The Planner (18 page)

Displaying a wide range of professional skills, Carl singlehandedly organised the transport. He telephoned a local firm and agreed a fee for a seven-seat taxi, reopening negotiations with the driver as soon as it arrived and reducing the price by a quarter. He marshalled the group in a good-humoured but firm manner out of the pub, and oversaw operations closely as they all incompetently and theatrically climbed in, for by now they were bringing out hysterical tendencies in each other. The journey itself, however, was uneventful and largely unnecessary, lasting slightly less than four minutes. It seemed that Olivia had refused to walk.

And now here they were – outside a nightclub in approximately the same part of Clerkenwell. The entrance, of course, gave little away. There were no illuminated signs, just a long, well-behaved queue trailing back from some large, unpainted wooden doors. What James hadn’t expected was that it would cost thirty-two pounds to get in but, as Felix explained, that was essential and actually to be welcomed. Ideally, you only wanted to take Class-A drugs with Class-A people. Just like a private members’ bar or boarding school, what you were paying for was the other customers, and if you didn’t pay enough then you ended up in a room full of fuckheads from north Kent. Although, of course, if it was
too
expensive then you risked finding yourself exclusively with tall girls from Chelsea and corporate lawyers who lived in Clapham – Felix did acknowledge that.

The demographic mix was important too. Ideally, you didn’t want that many black men there, but you did want enough to be able to buy drugs, and you certainly wanted plenty of black women. You also wanted Japanese, of either sex, but it had to be the kooky architecture students rather than the dippy tourists. Scandinavians were hugely welcome, though southern Europeans less so. Australians weren’t always as bad as everyone said, but South Africans and Israelis were, and it was a given that everything was significantly better if at least 20 per cent of the dance floor was homosexual. Above all, though, what you really wanted to avoid was a club full of white British people.

But the main thing was that, whoever was going tonight, James and his companions weren’t actually in the queue with them. Or at least, they were in another, smaller and better one. They were on a guest list. Not the list of famous people, but they were definitely on a list, which was, James recognised, an important achievement. It was one of the perks of buying your drugs from Marcus, who had a long-standing commercial association with a doorman. Felix described it as an ingenious piece of cross-selling that helped to differentiate him in the marketplace but, having now met Marcus, James wondered if it was really as thought through as that. But whatever the reason, it was to be welcomed – even James knew that the better the quality of the queue, the more quickly it moved and, in no more than ten minutes, they were inside the nightclub. Things were just as speedy in here as well: they paid with debit cards, they were briskly searched for concealed weapons, the women and Rafael went to the cloakroom, and then they were gently pushed through some heavy black doors.

Now there was no turning back, they had stepped out of London into a world that was alien and dangerous. Dazzled by laser beams, humbled by the noise, his lungs filling with purple smoke, James stumbled forward like an explorer on Jupiter. The music was so loud he feared that it would interfere with the functioning of his heart, but there was nothing to do but keep going. At the end of the room was an entrance to another, almost identical room, and then another after that. Everyone James had come with had scattered immediately, as if it was an adventure game. He wondered where Erica was, but didn’t know how he could find her, for the nightclub was enormous, in some ways as big as London, with tunnels, steps, vaults and secret chambers that went deep into the ancient heart of Clerkenwell.

By the time he had got to the fourth room, he had started to acclimatise. It was a fundamentally hostile environment, but he could see that it was possible to function. The music no longer crushed him, and his eyes had adapted to the irregular flashes of light. There was little nervousness, the drugs had at least helped with that, but the problem was he now felt restless and manically dissatisfied, with no sensible idea of what it was that he wanted. Just because you’re wandering it doesn’t mean that you’re lost, but in this case it was fair to say that he probably was, and although he was still looking for Erica, he was no longer sure why.

After half an hour, he at least managed to find Carl, who was standing on the edge of a dance floor, drinking a bottle of Coke and with a curious, sinister expression as if some great but unwelcome truth had just been revealed to him.

‘Hi Carl,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where anyone is.’

‘Hi,’ said Carl. ‘Neither do I.’

Carl walked abruptly on, out into another room. That was actually to be expected, for one of the things James had learnt was that sociopathic behaviour was standard here. The music was too loud to do anything else, and there was no reward system for good manners. You banged into people who were in your way, you ordered drinks with hand gestures, and if you wanted to display affection to someone then you danced very closely to them until either something happened or they moved away. And as a result, muted, you ended up feeling lonely and alienated, unless you had taken enough drinks and drugs not to know any better. He thought about sending a text message to Rachel, but didn’t know what to say and, besides, she would be asleep.

James had tried his hardest, but it was no good – he was feeling old again. Worse than that, he was feeling
young
again. He was surrounded by lovely, frail faces with lean bodies, but there was a seasoned competence to them. They were veterans of London’s night-time economy, and were highly experienced at having a very good time. True, they weren’t obviously enjoying themselves like in other bars and clubs – they weren’t shouting or laughing or fighting, and no one was getting off with anyone else – instead, they were methodical and sombre, focused on the task of dancing to the music as truthfully as possible. And if they weren’t dancing they were resting. Like athletes, they were being careful with their bodies. They drank bottles of mineral water and replenished their blood sugar levels with sucrose bars and energy drinks.

Eventually, he was back in the first room, where some of the others had regrouped. He could see that Felix was dancing brilliantly. Or, at least, and this was the key thing, he looked exactly like he knew what he was doing. He was probably dancing with little technical skill, but that didn’t matter. He was dancing with great strength of character, expressively and in perfect harmony with his worldview. At the same time, and James wasn’t sure how, he was dancing with irony. Rafael and Olivia were dancing nearby, but slowly moving away together. It was inevitable that they would have sex later that night. Erica was nowhere to be seen.

