Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  When he had had things to do Mr Phillips had not noticed how busy, how urgent, everybody in the city seemed.

  Mr Phillips got on the bus. He went upstairs to the top deck and sat down at the front.

  This bus went through all the glamorous parts of London. First it went down past the Trocadero, down Haymarket, then back up Regent Street to Piccadilly, then along past the Royal Academy, past the Ritz, past Green Park, round Hyde Park Corner, and along Knightsbridge. By and large these were all parts of London that Mr Phillips never visited. They belonged to other kinds of people. The feeling of wealth and prosperity was thickly present in all these places, and it made Mr Phillips wonder what the city would look like if, instead of bricks and mortar, concrete and cement, buildings were made out of piles of stacked cash, wadded and glued together into bricks. A house out in Leytonstone would be say eight foot high, a sort of wattle hut made out of fivers, whereas one in Knightsbridge would be a skyscraper of £20 notes. And the people, too: if they were nothing more than their total capital value they would vary from tiny bunches, hardly visible, of rolled up notes, to towers thousands of feet tall, stretching up into the clouds, causing trouble for air traffic control and weather balloons, vulnerable to lightning. Mr Phillips himself would be a respectable man-sized pile of cash, if you counted the unmortgaged part of 27 Wellesley Crescent, though he would soon start shrinking fast. If you excluded the house, the assets held jointly with Mrs Phillips and the ones in her name, and deducted debts such as the unpaid part of the mortgage, he would be much less healthy – barely a briefcaseful.

  Mr Phillips often thinks about people’s time and what it costs. The ideal is the taxi meter, ticking away to show how much the customer is spending, every penny accounted for and all above board. The red numerals travelling in one direction only. Everyone should have a little meter on them, in Mr Phillips’s view – lawyers in court, politicians on the television; a special lightweight one for footballers and athletes; bus drivers, housewives, Mrs Phillips during her piano lessons and Mr Phillips himself at the office. Only the off duty and the unemployed would be exempt; perhaps they would wear meters that had been switched off, or meters stuck on their last reading. Or should they show average earnings across time, so that even people on unemployment would tick slowly along? The whole point would be the way people chug along at different rates: Mr Mill, who cost £45,000 a year, would clock along at 45,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £25.71 per hour, whereas the beloved and much fancied Karen would tick along at £18,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £ 10.29 per hour, with everyone else in the office, from Eric the charismatic head of the post room to Mr Wilkins himself, who was sighted by someone in accounts about twice a year, ticking away at their own personal rates, the whole process giving an added point or edge to all interpersonal transactions in the office, something to notice and think about, though it would no doubt become quickly invisible as everyone got used to it, as everyone always does. (That of course would happen even if little green men landed and were on the nine o’clock news – after a few weeks’ initial excitement humanity would go back to business as usual.)

  The system could get elaborate. For instance, actors could have to wear two meters, one showing their rate and the other the rate of the characters they were playing, indicated perhaps by green numerals as opposed to red ones. You would see an actor playing one part, the paterfamilias in an historical drama, with trademark mutton chop whiskers, and then not see him for months or even a year or two until he turned up again as the butler in an advertisement for vintage port, and you’d realize from looking at his meter, still stuck at the figure it had been on at the end of the drama series, that he’d been ‘resting’ in the interim. Sometimes a famous and highly paid actor would be playing a penniless waif, and the difference between the two meters would become horribly distracting. Musicians would tick away as they played on Top of the Pops, newsreaders and politicians while they talked, beggars as they sat on the street, bus drivers, nurses, waiters, yellow-hat construction workers, everyone. The meters would have different settings to reflect earnings this day, earnings this task, and lifetime earnings. The Prime Minister was paid £57,018, in addition of course to his salary as an MP, but how much he ticked away at per hour would depend on whether you thought he was on duty all the time, whether his holidays were proper holidays etc. The President of the USA was paid about £125,000 and the same thing applied.

  Mr Phillips’s bus emerged from Hyde Park Corner and began heading down Knightsbridge. The traffic bottlenecked momentarily to squeeze past a BMW that had been stopped by a police motorcyclist. The policeman was talking to the driver, a tall black man wearing sunglasses.

