Mr. Phillips

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.

He does a calculation: the papers publish say seventy pictures of girls with no clothes on a week — a highly conservative figure, given that there’s one every day in the Sun, one in the Mirror, seven in the Sport, one in the Star, plus say another dozen on Sundays, which comes to seventy-two. So that’s 72 times 52 naked girls a year, which is 70 times 50 is 3500 plus 70 times two is 140 is 3640 plus two times 52 is 104 is 3744 naked girls in the newspapers. Then magazines, dirty magazines per se, there are dozens: Fiesta, Men Only, Knave, Penthouse, Playboy, Mayfair, also specialist magazines, Asian Babes, big tit mags, fat girl mags, Readers’Wives, you name it; so assume, again super-conservatively, at least twenty-five magazines coming out every week, with say ten girls per issue each, which would probably be more if you allow for smaller pictures in the personals, round-ups, last year’s greatest hits etc, but say ten per issue, which is 25 x 10 = 250 naked girls per week times 52 is 50 times 250 is 12500 plus 2 times 250 is 500 = 13000. When you add the newspaper figure this gives a very very conservative estimate of 3744 plus 13000 = 16744, which is the number of British women happy to take their clothes off for money per annum. All of them, except the specialist interest ones, have bodies like the girl in the photograph that the man has now stopped looking at as he turns the page to begin reading a piece called ‘Hanky-Panky No Thanky! Neighbours’ Spanking Game Keeps Street Up All Night’.

Seventeen thousand people would be a town one and a half times the size of St Ives, where they took their first holiday after Martin was born. So that’s a whole small townful of naked British women among us disguised as normal people. For a moment Mr Phillips is distracted by the idea of his town of nude women going through the day with no men anywhere about, going to do the shopping, washing things, sitting in offices, cleaning windows on those terrifying lift gadgets, their breasts and bums jiggling, some of them looking distinctly chilly which of course makes them go all shivery and pointy-nippled. Did they feel nervous the day the photos came out, of being recognized in the street; or proud, boasting to friends and family? Of course, being recognized could be embarrassing for other people too. I’m sure I know you from somewhere, Mrs Whatsit. Honestly for the life of me I’m quite sure you’re mistaken, Vicar.

Seventeen thousand naked women was a lot of naked women. More than enough for most purposes. Mr Phillips thinks often about what it would be like to have a harem. If you thought about it too much, of course, you would start to become aware of all the possible complications, so the thing was to keep the fantasy as pure as possible: restrict it to the idea of women on tap for sex, as much sex as you wanted, all the time, variety and strangeness freely sanctioned, available. Yum yum! And of course the women would not be women but girls, since that is what men mostly want, all attempts to pretend otherwise notwithstanding. Indeed, one of the first signs of growing older was when you stopped fancying older women. The desperate heat with which Mr Phillips had looked at his teachers, younger friends of his mother’s, anyone, is a still vivid memory. The fantasy was about being taken to bed by an older woman. Mrs Robinson, that was the general idea. ‘Seduced’ was the usual word but it was a bad word since it implied reluctance on the part of him, Mr Phillips. It suggested that he was done unto when all he wanted was to be done. He enters no claims for the originality of the fantasy.

Then he began to notice much younger women, schoolgirls even, sixteen perhaps, but who knew? It’s as if there was one specific moment when you switched from one sort of sexual fantasies to another: you went off to work one day thinking about Anne Bancroft in The Graduate and you came back thinking about Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children. Or perhaps there was a brief, blessed interlude of fancying both or neither, in the way that some men were randy for all women all the time and others seemed to live in a cocoon of sexlessness — which in so many ways would make life simpler. It would be like living in a completely flat country with brilliant public transport and amenities and nothing to complain about.

Eventually, with sadness, he recognized this fantasy switch as a sign of ageing: his genes wanted to impregnate some good young breeding stock and thereby allow their vehicle, his body, to go out on a high note. As far as Mr Phillips is concerned, that’s the beauty of genes, you can blame them for almost anything. The voice inside which says Get a younger one is like the moment in the film where Sean Connery is a policeman investigating a sex crime and he says to his wife, ‘Why aren’t you beautiful?’ Beautiful here was another word for young.

Mr Phillips can remember what must have been almost his first time, the onset of the Younger Woman. She had been a barmaid at the Frog and Parrot on a quiz night about twenty years before, the days when he used to do that sort of thing. She was reaching down to stack glasses on a circular rack inside a dish-washer, her long skirt riding slightly at her waist, her way of folding herself up into a crouch somehow impossible, like origami. Mr Phillips had felt an awful gust of her youth sweep over him, a pure lust to penetrate and corrupt. What was it Tony Curtis said, when asked the secret of eternal youth? ‘The saliva of girls.’ The next thing you knew you were slowing down as you drove past bus stops.

