On the way back from peeing and brushing his teeth, Mr Phillips pauses outside the door of Tom’s bedroom. An apparently genuine no entry sign hangs there. It has taken considerable forbearance on Mr and Mrs Phillips’s part to avoid asking where the sign came from, since that would either produce a heated denial of any illegality (if it had been, as Mr Phillips suspected, stolen) or a pained but triumphantly self-righteous brandishing of a receipt from, say, a novelty shop (which is what Mrs Phillips thought: ‘It looks far too new.’) It’s hard not to see your own flaws in your children, thinks Mr Phillips. Thomas is never angrier than when he is in the wrong, and never more irritating than when he is in the right. Mr Phillips has no difficulty in recognizing that. Martin, on the other hand, has the ability to be good-naturedly and fixedly in the wrong – it doesn’t seem to bother him. Mr Phillips first noticed this ability when his son was ten and broke a clock in the sitting room by hitting it with a tennis racket, observed by Mrs Phillips’s mother, who was baby-sitting one year old Tom upstairs and who, unbeknown to Martin, had come down to make a cup of tea. Martin denied the accident, or crime, with total vehemence, despite the fact that it had been witnessed, until he all of a sudden ceased to deny it, blushing and smiling and apologizing all at once. Mr Phillips saw that although his son minded being in the wrong to some extent, he didn’t really mind it the way most of us do – at which Mr Phillips felt a pang of fear and wonder at his offspring’s alien life, either unprotected or doubly protected by this enviable and mysterious heedlessness.
There is no noise whatsoever from Tom’s room. He is out cold, as usual; Tom sleeps an astonishing, inexplicable amount. But Mr Phillips can remember that he had wanted to sleep all the time at that age too, except that his father wouldn’t let him. The only domestic task that Michael Phillips ever performed was bringing his son a cup of tea on weekend and holiday mornings – as if in preparation for an adulthood of abrupt awakenings and departures, in which you were in need of constant vigilance. He saw adult life as a contest, a decathlon without the lightheartedness or the fellow-feeling between contestants.
Mr Phillips doesn’t agree; he thinks that his son needs all the sleep he can get. In his view, teenagers sleep so much because they are preparing for the insomniac and sleep-shortened times ahead: the knackering first few years of working and socializing (Mr Phillips was exhausted for the first two years of full employment at Grimshaw’s, often falling asleep on the train home); the unimaginable exhaustion of young parenthood, with its broken nights, incessant physical and emotional labour, and the trench warfare of raising small children; the different fatigue of later adulthood, that of sheer accumulated livedness, the sense that nothing again would ever be new or surprising, that vital reserves of energy and luck had been critically and irreversibly depleted. As you grow older, sleep somehow becomes thinner, as if the fabric of unconsciousness itself is becoming stretched and febrile; you don’t go down as far or for as long; as if the permanent period of rest in the rapidly approaching future is already exerting an effect, in the way that one recovers reserves of energy as soon as the end of a boring film or dinner party finally heaves into sight. Sleep is a bank account that you put capital in when you are young and draw on as you get older; and then you run out of capital and die.
Mr Phillips puts his ear against the door of his son’s room and listens for a moment to the silence. Left to his own devices, Tom will never come downstairs before midday, and when he does so will wordlessly take a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of Nescafé from the kitchen to flop down in front of the television. If he is up before noon on Saturday he will turn on a pop music programme, which Mr Phillips secretly likes to watch, because the videos often have erotic content in the form of writhing girls. I know what they’re doing but I don’t understand why they’re trying to do it standing up, as the old buffers used once to say. He can however tell that his presence has a suffocating effect on Tom. Perhaps his son’s motive for watching the programme is sufficiently close to his own to make the moment embarrassingly intimate; or perhaps watching anything to do with sex in the company of our parents is to some extent the same as watching our parents have sex. Last Saturday, two days before, Mr Phillips went downstairs to find Tom watching a video which, to the sound of the usual arrhythmical crashing and wailing, consisted of nothing more than a girl’s beautiful tea-coloured midriff, her navel pierced with a single thin band of gold, wiggling from side to side, up and down, a glimpse of low-slung skirt intermittently visible at the bottom of the shot, which was otherwise without distractions. Images which in Mr Phillips’s youth would have been considered pornographic are now everywhere, an accepted visual language; and all to the good, thinks Mr Phillips. Well done! On the back cover of the current issue of Vogue, for instance, an indulgence Mrs Phillips allows herself every few months, is a beautifully lavish black and white photograph of a woman’s bottom – and a very small bottle of perfume. Well done! Mr Phillips, standing, and Tom, lying, had watched the girl’s wiggling in embarrassed but rapt silence for ninety seconds until Mr Phillips had said:
‘That must hurt.’ – an attempted reference to the navel ring. Mr Phillips could hear the middle-agedness in his voice and hated it. Tom hadn’t even looked up at him, and he left the room.
