John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

‘Nearly there,’ she says. She can clearly see that he is struggling. Mr Phillips can feel his breath becoming short and chesty. They cross a concrete garden where someone’s determined efforts to brighten things up with flower beds and paint have created an enhanced air of desolation. A hose that has been left trained into a flower bed is leaking into a big brown puddle of floating dirt. I’m glad I don’t live here, thinks Mr Phillips. I’m glad I’m not old. Somewhere just out of sight children’s voices are being sharply raised in either anger or play.

The doors to the ground floor of the flats are opaque glass reinforced by squares of metal thread. On one wall is an array of mailboxes, a handsome piece of wooden furniture that is obviously too small for modern amounts of junk mail and leaflets, since many of the pigeonholes are visibly stuffed to the brim, like ballot boxes in a rigged election, and there is a surf of leaflets and take-away menus on the floor beneath. On the wall beside that is a dark stairwell and a not very salubrious looking lift. The entrance hall is illuminated by a fluorescent light that makes Mr Phillips feel he might be on the point of fainting or having a fit until he realizes the flickering has to do with it and not him.

The old woman presses the button and the lift doors open immediately. Lifts, like tunnels, are not Mr Phillips’s strong point, except for the nice modern ones with glass that you can see out of. This one is not like that: it is a shiny metal box, long and narrower at the ends than in the middle — a coffin shape. Of course coffins would be one of the things it is used for, as the older residents died out and their children or grandchildren sold their flats. Despite the fact that everyone who lived there was getting inexorably older, the average age of the inhabitants would gradually go down — an apparent defiance of the laws of physics.

However much he dislikes the look of the lift there is now no question of being able to avoid travelling in it, so Mr Phillips gets in, with feelings of trepidation. The first thing he does whenever he enters a lift is to check that there is an escape hatch overhead — not that he has any notions about clambering up there, but it is reassuring to know that you can open a hatch to get some more oxygen if the lift breaks down. The next thing he checks is the emergency alarm or (better) speaker or (best) phone. But this lift has nothing but a seamless metal roof and although it does have a phone the phone has an Out of Order sign attached to it. It is the worst lift in the world.

The little old lady presses the button to the fourteenth floor. The button lights up, the lift doors bang together, and after a tiny but horrible dip downwards the lift lurches and begins to go up. Covertly inspecting the overhead display Mr Phillips can see that the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth, and that the number has been changed as a concession to superstition. This is something that he has never been able to work out. If you thought there was something dangerous about the number thirteen, surely the thirteenth floor would be dangerous whatever you called it, since it is the fact of thirteen and not the word that is the problem? It was treating the gods or the fates or God himself — not that this was the sort of thing you would expect Him to bother about — as if He was very stupid to think that they or He wouldn’t notice.

The lift, which has rocked and banged all the way up, stops at the so-called fourteenth floor. There is a terrible moment of absolute stillness and then the doors creak slowly open. The woman, taking charge, moves into the hallway outside, which has been painted in peeling grey-green and is lit by another flickering fluorescent strip-light. She turns left along the narrow corridor, walks past two doors, through one of which Mr Phillips can hear loud pop music being played on a low-fidelity radio. The third door along the corridor is hers. It has a brass knocker as well as a bell, a metal plate carrying the number 46 made out of the same brass, and an extra lock. She has already taken her key out of the bag as she arrives at the door, and she manipulates the locks in sequence with the ease of much practice. It is a thing people do in cities now, Mr Phillips knew, he had seen an item about it on Crimewatch . They get their keys ready in advance. That way you are less likely to have someone come up behind you and bop you on the head.

But the inside of the flat is a surprise. When he comes through the door behind the woman he finds that he is looking across the room to a huge picture window, through which the blue evening sky looks like an abstract painting. At one end, occupying the whole wall, is a waist-height bookshelf, very tidy, with dozens of framed photographs resting on it. Many of them feature younger versions of this woman with a big man of about the same age. She is a pretty little thing in the early photos. The man is a bruiser, somehow familiar-looking, with lots of black then lots of white hair. He is a good bit taller than her, and is usually wearing a tie.

Copying the woman’s good lifting technique, Mr Phillips bends at the knees and sets the bags and his briefcase down. The plastic handles have dug deeply into his hands and left livid red, white and purple marks that look as if they will never fade. Glancing around the room, Mr Phillips sees what is right beside him: a fish tank, the length of the whole side wall, full of the most highly coloured fish he could ever imagine. The tank is decorated with grey rocks and green moss and the fish look as bright as jewels. There is a small shoal of tiny black ones with red go-faster stripes, darting and flitting around the tank, and one big electric-blue fish floating motionless apart from a slow opening and closing of its mouth. Some other indeterminate-sized fish float and glint, and one, green and blue with a cheeky expression, hovers beside an updraught of bubbles in the middle of the tank, looking for all the world like a man undertaking a decadent pleasure such as sucking on a hookah.

‘Amazing fish,’ says Mr Phillips.

‘They were my husband’s,’ says the woman, from the kitchen, where she has gone with two of the bags that Mr Phillips set down. A few seconds later she comes back carrying a large box of fish food, which she carries over to the tank.

‘I wondered what was so heavy in there,’ says Mr Phillips.

‘You’d be surprised how much they get through.’ And then, as she begins tipping the food into the tank, moving from side to side to give all the fish a fair whack, and the fish start to feed, she adds, ‘I’m Martha.’

‘I’m Victor. Pleased to meet you,’ says Mr Phillips.

‘They were his passion,’ she says, nodding at the fish tank.

‘They’re quite something.’

‘He would have preferred dogs, but it’s not fair to them, is it? With the space.’

‘No.’

‘Not that those are all the same, his actual fish. They don’t live for ever.’

‘What’s this one?’ asked Mr Phillips, pointing at the motionless whopper in the middle of the tank.

‘That’s Boris. He’s a parrot fish. Brian named him after a man he knew.’

‘He’s very handsome.’

‘He eats more than all the others put together.’

Mr Phillips has heard that goldfish, if they escaped into the wild, would grow to an unlimited size. But there seems to be no tactful way of asking about this.

‘They liven up the flat,’ says the woman on a concluding note. She picks up the other two bags and takes them into the kitchen, from where she calls out, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘I’d better not,’ says Mr Phillips.

‘I’ll be making one for myself anyway,’ says Martha.

‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ says Mr Phillips.