The Planner(51)

A door banged open, and James turned to see Rick and Erica come out of a cubicle, their faces flushed and overheated, their clothes disorganised and their bodies entangled.

‘That was the best fucking shit I’ve ever had,’ announced Rick.

James smiled at them. It was a tremendous feat – the greatest smile he had ever produced in his life, a smile strong enough to forgive Erica and to neutralise Rick’s evil cackle. But they walked straight past – either they hadn’t seen him or maybe the parts of their prefrontal lobes responsible for facial pattern recognition had been disabled. James often wished that he had studied biology at university, but he had taken the wrong A levels. The cubicle was taken by two blond women in black leather trousers.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the solution came to him. He would go home. It was the only, the obvious, thing to do – why on earth hadn’t it occurred to him before? A unilateral, and not even that bold, decision – it was all that was required. He didn’t know where everyone else was, and he didn’t care: he felt far too preoccupied to bother about his companions who were, after all, largely wankers. Who knows, maybe they had all done the same thing hours ago. But once the decision had been made, it had to be acted upon at once.

He walked quickly, he ran, all the way back through the club, determined not to meet anyone – particularly anyone from work, particularly not Rick or Erica. He didn’t want anyone to slow him down, or make him have to explain. His head lowered, he crossed the floors as directly as possible, barging youths aside, knocking over drinks and disrupting the dancers. He was, just like everyone else there, behaving badly. He went through dance rooms and bars and chambers and cloakrooms, passed doormen and barmen and drug dealers, and heaved open the wooden doors until finally he had left the noise and the heat behind him.

He now had to face a new set of challenges which were less drastic but more intractable. For, if the cocaine had ever worked at all, its effect was to leave him unable to sleep and feeling sad and self-absorbed. It had made him modern, and there was little he could do about it. Outside the club there was a market that was either under- or over-regulated, he couldn’t decide which, but it was clear that doormen were allocating people to taxi cabs and destinations on an anti-competitive basis. Unable to negotiate, unwilling to be humiliated, James instead walked off. If this was a night for anything at all, then it was a night to walk home. A cold, dry night. No stars, of course, there never were in London, but there was three-quarters of a moon and the drink and drugs would at least keep him warm.

He headed off in what was, he knew, only approximately the right direction. Earlier he had been lost in the nightclub, and now he was lost on the streets. That was Clerkenwell for you, but did anyone really know where they were going in this city? It was still difficult to understand how it had happened. An obscure Anglo-Saxon riverside settlement in an abandoned Roman military camp that had, like Anglo-Saxons everywhere, got wildly out of control. It was the least-planned city in the developed world. No invading power had drained its marshlands and founded a city state, no tyrant had ever razed it to the ground and rebuilt it on more orderly principles. Some Victorian engineers had done their best to clean things up, but the really big opportunities, the Great Fire and the Blitz, had been wasted. It had been two thousand years before Patrick Abercrombie had got round to producing a plan, and by then it was all much too late.

There was no grid system, and no wide boulevards elegantly radiating out from the city centre. In fact, there wasn’t even a centre. Apparently there had been once, but it had got lost, buried and hidden along with everything else. There was a plaque on a wall somewhere near Charing Cross Station, there was a pipe under Blackfriars Bridge where the River Fleet trickled into the River Thames, and there was a piece of stone in Cannon Street, which had once meant something important, but no one now could remember what. And on top of these were Modernism and capitalism and the twentieth century, and all the things that the heritage organisations and conservation societies, the environmentalists and town planners had failed to stop happening. There were no city walls or gates or guards left either. There was nothing to keep them in and the others out, no one to keep them safe. And as a result of all this James, the town planner, was lost along with everyone else.

He had walked for no more than fifteen minutes, but already he was prepared to surrender. His serotonin depleted, his legs aching, London had defeated him yet again. He was developing what he knew would be a debilitating headache, but it was hard to tell if that was due to the legacy of the drugs, all those pints of Slovakian lager, the cannabis, the after-shock of the music or just the city he lived in. It had hardly been a controlled experiment. A car passed by very slowly, James raised his hand and it stopped. The driver offered to take James home for an extraordinary amount of money, almost twice as much as he had been quoted outside the nightclub. James accepted without a word and climbed in.