The Planner(5)

‘Okay,’ said Felix. ‘I predict Adam is going to get this. He’s the lawyer and the lawyer always wins.’

‘Tails never fails,’ said Adam.

‘Tails it is,’ said Carl, lifting his hand with an exaggerated grimace. ‘Well, so be it. Dinner and drinks are on you two. But next time it’s my treat, and we go somewhere really fucking expensive.’



More than an hour later, James still wasn’t home. It had gone two in the morning and, to his disgust and shame, he was waiting for a night bus. In fact, it was worse than that – he was waiting for his second night bus. The first, populated by over-excited teenagers, foreign-language students and drunk poor people, had got him as far as London Bridge station. But now another one was required for the much longer journey to Crystal Palace. A bus that would hopefully be more sombre, but which also came much less frequently. Ominously, he’d been there for twenty minutes and still seemed to be the only person waiting.

It was January, there was no wind but the air was cold in a way that James had no way of protecting himself from. It was a mark of how serious things were that he had considered trying to look for a taxi. But no, he couldn’t, and it wasn’t just the expense – he had been driven stubborn by sadness, and he was now determined to get home by public transport, even if it took all night.

James was thirty-two years old. It was such a big, cocksure kind of an age. Not young any more, not callow and soft-hearted, but by no means old either. It was an age to be energised and just the right side of over-confident. It was the time when you should be making all of your really critical life decisions, armed with experience and optimism but without the debilitating weakness and caution. But instead, what was he doing? What decisions was he making? He wasn’t contemplating marriage or divorce or procreation. He wasn’t choosing a house to purchase or sizing up the job offer in North America.

No. For his was a life of small decisions. He was trying to decide whether to buy a bicycle or not. And how had he got here? Because, again, of all the small decisions he’d made, and all the ones that he hadn’t. It was an existential failure that had got him here. Above all, it was his twenties that had got him here. His not-so-roaring twenties. Wasn’t that the decade in which you were meant to get everything out of your system? The thirties were different. As far as he could tell, if you fucked up your thirties then you really were in trouble. But you were allowed to fuck up your twenties, that was the one good thing about them.

And what, exactly, had he done with his twenties? Well, he’d spent an awful lot of it in the office – waiting for his computer to boot up, eating sugared biscuits in meetings, reformatting Microsoft Word documents, filling in Excel spreadsheets, agreeing to things that he had no powers to disagree with. Where were the mistakes: the entertaining misadventures, the expensively learnt lessons, the-disastrous-at-the-time-but-now-fondly-remembered blunders? Maybe he hadn’t made any. Maybe what he’d done instead was just make one very big one.

And why weren’t any of his experiences bittersweet ones? Did such a feeling really exist? He would, he supposed, need to have had a major love affair in order to know for sure. A reciprocated but doomed romance, ideally with someone of a different social class or ethnic group. There had been little opportunity at work. As far as he could tell, the office had never been much of a place for that. Or was it going to be like university all over again – would he discover, in ten years’ time, that everyone had been fucking everyone else? That all those evenings when he’d worked late or gone home early, everyone else was round the corner doing far-fetched things in a nightclub. Somehow, as unlikely as it seemed, it wouldn’t entirely surprise him.

The bus rolled up. It always did in the end. But it was a ghostly vehicle with no passengers or lights, and heartbreakingly it simply stayed where it was, its engine rumbling good humouredly, its doors closed. As James well knew, this could easily go on for half an hour. The driver at least would be warm. He looked down at his phone. It was 2:25 a.m.

How had it got to this? Waiting for a night bus, hiding in toilets, getting drunk on wine he couldn’t afford, having friends he was scared of seeing, living in Crystal Palace, working in local government, and wanting to cry a lot of the time. Those were hardly the ingredients for a happy and successful life. It was hardly what he had planned.





2

28 January

People should be able to live and work in a safe, healthy, supportive and inclusive neighbourhood with which they are proud to identify.

– The London Plan, Section 7.4