Mr Phillips climbs on to the step of the bus behind the supposed Jehovah’s Witness. He has a good view of her big, strangely high bottom. She peremptorily flashes a bus pass at the driver. Simultaneously, as if the sight has put the thought of money in his mind, he realizes that he has no coins. His ticket from Clapham Junction to Waterloo has cleared him out of change. Mr Phillips fishes his wallet out of his jacket pocket, takes out a £10 note and says:
‘I’m sorry about this.’
The driver looks at the note, where it sits in the little metal dish by his compartment.
‘You’re winding me up,’ he says without moving. The bus thrums loudly at its standstill.
‘I don’t mean to. I just don’t have any change,’ says Mr Phillips.
‘You’d like me to believe that, wouldn’t you?’ says the driver.
‘Is my money not good enough for you?’ says Mr Phillips, consciously choosing to go over to the attack.
‘What was that jingling sound when you got on?’ demands the driver. ‘You’ll tell me it’s your keys. That’s what you lot always say.’
‘I don’t have a “lot”. I have ten pounds,’ says Mr Phillips.
The driver looks at him without speaking for a few seconds. Then, apparently without any exertion on his part, a cascade of coins falls into a second metal dish below the first one. The driver reaches out and takes the note between thumb and first finger with an air of aggrieved delicacy. There is a chattering sound and a printed ticket extends itself from a slot.
‘Eight pounds sixty change,’ says the driver.
Mr Phillips takes his change and puts it into his baggy pocket — which, like everyone else’s, has suffered a battering since the abolition of the pound note in favour of the chunky squid. Even if you like the pound coin, as he does, you have to admit it’s hard on the old trousers. His favourite among the coin’s designs is also the most common, the one with DECUS ET TUTAMEN EST cut into the rim of the coin. An ornament and a safeguard. The words are supposed to refer both to the monarchy and to the lettering itself, because it made the coins harder to forge. Mr Monroe is particularly keen on this coin. ‘Amazing language, Latin,’ he says. ‘Just four words and it means The Holocaust Could Never Happen Here Because We’ve Got the Queen and Piss Off You Forgers all at the same time. I have to say that I find the Scottish motto to be in relative terms a disappointment. The design a thistle, the motto Nemo me impune lacessit, No One Wounds Me With Impunity. It’s a prison sentiment by comparison.’
Without meeting any eyes inside the hot ground floor of the bus, Mr Phillips heads for the upper deck. As a child he loved the staircase on double decker buses. He and his parents and his sister had once stayed in a holiday cottage where the wooden spiral staircase was carved out of a ship’s mast. The way the stairs twisted half-way around, like an attempt at a spiral, made him think of ships and secret passageways, shivering guards standing watches in high battlements, dragons, romance …
After climbing the ten feet and making two right turns Mr Phillips heads for the front of the bus, sees that there are no seats there, and then turns towards the back. It is a point of commuting and urban etiquette to take an empty double seat wherever possible rather than squeezing in beside someone already seated. Most of the passengers look as if they are on the way to work. He squeezes in beside a smartly dressed, cross-looking woman who has the air of an important person’s trusted secretary.
Mr Phillips leaves his book in his briefcase. Reading it as the bus bumps and jogs would make him nauseated. Thomas has inherited this gene for motion sickness, and needs to be soothed and distracted and given breaks on journeys of any real length, whereas Martin would sit in the back happily rereading comics, and occasionally taunting his younger brother by offering to lend them to him. It is one of those issues where the difference between the two siblings seems planned and structured, as if the gene for confidence in Martin triggered the gene for shyness in Thomas, and so on with loud/quiet, liking girls’ company/preferring boys’, getting on better with father/mother, favourite colour purple/black, wanting a dog/wanting a cat. It was as if they took readings off each other and used them to calibrate their own whereabouts.
The bus moves half-way across Chelsea Bridge and comes to a halt. A vista opens up towards Canary Wharf in the east and past Battersea Bridge towards Hammersmith in the other direction. There isn’t much traffic on the river today. There never is. Mr Phillips has lived in London his entire life and has never been afloat on the River Thames, not once. It is one of a collection of things he hasn’t done. He hasn’t been in a helicopter, met anyone famous, been to Wembley Stadium or the Royal Albert Hall or the House of Commons. He has never given anyone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or made a citizen’s arrest. He had never seen a dead body until his father’s death in 1981. At the lying-in he was stiff and unforgettably cold to the touch.
There would be a good number of people in this town who had never ever seen a dead body — conservatively, 80 per cent. So the set of people who had never been on the Thames and had never seen a dead body would be high too. And according to the sex survey he had bought and read secretly and obsessively a couple of years before, only 30 per cent of Britons had ever experienced anal intercourse — a figure which seemed surprisingly low, for though to Mr Phillips himself the subject was neither here nor there and his own single experience, with Sharon Mitchell, had ended with her in tears and him comforting her before sneaking off to masturbate in the toilet, he knew that this was a very general number one double-top male fantasy. Indeed, the most common heterosexual male fantasy, if you ignored for the moment the one about watching women doing it with each other, was about women who were a. as keen on sex as men, if not more so, b. as quickly ready for it, c. as easily satisfied, and d. loved anal intercourse. Putting together the figures for this bus, and assuming figures of 70 per cent for no anal intercourse, 75 per cent for not having been on the Thames, 80 per cent for not having seen a dead body, and saying that there were 80 people on the bus, you multiply 70 per cent by 75 per cent by 80 per cent to get 42 per cent, which means that a total of 33.6 people on the bus have never been on London’s river, seen a corpse nor experienced anal intercourse. Thanks to Sharon, Mr Phillips is in the relatively suave and experienced subset who have only not been on the Thames. He has lived.
About half the people on the bus are reading books and newspapers; the others are lost in rapt trances of pure being. They are presumably abandoned in their on-the-way-to-work thoughts, their what-I’ll-say-to-him-if-he-says thoughts, their dreams of how-dare-he and how-I’ll try-to-catch-her-at-the-photocopying machine, their reveries of when-I-get-home-I’ll tell-him-that. As well as the usual fantasies about sex, power, recognition, revenge. A man across the bus’s narrow, sticky aisle is staring into nothing while silently talking to himself. There is, if not a smile, at least a slight upward inflection at the creases of his lips. It looks as if he is rehearsing a long speech in triumphant self-justification.
Immediately beside Mr Phillips the cross-looking woman is reading a Sunday newspaper’s astrology column with particularly close attention, apparently not concentrating on any one star sign but scrutinizing all of them with equal rigour. She doesn’t look like a natural tabloid reader. Mr Phillips wonders if she is a sceptic checking for contradictions and internal inconsistencies, or has lots of children and close relatives and wants to monitor the auspices for all of them. Or she could be an orphan whose birth certificate had been lost and is trying to work out what month she was born in by the unscientific method of checking all horoscopes and correlating them against what happened to her, or perhaps she is simply very very interested in astrology. She notices Mr Phillips looking at her and lifts her paper slightly away from him to make his scrutiny of what she is reading more difficult. On the opposite page of her paper he catches a glimpse of a story about Clarissa Colingford, something about a secret engagement. She is known to have boyfriend trouble, multiple boyfriends, boyfriends who are caught with other women, that sort of thing. But there is no way he can find out more without actually taking the paper out of his neighbour’s hands.