Mr. Phillips

4.1

What do you call a man with a seagull on his head? Cliff. What do you call a man with a spade in his head? Doug. What do you call a man with no arms and no legs in the ocean? Bob. What do you call a man with ten rabbits up his bum? Warren.

Mr Phillips is lying face down on the floor of Barclays Bank. His arms are spread above and on either side of his head, and his jacket has ridden up and bunched so that it feels as if his circulation is being cut off around his shoulders. Also it is very hot. But Mr Phillips does not want to adjust his position and make himself more comfortable, because four men with shotguns have taken over the bank and it is on their orders that he is lying on the floor looking at the Barclays carpet and trying to keep calm. When the men communicate they do so by shouting and their threats are easy to believe. They have said that they will blow the fucking head off any fucker who moves.

Funnily enough, Mr Phillips saw the men come into the bank just as he noticed a sign saying ‘No Crash Helmets Please’. About two seconds later four men wearing jeans, windcheaters and crash helmets walked into the bank, and there was a split second in which Mr Phillips was noticing and remarking on the coincidence — oh look, there are men in crash helmets, who I don’t suppose will know they’re not meant to come in here dressed like that — before the men started shouting commands and making everyone lie on the floor. One of the crash helmets then picked a middle aged woman in a perm up off the floor and held what appeared to be a sawn-off shotgun, an object about a foot and a half long with a double barrel, at her head. He told the cashiers that if they did not buzz him through to their part of the bank, behind the glass partition, he would blow her face off. So the cashiers buzzed him and one of his companions through while the other two robbers stayed outside and patrolled the banking hall.

How many hairdressers does it take to change a light bulb? Five — one to change the bulb, four to stand around saying ‘Super, Gary.’ How many yuppies does it take to change a light bulb? Two — one to change the bulb, one to organize a skip. How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? None — the light bulb can change itself, but only if it wants to. How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? One — and it’s not funny. How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Two — one to change the bulb, the other to suck your cock.

That was one of Martin’s.

It is all Mr Phillips’s fault that he was caught in here. He had not really needed to come into the bank at all. In fact, all day, on and off, he has been deliberately not-thinking about going to the bank and asking for an up-to-date statement of his financial position, checking his balance, which is about £500, and his savings account, which is about £3000, before he gets his three months’ tax free redundancy, which would come to about £8000. But this was something he simply could not face doing, so he had not-thought about it until what seemed at first to be a happy accident had happened.

Mr Phillips had come out of the church and wandered down to Shaftesbury Avenue. As the day went on London seemed to be getting busier and busier — more people, more rushing about, more cars, more tourists, more cycle couriers and motorcycle messengers, more red buses and black taxis and angry white vans, more coaches and coach parties and more girls and more men carrying things and in a hurry. It was ever so slightly less warm than it had been, at least on the side of the road that wasn’t in the direct sun. Mr Phillips could feel the cold patches on his back where the shirt had soaked up sweat. He knew that his feet would by now be humming up a storm.

A man came up Shaftesbury Avenue leading a group of Asian tourists who had clearly just come out of a matinée of Les Misérables. They were clutching programmes. The guide was holding up a bright orange umbrella and kept pivoting to check that his flock was still there behind him. Then a cyclist shot past Mr Phillips where he stood, swerved between a pair of European-looking tourists and a young man carrying a Tower Records bag, hopped in the air as his bike went over the kerb, cut up a taxi and hurtled over a pedestrian crossing before mounting the pavement and setting off towards Piccadilly Circus.

It was nearly four. Mr Phillips had to use up another two and a half hours before he could plausibly arrive home. It occurred to him for a brief, mad moment that he could even walk the distance … but that would be daft, he was tired enough as it was. A couple of hours more walking would finish him off.

He crossed the road and began walking towards Piccadilly, in the wake of the demon cyclist. About fifty yards along a temporary bus stop had been erected, compensating for the fact that the permanent bus stop was submerged under a pile of scaffolding where something was being built or demolished or painted or cleaned. As he walked up to the stop, a Routemaster bus, spewing thick black diesel fumes, pulled up beside him and twenty or thirty people began to get off, the younger and nimbler of them not waiting for the bus to stop but hopping off and hitting the ground running. The first of them, a young black man, jumped off with a dancer’s wide leap, buckled for a moment with the effort of adjusting his momentum as he hit the ground, and then jogged off towards Chinatown.

