The Planner (31 page)

It occurred to James that he was behaving oddly, but so long as he was aware of this, it couldn’t be that serious. It was only if he didn’t know when he was being strange and aggressive that he ought to worry – in which case, of course, he wouldn’t anyway. Carl had been right that evening when they had gone clubbing – cocaine made you clever, which meant that this stuff must make you
really
clever.

‘So, are you Jewish then?’ said James. ‘Is that what’s going on?’

‘Uh, no,’ said Sam. ‘No, I’m not. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.’

Sam was looking at him in a way that James didn’t especially like, but there didn’t seem much he could do about it. He didn’t seem cross – he had patient eyes and a social worker’s concern for another’s well-being. Sam didn’t even need to be Jewish – he was just the most grown-up person there, and James knew that the one thing that all women want in a man, the single most essential and attractive quality, is for him to be a grown-up.

‘Well, good to meet you – was interesting to talk. I ought to go and see where Alice is.’

James wasn’t sure if he had vanquished an enemy or suffered some kind of obscure but damaging defeat. It was something to be thought through later. In the meantime, he felt a great need to move on quickly – not to retreat or run away, but to be somewhere else.

He went into the third and final room. It was much smaller and quieter. This was a good thing because he needed to be on his own for a bit. He was, he was reasonably certain now, feeling unwell. Surely this couldn’t be cocaine? Either that or Marcus’s stuff hadn’t really been cocaine at all. Or perhaps it was just a question of how much money you spent on it. In which case, it served him right – he should have learnt by now that anything given to him for nothing was bound to be extremely expensive. The truth was, he didn’t really know anything about recreational drugs. Nor did he know anything about the contemporary art sector, literary fiction or professional football. He didn’t really know enough about anything – except for Southwark Council’s social-housing policies. He thought he had for a while, but now he knew otherwise. That was the problem with cocaine – it made you clever, clever enough to realise that you weren’t very clever at all.

There were no paintings here. Instead there was a sculpture, or maybe it was what was known as an installation – a little irregular grouping of rods and circles arranged in the centre of the room. They were so slight and delicate, that he wondered for a moment if they were plants. They reminded him of the projector images he had seen in the nightclub – geometric lines and abstract shapes, which quivered together in little clumps. He walked up closer. They were devoid of colour or texture or meaning, and because of that could be trusted.

The sculpture was rotating. But unlike everything else in the world that was made of metal and moved, it wasn’t going to hurt anyone. Instead, it did nothing more than gently sway back and forth in wide, irregular arcs. If anything, it seemed to want to befriend him. He couldn’t detect any electric motors, although these days such things were invisible and made no noise. More likely, he guessed it was simply made of aluminium or some alloy so light that it took no more than an air conditioner and passing bodies to be animated.

From time to time, James peered into the room behind him, but each time it was hopeless. He had lost his sense of perspective, and the scene was two-dimensional, congested and essentially unnavigable. He could still understand the pictures on the walls, but everything else, everything human, was a mystery. Why had everyone come here? Was anyone apart from Jacob actually going to buy anything? How did all these people earn any money? Maybe it wasn’t just the cocktails: maybe the whole thing, maybe all of London, was being paid for by Felix, as part of some gigantic, real-life advertisement.

It didn’t help that his hearing had been damaged. Not that he heard less now – in fact, the opposite seemed to have happened. He could now hear
everything
– the chink of cocktail glasses across the room, whispered curses in the corners, the twang of insincerity in Felicity’s voice, the clicking of Alice’s shoes, and echoes from where the old printing presses used to be. He badly needed to sober up, or else have another drink – to do something about all the drugs and confusion that were leaking through his body.

It was difficult to tell how long he had been standing there. He hadn’t been checking his watch, and his body was incapable of monitoring the time. He was sure that the arms of the sculpture had undertaken a full rotation at least a dozen or so times, but there was no way of knowing how fast they were moving. All he knew was that it was much better to be here than anywhere else.

But now, from the room behind him, he was aware of other noises – noises that anyone might hear. Noises that had probably been going on for a while, and which he could no longer ignore. They were wild and frightening, and it was clear that something terrible was happening. He didn’t want to go back. It was calm in here, and he sensed that once he looked round, once he went back into the room, things would never be calm again.

There were footsteps and he turned round to see Felix. He had been expecting that.

‘James, I think your guest may need some assistance.’

He walked back into the room. No one was waiting for him, but there they all were. There was Alice who, after all these years, was still able to cause him great harm, and her boyfriend, whom James wouldn’t be able to compete with for another twenty years. There was Felicity, who was laughing unpleasantly. There was Jacob, the art collector, who was in a corner poisoning a young woman. There was Derek, the artist, who had seemed so cheerful an hour ago, but now looked as if he was weeping.

Most disturbing of all, though, in the centre of all this, there was Harriet. In some ways, he had to concede, she was looking better than he’d ever seen her. She looked like an Amazonian warrior – more ferocious, alive and dangerous than anyone else in the room. Her hair was long and her mouth more powerful than ever. But the problem, the insurmountable difficulty, was that she had just destroyed at least two works of art, and was attempting, with great violence, to dismantle another one. It was essentially a terrorist situation.

Given all this, it was surprising how well behaved everyone else was being. They were watching in respectful silence, while a woman who seemed to have a position of authority stood in the centre of the room. James wasn’t sure if she was the gallery owner, or just taller and more handsome than anyone else. But in any case everyone, except for Harriet, seemed to be doing what she told them.

