The Planner(34)

Adam, who had the room across the corridor, had been very different. His upbringing in Chiswick and year off in Vietnam had given him a head start and he had arrived at the London School of Economics not to make friends and smoke cannabis, he’d already done all of that, but to study and improve his prospects. Alice, of course, had been much the same, albeit she had been brought up in North London, had spent her year off in Tanzania, and had come to study so that she could improve Sub-Saharan Africa. And James? Had he really studied and worked so hard, harder than any of them, that he could be sitting here, on the fourth floor of Southwark Council?

The responses came quickly. Adam was up for it, and so it seemed was everyone else: that unfriendly woman called Olivia who inexplicably got invited to things these days; Adam’s fiancée Justine, who was bound to ask James why he didn’t have a girlfriend; Helen, who had studied geography with him but now worked in the pharmaceutical industry; and a little fucker called Stuart, who had done maths with Carl and was partly responsible for his damaged worldview. Yes, everyone was coming – everyone except for Alice:



Darlings – of course I would have loved to join you, drunk champagne at the expense of a bank and helped celebrate another of young Carl’s triumphs on behalf of international capital. But . . . I’ve got to be at a film gala and so alas will be in Shoreditch rather than Mayfair tonight and suspect will be drinking white wine (if I’m lucky) rather than Bollinger. Have fun and try not to behave yourselves xx



So Alice wasn’t coming. And in refusing the invitation, she was maintaining the moral high ground while also making it clear that she had something much better to do that evening. Well, in that case, James wouldn’t go either. He’d find something better to do himself. He’d go for a drink with Rachel. She was, after all, better company than any of them. He could make amends for the fuck up with Laura, and talk about planning and Lionel.

He waited thirty minutes and then spent another ten writing a suitably carefree and rushed email, with carefully re-engineered spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.



Sorry, can’t make it either. I’ve already something got on this evening (though not a film gala, whatever that is) and too much work to do to get away early.Have a greatt time.



Almost immediately there was another email from Alice and, for the first time in months, this one was sent exclusively to him.



Well, it’s nice to see that at least someone from our generation is using his talents for the common good rather than personal gain. Hope you’re not working too hard, and still getting to book launches xx



Alice was headed for great things. You could tell that by the way she dressed, the savageness of her fringe and the style and speed of her emails. And James? Where was he headed? To do things for the common good, to be a good guy? That sounded an awful lot like middle-management.

In need of a distraction, he opened up some files and started to do some work. It was, after all, what he was meant to be doing. But it didn’t provide any comfort, it just heightened his sense of responsibility and anxiety. The idea was to make Sunbury Square look like his poster, but at the moment it looked like it did in his spreadsheet. Row after row of failure: statistical outliers, dismaying trends, figures that were high when they should be low, and low when they should be high. On the multiple deprivation index, it was the poorest ward in one of London’s poorest boroughs. The violent crime rate had doubled in the last five years. It had the highest number of teenage pregnancies in the south of England, and fewer than one in ten residents had any A levels. And the fact that the people here were so much poorer than him was no consolation – after all, he hadn’t gone to university with any of them.

James worked through it slowly, calculating averages and variance and extracting headline figures. His ancient desktop computer whirred unhappily as he opened up multiple files and programs and carefully constructed the briefing paper, marshalling evidence and putting forward rationales for intervention that had been used many times before. He wondered what Laura would have made of them. And then he had to write a long email explaining to Lionel what the briefing actually meant, and the things he should and shouldn’t say in his meeting.

He closed down the programs and opened up a news website. The government was promising to make more cuts to local authorities and an opinion poll showed that 70 per cent of people thought this was a good idea. It had gone five o’clock, it was dark outside and the building was starting to empty. Rachel had left without saying goodbye.

If this was it, if this was what he was going to do for a living, then shouldn’t he do it somewhere else, somewhere where he was more senior and better paid? Of course, even then it wouldn’t be enough. What he needed was not to earn money but to make money, like Carl. But that was going to be difficult for, as he well knew, there was no such thing as a rich town planner. You could no more make money from town planning than you could from being a tax inspector or a football referee. True, you could take a certain satisfaction in stopping other people from making money, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. No, the only way to make any money from planning was to be crooked. You could take bribes, pass on intelligence, help property developers make large amounts of money and take a portion along the way. But who on earth was ever going to bribe James? The only person he had any influence over was Lionel.