‘Martin? He’s fucking our Art Director. If I got him involved with Camilla that really would screw things up.’
This was more like it. James had spent enough time with urban planners and public servants, with people called Lionel and Neil. He needed to know more Felixes and Camillas. He needed to have drinks with people who worked in the glamorous parts of the private sector, and who could speak openly and cynically about sex and money, people with their own personal brands, complicated remuneration packages and opaque tax arrangements.
Camilla returned from the bathroom where it looked like she had been crying, and ordered an over-generous round of drinks and bar snacks. She then proceeded to be completely charming with everyone. In fact, James had just got to the point of wondering whether he ought to try and have sex with her after all, when she started to raise her voice again, and Erica immediately suggested that they go home.
‘It’s midnight,’ said Felix. ‘We should all probably go. One of the critical things with evenings like this is to demonstrate moderation and sound judgement. It’s something Camilla has never managed.’
‘Well, I didn’t think she was too bad. In fact, all of your friends seemed very nice,’ said James.
‘They’re really not, you know. Even Erica. They’re just very skilled at their jobs, and they understand that in this profession you’re always working.’
‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. After all, we are nothing more than what we pretend to be. I guess that goes for account directors as well as everyone else.’
James didn’t get the night bus home that night. No – he got a taxi, all the way! He sat on his own in the deep leather seats luxuriating in the quiet, troubled by nothing more than his own thoughts – which were, unfortunately, so much worse than the students on the night bus. But it was still a good way to travel: going through South London at a constant speed, under bright but intermittent lights, even the shit parts, even the parts he was responsible for, didn’t look so very bad. But the age of planning cities for the motorcar had long come to an end. It was a shame, in a way, for it had been a time when town planners had never had more power and prestige. Even Adam would have been impressed if James had demolished his house to make way for a dual carriageway.
So he needed a worldview – a doctrine, maybe a fierce modern one, or else something derived from ancient wisdoms. He needed to be theoretically willing to undertake great feats that would accelerate the direction of history or, failing that, help him to sleep peacefully at night and seduce women. His other friends had them, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what they were. You could tell by the way that Alice became louder when someone was disagreeing with her, or in Adam’s wry little smile – they knew something important about the world. Even Lionel probably had a worldview – a stoical acceptance of the hierarchies of incompetence, and his ineffective position among them.
He got out of the taxi. It had cost an exhilarating thirty pounds or, after income tax, about a third of what he’d earned that day. But the problem, of course, was that whichever method he travelled home by, however much he spent on the journey, he always ended up in the same place: Crystal Palace, SE19. James had a powerful understanding of his neighbourhood. The data was abundant, and extracting and analysing it was the kind of thing he did for a living. So he knew, for instance, that there were four times as many burglaries in his postcode than the national average and twice as many sexual offences. The proportion of homes with satellite television was unusually high and three-quarters of all residents received some form of income support benefit. It was, in short, a shithole. House prices had risen by 243 per cent in the last five years.
But the problems only magnified once you actually got inside his flat. James lived in a rented flat – it was the single greatest tragedy of his life. It would have been more acceptable, of course, if his friends hadn’t all bought theirs at an eerily young age. It would also have been better if James didn’t have flatmates, for he hadn’t given anything like enough thought as to whom he would be sharing with. It was a characteristic error, exactly the kind of mistake that a town planner would make, and he had been living with the consequences for the last two years. He was living with them now. As he came in, long after midnight, he could hear the soft bangings and mutterings of Jane who was clumsy and inconsiderate, and of Matt, who was a massive berk, as they barged pointlessly around.
His bedroom was no refuge. He well knew how dismal it would look to a visitor, although that was something of a hypothetical concern. Everywhere he rested his eyes was another small monument to his lack of progress. The undergraduate textbooks on his shelves were an obvious giveaway, while the two science-fiction anthologies, although not in themselves a disaster, were accompanied by nothing more than some guides to planning regulations, The Lord of the Rings and the dictionary that his parents had given him for passing his A levels. And there were the same two prints, one by a famous impressionist and one by a famous surrealist, which he had owned for nearly ten years. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like them, he had never liked them, but now he wasn’t even sure if he was supposed to – he wondered, for instance, what Alice would think of them. The items on his desk were also problematic: the rubber plant that he had thought was amusing at eighteen but which still hadn’t died, the three pint glasses of silver and copper coins, which ought to have been taken to a charity shop but instead constituted his only financial savings, and a primitive computer, a discontinued line bought with enthusiasm just three years ago, but which now looked older than anything else in the room.