The Planner (2 page)

It was a sorry state of affairs – James wasn’t just lagging behind his peers, he was in danger of getting
lapped
. Other people were dismantling their marriages, resigning from executive management positions, going back to college to study non-vocational subjects and embracing ancient and exotic religions. A colleague of Adam’s had given up being a director in a law firm and was currently doing the pilgrimage to Santiago on his knees, Alice’s brother was training to become a violin maker. Their cleverest friend at university had sold his digital marketing business and then drowned himself in the river Nile. But James could take little solace from any of this. All he could do was wonder at the exciting and expensive ways in which people were now able to make themselves unhappy.

‘I really have to be going,’ said Alice. ‘I’m horribly late, but it’s been completely fabulous. Huge fun.’

Alice was leaving. It was almost midnight but, not actually all that amazingly, she had another party to go to. A party in Notting Hill that sounded dispiritingly good and which she hadn’t invited them to. It seemed that for Alice, the days of turning up at parties with unannounced guests were over – particularly if none of them were well known or powerful. In the meantime, and this wasn’t really any help at all, Carl had ordered the rest of them a round of brandies.

Alice kissed them all on the cheek with great enthusiasm, but as far as James could tell there was no more tenderness in his kiss than any of the others. In fact, she seemed to linger for at least three seconds longer with Felix.

‘Have fun,’ said Adam. ‘We mustn’t leave it so long next time. Apparently there’s a fantastic new Vietnamese restaurant your way. Justine keeps badgering me to take her there.’

‘Oh, the Lemon Grass. Do you know, it’s just round the corner from me, and I still haven’t been. The food editor at work won’t stop talking about it. Let’s fix something up. I’ll email. I’ve got to go. Bye! Bye! Bye!’

Part of the problem was that James had left London. Or rather, that he had come back. For nearly three years he had worked as a junior planning officer in Nottingham. A perfectly cheerful and well-functioning town with planning issues that challenged rather than overwhelmed. Those had been what Adam had called his lost years, but which now seemed more like a golden age. He had walked to work in the mornings, he had spent a small proportion of his income on rent, he had prospered at work in undemanding circumstances and been promoted twice. He had captained his pub quiz team. For six months he had gone out with a maths teacher. And he had left all of this to move back to London, to work in the borough of Southwark, live in Crystal Palace and to spend evenings with friends from university who earned five times more than him.

‘I’ve decided that your friend Alice is a good-looking girl,’ said Felix.

‘She’s lost weight,’ said Carl. ‘And she dresses miles better these days. You should have seen the nonsense she used to wear. Plus, she wears contact lenses and make-up now – makes a big difference. Christ, when she was at university she didn’t even use deodorant.’

‘That’s all true,’ said Adam, sipping his brandy judiciously. ‘But there’s something else about her now. She seems a different person. Much more confident and self-assured. She knows exactly what she wants from life, and that always makes a woman attractive. She looks more Jewish as well. I know she always was, but these days she actually looks it.’

‘Really? I don’t think she’s very pretty at all,’ said Olivia.

But Olivia, who clearly didn’t have a fucking clue about anything, was wrong. Alice did look good – really good. And Adam was right. It was more than her clothes and figure. There was a prettiness that didn’t just accompany her cleverness – it was part of it. Her dark eyes glimmered with bright curiosity, her nose curved intelligently. Even her fringe that evening had been witty. She was altogether a vastly better proposition than she had been all those years ago when, once upon a time, James had gone out with her.

‘I don’t think she’s all that different,’ said James. ‘She’s still very political.’

‘Yes, but not in the same way,’ said Adam. ‘She isn’t banging on all the time about Palestine and women’s rights in Timbuktu. She’s discovered irony. She’s become a modern feminist, or maybe a post-modern one. I don’t know – a better one anyhow.’

‘I’m sure her breasts have got bigger as well,’ said Carl.

‘So has she got a boyfriend?’ asked Felix.

‘Oh a few of them, I imagine,’ said Adam. ‘But I’m not sure if there’s anyone in particular.’

So now they
were
talking about girls. But not, thought James, in a good way. They were talking about Alice in much the same way that they had been talking about the global economy – with poise and expertise, and also with great detachment. The others could afford to be objective on such matters – they had never gone out with her, and besides Adam was engaged to Justine, a highly attractive all-rounder whose selection as a life partner resolved at a stroke many problems, and Carl was in a relationship that he described as messy, but actually sounded brilliant. And not having a girlfriend, which could be liberating and exciting, was actually becoming a major fucking problem.

But it was only now that the worst part of the evening, the bit James had really been dreading, was upon them. The bill. It was every bit as bad as he’d feared – a truly astounding amount of money. There had only been six of them, and Olivia had barely ordered a thing, and yet there it was: £713 plus service. It was just as well that Olivia had eaten so little, for it seemed she had no intention of paying anything, and nor did anyone else have any intention of asking her to. That was okay, James could understand that, but what was really unacceptable was that they had no intention of asking him to pay anything either. Instead, it was something to be settled by the grown-ups, and paid for by the private sector. He was being subsidised.

‘Okay,’ said Carl. ‘Let’s toss for it.’

‘Good idea,’ said Adam.

James should have expected that. Gambling, which for moral and psychological reasons was just about his least favourite thing, was also one of the things that nowadays Carl most liked doing. He had recently joined a private casino in Knightsbridge and started to lose glamorous amounts of money playing poker with comedians and actors, which he then won back from foolish young Arabs. Before too long, he would doubtless be joining a golf club and taking up pheasant shooting.

‘Hold on,’ said Felix. ‘How’s this going to work? There are three of us.’

