Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  Mr Phillips pushes the door, goes in, unzips his trousers, releases his penis from his Y-fronts, and begins to pee. It is a surprisingly unmodern urinal given the rest of the restaurant décor, a long marble stand-alongside. After half a century of visiting urinals, Mr Phillips is still uncertain whether the little built-up ledge is supposed to be used for standing on and peeing downwards, or for standing behind and peeing over, which is more protective of the pee-er’s feet but also messier since drops inevitably splosh on the ledge. In Mr Phillips’s experience other men don’t know what to do either, or at least there is no consistent pattern, or (at the very least) two schools of thought.

  The bright blue medicinal balls in the bottom of the urinal give off a sharp chemical smell as they come into contact with Mr Phillips’ unusually dark, almost ochre, urine. When he does his trousers up Mr Phillips notices their increased after-lunch tightness. His stomach presses against the waistband with a friendly pressure, like a man laying a respectful rather than a lascivious hand on his wife’s bottom.

  3.2

  The street outside the restaurant is very busy. It can’t get any hotter. This is the kind of weather Mr Phillips’s father had loved – ‘It’s good to sweat,’ he would say cheerfully, striding away up a hill on an August expedition to the country with his shirt soaked through in the small of his back.

  Not far from where Mr Phillips is standing there is, he knows, the White Hart, the pub where, going out for a drink with some colleagues from Grimshaw’s, he met the future Mrs Phillips for the first time. She was part of a group of girls at the bar to whom he and his friends got talking when one of them spilt a Pernod and blackcurrant on somebody’s trousers. Not that it was love at first sight: tall and brown haired with a high, wide forehead, pretty but not overwhelmingly so, brainy-looking, she wasn’t precisely Mr Phillips’s type, since in those days he liked, or thought he liked, obviously tarty-looking girls, ideally blonde or, failing that, black-haired, shorter than him, with the emphasis more on the bum than the tits though not dogmatically so. He had a tendency to fall for girls to whom he could explain things. But for some reason, girls to whom he could explain things did a very good job of not falling for him.

  Mrs Phillips, on the other hand, not only seemed to be better informed than him on most artistic and political subjects, she also knew London better, or knew more parts of it, and she also knew what she wanted to do – which was play, teach, and listen to music. It was not something she went on about or showed off about but it was there, and Mr Phillips to his great surprise found this a turn-on. The first time he saw her playing the clarinet, her subsidiary instrument after the piano, at a concert in a church in Islington, he got an enormous erection – it was in that moment that she became, for him, fully charged sexually. At the same time, she seemed actually to like him, which, he realized, quite a few of his other girlfriends hadn’t. He hadn’t liked them much either. Meeting the future Mrs Phillips made him realize that this was not necessarily how things were supposed to be.

  ‘You seemed so lost,’ she said, years later, explaining why she had taken to him. The first time they made love, at her shared flat on a Saturday night when her Scottish flatmate had gone home for the weekend to celebrate her parents’ wedding anniversary, she had insisted on keeping her socks on, which Mr Phillips had found more intimate and revealing than if she had been starkers.

  ‘But what if I had wanted to keep mine on?’ he asked afterwards.

  ‘I would have kicked you out.’

  ‘There’s a double standard at work,’ said Mr Phillips.

  *

  The shop Mr Phillips is standing in front of sells leather clothes, and advertises itself as a ‘clone zone’. It takes him a second or two to realize that it is aiming at a clientele of homosexual men. Once he does realize, he becomes self-conscious and begins to move away, though not without wishing he didn’t feel self-conscious, so he could settle down for a proper look. It would not do to give people the wrong impression: but what were ‘poppers’? And why would anyone want to have his nipples pierced?

  The shop next door has a grotto-like entrance, painted a luscious dark vaginal red. Abored-looking girl – pretty girl again – with short dark bobbed hair sits behind a sort of counter, painting her nails pink and looking up occasionally to address encouraging remarks to potential customers. Live Sex Shows XXXX says a sign above her head. Behind her and to one side is a plastic curtain.