When he had had things to do Mr Phillips had not noticed how busy, how urgent, everybody in the city seemed.

Mr Phillips got on the bus. He went upstairs to the top deck and sat down at the front.

This bus went through all the glamorous parts of London. First it went down past the Trocadero, down Haymarket, then back up Regent Street to Piccadilly, then along past the Royal Academy, past the Ritz, past Green Park, round Hyde Park Corner, and along Knightsbridge. By and large these were all parts of London that Mr Phillips never visited. They belonged to other kinds of people. The feeling of wealth and prosperity was thickly present in all these places, and it made Mr Phillips wonder what the city would look like if, instead of bricks and mortar, concrete and cement, buildings were made out of piles of stacked cash, wadded and glued together into bricks. A house out in Leytonstone would be say eight foot high, a sort of wattle hut made out of fivers, whereas one in Knightsbridge would be a skyscraper of £20 notes. And the people, too: if they were nothing more than their total capital value they would vary from tiny bunches, hardly visible, of rolled up notes, to towers thousands of feet tall, stretching up into the clouds, causing trouble for air traffic control and weather balloons, vulnerable to lightning. Mr Phillips himself would be a respectable man-sized pile of cash, if you counted the unmortgaged part of 27 Wellesley Crescent, though he would soon start shrinking fast. If you excluded the house, the assets held jointly with Mrs Phillips and the ones in her name, and deducted debts such as the unpaid part of the mortgage, he would be much less healthy — barely a briefcaseful.

Mr Phillips often thinks about people’s time and what it costs. The ideal is the taxi meter, ticking away to show how much the customer is spending, every penny accounted for and all above board. The red numerals travelling in one direction only. Everyone should have a little meter on them, in Mr Phillips’s view — lawyers in court, politicians on the television; a special lightweight one for footballers and athletes; bus drivers, housewives, Mrs Phillips during her piano lessons and Mr Phillips himself at the office. Only the off duty and the unemployed would be exempt; perhaps they would wear meters that had been switched off, or meters stuck on their last reading. Or should they show average earnings across time, so that even people on unemployment would tick slowly along? The whole point would be the way people chug along at different rates: Mr Mill, who cost £45,000 a year, would clock along at 45,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £25.71 per hour, whereas the beloved and much fancied Karen would tick along at £18,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £ 10.29 per hour, with everyone else in the office, from Eric the charismatic head of the post room to Mr Wilkins himself, who was sighted by someone in accounts about twice a year, ticking away at their own personal rates, the whole process giving an added point or edge to all interpersonal transactions in the office, something to notice and think about, though it would no doubt become quickly invisible as everyone got used to it, as everyone always does. (That of course would happen even if little green men landed and were on the nine o’clock news — after a few weeks’ initial excitement humanity would go back to business as usual.)

The system could get elaborate. For instance, actors could have to wear two meters, one showing their rate and the other the rate of the characters they were playing, indicated perhaps by green numerals as opposed to red ones. You would see an actor playing one part, the paterfamilias in an historical drama, with trademark mutton chop whiskers, and then not see him for months or even a year or two until he turned up again as the butler in an advertisement for vintage port, and you’d realize from looking at his meter, still stuck at the figure it had been on at the end of the drama series, that he’d been ‘resting’ in the interim. Sometimes a famous and highly paid actor would be playing a penniless waif, and the difference between the two meters would become horribly distracting. Musicians would tick away as they played on Top of the Pops, newsreaders and politicians while they talked, beggars as they sat on the street, bus drivers, nurses, waiters, yellow-hat construction workers, everyone. The meters would have different settings to reflect earnings this day, earnings this task, and lifetime earnings. The Prime Minister was paid £57,018, in addition of course to his salary as an MP, but how much he ticked away at per hour would depend on whether you thought he was on duty all the time, whether his holidays were proper holidays etc. The President of the USA was paid about £125,000 and the same thing applied.

Mr Phillips’s bus emerged from Hyde Park Corner and began heading down Knightsbridge. The traffic bottlenecked momentarily to squeeze past a BMW that had been stopped by a police motorcyclist. The policeman was talking to the driver, a tall black man wearing sunglasses.

