Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  Apparently armed robbers were looked up to in prison. Mr Phillips has read that somewhere. Sex criminals were the lowest form of life, whereas armed robbers were the aristocrats.

  How do you tell the difference between a stoat and a weasel? One’s weasily recognizable, the other’s stotally different. What do you call a man with no arms and no legs crawling through a forest? Russell. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you’ve told her twice already. Martin again. Perhaps he should tell that one to the robbers. It might be their kind of joke.

  Mr Phillips can hear a woman crying, about fifteen feet away from where he is lying. It is a choking, moaning sort of cry, as if she were making every effort to minimize the amount of noise – which of course makes things worse. Mr Phillips could remember his own efforts not to cry at his father’s funeral, and the feeling that his chest would crack open; as if he were struggling to contain volcanic forces. The effort made his shoulders jerk and his chin wobble, and strangled choking sounds came out of his mouth. In those days men did not cry at funerals. The feat of suppression involved was in its way as wild and violent as any open grief.

  His father once, when Mr Phillips, aged about nine, fell and cut his knee on gravel – he can no longer remember where, only his father’s words stay with him – told him to stop crying, that it made him look like a girl. That happened over forty years ago, and it is still one of Mr Phillips’s most vivid memories. It is as if the stream of tears was at that moment diverted underground and has not been seen properly above the surface since. In the meantime it went sloshing around out of sight like the run-off from a broken water main coursing through the foundations of a house. In childhood, as far as he can remember, crying had inside it the idea that this feeling would go on for ever – that the pain, whatever it was, that was causing you to cry was infinite and would possess you for ever. Or you would live inside it for ever. Now he sees it as the first vague intimation of what death would be like – to be in the same state without end.

  Mrs Phillips cries easily at films and more rarely at music, but she isn’t as much of a crier as Mr Phillips would have been if he had been a woman, or so he feels. She does not shake or heave. Tears simply begin to appear in her eyes and waterfall down her face, accompanied by sniffles. It is like a spring or a well or some other non-volcanic phenomenon. Both Martin and Thomas have inherited this ability, which Mr Phillips has been at pains not to discourage. No doubt part of the reason this woman is struggling is the effort involved in crying when you are lying spreadeagled face down on the floor. Mr Phillips has not tried that and has no plans to.

  Death is another subject Mr Phillips exerts himself, not always successfully, to not-think about. He has got to the stage when it only enters his mind when someone he knows died – Betty his first-ever secretary of cancer last year, Finker his friend from accounting school of a heart attack at Christmas, Mr Elton, Thomas’s favourite football teacher in a car crash in January, were the most recent. These deaths always bring a wave of anxiety and of me-too, me-next, what-will-it-be-like thoughts. One of Mr Phillips’s least favourite reveries involves the idea of lying in a hospital listening to a beeping monitor, wondering if this time would be It. When you are young sex is It, when you are older death is.

  Not so much being dead as dying is what frightens Mr Phillips. This is a question which divides people, and he knows the arguments for the other point of view, not least because Mrs Phillips subscribes to them.

  ‘The awfulness of nothing. To lose all this,’ she explained. They were sitting in their kitchen, which was throbbing with the noise of moronic neighbours revving their car engines as per their Saturday norm, but even so Mr Phillips knew what she meant.

  None the less, he doesn’t see it that way. Not being here is in itself nothing to fear. The moment of transition, though – the moment of breaking through the veil of being-here and going through to notness, which presumably involves a terrible rending moment in which you realize what is happening, have full consciousness of what you are going through – now that seems to be worth fearing. If he could have a written guarantee from the responsible parties that death would be something he wouldn’t notice – here one moment, gone the next, with no lived transition – he would feel perfectly sanguine, even gung-ho, about the whole business. But the thought that you would be aware of what was going on as you died implied that somewhere in his future was a moment of the purest terror, terror at 200 proof, so that you could have a small taste of the fear every time you let your mind touch on the subject, even for a second or two.

