The Planner (19 page)

He walked quickly, he ran, all the way back through the club, determined not to meet anyone – particularly anyone from work, particularly not Rick or Erica. He didn’t want anyone to slow him down, or make him have to explain. His head lowered, he crossed the floors as directly as possible, barging youths aside, knocking over drinks and disrupting the dancers. He was, just like everyone else there, behaving badly. He went through dance rooms and bars and chambers and cloakrooms, passed doormen and barmen and drug dealers, and heaved open the wooden doors until finally he had left the noise and the heat behind him.

He now had to face a new set of challenges which were less drastic but more intractable. For, if the cocaine had ever worked at all, its effect was to leave him unable to sleep and feeling sad and self-absorbed. It had made him
modern,
and there was little he could do about it. Outside the club there was a market that was either under- or over-regulated, he couldn’t decide which, but it was clear that doormen were allocating people to taxi cabs and destinations on an anti-competitive basis. Unable to negotiate, unwilling to be humiliated, James instead walked off. If this was a night for anything at all, then it was a night to walk home. A cold, dry night. No stars, of course, there never were in London, but there was three-quarters of a moon and the drink and drugs would at least keep him warm.

He headed off in what was, he knew, only approximately the right direction. Earlier he had been lost in the nightclub, and now he was lost on the streets. That was Clerkenwell for you, but did anyone really know where they were going in this city? It was still difficult to understand how it had happened. An obscure Anglo-Saxon riverside settlement in an abandoned Roman military camp that had, like Anglo-Saxons everywhere, got wildly out of control. It was the least-planned city in the developed world. No invading power had drained its marshlands and founded a city state, no tyrant had ever razed it to the ground and rebuilt it on more orderly principles. Some Victorian engineers had done their best to clean things up, but the really big opportunities, the Great Fire and the Blitz, had been wasted. It had been two thousand years before Patrick Abercrombie had got round to producing a plan, and by then it was all much too late.

There was no grid system, and no wide boulevards elegantly radiating out from the city centre. In fact, there wasn’t even a centre. Apparently there had been once, but it had got lost, buried and hidden along with everything else. There was a plaque on a wall somewhere near Charing Cross Station, there was a pipe under Blackfriars Bridge where the River Fleet trickled into the River Thames, and there was a piece of stone in Cannon Street, which had once meant something important, but no one now could remember what. And on top of these were Modernism and capitalism and the twentieth century, and all the things that the heritage organisations and conservation societies, the environmentalists and town planners had failed to stop happening. There were no city walls or gates or guards left either. There was nothing to keep them in and the others out, no one to keep them safe. And as a result of all this James, the town planner, was lost along with everyone else.

He had walked for no more than fifteen minutes, but already he was prepared to surrender. His serotonin depleted, his legs aching, London had defeated him yet again. He was developing what he knew would be a debilitating headache, but it was hard to tell if that was due to the legacy of the drugs, all those pints of Slovakian lager, the cannabis, the after-shock of the music or just the city he lived in. It had hardly been a controlled experiment. A car passed by very slowly, James raised his hand and it stopped. The driver offered to take James home for an extraordinary amount of money, almost twice as much as he had been quoted outside the nightclub. James accepted without a word and climbed in.

10

6 March

It is worth remembering that change presents opportunities for London, as well as challenges.

–
The London Plan
, Section 1.50

‘Yes, of course. That would be really nice.’

‘Yes, it was a real shame I couldn’t come up. I’ve just been so busy with work.’

‘Don’t worry – of course, I have been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.’

James was speaking to his mother. Even in 2013, these kinds of mistakes still happened from time to time. His mobile phone had rung, the number hadn’t appeared, and he had thought it was someone else, maybe Harriet calling from Morocco, for instance. And now, here he was, outside a bar on the King’s Road in Chelsea, having a conversation he didn’t want to have for at least another week, while Felix was inside drinking a bottle of white wine.

‘I know it’s a very good opportunity, but I’m not sure if it’s the right time in my career.’

‘Yes, I know. It would only be an hour away. But you know, that’s not much further than where I am now.’

What was the news from Leicester? It was much the same as it had been two weeks ago. His father wasn’t well, but nobody really knew why, his sister was enjoying her teacher training, the weather was wet, the economy was contracting, the garden wall needed repairing, the hospital where she worked wasn’t, after all, going to get its neo-natal units.

‘I’ve got to get going. My friend is waiting for me.’

Not so long ago, James had been on the verge of going back. Not quite back to Leicester, but certainly back to the Midlands. It was still an option. There was, for a few weeks longer, a job waiting for him. Deputy Director of Planning at Nottingham City Council – the man he would be replacing was at least ten years older than him. From a certain perspective, by local government standards, James would be a success. But would anyone else ever know that? Would it feel like success?

‘Yes, don’t worry – I’m definitely coming for that weekend.’

‘I’ve got to get going. Speak soon. I love you lots.’

James put the phone back in his pocket. He had just told his mother that he loved her on the King’s Road in Chelsea. Because of her poor hearing, because of the phone reception and the noise from the street, he had said it quite loudly. Not with great pride, but certainly with volume. Enough for a good-looking young man with ruthless blond hair, expertly smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of beer, to look up at him with an amused smile.

Well, it was true. He did love his mother. Just as he felt sorry for his father and worried a bit about his sister. But that, surely, wasn’t enough to leave London. What about the life plan? He was, after all, only halfway through. Okay, he hadn’t enjoyed the nightclub or the drugs much but he was, he felt sure, developing. He was moving, jerkily and expensively, in the right direction and he was still committed to the process. It was why he was here on the King’s Road.