Sometimes an image from a telly programme, or from a woman seen in the street, or even a sexy memory that just popped up for no reason, will lodge in Mr Phillips’s mind like a splinter under a fingernail and stay there for weeks, so that he finds himself replaying it over and over again (the expression in the eyes of Sharon Mitchell, blank with lust, as she turned her head to look at him as he slid his cock into her from behind on her parents’ downstairs divan: a thirty year old memory that one day, as he was masturbating in the bath, popped up in front of his imagination like a projected slide). At the moment the image tormenting him is of Clarissa Colingford, surely not her real name, whom Mr Phillips had first seen on some show in which celebrities made fools of themselves for charity. She had been doing the locomotion, and something about the way she did it, mechanically precise in her choo-chooing motion, embarrassed but also abandoned, smiling and blushing at the same time, had snagged at Mr Phillips, so that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was something to do with the hinterland of life you could guess in her, the background life of getting out of bed in the morning, checking her answering machine messages, swearing when she stubbed her toe, popping out for cat food and dental floss, putting bank statements in the bin without opening them – you could picture her doing all these things in the same busy, preoccupied, sexily absent-minded way. Mr Phillips could tell they would like each other if they met. She was the sort of person you could tell at say a fourth meeting that you’d had a dream about them, or even, conceivably, if you really were getting on, that you’d had a crush on them for ages. Mr Phillips has to admit that he would be capable of making a fool of himself for Clarissa Colingford. And as chance would have it, just as Mr Phillips was becoming obsessed with her, so everyone else seemed to be too. She had caught the public imagination and suddenly there were appearances on panel games and tabloid stories about boyfriend trouble. She was famous in that pure, almost abstract, modern way, a celebrity. If you stopped someone in the street and asked if they had heard of Clarissa Colingford the answer would probably be Yes. If you asked what it was she was best known for, there would probably be a sticky pause. But the truth was, who needed to be known for anything when they could have Clarissa’s pure, blonde, above-it-all innocent sexiness?
1.5
On mornings when he leaves the house to go to work, Mr Phillips comes out of the front door and stops for a moment while he runs his eye over the trellis beside the bay window. Mrs Phillips’s climbers are struggling again. While he does this he surreptitiously checks the street for the presence of neighbours. Even though he basically gets on with most of them, thanks in no small part to the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch Association, Mr Phillips nonetheless feels a small but vivid
dislike of bumping into them at this point in the day, as they head off to work with closed, practical faces. The worst of them is the extraordinarily nosy Mr Palmer at number 42, known to the Phillips family as Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips’s mood lifts slightly whenever he sees that the coast is clear. Today there is no Norman but he does have to walk past Mr Morris at number 32, five doors down, as he stands in a track suit beside the open door of his big car.
‘Morning,’ says Mr Phillips.
‘Morning,’ says, or rather grunts, Mr Morris – evidently this isn’t his favourite ritual either. And it is a nice enough morning, for London anyway, already warm, the blue sky reasonably visible between chunky but fast moving, whiter-than-usual clouds.