  Today, lying here on the floor of the bank, must be the closest Mr Phillips had been to death for many years – perhaps the closest since his friend Tony Wilson, who moved to Dorset to run a minicab company and whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years, had crashed their car on the way back from a wedding in Suffolk. Tony was drunk – not paralytic, but tipsy. He had taken a corner too fast, skidded, and gone into a ditch about ten feet from a concrete drainage pipe. If they had hit the pipe they would have been dead.

  ‘You’re very lucky young men,’ the policemen had told them.

  ‘If we’d been that lucky what were we doing in the fucking ditch in the first place?’ Tony said. He knew that he was going to lose his licence anyway.

  Mrs Phillips, who had been at home because she was eight and a half months pregnant with Martin and couldn’t face the round-trip drive to East Anglia, had forbidden her husband from ever travelling in a car driven by Tony again. That was a quarter of a century ago. Since then the nearest Mr Phillips has come to death is through the usual risks to do with strokes and heart attacks and haemorrhages, the things which can jump up and whack you, take you at any moment, as well as the longer-term, more stealthy killers, the ones that creep up on you from behind and kidnap you into the treeless country of terminal illness – the cancers, the degenerative diseases. In that sense he has lived with the same proximity to death as any other sedentary man in his fifties with a white collar job, the kind of intimacy you could have with an acquaintance who might drop in at any moment but who you would probably at the same time have no reason to expect on this particular day, or on any other day for a little while yet.

  This raises the question of how likely death is, on any particular day. It came up one morning a few months ago, when they were all sitting around before the monthly progress meeting of the Accounts Department.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Abbot, the youngest of them. ‘The odds against winning the Lottery are fourteen million to one, right?’

  ‘The odds against winning the jackpot,’ said Monroe in his Aberdonian voice. ‘Six divided by forty nine times five divided by forty eight times four divided by forty seven times three divided by forty six times two divided by forty five times one divided by forty four, which is 0.00000007151 or one in 13,983,816, usually referred to as one in fourteen million. So if the prize is greater than fourteen million quid it becomes a rational bet as supposed to just a stupidity tax.’

  ‘Assuming all the money goes to only one winner, which you can’t assume,’ said somebody else.

  ‘Fourteen million to one that you’ll get all six numbers right,’ said Monroe. ‘There is however another risk here which affects the likelihood of winning. Does anybody want to tell me what it is?’

  Mr Phillips, who knew the answer because he had heard Monroe on the subject before, kept silent so as not to spoil his fun.

  ‘No takers. All right. The additional factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the chance of being dead by the time the Lottery results arrive – since, obviously, the chance of dying in any given week is much, much higher than that of winning the Lottery.’

  There was a pause, the sound of six accountants sizing up a mathematical problem in their heads.

  ‘What’s the death rate? How many people die every week?’ said Austen.

  ‘According to the relevant Government agencies,’ said Monroe, ‘the population of England at the
time of the last estimate was 49,300,000. The previous year, deaths totalled 526,650. The death rate per week was therefore 10,128, rounded up to the nearest cadaver. Using these data we find that for an Englishman the chance of dying in any given week is therefore 0.0002054, or one in 4880.’

  ‘So your chance of winning the Lottery’, said Abbot at his calculator, ‘is, er, 2873 times worse than your chance of being dead by the time of the National Lottery draw.’

  ‘But we’re assuming you buy the ticket at the start of the week,’ Monroe went on. ‘In other words, if you buy your ticket at the start of the week and hold it until the draw, your chance of being dead by the time of the result is much better than your chance of winning. But most people don’t buy the ticket on Sunday, they buy it in the middle of the week before the draw, and so their odds are better. If you buy your ticket at four o’clock on Friday afternoon your chance of not being dead before the result must be significantly improved.’

  They were already doing the sums.