  And now, as the bus went past Harrods, Mr Phillips, who had been looking at people in the street in an idle, incurious way, felt a jolt of surprised excitement. He had spotted her! It was Clarissa Colingford, sure as eggs were eggs, the TV person he had been thinking and indeed masturbating about on and off for some months. She was crossing the street, coming out of a clothes shop with a parcel labelled Chez Guevara under her arm, at some speed, tripping along at a near-run, looking pretty, busy, preoccupied. She was shorter than she seemed on TV and less lifelike – less like herself than like the generic idea of a thin, youngish, blonde woman in expensive clothes. In fact if Mr Phillips had seen her in real life first he might well have been inoculated against her. But he hadn’t and he wasn’t and, deeply curious to get a second look, he got off the bus at the next stop, doubled back, picked up her trail further along Knightsbridge, becoming a stalker or private detective for all of about three minutes, until she had suddenly swerved to one side and gone into the bank, a branch of the very same bank that Mr Phillips himself patronized.

  A real man shoots his own dog. Mr Phillips decided to be a man: he would go in, draw some cash and request a full statement sent to his home address. If he happened to bump into Clarissa Colingford, their hands brushing together as they simultaneously reached for a deposit slip, no please after you, no I insist, took me a moment to find them it’s not my usual branch, yes South London, oh do you how interesting, yes a cup of coffee would be delightful … well, that would just be one of those freak coincidences. Which is how Mr Phillips came to be lying face down on the floor of this bank, ten feet away from Clarissa Colingford, at the business end of a sawn-off shotgun. It was just one of those things.

  At this range he can see that it’s some outfit she has on. Her thin pale-brown shirt looks as if it were made out of chamois leather, and her thin-looking cream trousers unfortunately seem likely to pick up all kinds of dirts and smears from the Barclays carpet. From this distance she is more like she is on TV than at medium range. She has the same sense of invisible shine and of being almost too good to be true, though she is skinnier than she seems on television, by about ten pounds, which makes her seem more nervous, less voluptuous, but immediately wantable. She looks, not sweaty, but as if you might, if you got up very close to her, see a faint clamminess at the base of her neck, in the crook of her elbow, her perfume enhanced by her body heat. Mr Phillips feels that he is very much in love.

  This carpet however has Mr Phillips worried. Once you are pressed out cruciform on any floor surface – prostrated, they would say in church, in the position priests used to adopt when being ordained – you begin to think about what else has been on that floor before you. In the case of a much trodden-on urban bank carpet there is the question of dog shit on people’s shoes. Also pigeon shit, urine, rubbish, spilt things; but mainly dog shit. It would be picked up, brought here, and then trodden into the carpet which was now an inch from Mr Phillips’s nose, a pale blue flooring made out of some industrial substance with a tight knobbly weave, the better to capture millions of tiny molecules of transported dog excrement, the sort that made children blind if they ate it. Why would they eat it, you might well ask, to which the answer was, accid
ents do happen.

  Mr Phillips once went through a phase of being worried about dog shit in London’s parks, on behalf of the children. For instance that Martin would kick the football through some dog shit, pick the ball up without noticing, rub his eyes or polish an apple with the contaminated hand, and become sick. It was something to do with worms. Then the worries had gone away, apparently of their own accord. Now they have come back again. It is as if he can see tiny particles of dog shit everywhere he looks.

  Clarissa Colingford had come into the bank and gone straight over to the cashpoint machine. Or not quite straight over; she had stood around looking vague for a moment or two and then gone to stand behind a hugely fat man who was having tremendous difficulty inserting his card into the automatic teller. Mr Phillips knew this fine art well and knew that it was all a matter of timing, but this man’s stiff, jabbing action – and who knew whether the card was even the right way round! – and the quiet mechanical crunch of the card being rejected made something obscene out of his failure to insert it. Finally Clarissa Colingford stepped in, coming up beside the man and with the sweetest expression saying, ‘May I?’

