Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  The next day, after his first night on the skids, he would be more bedraggled, poorer – obviously there would be no getting money out of the bank without letting on where he was. And then in the days to come he would be integrated more and more completely into this new life. Becoming dog-tired on a brief excursion outside the Underground he would sit down beside a wall at the side of a pedestrian underpass, taking the weight off, and as he sat a passer-by would drop a coin in his lap, and he has become a beggar, a mendicant. Over the next days and weeks he develops his tramp routines, his pitches and places to sit; he becomes invisible, so that even if someone who knows him were to walk past – Mr Wilkins or Mr Davis-Gribben his neighbour or even Mrs Phillips – he would not be recognized. The point would be to hide in plain sight, simply to melt into the city like a raindrop in a puddle. It would be a version of what men in India did, making their pile and providing for their families before going off to be a sanyassin, a holy man, free of earthly connections; free of family. To live without love, that would be the idea.

  The tramp at the front of the bus seems to be attempting to start a conversation with the schoolgirl. At least he is making noises in her direction while she looks out of the window trying to ignore him, the poor thing. It’s such a feature of city life, being bearded by madmen and weirdoes. When Thomas played in the all-conquering St Winifred’s Under-11 football team their matches attracted a regular spectator who wore a green duffle coat and a matching felt hat decorated with three prominent feathers. These were different each week, and looked as if they had been freshly plucked. The man was always either beaming as if he had just won the Pools or scowling like a mad vicar about to launch into a sermon denouncing everything he saw. No one knew who he was. When Eric Harris, father of Wayne, the team’s little right-footed left back, approached him he would only say, ‘There’s not much I can admit to. I’m scouting for one of the big clubs, the very big clubs.’

  ‘Nutter’ was Eric’s summing up.

  ‘But is he dangerous?’ asked Mr Slocombe, whose son Grant wore glasses and was the team’s controversial goalkeeper – a good shot-stopper but weak on crosses.

  Mr Harris thought about that while the two teams ran around the field being shouted at by their fathers.

  ‘Nah.’

  This verdict proved true. The man had come to every match for a whole season and was then never seen again. By the end of that time Mr Phillips came to feel that, compared to many of the fathers, screaming orders at their boys to make ever greater and more violent effort, the poor madman’s presence was oddly soothing.

  The schoolgirl in the front seat seems to be reaching a similar verdict about the tramp sitting next to her. He has said something to her that made her laugh, and she is now chatting to him, apparently happily. In fact she is smiling and giggling as he speaks. It is easy to see that if you were a funny tramp, that would give you an advantage over other tramps, Mr Phillips could recognize that. Humour is a help in almost any walk of life.

  Mr Phillips has been on board the bus for about half an hour. In that time they have travelled roughly a thousand yards. His body feels as if it is secreting packets of heat about itself; when he shifts in his seat a moist, intimate gust of ball-sweat wafts up to his nostrils. But after having been completely immobile for several minutes, the bus finally squeezes over into the right-hand lane and chugs past the obstacle that has been blocking traffic. This is a huge hole in the ground, surrounded by plastic sheeting, out of which water is boiling on to the surface of the road. A group of workmen stands around the hole in bright orange safety vests and helmets. Burst water main? It is probably something to do with those miles and miles of stinking, crumbling, brick-lined Victorian sewers, each awash with everything from sink slops to rainfall run-off to plastic bags, tampons, pet frogs, coagulating kitchen fat, all the stuff people flush and wash away, not of course forgetting every imaginable variety of urine and excrement. The mad Religious Education teacher at school, Mr Erith, whose pupils would often sit listening half aghast and half trying not to giggle as he ranted on about his favourite subject, sin (he was the only teacher in the history of teaching for whom the word sin was a sure-fire, guaranteed successful red herring, leading to a forty-minute speech on the subject) – Mr Erith had liked to quote to his blushing and sniggering charges St Augustine’s words that we are born inter urinam et faeces.

  ‘Don’t be deceived into thinking that these are technical terms,’ Mr Erith had added, his height and width and not-quite-clerical black suit adding to both the comedy and the menace he always projected. There were rumours of the usual lurid schoolboy sort around Mr Erith, and they all contained this combination of the ridiculous and the sinister. He had been an Army chaplain who was kicked out after going on the rampage and killing an enormous number of Germans, rending them limb from limb with his bare hands. (Mr Phillips had done the sums and this didn’t quite work – Mr Erith, in his mid thirties during the late fifties, would have had to have been one of the British Army’s rare teenage padres.) He had been an Olympic level discus thrower who gave up athletics for God before being given up by God in his turn and leaving the seminary to become a teacher. He had been kicked out of priest’s school for holding seances. He had been kicked out for beating up another seminarian, after an argument about theology and/or women. He had been kicked out for beating up the college principal, who had rigged the exams so that he failed because the principal had worked out that he was having an affair with his wife. Those were the sorts of rumour.

  ‘Urinam et faeces – this is demotic language. “Piss” and “shit”. Todhunter, did you have something you wanted to share with us?’

  An involuntary squeak had come out of Todhunter, who was a known giggler.