So the harem would have girls for sex. But thinking more, you realized it could not stop there. You would need someone to cook, like Mrs Mitchinson whom Mr Phillips had worked with at Grimshaw’s and who was forever talking about, thinking about, shopping for and cooking, food. Her husband was a small, round, very silent man who always seemed to be smiling. Mr Phillips had only eaten her food twice and still remembered it — not that it was fancy or elaborate, roast chicken and apple tart the once, fish cakes and home-made ice cream the next, but so vivid, like alchemy. As for the sex part, it wasn’t what you would first think of with Mrs Mitchinson, she was low and round like her husband, with a bright red face, one of those Russian dolls, but it would be clearly part of the deal and you would have to keep your side of the bargain, not every night of course, that was the whole point of the harem arrangement, but at least every six months or so. Although perhaps you would have an off-limits granny or two, to keep order and boss the servants (who would be part of the harem too) and help with the inevitable baby-sitting. He would have his secretary Karen, obviously, to help with accounts and household expenses (Mrs Phillips would appreciate that), but also for sex, perhaps at the same time, having her bent over the desk and straightening out papers afterwards — not something Mr Phillips had thought about less than ten thousand times. He would have that Clarissa Colingford, you needed a touch of glamour. Sharon Mitchell would be a blast from the past. Perhaps Tricia the cleaning lady. There would be Superman’s girlfriend, from the TV series, he couldn’t remember her name. But Mrs Phillips would always be wife number one. He owed her that.

A train, one of the small, boxy, graceless, modern commuter types, appears around the bend four hundred yards away and slows into the station. The platformful of passengers assembles around the doors, which wheeze open in a row, and a few dozen people hop out of their carriages, minding the gap, before a couple of hundred others surge onto the train. Like most experienced commuters, Mr Phillips has a variety of techniques for seizing somewhere to sit, sneaking in around the side of the door and sliding into one of the jump-seats or barrelling down to the far end of the compartment, through the thickets of passengers, briefcases, newspapers, outstretched legs. Today though he is content to strap-hang, or not worked-up enough to fight for a seat. The battle for a space prepared you for, was an allegory or image of, the daily struggle. You could argue that those who fought their way to the seats were the people who needed them least. To them that hath shall be given, that was the deal.

Clinging to his metal post by the door Mr Phillips looks around the compartment and wonders if he is the only person here who isn’t on his way to work. Eighty percent of the men in the compartment are wearing suits and ties. They all look tired. Office people heading in to work look tired at the beginning of the day and febrilely energetic, in a hurry to escape, on the way home. It’s as if the thought of work drains them of vigour whereas leaving work gives them a jolt of it. Mr Phillips is no stranger to that feeling himself: his heart is always lighter on the trip down the steps from Clapham Junction at the end of the day than on the trip up them at the beginning.

A young man sits across from him in jeans and a black T-shirt with the words Rage Against the Machine written on it. He chews gum mechanically, like a cow chewing the cud, and he is stubbly, looking into space; perhaps he isn’t going in to work. But no, the gum chewer reaches into a back pocket and takes out a tiny mobile phone. Like every mobile phone conversation Mr Phillips has ever heard, this call is largely about the fact of its own occurrence. He wants to eavesdrop on people saying ‘Sell, sell, sell! Unload it all now!’ or ‘What do you mean, am I fucking Janet?’ or ‘It’s you who’s the spoilt one!’ but all he ever hears is ‘I’m at the bus stop / in the street / on the mobile / on my way / late / early / nearly there’ or as in this case:

‘Yeah — me. Yeah, I’m on the train. Yeah, be there in plenty of time, we’ve just left the Junction. Yeah, bye.’ The youth puts the mobile back into his pocket and wriggles his buttocks on the plastic train seat in a pleased way. Mr Phillips feels a moment of loathing hit him like indigestion.

No sooner has the train accelerated for forty seconds or so than it begins to slow down. The terrain outside has the low, scruffy, nowhere-in-particular feel of generic South London: a furniture warehouse, the backs of houses, a Baptist church. On the other side of the train tracks a billboard directed at returning commuters says ‘If you lived here you’d be at home by now.’ A few passengers put newspapers away, arrange their bits and pieces and prepare to push towards the doors or brace themselves in preparation for standing up.

The train squeals to a halt, people get off, and further knackered-looking people in work uniform get on. Mr Phillips is a non-combatant, he again doesn’t enter the contest for seats. The train is properly crowded now. A thin, pointy-faced woman in spinster’s clothes, close to Mr Phillips’s age, has insinuated herself between him and the wall of smeared transparent plastic that separates the standing-room-only door area from the seats and the rest of the compartment.

