Mr. Phillips

3.4

It is half past three. In the office this was Mr Phillips’s least favourite part of the day, the time when, although the bulk of the work day had been successfully got through, often with surprising speed — oh look, it’s twenty to twelve! oh look, it’s five to two! — now that the end was in sight the clock mysteriously slowed down, so that the time between three thirty and five o’clock took what felt like six or seven hours, until 5.01, when the twenty-nine minutes until official going-home time at five thirty rocketed past.

It always takes Mr Phillips a few moments to adjust when he comes out of a cinema into the daylight. The feeling is voluptuous, sinful. He stands blinking and momentarily at a loss as to what he should do until it is time to go home. The thought of going back and waiting for Mrs Phillips to return from her lessons, which she would do at around five, appears in the distant wings of Mr Phillips’s mind. She would come in, he would tell her what had happened. He catches a glimpse of the idea in the mental equivalent of peripheral vision and the notion scuttles back out of sight.

While still in the grip of his post-cinema daze, Mr Phillips comes to the end of the street and steps into the roadway without, it has to be admitted, looking left or right. A big white van swerves and comes to a stop about a foot away from him, so that he is looking straight into the face of its driver, which is first pale and then red. If the driver had reacted say.01 of a second more slowly Mr Phillips would have been run over. As part of Mr Phillips’s mind is registering this fact, another part is noting that this vehicle was bound to have been a white van. In London, it always is. It must be either because (a), the vans tended to belong to self-employed small businessmen, who as a type were noted for being aggressive, impatient, right wing, unashamed about tactics of late payment and intimidation; (b), the vans tended to be driven by men working for large companies in some delivery and/or menial capacity, and so because the drivers had no stake in the vans they drove them aggressively, intimidatingly, recklessly, heedless of the full insured capital value; (c), there was something about white vans that made the people who drove them become irrationally aggressive — i.e., white vans made drivers go insane; (d), there was something about white vans that made aggressive men want to drive them — i.e., only people who were already insane drove white vans.

This particular white van driver winds down his window. Mr Phillips, unsure whether to go backwards or forwards across the road, sees that the man is showing no signs of climbing down out of the van and thumping him. So he continues across the street. As he does so the van driver leans out of his window. Here we go, thinks Mr Phillips.

‘Tired of living, cunt?’ asks the man in a neutral voice. He doesn’t wait for a reply.

*

Across the road, under the lee of a theatre’s stage door, a man is juggling three — no, four — fire torches. A small crowd has accumulated. They don’t seem to be spectators so much as people who for the moment aren’t doing anything else. The juggler’s face is a distinctive dark brown colour, as if he has spent weeks and weeks out in the sun, and Mr Phillips has the feeling that he has seen him somewhere before. Of course: practising this very morning in Battersea Park. The man now picks up a fifth fire torch from the brazier in front of him. This, juggling with five torches, Mr Phillips knows is astoundingly difficult. The man, older than he looks at first glance — late thirties, perhaps — has a rapt, vacant look for the next thirty seconds or so, as the whirling torches pirouette in mid-air. Then he catches them, more clumsily than he juggled them, puts three of them back in the rack, and slowly, in a much more languorous and lingering way than the businesslike arts of fellation that Mr Phillips has just been watching, puts the other two, one after another, into his throat. When he takes them out they are extinguished. Mr Phillips notices that his erection has gone away. A member of the audience steps forward and drops a coin into the upside-down hat at the juggling fire-eater’s feet.

It comes to Mr Phillips that he could set up in business on his own. The words arrive as a sentence, fully formed: ‘I could set up on my own.’ At the same time, it is unclear what precisely that means. He can hardly rent a shop and say ‘Redundant fiftysomething accountant setting out on his own. Watch out, world.’ He would need something specific to offer in the line of goods and services.

