‘See you around,’ said Marcus. ‘Oh wait, I better see you out.’
He walked them to the door, back through the hallway and into the open. The sky had darkened and a breeze had picked up. A day much like any other was coming to a close. James found himself suddenly shivering in the cold air, no longer warmed by Marcus’s overactive, welfare-subsidised radiators.
‘Goodbye,’ said Felix.
Marcus nodded, James nodded back. There were no secret messages in their nods and sighs, just a tacit understanding that communicating in this way was less wearisome. It occurred to James that it was unlikely that he would ever meet Marcus again and, on balance, that this was probably a good thing.
And now, six hours later, James had taken his drugs and was dealing with the consequences. One of the most important was that he had had loads and loads to drink. Overexcited by the drug deal and who knows, maybe even the drugs themselves, James had proceeded to drink five pints of strong lager, brewed by Slovakian monks to a secret fourteenth-century recipe. It had seemed the obvious thing to do. They were in a pub in Clerkenwell with wooden floors. James wasn’t able to say much more than that – it wasn’t his territory and his powers of reasoning were diminished. All he could say for certain was that he was in North, arguably East, London. Disturbingly, and this was something which hardly ever happened, he didn’t even know which borough he was in.
There were seven of them, and although Felix and Carl had jointly coordinated the group for a specific purpose, there didn’t seem to have been any thematic criteria to their selection. There was Olivia, who had been in the restaurant that night with Adam, and who seemed a great deal friendlier than he remembered – but he couldn’t be sure if that was because she was on drugs, or he was. There was Erica, the advertising woman James had met at Felix’s club, and who looked exactly the same as he remembered, except she was wearing trainers. Perhaps, just like the other evening, she regarded this as work.
Carl had brought along two colleagues from the bank: a beautiful boy called Rafael, with dramatic black hair and amber-brown skin, who hardly spoke and may have been intended as a sex offering for one of the women; and Rick who was a terrible little man with dirty fingernails, teeth that were close to ruin and cunning red eyes. He had his own source of drugs and, unlike Marcus, Rick really did look like a cocaine dealer, but he was actually a commodities trader. James had tried to invite Harriet, but she had abruptly left her job and gone to Marrakesh for four weeks.
‘I think,’ said Felix, ‘that all the ingredients are here for a successful evening. The preparation has been thorough. James and I, in particular, need to be congratulated for crossing the entire city region today on everyone’s behalf.’
‘You’ve both done very well,’ said Erica.
‘This is fucking brilliant,’ said Rick.
‘I am so very excited,’ said Olivia. ‘I haven’t been out like this for ages.’
‘I’m too excited. Let’s go outside and smoke some weed,’ said Carl. ‘I need to self-medicate a bit.’
James, Felix and some of the others followed him outside, through a side door to the back of the pub, from where there was an alley leading into a small, closed yard set against the walls of a Roman Catholic church, and which didn’t appear on any maps. As James knew, in this part of London history always trumped geography. Five hundred years ago it would have been a designated site for burying religious heretics, witches and plague victims, but it now seemed purpose-built for taking drugs.
Carl produced a joint from his jacket pocket and lit it with a happy flourish. He looked like someone who had taken exactly the right amount of stimulants and narcotics: overconfident, expansive with his thoughts and generous with his cannabis.
‘Do you know why, at some point in the 1990s, London definitively overtook Frankfurt as Europe’s financial centre?’
James shook his head. He didn’t really know what Carl was talking about, and he’d never been to Germany.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ continued Carl, with an extravagant inhalation of the joint. ‘Have you ever been stuck in Frankfurt on a Friday night?’
‘Fuck – yeah,’ said Rick. ‘I defy anyone to find a single good line of coke there.’
Carl handed the joint to James. He looked at it unconfidently, raised it quickly to his lips and inhaled deeply and incompetently – so incompetently that it would either be entirely ineffectual or else leave him comprehensively intoxicated.
‘It’s not just the drugs. It’s everything,’ continued Carl. ‘I’ve had to spend whole weeks of my life there. It’s the lack of high-quality bars, the crummy football team, the piss-poor modern art gallery and the fact that everyone is so fucking white. No Jews, obviously, but no blacks or South Americans either. All they’ve got are Turks, who I admit aren’t white, and Poles.’