John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

‘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.