The Planner(7)
‘Yes, of course. I’d be very happy to go into more detail if that would be useful,’ said Neil. He looked round the room hopefully.
‘Yes, please do,’ said Lionel. ‘I think that would be very helpful.’
Although not highly regarded as a public speaker, James was undoubtedly a talented listener. It wasn’t just that he efficiently absorbed information – he actually looked like he was listening. As Neil started up again, he made a tight mouth, kept his eyes fixed, and from time to time would give earnest little nods of his head. Crucially, he never tired, but would maintain a purposeful demeanour broken only by quick, occasional smiles. It was at least partly because he was kind.
Neil kept talking. Lionel nodded happily – the meeting was going well. The data projector, no longer needed, continued to hum soothingly to itself, like an old uncle mumbling in his sleep. James ate a chocolate biscuit.
It was half past twelve. James was eating a sandwich, Rachel was smoking a cigarette and, across the road, they were coming out of the office. Blinking in the low winter sun, frightened by the traffic, the senior members of Southwark Council’s management team were ineptly trying to navigate the city that they helped to run.
James looked at them grimly. Just as the military had its veterans, so too did the public sector. Of course, none of them were battle torn – they weren’t maimed or limbless, they didn’t limp or breathe noisily or make you feel disgusted and ashamed. But they were wounded nonetheless – misshapen, mangled, crushed. They leant, whispering to one another, with their inefficient hearts, their clapped-out livers and withered imaginations. James could recognise what had happened from all those geography undergraduate field trips. The steady application of erosive forces – day after day, meeting after meeting, year after year. Whether it was thermal erosion, sun blast, wind abrasion or just twenty-five years of public service, they had been worn away, their edges smudged and their centres softened. Of course, it didn’t happen to them all in the same way. Like clay men, some had buckled and swollen under the stress, while others had stretched and disappeared under the tension. But they all looked terrible.
Which way would he go? He was tall now, but that counted for little. He could get still taller, he could become stretched and pinched and gaunt until he was no more than a shadow, a whispering, charcoal-grey presence with poor eyesight and thinning hair who quietly sipped sweet tea in meetings and nodded in agreement to things. Or he could go the other way. His round shoulders could get rounder, his stoop more pronounced. His spine would curl and his neck would contract, his chin would move upwards and his cheeks would sink. He would become compressed, spherical, red and always cross, his life based round energy-dense pub lunches and pints of dark bitter.
Meanwhile, Rachel Harris, stalwart of the planning team, was talking. ‘One of the less obviously lethal punishments in North American prisons is to order inmates to dedicate an entire day from dawn to dusk, digging a big deep hole, and then spend the next one filling it back up again.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said James.
‘That’s what’s happened,’ said Rachel with a wave of her cigarette. ‘Those poor wrecks have spent the last twenty years digging and refilling holes. Eighteen months to develop a new strategic framework, and then another eighteen months to revise and dismantle it. Again and again and again, year after year. That’s why they look like that. That’s why we’ll end up looking like that.’
James looked across the road again. There was another explanation. We make our buildings, and then our buildings make us – wasn’t that the first thing that every town planner gets taught? In which case, maybe it was the building that had done this to them? For the planning offices of Southwark Council were stupendously foul. So bad, in fact, that they had been nominated for a prestigious architectural award in 1967. A mysterious twenty-year property boom had transformed the city and wherever you went, every patch of land was being developed, built upon, improved, ruined. But not on this street, where it seemed an equally mysterious force was resisting. Offices were not, as a rule, haunted – but this was a special case, and anything may have happened. Had the architect done something dreadful in its foundations? Was it a site of one of those spectacular medieval atrocities? James was a geographer – nothing less, nothing more. He wasn’t a human geographer, and he certainly wasn’t a psycho-geographer. But in this instance, he was prepared to accept that other forces, forces beyond his understanding, were at work.