Phillips has lived in London his entire life and has never been afloat on the River Thames, not once. It is one of a collection of things he hasn’t done. He hasn’t been in a helicopter, met anyone famous, been to Wembley Stadium or the Royal Albert Hall or the House of Commons. He has never given anyone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or made a citizen’s arrest. He had never seen a dead body until his father’s death in 1981. At the lying-in he was stiff and unforgettably cold to the touch.
There would be a good number of people in this town who had never ever seen a dead body – conservatively, 80 per cent. So the set of people who had never been on the Thames and had never seen a dead body would be high too. And according to the sex survey he had bought and read secretly and obsessively a couple of years before, only 30 per cent of Britons had ever experienced anal intercourse – a figure which seemed surprisingly low, for though to Mr Phillips himself the subject was neither here nor there and his own single experience, with Sharon Mitchell, had ended with her in tears and him comforting her before sneaking off to masturbate in the toilet, he knew that this was a very general number one double-top male fantasy. Indeed, the most common heterosexual male fantasy, if you ignored for the moment the one about watching women doing it with each other, was about women who were a. as keen on sex as men, if not more so, b. as quickly ready for it, c. as easily satisfied, and d. loved anal intercourse. Putting together the figures for this bus, and assuming figures of 70 per cent for no anal intercourse, 75 per cent for not having been on the Thames, 80 per cent for not having seen a dead body, and saying that there were 80 people on the bus, you multiply 70 per cent by 75 per cent by 80 per cent to get 42 per cent, which means that a total of 33.6 people on the bus have never been on London’s river, seen a corpse nor experienced anal intercourse. Thanks to Sharon, Mr Phillips is in the relatively suave and experienced subset who have only not been on the Thames. He has lived.
About half the people on the bus are reading books and newspapers; the others are lost in rapt trances of pure being. They are presumably abandoned in their on-the-way-to-work thoughts, their what-I’ll-say-to-him-if-he-says thoughts, their dreams of how-dare-he and how-I’ll try-to-catch-her-at-the-photocopying machine, their reveries of when-I-get-home-I’ll tell-him-that. As well as the usual fantasies about sex, power, recognition, revenge. A man across the bus’s narrow, sticky aisle is staring into nothing while silently talking to himself. There is, if not a smile, at least a slight upward inflection at the creases of his lips. It looks as if he is rehearsing a long speech in triumphant self-justification.
Immediately beside Mr Phillips the cross-looking woman is reading a Sunday newspaper’s astrology column with particularly close attention, apparently not concentrating on any one star sign but scrutinizing all of them with equal rigour. She doesn’t look like a natural tabloid reader. Mr Phillips wonders if she is a sceptic checking for contradictions and internal inconsistencies, or has lots of children and close relatives and wants to monitor the auspices for all of them. Or she could be an orphan whose birth certificate had been lost and is trying to work out what month she was born in by the unscientific method of checking all horoscopes and correlating them against what happened to her, or perhaps she is simply very very interested in astrology. She notices Mr Phillips looking at her and lifts her paper slightly away from him to make his scrutiny of what she is reading more difficult. On the opposite page of her paper he catches a glimpse of a story about Clarissa Colingford, something about a secret engagement. She is known to have boyfriend trouble, multiple boyfriends, boyfriends who are caught with other women, that sort of thing. But there is no way he can find out more without actually taking the paper out of his neighbour’s hands.
The bus finally gets to the end of Chelsea Bridge and begins trying to turn right. There is a small flurry of people pressing to get up, shifting their balance, setting their feet, alerting their neighbours. The more experienced commuters then wait for the bus to swing around the corner at the end of the bridge before actually standing, while neophytes bang and jostle around like pinballs as the bus lurches through its right turn. About a third of the people on the bus get off by the incinerator tower opposite Chelsea Gardens. The seat in front of Mr Phillips is now empty. For a moment he wonders if slipping into it would be an implied criticism of the other person on his double seat; then he decides that if it causes her to worry about being ugly and/
or halitotic, so much the better, since she had been so sniffy about his sneaking a glimpse of her precious astrology column. Besides, she probably works for an arms dealer or some other Mr Wilkins figure or something. He moves with a fiftyish attempt at panther-like smoothness into the window seat in front. The astrology woman spreads her newspaper open across both seats with an air of complacency. A middle aged West Indian man in an enormous floppy hat comes up the stairs, followed by a schoolgirl wearing an almost parodically complete school uniform – dark grey jacket, light grey shirt, short dark blue skirt, ponytail, white socks, black shoes, satchel. They go towards the back and front of the bus respectively. The girl takes the seat right at the front with the good view but no leg room. Sticking out of the man’s pocket is a battered copy of Teach Yourself Tamil.
