Mr. Phillips Read online

  Mr Cartwright said that his brother who was in the Army had been to stay and had been woken up by the noise every night for a week. His brother had then suggested that they should get hold of a ground to air missile and shoot an aeroplane down. He said that air traffic into Heathrow would drop away dramatically afterwards. Mr Cartwright said that he had been looking into the possibility of acquiring a ground to air missile, purely from the feasibility point of view, and that the most promising source appeared to be the Stinger missiles which the CIA had given to the Mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan during the 1980s. He said that the CIA had supplied a thousand missiles, of which about 700 had been used and that they had shot down over 500 Soviet planes and helicopters, which was an impressive strike rate. The CIA had tried to buy back the missiles at a rate of US$1 million each but many of them were still in the hands of the guerrillas.

  Mr Phillips reminded other members that the budget for Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch for the current year was £47, most of which went on photocopying and biscuits.

  Mr Cartwright conceded the point but said that the Mujahedeen might be willing to give them a missile once they explained what it was for. He added that the guerrillas could be shown a map of Wilmington Park, just at the end of the road and always deserted at night, and they would see that it was an ideal point from which to launch a Stinger missile at a plane flying only a couple of hundred feet overhead.

  Mr Davis-Gribben wondered who would go and get the missile and how it would be brought back.

  Mr Cartwright said that he would go and get the missile. His first wife, with whom he was still on good terms, was a Mrs Khan whose family were from Lahore. He could go and visit them before making a side trip to Afghanistan. He said that he had consulted a map and that it was not far. He would smuggle the missile over the border into Turkey where it would be collected by his cousin Roger, a long-distance lorry driver who often did the Ankara route.

  Mr Tomkins wondered what would happen if the plane were shot down and it landed somewhere inside the borough of Wandsworth. If there were a disaster in the borough would it not place enormous financial strain on local services and result in much higher council tax bills?

  Mr Phillips said that to the best of his knowledge the cost of these sorts of disaster was borne by central government. He wondered if the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch ought to send a warning as to the action they intended to take, so that it was correctly interpreted as a protest against the aircraft noise and not claimed for their own handiwork by unscrupulous terrorists? Mr Cartwright agreed but Mr Davis-Gribben and Mr Morris did not. Mrs Wu pointed out that there was no hurry to resolve this point.

  1.3

  Mrs Phillips shifts in bed and Mr Phillips holds still so as not to wake her. The bed this morning smells warm and slightly sweaty, though not of almonds. That smell is much, much less common than it had once been. These days there is probably no need for the spermicide, Mr Phillips thinks, given that he is fifty and Mrs Phillips is … forty-six. (When he thinks of his wife’s age he always has a split-second flash of panic while he checks the date. Birthday, 14 October 1948; today’s date, 31 July 1995 – phew. Two months plus still to go. And nearly six months till the wedding anniversary, 14 January. Mr Phillips has a recurring fear that one day he will remember one of these dates only to find that it is too late, he has already forgotten it, notwithstanding its red-inked presence in the diary and in the reliable memory of Karen, and he will be involved in an orgy of self-abasement and apology and also the nagging doubt about why he had forgotten – was the marriage running out of steam, or was his memory fading, or both? Marriage being, like the religion Mr Phillips gave up long ago, a matter of both faith and works, of sustained will-to-belief and routine observances, both being necessary and neither sufficient.)