One thing would be to help people with their Income Tax returns and Value Added Tax obligations, or even give tentative savings and investment advice, though before he did that he would have somewhere to acquire a new manner and body language, since you would have to be very credulous to take advice about money from someone so obviously not thriving in his own personal finances. He would have to get a new wardrobe, new suits at the very least, a more modern haircut, office furniture that was either challengingly and interestingly contemporary or reassuringly old, a computer, even a new way of talking — avuncular, doctorly. The Revenue aren’t as bad as people say, honestly, Mrs Wilson. Customs and Excise love a good joke, Mr Hart. Don’t worry, Mr Stavros — bankruptcy means never having to say you’re sorry.

He would be able to help small traders with their VAT, even though he thinks the name is very unfair, since it isn’t a tax that adds value at all, but simply an extra sum the customers have to pay — a better name would be TAT, Tax Added Tax. If Mr Phillips sets up on his own he will have to charge and collect VAT and will therefore become what in the Bible is called a publican. St Matthew talks about someone being ‘an heathen man and a publican’, which at school Mr Phillips had thought was a bit harsh — what was so bad about running a pub? Then he found out. What’s more, St Matthew had been one himself, a Jew raising money for the hated Roman Empire. Whereas Mr Phillips and his clients would merely be raising money for Government and for the EU so that people in Calabria could have tarmacked roads and French farmers could afford to keep their fields uneconomically small and make special cheese.

Of course there is always revenge. Revenge! He could sniff around for a gap in the catering services market, identify one — an under-performing staff canteen franchise, or a catastrophic outbreak of food poisoning from football match burgers — go to the bank or much more glamorously to a venture capital company, raise the money, make the pitch, win the contract, bid for other contracts, win them, exceed all expectations and industry standards, float the company on the stock market, make a packet, expand aggressively, seek out and destroy the competition while taking levels of service, customer satisfaction and percentage return on capital to unprecedented heights, finally close in on Wilkins and Co., strip them of their key customers, hire their talented employees, undercut their prices, in short drive them to the wall, then step in just before the receivers with a derisorily small but unrefusable cash offer. Mr Wilkins himself quivering on Phillips Limited’s boardroom carpet, fourteen stone of jelly merely pretending to be a man. All the old management fired, or better still kept on at half their old pay, and made to attend regular seminars at which their faults are pointed out and enthusiastically discussed by younger but more senior colleagues; Mr Mill exposed as a drunkard and numerical dyslexic, his employment as head of department over Mr Phillips appearing in textbooks as a definitive example of the psychology of corporate incompetence.

Mr Phillips stops across the road from a squat church with a tall spire that looks out of proportion and a scruffy graveyard behind high, spiked black railings. A poster on them advertises Teatime Talks and underneath it, under the heading All Religions Dip Their Buckets Into the Same River, a talk for today, at 3 o’clock, on the subject of ‘What We Can All Learn From Buddhism’. Mr Phillips goes through the open gate and takes the short gravelled path through the graveyard. He is momentarily startled when he glances to his right and sees what looks like a dead body lying on the grass. Then he realizes it is a tramp having a snooze. Balanced intact on the tramp’s stomach is an open can of Tennents Super, ready for immediate swigging when he wakes up.

The church porch is suddenly and unexpectedly cool. In fact it’s the least hot place Mr Phillips has been in all day. The noticeboard is fronted in green felt and has the words Holy Trinity written across the top in fading gilt. It holds announcements about drug rehabilitation, a flower arranging roster, a list of names in a prayer chain, whatever that is, and a notice of the sequence of services and evensongs, along with the liturgy to be used. To Mr Phillips, cradle though lapsed Catholic, these are an exotic touch, something he never got used to about the Church of England, where the language might be either rollingly archaic or as flatly modern as a leaflet from the Inland Revenue.

Churches don’t mean much to Mr Phillips. He doesn’t find anything odd about that. An extraterrestrial would look at the number and apparent importance of churches in Britain, calculate the resources that must have been devoted to building them, and come up with a hugely wrong estimate of their importance in the national life. Both the Phillips boys were brought up nominally Catholic as a way of getting into St Francis Xavier, the local not-bad Catholic school. Religion per se isn’t something to which any of the family — certainly not Mrs Phillips, an unimpassioned but lifelong atheist — gives a great deal of thought.