  ‘No sir.’

  Mr Erith gave one of his rare, disconcerting smiles. His bared teeth were a rich yellow, the colour of mature ivory.

  ‘Good. Inter urinam et faeces – and that is how we live, too, above a rotting superstructure of sewage and effluent. Think of how much hideous waste is evacuated from this very school building every day. The pipes creaking and straining with it. The plumbing stretched to full capacity to deal with your unspeakable effluvia. Then multiply that by the number of similar buildings in London. Then add the private homes, the public so-called conveniences, the gutters and urinals and all the other subterranean conduits of Augustine’s two substances, whose names I shall not speak again since Todhunter seems unable to contain his amusement at the sound of them. And then with this image fresh in your minds understand that you have something not even a thousandth, not a hundred thousandth or a millionth, as repulsive as what God sees when he looks at us and he sees our –’

  At this point Mr Erith thumped his heavy fist on the desk, so that its jars of pencils and chalks hopped into the air, and he raised his voice to a hoarse bark:

  ‘– SIN.’

  He was breathing hard. The result of this speech was that Mr Phillips thought of his old RE teacher every time the subject of London’s sewers came to his mind. ‘London’s crumbling Victorian sewers’ was what they were always called.

  The tramp at the front of the bus must be, has to be, certainly looks, very smelly. He has the ingrained patina of dirt which comes from living rough. Not that this seems to put the schoolgirl off, and the two of them now appear to be getting on famously. Almost everything the tramp says seems to reduce her to helpless laughter. In turn, when she speaks he leans forward ‘hanging on her every word’. ‘If you can make them laugh you’re half-way there,’ Mr Phillips once heard girl-confident Martin confiding to girl-shy Thomas in the back of the car on the way home from a party. The tramp seems to be acting on the same maxim. His armpits and sweat-steeped clothes must be emitting who knows what odours; but she doesn’t seem to mind in the least. In fact, convulsing with laughter at this latest sally, she leans forward and slaps him on the thigh as if begging him to stop before she breaks a rib. It is an unschoolgirlish gesture and an unexpected one, th
ough not as unexpected as what follows as the tramp, seizing the day, kisses her on the side of her cheek as she turns away.

  Sweet sixteen and never been kissed, thinks Mr Phillips, not very relevantly, but then he feels his grip on things beginning to loosen. Now she is looking down, blushing, but not seeming too unhappy about the latest development. The same could not be said for the rest of the passengers on the upper deck. There are mutterings and rufflings, muffled consternation. The two women in front of Mr Phillips are whispering unoverhearable shocked somethings to each other. Then they go silent and rigid as the tramp reaches out, oddly gentle, and turns the girl’s face towards him and starts kissing her in earnest. A voice from towards the back of the bus, audibly anguished, gives an involuntary cry of ‘No!’ Someone else can be heard to say, ‘Somebody stop him!’ But the person most closely concerned, the schoolgirl herself, evidently doesn’t want to stop him. She is energetically returning the tramp’s kisses; from the way their cheeks and jaws are moving you can clearly tell that both sets of tongues are involved. Mr Phillips feels the twinge of nausea that always overtakes him when he sees people kissing – actors on the screen are bad enough, real people are always worse. It is something to do with the texture of tongues, their snail-like smoothness and sliminess, and the idea of other people’s mouths; you wouldn’t want to explore someone else’s mouth in theory, only in practice. At Grimshaw’s the most junior accountants had a popular game called Would You Rather, involving the invention of fantastically repulsive alternatives: ‘Would you rather’ – a voice would ask, usually in the pub after work – ‘suck snot off Mr Wink’s moustache or have poxy Patty (the boss’s twenty-stone secretary) sit on your face and fart?’ For Mr Phillips, keen on kissing in practice, the idea of kissing has something of a ‘would you rather’ about it.

  These two have no such difficulty. The tramp and the schoolgirl are now openly engaged in what can only be described as a snog. One of his hands is clamped to the back of her head. The other is out of sight elsewhere about her person. Her eyes are closed, her arms around him. Luckily the bus is making too much noise for any cries or moans to be audible. Mr Phillips doesn’t know what to think. He is looking straight ahead, slightly to one side of the couple, but they are on full display in his peripheral vision.

  ‘Ought to be a law against it,’ he catches from one of the women in front of him. She is in an ecstasy of outraged propriety.

  The bus stops. They are further along the Embankment, just to the south of Victoria Station. The tramp and the schoolgirl seem to have reached some agreement. They get up together, tittering happily and leaning against each other, and make for the stairs, which the girl descends first, her hand stretched back to the tramp, who looks younger and happier than he did when he got on but still far gone in filth. There is a general sense of relief in which Mr Phillips shares. Mr Phillips hears someone say the actual words ‘Well I never’. He risks a look out of the window at the happy couple who are now sort of skipping off up the pavement.