  One day the almond smell will become a thing of the past, gone for ever. Is anyone to blame, wonders Mr Phillips, or is this just what happens? He has discovered that there is a great secret about sex, a secret that far exceeds the other secrets that surrounded it when he was looking forward to it in youth – when sex was a country of possibility, the territory of films and pop music, the most forbidden, most exciting thing in the world. Sex itself was a secret into which you were initiated once and for all; everything about it was to do with secrets, some of which weren’t true (‘a girl can’t get pregnant unless she comes’, ‘if you wank too much you’ll go blind’) and some of which, it turned out, were true (like the fact that it was the best thing in the world). But all those secrets are as nothing compared to the real secret, the truth no one wants to tell you and which even adults don’t discuss or admit, and which, like all important secrets, is surprising and radical and obvious: it is that no one ever does it. This isn’t strictly true, of course: some people do do it – but as a maxim, the idea that no one ever does it is certainly much, much more true than the opposite claim, that everyone does it all the time. No one Mr Phillips knows ever does it, anyway; not his horrible immediate boss Mr Mill or his horrible ultimate boss Mr Wilkins, not his colleagues, Aberdonian Mr Monroe or young Mr Abbot or drunk Mr Collins or bald Mr Austen; not his neighbours, the Cartwrights on the left (who instead have noisy, drunken bi-monthly Friday or Saturday night arguments) and the Cotts on the right (who are, however, in their seventies, so their obviously-not-doing-it-ness is both taken for granted and gratefully received, and you don’t even have to think about them doing it), certainly not the Davis-Gribbens’s opposite, who not only don’t now do it but to judge by their childlessness have perhaps never done it, not even once, experimentally or to get it over with or by mistake. What is that brutal old wives’ adage? If you put a penny in a jar for every time you did it during the first year of being married, then took a penny out for every time you did it thereafter, the jar would never become empty. Cruel but fair, thinks Mr Phillips. The accountant in him likes the fact that the size of the jar doesn’t have to be specified.

  So how often do we do it, he wonders; seriously, how often? It’s hard to get an exact figure because everything human tends to go in clumps. It’s like football, where teams go from a losing run to a winning run and you find that one minute Crystal Palace (Mr Phillips’s team) have gone six games without a win and the next they’ve gone five without conceding a goal and the next they haven’t been beaten at home since February. Everything is like that. They haven’t done it since the day that Thomas fell off his mountain bike and broke his arm, which is five and a bit weeks ago. Mr Phillips got the call to go and collect him from Casualty on a Saturday afternoon – a flashback to the boys’ childhoods, when it seemed that he spent half his time ferrying them back and forth to hospital with bone-breaks and sudden allergies, and the time Martin had bitten the thermometer in half and the nurse very surprisingly had said it was nothing really to worry about. Perhaps there was some complicated flashback aspect to their doing it that night? But they had also done it three days before that, after drinking a bottle of champagne which one of Mrs Phillips’s pupils had given her to celebrate passing Grade Eight piano. So on the basis of that week’s statistical blip they do it twice a week, which is almost the national average, though Mr Phillips is professionally suspicious of that figure.

  He had once mentioned these doubts to Mr Monroe.

  ‘I have never been at all confident of the numbers which tend to be mentioned,’ Mr Monroe had said. He is a well organized former pipe-smoker with a dry, tight, friendly voice. He likes to talk, not in a running commentary on the day’s events, as some office-sharers in Mr Phillips’s experience preferred to do, but in chunks, as if he had settled down with his pipe. ‘The unreliability of all self-reporting statistics is something which need only be mentioned to be seen as decisive. In this particular case, when you bear in mind the number of single people, children, grandmothers, widows, priests and nuns and incarcerated felons, Highlanders in their distant crofts, the impotent, not forgetting the irreparably hideous, the
proposed national average of twice or twice and a half or even three times a week seems to me to be a lubricious fantasy.’

  ‘To make up the numbers you’d have to have some people somewhere doing it fifty times a day,’ said Mr Phillips. He and Mrs Phillips, realistically, did it probably once a month, a level to which they had dropped gradually but with a couple of marked dips when Martin and Tom were born. They had been out of their minds with fatigue, opportunities seemed nonexistent, and suddenly they were that thing which when you were younger you never imagined possible: too tired for sex.

  In fact, they had hardly been doing it at all when Mrs Phillips conceived Thomas, nine years younger than Martin – once a fortnight perhaps (twenty-six times a year, therefore a 26 in 365 chance of doing it on any given day). Mr Phillips remembers the sex well, after a Christmas party at the Walters’s – he being a colleague who subsequently transferred to Cardiff and was never heard of again. Mr Phillips had only just been sober enough to maintain a viable erection, but had been drunk enough to be very keen on the idea of sex, an excitement partly derived from the sight of other men’s wives, especially Mrs Walters, who wore a backless dress that showed off bony shoulders and a liverous freckly back and was ugly/sexy in the same way Miss Pettifer had been in last night’s dream. Her face seemed to have been put together absent-mindedly – nose just too high, or mouth too low, bunched male-looking lips, thick eyebrows, somehow monkey-like. She had stood so close, while talking to Mr Phillips in the party crush on the Walters’s ludicrous jungle-dense fitted carpet, that he could feel the warmth rising off her body; if he had been someone else he might have made a pass. Instead – Thomas, now asleep in his cave-like bedroom.