  The big man handed her the card and she slipped it into the purring machine at the first attempt.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ he said. She just smiled, as if saying anything might compromise his maleness, and stood back as he hunched scowling over the console. Mr Phillips felt intensely jealous. He lurched to one side before he was caught eavesdropping and moved to the counter where you filled in slips, did sums, and took leaflets. It was there that he was standing when the robbers burst into the bank.

  Of course she could have used the cashpoint outside if it was only cash she wanted. Mr Phillips suspects that he knows the reason why she didn’t. This Knightsbridge cashpoint can be relied on to have at least one beggar sitting or standing beside it, plaintively (usually) or aggressively (occasionally) asking for money, usually by saying, ‘Spare change please?’ Today there was a woman, probably in her thirties but looking ten years older, sitting half rolled-up in too many clothes for the weather – heavy trousers, two or three shirts, a coat, a bobble hat, with a couple of plastic bags strewn around her. She looked pitiful, but in Mr Phillips’s experience that doesn’t always make you want to give someone money. This beside-the-cashpoint spot must be prime territory; Mr Phillips wondered if beggars took turns occupying it. To Mr Phillips’s mind there was something hard to ignore about the juxtaposition of someone asking for money, needing it desperately even, and the money that the machine was vomiting or belching out to people who asked for it. It was as if there was a right way and a wrong way of asking for money: sit on the pavement and ask your fellow humans and you’ll be refused, stand up and ask a machine and you can have as much as you want.

  Mr Phillips sometimes feels a wave of anger or revulsion as he walks past a beggar. When he gives one money, usually 50p since they aren’t useful for parking meters, the emotion he feels is not primarily towards the beggar but towards himself, a warm glow of philanthropic self-congratulation. Similarly, the other feelings are directed at himself too, at his ungenerosity and ability to harden his own heart. It is this that makes people hate beggars, for what they make you do to them – since no one can give money to every beggar he sees, the existence of beggars turns everybody into the kind of person who walks past beggars. Hard to forgive them that.

  The men who are robbing the bank are not asking for money so much as simply taking it, and taking their time about doing it too, in Mr Phillips’s view. Though admittedly his ability to judge how much time has passed is probably not at its best. It feels like twenty minutes but is probably more like two. This would be something to talk about when he got home – though if he does he will have to say where he’s been, and what he was doing in Knightsbridge at four in the afternoon, which is something he doesn’t particularly feel like doing. This is another subject he prefers to not-think about.

  ‘Check that one,’ shouts one of the men behind the counter. Mr Phillips doesn’t want to look and see what is going on but can guess that it probably involves stashing bags full of cash. The curious thing is that because the robbers shout all the time – which Mr Phillips knows from watching Crimewatch UK is a trick to make it hard for people to identify their voices or accents – they sound a little like the head of department Mr Phillips had had at Grimshaw’s, a man called or rather nicknamed Knobber. He had shouted all the time too and had been able to call on a bottomless source of seemingly unfeigned anger. He once described his department’s performance in preparing at twenty-four hours’ notice for an audit as the worst day in the history of the accountancy profession.

  Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? Paracetamol. (Parrots eat ’em all.) Have you ever seen a bunny with its nose all runny, don’t say it’s funny ’cos it’s snot. What do you get if you cross a nun with an apple? A computer that won’t go down on you. Have you heard about the evil dyslexic? He sold his soul to Santa. Have you heard about the agnostic insomniac dyslexic? He lay awake all night wondering if there was a Dog. Why did the chicken kill itself? To get to the other side.