  Mr Phillips himself gets off the bus two stops later. The traffic is still crawling and he feels the need to travel at a more human pace. A group of other passengers seem to have made the same choice and decant themselves on to the streets carrying briefcases, bags, newspapers, jackets. Quite large numbers of people are moving along the pavement in the same direction that the bus was travelling. Many of them are tourists. Further up the street, coaches are disgorging their passengers and taxis are dropping people off; in short, a maelstrom of people and vehicles. Mr Phillips realizes that he is standing just down the road from the Tate Gallery. In fact, looking up the Embankment he can see that an orderly queue has formed, three across and a hundred or so yards long, heading towards a tent-like structure beside the gallery’s main building. Above that there is a sign advertising an exhibition called Manet, along with dates, times and prices.

  It is odd to see so many people happily carrying brightly coloured rucksacks as if they were badges of liberation and the ability to go anywhere, do anything, have no constraints. For anyone roughly Mr Phillips’s age, rucksacks are heavy, sodden canvas objects associated with being in the Army and with the specific absence of liberty and of being able to do what you liked. Even at St Aloysius’s, which had less of all that than many schools, rucksacks were still associated with extreme boredom and fatigue. (Mr Phillips had joined the cadets and turned out to be good at drill, the best in his year group. All you had to do was what you were told.)

  One tall boy in the queue has a tiny pink rucksack with yellow straps and fittings with the word ‘Sexy’ picked out in lime-green sequins. His hair is shaved at the sides and he wears a T-shirt with capped sleeves. He looks very fit, at least as fit as Mr Phillips had been at the end of his school days, when he had been fitter than at any other point in his life. Walking past the queue is a girl from the lower deck of the bus. She is wearing the shortest skirt Mr Phillips has ever seen; so short that the lower part of her buttocks are visible at the top of her thighs. The flesh there is slightly mottled, not quite with nodules of cellulite – she’s too young for that – but with a curious pale, corrugated texture like that of chicken skin. She also wears clogs and a pink T-shirt. Her brown hair is cut so short that her top vertebrae have a knobbly prominence. Her appearance gives Mr Phillips a pang of envy that girls in his day had not dressed like that and a near-simultaneous twinge of relief, since if they had he would never have summed up the courage to talk to them. She does not so much walk off as totter, making one or two smoothing-down gestures at her skirt, about which she seems with some justification to be a little self-conscious. Perhaps she has grown taller since the last time she wore it. Certainly it is well within the category of what Martin would call a ‘pussy pelmet’.

  ‘Clothes are a sign of the Fall not because they conceal our God-created nakedness but because they provoke desire,’ says a Caribbean woman’s voice immediately behind Mr Phillips’s right ear. He turns around. It is the Jehovah’s Witness, who has been watching him watch the girl and is now looking at him with real hostility.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Mr Phillips.

  Most of the younger people seem to have arrived independently, on foot and via public transport. Older people come in coach parties. A seventyish couple, looking very thoroughly used to each other, are leaning together puffing as they recover from having climbed down the steps of their coach. On the steps outside the front of the museum several dozen younger people, foreign-looking (darker skin, different clothes), are sitting chatting, gossiping, smoking, picking each other up, looking at guidebooks and what’s-on magazines, eating crisps and sandwiches and drinking soft drinks, or just staring into space. One girl, whose bobbed black hair circles down at the corners of her face as if putting her expression in brackets, is methodically blowing bubble gum. Mr Phillips remembers that feeling of waiting for something to happen, so strong when we’re young and so hard to recapture afterwards, just as boredom could be like a physical pain while it was happening but was impossible to recover through memory.

  Many of the people sitting on the stairs look little more than children. They are certainly a lot younger than Mr Phillips had been before he had any comparable freedom. When Martin went off on his first holiday with friends, at the age of seventeen, Mr Phillips had felt a stab of fear and pity for his youth and vulnerability. Two years (it felt like two minutes) later he was Railcarding around Europe on his own, getting up to who knew what who knew where with who knew whom. It was a hard time for Mr and Mrs Phillips, who had had their patience tested to destruction during Martin’s teenage years. These began late – he had been easygoing and affable right up until he turned fifteen – and then made up for it with the intensity of his fuckedoffness. The anxiety they felt when he travelled was a half-welcome reminder that they did, in fact, after all, love him. Mr Phillips had noticed at the time that as children we all occasionally wish or fantasize that our parents were dead – but the reverse doesn’t apply.

  Martin’s
six-week trip yielded them four postcards, each of which brought with it a specific and vivid set of worrying images (Amsterdam: drugs! Copenhagen: Aids! Berlin: skinheads! Athens: pollution!), and a single telephone call, from a village in Greece where the only payphone was broken, enabling people to call anywhere in the world for free. He came back with a short and neat beard that had unexpected red bits at the corners of his mouth. That and his eerily deep tan made him look a good five years older. After that trip he was never quite as angry, or as dismissive, or as sullen, or as close to them; it was when he began to leave home. Mr Phillips can’t help wondering what’s in store for the parents of all these children. Somewhere each of them has someone worrying themselves sick.

  As in a film or an advertisement, a boy travelling at speed hurtles up the steps past Mr Phillips and down on to the step beside the girl with the Louise Brooks bob and begins kissing her energetically. Mr Phillips has to look away before he finds out what happens to the bubble gum.