Two policemen arrived. It was, he had forgotten, East London – there were police everywhere, to deal with all the people who didn’t go to art galleries. One was a stout Anglo-Saxon, with short fair hair and big ears who looked a bit like his flatmate Matt, and the other was a slender young South Asian, with long eyelashes. Taking their command from the tall woman, they methodically began to apprehend Harriet – one of them wrenched the canvas from her and the other one took her firmly by the wrists.

‘Help me,’ said Harriet. ‘James – help me. They’re hurting me. Help me. Fuck. Please help me.’

James didn’t have any choice. If she had been screaming, he may have been able to ignore it, but she was asking for help, and so he would have to help her. He would have to intervene – it was what planners did, an unfortunate compulsion of duty. He spent most of his life observing, but essentially he was an interventionist – it was his job to get involved. Plus, he was on very strong drugs, which were impairing his judgement.

James was never able to fully describe what happened after that – not with anything as primitive as words, which in any case had never been his strength. A five-million-pound work of contemporary art, an avant-garde jazz opera or a beautiful game of pinball might represent it with more precision and clarity. Striding into the centre of the room, he could at least take advantage of his height. Policemen weren’t tall any more, and he was able to tower above them, to configure himself into an imposing and belligerent position. But, and he had forgotten this, although he was very tall,
he wasn’t all that strong
. Nor did he have any technique or training for this kind of thing – after all, he had gone to a fucking grammar school.

The policemen released Harriet and rushed towards him, while James clenched his fists and threw his arms forward without any great skill. It was, therefore, bad luck that the first thing to happen was that James punched one of the policemen directly in the throat. It was, everyone could see, an act of terrible violence and there was a gasp of appreciation from the room. Surprised and hurt, he had not so much fallen but squatted down, in obvious distress and pain. James wondered if he should now try and help, or else maybe start to kick him.

It was a shame that the officer that James had felled was the young Asian rather than the large white man. Not just symbolically – it might also have given him a chance to escape. For the one still standing was stronger and much better at fighting. He attacked James with great ferocity and competence. There were no idiotic punches, instead he seized James by the shoulders and pushed him hard into the wall. James in turn grabbed his chest and pushed back as hard as he could, and as he did so, another canvas fell loudly to the floor.

And then, suddenly, just as they’d got started, they both stopped as if by mutual agreement. The fallen officer slowly raised himself and started to unstrap something from his belt. The other one took a step or two back. James, who hadn’t really known what he was doing from start to finish, put his hands up in the air.

‘I think you had better come with us,’ said the policeman.

James nodded. That did seem the sensible thing to do. It had to be more sensible than fighting. The rest of the room was no longer quiet. There was a very loud and disagreeable humming, as everyone started talking at once. As far as James could tell, the consensus seemed to be that he had disgraced himself, but not in a good way – not in a contemporary art way. There was no need for him to be held – he very badly wanted to get out of there. His head down, he walked out between the police officers and into their car.

What with his geography degree, his certificate in town planning and his detailed knowledge of building standards, James was in a better position than most to analyse the spatial arrangements of his police cell. He wondered if it was any larger than the statutory minimum. It certainly felt small, but there again he was so very tall.

It was, James thought, probably an encouraging sign that they hadn’t taken much interest in him when he had arrived at the police station. An officer with very good manners had taken his details and asked James to empty his pockets. Another one had taken his phone, his shoes and his trouser belt, and escorted him to the cell. A minute later, he returned and kindly gave him a plastic cup of water and a grey cotton blanket. After that, they seemed to largely forget about him.

But for someone who was still trying to cope with the after-effects of cocaine, a night in a police cell was hardly ideal. He needed to embark on a long, meditative walk, but he could cross the floor of the cell in just three steps and there wasn’t much else he could do, except sit on a narrow bench. It would have been easier to put up with if they’d locked him up with Harriet, but she had fled. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she had managed to evade arrest. It occurred to James that that was a serious offence, although probably not as serious as punching a police officer.

It was dark and cold – it seemed a very long time ago that he had been overheating in an art gallery. The Metropolitan Police Service probably procured ten thousand grey cotton blankets each year, with unit cost being the only consideration. It was insubstantial, not large or thick enough, and offered very little warmth or comfort. Another problem was that it was also incredibly noisy. He had hoped that the prisoners in the other cells would be asleep or morbidly depressed, but in fact they were making dreadful sounds, like primates in a Victorian zoo. He was almost certainly the best-behaved prisoner in the whole building. Meanwhile, out on the streets of East London he could hear sirens and horns, shouts of rage, drunken chants and threats of violence, maybe even a helicopter. For a moment he wondered if a riot or an attack on the station was taking place, but no – it was just the sound of the greatest night of the week, the sound of a highly successful urban economy.

As he huddled on the concrete bench in the corner of his concrete cell and listened to the sounds of the city being destroyed, James suddenly realised that he did have a worldview. It wasn’t quite a revelation, for he’d probably always had it. It probably wasn’t a philosophy either, and it might not be worked through enough for Felix, but it did have the advantage of being easy to articulate:
people were fucking hopeless
. It wasn’t just that they were terrible and cruel bastards, although they often were that as well, and the problem wasn’t death-knowledge or insatiable longings – the main problem was that they just weren’t any good. They were incompetent at living, they couldn’t be trusted to reason effectively, and almost everything they wanted made them unhappy.

It wasn’t obvious why this was the case – it could just be a cosmic misfortune or the deep strategy of a wanker God or, more plausibly, that humans had evolved to live in an entirely different set of circumstances from the ones they now found themselves in. Fuck knows. The important point was that it was true: they were no good at making decisions that would maximise the well-being of themselves or those around them. And so they shouldn’t be allowed to.