4.4
As he comes out of his Tube train at Embankment, Mr Phillips can feel the pint of beer being shaken up inside him along with everything else he has eaten that day to make a giant cocktail of lager and porridge and bacon and scallops and G and T and coffee and banana and fish cake. Presumably the contents of your stomach look like what comes out of you when you are sick. That thought, the bubbles in the lager and the jolting action of the train help Mr Phillips to feel mildly but definitely nauseated. Mr Phillips lets the flow of commuters sweep him up the escalator, on to the concourse. He comes out of the station, out across the place in front where taxis and passengers mingle, and heads down the alley at the side towards the footbridge over the Thames. There are always a good few beggars about and today is no exception.
The pedestrian bridge is one of Mr Phillips’s favourites. He likes its narrowness and air of fragility, the way it makes him feel as if he is hanging in the air above the river.
This is the next-to-last leg of his journey home, and in an ideal world Mr Phillips would stop for a look at the river, but with single files of people hurrying over the narrow bridge in both directions it isn’t really possible, so he passes on at a slightly too quick walk and arrives breathless on the South Bank. As always it looks like an unlovely concrete animal sprawled out in death. He crosses the walkway, past an immensely unflattering bust of Nelson Mandela, and heads towards the train station. This is as close as he usually gets to the National Theatre; in fact, Mr Phillips has only ever been in the building once, to go and see King Lear when Martin was studying it for A-level. Mrs Phillips set the trip up and then disloyally but genuinely came down with flu that same morning. Mr Phillips, with a sense that he was behaving very well, volunteered to go instead. In retrospect he sees it as one of the longest four hours of his life, uncannily similar, in the sensation of discomfort, anxiety and pure duration, to that of waiting in Casualty.
‘What did you think?’ he risked asking Martin afterwards, on the way back to the car park. This was a scruffy patch of nothing land which by itself proved that you were now in South London, since car parks in North London were all claustrophobically underground or elaborately above, with ramps and lifts and one-way signs. The two Phillipses had agreed to award themselves a McDonalds on the way home.
‘It was long,’ said Martin. ‘It’s always long.’
‘I felt sorry for the man who had to take all his clothes off,’ said Mr Phillips.
‘Edgar,’ said Martin. ‘Small cock, too.’
*
Mr Phillips emerges from the overground tunnel into the main station concourse at Waterloo. One of the nice things about the way it’s all changed in the last couple of decades is the sudden arrival here of dinky shops, where you can buy not just a newspaper, as you always could, but flowers and chocolates and compact discs, and there is also a whole shop devoted to interesting socks, and another to cappuccino, and now you can even go downstairs on an impulse and get on a train to Paris or Brussels, just like that. In three and a bit hours he could be in a café on the left bank of the Seine wearing a beret, making gnoghi gnoghi noises and eating horsemeat and chips. Or he could be in Brussels eating whatever it was Belgians ate. He could learn the language, get a job as an accountant specializing in multilingual transactions, companies that sold lingerie to the British or spark plugs to the French or whatever. The system couldn’t be that different, the whole point about double entry bookkeeping was that it was the same wherever you went. He would do well over there, they would like his style and be charmed by Mrs Phillips – so unpretentious – so natural – and she plays like an angel! He would have an apartment in the middle of Paris, because the French tended to live in flats, and a little house in the country, Normandy perhaps, with a neighbour who kept an eye on things and whom he paid biannually in his famous home-made cider. Or alternatively he could become a tramp, only a French tramp, cadging francs for Gauloises and rough wine. Probably he would gravitate southwards where the weather was better. He could buy a packet of chalk and do drawings on the pavement. He could have a little French dog for company. If he went and got out the maximum on his credit card now, and then drew the maximum from his bank account, and bought a ticket for Paris, and tried to disappear, how far would I get, Mr Phillips wonders? How determined did you have to be if you wanted your life never to catch up with you?
There is something comforting about the huge board of departures above the main platform concourse. Not just Clapham Junction but Wimbledon, Sutton, Godalming, Putney Heath, Southfields, Queenstown Road, Southampton, Portsmouth. All these places which to somebody are a synonym for Home. Waterloo in the morning is an anxious place, full of the late-for-work, whereas at the end of the day, though it is just as full of people who are hurrying just as hard, for Mr Phillips it seems obscurely comfy.
