The Planner (22 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ said James. ‘What was that?’

‘The policy commitment on densities – are you sure that these are okay for the report?’

‘Oh yes, yes – this isn’t a problem. We’re comfortably over the target on the other sites in any case.’

‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘Because you know, we don’t want to get this wrong.’

‘Well, we won’t,’ said James.

‘Good,’ said Alex. ‘Because, as I said, we don’t want to get it wrong.’

James sunk back down in his chair and ate another biscuit. In as much as this meeting was going anywhere, it was moving on to other matters – something to do with the community engagement initiative or a new online discussion forum. This morning, he didn’t really care. Maybe that was another sign of progress? He had spent far too much of his adult life caring about such things.

No, he had to face facts: Alice was never going to boast about her glamorous ex-boyfriend who worked as a town planner and sat in meetings discussing community engagement. It wasn’t just that planning was difficult, it wasn’t even important any more. He’d been born two generations too late. The Second World War – now
that
was the time to be in public administration. And afterwards it had got even better: rebuilding East London, designing the welfare state, running airports and coalmines. Those had been the heroic days – mainly because there hadn’t been any heroes
.
There hadn’t been any internationally famous architects or Asian billionaire property developers. Instead, there had been committees with long titles and opaque processes, and men in dark suits who had sat in chilly wood-panelled rooms in town halls and been respected by the working classes.

But at least there were other options now, even for town planners. No one these days was expected to do the same thing all their life. Felix was right: he worked in the property sector, it was just a matter of positioning and presentation. He had valuable skills and knowledge, he just hadn’t realised it before. All he needed was the contacts to make the most of them.

‘James?’

He looked up with a start. God – had he managed to drift off again? Yes, he had a hangover, but really, this was inexcusable. He’d never done this before. Thank God he worked in the public sector.

‘I’m sorry. Could you just repeat that?’

‘I just did,’ said Lionel. ‘But again: James could you tell us whether the key-worker targets are going to apply to all of the sectors?’

‘This is important,’ said Alex. ‘Lionel, the Strategy Delivery Assessment is going to publication next month, and I need your team to be on top of this.’

James stiffened and Lionel looked hurt, his pink, crustacean face retreating, his plump body shifting. The Director of Planning hurt by Alex fucking Coleman, who was nothing more than a twenty-eight-year-old junior public affairs officer with a degree in media studies.

‘Yes, I’m sorry about this,’ said Lionel. ‘James could you briefly talk us all through it – I know you’ve got the details.’

James couldn’t stand Alex Coleman. It wasn’t just that Alex worked in Communications, the eternal foe of the Planning Directorate. It was even worse than that – he
believed
in Communications. It was quite possibly all he did believe in. Post-ideological and post-literate, it had been his ambition to work in advertising, but he had graduated at a time of great expansion in the public sector, and never found a way to get back out. It didn’t help that by local authority standards he was unusually good-looking – he had a well-crafted, modern face with sceptical lips and metallic blue eyes. At last year’s office Christmas party Rachel had given him a handjob in the stationary room.

‘Sorry, I’ll explain,’ said James. ‘All of the priority key sectors outlined in the draft strategy are subject to our overarching targets, but it allows for a certain degree of flexibility across different sites – I can give you the exact figures if needed – and also includes, for new developments only, dedicated, sector-specific housing. This means that, once the new nursing sites open in 2014, we should be able to manage the allocations so that all of the other targets are met.’

There was a wary silence. There was no getting away from this but, even wounded, he was good at his job, far better than Jane the web editor and, more importantly, than Alex, who was unlikely to have understood more than a fraction of what James had just said.

‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll probably follow up with you by email, but I guess that will have to do for now.’

‘Great,’ said Jane. ‘Could you copy me in on that?’

‘And me please,’ said Henry.

The meeting ended, as all meetings must. There was a series of action points that Alex had noted, almost all of which were assigned to James. The others left, but Lionel signalled with two stubby fingers for James to wait behind.

‘God,’ said James, ‘that Alex Coleman is such an irritating little shit.’

‘Never mind him,’ said Lionel. ‘He’s just the latest young know-nothing from Comms. He won’t be the last.’

They sat together in silence for a minute. James looked carefully at his manager and mentor, looked into his small mild eyes. Erosion wasn’t always a gradual process. Cracks happen. Things break. You can unravel in so many ways. Synapses fizzle out, cell walls disintegrate, organs stop. Bones calcify, the juices drain drop by drop and then, one day, they snap. Was something similar happening to Lionel? Had he suddenly started dying faster? His hands looked smaller than ever.

‘Are you all right?’ said Lionel at last, in his soft, fat-weakened voice. ‘I’ve been a bit worried about you.’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ said James. ‘What’s up?’

‘You seemed more than a little absent-minded just then. And you’ve not really been on it these past few weeks, not like you usually are. You don’t look great now, to be honest. Is everything okay?’

The reason James had a hangover was because he had drunk five pints of lager in a pub while watching a football match on the television. He had done this with Matt, his foolish, clumsy flatmate who had short hair and big ears and worked in marketing and whom James had never had a fully successful conversation with until last night. It was a revelation but, as Felix had told him, once you knew about football, once you knew enough to talk about football, which wasn’t actually all that much, vast social opportunities opened up. James had taken conversations he’d heard about the Chelsea midfield, reapplied them to an analysis of the Arsenal defence, and sat back as Matt had vigorously nodded his head and warmly expanded on his theories. It was a lot like drafting a masterplan.

