‘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’.
‘Clothes are a sign of the Fall not because they conceal our God-created nakedness but because they provoke desire,’ says a Caribbean woman’s voice immediately behind Mr Phillips’s right ear. He turns around. It is the Jehovah’s Witness, who has been watching him watch the girl and is now looking at him with real hostility.
‘Sorry,’ says Mr Phillips.
Most of the younger people seem to have arrived independently, on foot and via public transport. Older people come in coach parties. A seventyish couple, looking very thoroughly used to each other, are leaning together puffing as they recover from having climbed down the steps of their coach. On the steps outside the front of the museum several dozen younger people, foreign-looking (darker skin, different clothes), are sitting chatting, gossiping, smoking, picking each other up, looking at guidebooks and what’s-on magazines, eating crisps and sandwiches and drinking soft drinks, or just staring into space. One girl, whose bobbed black hair circles down at the corners of her face as if putting her expression in brackets, is methodically blowing bubble gum. Mr Phillips remembers that feeling of waiting for something to happen, so strong when we’re young and so hard to recapture afterwards, just as boredom could be like a physical pain while it was happening but was impossible to recover through memory.
Many of the people sitting on the stairs look little more than children. They are certainly a lot younger than Mr Phillips had been before he had any comparable freedom. When Martin went off on his first holiday with friends, at the age of seventeen, Mr Phillips had felt a stab of fear and pity for his youth and vulnerability. Two years (it felt like two minutes) later he was Railcarding around Europe on his own, getting up to who knew what who knew where with who knew whom. It was a hard time for Mr and Mrs Phillips, who had had their patience tested to destruction during Martin’s teenage years. These began late — he had been easygoing and affable right up until he turned fifteen — and then made up for it with the intensity of his fuckedoffness. The anxiety they felt when he travelled was a half-welcome reminder that they did, in fact, after all, love him. Mr Phillips had noticed at the time that as children we all occasionally wish or fantasize that our parents were dead — but the reverse doesn’t apply.
Martin’s six-week trip yielded them four postcards, each of which brought with it a specific and vivid set of worrying images (Amsterdam: drugs! Copenhagen: Aids! Berlin: skinheads! Athens: pollution!), and a single telephone call, from a village in Greece where the only payphone was broken, enabling people to call anywhere in the world for free. He came back with a short and neat beard that had unexpected red bits at the corners of his mouth. That and his eerily deep tan made him look a good five years older. After that trip he was never quite as angry, or as dismissive, or as sullen, or as close to them; it was when he began to leave home. Mr Phillips can’t help wondering what’s in store for the parents of all these children. Somewhere each of them has someone worrying themselves sick.
As in a film or an advertisement, a boy travelling at speed hurtles up the steps past Mr Phillips and down on to the step beside the girl with the Louise Brooks bob and begins kissing her energetically. Mr Phillips has to look away before he finds out what happens to the bubble gum.
For a moment Mr Phillips thinks about queuing for the big exhibition. But long queues, which are always the closest imaginable thing to being dead, are probably not a good idea today. So instead he weaves up the steps and through the revolving doors, behind a waddling man in trainers and a sunhat whose enormous jeans are hitched up to his sternum, and goes into the main gallery.
It is immediately cooler and more noisy than the city outside. Some people are standing in front of the table where bags are being, not very convincingly, searched by a pair of guards in amateurish uniforms which look as if they had been made on a sewing machine at home. This will be all about bombs, presumably, one of those London things you get used to, unless it was also to scan for nutters who wanted to carve paintings up with Stanley knives or spray paint on them or set light to them or whatever. Chop them up with a machete until cornered by the underpaid, half-asleep guards. I’ll take two of you with me!