And now, as the bus went past Harrods, Mr Phillips, who had been looking at people in the street in an idle, incurious way, felt a jolt of surprised excitement. He had spotted her! It was Clarissa Colingford, sure as eggs were eggs, the TV person he had been thinking and indeed masturbating about on and off for some months. She was crossing the street, coming out of a clothes shop with a parcel labelled Chez Guevara under her arm, at some speed, tripping along at a near-run, looking pretty, busy, preoccupied. She was shorter than she seemed on TV and less lifelike — less like herself than like the generic idea of a thin, youngish, blonde woman in expensive clothes. In fact if Mr Phillips had seen her in real life first he might well have been inoculated against her. But he hadn’t and he wasn’t and, deeply curious to get a second look, he got off the bus at the next stop, doubled back, picked up her trail further along Knightsbridge, becoming a stalker or private detective for all of about three minutes, until she had suddenly swerved to one side and gone into the bank, a branch of the very same bank that Mr Phillips himself patronized.

A real man shoots his own dog. Mr Phillips decided to be a man: he would go in, draw some cash and request a full statement sent to his home address. If he happened to bump into Clarissa Colingford, their hands brushing together as they simultaneously reached for a deposit slip, no please after you, no I insist, took me a moment to find them it’s not my usual branch, yes South London, oh do you how interesting, yes a cup of coffee would be delightful … well, that would just be one of those freak coincidences. Which is how Mr Phillips came to be lying face down on the floor of this bank, ten feet away from Clarissa Colingford, at the business end of a sawn-off shotgun. It was just one of those things.

At this range he can see that it’s some outfit she has on. Her thin pale-brown shirt looks as if it were made out of chamois leather, and her thin-looking cream trousers unfortunately seem likely to pick up all kinds of dirts and smears from the Barclays carpet. From this distance she is more like she is on TV than at medium range. She has the same sense of invisible shine and of being almost too good to be true, though she is skinnier than she seems on television, by about ten pounds, which makes her seem more nervous, less voluptuous, but immediately wantable. She looks, not sweaty, but as if you might, if you got up very close to her, see a faint clamminess at the base of her neck, in the crook of her elbow, her perfume enhanced by her body heat. Mr Phillips feels that he is very much in love.

This carpet however has Mr Phillips worried. Once you are pressed out cruciform on any floor surface — prostrated, they would say in church, in the position priests used to adopt when being ordained — you begin to think about what else has been on that floor before you. In the case of a much trodden-on urban bank carpet there is the question of dog shit on people’s shoes. Also pigeon shit, urine, rubbish, spilt things; but mainly dog shit. It would be picked up, brought here, and then trodden into the carpet which was now an inch from Mr Phillips’s nose, a pale blue flooring made out of some industrial substance with a tight knobbly weave, the better to capture millions of tiny molecules of transported dog excrement, the sort that made children blind if they ate it. Why would they eat it, you might well ask, to which the answer was, accidents do happen.

Mr Phillips once went through a phase of being worried about dog shit in London’s parks, on behalf of the children. For instance that Martin would kick the football through some dog shit, pick the ball up without noticing, rub his eyes or polish an apple with the contaminated hand, and become sick. It was something to do with worms. Then the worries had gone away, apparently of their own accord. Now they have come back again. It is as if he can see tiny particles of dog shit everywhere he looks.

Clarissa Colingford had come into the bank and gone straight over to the cashpoint machine. Or not quite straight over; she had stood around looking vague for a moment or two and then gone to stand behind a hugely fat man who was having tremendous difficulty inserting his card into the automatic teller. Mr Phillips knew this fine art well and knew that it was all a matter of timing, but this man’s stiff, jabbing action — and who knew whether the card was even the right way round! — and the quiet mechanical crunch of the card being rejected made something obscene out of his failure to insert it. Finally Clarissa Colingford stepped in, coming up beside the man and with the sweetest expression saying, ‘May I?’

The big man handed her the card and she slipped it into the purring machine at the first attempt.

‘Well, thanks,’ he said. She just smiled, as if saying anything might compromise his maleness, and stood back as he hunched scowling over the console. Mr Phillips felt intensely jealous. He lurched to one side before he was caught eavesdropping and moved to the counter where you filled in slips, did sums, and took leaflets. It was there that he was standing when the robbers burst into the bank.