The heavy, thick oak door into the church proper is half open, and Mr Phillips squeezes through into the main body of the building. Like all churches, presumably because they are always empty, it feels bigger on the inside than the out. Plain glass windows along both aisles admit some light but not much; the high fluorescent tubes add a sense of epileptic flicker but little else. Towards the altar, orange plastic stack-able chairs — which is what the church has instead of pews — have been arranged in a semicircle for a dozen or so people to sit and listen to a man who sits opposite them. One of the people sitting in this half moon of chairs, a cross-looking middle aged woman wearing a duffle coat, turns and glares at Mr Phillips for three seconds until her expression suddenly switches to a full-wattage smile. She looks as if she has been appraising the likelihood that he is a burglar or beggar and has decided that he isn’t. Then she turns back to the speaker. Luckily, at this range Mr Phillips can’t hear what he is saying.

The main body of the nave is empty, with chairs stacked tee-teringly high against the two walls. It creates a curious sense of exposure; there are no pews to duck into, no copies of the Alternative Service Book to pretend to read. The only distraction is provided by a table at the back of the church, strewn with pamphlets: How to Pray, What Jesus Can Mean to You, Is There a Hole in Your Life? There is a photocopied leaflet offering a history of the building for 10p and another providing a guided tour. Mr Phillips feels that having come into the church he cannot, especially now he has been spotted, simply turn on his heel and walk away, so he takes a copy of the 10p tour leaflet and pretends to look at the new stained glass window in the middle of the north wall. Its centrepiece is a joky version of Noah’s Ark, with the patriarch afloat in his tiny boat behind a unicorn, a dinosaur and a sort of griffin. Someone paid for this to be done in 1962 by some artist Mr Phillips has never heard of. It is typical of the public art that seems to be scattered about London more or less randomly — the tiny blob-like Henry Moore sculpture just around the corner from Wilkins and Co., monuments to generals no one has ever heard of, all that. Meanwhile the city is inhabited by people 99.999 per cent of whom will never have a monument built to them, and who know it, and who repay the compliment by ignoring all the monuments and memorials to toffs and nobs and heroes and famous victories.

Mr Phillips is now within earshot of the talk.

‘… so that there’s a sense, a very real sense,’ the earnest man in the centre of the group is saying, ‘in which the idea of reincarnation is a Christian idea, the embodiment of those responsibilities to all living things that St Francis taught, and the idea of, you know, stewardship, so that if you go around thinking that cows and lizards and even, sort of, ants are people too, in a sense, then you won’t sort of step on them or whatever it is.’

This appears to have been the climactic part of his talk. He stops speaking, slumps back into his seat and looks around the group with a bright expression. There is a silence and a shuffling. Mr Phillips’s least favourite part of any discussion or talk or meeting, from the PTA at St Francis Xavier’s to the weekly accounts overview session at Wilkins and Co., is precisely this point, when people look at their shoes or rearrange their paperwork and pray that someone will say something, ask something, do something. It is as if everyone in the room simultaneously and immediately becomes intensely self-conscious. As he stands still, and the chill of the stone floor begins to seep up through his shoes, he is aware of how much his feet hurt, a stinging ache that he hasn’t felt for years.

‘Niceness is so important, isn’t it?’ says the woman who glared at Mr Phillips. She has a bright, well-bred, carrying voice. There is not quite a murmur of agreement, but a shuffling and grunting and grinning. The man who gave the talk nods enthusiastically.

‘That’s so true,’ he says. But this intervention hasn’t been pitched at the right level and the silence descends again. Mr Phillips feels pinned down as if by a sniper, since if he begins walking his echoing footfall will be by far the loudest noise in the church. The pause is broken by a balding man in a T-shirt, who says in a flat and oddly loud voice, as if he were wearing a pair of earphones and talking at the same time:

‘The thing I don’t understand is, you improve your karma by acting ethically, yes?’

The talk-giver, with what looks like artificial calm, says:

‘We would perhaps say not that you improve your karma but that in a very real sense you are it.’

