John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

‘ 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, though 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’.