The Planner Read online

  To Mum and Dad

  Contents

  1 25 January

  2 28 January

  3 1 February

  4 5 February

  5 9 February

  6 15 February

  7 19 February

  8 22 February

  9 1 March

  10 6 March

  11 12 March

  12 15 March

  13 21 March

  14 26 March

  15 28 March

  16 29 March

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Tom Campbell

  1

  25 January

  At its best, London can provide what is amongst the highest quality of life to be found anywhere. Unfortunately, this is not the universal experience of Londoners.

  – The London Plan, Section 1.44

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Adam. ‘Verb.’

  ‘Fuck you, you fuck – noun,’ said Carl.

  ‘Fuck you, you fucking – adjective – fuck.’

  ‘Well, fucking – adverb – fuck you, you fucking fuck.’

  Adam laughed. ‘You bastard,’ he said.

  ‘So what, swearing is funny now?’ said Alice.

  ‘No,’ said Adam. ‘Swearing isn’t funny. We’re funny.’

  But James wasn’t sure how funny they were. He may not have been much of a comic himself, but at least he usually knew when to laugh. Tonight, though, it seemed he couldn’t even manage that: there was a dullness to him that made even smiling an effort. There was a woman there with them he’d never met before, Olivia, and she wasn’t being particularly funny or laughing much either. But that was no consolation because she had other, unspecified talents. She wasn’t what one would ordinarily call pretty – she had one of those flat, old-fashioned faces – but she was really posh, posher even than Adam, and James knew that meant she had to be assessed differently. In fact, for all he knew, it might mean that she was actually very beautiful.

  It didn’t help that the restaurant was just about the most expensive he had ever been to in his life. The address in Farringdon could have meant anything, but the inconspicuous entrance, tucked away on a terraced side street, its dark front door and small square windows should have raised alarm bells. The booby traps and unamusing quirks scattered across the English class system were not something James had ever navigated with ease, but he did know this much: anything this understated had to be classy, which meant that it had to be costly. He had no idea how much his meal was, but certainly enough to ruin every mouthful, and the drink was just as problematic for Carl, like James, was only capable of judging wine on the basis of price and so had ordered the most expensive bottles he could find.

  But the real problem tonight was Alice. Even more than Adam and Carl, he was worried about Alice. She was on especially good form, which was likely to mean one of two things – either she was notching up another of her triumphs at the newspaper, or else she’d met someone. Another glamorous and improbably well-known boyfriend. It was getting out of hand: the last one, an incredible sod, had kept cropping up on the radio, and Alice herself was starting to become someone who wasn’t famous, but who famous people knew and liked – something, James had learnt, which was actually much better, more desirable and harder to achieve.

  In truth, ever since Alice had stopped being a teacher, James had found their friendship difficult to sustain. He was reasonably confident that he still earned more than her, but that was no comfort. She was in the kind of profession where success was measured in ways other than money and anyway, crucially, she owned her flat. Eight years ago, with help from her parents, Alice had shrewdly bought a two-bedroom flat in Highgate that had immediately and relentlessly risen in value every month since.

  James stared down at his plate. It was a Silk Road fusion restaurant, with dishes originating from Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Armenia and a number of other countries he was unlikely ever to visit. In the face of such a range, it was almost inevitable that he would choose poorly, and he was now facing a pretentious, unpalatable mess. James’s semiotic analysis bordered on the dysfunctionally superstitious. Was his dinner a symbol of globalisation? Or did it represent more personal failings? He looked across the table – Adam had chosen some crisp and attractive spinach pancakes and Carl was oafishly enjoying his skewed kebab and chips. Christ, he thought, it never used to be like this. When did enjoying oneself become such terribly hard work?

  ‘Mine isn’t any good either,’ said Felix, with a friendly smile. ‘I think this place is overrated. Just like everything else.’

  James smiled back. As seemed to happen more and more often, the person he was getting on with the best was the one he knew the least: Felix Selwood, whom he knew nothing about other than he was clever and worked in advertising. It was another of Adam’s achievements that he had managed to acquire a varied and high-quality collection of close friends since leaving university.

  ‘And, sorry – what is it you do? Adam did tell me, but I’m not sure if I quite understood him. Something to do with local government?’

  ‘Sort of. I work in town planning,’ said James with immense cautiousness.

  ‘That sounds interesting.’

  Yes, his job was interesting – at least James had thought so once, and there were, in theory, still interesting things to do: masterplans to produce, jobs to create, leisure centres to build, homes to knock down, communities to displace. These were all real and substantial things – more real, surely, than what the others did for a living.

  ‘So what does a town planner actually do every day?’

