Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  He closes the magazine and walks out of the shop, sensing glances on his back as he goes. He pushes through the plastic curtain and takes a sharp right U-turn through the door marked Films. A steep, not especially well lit or well maintained flight of stairs leads him upwards into a bigger, hall-like area in which a girl sits behind a kiosk chatting to a heavy-set man in a leather jacket. There are posters for films on the wall. A three-quarters naked woman in a white dress with a very strange hairstyle – it looks as if she had bread rolls in her ears – carrying a science fiction pistol in her left hand and pointing it very close up in front of her mouth, is advertising a film called Star Whores. A woman apparently wearing no clothes is lying head to toe on top of a man, also naked, in front of a flying saucer piloted by a cartoon space alien, with bug eyes and little antennae, who is looking down at them. That one is called Close Encounters of the Sixty-Ninth Kind. A poster frame labelled Showing Today is empty. Mr Phillips, feeling hotter than at any other point in the day, goes across to the kiosk and says to the girl:

  ‘I’d like a ticket for one please.’

  The girl, who is chewing gum, says, ‘Members only.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Mr Phillips, who has a feeling that things are somehow not going to prove quite as simple as he had hoped. He begins to turn away and the girl says, using the kind of voice normally reserved for not very bright children, ‘You can join.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Mr Phillips again. ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty-four hour membership is £8.50.’

  Mr Phillips begins to reach for his wallet.

  ‘Plus the film is £5,’ says the girl, who at one level and despite her apparent detachment clearly enjoys her work. Mr Phillips with sweaty hands passes over a £20 note. She takes a small cash box out of a drawer in her kiosk and puts the £20 under a little tray inside it before counting out his £6.50 change. Is VAT included? Not the kind of question you could ask. She hands over a scrappy ticket torn off a blue roll, like a bus ticket bought from a conductor. She also gives Mr Phillips a piece of cardboard with the words Temporary Member stamped on it. The man in the leather jacket – giving Mr Phillips a hard, I’ll-recognize-you-next-time look, which Mr Phillips feels breaches the porn cinema’s implied and desired ethic of anonymity – tears the ticket in half and lets Mr Phillips through into the small auditorium that is down three or four steps. Thinking about it, Mr Phillips realizes he is either above the sex shop he was in moments before, or perhaps over the shop next door; it is like being in a small grubby labyrinth.

  Mr Phillips is in luck. Afilm is just beginning. It is called Jim MacTool and the Salmon of Wisdom. The lights have gone down and he has to manoeuvre his way to a seat under the glow of the flickering screen. About a dozen men are sitting in the room, each of them carefully self-quarantined in his own group of seats.

  The film is set in a not very convincing version of Ireland, a rugged landscape with very tall trees. Jim, the hero, is played by a large, deeply tanned blond actor with muscles so big they look as if they have been pumped full of air. He wears a kilt, carries an animal fur on his shoulders and wields a club. Mr Phillips feels that the filmmakers can be relied on to get all of these details wrong. Jim is quite game about trying an Irish accent though about half-way through the film he gives up, or was told to stop, and begins speaking American.

  At the start of the film Jim the hero is wandering around on an unnamed quest when he meets a blind old man sitting beside a river with a fishing rod. The man moves to cast his line, loses his footing and falls in, and Jim rescues him. Then they sit around a fire talking. The wise old man tells Jim of his lifelong search for a famous fish called the Salmon of Wisdom. ‘He who shall have first taste of the flesh of this fish shall know the wisdom of all things,’ says the man. So Jim says he will help the man and the man makes him promise that he will let the man have the first bite of the fish once they have caught and cooked it, since only the first bite allows the eater knowledge of all things. Jim agrees.

