The Planner (17 page)

‘Not really. He was a dayboy, so we didn’t mix much. Anyway, I didn’t stay there very long.’

They watched some more television. It was the lunchtime news. There had been floods in rural India, food riots in Jakarta and an especially significant assassination in Mexico. But here, in this little terraced house somewhere on the outskirts of Watford, it was safe and warm.

Felix came down the stairs. He was moving swiftly and with great purpose. He didn’t look like someone on drugs, but like a man who needed things around him to happen as quickly and decisively as possible. For the first time since James had known him, he looked exactly like an executive in an advertising agency.

‘Uneventful,’ said Felix, ‘but it will have to do. You’re very fortunate to be operating in such an inefficient market. It better not give us dysentery.’

‘So how much do you want?’

‘I’ll take six grams. That should save me the bother of coming out here for a while. Although, of course, it’s always very good to see you.’

Marcus shrugged. He didn’t seem especially interested one way or another.

‘So I’m expecting a discount on the basis of the size of my order and our long-standing friendship,’ said Felix.

‘Not for six grams,’ said Marcus. ‘That’s not enough.’

‘Well, I’m not buying any more than that.’

There was a silence for thirty seconds or so, but it didn’t feel especially uncomfortable. Marcus lived most of his life not necessarily in peace, but certainly in pauses, during the commercial breaks, or while the tea leaves stewed. While Felix and James stood waiting, he seemed content to sit on his sofa thinking about any number of things, or perhaps nothing at all.

‘Come on, Marcus. Let’s do the deal.’

Marcus shrugged again. ‘Fuck it. Okay. Call it three hundred quid.’

‘Good man,’ said Felix. ‘I’m fine with that.’

‘Okay, wait here.’

Marcus left the room. He went up the stairs and came down again a minute later. It might well have been the only piece of work he would do all day. If it wasn’t for his central heating, thought James, Marcus’s carbon footprint would be impressively low. He returned with a small paper bag, which he handed to Felix, and then sat back down on the sofa. Felix gave him some money, and Marcus put it in his wooden box.

‘See you around,’ said Marcus. ‘Oh wait, I better see you out.’

He walked them to the door, back through the hallway and into the open. The sky had darkened and a breeze had picked up. A day much like any other was coming to a close. James found himself suddenly shivering in the cold air, no longer warmed by Marcus’s overactive, welfare-subsidised radiators.

‘Goodbye,’ said Felix.

Marcus nodded, James nodded back. There were no secret messages in their nods and sighs, just a tacit understanding that communicating in this way was less wearisome. It occurred to James that it was unlikely that he would ever meet Marcus again and, on balance, that this was probably a good thing.

And now, six hours later, James had taken his drugs and was dealing with the consequences. One of the most important was that he had had loads and loads to drink. Overexcited by the drug deal and who knows, maybe even the drugs themselves, James had proceeded to drink five pints of strong lager, brewed by Slovakian monks to a secret fourteenth-century recipe. It had seemed the obvious thing to do. They were in a pub in Clerkenwell with wooden floors. James wasn’t able to say much more than that – it wasn’t his territory and his powers of reasoning were diminished. All he could say for certain was that he was in North, arguably East, London. Disturbingly, and this was something which hardly ever happened, he didn’t even know which borough he was in.

There were seven of them, and although Felix and Carl had jointly coordinated the group for a specific purpose, there didn’t seem to have been any thematic criteria to their selection. There was Olivia, who had been in the restaurant that night with Adam, and who seemed a great deal friendlier than he remembered – but he couldn’t be sure if that was because she was on drugs, or he was. There was Erica, the advertising woman James had met at Felix’s club, and who looked exactly the same as he remembered, except she was wearing trainers. Perhaps, just like the other evening, she regarded this as work.

Carl had brought along two colleagues from the bank: a beautiful boy called Rafael, with dramatic black hair and amber-brown skin, who hardly spoke and may have been intended as a sex offering for one of the women; and Rick who was a terrible little man with dirty fingernails, teeth that were close to ruin and cunning red eyes. He had his own source of drugs and, unlike Marcus, Rick really did look like a cocaine dealer, but he was actually a commodities trader. James had tried to invite Harriet, but she had abruptly left her job and gone to Marrakesh for four weeks.

‘I think,’ said Felix, ‘that all the ingredients are here for a successful evening. The preparation has been thorough. James and I, in particular, need to be congratulated for crossing the entire city region today on everyone’s behalf.’

‘You’ve both done very well,’ said Erica.

‘This is fucking brilliant,’ said Rick.

‘I am so very excited,’ said Olivia. ‘I haven’t been out like this for ages.’

‘I’m
too
excited. Let’s go outside and smoke some weed,’ said Carl. ‘I need to self-medicate a bit.’

James, Felix and some of the others followed him outside, through a side door to the back of the pub, from where there was an alley leading into a small, closed yard set against the walls of a Roman Catholic church, and which didn’t appear on any maps. As James knew, in this part of London history always trumped geography. Five hundred years ago it would have been a designated site for burying religious heretics, witches and plague victims, but it now seemed purpose-built for taking drugs.

Carl produced a joint from his jacket pocket and lit it with a happy flourish. He looked like someone who had taken exactly the right amount of stimulants and narcotics: overconfident, expansive with his thoughts and generous with his cannabis.

‘Do you know why, at some point in the 1990s, London definitively overtook Frankfurt as Europe’s financial centre?’

James shook his head. He didn’t really know what Carl was talking about, and he’d never been to Germany.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ continued Carl, with an extravagant inhalation of the joint. ‘Have you ever been stuck in Frankfurt on a Friday night?’

‘Fuck – yeah,’ said Rick. ‘I defy anyone to find a single good line of coke there.’