  By way of a response, James decided to go to the toilet, though it was hardly a sustainable solution. At least with the washrooms he was getting some value for money for, in contrast to the restaurant itself, they were idiotically overwhelming. Here, everything was superfluous, far too large and symptomatic of a civilisation on the brink of collapse. Limestone basins with gushing brass taps, dramatic mirrors with elaborate gold-gilded frames, a mosaic of cool cream and blue glass tiles, all pointlessly serviced by silent black men with soft hands. He removed his glasses, held his wrists and then temples under very cold water and breathed slowly. The basin was so wide and deep that he could comfortably fit his entire head in it while he wondered what on earth he was doing here.

  In theory they were all there to congratulate Adam on a significant promotion. But that was hardly a cause for celebration. James tried to think back to the last time he had actually enjoyed his friends’ success. He could recall being drunk and happy at Alice’s twenty-eighth birthday party, and had been genuinely pleased when Carl had got engaged to Jane. But that was all a long time ago. Since then there had been many successful parties, many promotions and Carl was now going out with Zoe. How bad had things got? Had it got to the point where he actually disliked his closest friends? When had that started? Of course, that was one of the principal problems in doing your degree at the London School of Economics, the thing that they never mentioned in the prospectus: all the friends you made would go on to become insufferable wankers. Or was it just capitalism that had fucked everything up for them? Surely things wouldn’t be so bad if Adam and Carl worked in the public sector? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone worked in the public sector? All James knew for sure was that he couldn’t stay with his head in the basin forever, and that he very much wanted to be home.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  James jerked his head up and put his glasses back on. It was Felix. Time passed differently under water and he couldn’t be sure how long he’d been there.

  ‘No,’ said James. ‘No, I don’t think I am.’

  Felix nodded. He didn’t look like Adam, he didn’t have vigorous dark hair and a big upper-middle class forehead, and he didn’t look like C
arl with pale proletariat skin and a brutish square face. For the moment, that would just have to do, and James had the sense that he was safe, that Felix wouldn’t make things any worse.

  ‘Have you had too much to drink?’

  James probably had, but that was hardly the problem. It wasn’t him that was ill, it was everything else. The whole migraine world.

  ‘I hate my friends,’ said James. ‘They’re all awful.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Felix. ‘I think they probably are.’

  A black man handed James a white towel and he held it to his face and hair. It smelt of apples and lemons.

  ‘We don’t have to go back,’ said Felix. ‘It’s fine to stay here if you’re not feeling up to it.’

  James nodded. It would be nice to put his head back into the sink and stay there indefinitely, for his heart to slow down and his blood to cool, perhaps to let water erosion take its course and shape him into someone else.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ said James. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be along in a minute.’

  James waited until Felix left, and then felt inside his trouser pocket for where he knew there was a ten-pound note. He didn’t really know what he was doing, he didn’t really like what he was doing, but he wanted to give some money to the only person in the building who had less than him. He put the note on a little silver dish. The attendant was at least fifty years old. He looked at it with eyes full of sorrow, but didn’t say anything.

  When he got back to the table, things were only marginally better. People weren’t making jokes any more and so he didn’t have to laugh or try to say something funny. Instead, they were having an argument. But the difficulty was that they weren’t arguing about music or sport or even politics – they were arguing about the economy. And it wasn’t something easy like what a bunch of fuckers the bankers were, but rather what seemed to be a reasonably technical discussion around the merits of fiscal investment versus monetary expansion, and their associated inflationary risks. Again, James could only look at his friends in dismay. Okay, Carl worked in finance and Alice wrote for newspapers, but how on earth did Adam get to know about this kind of shit? He was a lawyer, with a degree in English Literature, and yet here he was sounding perfectly knowledgeable about macroeconomics. God, he even seemed to know something about microeconomics.

  Increasingly, on nights like this, James felt as if Adam and Carl and Alice and everyone else were the adults, and that he was no more than their teenage nephew. They had grown up in ways he never had, and maybe, he was now beginning to fear, never would. It was more than simply wives and careers, money and mortgages – they had mastered the very principles of adulthood, while he was still watching, learning, aping them. Having an informed position on the economy was part of this, and James was frantically trying to think of something wise and insightful to say, but it was no good – anything he could come up with would either be truthful and naive, or else false and pompous. It was so much hard work, having to pretend he understood what was going on in the world, to have a view on what was going to happen next. And God, hadn’t it been so much better when all that anyone ever did was get pissed and talk about girls?

  The race of life, so people were often saying, is a marathon and not a sprint. But if that was really the case, why was everybody else sprinting? None of the others seemed to be pacing themselves, taking it easy and slowing down a bit. They had come flying out of the blocks immediately upon graduating and now, ten years later, seemed to be going faster than ever. Even the recession didn’t seem to be holding them back. James had had high hopes for it, he had watched banks implode and stock markets fall with mounting excitement, but incredibly – and this was scarcely believable – it now seemed to be affecting him more than any of the others. It was Southwark Council that had frozen salaries, instigated redundancy programmes and now wanted to renegotiate his pension plan. And it was his landlord who had announced that his monthly rent would have to go up, while everyone else kept marvelling at how low their mortgage repayments had become.

  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.