‘If you really want to understand London,’ Felix had told him earlier that week, ‘then you have to hang out with some rich people. It’s what this city is all about.’

‘Yes, I can see that. But does it have to be football?’

It seemed that it did. Just as in the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, a gentleman was expected to be able to speak knowledgeably about warfare, so in 2013 a young man of any standing had to be able to hold his own in a discussion about football. The problem, of course, was that James didn’t know anything about it: football was yet another of those things that he had never been educated in. No one had ever talked about it when he’d been a student and while it was true that his school had had a strong tradition of team sports, they were all the wrong ones. Like most grammar schools, James’s had made a point of competing with great seriousness at cricket and rugby, of beating comprehensives with ease and losing valiantly to schools that had much more money. But that was no use now when all that anyone was interested in was football and anyway – he had never even been any good at rugby or cricket. The only thing he had ever been good at was the long jump.

But here they were. It was a Wednesday night and James was now back inside the wine bar with Felix, round the corner from Stamford Bridge football stadium in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. James hardly ever came here, but he knew its statistical profile all too well. The figures were formidable, and everyone working in London government was meant to be trying to make their part of the city more like this one. It was the borough with the highest life expectancy, the highest average income and the lowest unemployment. More people participated in cultural activities than anywhere else and fewer people got run over or murdered.

Sitting in the bar, some other things struck him – things that didn’t come up in the data, but which weren’t actually that surprising. For instance, people were generally taller here than they were in pubs in South London – for reasons not fully understood, the positive correlation between income and height had been maintained, even though poorer people now ate more than rich people. Being around tall people was never something James had to worry about, but more troubling was the fact that everyone was good-looking. It wasn’t like being in East London – you didn’t have to study people closely in order to work out whether they were attractive or not, and what the strategy behind their choice of personal disfigurement was. Everyone was just good-looking – it was as simple as that. The men had thick arms and well-structured faces and could only really be described as handsome, while the women had long, sternly combed hair, nimble features and clever mouths. And what with being so tall and good-looking and wealthy, they were also unusually loud.

‘What are you getting so grumpy about? It’s not so bad in here,’ said Felix.

‘It’s not really my kind of place,’ said James. ‘It’s far too noisy.’

‘The key thing is to judge people by your value system, rather than to judge yourself by theirs.’

‘Well, okay. I don’t really like the people here.’

‘You’ve got to learn to enjoy London,’ said Felix. ‘And it’s largely because it’s brimming with appalling people that it’s so enjoyable. The half-witted celebrities, the venal politicians, the pretentious artists, the oikish footballers – all paid for by the cretinous bankers. Imagine how impoverished the city would be without its monsters. Anyway, let’s go. I promise you’ll enjoy it more than the nightclub.’

They left the bar, and joined the thickening stream of Chelsea fans walking conspicuously towards the stadium. It was, James noted with satisfaction, a stupendously poor piece of town planning. Or rather, and this cheered him all the more, there hadn’t
been
any planning. It was a welcome reminder of why cities needed long-sighted, over-officious professionals like him, why everything would be so much better if only it looked like it did in his masterplan poster. There were railway lines here, but no mainline station to service the stadium. The pavements weren’t wide enough, there were coaches stuck in traffic, insufficient parking spaces and unlicensed stalls selling scarves and football shirts. And through all of this marched forty thousand men.

Even if Felix had promised him that they would be watching the match exclusively with people on very high incomes, they still had to get there along with everyone else. They had to wait in lines, to squeeze through ticket gates, walk up stairwells and get given directions by men in their sixties who were supplementing their state pensions. All of this gave James the opportunity to have a good look at the football fans. Rich, well-educated people now went to football, he knew that, but what was more surprising was that working-class people still went as well. Almost certainly, these were the affluent working classes, who had travelled here from across southern England. This was the socio-demographic group who decided general election results and drove saloon cars, and who were deeply suspicious of government but wildly susceptible to Felix’s advertising campaigns.

‘I know, I know. It’s not what you were expecting,’ said Felix. ‘But we’ll enjoy the private box all the more for having to go through this.’

James had been brought up to fear all crowds, but there was, he soon realised, no need to be worried. They weren’t in the least bit violent and even though they supported the same team, they didn’t have enough sense of common purpose to act as a mob. It was no more than a dense concentration of moderately unpleasant men. They had drunk just enough alcohol to raise their voices without embarrassment and to swear a great deal, but not enough to sing songs or get into fights. Instead, most of them were eating hot dogs and playing with their mobile phones.

But the higher Felix and James climbed, the fewer of these people there were, the fewer there was of anyone. On the upper floor of the stadium were the executive suites, and a pleasing sense of well-managed calm, as if they were in a conference centre in an unspecified northern European city. They walked past a row of identical wood finish doors, each with a name plaque belonging to companies that James knew he ought to have heard of.

‘Everyone thinks that London is the world centre for capitalism,’ said Felix. ‘But, in truth it actually functions more like a tribal gift economy. It’s composed of business people giving things to other business people. And the trick is to give them enough that they then give you something back which turns out to be of greater value – like a contract or profile in a newspaper. And the wider and more generous the giving, the better chance that you’ll hit upon someone who will one day repay you.’

They stopped outside a door just like all of the others, with the name Galbraith & Erskine sombrely engraved on a copper plaque. Felix boldly pushed it open and they came into what looked much like the room of a hotel in the vicinity of Heathrow airport. It was a square room, with a colour-flecked carpet. The lighting was bright and uncomplicated and the brass wall fixtures shiny. Adam, who was still arguably his best friend, was there.