The houses in the Crescent are low-squatting semi-detached Edwardian villas – a word which always gives Mr Phillips a mental glimpse of people in togas on the set of Up Pompeii. They look more cramped than they are, with decent space at the back and sometimes an attic too, as well as three upstairs bedrooms. If houses were faces the street would be a row of well-fed Tories, golfers, Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts. Now that Martin has left home their house has gone from near population overload to being eerily roomy, and Mr Phillips has taken over the loft (formerly Martin’s lair) as a study or den. From it he looks out over neighbours’ gardens and the roofscape towards the tower block about half a mile away. In his den he mostly studies second-hand car prices or reads one of his autobiographies.
At the end of the road Mr Phillips turns left again and heads down Middleton Way, today as on every work day. This street is used as a cut-through by cars trying to defeat the one-way system, even though so many drivers know the route that it’s just as clogged and congested as the official route – a typical London event, in a city where knowing the wrinkles and shortcuts only helps as long as not enough others know them too. Today the cars in the cut-through sit fuming and revving in the July warmth, the air already close and polluted. Mr Phillips watches the inhabitant of a dark blue L-reg Vauxhall Astra, a thirtyish man with a suit jacket hung in his offside rear window, pick his nose, consider the product of his excavation and then, with a decisive gourmandly air, eat it. Three cars in front, a woman in a VW Passat is leaning over and using the rear-view mirror to check between her front teeth.
Mr Phillips turns into Kestrel Lane opposite the chemist, whose window displays are one of the most reliable indicators of the changing seasons. Today it’s hay fever medicine, which is advertised by a huge, transparent three-dimensional model of a head with the nose and the sinuses blocked with red tubular fillings to indicate mucus. Bye bye hay fever, bye bye drowsiness, says the poster. When Mr Phillips took his A-levels – 1963, a decade after the end of rationing, an event he can still remember – the invigilator, a supply teacher he had never set eyes on before, had been suffering from the worst case of hay fever he had ever seen, his eyes bloodshot and liquid, nose running, breathing heavily through his mouth. They had all thought that was hilarious. Hay fever was rarer then than now; the whole city has allergies, it’s the nitric oxide. It beats up your immune system so the other stuff gets through to you more easily. Even Mr Phillips’s doctor came down with asthma, at the age of forty-five.
A white man with dreadlocks comes out of the chemists and is greeted by his eager dog, who is wearing a collar made out of a red ribbon.
Pedestrians stream past in every direction, most of them dressed for the working day, most of them in a hurry.
Mr Phillips stops in front of the travel agent, two doors down. There are posters in the window of happy people in places with good weather. A woman of about twenty-five watches her husband batting a large beach ball into the air while two small sandy children tug at his legs. In the middle distance of another photograph, a man learns to windsurf. Child-free couples walk on beaches in front of a cinema sunset. Standing and looking at the pictures, Mr Phillips has a vision of himself beside a swimming pool somewhere hot. At his right side, a cold drink beaded with sweat and icy to the touch. At his left, Karen the secretary, face down, in a leopard print bikini, tiny volcanic irregularities of smoochable cellulite crawling under her bikini bottoms, a stray brown pubic hair visible to the truly attentive eye, her back also beaded with sweat, shiny with suntan oil, hot to the touch. On his stomach, which is flatter than in real life, Mr Phillips balances a copy of the Daily Mail, where he is reading about Europe’s triumph over America in the Ryder Cup, or England’s over Australia in the Ashes, or studying a business story about how some company in which he just happens to have bought lots of shares has surged 1000 per cent upwards in a week, or looking at the fashion pages and picking out a pink frock with a slashed shoulder whose scooped ovoid neckline would suit Karen only too well. A list of prices for flights hangs beside one for all-in holiday packages:
Malaga £179 for 2 weeks Morocco £219 return
San Francisco £239 return Costa Rica £299 return
Faro £85 return New York £190 return
Alicante £84 return Paris city break from £109 room
Atlanta £229 return £15 p.p.p.n
Ask us about Vietnam!
Everything seems implausibly cheap, given the distances involved.
It wasn’t always like that. The Phillips family holidays were gruelling but are now a false happy memory, and when the Phillipses were gathered together they often spoke of them – the time Martin’s canoe sank off the beach in Majorca, the time Tom was sick over a waiter in Corfu. Mr Phillips’s favourite holiday had been on honeymoon in a cottage in Cornwall, hired via an old friend of Mr Phillips’s father who ran a rental agency. The newly married Mr and Mrs Phillips had made love twenty-seven times in the week. Even then he had liked to count.
