Authors: Tom Campbell
‘Well don’t look at me,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ve got my own brand to think about, remember.’
‘I don’t think the chemistry is there,’ said James, who hadn’t had sex for over a year, but didn’t think he was ready to start with Camilla.
‘Can’t you get one of your account managers to do it?’ said Felix. ‘What about that beautiful boy Martin? He’s got to be good for something.’
‘Martin? He’s fucking our Art Director. If I got him involved with Camilla that really would screw things up.’
This was more like it. James had spent enough time with urban planners and public servants, with people called Lionel and Neil. He needed to know more Felixes and Camillas. He needed to have drinks with people who worked in the glamorous parts of the private sector, and who could speak openly and cynically about sex and money, people with their own personal brands, complicated remuneration packages and opaque tax arrangements.
Camilla returned from the bathroom where it looked like she had been crying, and ordered an over-generous round of drinks and bar snacks. She then proceeded to be completely charming with everyone. In fact, James had just got to the point of wondering whether he ought to try and have sex with her after all, when she started to raise her voice again, and Erica immediately suggested that they go home.
‘It’s midnight,’ said Felix. ‘We should all probably go. One of the critical things with evenings like this is to demonstrate moderation and sound judgement. It’s something Camilla has never managed.’
‘Well, I didn’t think she was too bad. In fact, all of your friends seemed very nice,’ said James.
‘They’re really not, you know. Even Erica. They’re just very skilled at their jobs, and they understand that in this profession you’re always working.’
‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. After all, we are nothing more than what we pretend to be. I guess that goes for account directors as well as everyone else.’
James didn’t get the night bus home that night. No – he got a taxi, all the way! He sat on his own in the deep leather seats luxuriating in the quiet, troubled by nothing more than his own thoughts – which were, unfortunately, so much worse than the students on the night bus. But it was still a good way to travel: going through South London at a constant speed, under bright but intermittent lights, even the shit parts, even the parts he was responsible for, didn’t look so very bad. But the age of planning cities for the motorcar had long come to an end. It was a shame, in a way, for it had been a time when town planners had never had more power and prestige. Even Adam would have been impressed if James had demolished his house to make way for a dual carriageway.
So he needed a worldview – a doctrine, maybe a fierce modern one, or else something derived from ancient wisdoms. He needed to be theoretically willing to undertake great feats that would accelerate the direction of history or, failing that, help him to sleep peacefully at night and seduce women. His other friends had them, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what they were. You could tell by the way that Alice became louder when someone was disagreeing with her, or in Adam’s wry little smile – they knew something important about the world. Even Lionel probably had a worldview – a stoical acceptance of the hierarchies of incompetence, and his ineffective position among them.
He got out of the taxi. It had cost an exhilarating thirty pounds or, after income tax, about a third of what he’d earned that day. But the problem, of course, was that whichever method he travelled home by, however much he spent on the journey, he always ended up in the same place: Crystal Palace, SE19. James had a powerful understanding of his neighbourhood. The data was abundant, and extracting and analysing it was the kind of thing he did for a living. So he knew, for instance, that there were four times as many burglaries in his postcode than the national average and twice as many sexual offences. The proportion of homes with satellite television was unusually high and three-quarters of all residents received some form of income support benefit. It was, in short, a shithole. House prices had risen by 243 per cent in the last five years.
But the problems only magnified once you actually got inside his flat. James lived in a rented flat – it was the single greatest tragedy of his life. It would have been more acceptable, of course, if his friends hadn’t all bought theirs at an eerily young age. It would also have been better if James didn’t have flatmates, for he hadn’t given anything like enough thought as to whom he would be sharing with. It was a characteristic error, exactly the kind of mistake that a town planner would make, and he had been living with the consequences for the last two years. He was living with them now. As he came in, long after midnight, he could hear the soft bangings and mutterings of Jane who was clumsy and inconsiderate, and of Matt, who was a massive berk, as they barged pointlessly around.
His bedroom was no refuge. He well knew how dismal it would look to a visitor, although that was something of a hypothetical concern. Everywhere he rested his eyes was another small monument to his lack of progress. The undergraduate textbooks on his shelves were an obvious giveaway, while the two science-fiction anthologies, although not in themselves a disaster, were accompanied by nothing more than some guides to planning regulations,
The Lord of the Rings
and the dictionary that his parents had given him for passing his A levels. And there were the same two prints, one by a famous impressionist and one by a famous surrealist, which he had owned for nearly ten years. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like them, he had never liked them, but now he wasn’t even sure if he was supposed to – he wondered, for instance, what Alice would think of them. The items on his desk were also problematic: the rubber plant that he had thought was amusing at eighteen but which still hadn’t died, the three pint glasses of silver and copper coins, which ought to have been taken to a charity shop but instead constituted his only financial savings, and a primitive computer, a discontinued line bought with enthusiasm just three years ago, but which now looked older than anything else in the room.
James was a young man – his bedroom was a testament to that – but there was plenty of other evidence. Every day his body produced high quantities of purposeless testosterone and troubling adrenalin. His spine was straight, his fat tissues low – possibly too low, for his diet was rudimentary and his meals irregular. He had stopped growing, but his short-sightedness had not yet stabilised and his wisdom teeth could still on occasion cause great sorrow. His collection of personal anecdotes and misadventures was small. He had no expertise in negotiating with drug dealers, nightclub bouncers or landlords. He would often wake in the middle of the night from sinister dreams. He had never owned a property, never bought a sofa and all of his personal possessions could fit into three suitcases. He was still attracted to women significantly older than him. He was over-sensitive – it was easy to hurt his feelings and he thought too much about what other people said about him. He worried about how the universe would end, and whether he had slept with enough women.
