John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

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 to 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.

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.