‘I’ve got quite a lot on my mind at the moment, but don’t worry: everything is okay,’ said James. ‘There’s just a lot going on, that’s all. You know – with work, Sunbury Square, housing commitments and everything else.’

Lionel looked at him carefully, his eyes ponderously scanning James, like an analogue security system in a domestic airport. He was getting scrutinised, possibly even disciplined. It was difficult to tell for sure – it had never happened before, and it was coming from Lionel who had little emotional range and was a poor communicator, reluctant to speak directly but with no mastery of subtext.

‘And I noticed you were away for a couple of days – you missed a Friday and then a Monday the other week. That’s not like you.’

‘No, I know – I had that bug that was going around.’

‘So you weren’t just gadding about town then?’ said Lionel, forcing a stunted laugh into his voice.

James flinched. That wasn’t a joke. It was the type of joke Lionel would make, but in this case it wasn’t one – he
knew
. Surely Ian Benson hadn’t said anything? No, he was a fucker, but not that kind of fucker. Maybe he or Alex had been blathering about it in the office? It didn’t sound very likely – but there again, what else did those goons talk about? And would Lionel really have overheard them? More likely, someone else would have told him. After all, he worked in government, he had enemies everywhere.

‘God no, I felt awful. It’s not like me at all – I think it’s the first time I’ve ever missed work since I’ve been here.’

Lionel nodded. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Not like you at all.’

The only sickie he had ever taken and somehow he’d been caught out. There was probably a lesson in there.

‘I’m fine. It was just a bad bug, that’s all. I actually thought I’d shaken it off by Friday evening, but I was laid up all weekend.’

‘Well, let me know if anything’s up. I’m sure we can work something out if you’re struggling.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m feeling much better now.’

‘Good,’ said Lionel. ‘Because I need you to be at one hundred per cent at the moment. I can’t do everything round here. You know it’s a small team with more cuts coming, and I need to be able to rely on every member.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m completely on it,’ said James. ‘I won’t let you down.’

James went back to his desk, determined not to do anything he was paid to do. He made himself a cup of tea without checking if any of his colleagues wanted one, and then sat down again. On his computer there was an email from Graham Oakley.

Hi James,

Just touching base, haven’t heard from you for a while. Just to say, HR have been on to me about Guy’s replacement, and I’m obviously keen not to have the role unfilled for any length of time.

I guess you’re still considering things, but if you could give me some indication soon (i.e. in the next week or so) whether you want the job that would be a big help. We don’t have to finalise starting dates, terms etc, but once I know for sure that you’re coming, I can at least tell people here, and halt any recruitment process.

All the best,

Graham

James read it through carefully. Growing up is a process of making compromises, closing down opportunities, narrowing options. He understood that – it was partly how he had ended up here – but that didn’t mean he had to do it again just yet. There was still, he felt more and more certain, too much going on. He closed his email, and then closed his eyes.

One day London will run itself, for they were living in an age of great technological acceleration and political stagnation. Traffic lights will flicker on and off in response to vehicle numbers and the mobile phones trying to cross the road. Buses, trams and trains will steer themselves across town, deftly avoiding one another and stopping at unmanned stations run by highly accomplished ticket machines. Electric photo sensors will track the swiping of microchip cards and embedded transmitters will relay the news to one another through interoperable protocols. Things won’t need to bleep or flash any more – information will invisibly and silently radiate across the warm sky in a billion little data packets, all backed up on a server farm just outside of Basingstoke. And everything else, everything that can’t be automated or computed or ignored, will be done by the immigrants – men and women of indeterminate skin colour and legal status, and who will never dare to speak.

All those labour- and social-interaction-saving devices. All those invisible machines, all that networked intelligence. The city was getting worse, all the statistics said so – there were more robberies and murders and everyone was getting angry and anxious. But it was also getting so much
cleverer
. It was absorbing information, gigabytes and terabytes of it, and it was processing it, it was applying coefficients and evolving weightings. And the more information it processed, the cleverer it became.

One day, too, there wouldn’t be any planners. Cities were full of humans and humans were too complicated for other humans to know how to deal with them. It was better left to the computers. Not just desktop PCs, but gigantic calculating machines of the kind that you only ever came across in out-of-date science fiction, and which would sit in the basement of City Hall and every day make a hundred billion calculations. They would compute air pollution, noise pollution, medium-term flood risk, waste disposal rates, levels of new company formation, housing stock supply, peak-hour congestion levels, the value of the visitor economy, the net rate of migration and the proportion of cyclists who wore helmets. They would make allowances for multiplier effects and positive feedback loops and non-linear sensitivities, they would undertake ingenious statistical analysis and relentlessly run through powerful algorithms, and then they would make optimal decisions – decisions that no one could fathom but which would invariably be correct – although in any case, it would be too difficult for any human to judge one way or another. And in Southwark Council, the only people with any jobs left to do would be the ones who could mend the computers and write press releases about how well it was all going. The only people left would be Ian Benson and Alex Coleman.

‘Well what the fuck did you expect?’ said Rachel. ‘You’re behaving like a knob. You even smoke cigarettes like a knob.’

They were outside now, and Rachel was smoking cigarettes. James was trying to smoke one too. He was practising, for when he next saw Harriet.

‘I’m not behaving like a knob,’ said James. ‘I think that’s unfair.’

‘You looked like you were on sleeping pills for most of last week. And that last report on retail you sent me was dogshit, you must have written it in about four minutes. And you haven’t been in the pub on Friday for weeks now – people notice these things. Remember: all we talk about is the people who aren’t in the pub with us, and it’s not as if anyone ever says
nice
things.’