Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  The bank robber nearest to Mr Phillips is looking at him steadily and seems to be working out what to do. He half-turns to look at the other robbers and then he begins to move his shotgun upwards in the direction of Mr Phillips’s head. As he does so a loud and distorted voice, coming through a megaphone, says:

  ‘Armed police. Throw down your weapons.’

  4.2

  According to the very nice Detective Sergeant who took Mr Phillips’s statement, the police had been acting on a tip-off. They had been following the gang for some time before the robbery and were only been waiting for them to begin the actual robbery before moving in and arresting them.

  ‘Trouble is we were expecting three of them and a driver. When it turned out there were four of them and a driver it made things more tricky. So we decided to get them as they came out of the bank. Then you had your bright idea, sir, if you don’t mind my putting it like that, and we had to come in then and there. You gave us a bit of a fright, sir.’

  It was an eventful couple of minutes. When the police told the bank robbers to throw down their guns, the robber nearest Mr Phillips slowly turned round to look at his colleagues and there had been a brief moment during which the four of them had just stood and looked at one another.

  ‘We’re not getting out of here without hostages,’ said the one who had seemed to be in charge. He was the first to put down his shotgun, laying it on the counter with a delicate touch – it might have been made of porcelain.

  ‘Would they really have taken hostages?’ Mr Phillips asks his policeman. They are still in the bank, where all the customers and staff who were caught up in the attempted robbery are now being interviewed to give their statements. Someone has made cups of sweet tea, saying that they are good for shock, and Mr Phillips has taken one. It is very sweet: the first cup of tea with sugar in it that he has drunk for thirty-plus years. He is being interviewed by two policemen, but the one taking the statement is doing all the talking while the other just sits there. The fact that they do things by handwriting strikes Mr Phillips as reassuring. Also the detective does not seem to be a particularly confident writer. He is concentrating hard as he scribbles away.

  ‘It’s been known,’ says the policeman. ‘It slightly depends on the career profile of the individual criminal. If he’s got previous and he’s going to go down for say ten to fifteen years anyway then he’s only adding a couple of years on the end in return for maybe getting away. That’s if he thinks he’s a chance of getting away, and these blokes could probably tell that wasn’t very likely. So no, you weren’t in much danger. At least not on that count.’

  ‘Somehow I hadn’t counted on the idea of being taken hostage,’ says Mr Phillips truthfully.

  After the bank robbers decided not to take hostages they had all laid down their weapons and put their hands in the air, and then policemen wearing caps and bullet-proof jackets and carrying machine pistols had come into the bank, made them lie on the floor, and put handcuffs on them. Then, but not before, they said that the customers in the bank could get up. One young man, a member of staff in a short-sleeved white shirt with pens in the top pocket that had leaked while he was lying down so that it looked as if he had been shot in the breast and bled blue blood, started laughing, a tight, breaking giggle, but no one else joined in. There had been some subdued talk – ‘I thought we were for it … D’you think they would really have … Never seen anything …’ – and then more policemen, these ones without guns and flak jackets, came in and began their interviewing. There was something dignified about the handcuffed criminals as they were led away. As the robbers were being taken out of the bank, each with at least one policeman attached to each arm, one of the little old ladies said to one of them in a tone that was shrill but still conversational – the tone you might use to speak to someone you hadn’t spoken to for years but had collided with in the street, in which the basic hostility between you is still present in the clenched sound of your own voice – ‘What do you think you’re going to get out of this, then?’

  For a moment it seemed as if the woman’s question was going to go unanswered, but then the last of the men – not the one who had been in charge but the other one who had been behind the counter with him – said in a quiet and unexpectedly educated voice:

  ‘About ten years, love.’

  *

  Mr Phillips finds that it is more frightening to tell over what had happened than it had actually been living through it. He thinks: I was in a bank robbery! But the policemen are reassuringly matter of fact about the whole business, until it gets to the awkward question of what he was doing there in the first place.

  ‘Could you confirm your place of work, sir?’ the one asking the questions asks.

  ‘Do I have to?’ says Mr Phillips. The effect of this remark is to make the two policemen look at each other and then look back at him without speaking.

  ‘I popped in to check my balance,’ Mr Phillips says.

  ‘At four thirty on a weekday,’ says the hitherto silent detective.

  ‘When your office is in the City,’ says his hitherto nice colleague, in a friendly way, as if asking for clarification.

  ‘Well, when I say it was my office, I mean it used to be my office.’

  There is an interrogatory silence.

  ‘I don’t work there any more.’

  ‘So where do you work?’

  ‘I, er, I don’t,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t work.’

  ‘You don’t look like you don’t work.’ This is the nasty one again.

  Mr Phillips, on the point of saying thank you, catches himself and nods instead.

