The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix

by Paul Sussman

  So brisk and assertive was his manner; so utterly confident, that, having told me to sit down, I would not fail to do otherwise, that I felt compelled to obey and, almost without realizing what I was doing, I crossed the room and installed myself on the straight-backed wooden chair he had indicated with his chubby finger.

  ‘Now,’ he said, examining a sheaf of papers on his desk, ‘I see you’ve applied for the post of trainee assistant till clerk, second class.’

  ‘No,’ I corrected. ‘I’ve come to change some money.’

  He twitched, as though he had just received a minor electric shock, and a look of surprise bordering on consternation washed across his face. He adjusted his spectacles and referred once again to the papers in front of him.

  ‘Trainee assistant till clerk, second class,’ he repeated, as though I had perhaps misheard him the first time and that by saying the phrase again he could thereby persuade me of its applicability to my own person.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I responded. ‘I just want to exchange some dollars for pounds sterling.’

  He was silent for a moment, and then, suddenly, craftily, shouted, ‘Assistant till clerk, second class, trainee!’ hoping, it would seem, to trick me into answering in the affirmative.

  ‘No,’ I repeated firmly. ‘Not assistant till clerk, second class. Not assistant till clerk any class. I simply wish to exchange some money. Fifteen dollars and eight cents, to be precise. And a few nickels, but I suspect you don’t do those.’

  He shook his head from side to side, blinked, fiddled with his bow tie and then, with a swiftness of movement quite at odds with his rotund physique, shot off across the room to a filing cabinet in the far corner. I was quite dazzled by the speed and smoothness of his passage, and it was a moment before I realized he had not even stood up but was in fact propelling himself upon his chair, to the legs of which were affixed small castors. The latter hissed across the floor with a sound similar to that made by skates on ice.

  From the filing cabinet he withdrew more sheaves of paper before spinning back to his desk again.

  ‘It says here that you’ve come for an interview with regards to the position of trainee assistant till clerk, second class,’ he announced triumphantly, waving a sheet of paper in the air. ‘It’s perfectly clear. 12 a.m. appointment – assistant till clerk, class two, trainee. You can see for yourself. It’s all been arranged, noted, confirmed and double checked.’

  ‘I can only repeat,’ I replied, ‘that I am not, nor have I ever been, desirous of working as an assistant till clerk in a bank. It is, I am sure, a most rewarding occupation, but not one I would wish to undertake at this present juncture in my life.’

  ‘So,’ he said slowly, deliberately, as if trying to convince himself of a fact quite beyond human comprehension, ‘you’re not applying for the post.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There must be some mistake.’

  This provoked another convulsion, more violent than the one previously. The ends of his waxed moustache appeared to curl up and down of their own volition and, delving into his jacket pocket, he removed a small bottle of pills, two of which he popped into his mouth. He then seized the side of his desk and propelled himself around it as though riding on a waltzer, coming to a halt directly in front of me.

  ‘We do not,’ he growled, ‘make mistakes at Simsby’s of Castle Street. “Mistake” is not a word we know or use within this institution. We number amongst our clients three lords, two admirals, eighteen knights of the realm and some of the most important industrialists of our time. We have five times been voted best bank in the North of England’ – he gestured to a row of framed certificates on the wall to his left – ‘and were recently awarded the Lloyds Bank badge of merit’ – another gesture to another certificate, this one hanging beside the window. ‘We are renowned far and wide for the extraordinary soundness of our financial advice, and in three weeks’ time I shall be lunching with none other than the Governor of the Bank of England himself. We have awesome responsibilities, and in the discharging of those responsibilities – three lords, two admirals and eighteen knights of the realm, don’t forget – we DO NOT MAKE MISTAKES!’

  He removed his glasses and polished them vigorously with his handkerchief before grabbing his desk and spinning himself back to its far side. He re-examined the papers lying before him, scribbled some notes on a blotter, re-re-examined the papers, squinted, and then, laying his hands calmly upon the surface of the desk, said:

  ‘So, you’ve applied for the post of trainee assistant till clerk, second class.’

