The Planner by Tom Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

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