  ‘Your heart’s desire is inside,’ says the girl to Mr Phillips, so matter-of-factly that it gives him a strange jolting thrill; by being so uninterested in what she is saying she makes him feel as if it might be true. If a woman’s business was sex there could be something sexy about her not being all that interested or bothered about it. Part of Mr Phillips, quite a large part, wants to push past that plastic curtain and go into the grotto. But he feels too shy, and as if he would somehow be exposing himself. So he sidles past trying to look casual.

  It is hard to walk down this street without being made to think about sex. The number of gay businesses is striking, once Mr Phillips realizes that that is what they are – the bar called Spartacus, for instance, and the coffee shop, spilling out into the fumes and dirt of the pavement, none-too-subtly called Gay Paree. There are also plenty of straightforward sex shops or ‘Adult Shops’, not as explicit in their window displays as they would have been a few years ago, but now in a way worse because they have words like ‘xxx’ and ‘Sex Toys’ and ‘Videos’ and ‘Adults Only’ and ‘Explicit Material Inside’ and ‘DO NOT ENTER Unless You Are Not Shocked By Sexually Explicit Material’ and all the other enticements. Mr Fortesque was right. Sex is a good steady business to be in, Mr Phillips can see that.

  When his father had died in 1981, of a stroke, Mr Phillips had helped his mother clear out his parents’ small house – not the one Mr Phillips had grown up in in Wandsworth but a newer, bigger semi in Sutton. It was a bad time. Mr Phillips disliked sorting through old things anyway, because his overwhelmingly strong instinct never to throw anything away made it difficult for him to take rational decisions; he ended up lingering over and fingering old calendars, old rail tickets, car magazines, bank statements. In the course of the Phillips’s periodic blitzes on Martin’s and Tom’s rooms, he would be more reluctant to chuck out old clothes and old posters than they were themselves. Mr Phillips liked to think this was linked to the trained accountant’s fear of mislaying an important piece of paper. At the same time, he felt a powerful impulse to cling on to everything, to keep the past alive by maintaining a physical grip on objects whose meaning belonged there.

  ‘You’re a squirrel,’ was what his mother had said. It struck him as a startling metaphor.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘It’s just an expression.’

  ‘They’re vermin, aren’t they? Squirrels.’

  ‘It’s just an expression.’

  His father too had been a squirrel; his mother on the other hand was a … whatever the opposite of a squirrel was. It was hard to think of an animal that took active pleasure in throwing things out. Something small and clever and quick, which didn’t keep things stashed in its burrow.

  The result was that the house, when they went through it in the aftermath of his father’s death, had been full of his things but had almost nothing of his mother’s. It was as if she had died a while before. There didn’t seem to be any distinctions or discrimination in his father’s hoarding. One trunk had carried both his own father’s birth certificate, which by any standards was an important piece of paper, along with ten years of Mr Phillips’s and his sister’s school reports, carried in a Manila envelope that was itself stained with age.

  The bottom drawers of his father’s desk, one on each side, had been locked. The key was in the supposedly secret drawer at the back of the middle part of the desk, just above where your knees went – though it was hard to imagine a burglar so idle or so useless that he wouldn’t find the hiding place within seconds. The left-hand drawer
had contained up to date financial records and two National Savings certificates to the tune of £5000 each – which, with the house, proved to be the outstanding bulk of his father’s estate, enabling Mrs Phillips to move to Australia to live with Mavis and Terry and the girls. The marriage certificate, from Wandsworth registry office, and Mr Phillips’s grandmother’s death certificate were also there, in a folder marked ‘Certificates’. The drawer on the other side had been full of pornographic magazines and pictures cut out of pornographic magazines, some of which had been put in a clear plastic folder because … because what? They were his father’s favourites and he didn’t want them to be damaged by his own fingering?

  Mr Phillips could not stop himself from paying close attention to this glimpse into his father’s consciousness. At the same time, he had to admit that he wouldn’t want his sons to have the same opportunity in relation to him –

  ‘Dad wasn’t much of a tit man, was he?’

  ‘No, it was bums or nothing for the old man.’