  What do you do when destiny makes so obvious a show of opening His door and ushering you through? Do you ignore Him, insisting that one, and only one, person will decide your future and that’s you? Or do you submit? Accept the inevitable, bow to the signs and do what Fate tells you. Do you struggle, or do you lie down? In my case, I am sorry to say, it has invariably and unavoidably been the latter. Always has been, always will be, never could be any different. That’s why I’m going to kill myself. It was pre-ordained in my initials. There’s no escaping pre-ordination.

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed wearily, rubbing The Pill against my cheek with one hand and with the other replacing the dollar notes I had intended to change in my trouser pocket. ‘Yes. I’ve come to be a trainee assistant till clerk, second class.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Popplethwaite, clapping his hands. ‘Very good and proper. Now, your name, please . . .’

  ‘Raphael Ignatius Phoenix, late of Tropical Drive, Los Angeles . . .’

  Which is how, to no one’s surprise more than my own, I found myself working as a trainee assistant till clerk (second class) in Simsby’s Banking and Financial of Castle Street, Liverpool. What happened to the person whose interview I so unwittingly purloined I have no idea, but I applied myself assiduously to my duties, and within a year was considered sufficiently versed in the cabala of till clerkdom to lose the trainee bit of my title and assume the post of Assistant Till Clerk, Second Class.

  This, however, was simply the beginning of my meteoric rise through the ranks of the banking world. Within two years of stepping off the Scythia I was no longer an assistant but a fully fledged Till Clerk, Second Class, and then a fully fledged Assistant Till Clerk, First Class and then – honour of honours – a fully fledged Till Clerk, First Class, with assistants and trainees and second-classers beneath me, at my beck and call.

  I remained in this position for almost three years, until January 1938, when to general consternation and over the head of Mr Froops, who had been widely expected to assume the post, I was promoted to the giddy heights of Temporary Deputy Assistant Under-Manager, Bullion Division, which is where I remained until I murdered Mr Popplethwaite two years later.

  The position Temporary Deputy Assistant Under-Manager, Bullion Division, brought with it certain perks which, whilst not in themselves particularly impressive, nonetheless seemed so within the introverted perkless world of high-street banking. I was, for instance, allowed to wear a bow tie, which, after seven years in a normal black one, came as a sartorial boon of immeasurable value. I was also permitted to sport a handkerchief in my jacket pocket, and wear a bowler hat. To the people I passed each day on the street I must have appeared normal to the point of drabness. Compared with my fellow Simby’s workers, however, I looked positively rakish, and took considerable pride in the admiring looks I received from the company secretaries when I arrived for work each morning.

  Best of all, as Temporary Deputy Assistant Under-Manager, Bullion Division, I had my own office. It was not a large office – more of a glorified cupboard really – but it had my name on the door, and a key with which I could lock it and, most significantly, was on the first floor of the bank, directly above Mr Popplethwaite’s room.

  To be promoted from the ground floor to the first (or second or third or fourth) floor of Simsby’s was an honour to which every employee aspired. Small-minded it might have been, but to be able to enter the bank of a morning and asc
end the stairway to the rarefied heights above imparted a sense of achievement and self-importance that quite turned one’s head. Those on the ground floor gazed upwards at those on higher levels with much the same awed reverence as humans gazed upwards at the blessed of heaven; and, like the blessed of heaven, we gazed downwards at those beneath us with a sense of benevolent pity, bolstered by the knowledge that our lives were so much better than theirs were, or indeed ever could be. We were financial superbeings, incremental demi-gods, and if Mr Popplethwaite chose to have his office at the foot of the stairs it was simply because he had the power and supreme self-confidence to do so, much as Jesus had the power to come to earth and make his dwelling amongst the poor.

  ‘As Mrs Popplethwaite will tell you,’ our manager would frequently declare, twitching slightly at the mention of his wife’s name, ‘I am a simple man of simple tastes. In banking, modesty is all.’

  Within my small office – which was, I repeat, on the first floor of the bank – I had a small desk with a small chair, a small filing cabinet and, on a small pedestal beside the small filing cabinet, an extremely small potted plant. Everything within my office was small, and indeed needed to be, for had it not been there would have been insufficient space to accommodate the room’s main feature – a large free-standing safe located against the right-hand wall.

