The Planner (16 page)

Felix, who hadn’t even bothered to ring his advertising agency, was eating a cooked breakfast.

‘We have a long and challenging day ahead of us,’ he said. ‘It is important to stock up on all the food groups now. You’re unlikely to eat much later.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said James, who had undertaken some desk research. ‘I know it suppresses the appetite. Is that breakfast any good?’

‘It’s magnificent. I try to come here at least once a week. This is the best cafe in Notting Hill, and it’s our duty as citizens to protect it when consumers won’t. I’m worried that it’s going to get destroyed by capitalism – all the rents are going up. You know about this stuff. Maybe the council could save it?’

James shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not a listed building, or a school or anything.’

‘That’s the problem with planners – you’re always protecting the wrong things, the things that no one actually likes.’

‘Legally, we can’t protect this as a cafe. I expect it’s got A3 usage, so you don’t need permission to turn it into any other restaurant or coffee bar.’

‘So you can’t stop the landlord from shutting it down and doing something else with it?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be straightforward to turn it into a chemicals factory or a bank or make it residential. I’d have to check the borough’s local development framework. That’s the crucial thing.’

Felix shook his head. ‘No, that’s not the crucial thing at all. The crucial thing is that it stays exactly like it is and continues to be run by the same inbred Armenian family, who know how to make decent all-day breakfasts.’

‘You’re mixing use with ownership. Planners can’t make a judgement on who owns buildings, only the different uses they put them to.’

‘Well, what about if the government owns them?’

‘We don’t really own all that many buildings any more. We certainly wouldn’t own the lease on a cafe like this.’

‘In that case, your whole profession is fucked. Ownership is everything. If you don’t own anything then you’re nothing.’

They walked to Felix’s car. It was, and James should have guessed this, elderly, French and battered – the smallest and least expensive car on the street. It was like the pieces of public art that accompanied new shopping centres: an expression of non-market values, paid for out of the proceeds of consumerism. James was not necessarily any closer to having his own worldview, but he was at least getting better at understanding Felix.

They drove off and left the knowing streets of Notting Hill with its pink and blue houses, dark velvet bars and retail follies run by the wives of investment bankers. They crossed the West Way and continued north-west, beyond the Georgian terraces and Victorian villages. They travelled between the disputed territories of Kilburn and Kensal Rise and into Willesden with its food wholesalers and less fashionable ethnic minorities. They went on, passing Cricklewood, which James had always found difficult to interpret, and through Wembley’s uncompetitive light-industrial base.

Further still they went, until the roads widened out, the speed limits rose, the cars got bigger and they were somewhere else al­together: they were in Metroland. James knew it well – not from direct experience, but from the books he’d read, and the things his lecturers had told him. Terrible things. For this was London’s Wild West – unplanned, unregulated, manically constructed by speculators before Patrick Abercrombie and his men at the County Council had tamed the city, bound it with Green Belt and stopped it from eating England. But what had been done couldn’t be undone: Uxbridge, Stoneybridge, Ruislip, Harrow Town, Ickenham – they would be here for ever now. The permasuburbs, more enduring and solid than the city they had come from, as if it was London itself that was the afterthought, the shanty town in the centre that wouldn’t stay still.

As James knew, it had happened very quickly – no more than twenty years – for private investors can do bad things so much faster than public investors can do good things. And everything had been set-up for them, largely of course
by
the public sector, who had constructed an Underground line, new arterial roads, energy supply lines and beautiful train stations – everything the developers had needed. In no time at all they had built tens of thousands of semi-detached houses that were perfectly designed to make money. Beloved by house buyers, estate agents, mortgage lenders. Beloved by
Laura
, and all those people who didn’t know anything about town planning.

And ever since then, all those new families on moderate incomes and long-term fixed-rate mortgages had come here with their pet goldfish and made decisions entirely on the basis of their own desires, unconstrained by planning restrictions and with the sole purpose of increasing their individual happiness. They had built porches, bought plastic window frames, decorated facades with replica Tudor beams, covered their brickwork in stone cladding, poured concrete over their front gardens and stuck satellite dishes on their roofs.

‘I can’t bear this part of London,’ said James. ‘The way it just goes on and on, and with all these bloody awful people.’

‘I won’t hear anything against them,’ said Felix. ‘These are my tribe. I may not interact with them on a personal level, but these are the people whom I am paid to relate to. There wasn’t really even an advertising industry until they came into being.’

But it was more difficult for James to take an objective perspective. Largely because he was one of them, James couldn’t abide the lower-middle classes. It had taken a long time and quite a lot of money for him to learn this, and to learn to be suspicious of his own tastes and values. But now he knew better. He was a planner, and one of the things he was paid to do was to have opinions and make judgements on how horrible other people’s houses were. Although, the strange thing was, driving at forty-five miles per hour on a dual carriageway in the sunshine, it didn’t actually look all that bad.

‘I think part of the problem,’ said Felix, ‘is that cities are never finished, like works of art, and they don’t die like humans. There’s no shape or dignity. London is two thousand years old, and it’s still an unruly adolescent.’

On they went, on and on – across monumental roundabouts, over the mega-junctions, through the town centres that could only be recognised by their one-way systems and beneath road bridges of strategic importance to the national economy. They travelled past lucrative car dealerships, docile industrial parks and under-used public facilities until the air thinned and they were at the very edge. They had gone beyond Harrow, the capital of Metroland, they had gone beyond Pinner and Northwood and, at last, after nearly two hours, they had run out of city.