  ‘Assuming the deaths are spread evenly over the calendar –’

  – which Mr Phillips didn’t feel you could assume. Surely more people died in winter and at weekends, of drinking and fighting and the stress of being cooped up with their families and so on? But he didn’t say anything –

  ‘That means that the chance of dying, for a random member of the population, is 0.0107 per year, or 0.0000293 per day, or 0.00000122 per hour, or 0.0000000203 per minute. In other words each of us has a 1 in 49,200,000 chance of dying in any given minute. So in order for the probability of winning the jackpot to be greater than the chance of being dead by the time of the draw one would have to bet no earlier than’, Monroe tapped some figures into his Psion Organiser, ‘three and a half minutes before the draw.’

  ‘Christ,’ said someone.

  ‘But that’s averaging the risk out,’ Monroe continued. ‘Obviously a nineteen-year-old girl who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, has no familial history of anything and whose great-grandmother is still alive at the age of 102 is more likely not to be dead than a sixty-year-old chain-smoking alcoholic with a Private Pilot’s licence. We’d need to get hold of some proper actuarial tables,’ he concluded, giving the word ‘proper’ a discreet but very Scottish emphasis. At that point Mr Mill the useless departmental head came into the room, the conversation petered out and the meeting began instead.

  Monroe, however, did not forget. About two weeks later a notice appeared on the board in the company canteen saying ATTENTION LOTTERY GAMBLERS, and below giving a breakdown, along the lines discussed, of the averaged-out risk of being dead compared to the chance of winning the Lottery. The table gave a time after which the chances of winning the Lottery were better than those of being dead by the end of the week.

  AGE HOW LATE TO LEAVE IT

  Under 16 1 hour 10 minutes

  16–24 1 hour 8 minutes

  5–34 51 minutes

  35–44 28 minutes

  45–54 11 minutes

  55–64 4 minutes

  65–74 1 minute

  75 and over 24 seconds

  It had lingered in the mind. Mr Phillips wonders what his relative chances of being dead before this week’s Lottery draw are at this precise moment. In all probability they have never been better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. It would only take a single convulsive motion of one robber’s finger. The feeling was the same as the one you sometimes have driving, when it occurs to you that all it would take is a strong twitch on the steering wheel and your car will go across the line into oncoming traffic, or over the kerb into a wall, or through a hedge or a ditch or a shop window, any of those things which people in film accidents do to comic or exciting effect but which in real life involve death. This is like that feeling only more so. All that would have to happen is for one of the bank robbers to conceive a dislike of Mr Phillips as he lies spreadeagled and puffing on the floor, inhaling minute particles of dog shit.

  ‘Right, last one. Fifteen seconds,’ shouts one of the men on the other side of the bank counter. Mr Phillips, if forced to guess, would say that the man is a Scouser. If the robber crosses into the bank lobby with whatever he is using to carry the money slung over his shoulder – Mr Phillips can’t see, but the men are clearly jamming bank notes into some kind of bags or haversacks that they’ve brought with them – another item that should perhaps be banned from banks, along with crash helmets – if he comes out, points his sawn-off at Mr Phillips and blows his head off, for any reason or no reason, today, 31 July, will be the day that was lying there in wait for him all his life, hiding in the calendar, in secret parallel to 9 December, his birthday. Everybody has this day, hiding in plain sight, the one day out of the 365 which has a significance for us that we aren’t here to know about. His deathday will be the day on which Mrs Phillips and the boys remember him, or remember him with particular vividness, Mrs Phillips especially. For her 31 July would be like a returning ache, every year. The boys would make a big effort to be with her, at least for the first few years, but then the practice would be less strict, it would gradually die out like a national custom that people were gradually forgetting. Only for Mrs Phillips would the day continue to have its special weight in the calendar, a day she would always dread, when she wouldn’t be able to bear the sound of certain pieces of music.

