A train, one of the small, boxy, graceless, modern commuter types, appears around the bend four hundred yards away and slows into the station. The platformful of passengers assembles around the doors, which wheeze open in a row, and a few dozen people hop out of their carriages, minding the gap, before a couple of hundred others surge onto the train. Like most experienced commuters, Mr Phillips has a variety of techniques for seizing somewhere to sit, sneaking in around the side of the door and sliding into one of the jump-seats or barrelling down to the far end of the compartment, through the thickets of passengers, briefcases, newspapers, outstretched legs. Today though he is content to strap-hang, or not worked-up enough to fight for a seat. The battle for a space prepared you for, was an allegory or image of, the daily struggle. You could argue that those who fought their way to the seats were the people who needed them least. To them that hath shall be given, that was the deal.
Clinging to his metal post by the door Mr Phillips looks around the compartment and wonders if he is the only person here who isn’t on his way to work. Eighty percent of the men in the compartment are wearing suits and ties. They all look tired. Office people heading in to work look tired at the beginning of the day and febrilely energetic, in a hurry to escape, on the way home. It’s as if the thought of work drains them of vigour whereas leaving work gives them a jolt of it. Mr Phillips is no stranger to that feeling himself: his heart is always lighter on the trip down the steps from Clapham Junction at the end of the day than on the trip up them at the beginning.
A young man sits across from him in jeans and a black T-shirt with the words Rage Against the Machine written on it. He chews gum mechanically, like a cow chewing the cud, and he is stubbly, looking into space; perhaps he isn’t going in to work. But no, the gum chewer reaches into a back pocket and takes out a tiny mobile phone. Like every mobile phone conversation Mr Phillips has ever heard, this call is largely about the fact of its own occurrence. He wants to eavesdrop on people saying ‘Sell, sell, sell! Unload it all now!’ or ‘What do you mean, am I fucking Janet?’ or ‘It’s you who’s the spoilt one!’ but all he ever hears is ‘I’m at the bus stop / in the street / on the mobile / on my way / late / early / nearly there’ or as in this case:
‘Yeah — me. Yeah, I’m on the train. Yeah, be there in plenty of time, we’ve just left the Junction. Yeah, bye.’ The youth puts the mobile back into his pocket and wriggles his buttocks on the plastic train seat in a pleased way. Mr Phillips feels a moment of loathing hit him like indigestion.
No sooner has the train accelerated for forty seconds or so than it begins to slow down. The terrain outside has the low, scruffy, nowhere-in-particular feel of generic South London: a furniture warehouse, the backs of houses, a Baptist church. On the other side of the train tracks a billboard directed at returning commuters says ‘If you lived here you’d be at home by now.’ A few passengers put newspapers away, arrange their bits and pieces and prepare to push towards the doors or brace themselves in preparation for standing up.
The train squeals to a halt, people get off, and further knackered-looking people in work uniform get on. Mr Phillips is a non-combatant, he again doesn’t enter the contest for seats. The train is properly crowded now. A thin, pointy-faced woman in spinster’s clothes, close to Mr Phillips’s age, has insinuated herself between him and the wall of smeared transparent plastic that separates the standing-room-only door area from the seats and the rest of the compartment.
Mr Phillips takes the view that many human capacities — courage, strength, will-power, luck, sex-appeal — are finite, that you draw against an unreplenishable fund of them like capital left in a bank, so that when they’ve gone they’re gone for ever. Today is one of those days when he feels that his capacity for self-assertion is finite, so that if he uses some up now he may not have any available later.
We condition ourselves very hard to screen out the details of our enforced city intimacies. Oh, but it’s hard sometimes. Today Mr Phillips can smell the heated deodorant of the pole-gripping man standing next to him, the armpit-warmed chemical odour of what at the boys’ school was called ‘Poof Spray’. He can see the grain on the skin of a girl standing eighteen inches away from him reading the problem page of a folded magazine and see also the slight psoriatic redness and scurf where her hair is scraped thinly upwards at the nape of her neck. Two walkmen are competing in the standing area, both tinny and tinnitic, their owners a black boy in a sweatshirt and a white woman with purple lipstick. Martin says that walkmen are the worst thing you can do for your hearing, so both these people are presumably going deaf, though not quickly and completely enough to suit Mr Phillips. The noise always makes him think of insects.
Although there is a gust of new oxygen when the train doors open, the air inside the compartment feels as if it has been breathed and rebreathed, recycled through lungs, picking up bacilli, viruses, tiny minute droplets of mucus and lining and bad breath and stomach gases, the feet and farts and crotch-whiffs of everyone in the train, going round and round their respiratory systems before being passed on to the next commuter. It’s like that story about the water in London having been through three people’s urinary tracts before it’s finally drunk (which Mr Phillips has seen denounced as a fiction by a bald man from the water company, the same one who was always going on about how little water there was in the reservoirs). But even if it wasn’t true it felt true and tasted true, and even more so for the air.
Looking at the number of people in here, it simply does not seem possible that there is enough oxygen to go around. Especially if the train stops — which now, as Mr Phillips is thinking these thoughts, it does. London trains have many different kinds of stop: a tremulous, we-could-be-off-at-any-moment, champing-at-the-bit kind of stop (often very deceptive, since the train can stay in this condition for minutes, even hours); the exhausted, clanking, what-is-it-this-time, why-won’t-the-others-get-out-of-my-tunnel, never-quite-getting-up-to-full-speed-without-coming-to-a-halt-a-few-seconds-later stop (which can give the feeling that a secret mechanism forces the train to stop for a specified number of minutes every time it exceeds a certain speed); the much feared, horribly disconcerting total blackout mid-tunnel stop; and, as in this case, the heavy, final, definitive quiet of the stop that makes it clear right from the outset that it’s going to be a long one. It is impossible not to speculate about what has happened. A suicide? Surely not in rush hour. Nobody could be that thoughtless. A mechanical failure? And if so, what kind — malfunctioning signal, erratic signal light, wonky track, broken-down train, power cut? Or something cataclysmic, like a fire? Thank God they aren’t underground, in a tunnel. (Mr Phillips’s personal record stuck underground is an hour and a half.) The supply of oxygen wouldn’t be infinite, that stood to reason, so just how finite was it?
Perhaps the most oppressive thing is the silence, not just the silence of the train but the silence inside the compartment. Quite a few people must be experiencing acute discomfort — choking fantasies, oxygen terrors, panics about fainting, urgent intimations of imminent mortality, detailed scenarios about passing out, falling, knocking their heads and pissing themselves — but no one shows it. This in its way is as unnerving as if people were bursting into tears and shouting ‘We’re all going to die!’ It is a more British version of the same thing.
Mr Phillips can feel himself swaying and bouncing with the blood supply to his feet. Somewhere in the world there are yogis and fakirs and shamen who have the ability to banish this sort of thing from their minds. He tries to make himself drift off into thinking about his imaginary Neighbourhood Watch meeting. But it just isn’t comfortable enough inside the train compartment, which is hot both with the sunlight and with the body heat of people in suits. The girl with scraped-back hair is looking pink with the warmth, and she isn’t the only one. At the offices of Wilkins and Co., where the windows can’t be opened and the air-conditioning doesn’t work properly, it will be an uncomfortable day with even Mr Mill’s secretary, saintly shy Janet, looking like she wouldn’t mind doing a bit of complaining. In summer she wears sleeveless dresses which give you glimpses of armpit and sometimes the preliminary foothills of flesh swelling like the lower slopes of a volcano at the side of her breasts.