John Lanchester - Mr. Phillips

‘You smell of smoke,’ Mrs Phillips said when he came in. She had repeatedly offered to help.

‘Just a few odds and ends,’ said Mr Phillips, thinking of his momentary panic when a fragment of burning girl — the upper half of a blonde with big tits, his father’s type — had begun to rise on the flames, up to head height, so that for a second it looked as if she might be carried away on the breeze into a neighbour’s garden, until the updraught of hot air failed her and she sank, charred and unrecognizable now, just beyond the outer edges of the pyre.

Mr Phillips is now standing across the road from a shop that has the word Videos written in dark crimson on a pink shutter; it also has the plastic curtains which seem big in this market sector. Beside the shop entrance is another doorway with a flight of stairs visible inside it. The word Films is written above the lintel. People are milling about, apparently not paying much attention to one another, in that deceptive London way which can mean that they aren’t paying attention, or that they are sizing each other up. Sex and violence are always possible. Two men in shorts and vests, both with cropped blond hair, walk past. Mr Phillips has to concede that they are better dressed for the weather than he himself is. Another man, squat and cheerful, is standing beside the sex shop calling out ‘ Big Issue’ and holding a copy of the magazine in front of his chest as if he were advertising not it but himself.

Mr Phillips takes his courage in his hands and crosses the street, pushes through the curtain and goes into the sex shop. It is a square box of a room with magazines on two walls, a display cabinet on the third and a counter on the fourth. There are two other customers, both men, and a bored, grumpy fat man at the till. Both of the men are leafing through magazines with a flushed listlessness.

Mr Phillips moves over to one of the stands of magazines while casting sideways looks at the third wall, which seems mainly to consist of objects made to look like penises — dildoes and vibrators. There is also a box with the words ‘edible underwear’ written on it, another box labelled ‘tit clamps’ and a third box that says simply ‘one size fits all’. One or two of the dildoes are remarkably big — in context, perhaps the biggest things Mr Phillips has ever seen. It is a long time since he has seen penises in any significant numbers, since the showers at St Aloysius’s in fact, but his memories on the point are pretty clear, and they are that although penises look very much unlike each other, more so than even their owners (if that was the word), they don’t vary all that much in size — especially when compared to breasts, which vary wildly, and in wholly unpredictable ways. Small girls have big tits, big girls have invisible tits, and every permutation in between, most of them employing the three basic shapes of the dome, the turret, and the hillock. Penises are not like that. In the language of statistics, they are tightly grouped about the mean. So these dildoes in Mr Phillips’s opinion are at the least statistically unrepresentative or at the worst wild flights of fantasy.

A large sign over the magazine rack says ‘Try Before You Buy is Not Our Policy.’ Mr Phillips feels too shy to actually pick up any of the magazines so he merely stands and looks at the covers. Dutch Hardcore xxx is the name of the magazine that the man next to him is reading. He is wearing a black donkey jacket and seems half asleep. There are many titles that would have suited Mr Phillips’s father. Big Tits, Jugs, Hooters! and Party Tits are some of the examples. Mr Phillips thinks he can confirm his impressions about unrepresentative penis size by looking at one of the gay or hardcore magazines, but he doesn’t feel quite strong enough. Cautiously, with a growing sense that he is doing something he is not supposed to do, he reaches out for a copy of Anal Action magazine, telling himself that he is looking to see if it is what he thinks it is. He opens the magazine at random and finds himself faced with a full-page photograph of a penis inserted halfway inside a woman’s rectum. The woman’s unoccupied vulva is visible too, but no other part of either protagonist. There is something shocking but also almost abstract about the picture. So much has been left out. The picture does not describe sex or evoke it; it doesn’t make Mr Phillips imagine what that would be like to do, merely leaves him numb in the face of its having been done. The colours — the healthy pink of the woman’s bottom, the darker purply pink of the man’s penis and the bruised reddish-brown aureole of the penetrated anus — are almost the main feature. The photographer’s task, his face and camera pressed close to the flesh of the performers, must have been a strange one. Mr Phillips feels dazed, aroused, oddly flat.

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.