On they went, on and on – across monumental roundabouts, over the mega-junctions, through the town centres that could only be recognised by their one-way systems and beneath road bridges of strategic importance to the national economy. They travelled past lucrative car dealerships, docile industrial parks and under-used public facilities until the air thinned and they were at the very edge. They had gone beyond Harrow, the capital of Metroland, they had gone beyond Pinner and Northwood and, at last, after nearly two hours, they had run out of city.
Now, if there was anything James feared more than the suburbs, then it was the countryside. And if there was anything worse than the countryside, then it was where the two met. A coming together of town and country, but there was no synergy here, no collision even, just a dismal petering out, a leakage of urban waste into the reservoir of England. Ahead, there was space – miles and miles of it – but it was the wrong type. This wasn’t planned space, like the squares or parks that he tried to design and protect. This was bad space, crude space, the kind that lets blasts of wind gather momentum on cold March days, that makes the sky bigger, the earth browner and humans so much smaller. And it was here, in the very last house in London, that Felix’s drug dealer lived. A two-storey, brown-brick house on the end of a terrace, with an untidy front yard and an unvarnished wooden gate that didn’t shut properly.
Felix knocked firmly on the peeling, poignant white door, and they waited for two minutes. There were no more street lights, but in the distance James could see all the ingredients for another metropolitan fuck-up: Portacabins and breeze-block huts, skips half full of rain water and rudimentarily stacked pallet towers, portents of car parks and supermarkets, bowling alleys and multiplex cinemas.
The man who finally appeared looked much like his front door – an unhappy white 35-year old, but his skin was so worn out, it was difficult to precisely guess his age or income. It was likely that he took many of the drugs he sold for a living and that these were accelerating the ageing process. James understood that this was a common occurrence.
‘Marcus – good to see you,’ said Felix. ‘This is my friend James.’
Marcus nodded and, without saying anything, they followed him down a hallway. The house was unnecessarily warm, and Marcus wasn’t wearing nearly enough clothes. All he had on was a large orange T-shirt, ill-disciplined tracksuit bottoms and woollen socks. It was likely that he’d slept in them. Unwisely, Marcus was clean-shaven, for his face was without mystery and didn’t stand up well to scrutiny. It looked soft and in need of protection, made for the indoors, and his eyes were wet. It was not, James would have said, the face of someone who was ever meant to be a drug dealer. And the name Marcus didn’t seem right either. Perhaps he had only got into it after making some fundamental and irrecoverable mistake, like a degree in geography.
Marcus sat back down on a green sofa, not far from an enormous television. There was a duvet in the corner of the room. James wondered how much of the house he ever occupied. At his feet were mugs and spoons, an electric kettle, tea leaves, two jars of instant coffee, opened packets of biscuits, spilt sugar granules, a variety of herbal tea bags and cartons of milk. Collectively, it was the most important feature of the room, possibly the whole house, but there was no offer to make them anything to drink.
‘What would you like then?’ said Marcus.
‘The usual, of course, but it needs to be of the highest quality.’
Marcus shrugged. ‘It is what it is,’ he said.
‘Then we might have a difficulty. The last stuff was particularly useless.’
‘I can’t do much about that,’ said Marcus. ‘I only sell the shit.’
‘I fear that what we have here,’ said Felix, ‘is a particularly striking instance of market failure through information asymmetry.’
‘Is that going to be a problem?’ said Marcus.
‘It was the American economist Keith Arrow, who formulated the concept of information asymmetries,’ said Felix. ‘These are transactions in which one party, almost always the vendor, has more information about the product than the buyer. In such circumstances, there exist opportunities for the vendor to cheat. For while the buyer knows the price of a product, it is only the vendor who knows its true value – its scarcity, efficacy, durability.’
There was a glum silence. If Felix had wanted to do some high-concept sparring over the course of negotiations then he needed to get another drug dealer. Marcus sniffed, he clearly suffered from colds pretty much all of the time, and looked bored. He reached for the remote control and started to flick through some television channels. But it wasn’t, James thought, a negotiating tactic – he just was bored. It was, he could see, probably something of an occupational hazard.