  ‘Large’ is perhaps to understate the case somewhat. The safe with which I shared a room was not so much a large safe as an enormous one. It was a vast safe, a gigantic safe, the biggest safe I have ever seen or, I suspect, am ever likely to see, constructed of solid, four-inch-thick Sheffield steel, eight feet high, four wide and four and a half deep, and covered from top to bottom with a bewildering assortment of dials, wheels, levers, cranks, handles, knobs and keyholes. God alone knows how it had got up on to the first floor, and God alone knows how it managed to stay there, for it must have weighed at least five tons and was supported by but the flimsiest of floorboards. For the two years I cohabited with it, indeed, I lived in constant fear that it might suddenly disappear before my eyes, crashing downwards with a whoosh into Mr Popplethwaite’s office below as its weight eventually got the better of its surroundings. Fortunately, it never did so, until the very end that is, but that didn’t stop me moving around the room with extreme caution, tiptoeing from place to place and ensuring I never made any sudden movements lest by so doing I should disturb the safe’s precarious stability.

  ‘Good to see you sweating, Mr Phoenix!’ Mr Popplethwaite would enthuse. ‘Sweat signifies respect, and respect for money, particularly bullion, is the very crux of banking.’

  As Temporary Deputy Assistant Under-Manager, Bullion Division, it was my responsibility to look after this gigantic safe. My only responsibility, indeed, for aside from making the odd phone call and filling out an occasional form, I did nothing else in the two years I occupied the post.

  Each morning I would arrive in my tiny office at 8 a.m. and, having hung up my coat and bowler hat, would duly set to work with a feather duster about the safe’s top and sides. I would then oil its hinges and lubricate its dials. I would polish its handles and blow into its keyholes and buff up its cranks and burnish its levers. I would ensure that the large brass wheels on its door could be rotated without impediment, and that the Simsby’s of Castle Street plaque just above those wheels was scoured to an eye-aching degree of brilliance. In warm weather I was expected to keep the safe cool (by fanning it), and in cool weather to keep it warm (by massaging it), and in all weathers to be on the lookout for any signs of rust, the appearance of which I dreaded in much the same way as some people dread the idea of contracting a virulent skin contagion.

  Most important of all, I would, each day at 4 p.m., actually open the safe. This was a complex procedure, and one I could not undertake singlehandedly, since it took five keys to get the door open, and I only possessed one of them, the other four being held by, respectively, the Assistant Under-Manager of the Bullion Division, the Under-Manager, the Manager and Mr Popplethwaite himself. Also required was the presence of a small, wizened man called Jones the Safe, the latter apparently the only person alive in possession of the full combination thereto, and that of Mr Cree and Mr Blain, the twin heads of in-house security. With these eight people all in position, and with Mr Popplethwaite shouting out instructions (‘Insert keys!’, ‘Turn keys!’, ‘Dial combination!’, etc.), the safe door would be slowly and dramatically heaved open to reveal, languishing on a black velvet cushion at the very back of the vault, a single, rather small, silver ingot.

  This ingot was the only thing in the Simsby’s bullion safe. It was, so far as I could ascertain, the only thing that had ever been in the Simsby’s bullion safe, and, despite persistent rumours that we were about to take delivery of a sizeable shipment of South African gold, remained the only thing in the Simsby’s bullion safe for the whole time I was there. We would look at it briefly, Mr Popplethwaite mumbling, ‘Ah, the blessed allure of precious metals!’ and then get to work closing the safe again. Once it was shut, the others would all return to their respective offices and I would type up a general memo to the effect that staff could sleep easily at night in the knowledge that all was well with the Simsby’s bullion. Then I would take a duster and set to work wiping away my colleagues’ fingerprints.

  ‘It’s not the amount of bullion that counts,’ explained Mr Popplethwaite when I once asked him whether such an enormous safe was really needed for such a small amount of silver, ‘but rather the fact that there is bullion. And where there is bullion, there must be security. Without that, Mr Phoenix, we are lost. Quite lost.’