  His father did however seem to have been a tit man. How odd that these things weren’t inherited or genetically programmed. The photos encased in plastic were not, Mr Phillips was confident, the ones that he himself would have chosen. You would have thought that if any preference or affinity was going to be inherited it would be that.

  His father had died too soon: these days there were whole magazines dedicated to the subject of big breasts. Though that might have been too much of a good thing; perhaps flicking through the pages looking for a just-right girl was part of the thrill of the chase. But Michael Phillips had been forced to look at photos of girls bending over to show off their bottoms, or lying on their backs looking as if they wanted to have sex right there and then – which was fine in Mr Phillips’s book, but did tend to make their breasts look smaller. In the drawer there must have been thirty magazines, featuring naked girls in not too explicit poses – no ‘beaver shots’ of gaping vulvas. Say ten girls a magazine, so a total of three hundred girls in his father’s version of Bluebeard’s room. In addition, there were another forty or so girls encased in the plastic. So that was 340 in all, hidden in his father’s desk drawer. The girls would have gone on with their lives, some of them presumably making reasonable livings in modelling, others quitting young, or having one big break, this session with Knave or Penthouse or May-fair the apogee of their careers, since what did they do next? Were they endlessly recycled among the top magazines, or was it one brief moment literally under the lights and then finito? Anyway, their lives would have gone on, the photo session a vague or vivid or unhappy or deliberately suppressed memory, while they lived on fixedly in his father’s desk drawer, caught for all time in a momentary pose adopted who knew where, who knew when, in front of who knew what sort of sleazy, grimacing patter-keeping-up photographer. ‘Make love to the camera! Show me your heat!’

  The strength of the appetites represented by this pile of images had its impressive side. But finding the photos made Mr Phillips feel lonely. His grief he had to some extent been able to share with his wife (who had liked his father, and thought he was ‘a good man’) and mother and sister, who had flown over for the funeral but only stayed for thirty-six hours, since she had had to return for some pressing family reason Mr Phillips could not now remember. But he didn’t feel he could share his discovery with any of them; it was against the ethics of male fellowship, as well as against family feeling, as well as the opposite of what his father would have wanted. So he put the magazines and clippings and plastic folders along with other throwoutable items into a big plastic bag and headed for the council dump. There was a not-small touch of death in this, since papers which his father by definition hadn’t thrown out had now become, at the moment of his death, junk, rubbish, clutter, their interpretable status changing through no fault of their own. He chose the dump, rather than just leaving them out for collection by the bin men, in case one of the bags might split open and disgorge its mixture of old bills, old bank statements, old newspapers and pictures of naked women to the astonished and secretly thrilled street. I always thought there was something odd about him.

  The plan was to take the clothes to Oxfam; other saleable items, like the radio his father had kept in the bathroom, a dressing-table mirror with a hideous pink frame, and other things that neither his wife nor Mrs Phillips wanted, to the Barnardo’s charity shop; papers and pornography to the dump. Mr Phillips drove to the dump first, because he was troubled by the possibility that he might hand the wrong bags over by mistake. A man from the council in blue overalls was directing traffic at the site, over which hung a faint smell of burning and the stronger, sweet reek of dumped rubbish. As he began hefting the bags out of the car Mr Phillips realized that he didn’t trust them to stay intact until they were thrown into the masher or incinerated or whatever happened to them. Again, the worry was that the bags might be torn open and the contents strewn around by the wind or whatever else, and his father’s secrets would be revealed, and at the same time, because of the bank statements and utility bills, his identity might be traceable, so that everyone would know who he was and what he had liked. So, having got to the dump, Mr Phillips returned the bags back to the back of the car and drove home, by now in Saturday post-football traffic. He made a melodramatic bonfire in his own back garden, banning Mrs Phillips and the children from going outside. He stacked up the magazines, took the pictures out of their plastic holders and crumpled them on top, poured barbecue lighter fluid over the lot and threw on a match. The mountains of girls in their stiff paper, the curious waxy paper of porn mags, burned well. Then he put the other, innocuous papers into the rubbish bin at the front of the house, the last time his father’s stuff would be taken away by the bin men, and went back inside. The clothes and odd and ends stayed in the car, since it was by now too late to take them to their respective charities.