  This is the closest Mr Phillips has ever been to actual violence in his whole adult life, excluding the occasional scuffle in the street, not that he’s taken part in one – God forbid – but because he occasionally sees them out of a car or a train window. Mr Phillips must have witnessed many thousands of violent incidents, shootings and explosions and stabbings and abductions and rapes and fist fights and drive-by machine-gunnings, and assassination style head shots and Saturday Night Special shootings, and cars blown up by shoulder fired rocket launchers, and rooms systematically cleared by grenades followed by machine-gun fire, and petrol stations blown up by deliberately dropped cigarette lighters, but all of these were on television (or occasionally at the movies). The last proper stand-up fist fight he saw was nineteen years ago, when he spent six months commuting to the plant in Banbury, a few years after he started at Wilkins and Co. A foreman from Newcastle had accused a fitter from London, a Cockney wide boy whom nobody much liked – the plant was the first place Mr Phillips had realized how much ‘Cockneys’, as all Londoners were called, were disliked – of being a thief. Twenty pounds, then quite a lot of money, had gone missing from the Geordie’s locker. The Geordie had won by making the Cockney’s nose bleed so much that the fight had to stop so that he could go and get it looked at in Casualty. There was no more thieving, though no one ever found out who had stolen the money. As would happen in a film, the two men later became inseparably fast friends.

  The two robbers in the front part of the bank are prowling around the room keeping order. Occasionally one or other of them stands so close to him that Mr Phillips gets a good view of his footwear. One of them has on a pair of expensive-looking new trainers, one of the brands that children wear and now, these days, rob and murder to own. The other has on an old pair of tennis shoes that have a slight and very incongruous air of raffishness – the kind of shoes a stockbroker with two homes might wear in the country at weekends, on one of the days he isn’t bothering to shave. Both of them wear jeans.

  About a dozen customers are in the bank. Mr Phillips wonders how many of them have recognized Clarissa Colingford and whether any of them feels, not the same way that he does, since that would be impossible, but something, however faintly, similar. Three or four of the customers are men: there are two businessmen, and a scruffy youth who fifteen years ago would have been a punk. Luckily, none of the women has children in tow. Perhaps that is an accident or perhaps the robbers have been careful about their timing.

  There must be a lot of detail to have to think about, being a bank robber. It would seem like a job for the headstrong and reckless but there must be a great deal of planning in it too. It would attract a curious type of person, willing to risk their own lives and threaten other people’s but also prepared to take pains over things like escape routes, what kind of get-away car to use, how to dodge the traffic, best time t
o rob the bank, how long it would take the police to get there and so on. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing where you had a few beers and were suddenly seized with the need to put a helmet on, grab a sawn-off, and go rob a bank.

  The rewards must justify the risks. That stood to reason. Enough robbers must do well enough to keep the profession alive. But how well was well enough? It must be hard to be precise about robbers’ average wages. Some would do well, some less well, and since doing less well involved spending years in prison there would be no sensible way of averaging them out. How did you compare a year in which you cleared £100,000 (and that free of tax) and took the whole family to Barbados to one in which you got sent to prison for a decade? But presumably if he were to tell the armed robbers that he has worked in an office for more than a quarter of a century, earning a top salary of £32,000, and had just been made redundant, they would think that was hilarious. In fact, if you spent eight hours a day for thirty years in an office that was the same as spending ten years in jail for twenty-four hours a day – and it was an unlucky bank robber who actually spent ten years in the slammer, since you always served a good bit less than you were sentenced for, and in jail you could read books, do a degree, that sort of thing. There would be no shortage of time spent doing nothing.

  In films there were people in prison who controlled huge criminal syndicates from the comfort and safety of their own cells. Tell Levinsky if he comes back and asks nicely, plus gives us 90 per cent of the gross, I won’t chop his dick off and stick it in his mouth, growls Mr Phillips the mob boss to his quailing deputy, who has brought the twice-weekly delivery of Krug and sevruga in a Harrods bag, right under the noses of the bribed and terrified warders. Tell that kid in Streatham he needs to show a little more respect. Nothing too heavy – break his arms, torch his Beamer. You OK Joe, you look a little pale. Maybe you’re not eating right. Or maybe you’re staying up too late fucking that little piece of totty you’re running on the side. Yeah that’s right I hear things, you should show your wife a little more respect. A man who doesn’t spend time with his family is not a real man. How are Janie and the kids, I hear Luigi got into St Paul’s, you must be very proud. Amodel prisoner, revered by his fellow inmates in the lax regime of the Open Prison, gracefully accepting their unsolicited gifts of cigarettes and phone cards.