  And who was I to argue? When it came to money and how to look after it, no one in the world knew more than Mr M. Popplethwaite of Simsby’s of Castle Street.

  Caring for the Simsby’s bullion safe was an exacting business, and my life beyond the bank during those years was a quiet and unassuming one.

  I took a room in a rather quaint Georgian house on Mount Pleasant and, having returned from work each evening and eaten my dinner, would thereafter spend the rest of the evening in an armchair in front of the wireless listening to Arthur Askey and Jack Warner.

  My landlady was a Mrs Gristle, rather like her chops, who had taken lodgers since her husband, Alf, was blown up on the Somme in 1916. She was a large woman, with dishevelled red hair and an unnaturally pendulous lower lip, and was a strong candidate for the title of ‘World’s Most Devoted Liverpudlian’.

  Mrs Gristle revered Liverpool in much the same way as Mr Popplethwaite revered money. There was nothing about the city that she didn’t know, and no aspect of its history about which she couldn’t discourse at extraordinary length. She had a veritable library’s worth of books and pamphlets about the place, as well as what she proudly claimed to be the world’s largest collection of Merseyside postcards. She seemed to know everybody within a ten-mile radius of the centre, and was probably the only person in footballing history to support both Liverpool and Everton at the same time.

  ‘How can I choose between them,’ she exclaimed, ‘when they both come from the same place?’

  Almost the first thing Mrs Gristle said to me, before I had even agreed to take the room, was: ‘This is a fine city, my lad, and I’ll throttle anyone who says different. Throttle them with my bare hands, I will!’

  I informed her that from what little I had seen it was indeed a most pleasant place to live, a comment which endeared me to her no end and moved her to knock a whole shilling off the price of my rent. Thereafter, no conversation, however brief, could pass without her delivering in the midst of it a brief encomium to the city of her birth.

  ‘We’ve got steak and kidney pudding tonight, Mr Phoenix,’ she would say, ‘and did you know that over 3 million tons of shipping passes through this city every year? Then spotted dick to follow.’

  There was but one thing that interested Mrs Gristle more than Liverpool, or rather three things, and those were her daughters. Clara, Angeline and Poppeta Gristle s
hared a room on the top floor of the house and were, despite having inherited their mother’s pendulous lower lip and dishevelled hair, all in their own way rather pretty. They had long legs and flashing emerald eyes and were the subject of constant attention from the local male population, whom they would tease and torment to the point of distraction.

  I had been under Mrs Gristle’s roof for less than a week when I first had sex with Clara. She was at that point 21, and one of the most athletic young women I had ever met. We continued having sex at least four times a week for the next three years – usually in my bedroom, occasionally in a shrubbery in a local park – when, to everyone’s surprise, she ran off with a sailor, whereupon I transferred my attentions to Angeline. The latter was by that point herself 21 and, if not quite as pneumatic as her elder sister, certainly no less satisfying. We bonked on and off until 1937, when she decided to marry a shipyard rivetter, necessitating the withdrawal of my affections from her and their bestowal instead upon Popetta, the youngest and most coquettish of the sisters. With Popetta I enjoyed a further three years of illicit nocturnal tumbling before she too decided to tie the knot – with, to her mother’s horror, a Greek Jewish saxophonist – leaving me sexless for the first time in nine years. I was rather disappointed by her departure, although in the long run it didn’t matter, since it was only three days after she left that I did for Mr Popplethwaite and disappeared into the Second World War.

  Mrs Gristle, of course, had no idea I was knocking off her daughters. Had she done so, it would have sent her quite over the edge, for they already caused her enough worry without the added distress of knowing they were sleeping with her lodger.

  ‘They’re quite wild, Mr Phoenix,’ she would wail, ladling cabbage on to my plate. ‘Quite wild. Lord alone knows what they get up to when my back’s turned. If my Alf was here, he’d put them right, but Alf got blown up on the Somme so I have to do my best alone. Alone, Mr Phoenix. I’m all alone. More greens? Frankly, it’ll be a blessed relief when they’re all married. I do worry so.’