  The next day the two of them go fishing together and surprise surprise catch a fish which the old man immediately realizes is the Salmon of Wisdom. The two of them fight the fish and land it. The old man, beside himself with excitement, tells Jim to make a fire and settles down to cook the salmon. When the salmon is cooked, Jim goes to take it off the fire but he is over-eager in picking it up and the pain of the heat made him drop the fish into his lap, where it lands in his naked crotch and burns him. He cries out in pain, picks the fish up out of his lap and dumps it into the plate in front of the old man. The old man asks what has happened, and when Jim tells him bursts into tears and says that now Jim’s flesh has been burnt by the salmon he has the secret of wisdom every time he sucks the affected piece of flesh. And Jim explains that he has been burnt in a place he cannot suck and that he is the most wretched of men. ‘No, the second most wretched,’ says the old man, who then drops dead. Jim buries him.

  The next day Jim continues his travels and meets a woman who is weeping at a crossroads. She too is blonde, wearing a big black shawl that is partly wrapped around her head in a sort of cowl. She speaks with a thick American accent. She is sad because she is a widow and because her landlord is going to evict her and she can’t think of anything to do. So Jim is sad with her but then says that maybe he has an idea, and he explains about the Salmon of Wisdom and what has happened and says that although he cannot consult the salmon himself, anyone sucking the affected area will have knowledge of all things. So with great alacrity the beautiful young widow says that she thinks it is worth a try, and sinks to her knees in front of Jim and lifts up his kilt to reveal a penis that seems, like the rest of Jim, to have been lifting weights and exercising. (Was this possible? Surely not. Jim’s penis is large but not comically or terrifyingly so – it is merely very big and rather tanned.) And then the widow slips off her shawl and Jim takes off his kilt, though not his animal fur or his boots, and they have sex in several different ways. The whole Salmon of Wisdom thing is discreetly dropped.

  The disconcerting thing about this is that the sex goes on for as long as the rest of the film hitherto, about ten minutes, and that whereas the acting has been bad but touching in its amateurishness (his accent, her attempts at injecting her speech about the evil landlord with real feeling), the sex is mechanical and professional, and is clearly what the people involved are best at and do for a living, while being at the same time so stylized that it, like the Anal Action photo Mr Phillips has just seen, is almost abstract. Jim holds his body well clear of the Beautiful Young Widow so that the viewers can see his penis penetrating her vagina, as if his cock were a fleshy piston. The close-up footage of the penis going into and out of the vagina, at a steady rate of, according to Mr Phillips’s measurements, about three thrusts per second, is particularly disorientating. The appearance of the act looks completely different from how it feels (assuming that Mr Phillips remembers it correctly). A ten-foot penis going into and out of a two-foot-diameter vagina doesn’t in Mr Phillips’s opinion correspond to any known human sensation. The penis is so sinisterly knobbled and distorted, the vagina and engorged clitoris so repellently slick, that the whole thing looks somehow inhuman; this act, Mr Phillips realizes, is all about hydraulics.

  When younger Mr Phillips would probably have envied this man his work, the endless succession of sex. To spend so much of your life inside vaginas would have seemed hard to beat at nineteen, twenty-four, thirty, even forty. That was when sex seemed like the only thing in the world – which was still, in Mr Phillips’s opinion, a perfectly reasonable view, though not one he continued to share. Now he is better able to imagine pitfalls and difficulties: this being one of the things at which you got better as you got older. Take Aids, for one thing. He worries about it enough on behalf of Martin. The porn stars don’t look or act as if they have given it a thought but then they wouldn’t, would they? And then having to get erections on demand: is there a knack to it or is it a skill you are born with? And if you got an erec
tion on demand did it feel like a normal erection – did you want to do the same things with it – or was it more somehow impersonal, an indifferent appendage for tool-using purposes, like mankind’s famous opposable thumb? And then what would you do about normal sex, would that be distinguishable from work?

