The Planner(31)

Okay, he had probably hurt Laura’s feelings a bit. But he reasoned that his self-esteem had risen more than hers had fallen. Plus, she almost certainly still had a lot more of it than he had. Laura herself could hardly object to his reasoning: it was the kind of analysis she did all the time, and, besides, the main thing was she’d be absolutely fine. There was very little point worrying about the Lauras of this world. She was, after all, Civil Service Fast Stream. Before too long she’d be going out with a special advisor, or engaged to someone in the Bank of England. It was only a matter of time. Ultimately, she was a much better prospect than he was.

Well, whatever the evening had meant for Laura, for him it had been a major confidence boost – a triumph he’d have to call it, even if nothing much had actually happened and he hadn’t really enjoyed it. He reached for his phone and sent a text message to Rachel: ‘Thanks for fixing me up with Laura. She was good, but not good enough.’ He regretted doing it immediately afterwards. But no matter – it wasn’t a time in his life to be nurturing regrets. It was a time to be doing things. And now it was obvious what he needed to do next. He needed to go on another date as soon as possible.





7

19 February

Decisions will have to be made at global, national and regional levels that will have profound consequences.

– The London Plan, Section 1.36



James didn’t believe in conspiracy theories – they were too good to be true. If only the world was being run by a cabal of highly intelligent Jews from Yale University. But no: the sad truth was that no one really was in control of all this. No secret organisation in Oregon was responsible for global warming or the crisis in the Middle East, which meant that no secret organisation was ever going to sort them out. Instead, there were seven billion people stumbling around doing shit things to one another and wondering why shit things kept happening to them. And the only people trying to help them were people like him – the planners. The regulators, busybodies and do-gooders. But there weren’t very many of them, not really, and most of them were so bad at it that they just made things worse.

He was with them now, on the fourth floor of Southwark Council, sitting at his desk in the middle of the Planning and Environment Directorates. It was, indisputably and reassuringly, an office. He was well aware that nowadays they weren’t all like this. He had been to other ones, architects’ mainly, where things were done differently with a colourful collection of conflicting objects and furniture – plasma screens, red sofas, leather beanbags, table-football machines. But there was no such ambiguity here where every desk, filing cabinet and patterned carpet had come from a single supplier, carefully selected from a national procurement roster on the basis of a wide range of factors, none of which had anything to do with the attractiveness of its products.

The most important feature of the room was directly in front of his desk – the fourth floor kitchenette, a monument to the failings of collective responsibility. From where James sat, he could see the white plastic kettle and the counter coated in hardened sugar and spilt coffee granules. Below was a cupboard of mugs with slogans from health promotion campaigns, and the communal fridge, long ago rendered unusable by the stack of unclaimed Tupperware boxes with their pasta salads and tuna bakes. How many rounds of tea had he made here? And how many hours at the end of the day had he spent at the sink washing up mugs in lukewarm water, rubbing away at tannin stains, or trying to dislodge the insoluble remains of instant soup mixture?

James turned back to his screen. There was a long email from his sister, a letter really, with observations on her teacher-training course, news from home, which wasn’t significant enough to be considered good or bad, and enthusiasm about the job offer in Nottingham. James hadn’t even finished it before he turned to read another email, from Felix.

In person, Felix liked to speak at length, making eloquent pronouncements in complete sentences. But when it came to electronic communications he was curt and brutally to the point. His emails were businesslike, forcefully punctuated and demanded action. To James, who had only ever worked in the public sector with colleagues who were well mannered and socially unconfident, this inevitably meant that they came across as menacing.



Subject: The Date

What happened? Need a full report.



Without delay, James started to write a detailed reply, describing his evening with Laura and what had and hadn’t happened. He was meant to be drafting a briefing for Lionel, which should have taken him three hours, but so far had taken two days. This wasn’t for any of the usual reasons: he hadn’t been interrupted by a crisis generated by the communications team, he hadn’t had to deal with an aggrieved planning applicant, and it wasn’t because his computer had broken down. He just couldn’t be bothered. It was barely two o’clock and he felt fatigued, uninterested, mildly unhappy and unappreciated. He felt like someone who worked in the public sector.