‘Fine, fine. So we behave well and move up the reincarnation ladder. Be nice to your granny and go up three notches. Be nasty to babies and dogs and move down five notches. Move down enough notches and you’re reborn as a moose or a dragonfly or whatever. Finally you end up as a cockroach. And then you begin to move back up the ladder so that you’re reborn as a human being. Right? That’s the general idea?’

The other man seems less alarmed now. He spreads his hands and says:

‘Very very broadly speaking. I’d suggest that …’

‘OK, OK,’ goes on the flat-voiced man. ‘So let’s say you’re nasty to everyone, you don’t pay your TV licence fee or return your library books, and you’re reborn as a crocodile. You’ve been a bad boy so now you’re a crocodile. There you are in your creek in the Upper Limpopo or whatever. Now here’s my question: how do you improve your karma? How do you behave well? What does an ethical crocodile look like?’

There is a loud pause. People seem embarrassed but interested. There is also, suddenly, the risk of a scene, and that is one of Mr Phillips’s least favourite things. That dislike does seem to be genetic, a horror of raised voices and raised blood pressure that he without question inherited from his father and mother. ‘A man who loses his temper is a ridiculous man,’ his father would say, and indeed he never publicly lost his temper, merely turning quiet and pale and clenching his teeth and being unable to prevent a reedy, shaky edge coming into his voice, when he was angry — which he often was, especially at public slights on the part of people who were supposed to be helping or serving or looking after him, car park attendants and cinema ushers and, when he was in hospital for a prostate operation a year before he died, the nurses and caterers, although not the doctors, since their status was superior to his and so the transaction worked in a different way. His anxieties were to do with status and the respect he felt should be accorded to him but wasn’t. All these people should be giving it to him, in the form of prompt, respectful, attentive help, and if they didn’t he would become angry, would turn in on himself, and would sit silently and furiously brooding while more vociferous complainers would speak and get attention or amends. This in turn would make his mute sulking rage, his silent, passive temper tantrum, all the worse.

Mr Phillips’s mother, on the other hand, seemed not to have a temper at all, although she would sometimes go quiet and depressed, often in response to her husband’s sulk — it was as if she caught the feeling from him, though in a milder form. They shared a horror of altercations, public displays of crossness, all forms of ruction, and so did their son, who is beginning to wish that he wasn’t where he is, as the earnest man tries to gather himself and counter-attack.

‘Well,’ the talk-giver says. This gets the other man going again.

‘What about an ant? Or a praying mantis? Or a piranha? Or a virus? What’s a well-behaved flu virus do so that it can be reborn as an amoeba or a protozoon? How does a wasp improve its karma?’

‘Well,’ says the other man again. A youngish woman who had not spoken up before suddenly says in a loud, posh, mad voice:

‘Jesus died for your sins. Do you understand that? He died for your sins.’

‘But St Francis would never —’

‘I mean, if you’re just going around stinging people, and that’s your actual job —’

‘The sacrifice that He made for you —’

‘… we’re getting a bit away from the —’

‘… simple question —’

‘… in between a thief and a murderer —’

‘… more a sort of metaphor thingy —’

‘… crocodile-skin handbags —’

‘… Our Saviour, mine and yours —’

‘… difference of emphasis.’

Four or five people are now talking at once. From being shy or cowed they are now being voluble and, to varying extents, cross.

‘Vicarious suffering! Vicarious suffering!’ shouts the posh, loud, mad one in an even louder, madder voice.

Mr Phillips realizes that at least some of these people know each other and have had this argument, or at least a version of it, before. He decides to seize the opportunity to make a bid for freedom. Without moving too quickly, he starts walking towards the exit. As he gets to the heavy door and pulls it towards him, the man with the flat voice sees him and calls out:

‘Oi! Where do you think you’re going?’

At least half the group burst into approving, jeering, raucous laughter, and that is the last sound Mr Phillips hears as he slips out into the porch. In the churchyard the tramp does not seem to have moved at all, but the can of lager that was balanced on his stomach is no longer there.