John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

‘Yeah — me. Yeah, I’m on the train. Yeah, be there in plenty of time, we’ve just left the Junction. Yeah, bye.’ The youth puts the mobile back into his pocket and wriggles his buttocks on the plastic train seat in a pleased way. Mr Phillips feels a moment of loathing hit him like indigestion.

No sooner has the train accelerated for forty seconds or so than it begins to slow down. The terrain outside has the low, scruffy, nowhere-in-particular feel of generic South London: a furniture warehouse, the backs of houses, a Baptist church. On the other side of the train tracks a billboard directed at returning commuters says ‘If you lived here you’d be at home by now.’ A few passengers put newspapers away, arrange their bits and pieces and prepare to push towards the doors or brace themselves in preparation for standing up.

The train squeals to a halt, people get off, and further knackered-looking people in work uniform get on. Mr Phillips is a non-combatant, he again doesn’t enter the contest for seats. The train is properly crowded now. A thin, pointy-faced woman in spinster’s clothes, close to Mr Phillips’s age, has insinuated herself between him and the wall of smeared transparent plastic that separates the standing-room-only door area from the seats and the rest of the compartment.

Mr Phillips takes the view that many human capacities — courage, strength, will-power, luck, sex-appeal — are finite, that you draw against an unreplenishable fund of them like capital left in a bank, so that when they’ve gone they’re gone for ever. Today is one of those days when he feels that his capacity for self-assertion is finite, so that if he uses some up now he may not have any available later.

We condition ourselves very hard to screen out the details of our enforced city intimacies. Oh, but it’s hard sometimes. Today Mr Phillips can smell the heated deodorant of the pole-gripping man standing next to him, the armpit-warmed chemical odour of what at the boys’ school was called ‘Poof Spray’. He can see the grain on the skin of a girl standing eighteen inches away from him reading the problem page of a folded magazine and see also the slight psoriatic redness and scurf where her hair is scraped thinly upwards at the nape of her neck. Two walkmen are competing in the standing area, both tinny and tinnitic, their owners a black boy in a sweatshirt and a white woman with purple lipstick. Martin says that walkmen are the worst thing you can do for your hearing, so both these people are presumably going deaf, though not quickly and completely enough to suit Mr Phillips. The noise always makes him think of insects.

Although there is a gust of new oxygen when the train doors open, the air inside the compartment feels as if it has been breathed and rebreathed, recycled through lungs, picking up bacilli, viruses, tiny minute droplets of mucus and lining and bad breath and stomach gases, the feet and farts and crotch-whiffs of everyone in the train, going round and round their respiratory systems before being passed on to the next commuter. It’s like that story about the water in London having been through three people’s urinary tracts before it’s finally drunk (which Mr Phillips has seen denounced as a fiction by a bald man from the water company, the same one who was always going on about how little water there was in the reservoirs). But even if it wasn’t true it felt true and tasted true, and even more so for the air.

Looking at the number of people in here, it simply does not seem possible that there is enough oxygen to go around. Especially if the train stops — which now, as Mr Phillips is thinking these thoughts, it does. London trains have many different kinds of stop: a tremulous, we-could-be-off-at-any-moment, champing-at-the-bit kind of stop (often very deceptive, since the train can stay in this condition for minutes, even hours); the exhausted, clanking, what-is-it-this-time, why-won’t-the-others-get-out-of-my-tunnel, never-quite-getting-up-to-full-speed-without-coming-to-a-halt-a-few-seconds-later stop (which can give the feeling that a secret mechanism forces the train to stop for a specified number of minutes every time it exceeds a certain speed); the much feared, horribly disconcerting total blackout mid-tunnel stop; and, as in this case, the heavy, final, definitive quiet of the stop that makes it clear right from the outset that it’s going to be a long one. It is impossible not to speculate about what has happened. A suicide? Surely not in rush hour. Nobody could be that thoughtless. A mechanical failure? And if so, what kind — malfunctioning signal, erratic signal light, wonky track, broken-down train, power cut? Or something cataclysmic, like a fire? Thank God they aren’t underground, in a tunnel. (Mr Phillips’s personal record stuck underground is an hour and a half.) The supply of oxygen wouldn’t be infinite, that stood to reason, so just how finite was it?

Perhaps the most oppressive thing is the silence, not just the silence of the train but the silence inside the compartment. Quite a few people must be experiencing acute discomfort — choking fantasies, oxygen terrors, panics about fainting, urgent intimations of imminent mortality, detailed scenarios about passing out, falling, knocking their heads and pissing themselves — but no one shows it. This in its way is as unnerving as if people were bursting into tears and shouting ‘We’re all going to die!’ It is a more British version of the same thing.

Mr Phillips can feel himself swaying and bouncing with the blood supply to his feet. Somewhere in the world there are yogis and fakirs and shamen who have the ability to banish this sort of thing from their minds. He tries to make himself drift off into thinking about his imaginary Neighbourhood Watch meeting. But it just isn’t comfortable enough inside the train compartment, which is hot both with the sunlight and with the body heat of people in suits. The girl with scraped-back hair is looking pink with the warmth, and she isn’t the only one. At the offices of Wilkins and Co., where the windows can’t be opened and the air-conditioning doesn’t work properly, it will be an uncomfortable day with even Mr Mill’s secretary, saintly shy Janet, looking like she wouldn’t mind doing a bit of complaining. In summer she wears sleeveless dresses which give you glimpses of armpit and sometimes the preliminary foothills of flesh swelling like the lower slopes of a volcano at the side of her breasts.

The train judders into motion again and Mr Phillips decides on impulse to get off. After all, it’s not as if I’m going anywhere. Every single person on this train is going to work except me, thinks Mr Phillips, but then he squashes the thought down with an almost physical effort and as he does so pictures to himself an elephant sitting on a small mound of cardboard boxes and flattening them, with bits of polystyrene exploding everywhere.

The spires of Battersea Power Station loom up over the rail tracks ahead and Mr Phillips realizes where he is, at the stop close by Battersea Dogs’ Home. This is a place where commuters get on rather than off — even though a few people must of course come here to look after the dogs, fix their little meals, check them for fleas and talk up their virtues to prospective owners. ‘He’s got a very sweet nature,’ they would say of famously grumpy compulsive biters, or ‘very affectionate’ of the neurotically ungrateful mutt who pretends not to recognize anybody. And then the dogs are put down if they can’t find a home after a specific length of time. He wonders if they get fond of particular dogs that can’t find a home, ugly dogs or dogs with bad breath and limps and chewed-off ears, and there’s a countdown to when they have to be put down so that the attempts to find an owner become increasingly desperate, and then the dreadful day of the fatal injection dawns, so that apprentices and new workers at the Home have to be taken to one side on the first day and told, ‘Never get too close to a dog.’