The schoolgirl in the front seat seems to be reaching a similar verdict about the tramp sitting next to her. He has said something to her that made her laugh, and she is now chatting to him, apparently happily. In fact she is smiling and giggling as he speaks. It is easy to see that if you were a funny tramp, that would give you an advantage over other tramps, Mr Phillips could recognize that. Humour is a help in almost any walk of life.
Mr Phillips has been on board the bus for about half an hour. In that time they have travelled roughly a thousand yards. His body feels as if it is secreting packets of heat about itself; when he shifts in his seat a moist, intimate gust of ball-sweat wafts up to his nostrils. But after having been completely immobile for several minutes, the bus finally squeezes over into the right-hand lane and chugs past the obstacle that has been blocking traffic. This is a huge hole in the ground, surrounded by plastic sheeting, out of which water is boiling on to the surface of the road. A group of workmen stands around the hole in bright orange safety vests and helmets. Burst water main? It is probably something to do with those miles and miles of stinking, crumbling, brick-lined Victorian sewers, each awash with everything from sink slops to rainfall run-off to plastic bags, tampons, pet frogs, coagulating kitchen fat, all the stuff people flush and wash away, not of course forgetting every imaginable variety of urine and excrement. The mad Religious Education teacher at school, Mr Erith, whose pupils would often sit listening half aghast and half trying not to giggle as he ranted on about his favourite subject, sin (he was the only teacher in the history of teaching for whom the word sin was a sure-fire, guaranteed successful red herring, leading to a forty-minute speech on the subject) — Mr Erith had liked to quote to his blushing and sniggering charges St Augustine’s words that we are born inter urinam et faeces.
‘Don’t be deceived into thinking that these are technical terms,’ Mr Erith had added, his height and width and not-quite-clerical black suit adding to both the comedy and the menace he always projected. There were rumours of the usual lurid schoolboy sort around Mr Erith, and they all contained this combination of the ridiculous and the sinister. He had been an Army chaplain who was kicked out after going on the rampage and killing an enormous number of Germans, rending them limb from limb with his bare hands. (Mr Phillips had done the sums and this didn’t quite work — Mr Erith, in his mid thirties during the late fifties, would have had to have been one of the British Army’s rare teenage padres.) He had been an Olympic level discus thrower who gave up athletics for God before being given up by God in his turn and leaving the seminary to become a teacher. He had been kicked out of priest’s school for holding seances. He had been kicked out for beating up another seminarian, after an argument about theology and/or women. He had been kicked out for beating up the college principal, who had rigged the exams so that he failed because the principal had worked out that he was having an affair with his wife. Those were the sorts of rumour.
‘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.