  ‘Briefcase, suit,’ the nasty one adds.

  ‘Dressed for the office, I’d say,’ says the nice one.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mr Phillips.

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes, I’m dressed for the office.’

  ‘But you don’t work.’

  ‘No, not any more.’

  ‘Made redundant, were you sir?’ asks the nice one.

  ‘Yes.’

  Both detectives sit back slightly.

  ‘We see a lot of it, sir. You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Not quite on a daily basis, I wouldn’t say that, but a lot of it all the same.’ This from the former Mr Nasty.

  ‘More than you’d think.’

  ‘It affects people in different ways.’

  ‘Many of its effects couldn’t be called small ones.’

  ‘They’re big.’

  ‘People do things.’

  ‘Silly things.’

  ‘Things they wouldn’t usually do.’

  ‘They say things too.’

  ‘Such things.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘We had one in a strangling case, didn’t we, Kevin? On Hampstead Heath. Drew a map of everybody who was present. Interviewed hundreds of people. Cross referenced, little coloured pins on the map in the situation room. Reports kept turning up this chap just sitting on a bench in a three-piece suit staring into space. There all day every day. Turned out he’d been made redundant, just like you, sir. Hadn’t told his family.’

  ‘Nice chap he was too, sir.’

  ‘Asked us not to tell his family.’

  ‘Which we didn’t.’

  ‘Been going there for three months, hadn’t he, Kevin?’

  ‘More.’

  ‘So you see, sir, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘We see everything all the time.’

  ‘Think of us as being proctologists,’ says the nicer of the two policemen. They share a fond smile, as at a much loved private joke.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ asks Mr Phillips when they have turned back to him.

  The one with the notebook says, ‘Thank you very much, sir. I’ll just write this out all neat and decent, and then we’ll ask you to read and sign and then you’re free to go.’

&nbs
p; ‘Unlike the bank robbers,’ Mr Phillips says, tempted to try a joke. Neither of them reacts in any way.

  4.3

  Near the end of Knightsbridge Mr Phillips walks past Knightsbridge tube station, turns right and begins heading south. He wonders if he might be on the news later in the evening. Camera crews were arriving outside the bank while the police were doing their interviews. Someone holding a microphone had stepped towards Mr Phillips saying ‘Excuse me’ as he walked out, but Mr Phillips didn’t stop and they didn’t pursue him. On the other side of the bank door, a crowd of cameramen, women with clipboards, men with microphones and tape recorders, and men with notebooks was standing in a circle around Clarissa Colingford. She would certainly be in the news, and would become even more famous. Perhaps some other men would see her talking about her ordeal and fall in love with her as a result. As for Mr Phillips himself, he feels that he is over his thing about Clarissa Colingford. That was then, this is now.

  Mr Phillips plods on past the expensive shops at the top end of Sloane Street, then down past the mansion blocks and private gardens, towards the permanent traffic jam of Sloane Square. The rent and rates around here must be astronomical, invisibly pushing up the prices of every frock, every watch, every cappuccino. It occurs to Mr Phillips that what Martin wants is to have enough money to feel at ease in places like this; to feel that, if he sees something he wants, he can simply go into a shop and buy it, without a qualm. So that places which to most people would seem to be excluding them would be open and welcoming to him, and that London would be transparent, a city of open doors.

  At the pedestrian crossing in front of Mr Phillips, a girl in a Union Jack T-shirt and Doc Martens is wearing the day’s second candidate for the shortest skirt he has ever seen, so short that you could see the downward bulge of her pubic mound, her cunt. Was this supposed to be the effect?

  In the corner of Sloane Square, overtaking the gridlocked, honking traffic on foot, Mr Phillips passes a pub most of whose customers have spilled out on to the street. These people aren’t hurrying home; not a bit of it. Many of them are office workers, mostly young. The men who wore jackets and ties to work have taken their jackets off and loosened their ties, the men who wore just T-shirts or shirts are now, most of them, bare chested, and either veal-coloured or bright pink. The women are cheerful and jaunty and eager to keep up, mainly with brightly coloured fizzy drinks but with an occasional defiant pint drinker among them. Mr Phillips was at one point – after marriage, up to the time Martin was born – a great one for stopping off after work for a couple of pints, bitter in those days, especially on Friday nights. Mrs Phillips never complained, though she might have had reason to resent the implication that he would rather spend two or three hours in the company of people he spent the whole working week with anyway, and then come home smelling of beer and smoke, when he could simply go straight home and be with her. In those days it had been as if work and pubs were mainly things men did to keep away from women. That looks different now. The women seem just as noisy, just as confident, and just as keen on having a good time. It is hard to tell what they are getting away from.