  Today could be the day … any day could be the day, of course, that is the whole point, but today especially. Mr Phillips puts his hands under his shoulders and pushes himself up. Then he gets to his feet. As he does so he realizes he is holding his hands above his shoulders, and that this gesture doesn’t really make sense any more, so he lowers them. His view of what is going on in the bank is very much better from up here. In fact there’s no comparison. Mr Phillips can see the way people are lying scattered in the face-down position, not radiating out from a single point but higgledy-piggledy, pointing in all directions. Clarissa Colingford, who is lying with her face turned to the right away from him, has her trousers stretched over her buttocks, not quite so stretched that the material is shiny, but nearly. It is quite a sight. He can also see the two bank robbers in the front part of the bank. Both of them are looking at him with as much of a surprised expression as it’s possible to have inside a motorcycle helmet. The two men are thin and wiry. Mr Phillips probably weighs as much as one and a third of them. He says:

  ‘I’m not doing that any more.’

  ‘You fucking –’ says one of the men, advancing towards Mr Phillips, not pointing the gun directly at him but pointing it past his side. He forgot to shout, and his accent is definitely Liverpudlian.

  ‘Get the cunt down!’ shouts the robber behind the counter who seems to be in charge. It has been at least two minutes since he shouted about its being fifteen seconds until they would finish, so perhaps something is going wrong. He does not look at Mr Phillips as he shouts but down at the counter, below which his colleague is doing something out of sight.

  ‘I’m not going to get down,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘I think everyone should feel free to stand up.’

  The other people in the bank are by now all looking at him, their necks doing all sorts of kinks and cricks in order to do so. People’s faces are extraordinarily blank. Between them they can’t notch up so much as a single expression. There is no way to tell what they are thinking. Even Clarissa Colingford, who has turned her head around and is now lying with her right cheek on the floor – she has turned around in order to get a better view of Mr Phillips! – you can see the red imprint of the carpet on her face – even Clarissa Colingford looks as she might look in a camera that was turned on her while the main camera, the one that was broadcasting live, was following someone else. Her face is off duty.

  ‘If you don’t lie down on the fucking floor you’re going to get your fucking head blown off,’ the nearest robber shouts – he remembers this time. His shotgun is pointed at Mr Phillips’s stomach. Mr Phillips does not move.

  ‘I think you should all get up too,�
�� he says to the other people in the bank. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  They all stay where they are. It is what Mr Phillips would have done in their shoes. A little old lady writhes around on the floor and Mr Phillips for a moment thinks she is about to get up, but it turns out she is only manoeuvring to be more comfortable and to get a better view. The others do not make eye contact with Mr Phillips – it is psychologically and physically difficult to make eye contact with a standing man when you are lying face down on the floor – and are looking in his general direction rather than looking at him.

  Mr Phillips feels a great sensation of lightness. It is as if his life is a crushing weight, a rucksack filled with bricks that he gradually got so used to he forgot it was there, and he has now managed to shift the burden so that the sense of ease, of release, is exhilarating. He feels that he could hop ten feet straight into the air. Or, more gently, just decide to float upwards, so that his perspective down on the floor-people would become steeper, and the bank robbers would crane their necks up at him in amazement, and then he would be up through the roof, looking down at the building and out across Knightsbridge, the traffic, Harrods already visible, and then further up, able to see the Victoria and Albert Museum, the way you can fly in a dream (though even in a dream you always know you’re going to fall back down, and Mr Phillips has no such feeling) and then further and further up, the Thames snaking away behind and London turning into an aerial photograph and then into a map of itself, the horizon stretching further and further away, startled birds and pigeons swerving to avoid him, up through the first thin layer of wispy cloud and then further up into the clean blue, the haze of pollution and fug over the city becoming visible as it is left behind, the countryside spreading out and expanding as London shrinks, and then England shrinks, turns into an island as he gets higher and higher up, so that he can see the Channel, the crinkly coasts of Ireland and France, then the blob of Paris, so small from up here, and the Low Countries, and then Europe shrinks, and he can see out over the Atlantic, into Russia, and then the edges of the Earth itself would come into view, and Mr Phillips would float free of the planet, out into the clean nothingness of space, and suddenly the Earth would seem tiny and fragile and blue and green, shrinking fast, and most of the universe would be darkness in which the stars and planets would seem tiny, decorative, hardly disturbing the beauty and calm of the blank, lifeless void.