3.4
It is half past three. In the office this was Mr Phillips’s least favourite part of the day, the time when, although the bulk of the work day had been successfully got through, often with surprising speed — oh look, it’s twenty to twelve! oh look, it’s five to two! — now that the end was in sight the clock mysteriously slowed down, so that the time between three thirty and five o’clock took what felt like six or seven hours, until 5.01, when the twenty-nine minutes until official going-home time at five thirty rocketed past.
It always takes Mr Phillips a few moments to adjust when he comes out of a cinema into the daylight. The feeling is voluptuous, sinful. He stands blinking and momentarily at a loss as to what he should do until it is time to go home. The thought of going back and waiting for Mrs Phillips to return from her lessons, which she would do at around five, appears in the distant wings of Mr Phillips’s mind. She would come in, he would tell her what had happened. He catches a glimpse of the idea in the mental equivalent of peripheral vision and the notion scuttles back out of sight.
While still in the grip of his post-cinema daze, Mr Phillips comes to the end of the street and steps into the roadway without, it has to be admitted, looking left or right. A big white van swerves and comes to a stop about a foot away from him, so that he is looking straight into the face of its driver, which is first pale and then red. If the driver had reacted say.01 of a second more slowly Mr Phillips would have been run over. As part of Mr Phillips’s mind is registering this fact, another part is noting that this vehicle was bound to have been a white van. In London, it always is. It must be either because (a), the vans tended to belong to self-employed small businessmen, who as a type were noted for being aggressive, impatient, right wing, unashamed about tactics of late payment and intimidation; (b), the vans tended to be driven by men working for large companies in some delivery and/or menial capacity, and so because the drivers had no stake in the vans they drove them aggressively, intimidatingly, recklessly, heedless of the full insured capital value; (c), there was something about white vans that made the people who drove them become irrationally aggressive — i.e., white vans made drivers go insane; (d), there was something about white vans that made aggressive men want to drive them — i.e., only people who were already insane drove white vans.
This particular white van driver winds down his window. Mr Phillips, unsure whether to go backwards or forwards across the road, sees that the man is showing no signs of climbing down out of the van and thumping him. So he continues across the street. As he does so the van driver leans out of his window. Here we go, thinks Mr Phillips.
‘Tired of living, cunt?’ asks the man in a neutral voice. He doesn’t wait for a reply.
*
Across the road, under the lee of a theatre’s stage door, a man is juggling three — no, four — fire torches. A small crowd has accumulated. They don’t seem to be spectators so much as people who for the moment aren’t doing anything else. The juggler’s face is a distinctive dark brown colour, as if he has spent weeks and weeks out in the sun, and Mr Phillips has the feeling that he has seen him somewhere before. Of course: practising this very morning in Battersea Park. The man now picks up a fifth fire torch from the brazier in front of him. This, juggling with five torches, Mr Phillips knows is astoundingly difficult. The man, older than he looks at first glance — late thirties, perhaps — has a rapt, vacant look for the next thirty seconds or so, as the whirling torches pirouette in mid-air. Then he catches them, more clumsily than he juggled them, puts three of them back in the rack, and slowly, in a much more languorous and lingering way than the businesslike arts of fellation that Mr Phillips has just been watching, puts the other two, one after another, into his throat. When he takes them out they are extinguished. Mr Phillips notices that his erection has gone away. A member of the audience steps forward and drops a coin into the upside-down hat at the juggling fire-eater’s feet.
It comes to Mr Phillips that he could set up in business on his own. The words arrive as a sentence, fully formed: ‘I could set up on my own.’ At the same time, it is unclear what precisely that means. He can hardly rent a shop and say ‘Redundant fiftysomething accountant setting out on his own. Watch out, world.’ He would need something specific to offer in the line of goods and services.
One thing would be to help people with their Income Tax returns and Value Added Tax obligations, or even give tentative savings and investment advice, though before he did that he would have somewhere to acquire a new manner and body language, since you would have to be very credulous to take advice about money from someone so obviously not thriving in his own personal finances. He would have to get a new wardrobe, new suits at the very least, a more modern haircut, office furniture that was either challengingly and interestingly contemporary or reassuringly old, a computer, even a new way of talking — avuncular, doctorly. The Revenue aren’t as bad as people say, honestly, Mrs Wilson. Customs and Excise love a good joke, Mr Hart. Don’t worry, Mr Stavros — bankruptcy means never having to say you’re sorry.
He would be able to help small traders with their VAT, even though he thinks the name is very unfair, since it isn’t a tax that adds value at all, but simply an extra sum the customers have to pay — a better name would be TAT, Tax Added Tax. If Mr Phillips sets up on his own he will have to charge and collect VAT and will therefore become what in the Bible is called a publican. St Matthew talks about someone being ‘an heathen man and a publican’, which at school Mr Phillips had thought was a bit harsh — what was so bad about running a pub? Then he found out. What’s more, St Matthew had been one himself, a Jew raising money for the hated Roman Empire. Whereas Mr Phillips and his clients would merely be raising money for Government and for the EU so that people in Calabria could have tarmacked roads and French farmers could afford to keep their fields uneconomically small and make special cheese.
Of course there is always revenge. Revenge! He could sniff around for a gap in the catering services market, identify one — an under-performing staff canteen franchise, or a catastrophic outbreak of food poisoning from football match burgers — go to the bank or much more glamorously to a venture capital company, raise the money, make the pitch, win the contract, bid for other contracts, win them, exceed all expectations and industry standards, float the company on the stock market, make a packet, expand aggressively, seek out and destroy the competition while taking levels of service, customer satisfaction and percentage return on capital to unprecedented heights, finally close in on Wilkins and Co., strip them of their key customers, hire their talented employees, undercut their prices, in short drive them to the wall, then step in just before the receivers with a derisorily small but unrefusable cash offer. Mr Wilkins himself quivering on Phillips Limited’s boardroom carpet, fourteen stone of jelly merely pretending to be a man. All the old management fired, or better still kept on at half their old pay, and made to attend regular seminars at which their faults are pointed out and enthusiastically discussed by younger but more senior colleagues; Mr Mill exposed as a drunkard and numerical dyslexic, his employment as head of department over Mr Phillips appearing in textbooks as a definitive example of the psychology of corporate incompetence.