  ‘You smell of smoke,’ Mrs Phillips said when he came in. She had repeatedly offered to help.

  ‘Just a few odds and ends,’ said Mr Phillips, thinking of his momentary panic when a fragment of burning girl – the upper half of a blonde with big tits, his father’s type – had begun to rise on the flames, up to head height, so that for a second it looked as if she might be carried away on the breeze into a neighbour’s garden, until the updraught of hot air failed her and she sank, charred and unrecognizable now, just beyond the outer edges of the pyre.

  3.3

  Mr Phillips is now standing across the road from a shop that has the word Videos written in dark crimson on a pink shutter; it also has the plastic curtains which seem big in this market sector. Beside the shop entrance is another doorway with a flight of stairs visible inside it. The word Films is written above the lintel. People are milling about, apparently not paying much attention to one another, in that deceptive London way which can mean that they aren’t paying attention, or that they are sizing each other up. Sex and violence are always possible. Two men in shorts and vests, both with cropped blond hair, walk past. Mr Phillips has to concede that they are better dressed for the weather than he himself is. Another man, squat and cheerful, is standing beside the sex shop calling out ‘Big Issue’ and holding a copy of the magazine in front of his chest as if he were advertising not it but himself.

  Mr Phillips takes his courage in his hands and crosses the street, pushes through the curtain and goes into the sex shop. It is a square box of a room with magazines on two walls, a display cabinet on the third and a counter on the fourth. There are two other customers, both men, and a bored, grumpy fat man at the till. Both of the men are leafing through magazines with a flushed listlessness.

  Mr Phillips moves over to one of the stands of magazines while casting sideways looks at the third wall, which seems mainly to consist of objects made to look like penises – dildoes and vibrators. There is also a box with the words ‘edible underwear’ written on it, another box labelled ‘tit clamps’ and a third box that says simply ‘one size fits all’. One or two of the dildoes a
re remarkably big – in context, perhaps the biggest things Mr Phillips has ever seen. It is a long time since he has seen penises in any significant numbers, since the showers at St Aloysius’s in fact, but his memories on the point are pretty clear, and they are that although penises look very much unlike each other, more so than even their owners (if that was the word), they don’t vary all that much in size – especially when compared to breasts, which vary wildly, and in wholly unpredictable ways. Small girls have big tits, big girls have invisible tits, and every permutation in between, most of them employing the three basic shapes of the dome, the turret, and the hillock. Penises are not like that. In the language of statistics, they are tightly grouped about the mean. So these dildoes in Mr Phillips’s opinion are at the least statistically unrepresentative or at the worst wild flights of fantasy.

  A large sign over the magazine rack says ‘Try Before You Buy is Not Our Policy.’ Mr Phillips feels too shy to actually pick up any of the magazines so he merely stands and looks at the covers. Dutch Hardcore xxx is the name of the magazine that the man next to him is reading. He is wearing a black donkey jacket and seems half asleep. There are many titles that would have suited Mr Phillips’s father. Big Tits, Jugs, Hooters! and Party Tits are some of the examples. Mr Phillips thinks he can confirm his impressions about unrepresentative penis size by looking at one of the gay or hardcore magazines, but he doesn’t feel quite strong enough. Cautiously, with a growing sense that he is doing something he is not supposed to do, he reaches out for a copy of Anal Action magazine, telling himself that he is looking to see if it is what he thinks it is. He opens the magazine at random and finds himself faced with a full-page photograph of a penis inserted halfway inside a woman’s rectum. The woman’s unoccupied vulva is visible too, but no other part of either protagonist. There is something shocking but also almost abstract about the picture. So much has been left out. The picture does not describe sex or evoke it; it doesn’t make Mr Phillips imagine what that would be like to do, merely leaves him numb in the face of its having been done. The colours – the healthy pink of the woman’s bottom, the darker purply pink of the man’s penis and the bruised reddish-brown aureole of the penetrated anus – are almost the main feature. The photographer’s task, his face and camera pressed close to the flesh of the performers, must have been a strange one. Mr Phillips feels dazed, aroused, oddly flat.