It was nearly four. Mr Phillips had to use up another two and a half hours before he could plausibly arrive home. It occurred to him for a brief, mad moment that he could even walk the distance … but that would be daft, he was tired enough as it was. A couple of hours more walking would finish him off.
He crossed the road and began walking towards Piccadilly, in the wake of the demon cyclist. About fifty yards along a temporary bus stop had been erected, compensating for the fact that the permanent bus stop was submerged under a pile of scaffolding where something was being built or demolished or painted or cleaned. As he walked up to the stop, a Routemaster bus, spewing thick black diesel fumes, pulled up beside him and twenty or thirty people began to get off, the younger and nimbler of them not waiting for the bus to stop but hopping off and hitting the ground running. The first of them, a young black man, jumped off with a dancer’s wide leap, buckled for a moment with the effort of adjusting his momentum as he hit the ground, and then jogged off towards Chinatown.
When he had had things to do Mr Phillips had not noticed how busy, how urgent, everybody in the city seemed.
Mr Phillips got on the bus. He went upstairs to the top deck and sat down at the front.
This bus went through all the glamorous parts of London. First it went down past the Trocadero, down Haymarket, then back up Regent Street to Piccadilly, then along past the Royal Academy, past the Ritz, past Green Park, round Hyde Park Corner, and along Knightsbridge. By and large these were all parts of London that Mr Phillips never visited. They belonged to other kinds of people. The feeling of wealth and prosperity was thickly present in all these places, and it made Mr Phillips wonder what the city would look like if, instead of bricks and mortar, concrete and cement, buildings were made out of piles of stacked cash, wadded and glued together into bricks. A house out in Leytonstone would be say eight foot high, a sort of wattle hut made out of fivers, whereas one in Knightsbridge would be a skyscraper of £20 notes. And the people, too: if they were nothing more than their total capital value they would vary from tiny bunches, hardly visible, of rolled up notes, to towers thousands of feet tall, stretching up into the clouds, causing trouble for air traffic control and weather balloons, vulnerable to lightning. Mr Phillips himself would be a respectable man-sized pile of cash, if you counted the unmortgaged part of 27 Wellesley Crescent, though he would soon start shrinking fast. If you excluded the house, the assets held jointly with Mrs Phillips and the ones in her name, and deducted debts such as the unpaid part of the mortgage, he would be much less healthy — barely a briefcaseful.
Mr Phillips often thinks about people’s time and what it costs. The ideal is the taxi meter, ticking away to show how much the customer is spending, every penny accounted for and all above board. The red numerals travelling in one direction only. Everyone should have a little meter on them, in Mr Phillips’s view — lawyers in court, politicians on the television; a special lightweight one for footballers and athletes; bus drivers, housewives, Mrs Phillips during her piano lessons and Mr Phillips himself at the office. Only the off duty and the unemployed would be exempt; perhaps they would wear meters that had been switched off, or meters stuck on their last reading. Or should they show average earnings across time, so that even people on unemployment would tick slowly along? The whole point would be the way people chug along at different rates: Mr Mill, who cost £45,000 a year, would clock along at 45,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £25.71 per hour, whereas the beloved and much fancied Karen would tick along at £18,000 divided by 250 (working days per year) divided by 7 (working hours per working day) = £ 10.29 per hour, with everyone else in the office, from Eric the charismatic head of the post room to Mr Wilkins himself, who was sighted by someone in accounts about twice a year, ticking away at their own personal rates, the whole process giving an added point or edge to all interpersonal transactions in the office, something to notice and think about, though it would no doubt become quickly invisible as everyone got used to it, as everyone always does. (That of course would happen even if little green men landed and were on the nine o’clock news — after a few weeks’ initial excitement humanity would go back to business as usual.)
The system could get elaborate. For instance, actors could have to wear two meters, one showing their rate and the other the rate of the characters they were playing, indicated perhaps by green numerals as opposed to red ones. You would see an actor playing one part, the paterfamilias in an historical drama, with trademark mutton chop whiskers, and then not see him for months or even a year or two until he turned up again as the butler in an advertisement for vintage port, and you’d realize from looking at his meter, still stuck at the figure it had been on at the end of the drama series, that he’d been ‘resting’ in the interim. Sometimes a famous and highly paid actor would be playing a penniless waif, and the difference between the two meters would become horribly distracting. Musicians would tick away as they played on Top of the Pops, newsreaders and politicians while they talked, beggars as they sat on the street, bus drivers, nurses, waiters, yellow-hat construction workers, everyone. The meters would have different settings to reflect earnings this day, earnings this task, and lifetime earnings. The Prime Minister was paid £57,018, in addition of course to his salary as an MP, but how much he ticked away at per hour would depend on whether you thought he was on duty all the time, whether his holidays were proper holidays etc. The President of the USA was paid about £125,000 and the same thing applied.
Mr Phillips’s bus emerged from Hyde Park Corner and began heading down Knightsbridge. The traffic bottlenecked momentarily to squeeze past a BMW that had been stopped by a police motorcyclist. The policeman was talking to the driver, a tall black man wearing sunglasses.
And now, as the bus went past Harrods, Mr Phillips, who had been looking at people in the street in an idle, incurious way, felt a jolt of surprised excitement. He had spotted her! It was Clarissa Colingford, sure as eggs were eggs, the TV person he had been thinking and indeed masturbating about on and off for some months. She was crossing the street, coming out of a clothes shop with a parcel labelled Chez Guevara under her arm, at some speed, tripping along at a near-run, looking pretty, busy, preoccupied. She was shorter than she seemed on TV and less lifelike — less like herself than like the generic idea of a thin, youngish, blonde woman in expensive clothes. In fact if Mr Phillips had seen her in real life first he might well have been inoculated against her. But he hadn’t and he wasn’t and, deeply curious to get a second look, he got off the bus at the next stop, doubled back, picked up her trail further along Knightsbridge, becoming a stalker or private detective for all of about three minutes, until she had suddenly swerved to one side and gone into the bank, a branch of the very same bank that Mr Phillips himself patronized.
A real man shoots his own dog. Mr Phillips decided to be a man: he would go in, draw some cash and request a full statement sent to his home address. If he happened to bump into Clarissa Colingford, their hands brushing together as they simultaneously reached for a deposit slip, no please after you, no I insist, took me a moment to find them it’s not my usual branch, yes South London, oh do you how interesting, yes a cup of coffee would be delightful … well, that would just be one of those freak coincidences. Which is how Mr Phillips came to be lying face down on the floor of this bank, ten feet away from Clarissa Colingford, at the business end of a sawn-off shotgun. It was just one of those things.