John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

Mr Phillips decides to go for a pee, not so much because he needs one, more as a precaution. The fact of his not needing one, itself unusual, is a sign of how hot the day is, how much he must be sweating. He weaves through tables towards the back of the restaurant where the loos are. The place is thinning out now, and about half the tables are empty, people reluctantly dragging themselves back to work; of the lunchers who stay behind, a fair few of them look as if they are set for the long haul, with second or third bottles of wine being broached, brandies appearing, chairs being pushed back. Two of the tables have what look like courting couples sitting at them, holding hands and looking at each other. None of them seems at all married. Or not to each other, anyway. In the case of one couple, the man is at least twice his girlfriend’s age. Lucky devil! Well done! If he is married to someone else, he must be confident that this is the kind of place he can come to without any news of what’s going on getting back to anyone who knows him. Given that there must be a couple of hundred people passing through the restaurant at any one mealtime, that would seem to Mr Phillips to be a statistically significant risk.

The toilets are down a little white-walled corridor. Mr Phillips has a faint dread about whether or not he will be able to tell the Gents and the Ladies apart, but in the event it is straightforward: the Gents is demarcated by a cartoon dandy holding a monocle to his eye with his left hand and brandishing a cocked duelling pistol in his right. He wears a top hat and tails and a confident, supercilious expression. So that’s easy enough, even though anyone who looks less like Mr Phillips feels would be hard to imagine. The Ladies has a woman in a huge hooped ball gown that she is ever so slightly hitching up to reveal a glimpse of well-turned ankle.

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.

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.