Of course she could have used the cashpoint outside if it was only cash she wanted. Mr Phillips suspects that he knows the reason why she didn’t. This Knightsbridge cashpoint can be relied on to have at least one beggar sitting or standing beside it, plaintively (usually) or aggressively (occasionally) asking for money, usually by saying, ‘Spare change please?’ Today there was a woman, probably in her thirties but looking ten years older, sitting half rolled-up in too many clothes for the weather — heavy trousers, two or three shirts, a coat, a bobble hat, with a couple of plastic bags strewn around her. She looked pitiful, but in Mr Phillips’s experience that doesn’t always make you want to give someone money. This beside-the-cashpoint spot must be prime territory; Mr Phillips wondered if beggars took turns occupying it. To Mr Phillips’s mind there was something hard to ignore about the juxtaposition of someone asking for money, needing it desperately even, and the money that the machine was vomiting or belching out to people who asked for it. It was as if there was a right way and a wrong way of asking for money: sit on the pavement and ask your fellow humans and you’ll be refused, stand up and ask a machine and you can have as much as you want.

Mr Phillips sometimes feels a wave of anger or revulsion as he walks past a beggar. When he gives one money, usually 50p since they aren’t useful for parking meters, the emotion he feels is not primarily towards the beggar but towards himself, a warm glow of philanthropic self-congratulation. Similarly, the other feelings are directed at himself too, at his ungenerosity and ability to harden his own heart. It is this that makes people hate beggars, for what they make you do to them — since no one can give money to every beggar he sees, the existence of beggars turns everybody into the kind of person who walks past beggars. Hard to forgive them that.

The men who are robbing the bank are not asking for money so much as simply taking it, and taking their time about doing it too, in Mr Phillips’s view. Though admittedly his ability to judge how much time has passed is probably not at its best. It feels like twenty minutes but is probably more like two. This would be something to talk about when he got home — though if he does he will have to say where he’s been, and what he was doing in Knightsbridge at four in the afternoon, which is something he doesn’t particularly feel like doing. This is another subject he prefers to not-think about.

‘Check that one,’ shouts one of the men behind the counter. Mr Phillips doesn’t want to look and see what is going on but can guess that it probably involves stashing bags full of cash. The curious thing is that because the robbers shout all the time — which Mr Phillips knows from watching Crimewatch UK is a trick to make it hard for people to identify their voices or accents — they sound a little like the head of department Mr Phillips had had at Grimshaw’s, a man called or rather nicknamed Knobber. He had shouted all the time too and had been able to call on a bottomless source of seemingly unfeigned anger. He once described his department’s performance in preparing at twenty-four hours’ notice for an audit as the worst day in the history of the accountancy profession.

Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? Paracetamol. (Parrots eat ’em all.) Have you ever seen a bunny with its nose all runny, don’t say it’s funny ’cos it’s snot. What do you get if you cross a nun with an apple? A computer that won’t go down on you. Have you heard about the evil dyslexic? He sold his soul to Santa. Have you heard about the agnostic insomniac dyslexic? He lay awake all night wondering if there was a Dog. Why did the chicken kill itself? To get to the other side.

This is the closest Mr Phillips has ever been to actual violence in his whole adult life, excluding the occasional scuffle in the street, not that he’s taken part in one — God forbid — but because he occasionally sees them out of a car or a train window. Mr Phillips must have witnessed many thousands of violent incidents, shootings and explosions and stabbings and abductions and rapes and fist fights and drive-by machine-gunnings, and assassination style head shots and Saturday Night Special shootings, and cars blown up by shoulder fired rocket launchers, and rooms systematically cleared by grenades followed by machine-gun fire, and petrol stations blown up by deliberately dropped cigarette lighters, but all of these were on television (or occasionally at the movies). The last proper stand-up fist fight he saw was nineteen years ago, when he spent six months commuting to the plant in Banbury, a few years after he started at Wilkins and Co. A foreman from Newcastle had accused a fitter from London, a Cockney wide boy whom nobody much liked — the plant was the first place Mr Phillips had realized how much ‘Cockneys’, as all Londoners were called, were disliked — of being a thief. Twenty pounds, then quite a lot of money, had gone missing from the Geordie’s locker. The Geordie had won by making the Cockney’s nose bleed so much that the fight had to stop so that he could go and get it looked at in Casualty. There was no more thieving, though no one ever found out who had stolen the money. As would happen in a film, the two men later became inseparably fast friends.

