The Planner (24 page)

‘This just cost me a hundred pounds. It was all they had. And do you know – I’m not even sure if it’s got any alcohol in it. I think it might be fucking grape juice or something.’

‘Yes,’ said Felix. ‘I was afraid something like that might happen.’

Carl slumped down next to them. The smell was familiar and unpleasant, like a small house where a big dog lived. There was a pinball machine in the corner, maybe the last one in Westminster, but it had been discarded rather than curated, and James knew that it wouldn’t work. There were no women in the audience here, and while that was to be welcomed, it was troubling how few men there were either. But it wasn’t completely empty – at a table nearby sat a group of East Asian businessmen. Almost certainly, though you could never be sure, they were Chinese.

‘Now that,’ said Carl, with an emphatic jerk of the thumb in their direction, ‘is a very bad sign. As a rule, we don’t want to be enjoying the same things as those bastards.’

James looked at them carefully. He had to admit, they were disgusting. Overweight with awful glasses and grey suits bought at tax-free airport franchises, they looked like they worked in town planning for Shanghai City Government, although more likely they were electronics millionaires. They weren’t even watching or drinking anything. Instead, conforming entirely to their ethnic stereotype, they were fidgeting with handheld devices and trying to take pictures of each other. There could be no clearer sign that they were in the wrong place.

After a long period of inactivity and gradually increasing disquiet, some upbeat music started jerkily, and a girl came onstage. It was a disheartening start. She was Eastern European, but not in a good way. It looked like she was from Serbia or Bosnia – strikingly tall, with square shoulders, a clump of muscles around her abdomen, and a tattoo of a tiger on her thigh. She seemed to be full of hurt and hostility, which was almost certainly justified, and she commanded the stage like an actor in a Shakespearean history play as she pulled off her blouse and bra. Her breasts were too large for her chest, and her teeth were too big for her mouth.

‘That wasn’t exactly encouraging,’ said Carl. ‘She was formidable, I’ll give her that. But really – a woman like that needs to be serving in the navy rather than taking her clothes off onstage.’

The Chinese businessmen applauded, but the cultural divide was too great for James to tell if they were being polite, appreciative or ironic. There was a pause. The music stopped, then started, then stopped again.

‘At least we saw something this time,’ said James, who still wasn’t sure how he should benchmark his expectations.

‘I fear,’ said Felix, ‘that this place may be under new management since I was last here.’

‘Soho is going down the tubes,’ said Carl. ‘This used to be a world-class cluster for the sex economy. But it’s all been fucked. We’re losing our competitive advantage. You can bet those Chinese fuckers will be doing business in Paris next year.’

James took a gulp of his sweet white wine. He was probably right – just like manufacturing and finance and everything else, it wouldn’t be long before the Chinese became experts on pornography, and selected different suppliers. An unwelcome light came on. Nothing much seemed to happen for a while. Felix and Carl started to discuss oil prices. Some more Chinese men arrived. James got his mobile phone out, but couldn’t get a reception. Carl went to the toilets and reported back that they were almost certainly the worst in central London. And then, suddenly, the lights went off again, the music came on again, and a girl padded on to the stage.

This time the disaster was unequivocal. She looked
British
, possibly even Welsh. She had big feet and the kind of sturdy legs and arms particularly ill suited for this sub-sector of the entertainment industry. There were other issues too, the freckles and moles on her shoulders, the broken capillaries on her shins, but the main problem, the insurmountable difficulty, was her age. Protected by her make-up, distorted by the stage lighting, it was impossible to be precise, but it was all too easy to be accurate:
she wasn’t young
.

Felix and Carl were twitching in indignation, but James felt something else, something far more deadly: he felt sorry for her. It was so unfair that she had to do this. How could it have happened? A particularly unfortunate labour market failure, a breakdown in demand and supply had led to a sub-standard product being presented to a group of discerning consumers who had just paid a great deal of money on the expectation of something of considerably higher quality. And now here they all were, feeling uncomfortable and unhappy and cheated.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Carl. ‘I can’t bear this.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Felix. ‘I can see that this place is problematic. I’ve got somewhere else for us. I was holding it back until later, but if need be we can go there now.’

‘What about the wine?’ said James.

‘Fuck the wine,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll put it on expenses or something. But I’m not staying here to drink it.’

‘Come on,’ said Felix. ‘I’m afraid Carl’s right. We have to go immediately.’

‘Hold on,’ said James. ‘We can’t just get up and go while she’s still onstage.’

‘We’re fucking going,’ said Carl.

‘A market only functions efficiently if it has enough information,’ said Felix. ‘And if we don’t leave now and express our dissatisfaction, then we’re withholding information from the market. It’s how markets work. It’s how the world gets better.’

The logic was unassailable. What was James going to do? Felix and Carl were already walking out, and James could hardly sit on his own, staying to watch her take off her bra on the grounds of social democracy. It was such a shame. The woman was still dancing, she had no choice, but by now she must have been aware of the unhappiness she was causing. The Chinese were talking loudly and watching a film on an iPad as James walked across the room, his head down.

Outside, back in the alley, an emergency conference had been called.

‘Okay,’ said Carl. ‘That was an expensive fiasco. I’m thinking of going home.’

‘No, don’t worry,’ said Felix. ‘It’s all in hand. I wanted us to do Soho for the sake of James’s education, but I always thought we would end up somewhere else.’

‘Really? Where are you thinking? I’m starting to lose faith with the project.’

‘Well, I’m up for it,’ said James. ‘I’m up for anything.’

‘Of course you are,’ said Felix. ‘We all are. And as long as we stay that way, I promise that the evening will be successful.’

‘Christ, okay then. Let’s do this. But the next place better be fucking good.’

