‘The chicken is on a timer. Don’t touch any of the settings. Love Mum.’
‘I didn’t bring you a cup of tea this morning because you looked like you needed a lie-in. We’re out of bin liners.’
‘Martin: the stereo in the living room was still on when I got in last night and it was hot to the touch. HOW MANY TIMES MUST I REMIND YOU TO TURN IT OFF BEFORE GOING TO BED.’
‘Dad — five-a-side tournament moved till Sunday fortnight because of the flu epidemic can you still give me a lift Thomas.’
This might be a way of letting Mrs Phillips know what had happened.
‘Darling: I’ll probably be out late tonight wandering aimlessly around because I got the sack last week don’t wait up love Victor.’
The enormous advantage of this method would be that he wouldn’t have to be present to see her reaction, or — more probably and more painfully — her careful lack of reaction and attempt to act as if everything was OK. Knowing someone so well that you could anticipate their response to most things should make their responses easier to bear but in practice often does the opposite.
2.3
The traffic is crawling along the Embankment. Mr Phillips wants it to move more quickly, because that way there would be a greater variety of distractions. On the far side of the road, the footpath beside the river is busy with the last stray joggers of the morning, some of whom, fit scrawny men with little rucksacks, are clearly running to work. A group of twelve Gurkhas wearing olive-green T-shirts and shorts jogs past in tight formation, apparently heading for Chelsea Barracks.
About four hundred yards from Chelsea Bridge the bus stops again. There is the usual pause while people rummage for change to pay their fare and then the bus sets off. As it does so a very dishevelled man, evidently a tramp, comes to the top of the stairs. He wears a mouldy suit whose trousers are too big and whose jacket is too small, so that it seems he could burst all its seams by flexing his upper body. The trousers are kept up with knotted string. His shirt once was pink or orange. He wears shoes with the soles flapping loose and no laces, has obviously not washed or shaved for quite some time, and his face is a strange mottled purple colour. Asmell of meths or turpentine seems to rise off him. He carries three very full plastic bags. He could be any age from thirty to seventy.
Mr Phillips can feel everybody on the upper deck of the bus willing the man not to sit next to them. As if conscious of his moment in the invisible spotlight, the tramp stands at the top of the stairs and slowly scans the upper deck of the bus. Mr Phillips concentrates on avoiding eye contact while looking bored and unprovokable. The new arrival takes two steps towards the back of the bus and then with odd gracefulness swings around and heads for the front, tacking from side to side of the narrow corridor as he goes. With terrible inevitability he sways to the very front of the bus and sits down, with a loud combined sigh and cough, next to the girl in school uniform.
It isn’t often, Mr Phillips thinks, that you see tramps on buses. Presumably it’s the expense. On the Tube you see them all the time, especially on the Circle Line, where they got a whole day riding around and around for the price of one ticket, being spun around the capital like the flags on a prayer wheel. Mad people you saw all the time too on the Underground. In fact, after a certain time of night the Tube seemed to be populated entirely by the mad, the drunk, and the frightened.
Mr Phillips wonders what it would be like to become a tramp. If he didn’t go home this evening, for instance, but simply rode the Underground until it closed, watching the ebb and flow of human types through the long day — the people travelling to work in the morning, the afternoon-shifters, the tourists with backpacks and maps and guidebooks and questions, the errand-doers, the unclassifiables on trips of all stripes, the students, hookers, nurses, actors, all those who work funny hours, then at the end of the afternoon people returning from work, hanging from straps and clinging to poles in their tight hordes, heading out from the middle of town like an orderly crowd fleeing a disaster, Mr Phillips comfortably ensconced in the corner seat he has bagged during the mid-morning pre-lunch lull, in between dozes and daydreams and periods when his attention goes offline like the Wilkins and Co. IBM mainframe. Then the reverse exodus for the evening’s diversions, plays and movies and pubs and clubs, and then the late-night hour of the knackered and the smashed, which leads into the slow extinction of the network, the dwindling frequencies of the trains until shutdown at one or so, when he would go to one of the big railway terminals — probably not Euston or King’s Cross (too many Scotsmen, drug dealers, tarts, pimps, all that). Victoria, say, where he would try and find a spot to sleep or at least sit for the night. Later on in his career he would be more knowledgeable about soup kitchens, night shelters. He would learn the ropes.
The next day, after his first night on the skids, he would be more bedraggled, poorer — obviously there would be no getting money out of the bank without letting on where he was. And then in the days to come he would be integrated more and more completely into this new life. Becoming dog-tired on a brief excursion outside the Underground he would sit down beside a wall at the side of a pedestrian underpass, taking the weight off, and as he sat a passer-by would drop a coin in his lap, and he has become a beggar, a mendicant. Over the next days and weeks he develops his tramp routines, his pitches and places to sit; he becomes invisible, so that even if someone who knows him were to walk past — Mr Wilkins or Mr Davis-Gribben his neighbour or even Mrs Phillips — he would not be recognized. The point would be to hide in plain sight, simply to melt into the city like a raindrop in a puddle. It would be a version of what men in India did, making their pile and providing for their families before going off to be a sanyassin, a holy man, free of earthly connections; free of family. To live without love, that would be the idea.
The tramp at the front of the bus seems to be attempting to start a conversation with the schoolgirl. At least he is making noises in her direction while she looks out of the window trying to ignore him, the poor thing. It’s such a feature of city life, being bearded by madmen and weirdoes. When Thomas played in the all-conquering St Winifred’s Under-11 football team their matches attracted a regular spectator who wore a green duffle coat and a matching felt hat decorated with three prominent feathers. These were different each week, and looked as if they had been freshly plucked. The man was always either beaming as if he had just won the Pools or scowling like a mad vicar about to launch into a sermon denouncing everything he saw. No one knew who he was. When Eric Harris, father of Wayne, the team’s little right-footed left back, approached him he would only say, ‘There’s not much I can admit to. I’m scouting for one of the big clubs, the very big clubs.’
‘Nutter’ was Eric’s summing up.
‘But is he dangerous?’ asked Mr Slocombe, whose son Grant wore glasses and was the team’s controversial goalkeeper — a good shot-stopper but weak on crosses.
Mr Harris thought about that while the two teams ran around the field being shouted at by their fathers.
‘Nah.’
This verdict proved true. The man had come to every match for a whole season and was then never seen again. By the end of that time Mr Phillips came to feel that, compared to many of the fathers, screaming orders at their boys to make ever greater and more violent effort, the poor madman’s presence was oddly soothing.