  Mr Phillips had mentioned the figure of once a month to Mr Monroe, and they had agreed to treat this purely hypothetical example to some number-crunching.

  ‘Once a month is twelve times a year,’ said Monroe, tapping at his Psion organiser. ‘Twelve divided by 365 multiplied by 100 gives a 3.28767 per cent chance of our hypothetical couple, let’s call them our virtual couple, having sex on any given day, or to put it another way, on the same given day there is a 96.71233 per cent probability of their not having sex.’

  ‘Not that people always do it the same amount,’ said Mr Phillips. ‘It sort of comes and goes.’

  ‘Aye, to be completely accurate you would have to build in the way the probability changes over time, and allow for the fact that the day after doing it the probability of doing it again will be very low, 1 per cent or less, gradually rising over time to a few weeks later when it might almost become more likely than not, say 50.01 per cent, or if your chappie spends three months in Antarctica or in prison or something, a well-nigh racing certainty.’

  At the moment, the closest to a sure thing in Mr Phillips’s sex life is the fact that they almost always have sex, or make love, or fuck, or – to use the phrase Mr Phillips uses in his innermost being, the basic, fundamental plumb level of his attitude to sex – ‘do it’ after going to see a film. Any film, not just sexy ones. Afterwards, Mrs Phillips is demonstrably keener on the idea and Mr Phillips himself is readier for it, as if psychic sap had irresistibly risen while he was sitting peering forwards in the crowded dark. Perhaps it is nothing more than the body heat of strangers, or the tacit admission of a universal appetite for voyeurism; in Mr Phillips’s view, no one who has ever been to a film can claim that he doesn’t like to watch. Or perhaps that the faces on screen were magnified and close, all their grain visible, in the way that only faces during sex are close; the only time we ever see each other in such detail and with such urgency. (In Mr Phillips’s opinion, the sexiest film ever made was The Railway Children, though he knows you aren’t supposed to say that.) But they only went three or four times a year. Videos didn’t have the same effect. For a moment Mr Phillips wonders what happened when people became film critics. Perhaps they were the people who bumped up the averages.

  However, even allowing for the films, Mr Phillips is still left with an average daily probability of 96.7 per cent against having sex. As an accountant, he has to admit that is a pretty grim figure. Was it for this, Mr Phillips wonders, as he rolls on his back and looks up at the ceiling – a Dulux white stained cream-coloured by the sun coming in through the yellow curtains – Mrs Phillips, always a more determined sleeper than he, still far gone by his side – was it for this that he, stranded on the cliff edge of pubescence, had looked forward to adulthood as a limitless ocean of sex? Those years when every allusion to sex, even words like ‘thing’ or ‘it’ or even, God help him, ‘dog’ (because the opposite of ‘cat’, which was cognate with ‘pussy’), could ensure an instant hard-squeezed snigger? Those years of masturbating, of doing it, not to be confused with Doing It, for the years before he got to Do It for real for the first time with Maureen, his first girlfriend at college?

  As for that almond smell, a couple using the cap and having sex a normal amount, whatever that meant, have a 94 per cent chance of not making a baby by the end of a given year. If he and Mrs Phillips did it once a month and the supposed average was ten times a month (2.5 times a week times four weeks), notwithstanding Mr Monroe’s justified scepticism about that figure, then they did it a tenth of the average. Their ages made it even less likely, say a tenth as likely as when they were fully fertile. So their chance of conception was 10 per cent of 6 per cent, i.e. 0.6 per cent, i.e. not very high. When you took into account the fact of their age, the cap seems not so much a necessity as a votary tribute to the biological forces that are wavering and flickering inside them like broken pilot lights. In any case, for all these reasons, that almond smell is a lot more rare than it used to be.

  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.

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bsp; 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.