  The truth is, Mr Phillips feels that he could murder a pint of lager. And why not? He sidesteps his way through the energetically boozing, laughing, flirting, gossiping loose scrum outside the pub and pushes into the dark interior. Here there is a wall of cigarette smoke, loud Martin-type pop music, fruit machines twinkling brightly in the half-gloom, and fewer people than there are out on the pavement. The drinkers outside in the street seem recreational; those inside are more businesslike. At the bar, a group of men who have made an early start and are already quite drunk are arguing over an article about football in the Evening Standard.

  ‘He’d never fucking have. He just wouldn’t,’ says a man in a yellow sweatshirt leaning back against the bar with his elbows on the counter – an oddly upper-class pose.

  ‘It says here he fucking was,’ says the man brandishing the newspaper.

  ‘He’s capable of fucking anything,’ grumbles a third into the glass he was raising to his mouth. ‘The cunt.’

  ‘Well as far as I’m concerned he can fuck off,’ says the first man.

  ‘Now you’ve said something I agree with,’ says the paper-brandishing man to general agreement.

  The two bar staff are keeping well out of range of this, at the other end of the counter. Mr Phillips tries leaning over the bar, the edge jabbing into the uppermost part of his stomach in a not unpleasant way, and smiling in their general direction. It does not work.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he finally calls out, the demand sounding more like an apology than he means it to. One of the barmen looks over at him and with visible reluctance breaks off his conversation to come and attend to Mr Phillips. He is wearing what is supposed to be a uniform of white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers, but is doing so with an unbuttoned dishevelment that is clearly meant to be insubordinate. When he gets opposite Mr Phillips he simply raises his eyebrows. He is chewing gum.

  ‘Pint of lager,’ says Mr Phillips, consciously and effortfully repressing the impulse to say ‘please’. The youth takes a glass up from beneath the counter, holds it under the brightly neon-decorated handle and flicks the beer pump on with his spare hand. The urban day is full of moments like these, when conversation and social exchange would be natural, but don’t happen, because of the weight of the city pressing down on every interaction. If you started talking to strangers, where would it stop? Somewhere in his heart Mr Phillips has a fantasy of a country life that is different, where the shopkeeper bored you rigid for ten minutes on the subject of how he had been swindled out of third prize for his competition turnips at the county show when you popped in to get a pint of semi-skimmed milk, and where every visit to the pub was a long, warm bath-like soak in collective and individual grievances against outsiders, landowners, the council, the government, the European Union, in short anyone not present; a life where you nodded at and chatted to everyone you bumped into – except people with whom you were in mid-feud – as a matter of course. And perhaps that life or a version of it is now possible, if they cash in the £100,000 of the redeemed part of their mortgage and buy a place in the country. Not the south-east – for that kind of money it would have to be somewhere pretty but cheap; say Herefordshire, a little stone town house or an old post office or a comfy new bungalow. Mrs Phillips could tout for music lessons – it wouldn’t be that difficult, people would be looking for things to do – Thomas would go to the local school for what would after all only be one more year, Mr Phillips would set himself up as a posh London chartered accountant doing a favour for the rustics. He wouldn’t put it quite like that but that would be the gist. The country must be full of clueless self-employed people in need of help with their sums. Everything is possible.

  ‘Two pounds fifteen,’ says the bartender, spilling some lager as he puts the astonishingly expensive pint down on a little rubber mat in front of Mr Phillips. Raising his eyebrows to register a dignified protest, Mr Phillips reaches for his wallet and as he does so realizes that he has forgotten to check his balance, the whole official reason for his expedition into the bank in the first place. Keeping his five pound note for dealings with politer tradesmen, he hands over a twenty. It’s a badly crumpled note, a reminder, among other things, of how amazingly resilient is the paper used in making money.

  ‘Got anything smaller?’ sneers the young man.

  Not for nothing a born Londoner, Mr Phillips has his own reserves of rudeness. Looking straight and expressionlessly at the bartender he very slowly shakes his head. (This despite the bus change which is still heavy in his trouser pocket. But there comes a time when you have to make a stand.) The bartender goes off and does noisy things at the electronic till, coming back with a ten pound note and a large fistful of coins.

  ‘No fives,’ says the youth, holding out a fistful of coins palm downwards and decanting them into the upturned cup of Mr Phillips’s hands. Mr Phillips forward
s the small avalanche of metal into his pocket. He takes his drink out from the depressing interior of the pub past the sign saying No Drinking On The Pavement into the happy throng of people drinking on the pavement. He finds a small patch of wall with a ledge and puts his drink on it, and then puts down his briefcase to mark his territory. A few feet away, an after-office group are roaring at one of their colleagues who is doing an impersonation of a man performing Chinese martial arts exercises in slow motion. He is standing on one foot with both arms above his head, puffing out his mouth and making a high-pitched mewing sound.