Carl handed the joint to James. He looked at it unconfidently, raised it quickly to his lips and inhaled deeply and incompetently – so incompetently that it would either be entirely ineffectual or else leave him comprehensively intoxicated.

‘It’s not just the drugs. It’s
everything
,’ continued Carl. ‘I’ve had to spend whole weeks of my life there. It’s the lack of high-quality bars, the crummy football team, the piss-poor modern art gallery and the fact that everyone is so fucking white. No Jews, obviously, but no blacks or South Americans either. All they’ve got are Turks, who I admit aren’t white, and Poles.’

‘And what’s your point?’ said Erica.

‘My point is, London is the best place to do business, because it’s the best place to do things like this.’

‘You don’t have to tell this to James,’ said Felix. ‘It’s his job – he’s the town planner, remember. If you want to thank anyone for London’s premier position as the world capital of neo-liberalism then it’s him. He’s our great wealth creator. It’s why we mustn’t let him run away to Nottingham.’

‘That’s actually sort of right,’ said James.

‘Fuck – respect, man,’ said Rick, nodding his head gravely.

Felix took the joint and breathed in deeply. There was a moment of peaceful reflection. James felt fairly confident that, despite everything he had done and all the money he had spent, he wasn’t having a bad time.

‘Personally, I was always led to believe that the best place to live in the world was Norway,’ said Felix.

‘Norway? What the fuck are you talking about,’ said Carl.

‘There’s actually a little-known philosophical proof,’ continued Felix. ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that Norway is the greatest country in the world. Wittgenstein only spoke truth. Therefore .
.
.’

‘That’s right,’ said Erica, unexpectedly. ‘Wittgenstein did say that. The syllogism holds.’

‘So do you think I need to worry about capital and labour moving to Norway?’ said James.

‘Christ no,’ said Felix. ‘Do you know how much tax they pay over there?’

Carl looked at them all grimly. ‘That’s the thing about cocaine,’ he said. ‘It makes everyone so fucking
clever
. At this rate, Rick will start speaking in symbolic logic. Come on, let’s go back inside. I need another drink.’

But having come out, James wasn’t now sure if he wanted to go back in. Something had happened to him, something to do with the cannabis, which had cancelled out the cocaine, and suddenly made him question what exactly he thought he was doing here. He wasn’t the great wealth creator at all. He was James Crawley, he worked in town planning at Southwark Council, and he didn’t even know which borough he was in.

He peered anxiously through the doorway. Felix had already made it back to the bar, but James was stuck. He wasn’t sure what he should do next, and the necessary journeys ahead of him – to the bar, to the toilet, to the others – appeared treacherous, with untold obstacles and dangers. But thankfully, he wasn’t alone. Erica was there with him too.

‘I think we may have overdone it,’ she said. ‘That joint was very strong. Let’s just wait here for a minute, until the head rush stops.’

She stood with him in the alleyway. Even wearing trainers she was tall, but of course not too tall for him. She held his hand, and looked at him as affectionately as her small black eyes would allow.

‘Don’t worry, it will soon pass,’ she said.

James nodded. She was right – already he was starting to feel better. The alleys of Clerkenwell were bright but soft in the moonlight. He could hear Erica breathing unnaturally loudly, but he was sure he would have done without any drugs, and anyway it was a nice sound.

‘So is Felix a good friend of yours?’ said James.

‘Well, I thought so once. But now I’m not sure if Felix really has any friends.’

‘I don’t know. He seems to have lots of friends.’

‘He has projects. He has people who interest him. But it’s not the same thing.’

‘I like him. He’s been good to me.’

‘I’m not saying he isn’t kind,’ said Erica. ‘If anything, he’s too kind. For a while, at least. And then, quite suddenly, he isn’t.’

‘That sounds ominous. What happens?’

‘Oh, nothing really. Nothing happens.’

James nodded. He didn’t understand, but that was all right for now. For now, he wanted to think about other things.

‘When we met before, I thought you worked with Felix. But you don’t, do you? You work for the government or something.’

‘No, sorry – that was a misunderstanding. I’m not a brand planner, I’m a town planner.’

‘You should have told me. I think that’s so much more interesting. I hate advertising.’

As she said this, Erica squeezed his hand. He squeezed hers. They stood for another minute, maybe two, without saying anything.

‘Okay?’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m fine. Are you okay?’

‘It’s fine. To be honest, I’m just glad to get away from Rick. He’s such a creep. He’s been harassing me all night.’

James nodded, determined to protect her – if nothing else, it would be his mission for the night. They squeezed each other’s hands again and went back inside, where the others were making more noise than ever. The conversation had become worryingly unstructured and was in danger of breaking down completely. People were still saying things, sometimes even good things, but the narrative had been lost, and the only person listening to what was being said was probably now James.

‘Drugs are not sufficient for a successful night out,’ said Felix, ‘but they are becoming increasingly necessary. I think it’s because we’re all getting older.’

‘We’re going to need them for where we’re going,’ said Carl.

‘I’m sick of this place. I need to be dancing,’ said Olivia.

‘I need to take a fuck-load more,’ said Rick.

‘I agree,’ said Rafael.

‘My mouth is completely numb,’ said Olivia. ‘It’s like being at the dentist’s.’

‘The problem,’ said Carl, ‘is that you always need so much of it.’

‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Olivia.

‘None of it’s any good any more, that’s the problem,’ said Rick. ‘It’s all just shit.’

‘The lesson, as ever, is to be happy with what you have, rather than to have what makes you happy,’ said Felix.

It was now 11 p.m. and the pub was closing, but James had only got through about 40 per cent of the evening, for next they had to go to a nightclub. Again, he understood that this was something that would have to be done. There was even, now that he had held hands with Erica, a chance he might enjoy it.