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.

None the less, he doesn’t see it that way. Not being here is in itself nothing to fear. The moment of transition, though — the moment of breaking through the veil of being-here and going through to notness, which presumably involves a terrible rending moment in which you realize what is happening, have full consciousness of what you are going through — now that seems to be worth fearing. If he could have a written guarantee from the responsible parties that death would be something he wouldn’t notice — here one moment, gone the next, with no lived transition — he would feel perfectly sanguine, even gung-ho, about the whole business. But the thought that you would be aware of what was going on as you died implied that somewhere in his future was a moment of the purest terror, terror at 200 proof, so that you could have a small taste of the fear every time you let your mind touch on the subject, even for a second or two.

Today, lying here on the floor of the bank, must be the closest Mr Phillips had been to death for many years — perhaps the closest since his friend Tony Wilson, who moved to Dorset to run a minicab company and whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years, had crashed their car on the way back from a wedding in Suffolk. Tony was drunk — not paralytic, but tipsy. He had taken a corner too fast, skidded, and gone into a ditch about ten feet from a concrete drainage pipe. If they had hit the pipe they would have been dead.

‘You’re very lucky young men,’ the policemen had told them.

‘If we’d been that lucky what were we doing in the fucking ditch in the first place?’ Tony said. He knew that he was going to lose his licence anyway.

Mrs Phillips, who had been at home because she was eight and a half months pregnant with Martin and couldn’t face the round-trip drive to East Anglia, had forbidden her husband from ever travelling in a car driven by Tony again. That was a quarter of a century ago. Since then the nearest Mr Phillips has come to death is through the usual risks to do with strokes and heart attacks and haemorrhages, the things which can jump up and whack you, take you at any moment, as well as the longer-term, more stealthy killers, the ones that creep up on you from behind and kidnap you into the treeless country of terminal illness — the cancers, the degenerative diseases. In that sense he has lived with the same proximity to death as any other sedentary man in his fifties with a white collar job, the kind of intimacy you could have with an acquaintance who might drop in at any moment but who you would probably at the same time have no reason to expect on this particular day, or on any other day for a little while yet.

This raises the question of how likely death is, on any particular day. It came up one morning a few months ago, when they were all sitting around before the monthly progress meeting of the Accounts Department.

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Abbot, the youngest of them. ‘The odds against winning the Lottery are fourteen million to one, right?’

‘The odds against winning the jackpot,’ said Monroe in his Aberdonian voice. ‘Six divided by forty nine times five divided by forty eight times four divided by forty seven times three divided by forty six times two divided by forty five times one divided by forty four, which is 0.00000007151 or one in 13,983,816, usually referred to as one in fourteen million. So if the prize is greater than fourteen million quid it becomes a rational bet as supposed to just a stupidity tax.’

‘Assuming all the money goes to only one winner, which you can’t assume,’ said somebody else.

‘Fourteen million to one that you’ll get all six numbers right,’ said Monroe. ‘There is however another risk here which affects the likelihood of winning. Does anybody want to tell me what it is?’

Mr Phillips, who knew the answer because he had heard Monroe on the subject before, kept silent so as not to spoil his fun.

‘No takers. All right. The additional factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the chance of being dead by the time the Lottery results arrive — since, obviously, the chance of dying in any given week is much, much higher than that of winning the Lottery.’

There was a pause, the sound of six accountants sizing up a mathematical problem in their heads.

‘What’s the death rate? How many people die every week?’ said Austen.

‘According to the relevant Government agencies,’ said Monroe, ‘the population of England at the time of the last estimate was 49,300,000. The previous year, deaths totalled 526,650. The death rate per week was therefore 10,128, rounded up to the nearest cadaver. Using these data we find that for an Englishman the chance of dying in any given week is therefore 0.0002054, or one in 4880.’

‘So your chance of winning the Lottery’, said Abbot at his calculator, ‘is, er, 2873 times worse than your chance of being dead by the time of the National Lottery draw.’

‘But we’re assuming you buy the ticket at the start of the week,’ Monroe went on. ‘In other words, if you buy your ticket at the start of the week and hold it until the draw, your chance of being dead by the time of the result is much better than your chance of winning. But most people don’t buy the ticket on Sunday, they buy it in the middle of the week before the draw, and so their odds are better. If you buy your ticket at four o’clock on Friday afternoon your chance of not being dead before the result must be significantly improved.’