There is a Clapham Junction train from platform four, ultimate destination Portsmouth, at three minutes past six, and another four minutes after that. The platform will close thirty seconds before departure because that way more people miss the train. Mr Phillips none the less decides to take a chance on trying to catch the 6.03 and breaks into a portly, shuffling half-jog. He must have taken more exercise today than in the whole of the previous year. Others of a similar mind are making a similar last-minute dash, and Mr Phillips is overtaken by a woman in a short tan skirt and a man wearing, for some reason, a raincoat of the same colour. They are giggling and holding hands, as they run down the platform and hop on the second carriage. Good luck to them. In Mr Phillips’s experience so many people avoid the nearest carriage on the assumption that it will be the most full, and instead get into the next carriage along, or even the next but one, that it is often those carriages which are the fullest whereas the nearest carriage is in fact, relatively speaking, reasonably empty. As you get older you make up in cunning for what you lose in speed.
Mr Phillips gets into the first carriage and takes the penultimate available seat, choosing the space beside a plump, affluent-looking man in a business suit in preference to the space beside a girl who is chewing gum and looking either out of the window or at her own reflection. She looks like an eighteen year old who looks like a fifteen year old, with off-blonde hair, puppy-fat cheeks and a full, slightly sulky mouth: a dirty old man’s type of girl. Mr Phillips wants to sit beside her but senses that his reasons for doing so would be too transparent; plus, he is worried about being smelly. Plus the seat he opted for has a discarded copy of the Evening Standard on it.
Two paces behind him a thirty to fortyish man who looks like he works in the City comes in behind Mr Phillips and takes the seat beside the girl. He doesn’t seem to notice her. He is carrying a briefcase and a carrier bag, which he opens to produce a bottle of wine wrapped in tissue paper. He gingerly takes the paper off the wine and, holding the bottle up on his knees, begins reading, or at least looking at, the label, in an apparent trance of reverent concentration.
With gratifying punctuality, the train doors squeal an alarm and then wheeze shut. There is a jolt and they begin to move out from underneath the train shed, past the spaghetti tangle of tracks outside the station, where there is a sudden expansion of the view out over South London, mainly low buildings with the occasional ugly office complex or disastrous sixties tower block. On working days this was just about Mr Phillips’s favourite moment in the whole twenty-four hours: the last leg of his trip home. Even as a boy his favourite journey had been the trip home, and his best moment in any excursion the point at which the outward leg of the expedition was over and they turned back to base. That feels less true today. He can’t claim to be particularly looking forward to getting home and the prospect of an evening in front of the telly doing more or less nothing.
Mr Phillips scans the Evening Standard quickly as the train bangs along. For him the etiquette of picking up a paper on a train is that you can read it on the train or other public place but you then have to leave it behind in your turn. Otherwise it is as if you have stol
en it. So he doesn’t have long. Most of the news is the usual. On page seven however there is a story about a pair of mime artists who were taking part in the festival of street theatre that is going on in London for the next three days until they were arrested for outraging public decency. They had dressed up as a tramp and a schoolgirl and pretended to have sex together on an Underground train. Their mistake was to pick a carriage with an off-duty policeman in it. The crime carries a maximum sentence of twelve months.
The train roars through Vauxhall station without stopping and then a few minutes later begins to slow down as it approaches Clapham Junction. Various people begin to make This Is My Stop preparations. The man with the wine bottle starts gently wrapping the tissue paper back around his treasure. The girl beside him stops looking at her reflection and adjusts a plastic folder she is holding to her chest. With sadness Mr Phillips sees that the folder is a brochure from a modelling agency called Model Models. It is as if no pretty girl can just be a pretty girl any more, it has to be a job or an ambition.
Mr Phillips squeezes up and out of his seat and stands gripping the rail beside the compartment door. The metal has the slick coolness of an object that has been touched by many hands since it was last cleaned, and it is hard to suppress thoughts about flu germs, tropical viruses, people who don’t wash their hands after wiping their arses. Mr Phillips is not phobic or hypersensitive about these things but sometimes they cross his mind. The train stops, the doors make their noises and open, and Mr Phillips hops across the gap on to the platform.
Mr Phillips comes out on to the bleak rear entrance of the station, where he faces a few disconsolate and halfhearted tower blocks, many of them ex-council flats now sold into private ownership. There is also a depressed-looking dentist’s and a meeting house for Seventh Day Adventists, both of them made out of concrete and appearing as if they were designed to be used as places of defensive entrenchment in the event of war or major civil unrest.
Weaving in between these low buildings, Mr Phillips wonders if the bank robbery will have already been on the news when he gets home, or whether that sort of thing makes the news at all. On the three or four times he has passed what looked like horrific traffic accidents – once when policemen seemed to be shampooing, or at least hosing down, blood off the Cromwell Road after an accident between, of course, a white van and a motorbike – he always expected to be hearing about it in gory detail when he sat down with the telly, but never yet had, not once. These things must be too commonplace to be reported. Perhaps bank robberies and stick-ups were like that also, going on all the time as part of the normal background life of the city.