Because the bus is momentarily at a halt Mr Phillips can hear the conversation of the two women in front.
‘Don’t know how she gets away with it,’ the woman on the left, who has an Irish accent, is saying. ‘If you or I did it we’d be arrested.’
‘And it’s not as if she’s younger than us.’
‘Older.’
‘The trout.’
‘And it’s not as if it makes her look ridiculous either,’ says the woman, with a note of wistfulness, before the bus roars off again and the rest of their talk is drowned out.
Mr Phillips looks at his watch, a silver-plated Omega with roman numerals which his father gave him as a present when he passed his charter exams. When Mr Phillips took the watch out of its box and looked up beaming to thank his father, the older man, with his arms crossed, merely said:
‘There.’
At the time, that had seemed a perfectly natural thing to say; or at least Mr Phillips had felt he understood it. Now he sometimes looks at the watch and remembers his father’s single word and wonders whether it meant there, that’s the whole business of present-giving discharged – or there, you’re a grown-up now, you need to be on time – or there, the days of exams are behind you – or there, you’ll never again look at the time without remembering your father. Perhaps it really had meant, I’ll be dead one day. There are times when he looks at the watch and is overcome by a recollection so acute that he can feel the stubble on his father’s chin as he embraced him, and smell the slight sourness of pickled things on his breath. And at other times he just looks at his watch and thinks, Oh it’s five to two.
Now, though, it’s five past ten. The working day at Wilkins and Co. will be well and truly under way. When Mr Phillips was younger he had liked to be as late as was possibly consistent with keeping his job, and had been voluptuously reluctant to get out of bed. These days he likes, or liked, to be at his desk by nine fifteen, or half past at the very latest; he enjoyed setting off to work while still feeling a tad groggy, with wisps of sleep trailing behind him. There was something comforting about being seated at his desk opening his correspondence with faint vestiges of sleepiness rising off him like the steam off his day’s first mug of coffee. That mug would be brought to him by Karen if she was in yet, or made by Mr Phillips himself if she had had trouble with her journey or at home. (There is a man in her life. More than that Mr Phillips does not know, and does not want to know.) Karen often looked very slightly flushed in the mornings, something to do with make-up or getting up or, perhaps, rushed sexual activity, its memory bringing a glow to her cheeks like a remembered embarrassment. And her coffee tasted better than Mr Phillips’s too, which was a mystery, since it was made to precisely the same formula (two level spoonfuls of Gold Blend, water just off the boil, dollop of skimmed milk).
By half past ten Mr Phillips would hope to have read his correspondence and dictated replies to most of it. He still has his Dictaphone – it is in his briefcase at this very moment – even though it is strictly (or even not so strictly) speaking company property. But there is something so personal about this chunky piece of metal and plastic that he had felt obliged to cling on to it and to slip it home. The Dictaphone’s tiny micro-cassette cassette now holds replies to memos that will never be typed, signed and dispatched, letters that will never be sent, admonitions and excuses that will vanish into the electronic limbo of erased cassette tape. Mr Phillips takes the Dictaphone cassette out of his bag, holds the speaker to his ear and presses Play.
‘Reply to memo from Mr Street in Administration Department,’ Mr Phillips hears himself say, in the low, intimate, urgent voice he uses to his Dictaphone. ‘Check to see if the early memo included a blind copy to Mr Mill and if so copy him again.’
It was Mr Mill to whom the original memo should have been sent, if he had not been so reliably inclined not to do anything about anything, ever.
‘Memo begins:
‘There are difficulties with the proposal to save money by switching to a cheaper brand of sticky … of paper with … er, just say Post-It notes, Karen. Full stop. To wit comma Post-It notes are patented and no cheaper brand, change that to more reasonable brand, is therefore available full stop. Apparently they were invented by an out-of-work engineer in America full stop. At the moment the budget for this item of stationery comma which costs 49p a small packet comma is fifteen thousand pounds full stop. On balance I would favour a memo from Administration informing employees of this fact comma and pointing out that free access to stationery cupboards will one day become a thing of the past if unbridled consumption of office materials cannot be checked full stop. End of memo.’
Mr Phillips stops the Dictaphone and takes it away from his ear. It would be nice to have been the man who invented Post-It notes and to feel that your wealth was accumulating minutely but perceptibly every time someone peeled a little piece of yellow paper off a block and plunked it down on somebody else’s desk. Now Wilkins and Co. would never hear of his plan to save £7500, equivalent to almost a quarter of his own annual salary, by stopping people stealing so much stuff from the office for their own use. Mr Phillips is perfectly aware that this happens since he does it himself. In the days when Mrs Phillips taught in the evenings the whole family used to communicate primarily through stolen Wilkins and Co. Post-It notes.