Now, if there was anything James feared more than the suburbs, then it was the countryside. And if there was anything worse than the countryside, then it was where the two met. A coming together of town and country, but there was no synergy here, no collision even, just a dismal petering out, a leakage of urban waste into the reservoir of England. Ahead, there was space – miles and miles of it – but it was the wrong type. This wasn’t planned space, like the squares or parks that he tried to design and protect. This was bad space, crude space, the kind that lets blasts of wind gather momentum on cold March days, that makes the sky bigger, the earth browner and humans so much smaller. And it was here, in the very last house in London, that Felix’s drug dealer lived. A two-storey, brown-brick house on the end of a terrace, with an untidy front yard and an unvarnished wooden gate that didn’t shut properly.

Felix knocked firmly on the peeling, poignant white door, and they waited for two minutes. There were no more street lights, but in the distance James could see all the ingredients for another metropolitan fuck-up: Portacabins and breeze-block huts, skips half full of rain water and rudimentarily stacked pallet towers, portents of car parks and supermarkets, bowling alleys and multiplex cinemas.

The man who finally appeared looked much like his front door – an unhappy white 35-year old, but his skin was so worn out, it was difficult to precisely guess his age or income. It was likely that he took many of the drugs he sold for a living and that these were accelerating the ageing process. James understood that this was a common occurrence.

‘Marcus – good to see you,’ said Felix. ‘This is my friend James.’

Marcus nodded and, without saying anything, they followed him down a hallway. The house was unnecessarily warm, and Marcus wasn’t wearing nearly enough clothes. All he had on was a large orange T-shirt, ill-disciplined tracksuit bottoms and woollen socks. It was likely that he’d slept in them. Unwisely, Marcus was clean-shaven, for his face was without mystery and didn’t stand up well to scrutiny. It looked soft and in need of protection, made for the indoors, and his eyes were wet. It was not, James would have said, the face of someone who was ever meant to be a drug dealer. And the name Marcus didn’t seem right either. Perhaps he had only got into it after making some fundamental and irrecoverable mistake, like a degree in geography.

Marcus sat back down on a green sofa, not far from an enormous television. There was a duvet in the corner of the room. James wondered how much of the house he ever occupied. At his feet were mugs and spoons, an electric kettle, tea leaves, two jars of instant coffee, opened packets of biscuits, spilt sugar granules, a variety of herbal tea bags and cartons of milk. Collectively, it was the most important feature of the room, possibly the whole house, but there was no offer to make them anything to drink.

‘What would you like then?’ said Marcus.

‘The usual, of course, but it needs to be of the highest quality.’

Marcus shrugged. ‘It is what it is,’ he said.

‘Then we might have a difficulty. The last stuff was particularly useless.’

‘I can’t do much about that,’ said Marcus. ‘I only sell the shit.’

‘I fear that what we have here,’ said Felix, ‘is a particularly striking instance of market failure through information asymmetry.’

‘Is that going to be a problem?’ said Marcus.

‘It was the American economist Keith Arrow, who formulated the concept of information asymmetries,’ said Felix. ‘These are transactions in which one party, almost always the vendor, has more information about the product than the buyer. In such circumstances, there exist opportunities for the vendor to cheat. For while the buyer knows the price of a product, it is only the vendor who knows its true value – its scarcity, efficacy, durability.’

There was a glum silence. If Felix had wanted to do some high-concept sparring over the course of negotiations then he needed to get another drug dealer. Marcus sniffed, he clearly suffered from colds pretty much all of the time, and looked bored. He reached for the remote control and started to flick through some television channels. But it wasn’t, James thought, a negotiating tactic – he just was bored. It was, he could see, probably something of an occupational hazard.

Not in the least discouraged, Felix continued.

‘There are a variety of solutions – regulation, consumer warranties. One could say that my own profession, advertising, is nothing but an attempt to address information asymmetries, or I suppose one could equally argue that the industry exists in order to perpetuate them. But none of these easily apply to the sale of illegal drugs. If your stuff is unsatisfactory or makes me ill I can hardly complain to the government or wave a receipt at you, and it’s not as if you have much in the way of a brand to protect.’

‘So do you want to buy some gear or what?’

‘Yes, but my point is – is it any good?’

‘Well, why don’t you just try some now? I’m not really in the mood for this shit.’

Felix nodded his head. That did seem the obvious answer. Without getting up, Marcus reached down under the sofa and pulled out a wooden box. He rummaged around and handed something to Felix, who went upstairs to the bathroom. In theory, being alone with a drug dealer was a new and socially challenging situation, but James didn’t feel the slightest bit nervous or intimidated. A sign of progress, but also a sign of just how physically unimpressive Marcus was. If anything, James might have been intimidating
him
. Being a cocaine dealer seemed to be as unglamorous and poorly paid as local government. Marcus turned the volume up, and they watched some television together.

‘How long have you lived here?’ asked James.

‘About four years. It’s pretty convenient.’

‘It must be nice and quiet,’ said James.

‘It’s okay. The landlord is an arsehole, but he doesn’t bother me.’

‘Is it expensive?’

‘He charges a fortune, and doesn’t do anything. But the housing benefit covers the rent.’

As he said this, he scratched his scalp and his belly, under his arms and between his legs. In his own house, at least, he made very little effort to seem what he was not. His wrists were thin, but he had a surprising amount of dark hair on his forearms. It was almost certain that he had head lice, a vitamin-D deficiency and fungal skin infections. He was a barbarian, but a weak one – not so much an affront to civilisation as a minor, long-standing problem, something that democratic society would just have to tolerate along with everything else.

‘Have you known Felix for long?’

‘Oh yeah – years. We were at school together for a bit,’ said Marcus.

‘Oh, did you know him well? What was he like at school?’