At the point where Mr Phillips emerges on to Kestrel Lane for the last five minutes of the walk home, he nearly bumps into an old woman who is carrying three or four plastic bags and is stooped over like a question mark from the effort. She is moving so slowly that she has turned herself into an obstacle. Mr Phillips swerves past her and heads onward, glad to have avoided a collision that would only have ended in his making apologies he didn’t believe. (Sorry, Mr Phillips will say, when someone treads on his foot.)
Mr Phillips doesn’t think much about what it would be like to be old, since he can’t imagine living longer than his father, who died at the age of sixty-one. Not that he thinks he is going to pop his clogs at any moment; but he just can’t picture it other than to entertain very vague mental images of himself at eighty dandling great-grandchildren, or effortfully blowing out a single tiny candle at his crowded ninetieth. He can however imagine that things just get worse and worse, and that the difficulties he has accumulated with his own body, the fatness and sweatiness and occasional out-of-breathness, his stiff morning back and pee-again prostate, his sour and reluctant-to-settle stomach acid, the sense that the face in the mirror was an unwelcome growth attached to his real face (which is thirty years younger); all these things would just get worse, so that he would be hugely fat, wheezing, barely able to walk, stooped, racked by arthritic pains, constantly peeing, chronically dyspeptic, ugly and malodorous, with in addition all the unexpected nastiness that would suddenly crop up, new diseases, a dodgy liver, dizzy spells, impetigo, insomnia, asthma, diverticulitis, any nasty surprise, basically, except Aids (chance would be a fine thing). All that is in store. The little old lady whom Mr Phillips has just overtaken looks as if she lives in a country where all these things are just part of an ordinary day.
Mr Phillips turns around and goes back towards her. In the time he has taken to go a hundred yards she has moved about twenty feet. As he walks up to the bent and wrapped figure he sees that she is alarmed by his approach. Frightened of me! Imagine!
‘Excuse me,’ says Mr Phillips, ‘can I help?’
She stops to listen. The woman’s expression says very clearly that the effort of stopping and starting and thinking the proposition over is not welcome. At the same time there is a shrewdness there, too. She is sizing up the likelihood that he will seize her bags and do a runner. She has, though, a nice face, a tiny bit whiskery but bright-eyed and open.
‘Can I help with your bags?’ Mr Phillips says.
She takes a moment to think this over and then without saying anything puts her bags down on the pavement, all four of them, though not her handbag, which she keeps over the crook of her arm. She has an unexpectedly good bending technique, flexing her knees rather than bending her back.
‘Thank you,’ says the woman, after she has put her bags down.
‘Are we going far?’
‘Over there,’ she says, pointing at the tower blocks that had once belonged to the council and now are a mix of public and private housing. Most of the new tenants are people like Martin, yuppies. This woman is one of the older generation of council tenants, the aboriginal inhabitants of this part of town, gradually being driven out by the influx of money.
‘Fine,’ says Mr Phillips. He picks up the bags, two in each hand, which with his briefcase makes five in all. The bags come from Asda, about ten minutes’ walk away for Mr Phillips and who knew how long for her. They are not light. She must wait for her pension and do all the week’s shopping in one go. Mr Phillips suspects that if he were in a similar position he would be inclined to do his shopping on a daily basis, popping out for a tin of baked beans and a loaf of bread one day, a pair of lamb chops and a baking potato the next – a daily trip or expedition.
‘I was getting a bit short of puff,’ the old woman says in a more confiding and cheery way.
‘It’s a big shop you’ve done,’ says Mr Phillips. She gives a small titter.
‘Monday is my day for them.’
‘My wife does all our shopping.’
‘You’re lucky.’
Am I? thinks Mr Phillips. They arrive at the barred gate to the block of flats. There is a little metal keypad where the old lady types in a four-digit entry code: 2146, Mr Phillips can’t help but notice. If people in the towers do the Lottery quite a few of them will probably use that same code, so if it ever comes up in the winning sequence there could be a mysterious rash of instant millionaires in the flats. The lift shafts would ring to the popping of champagne corks, the forecourts would suddenly become clogged with Bentley convertibles. The latch buzzes and the gate clicks open, the woman helping it swing wider by leaning on it with her shoulder. Mr Phillips squeezes through after her.
‘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.
Mr. Phillips Page 18