At this range he can see that it’s some outfit she has on. Her thin pale-brown shirt looks as if it were made out of chamois leather, and her thin-looking cream trousers unfortunately seem likely to pick up all kinds of dirts and smears from the Barclays carpet. From this distance she is more like she is on TV than at medium range. She has the same sense of invisible shine and of being almost too good to be true, though she is skinnier than she seems on television, by about ten pounds, which makes her seem more nervous, less voluptuous, but immediately wantable. She looks, not sweaty, but as if you might, if you got up very close to her, see a faint clamminess at the base of her neck, in the crook of her elbow, her perfume enhanced by her body heat. Mr Phillips feels that he is very much in love.
This carpet however has Mr Phillips worried. Once you are pressed out cruciform on any floor surface — prostrated, they would say in church, in the position priests used to adopt when being ordained — you begin to think about what else has been on that floor before you. In the case of a much trodden-on urban bank carpet there is the question of dog shit on people’s shoes. Also pigeon shit, urine, rubbish, spilt things; but mainly dog shit. It would be picked up, brought here, and then trodden into the carpet which was now an inch from Mr Phillips’s nose, a pale blue flooring made out of some industrial substance with a tight knobbly weave, the better to capture millions of tiny molecules of transported dog excrement, the sort that made children blind if they ate it. Why would they eat it, you might well ask, to which the answer was, accidents do happen.
Mr Phillips once went through a phase of being worried about dog shit in London’s parks, on behalf of the children. For instance that Martin would kick the football through some dog shit, pick the ball up without noticing, rub his eyes or polish an apple with the contaminated hand, and become sick. It was something to do with worms. Then the worries had gone away, apparently of their own accord. Now they have come back again. It is as if he can see tiny particles of dog shit everywhere he looks.
Clarissa Colingford had come into the bank and gone straight over to the cashpoint machine. Or not quite straight over; she had stood around looking vague for a moment or two and then gone to stand behind a hugely fat man who was having tremendous difficulty inserting his card into the automatic teller. Mr Phillips knew this fine art well and knew that it was all a matter of timing, but this man’s stiff, jabbing action — and who knew whether the card was even the right way round! — and the quiet mechanical crunch of the card being rejected made something obscene out of his failure to insert it. Finally Clarissa Colingford stepped in, coming up beside the man and with the sweetest expression saying, ‘May I?’
The big man handed her the card and she slipped it into the purring machine at the first attempt.
‘Well, thanks,’ he said. She just smiled, as if saying anything might compromise his maleness, and stood back as he hunched scowling over the console. Mr Phillips felt intensely jealous. He lurched to one side before he was caught eavesdropping and moved to the counter where you filled in slips, did sums, and took leaflets. It was there that he was standing when the robbers burst into the bank.
Of course she could have used the cashpoint outside if it was only cash she wanted. Mr Phillips suspects that he knows the reason why she didn’t. This Knightsbridge cashpoint can be relied on to have at least one beggar sitting or standing beside it, plaintively (usually) or aggressively (occasionally) asking for money, usually by saying, ‘Spare change please?’ Today there was a woman, probably in her thirties but looking ten years older, sitting half rolled-up in too many clothes for the weather — heavy trousers, two or three shirts, a coat, a bobble hat, with a couple of plastic bags strewn around her. She looked pitiful, but in Mr Phillips’s experience that doesn’t always make you want to give someone money. This beside-the-cashpoint spot must be prime territory; Mr Phillips wondered if beggars took turns occupying it. To Mr Phillips’s mind there was something hard to ignore about the juxtaposition of someone asking for money, needing it desperately even, and the money that the machine was vomiting or belching out to people who asked for it. It was as if there was a right way and a wrong way of asking for money: sit on the pavement and ask your fellow humans and you’ll be refused, stand up and ask a machine and you can have as much as you want.
Mr Phillips sometimes feels a wave of anger or revulsion as he walks past a beggar. When he gives one money, usually 50p since they aren’t useful for parking meters, the emotion he feels is not primarily towards the beggar but towards himself, a warm glow of philanthropic self-congratulation. Similarly, the other feelings are directed at himself too, at his ungenerosity and ability to harden his own heart. It is this that makes people hate beggars, for what they make you do to them — since no one can give money to every beggar he sees, the existence of beggars turns everybody into the kind of person who walks past beggars. Hard to forgive them that.
The men who are robbing the bank are not asking for money so much as simply taking it, and taking their time about doing it too, in Mr Phillips’s view. Though admittedly his ability to judge how much time has passed is probably not at its best. It feels like twenty minutes but is probably more like two. This would be something to talk about when he got home — though if he does he will have to say where he’s been, and what he was doing in Knightsbridge at four in the afternoon, which is something he doesn’t particularly feel like doing. This is another subject he prefers to not-think about.
‘Check that one,’ shouts one of the men behind the counter. Mr Phillips doesn’t want to look and see what is going on but can guess that it probably involves stashing bags full of cash. The curious thing is that because the robbers shout all the time — which Mr Phillips knows from watching Crimewatch UK is a trick to make it hard for people to identify their voices or accents — they sound a little like the head of department Mr Phillips had had at Grimshaw’s, a man called or rather nicknamed Knobber. He had shouted all the time too and had been able to call on a bottomless source of seemingly unfeigned anger. He once described his department’s performance in preparing at twenty-four hours’ notice for an audit as the worst day in the history of the accountancy profession.
Why are there no aspirin in the jungle? Paracetamol. (Parrots eat ’em all.) Have you ever seen a bunny with its nose all runny, don’t say it’s funny ’cos it’s snot. What do you get if you cross a nun with an apple? A computer that won’t go down on you. Have you heard about the evil dyslexic? He sold his soul to Santa. Have you heard about the agnostic insomniac dyslexic? He lay awake all night wondering if there was a Dog. Why did the chicken kill itself? To get to the other side.
This is the closest Mr Phillips has ever been to actual violence in his whole adult life, excluding the occasional scuffle in the street, not that he’s taken part in one — God forbid — but because he occasionally sees them out of a car or a train window. Mr Phillips must have witnessed many thousands of violent incidents, shootings and explosions and stabbings and abductions and rapes and fist fights and drive-by machine-gunnings, and assassination style head shots and Saturday Night Special shootings, and cars blown up by shoulder fired rocket launchers, and rooms systematically cleared by grenades followed by machine-gun fire, and petrol stations blown up by deliberately dropped cigarette lighters, but all of these were on television (or occasionally at the movies). The last proper stand-up fist fight he saw was nineteen years ago, when he spent six months commuting to the plant in Banbury, a few years after he started at Wilkins and Co. A foreman from Newcastle had accused a fitter from London, a Cockney wide boy whom nobody much liked — the plant was the first place Mr Phillips had realized how much ‘Cockneys’, as all Londoners were called, were disliked — of being a thief. Twenty pounds, then quite a lot of money, had gone missing from the Geordie’s locker. The Geordie had won by making the Cockney’s nose bleed so much that the fight had to stop so that he could go and get it looked at in Casualty. There was no more thieving, though no one ever found out who had stolen the money. As would happen in a film, the two men later became inseparably fast friends.