Carl began to expertly arrange things. It was, after all, what he did for a living. He was a broker and it wasn’t his job to make money – although he did, in fact, make a great deal of it – but to efficiently facilitate ways in which other people could win or lose even larger amounts.

‘Okay, this is how it works. Adam – if you call it right, you get to buy dinner tonight. If not, then I do. But first, Felix gets the chance to call on your call. If he’s right, then he’s lucky enough to pay for the drinks. If not, then one of us gets that privilege as well.’

As he spoke, Carl tossed the coin, neatly caught it in one hand and slapped it flat against the back of the other. Adam and Felix nodded. James couldn’t even begin to follow all this, but he had grasped the substantial point. Those atrocious fucks weren’t playing a game of chance in order to avoid paying for dinner. They were playing for the
right to buy dinner
. They actually very badly wanted to spend more than £700. They wanted to demonstrate their kindness and senseless generosity, to do to him exactly what he’d done to the toilet attendant.

‘Okay,’ said Felix. ‘I predict Adam is going to get this. He’s the lawyer and the lawyer always wins.’

‘Tails never fails,’ said Adam.

‘Tails it is,’ said Carl, lifting his hand with an exaggerated grimace. ‘Well, so be it. Dinner and drinks are on you two. But next time it’s my treat, and we go somewhere
really
fucking expensive.’

More than an hour later, James still wasn’t home. It had gone two in the morning and, to his disgust and shame, he was waiting for a night bus. In fact, it was worse than that – he was waiting for his second night bus. The first, populated by over-excited teenagers, foreign-language students and drunk poor people, had got him as far as London Bridge station. But now another one was required for the much longer journey to Crystal Palace. A bus that would hopefully be more sombre, but which also came much less frequently. Ominously, he’d been there for twenty minutes and still seemed to be the only person waiting.

It was January, there was no wind but the air was cold in a way that James had no way of protecting himself from. It was a mark of how serious things were that he had considered trying to look for a taxi. But no, he couldn’t, and it wasn’t just the expense – he had been driven stubborn by sadness, and he was now determined to get home by public transport, even if it took all night.

James was thirty-two years old. It was such a big, cocksure kind of an age. Not young any more, not callow and soft-hearted, but by no means old either. It was an age to be energised and just the right side of over-confident. It was the time when you should be making all of your really critical life decisions, armed with experience and optimism but without the debilitating weakness and caution. But instead, what was he doing? What decisions was he making? He wasn’t contemplating marriage or divorce or procreation. He wasn’t choosing a house to purchase or sizing up the job offer in North America.

No. For his was a life of small decisions. He was trying to decide whether to buy a bicycle or not. And how had he got here? Because, again, of all the small decisions he’d made, and all the ones that he hadn’t. It was an existential failure that had got him here. Above all, it was his twenties that had got him here. His not-so-roaring twenties. Wasn’t that the decade in which you were meant to get everything out of your system? The thirties were different. As far as he could tell, if you fucked up your thirties then you really were in trouble. But you were allowed to fuck up your twenties, that was the one good thing about them.

And what, exactly, had he done with his twenties? Well, he’d spent an awful lot of it in the office – waiting for his computer to boot up, eating sugared biscuits in meetings, reformatting Microsoft Word documents, filling in Excel spreadsheets, agreeing to things that he had no powers to disagree with. Where were the mistakes: the entertaining misadventures, the expensively learnt lessons, the-disastrous-at-the-time-but-now-fondly-remembered blunders? Maybe he hadn’t made any. Maybe what he’d done instead was just make one very big one.

And why weren’t any of his experiences
bittersweet
ones? Did such a feeling really exist? He would, he supposed, need to have had a major love affair in order to know for sure. A reciprocated but doomed romance, ideally with someone of a different social class or ethnic group. There had been little opportunity at work. As far as he could tell, the office had never been much of a place for that. Or was it going to be like university all over again – would he discover, in ten years’ time, that everyone had been fucking everyone else? That all those evenings when he’d worked late or gone home early, everyone else was round the corner doing far-fetched things in a nightclub. Somehow, as unlikely as it seemed, it wouldn’t entirely surprise him.

The bus rolled up. It always did in the end. But it was a ghostly vehicle with no passengers or lights, and heartbreakingly it simply stayed where it was, its engine rumbling good humouredly, its doors closed. As James well knew, this could easily go on for half an hour. The driver at least would be warm. He looked down at his phone. It was 2:25 a.m.

How had it got to this? Waiting for a night bus, hiding in toilets, getting drunk on wine he couldn’t afford, having friends he was scared of seeing, living in Crystal Palace, working in local government, and wanting to cry a lot of the time. Those were hardly the ingredients for a happy and successful life. It was hardly what he had
planned
.

2

28 January

People should be able to live and work in a safe, healthy, supportive and inclusive neighbourhood with which they are proud to identify.

–
The London Plan
, Section 7.4

‘Agenda item two: review of last meeting’s minutes.’

There was a movement of papers, a little anxious pause as no one said anything. James sipped his tea, confident that he alone had actually read the minutes.

‘So, are you happy for me to sign these off?’ said Lionel.

There was some gentle nodding and benevolent murmuring. It seemed that everyone was happy for everyone else to sign them off.

‘Okay, good. Item three: the main event, and I know there’s been considerable interest in this one,’ said Lionel, with a small chuckle. ‘Neil here is going to give us a briefing from his transport study.’

It was Monday morning, just after nine o’clock, in Meeting Room Two on the fourth floor of Southwark Council. With a little preparatory cough, Neil Tuffnel, Senior Planning Research Officer, launched into his PowerPoint presentation on the interim findings of his study on long-term surface transport projections. James sat back in his chair. The meeting, which was scheduled to last for two hours, stretched comfortably ahead of him.