‘Felix, what time is it? We’ve been here for hours.’

‘Alas, young James, I fear you’ve made the mistake of confusing the ontological with the phenomenological. We actually only got here forty minutes ago.’

‘Oh Christ, really?’

‘Don’t look so disheartened, my friend, you’re here to have a good time remember?’

James nodded, and bought a bottle of beer for a bewildering amount of money, but the fact that this would deter poor people from coming was no longer any consolation. At least there was no need to feel self-conscious about things, because no one was taking much interest in anyone else. It was quite possible to look at someone at length without anyone minding, so he did that for a while. There was a woman dancing flamboyantly not far from the bar, and so he watched her. He stared at her for so long, and so intently, that eventually she looked back at him.

‘Hello,’ she mouthed, waving her hand.

‘Hello,’ he said, waving his hand back.

She moved closer to hm. She was a talented dancer and if there were any significant defects in her appearance, then they weren’t picked up by the club lighting. He was almost a foot taller than her. She asked him something, but the music was too loud to be sure what, and she was unlikely to be interested in town planning. It was clear that English wasn’t her first language. They both smiled, but not at the same time. It was no good. He might as well have been trying to have a conversation with a zebra. He would have to give up.

‘Where’s Carl? Where’s Erica?’ said James, but Felix couldn’t hear him.

James went into another room, and then went through a door he hadn’t noticed before. He walked down a long, narrow corridor and found himself in a smaller room in which no one was dancing. Instead, people were sitting on the floor and staring at a wall on to which was being projected a series of images. It wasn’t particularly orderly, but it felt very calm. Either everyone here had taken different drugs from him, or else they had taken the same drug at different times. The images were abstract and senseless: shapes, colours and lines, the kinds of things that opticians test you with, but they didn’t hurt his eyes or his thoughts, and after a while he started to think they might even be good for him. Maybe they could heal his mind. There was music here, but it was of a different sort – gentle, melodic and, best of all, it wasn’t that loud.

James wondered if he could just stay here for the rest of the night, or even the whole weekend. It would be nice if Erica found him here, and they could see it through together. But then, to his surprise and dismay, it suddenly became apparent that he couldn’t, that he would have to go somewhere else as quickly as he could.

‘James! Fucking hell! It’s James Crawley.’

James had been assured that cocaine had no hallucinogenic properties, otherwise he may have wondered if his mind had manufactured some ghastly phantom. Ian Benson, rising star of Southwark Council’s IT Services department, was grinning at him.

‘Oh, hi Ian,’ said James. ‘Good to see you.’

‘I didn’t expect to see you here. Didn’t think this was your sort of thing.’

Was Ian on drugs as well? Probably, although he was such a haphazard creature, such a strange and obtuse personality, that it was impossible to tell. He had an unusually large head, too big for his body but not for his brain, which was known to be powerful, if often misapplied. He had a degree in physics, was in charge of the office intranet, and the only person who could be relied upon to mend James’s computer, though it was almost always him who broke it in the first place.

‘I’m with Alex,’ said Ian. ‘Alex Coleman from work. We’re on a proper night out. I don’t know where he’s gone. He’ll be chuffed to see you.’

Now that was even worse. Wasn’t the club’s pricing policy designed to exclude these kinds of berks? Alex from Comms and Ian from IT – junior local authority employees, exactly who shouldn’t be able to afford the entrance fee, and who you didn’t want to meet at two in the morning when you were feeling at your most defenceless.

‘It’s magic here, isn’t it,’ said Ian. ‘Great atmosphere. Properly buzzing.’

‘Yes,’ agreed James. ‘It’s really great. Do you come here a lot?’

‘No, mate, not often. Too expensive. But when I do, I like to really go for it.’

‘Totally,’ said James. ‘I’m with some other people, so I better go and find them. I’ll come back and see you in a minute.’

‘Cool,’ said Ian. ‘See you in a bit. I’ll be here.’

James went to the toilets, but they were a refuge from the music only. The lighting here was merciless, with the kind of luminosity normally associated with medical interventions, but the real problem was that they were so busy. The main reason for this was that it was full of women. It wasn’t that he had blundered into the wrong ones, and it wasn’t even as if they were designated as unisex. Rather, and as a planner he should have understood this, it was simply an out-of-date regulation that was being widely ignored. Women wanted to go into men’s toilets and so they did, and the men didn’t seem to mind. But James minded, for he wanted to be alone for a while, and that was impossible. All of the toilet cubicles were in medium- to long-term use, while a variety of sex and drugs crimes were being committed. Standing over a sink, the only calm he could construct came from looking deeply into himself in a mirror, but after no more than thirty seconds of this he became saturated with horror.

A door banged open, and James turned to see Rick and Erica come out of a cubicle, their faces flushed and overheated, their clothes disorganised and their bodies entangled.

‘That was the best fucking shit I’ve ever had,’ announced Rick.

James smiled at them. It was a tremendous feat – the greatest smile he had ever produced in his life, a smile strong enough to forgive Erica and to neutralise Rick’s evil cackle. But they walked straight past – either they hadn’t seen him or maybe the parts of their prefrontal lobes responsible for facial pattern recognition had been disabled. James often wished that he had studied biology at university, but he had taken the wrong A levels. The cubicle was taken by two blond women in black leather trousers.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the solution came to him.
He would go home
. It was the only, the obvious, thing to do – why on earth hadn’t it occurred to him before? A unilateral, and not even that bold, decision – it was all that was required. He didn’t know where everyone else was, and he didn’t care: he felt far too preoccupied to bother about his companions who were, after all, largely wankers. Who knows, maybe they had all done the same thing hours ago. But once the decision had been made, it had to be acted upon at once.