The Planner(23)

The early morning shoppers walked past, curious only until they realised that they didn’t have any gifts or product samples to give away. Rachel’s enthusiasm had disappeared. There had been some spasms of disgruntlement, but that had gone too and now she was playing patience on her mobile phone. James was trying to read Sexheads, but was finding it hard to get into.

‘When are you lot ever going to learn?’

James and Rachel looked up to see a short, middle-aged man. He was almost certainly the only person in the shopping centre apart from James wearing a tie, and he was shaking his head at them gravely.

‘Can I help?’ said James. ‘Have you got a view on the new plan?’

James recognised the type all too well. Although he was dressed smartly, his suit could easily be second-hand. He had neat grey hair and a moustache. If you didn’t know any better, you might have guessed that he had served in the army, but in fact it was likely that he had spent most of his adult life on some form of welfare benefit. James knew that he would be highly intelligent but economically incompetent and would have strongly held, wildly incoherent political opinions.

‘This scheme you’ve been dreaming up. It just isn’t going to work. None of it adds up.’

James could detect an unlikeable shrillness in his voice, the consequence of a lifetime of not being listened to.

‘Ah, adding up. James, I think this is more your domain,’ said Rachel. ‘I need to go for a cigarette.’

‘It simply isn’t going to work. And it certainly isn’t going to look like that,’ said the man, pointing over James’s shoulder.

James glanced back for a moment at his masterplan poster. He had overseen the design himself with a junior, and therefore less obnoxious, member of the council’s communications team, and he regarded it as his greatest creative achievement. It was large, almost two metres high, laminated with a cotton backing, and Lionel had grumbled about how much it had cost. But it was well worth it, if only because the image was everything that planning could be, everything he had once been taught and which he still believed in.

In the top left of the poster, the morning sunshine slanted powerfully through a friendly blue sky. A handsome black man in a suit and glasses strode into the foreground, his briefcase swinging confidently. A white woman, equally attractive and well dressed, was at his side, speaking into a mobile phone while holding a takeaway coffee. In the other direction, two boys on bikes with helmets and shoulder bags were hurtling towards school, while a grey-haired, fresh-faced woman walked her obedient Dalmatian dog. All of them were on a broad walkway lined with silver birch trees, which curved out from the new development behind them – a wonderfully bright and happy building, with rippled surfaces, undulating roofs bearing wind turbines, yellow bricks and green glass, irregular colour panels and rustic fittings. Just as important, of course, was what was missing: there were no cars, no clouds, no graffiti, no litter, no criminal damage or mental illness. They hadn’t even had to airbrush anything out, for the entire poster had been made on a computer, an ingenious montage of photos that the council owned the copyright on, fanciful architectural images and shapes and textures rendered with Californian software tools.

‘Do you want me to go through it with you?’ said James.

‘You don’t have to. I’ve already studied it. You’ve got it all wrong.’

While the usual problem with the British public was that they tended not to know anything, the real troublemakers were the ones who actually did. The retired civil engineers with radical transport solutions, the autodidacts who spent their days in public libraries mastering European environment regulations. These were the ones who weren’t just wrong, but were spectacularly, dangerously wrong – wrong in ways that must be discounted but couldn’t necessarily be refuted.

‘There are many problems with this plan, and I’ve outlined them in my written response. But the main one you’ve got is that it doesn’t take any account at all of traffic. What about car parking? You seem to be under the impression that everyone who lives here is going to be travelling exclusively by bicycle.’

‘Well, I think you’re quite right to the raise the issue and it is an important one. We’ve actually given it quite a lot of thought. We did commission a feasibility study that looked specifically at this.’

‘Oh, I’m well aware of that. But I haven’t been able to read it. I’ve submitted a number of Freedom of Information requests, and am still waiting. You do know that you’re obliged to reply in twenty-eight days to any request for information, unless it is pertains to the defence of the realm?’