Authors: Tom Campbell
James could identify each of the Planning Directorate’s four data projectors by the pitch and rhythm of its hum, and this happened to be his favourite – not necessarily the quietest, but the least irregular. Rachel, sitting opposite, gave him a resigned smile. The room was over-warm. Already, Jane Nichols, Environmental Policy Manager and just two years away from retirement, was looking sleepy. The Assistant Director of Road Networks from Transport for London, a well-known prick, had sent his apologies, rendering the meeting worthless, but there could be no question of not going ahead with it. James started to think carefully about which biscuit to select from the plate in front of him.
Neil moved on to the second slide. James had already read the presentation, which had been emailed along with the agenda, and Neil was not the kind of man to deviate from it. For thirty minutes, he carefully took them through every bullet point and figure, every graph and calculation.
Lionel was chairing the meeting with great experience but not much skill. Poor old deciduous old Lionel, with his dry skin and wet eyes, his pink nose and unhappy pouch. The seasons hadn’t been good to him. He had ineffectively chaired too many meetings, watched too many PowerPoints and dunked too many biscuits into mugs of sugared coffee. His career had peaked: he had reached the top band of his salary grade some years ago, and barely survived the last round of budget cuts. He breathed through his mouth too much and it was almost certain that at some point he would die of cancer.
Wanting to rest his eyes on something else, James looked out through the glass wall of the meeting room into the office beyond and, as he did so, he felt a surge of primitive and irrational tenderness for his colleagues. It wasn’t like his friendships – there was affection here and there was intimacy. All these people, for all these years, who he had lowered his head to look at so that they didn’t have to crane theirs to look up. He knew without asking how Lionel, Rachel and many others took their tea, whose mug was whose, and who minded and who didn’t if they got someone else’s. He knew that Neil liked coffee but no more than one cup a day or else he got anxious, and that since her heart scare Rupinder only drank green tea from her own packet. He knew the type of biscuits and confectionery they preferred, and which football teams they supported, and on Monday mornings he would ask them about the weekend and be rewarded with long friendly conversations that he had no interest in.
Of course, they couldn’t all be friends. That wouldn’t work. They needed other things, other people to bring them together. They didn’t have business competitors, but they did have common threats and predators: senior managers, who were mostly terrible bastards, and the politicians, who they hardly ever got to meet but who were stupid and could make bad things happen to them. And there were lots of other, more minor, villains, bullies and dickheads for them to fill their days complaining about. There were those pernicious idiots in the Communications Team who made unfair demands and didn’t understand anything that the organisation did, the entire Human Resources department, the drunkards in the postroom, and the IT officers with their foul manners and obscure powers.
There was an unexpected pause. Neil had finished, but it wasn’t clear that the others had been following him closely enough to realise. Lionel hadn’t been concentrating, and was looking elsewhere, and even Rachel didn’t seem to have been listening. Neil was looking up, unsure what to do next. But this was the kind of situation in which James thrived, and he had already designed a suitable question to ask.
‘Sorry, Neil, could you just talk us through the methodology you used for these estimates? Was it a telephone survey? It would be good to get a handle on the sample sizes as well.’
‘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.
‘Actually, I didn’t think that meeting was so very bad,’ said James.
‘Oh, come on – don’t be a sop. And you know we’ll have to do it all over again with that knob from Transport for London.’
Rachel didn’t just smoke cigarettes. She also drank half pints of Guinness, and ate packets of crisps in the pub. Her dark hair was formless and unprincipled without being especially innovative. She had a Midlands accent, which had probably held back her career, and a weakness for hyperbole and melodrama. She thrived on organisational discord and personal misfortunes, and adored restructures.
But Rachel’s strengths were immense and well known. There were no stars or heroes in planning, but there were stoics and know-alls, and she was the finest of them: industrious, wildly competent and with an in-depth understanding of social-housing regulations. She could talk about many other things too, for she was also the most friendly and conversationally skilled town planner in the team, possibly in all of London. James suspected it might have had something to do with her education. Rachel had studied geography just like him, but at Newcastle or Hull or somewhere else where you actually had a good time and made friends that didn’t go on to make you unhappy for the rest of your life.
‘Well, time to go back inside,’ said James. ‘I’ve got loads to do.’
‘We’ve always got loads to do. Generating work is what this organisation does. Even if there wasn’t such a thing as Southwark, everyone at Southwark Council would still be busy.’
For the entire afternoon, James sat at his desk and worked. Although he could perform in meetings, this was what he did best, his default state. That had been apparent from an early age. Even by the standards of ten-year-old boys he had brought unusual levels of care to his pie charts and cross-section diagrams. He was diligent. He was very good at absorbing knowledge – at learning facts and remembering things in the correct order. In another age, before databases and search engines, when clerks and administrators ruled the world, he would have thrived, but you needed to be able to do other things now. You needed to do the kinds of things that Carl or Adam could do – to think on your feet, to say things that sounded perfectly credible even if you weren’t sure if they were true, and to be able to make stuff up.
Part of the problem, although he hadn’t quite appreciated this at the time, was that James had gone to what was probably the worst school in the country. A school that had given him no educational gifts or valuable professional contacts, like Adam’s had, but no life skills either. If it had been one of those mad inner-city comprehensives attended exclusively by the children of the criminal classes and recently arrived immigrants, then he might have got something genuinely useful out of it: a bit of hard-won character, some street-wise toughness. But no – he had gone to school in the semi-urban dreary pleasantness of Leicester, and it had been, of all things, a grammar school. And the problem with grammar schools was that they were full of grammar schoolboys – nerdy little shits desperate to study Computer Science at university and with no greater ambition than to earn more money than their parents and to have children who would grow up to earn more than them.
‘Do you want a drink?’ said Rachel. ‘I’m going for one with Lionel and Neil.’
James looked up. It was now five o’clock, and the office was emptying.
‘I might join you in a bit,’ said James.
But still he worked. He read the draft supplementary planning guidance on retail development, underlining in thick pink marker the sections that were significant, or else making undulating lines in the margins, where something was unclear. What were other people’s jobs like? Adam would be at his desk, his head down, doing much the same as him, but more lucratively. Alice’s job was indistinguishable from socialising and at the moment she was probably drinking Prosecco and having a well-informed discussion with an attractive male who was in a position to further her career. And what was Felix Selwood doing right now? Giving a presentation without the use of PowerPoint, confidently pitching something to clients, preparing some dastardly marketing campaign? For some reason, James would like to know about him more than anyone. He had been very good to him that night in the restaurant and, what’s more, he hadn’t actually needed to be. It wasn’t what you’d expect from an advertising executive.
James’s knowledge of such things was limited: he had only had two jobs and unlike many of his contemporaries, he hadn’t thought long and hard over his choice of career. He hadn’t deliberated over a dazzling set of adventures and rewards, in which one weighs up the respective merits of a high salary against stock options, wielding power and influence against international travel. But nor had he blundered into it. Local government was, he knew, a refuge for many, but he at least hadn’t ended up there because the professions were too daunting and business too disgusting. No, this was it – and he wasn’t under any illusion, as so many others were, that it was merely transitory. There was no Plan B. He didn’t play in a rock band on Friday nights and he wasn’t studying part-time for a qualification in art conservation. He wasn’t even, for some reason, saving any money.
It was seven o’clock. It had been, he would have to say, a good day – and that, of course, was the problem. Before turning off his computer, he checked his personal email. There was a series of group emails from Adam and Carl celebrating the success of last Friday. There was an email from Alice, apologising for leaving while making it clear that the party she had left them for was well worth it. And there was an email from Graham Oakley, Director of Planning at Nottingham City Council.