James was an old man. He paid more than the minimum into the staff pension scheme and he had multiple insurance policies. He fretted about utility bills and didn’t like getting into debt. It was getting harder and harder to sleep soundly. He found it impossible to sustain a conversation with anyone under the age of twenty-five, though increasingly he found women much younger than him attractive. More and more, he tended to buy clothes on the basis of how comfortable they were. He had an unreasonable fear of dogs of any size, teenagers in hooded tops and beggars. He could no longer take his body for granted – for no good reason, he would experience an unpleasant stiffness in his back, often felt weary after lunch and his mouth hurt if he brushed his teeth vigorously. He worried about dying, and he knew that he hadn’t slept with enough women.
James picked up his mobile phone and before getting into bed sent a text message to Felix: ‘You’re right. Need self-improvement, a worldview and much more. Will u help?’
It was half past two in the morning, but the reply came back immediately. ‘Asking for help is 30 per cent of the solution. See you next week.’
4
London is a great city for night-time entertainment and socialising.
–
The London Plan
, Section 4.36
‘I’m not going to promise that you’ll enjoy this,’ said Felix.
‘I know that,’ said James.
‘But it is necessary that you go through with it.’
‘I know,’ said James.
They were going to a book launch. It had been Felix’s suggestion and James had immediately accepted. He knew that it was no longer sufficient to simply have professional and social interests: James needed a cultural life. He needed a
hobby
. He knew you could build entire friendships and personalities around such things, but it was important to choose the right one. Literature, theatre – these were perfectly reasonable choices. Crafts, contemporary dance, heritage – these were clearly dead ends, while going to the cinema every so often simply wouldn’t cut it. And music? Well, you had to be careful. It was probably too late for him to be jumping up and down in front of long-haired guitarists in Camden, but then again he wasn’t ready to sit down in a dinner jacket and come up with intelligent things to say at the end of an opera. So Felix had made the decision for him.
‘It’s my opinion,’ said Felix, ‘that even in 2013, a book launch is still a perfectly respectable way to spend a Tuesday night in London.’
James had his doubts, but he wasn’t really in a position to nurture them, for while he understood the concept of a book launch, the format was almost completely unknown to him. It didn’t help that he didn’t know the geography either, for he was a long way from home. They were in a theatre bar off Islington High Street, a part of the city that filled him with foreboding.
‘We better have another gin and tonic here. I warn you now: the quality of the wine at this thing will be outrageous. These are publishers, remember, not advertising agencies, and in certain important respects they haven’t got a clue. Of course, these days they haven’t got any money either.’
Earlier that day, James had spent almost an hour writing an email to Graham Oakley saying he would like to consider the job offer. As far as he could, he was going to keep his options open. There were good reasons for going back to Nottingham, even Felix had acknowledged that, and he didn’t want to turn it down just because he now had a friend who took him to book launches. It had been, he thought, a pretty good email: positive, open, truthful, even, and the reply from Graham had been every bit as accommodating as he’d expected. So he had two months to make London work for him, to implement his self-development plan.
Felix ordered more drinks. The last time James had experienced gin and tonic was on a visit to his uncle’s in the late 1990s. But since then the drink had undergone a significant repositioning in the market place. As Felix explained, following a successful brand-planning strategy, it was now a drink that was associated with affluence and good judgement. James had to acknowledge, it tasted much better than he remembered. More than that, he could feel it
making
him better, warming and strengthening him for the task ahead.
They left the bar, and turned away from the high street into a handsome, well-managed town square. Although James had never been here before it was unmistakably North London: smug, expensive and at a loss to explain its economic good fortune. Much of it looked like Crystal Palace, built at the height of Victorian prosperity and urban despair, when town planning was just getting started and everyone wanted to be at a safe distance from the thieves and typhoid carriers. Of course, it had been pretty much downhill ever since then, until unexpectedly, towards the end of the twentieth century, it had been rescued – made better by economic deregulation, the financial services industry, housing privatisation and a number of other things that James disliked.
The venue, too, was familiar. Islington Arts Centre was an early nineteenth-century town house on the corner of the square, converted into a cultural space, funded by the local authority and used exclusively by some of the wealthiest people in the country. There had been something very similar near where James lived, but which had fallen into disrepair and lost its funding.
Once inside, Felix went to get some drinks, and James quickly undertook his survey. They were in a large pastel-yellow reception room with some fold-up chairs against the wall and a carpet that needed replacing, but would have to wait many years for a spending review that would sanction it. There were about eighty people there, more women than men, with a level of ethnic diversity slightly higher than one would expect. James was one of the few people in a suit, and was also probably the tallest person there – but he knew that neither of these would be an advantage.
‘Just as I feared,’ said Felix. ‘The wine is almost satirically bad. And look – it’s being served in little plastic cups, as if we were on an aeroplane. I suspect that’s a deliberate attempt to manage our expectations.’
James drank deeply, grateful that he had something to do with his hands. It probably was disgusting, but all those gin and tonics had deadened his palate and anyway James still wasn’t old enough to tell the difference between good and bad wine.
‘Are you okay?’ said Felix.