Rounding the corner from Middleton Way, Mr Phillips is nearly run over by a boy on roller-skates, dressed from head to toe in shiny cycling clothes — Lycra shorts, orange top, blue helmet. ‘Sorry,’ the boy calls out over his shoulder as he vooms past. Mr Phillips doesn’t recognize him.
And then Mr Phillips turns into Wellesley Crescent. Most people have already got home and there is hardly anywhere left to park. Happily there is no sign of Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr and Mrs Wu from the Neighbourhood Watch meeting are standing on their doorstep, chatting to a man in overalls whom Mr Phillips hasn’t seen before. On the other side of the street, though, outside Mr Phillips’s house, is a much more surprising sight. Thomas is standing with his shirt off beside a bucket of soapy water, carrying a sponge which he dumps on top of Mr Phillips’s car windscreen, squeezes, and then wipes across the glass. Thomas, in short, is washing the car. This is such an unexpected vision that Mr Phillips stops short. But he doesn’t want Thomas to see him standing there just watching, so he gets moving again and comes up behind his son, who turns just as he arrives at the now gleaming Honda.
‘Thomas!’ says Mr Phillips. ‘You’re washing the car.’
Thomas laughs and resumes his dunk-squeeze-wipe gesture over the windshield, whose wipers are folded back and pointed into the air like insect antennae.
‘Felt like it,’ says Thomas. ‘You’re late. Mum was starting to get worried,’ he added.
‘Forgot something,’ says Mr Phillips. He thinks about asking if Tom will be in this evening but decides against it on the grounds that his son might think he is pushing his luck. And the car really does look very clean.
‘I’ll, er, I’ll see you later,’ says Mr Phillips. ‘That’s really nice of you about the car.’
‘That’s OK.’
Mr Phillips pushes the front door but it is off the latch. He replaces a dustbin lid which has been blown or knocked off and fumbles for his keys, which he finds in his left-hand jacket pocket, and opens the door. He has no idea what will happen next.
About the Author
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still appear. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written three novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. He is married, has two children and lives in London.