Mr. Phillips

1.4

At about seven o’clock, Mr Phillips hears the dustbin lorry turn into the far end of the street. The dustmen call to each other, shout, bang bins, swear, make noises that are associated with the effort of heaving bags up on to the back of the cart, all the sounds which are always different but always the same. The lorry is part of its being Monday, a process which started last thing at night on Sunday with remembering to put out the rubbish — an action which is more complicated than it once was, since the council now recycles waste, and there are different coloured plastic bags and different weekly schedules for paper and plastics and bottles. Cardboard, however, you still have either to put in with the normal rubbish or take up to the council tip by the dog track, which Mr and Mrs Phillips have formally decided, after doing it what felt like a million times, they can no longer be bothered to do.

The Monday feeling is under normal circumstances a fairly pleasant one, given the pressures exerted by the structure of the standard week: Mr Phillips feels that if he were blindfolded, disoriented, whirled round and round, given mind-altering drugs, deprived of external stimuli and calendars, but was still allowed to keep his mood, he would be able to work out what day of the week it was. Monday, along with its awful back-to-workness, contains a tinge of relief, of the bracing moment after the plunge into the icy pool when we realize the worst of the shock is over. Tuesdays are his least favourite weekday, since they lack the get-on-with-it feeling of Mondays, and at the same time the next weekend is still an impossible way off, and since, in addition, Mr Phillips was once told by a waiter in a Greek restaurant that Tuesdays are unlucky. Wednesdays still have the ghostly presence of school half-days benignly hanging over them. Thursdays are potentially heavy going, but do at least begin the ascent of good spirits that climb further through Fridays, about which Mr Phillips feels the same way as everybody else — Thank God It’s Friday, Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday — and Saturday is simply and gloriously Saturday, also much the most likely night of the week on which to have the monthly fuck. Sunday has its particular stalled feeling, which Mr Phillips is surprised to find has survived the instigation of Sunday trading and the arrival of Sunday football, and still clings to the day, an immovable, heavy, gravitational tug of depressive Sundayness. You could feel the week coming, and it felt bad.

As the dustbin lorry rumbles around the corner at the end of Wellesley Crescent, Mrs Phillips stirs but does not wake. Mr Phillips opens his eyes and decides he is now officially awake. He gets out of bed and pads to the bathroom in his striped pyjamas. When he gets to the mirror he sees that the open button of the jacket discloses a mass of grey and white curling chest hair, two shades further gone than what remains of the hair on his head.

Now, at fifty, Mr Phillips finds that his body — which has served him very well in some respects, only causing him to miss three days of work in his entire adult life — is, if not revolting, then at least acting like a rebellious province, tired of being ignored by central authority. In one absolutely central and literal sense he is ten years old — everything to do with feeling, with emotion, with excitement, with girls, with not being able to stop himself; and in another absolutely central way he feels he is nineteen — everything to do with the body, with its transparency to his will: if he wants to walk across London for a bet, or swim across the Thames at the turn of the tide, or beat up someone who scratches his car with a manly, straightforward right hook. But he only has to look in the mirror, or simply look down, to see his grey hair, his breasts, his sheer fleshiness, especially its outward-sloping, rounded, sagging silhouette. His body isn’t his body, except of course that it is. His crazy religious education teacher at school, Mr Erith, had once embarked on a famous rant about St Augustine’s claim that the penis was proof of original sin because it was resistant to the will and so it was a constant reminder of our disobedience, our fallen state. To Mr Phillips it is much too easy, just blaming his cock. It goes so much further than that. Mr Phillips’s whole body, more or less, is resistant to the will, when it comes to walking up a flight of stairs without getting puffed, or chopping firewood without slipping a disc when they rented a cottage in the country, or even just looking in the mirror and not seeing something which makes him feel queasy.

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?