At the moment there is, or was, a plan to save enough to spend some time in the sunshine over the winter, a vision which appears to Mr Phillips as a girl’s bottom, golden, with an almost invisible strip of cloth plunging vertiginously between her buttocks, an image all too familiar from TV but never seen in real life. It was a sight he felt he deserved to see at least once. This holiday is the first glimpse of a promised prosperity which in theory looms now that there is only one more year of payment left to go on the mortgage, thank God, and Martin has left home and Tom has only two years to go to official adulthood and the possibility of his leaving for college – though Mr Phillips somehow can’t see that, since his younger son’s pantomime defiance and self-sufficiency has within it, he feels, an unappeasable core of neediness. Tom isn’t the moving-out type. Still, the Phillipses are, or should be, coming up to that stage in life where prosperity looms in front of middle-aged, middle-class couples like a plush, well-appointed antechamber to the grave, or a luxuriously fitted waiting room outside the offices of a doctor whose prognoses are exclusively fatal.
‘What do you think you’re doing, Phillips?’
Mr Phillips experiences momentarily and unpleasantly the sensation that his thoughts are legible to any passer-by. But no, this is simply Mr Tomkins, the bumptious co-founder of the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme, whose daughter Mrs Phillips coached to scraping a pass in Grade Four piano before she fell in love with her former gym teacher and emigrated to New Zealand. Tomkins’s approach to the world had not changed. You had to give him credit for that. Or not, or something.
‘A man can dream,’ says Mr Phillips. Tomkins is wearing a suit that has at least three pieces and would perhaps turn out to have more under closer inspection. He works in a bank, turning down applicants for loans and overdrafts. Mr Phillips can imagine having a worse bank manager than Mr Tomkins, but only with difficulty.
‘Off to work?’
‘Men must work’, says Tomkins, heading down the road towards the railway station, his furled umbrella swinging in his right hand on this dry day, ‘and women must shop.’ He has spoken over his shoulder and now he’s gone.
Once Tomkins has cleared his own blast area, Mr Phillips sets off after him. Acrowd of people are getting on to a double-decker bus a
s he squeezes past. The street is blocked in both directions, as a fuming K-reg Mondeo has tried to squeeze past the bus, only to realize that the oncoming unloading laundry van doesn’t offer enough room, and so the road is now officially chocka, at a standstill. The quickest moving things are pedestrians and a mad cyclist, dressed like a parody of a civil servant with bowler hat and cycle clips, dodging impatiently between the growling stationary vehicles. When he drives and gets stuck like that Mr Phillips has a vision of the whole city being locked in by immobile traffic, a pattern of stalled and blocked-in vehicles ramifying and spreading like a pattern of crystals growing under a microscope, so that the jam – a totally solid gridlock, not just slow-moving but fixed – gradually spreads all over the capital, junctions clogging, back flows building up, a cancer of stasis blocking every traffic light, intersection, box junction, mini-roundabout, square and one-way system, the whole city gradually and permanently shutting down like a dying brain.
1.6
Mr Phillips, his return ticket tucked in his jacket pocket like a handkerchief, stands on the platform at Clapham Junction and waits for his train. It’s already getting warmer, and it’s possible to wish that he had worn a lighter suit. Even his briefcase looks as if it might be beginning to sweat. Along the platform a straggling line of fellow commuters is ready to rush the next train, and is filling the time by reading newspapers, though there are variant activities too – a girl in a knee-length split skirt nodding her head as she listens to a walkman, and a few oddbods reading books. Mr Phillips has not taken his book out of his case; he prefers to watch and wait. Next to him on one side a very tall man in jeans and a T-shirt is reading the Daily Sport, stopping at every other page to inspect with real care the pictures of naked women, all of whom to Mr Phillips’s eyes have breasts that are implausibly large and unerotically rigid, as if they had been inflated especially for the occasion. Not for the first time Mr Phillips wonders who these girls are.
Mr. Phillips Page 3