‘The chicken is on a timer. Don’t touch any of the settings. Love Mum.’
‘I didn’t bring you a cup of tea this morning because you looked like you needed a lie-in. We’re out of bin liners.’
‘Martin: the stereo in the living room was still on when I got in last night and it was hot to the touch. HOW MANY TIMES MUST I REMIND YOU TO TURN IT OFF BEFORE GOING TO BED.’
‘Dad – five-a-side tournament moved till Sunday fortnight because of the flu epidemic can you still give me a lift Thomas.’
This might be a way of letting Mrs Phillips know what had happened.
‘Darling: I’ll probably be out late tonight wandering aimlessly around because I got the sack last week don’t wait up love Victor.’
The enormous advantage of this method would be that he wouldn’t have to be present to see her reaction, or – more probably and more painfully – her careful lack of reaction and attempt to act as if everything was OK. Knowing someone so well that you could anticipate their response to most things should make their responses easier to bear but in practice often does the opposite.
2.3
The traffic is crawling along the Embankment. Mr Phillips wants it to move more quickly, because that way there would be a greater variety of distractions. On the far side of the road, the footpath beside the river is busy with the last stray joggers of the morning, some of whom, fit scrawny men with little rucksacks, are clearly running to work. A group of twelve Gurkhas wearing olive-green T-shirts and shorts jogs past in tight formation, apparently heading for Chelsea Barracks.
About four hundred yards from Chelsea Bridge the bus stops again. There is the usual pause while people rummage for change to pay their fare and then the bus sets off. As it does so a very dishevelled man, evidently a tramp, comes to the top of the stairs. He wears a mouldy suit whose trousers are too big and whose jacket is too sm
all, so that it seems he could burst all its seams by flexing his upper body. The trousers are kept up with knotted string. His shirt once was pink or orange. He wears shoes with the soles flapping loose and no laces, has obviously not washed or shaved for quite some time, and his face is a strange mottled purple colour. Asmell of meths or turpentine seems to rise off him. He carries three very full plastic bags. He could be any age from thirty to seventy.
Mr Phillips can feel everybody on the upper deck of the bus willing the man not to sit next to them. As if conscious of his moment in the invisible spotlight, the tramp stands at the top of the stairs and slowly scans the upper deck of the bus. Mr Phillips concentrates on avoiding eye contact while looking bored and unprovokable. The new arrival takes two steps towards the back of the bus and then with odd gracefulness swings around and heads for the front, tacking from side to side of the narrow corridor as he goes. With terrible inevitability he sways to the very front of the bus and sits down, with a loud combined sigh and cough, next to the girl in school uniform.
It isn’t often, Mr Phillips thinks, that you see tramps on buses. Presumably it’s the expense. On the Tube you see them all the time, especially on the Circle Line, where they got a whole day riding around and around for the price of one ticket, being spun around the capital like the flags on a prayer wheel. Mad people you saw all the time too on the Underground. In fact, after a certain time of night the Tube seemed to be populated entirely by the mad, the drunk, and the frightened.
Mr Phillips wonders what it would be like to become a tramp. If he didn’t go home this evening, for instance, but simply rode the Underground until it closed, watching the ebb and flow of human types through the long day – the people travelling to work in the morning, the afternoon-shifters, the tourists with backpacks and maps and guidebooks and questions, the errand-doers, the unclassifiables on trips of all stripes, the students, hookers, nurses, actors, all those who work funny hours, then at the end of the afternoon people returning from work, hanging from straps and clinging to poles in their tight hordes, heading out from the middle of town like an orderly crowd fleeing a disaster, Mr Phillips comfortably ensconced in the corner seat he has bagged during the mid-morning pre-lunch lull, in between dozes and daydreams and periods when his attention goes offline like the Wilkins and Co. IBM mainframe. Then the reverse exodus for the evening’s diversions, plays and movies and pubs and clubs, and then the late-night hour of the knackered and the smashed, which leads into the slow extinction of the network, the dwindling frequencies of the trains until shutdown at one or so, when he would go to one of the big railway terminals – probably not Euston or King’s Cross (too many Scotsmen, drug dealers, tarts, pimps, all that). Victoria, say, where he would try and find a spot to sleep or at least sit for the night. Later on in his career he would be more knowledgeable about soup kitchens, night shelters. He would learn the ropes.
Mr. Phillips Page 7