  Is this single sex act genuine, with the camera – which swoops in close, hovers above and circles around the coupling couple – being moved in between shots while they stop and start, or is it lots of separate fucks edited together? Mr Phillips knows that he will never know. At the moment of climax, Jim withdraws his penis from the woman, moves up until he is squatting more or less over her breasts, and masturbates until he squirts semen over her huge wobbly breasts while she looks ecstatic, as if this is what she had in mind all along, her very favourite thing.

  The sex in the film has almost no relationship with sex as actually practised but it has important unbreakable rules of its own. Jim does it with a pair of sisters who can’t find a way to raise dowry money, an Indian princess who has been shipwrecked and has to build a boat to sail home, a mother and daughter team in a wattle hut, four nuns who interrupt their own lesbian orgy to – in what quickly becomes Jim’s invariably successful chat-up line – ‘consult the salmon’. All of these encounters end with Jim ejaculating on or over the women. This is evidently a fixed convention of the genre, as securely defiant of actuality as the hero’s unemptyable gun in a Western. It has to be one major difference between sex for recreation and for work, since being able to ejaculate inside someone would in itself count as a major treat. Also, it seems to Mr Phillips, there are fairly obvious variations on the theme of the Salmon of Wisdom that are remaining unexploited, for reasons of taste or lack of imagination: the theme of Jim consulting the salmon for himself, for example, something which double-jointed people, yoga experts etc. were supposed to be able to do. Or Jim’s salmon being consulted by other men, say an undergraduate needing help with his exams. Or even Jim allowing the old man to consult the salmon as an ambiguous consolation prize? Again, there is a sense that the rules of the genre are arbitrarily and too strictly defined. The only one of the actresses who really gets to Mr Phillips is the younger of the two sisters, a dark haired girl whose exciting air of normality is enhanced by the fact that she has smallish breasts and a seemingly less professional attitude to the sex – it looks like her second or third time in front of the cameras, as opposed to her second or third thousandth. Her response to the task of performing cunnilingus on her ‘sister’ (while being penetrated from behind by Jim, naturally) also has something real to it, a reluctance combined with curiosity or the other way around; unless this is what Mr Phillips so much wants to believe that he is making it up. Might it be the first time she has ever kissed another woman’s vagina? She’d said in audition that she was willing to, acted like the request had been no big deal, and was now finding that it was more of an event, physically and psychologically, than she had expected, alien-familiar, fishy-salty-sweet; she looks like someone conscious of being, in a deep inner part of herself, a dirty girl. Mr Phillips likes that. Also, she talks less and makes less noise during sex than the other girls, which also makes her seem more amateurish, which in Mr Phillips’s view, in this context, is a virtue.

  Mr Phillips can feel that he has an erection and at the same time is very embarrassed, while also realizing that it is odd to feel embarrassed while sitting unobservably in the near-dark. He feels that if he were burst in on – by a police raid, for instance – he might literally die of embarrassment. For that reason and because the novelty is beginning to wear off, Mr Phillips gets up, at the beginning of a scene where Jim has fallen in with three other wandering heroes who are all about to come to the rescue of a tribe of Amazon-type women who are having trouble with a sorcerer. Mass consultation of the salmon is clearly about to occur. Mr Phillips sidles, one of the few times in his life he has ever consciously sidled, through the exit, into the dark tattiness of the ticket hall, where the girl is still chewing gum, the bouncer-cum-ticket collector still standing blankly silent. Then he goes down into the full daylit seediness of the street below.

  3.4

  It is half past three. In the office this was Mr Phillips’s least favourite part of the day, the time when, although the bulk of the work day had been successfully got through, often with surprising speed – oh look, it’s twenty to twelve! oh look, it’s five to two! – now that the end was in sight the clock mysteriously slowed down, so that the time between three thirty and five o’clock took what felt like six or seven hours, until 5.01, when the twenty-nine minutes until official going-home time at five thirty rocketed past.