Mr Phillips takes the view that many human capacities — courage, strength, will-power, luck, sex-appeal — are finite, that you draw against an unreplenishable fund of them like capital left in a bank, so that when they’ve gone they’re gone for ever. Today is one of those days when he feels that his capacity for self-assertion is finite, so that if he uses some up now he may not have any available later.

We condition ourselves very hard to screen out the details of our enforced city intimacies. Oh, but it’s hard sometimes. Today Mr Phillips can smell the heated deodorant of the pole-gripping man standing next to him, the armpit-warmed chemical odour of what at the boys’ school was called ‘Poof Spray’. He can see the grain on the skin of a girl standing eighteen inches away from him reading the problem page of a folded magazine and see also the slight psoriatic redness and scurf where her hair is scraped thinly upwards at the nape of her neck. Two walkmen are competing in the standing area, both tinny and tinnitic, their owners a black boy in a sweatshirt and a white woman with purple lipstick. Martin says that walkmen are the worst thing you can do for your hearing, so both these people are presumably going deaf, though not quickly and completely enough to suit Mr Phillips. The noise always makes him think of insects.

Although there is a gust of new oxygen when the train doors open, the air inside the compartment feels as if it has been breathed and rebreathed, recycled through lungs, picking up bacilli, viruses, tiny minute droplets of mucus and lining and bad breath and stomach gases, the feet and farts and crotch-whiffs of everyone in the train, going round and round their respiratory systems before being passed on to the next commuter. It’s like that story about the water in London having been through three people’s urinary tracts before it’s finally drunk (which Mr Phillips has seen denounced as a fiction by a bald man from the water company, the same one who was always going on about how little water there was in the reservoirs). But even if it wasn’t true it felt true and tasted true, and even more so for the air.

Looking at the number of people in here, it simply does not seem possible that there is enough oxygen to go around. Especially if the train stops — which now, as Mr Phillips is thinking these thoughts, it does. London trains have many different kinds of stop: a tremulous, we-could-be-off-at-any-moment, champing-at-the-bit kind of stop (often very deceptive, since the train can stay in this condition for minutes, even hours); the exhausted, clanking, what-is-it-this-time, why-won’t-the-others-get-out-of-my-tunnel, never-quite-getting-up-to-full-speed-without-coming-to-a-halt-a-few-seconds-later stop (which can give the feeling that a secret mechanism forces the train to stop for a specified number of minutes every time it exceeds a certain speed); the much feared, horribly disconcerting total blackout mid-tunnel stop; and, as in this case, the heavy, final, definitive quiet of the stop that makes it clear right from the outset that it’s going to be a long one. It is impossible not to speculate about what has happened. A suicide? Surely not in rush hour. Nobody could be that thoughtless. A mechanical failure? And if so, what kind — malfunctioning signal, erratic signal light, wonky track, broken-down train, power cut? Or something cataclysmic, like a fire? Thank God they aren’t underground, in a tunnel. (Mr Phillips’s personal record stuck underground is an hour and a half.) The supply of oxygen wouldn’t be infinite, that stood to reason, so just how finite was it?

Perhaps the most oppressive thing is the silence, not just the silence of the train but the silence inside the compartment. Quite a few people must be experiencing acute discomfort — choking fantasies, oxygen terrors, panics about fainting, urgent intimations of imminent mortality, detailed scenarios about passing out, falling, knocking their heads and pissing themselves — but no one shows it. This in its way is as unnerving as if people were bursting into tears and shouting ‘We’re all going to die!’ It is a more British version of the same thing.

Mr Phillips can feel himself swaying and bouncing with the blood supply to his feet. Somewhere in the world there are yogis and fakirs and shamen who have the ability to banish this sort of thing from their minds. He tries to make himself drift off into thinking about his imaginary Neighbourhood Watch meeting. But it just isn’t comfortable enough inside the train compartment, which is hot both with the sunlight and with the body heat of people in suits. The girl with scraped-back hair is looking pink with the warmth, and she isn’t the only one. At the offices of Wilkins and Co., where the windows can’t be opened and the air-conditioning doesn’t work properly, it will be an uncomfortable day with even Mr Mill’s secretary, saintly shy Janet, looking like she wouldn’t mind doing a bit of complaining. In summer she wears sleeveless dresses which give you glimpses of armpit and sometimes the preliminary foothills of flesh swelling like the lower slopes of a volcano at the side of her breasts.

The train judders into motion again and Mr Phillips decides on impulse to get off. After all, it’s not as if I’m going anywhere. Every single person on this train is going to work except me, thinks Mr Phillips, but then he squashes the thought down with an almost physical effort and as he does so pictures to himself an elephant sitting on a small mound of cardboard boxes and flattening them, with bits of polystyrene exploding everywhere.