Carl channelled his disgruntlement into negotiating a stunningly good price with a Pakistani minicab driver, and they clambered into a small saloon car that smelt rich and beautiful – of dark chocolate, fresh mint and strong cannabis. This time they were going much further: they were going east. James should have known – it was inevitable that this would happen at some point in the evening. The West End of London had become tamed and over-regulated. It was the fault of people like James, the planners, who had only succeeded in filling the town centre with coffee bars and sandwich shops and driving all the good stuff elsewhere. But the East was different, it was the future. Everyone knew that: Felix, the venture capitalists, the technology start-ups, the advertising agencies and the strip-club owners. The driver took them out of Soho, through Clerkenwell and into the City fringes, and then Felix took over, for specialist knowledge was required. They travelled through obsolete high streets and long-standing regeneration priorities, past failing churches and flourishing mosques, across Dalston Junction and onwards, deep into the heart of Hackney.

And then, unexpectedly, at a forlorn street corner somewhere near London Fields, Felix instructed him to stop, and they disembarked outside a shoe shop. A few weeks ago, James would have been confused – after all, this was obviously a premises with A1 rather than D3 usage. But he knew better now. He trusted Felix, and he trusted London. He was a regulator and he spent much of his life devising rules that people ingeniously evaded or simply ignored, and as a result London blundered on. It was high-functioning anarchy. People slept in commercial office space and ran businesses from their homes, they dealt drugs in their front rooms, opened all-night bars in warehouses and they established sex clubs in the basements of shoe shops.

‘Are we entirely sure about this?’ said Carl. ‘Because I don’t know how on earth we get back from here.’

But the cab had already gone, and they were on an empty street peering into a window display: a row of black and brown leather shoes, arranged without imagination, and all of which seemed to be on special offer.

‘Well, let’s just hope the sex bar is cross-subsidising the shop, rather than the other way round,’ said Felix.

There was no signage or low-frequency lights, and no one guarding the entrance. In fact, displaying a confidence that James considered to be reckless, there wasn’t even a door. There was simply a gap at the top of a flight of dimly lit stairs, which seemed to offer little prospect of going anywhere but to a storeroom, but Felix strode down, undaunted by the darkness or danger. At the bottom of the stairs they opened a door, walked past a young man who was reading a graphic novel, and found themselves in what was actually a storeroom. Or, at least, it clearly had been until very recently, for there were still empty shelves running around the walls, a small pile of shoeboxes neatly stacked in the far corner and wooden crates that had been repurposed as seats and chairs.

‘Ah good,’ said Felix. ‘It looks like things have already got started here. I think we’re going to be okay now.’

‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Carl. ‘Let’s get some drinks, sit down and see what they’ve got to show us.’

And now, thirty minutes later, James could feel confident that he was enjoying himself. Onstage, things were being done properly and girls were continually getting undressed in front of him. They weren’t necessarily as good-looking as in the first place, but that was okay because they were all immensely attractive, they had far less clothes on and James had had a lot more to drink. It also helped that none of them were actually on the stage for very long. They bounded on good-naturedly in high heels, danced a bit, unclipped their bras, wriggled out of their knickers, pouted provocatively while clutching their breasts and skipped off merrily. It wasn’t exactly dancing, more a kind of rudimentary, highly energetic jiggling about, and it didn’t look as if it required much in the way of training, but it was compelling. It was, in fact, and at long last,
pornographic
. And it took no longer than four minutes, like a perfect pop song. There wasn’t enough time to inspect the quality of their skin or the whiteness of their teeth in any detail, or to wonder if they were paying any tax or receiving income support benefit while doing this.

There were eight of them, the racial variety was impressive and one of the good things was that they quickly came round again and again, although in no particular order, like an iPod Shuffle. They each had their favourites. Carl, typically, liked a big-breasted Jamaican girl and Felix, of course, preferred a little Korean with a bob of black hair and boyish hips. And James had fallen for one who looked, though he knew this was probably unlikely, like an Israeli who was doing this in order to pay for her tuition fees while studying for a Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, and who, when she wasn’t onstage taking her clothes off, wore little round glasses and liked to read poems by E.E. Cummings.

All the girls were smiling beautifully. It might be stretching it to say they were enjoying themselves, but they seemed determined to make the best of the circumstances, and had a marvellous work ethic. They looked cheerful, in good health, and with no obvious signs of physical coercion or drug addiction. Crucially, they were exactly the right age. Not so young as to make him feel ashamed of himself and, even more important, not so old that he felt ashamed for them. They had been born at the end of the twentieth century, but they were twenty-first-century women, and it didn’t take too much imaginative effort for James to persuade himself that they were empowered, that they had come to this country through legitimate immigration channels, and were taking their clothes off in front of him purely as a consequence of informed career and lifestyle decisions.

Despite there being no entry fee, the crowd was much better here too: well mannered, unconventionally dressed and morally desensitised without being psychopathic. The market imperfections and barriers to entry were working to their advantage for people had come here not because they could afford it, but because they knew about it. There were no businessmen on a trade mission from Asia and no construction workers or investment bankers, both of whom had a tendency to ruin things like this. Rather, everyone looked as if they worked in the digital media industries: pop music directors, website designers and people who make video games for mobile phones. These were people who took their leisure seriously, and who had carefully researched and prepared before choosing to spend their Friday night here.

Even Carl was impressed. ‘Well, it’s good to see that we can still put on a decent tit-and-fanny show. Maybe the country isn’t completely ruined after all.’

Felix and James nodded approvingly. Yes, perhaps after all, it was still a hopeful time to be alive and to be living in London. The city was still young – the girls onstage were proof of that. The planners and regulators and developers had done their worst, but London’s entrepreneurial energy, its immigration lawyers, middlemen and criminal ingenuity had triumphed and, as a result, the sex industry was here, generating employment and prosperity for the people of East London.