  It always takes Mr Phillips a few moments to adjust when he comes out of a cinema into the daylight. The feeling is voluptuous, sinful. He stands blinking and momentarily at a loss as to what he should do until it is time to go home. The thought of going back and waiting for Mrs Phillips to return from her lessons, which she would do at around five, appears in the distant wings of Mr Phillips’s mind. She would come in, he would tell her what had happened. He catches a glimpse of the idea in the mental equivalent of peripheral vision and the notion scuttles back out of sight.

  While still in the grip of his post-cinema daze, Mr Phillips comes to the end of the street and steps into the roadway without, it has to be admitted, looking left or right. A big white van swerves and comes to a stop about a foot away from him, so that he is looking straight into the face of its driver, which is first pale and then red. If the driver had reacted say .01 of a second more slowly Mr Phillips would have been run over. As part of Mr Phillips’s mind is registering this fact, another part is noting that this vehicle was bound to have been a white van. In London, it always is. It must be either because (a), the vans tended to belong to self-employed small businessmen, who as a type were noted for being aggressive, impatient, right wing, unashamed about tactics of late payment and intimidation; (b), the vans tended to be driven by men working for large companies in some delivery and/or menial capacity, and so because the drivers had no stake in the vans they drove them aggressively, intimidatingly, recklessly, heedless of the full insured capital value; (c), there was something about white vans that made the people who drove them become irrationally aggressive – i.e., white vans made drivers go insane; (d), there was something about white vans that made aggressive men want to drive them – i.e., only people who were already insane drove white vans.

  This particular white van driver winds down his window. Mr Phillips, unsure whether to go backwards or forwards across the road, sees that the man is showing no signs of climbing down out of the van and thumping him. So he continues across the street. As he does so the van driver leans out of his window. Here we go, thinks Mr Phillips.

  ‘Tired of living, cunt?’ asks the man in a neutral voice. He doesn’t wait for a reply.

  *

  Across the road, under the lee of a theatre’s stage door, a man is juggling three – no, four – fire torches. A small crowd has accumulated. They don’t seem to be spectators so much as people who for the moment aren’t doing anything else. The juggler’s face is a distinctive dark brown colour, as if he has spent weeks and weeks out in the sun, and Mr Phillips has the feeling that he has seen him somewhere before. Of course: practising this very morning in Battersea Park. The man now picks up a fifth fire torch from the brazier in front of him. This, juggling with five torches, Mr Phillips knows is astoundingly difficult. The man, older than he looks at first glance – late thirties, perhaps – has a rapt, vacant look for the next thirty seconds or so, as the whirling torches pirouette in mid-air. Then he catches them, more clumsily than he juggled them, puts three of them back in the rack, and slowly, in a much more languorous and lingering way than the businesslike arts of fellation that Mr Phillips has just been watching, puts the other two, one after another, into his throat. When he takes them out they are extinguished. Mr Phillips notices that his erection has gone away. A member of the audience steps forward and drops
a coin into the upside-down hat at the juggling fire-eater’s feet.

  It comes to Mr Phillips that he could set up in business on his own. The words arrive as a sentence, fully formed: ‘I could set up on my own.’ At the same time, it is unclear what precisely that means. He can hardly rent a shop and say ‘Redundant fiftysomething accountant setting out on his own. Watch out, world.’ He would need something specific to offer in the line of goods and services.

  One thing would be to help people with their Income Tax returns and Value Added Tax obligations, or even give tentative savings and investment advice, though before he did that he would have somewhere to acquire a new manner and body language, since you would have to be very credulous to take advice about money from someone so obviously not thriving in his own personal finances. He would have to get a new wardrobe, new suits at the very least, a more modern haircut, office furniture that was either challengingly and interestingly contemporary or reassuringly old, a computer, even a new way of talking – avuncular, doctorly. The Revenue aren’t as bad as people say, honestly, Mrs Wilson. Customs and Excise love a good joke, Mr Hart. Don’t worry, Mr Stavros – bankruptcy means never having to say you’re sorry.