They were already doing the sums.

‘Assuming the deaths are spread evenly over the calendar —’

— which Mr Phillips didn’t feel you could assume. Surely more people died in winter and at weekends, of drinking and fighting and the stress of being cooped up with their families and so on? But he didn’t say anything –

‘That means that the chance of dying, for a random member of the population, is 0.0107 per year, or 0.0000293 per day, or 0.00000122 per hour, or 0.0000000203 per minute. In other words each of us has a 1 in 49,200,000 chance of dying in any given minute. So in order for the probability of winning the jackpot to be greater than the chance of being dead by the time of the draw one would have to bet no earlier than’, Monroe tapped some figures into his Psion Organiser, ‘three and a half minutes before the draw.’

‘Christ,’ said someone.

‘But that’s averaging the risk out,’ Monroe continued. ‘Obviously a nineteen-year-old girl who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, has no familial history of anything and whose great-grandmother is still alive at the age of 102 is more likely not to be dead than a sixty-year-old chain-smoking alcoholic with a Private Pilot’s licence. We’d need to get hold of some proper actuarial tables,’ he concluded, giving the word ‘proper’ a discreet but very Scottish emphasis. At that point Mr Mill the useless departmental head came into the room, the conversation petered out and the meeting began instead.

Monroe, however, did not forget. About two weeks later a notice appeared on the board in the company canteen saying ATTENTION LOTTERY GAMBLERS, and below giving a breakdown, along the lines discussed, of the averaged-out risk of being dead compared to the chance of winning the Lottery. The table gave a time after which the chances of winning the Lottery were better than those of being dead by the end of the week.

AGE HOW LATE TO LEAVE IT Under 16 1 hour 10 minutes 16–24 1 hour 8 minutes 5–34 51 minutes 35–44 28 minutes 45–54 11 minutes 55–64 4 minutes 65–74 1 minute 75 and over 24 seconds

It had lingered in the mind. Mr Phillips wonders what his relative chances of being dead before this week’s Lottery draw are at this precise moment. In all probability they have never been better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. It would only take a single convulsive motion of one robber’s finger. The feeling was the same as the one you sometimes have driving, when it occurs to you that all it would take is a strong twitch on the steering wheel and your car will go across the line into oncoming traffic, or over the kerb into a wall, or through a hedge or a ditch or a shop window, any of those things which people in film accidents do to comic or exciting effect but which in real life involve death. This is like that feeling only more so. All that would have to happen is for one of the bank robbers to conceive a dislike of Mr Phillips as he lies spreadeagled and puffing on the floor, inhaling minute particles of dog shit.

‘Right, last one. Fifteen seconds,’ shouts one of the men on the other side of the bank counter. Mr Phillips, if forced to guess, would say that the man is a Scouser. If the robber crosses into the bank lobby with whatever he is using to carry the money slung over his shoulder — Mr Phillips can’t see, but the men are clearly jamming bank notes into some kind of bags or haversacks that they’ve brought with them — another item that should perhaps be banned from banks, along with crash helmets — if he comes out, points his sawn-off at Mr Phillips and blows his head off, for any reason or no reason, today, 31 July, will be the day that was lying there in wait for him all his life, hiding in the calendar, in secret parallel to 9 December, his birthday. Everybody has this day, hiding in plain sight, the one day out of the 365 which has a significance for us that we aren’t here to know about. His deathday will be the day on which Mrs Phillips and the boys remember him, or remember him with particular vividness, Mrs Phillips especially. For her 31 July would be like a returning ache, every year. The boys would make a big effort to be with her, at least for the first few years, but then the practice would be less strict, it would gradually die out like a national custom that people were gradually forgetting. Only for Mrs Phillips would the day continue to have its special weight in the calendar, a day she would always dread, when she wouldn’t be able to bear the sound of certain pieces of music.

