‘No,’ said Felix. ‘South of the river isn’t really my thing.’
‘What about the rest of London?’
‘We have done, of course, but not much now. All the action is elsewhere. London is dying. The whole country is, and Europe’s no better. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Singapore. That’s where the money and talent is. That’s where the ambition is. I’ll probably relocate in a few months. There’s not enough going on here.’
‘So are all the architects leaving?’ asked James hopefully.
‘The good ones,’ said Felix. ‘But I’m sure there will still be more than enough left to do conservatories in Basingstoke.’
James didn’t say anything. They sat together in silence for a while.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any stimulating drugs?’ said Felix.
James shook his head. He got to his feet, at least that way he got to end the conversation, and looked over the room. It was louder and more colourful than ever. He suddenly felt very tired. That was the problem with being thirty-two. You were so old. Who wants to be old? Nobody ever wants to be old. But nobody should ever want to be young either. Nobody should ever wish to be so witless, so fearful and so fucking irritating.
It was no good – he would have to go home. That was obvious. The question was how. It was the eternal problem. In all his years of living in London, he still hadn’t found a satisfactory solution. How did anyone ever get home at night? When you thought about it, it was rather extraordinary that they did. Tonight his options were particularly bleak. It was either forty pounds in a taxi, a complicated series of night buses or else a three-hour existential walk. Either way, he would have to head back out into Camden alone, and the effects of the novelty vodka had long worn off. Perhaps, he should have just spent the night with Rachel and the others in the Red Lion.
There was little point in saying goodbye to anyone. Harriet was missing, it was technically impossible to have a conversation with Cordelia, the girl in the kitchen was still crying, and Felix was an amazing bastard. No, it would be better if he just quietly left. He got to his feet and tiptoed around the bodies, the burgundy rugs and maroon cushions, the wine bottles and cans of beer. Young people were so untidy, so careless, so irresponsible, so dirty, and this was their own flat – this was the private realm. No wonder the housing estate had failed and Camden was fucked.
But then, just as he reached the hallway, Harriet reappeared. That was of course yet another thing about young people – they were so inconsistent. She had bare feet, and looked at him affectionately and with a kindly smile. She was twenty-eight years old, she had a precarious job in a time of great economic uncertainty, and for many more years the most valuable things she would own would be her fridge and digital music system. But she was sexually adventurous, brave, wiser than she looked, and improbably happy. She was also almost certainly off her head on drugs.
‘There you are! I do hope you’re not trying to leave. I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’ she said.
That was highly unlikely – the flat wasn’t that big. Of course, the question was what had she been doing for the last hour, and who with? But the important thing was not to ask or worry about it. It was worrying about things that caused all the problems, and which made people so unattractive and unsuccessful, which made them so old. And James had made up his mind not to worry. It was the crucial lesson. Harriet took his hand, and led him away from the front door and back down the hallway.
‘Now, because I don’t really know you all that well, I’m not going to have sex with you,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ said James.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘depending on how we get on, I might suck you off.’
‘Okay,’ said James, and he followed her into a bedroom.
9
1 March
A growing London population is likely in itself to support an expanding economy, with growing demand for leisure and personal services.
– The London Plan, Section 1.18
James needed to be on drugs – proper drugs. It had been obvious that at some point this would have to happen, this would be something that he would just have to do. It was 2013 and everyone was taking them, unless they had a very cool reason why they shouldn’t – a conviction for smuggling, or else if they’d already fucked up their livers and hearts by taking too many. But James had no such excuses.
Once upon a time, of course, it had only been slum-dwellers and the aristocracy who took them. The class system still counted for something, it always did, but now the distinction was only really in the type and quality of the drugs they took. James, of course, was a lower-middle-class drug user, and as a result he had never got any further than boasting that he’d smoked some particularly potent cannabis. But that was hopeless – he wasn’t seventeen any more. He needed to be able to look people squarely in the eye and tell them how dismal their cocaine was. And that meant having some drugs of his own to consume and allocate. Not all the time, of course – it wasn’t part of the plan to become an addict, and apparently that never happened anyway. But he did need to take enough of them to know better.