Today could be the day … any day could be the day, of course, that is the whole point, but today especially. Mr Phillips puts his hands under his shoulders and pushes himself up. Then he gets to his feet. As he does so he realizes he is holding his hands above his shoulders, and that this gesture doesn’t really make sense any more, so he lowers them. His view of what is going on in the bank is very much better from up here. In fact there’s no comparison. Mr Phillips can see the way people are lying scattered in the face-down position, not radiating out from a single point but higgledy-piggledy, pointing in all directions. Clarissa Colingford, who is lying with her face turned to the right away from him, has her trousers stretched over her buttocks, not quite so stretched that the material is shiny, but nearly. It is quite a sight. He can also see the two bank robbers in the front part of the bank. Both of them are looking at him with as much of a surprised expression as it’s possible to have inside a motorcycle helmet. The two men are thin and wiry. Mr Phillips probably weighs as much as one and a third of them. He says:

‘I’m not doing that any more.’

‘You fucking —’ says one of the men, advancing towards Mr Phillips, not pointing the gun directly at him but pointing it past his side. He forgot to shout, and his accent is definitely Liverpudlian.

‘Get the cunt down!’ shouts the robber behind the counter who seems to be in charge. It has been at least two minutes since he shouted about its being fifteen seconds until they would finish, so perhaps something is going wrong. He does not look at Mr Phillips as he shouts but down at the counter, below which his colleague is doing something out of sight.

‘I’m not going to get down,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘I think everyone should feel free to stand up.’

The other people in the bank are by now all looking at him, their necks doing all sorts of kinks and cricks in order to do so. People’s faces are extraordinarily blank. Between them they can’t notch up so much as a single expression. There is no way to tell what they are thinking. Even Clarissa Colingford, who has turned her head around and is now lying with her right cheek on the floor — she has turned around in order to get a better view of Mr Phillips! — you can see the red imprint of the carpet on her face — even Clarissa Colingford looks as she might look in a camera that was turned on her while the main camera, the one that was broadcasting live, was following someone else. Her face is off duty.

‘If you don’t lie down on the fucking floor you’re going to get your fucking head blown off,’ the nearest robber shouts — he remembers this time. His shotgun is pointed at Mr Phillips’s stomach. Mr Phillips does not move.

‘I think you should all get up too,’ he says to the other people in the bank. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

They all stay where they are. It is what Mr Phillips would have done in their shoes. A little old lady writhes around on the floor and Mr Phillips for a moment thinks she is about to get up, but it turns out she is only manoeuvring to be more comfortable and to get a better view. The others do not make eye contact with Mr Phillips — it is psychologically and physically difficult to make eye contact with a standing man when you are lying face down on the floor — and are looking in his general direction rather than looking at him.

Mr Phillips feels a great sensation of lightness. It is as if his life is a crushing weight, a rucksack filled with bricks that he gradually got so used to he forgot it was there, and he has now managed to shift the burden so that the sense of ease, of release, is exhilarating. He feels that he could hop ten feet straight into the air. Or, more gently, just decide to float upwards, so that his perspective down on the floor-people would become steeper, and the bank robbers would crane their necks up at him in amazement, and then he would be up through the roof, looking down at the building and out across Knightsbridge, the traffic, Harrods already visible, and then further up, able to see the Victoria and Albert Museum, the way you can fly in a dream (though even in a dream you always know you’re going to fall back down, and Mr Phillips has no such feeling) and then further and further up, the Thames snaking away behind and London turning into an aerial photograph and then into a map of itself, the horizon stretching further and further away, startled birds and pigeons swerving to avoid him, up through the first thin layer of wispy cloud and then further up into the clean blue, the haze of pollution and fug over the city becoming visible as it is left behind, the countryside spreading out and expanding as London shrinks, and then England shrinks, turns into an island as he gets higher and higher up, so that he can see the Channel, the crinkly coasts of Ireland and France, then the blob of Paris, so small from up here, and the Low Countries, and then Europe shrinks, and he can see out over the Atlantic, into Russia, and then the edges of the Earth itself would come into view, and Mr Phillips would float free of the planet, out into the clean nothingness of space, and suddenly the Earth would seem tiny and fragile and blue and green, shrinking fast, and most of the universe would be darkness in which the stars and planets would seem tiny, decorative, hardly disturbing the beauty and calm of the blank, lifeless void.

The bank robber nearest to Mr Phillips is looking at him steadily and seems to be working out what to do. He half-turns to look at the other robbers and then he begins to move his shotgun upwards in the direction of Mr Phillips’s head. As he does so a loud and distorted voice, coming through a megaphone, says:

‘Armed police. Throw down your weapons.’