Fragrant Harbour (2 page)

Rory was posh, pushy, and thick. He had a round white face with a pink shaving rash around the collar of his striped shirt and, like all the other boys on the diary, he wore suits all the time. Worst of all, everybody at the
Toxic
seemed to love him. I suppose that was because he didn’t mind being a bit of a joke; this made him easy to tease, to laugh with instead of at, and therefore to work with too. The way in which he and the other men on the diary – it was Robin, four men and me; I was also the only one educated in the state system – slipped instantly into male-bonded mode could not have wound me up more. I was uptight, on the defensive, constantly aware of being on probation, in a new job, a new city, despising my colleagues and wanting to fit in with them at the same time, doing work which was completely unlike what I’d expected and for which I had no aptitude. Every morning I woke up feeling as if I’d swallowed something that was working its way around my stomach.

At the end of my third day at the
Toxic
, after I’d put together a world-shaking item about some D-list cokehead actor telling a paparazzo to fuck off outside San Lorenzo’s, Berkowitz invited me to go for a drink in the Paranoia Factory, as the office wine bar was known. He told me that he was going to leave the
Toxic
to go and work for a broadsheet I’ll call the
Sensible
.

‘They want me to write explanatory narrative pieces,’ he said, adding, somewhere between pride and sheepishness, ‘Apparently they liked the stuff I did about little Jimmy in Blackpool.’

I felt not tearful exactly, but the possibility of tears. I only knew one person at the
Toxic
, and he was leaving.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Just great. I’m thrilled for you.’

There may be people who do their best work in an
environment
where they feel friendless, isolated, paranoid, conspired against, tokenised, objectivised, and chippy. I’m not one of them. I will spare the details of the next three months. In Blackpool I had lived in a high-ceilinged flat with a view over the sea; I could come and go without bumping into anyone, and if I had a half pint of milk in the fridge when I went to bed I could get up in the morning and be confident it would still be there. I didn’t have to listen to anyone else’s music, field anyone else’s phone calls,
console
anyone else for their troubles, or remove anyone else’s pubic hair from the bath plug. In London, living in a shared house in Stockwell with a solicitor friend from Durham and three of her new London chums, none of that was true. There were sex
noises
, London noises, bathroom noises, argument noises (
‘You’re
the drama queen’); when I came home from work, wanting only to crawl into my burrow and drag the door in after me, I was instead reimmersed into the ongoing, reeking sitcom of
communal
living. It felt like a major step backwards. And although I was better off in notional terms, everything in London was so much more expensive that in practice I had less money. That stank too.

To make things worse, my love life – one of those phrases where you can use inverted commas in any configuration: my ‘love life’, my ‘love’ life, my love ‘life’ – had not thrived. In Blackpool I had been going out with a photographer called Michael Middleton. Or rather, a ‘photographer’ is what he would have called himself if he’d been American; being English, he would tell people that he worked in a bookshop, and let them
only gradually realise that photography was his chief interest, his main talent, and the whole of what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. (The British see this kind of thing as a form of modesty. Americans – foreigners in general – see it as an especially
invidious
form of boasting and superiority complex. Nowadays I agree with them.) He used his wages from the bookshop to subsidise the time he spent taking trendily desolate pictures of Blackpool ‘holidaymakers’, the piers and the arcades, condoms washed up on the beach, discarded bags of chips, boarded-up shops, dead seagulls, etc.

It was in his place of work, the town’s only half-decent
bookshop
, that I met Michael. I was standing at a shelf of staff
recommendations
, fingering a copy of Angela Carter’s
Nights at the Circus
with a label on the shelf below it that said ‘Her best yet!’, signed ‘MM’. The other two books on the shelf were the 1985
Good Food Guide
with a label reading, ‘It’ll make you hungry: Kevin’ and Martin Amis’s novel
Money
with the label, ‘Amy says: fabulous prose stylist’. I was standing there thinking, I’ll read this eventually, why not take the plunge now. On the other hand I was also thinking,
£
8.95 for a book? And I suppose another part of me was liking the idea of being the kind of twenty-four-
year-old
femme sérieuse
who bought new fiction in hardback.

‘It’s dead good,’ said a voice behind me with an educated Geordie accent. I turned: a boy my age, skinny, good-looking, black jeans and T-shirt, slightly floppy but the accent worked against that. ‘I’m the one who put it on the recommended shelf,’ he added, with a nicely friendly, ‘we-Angela-Carter-fans-are-
in-this
-together’ air.

‘You’re MM?’

‘Michael.’

‘So it’s better than
The Bloody Chamber
?’

‘If you don’t like it,’ he said, ‘and as long as you don’t tell the boss, bring it here and I’ll give you your money back.’

I bought it, read it, liked it, came back a week or so later, got chatting, went out for a drink, and so on. We started seeing each other.

Michael-and-me went brilliantly at the start, as these things do when they go at all, then we had the usual getting-to-know-you rows, and then settled into a basically pretty good relationship.

The trouble was that I made no secret of wanting to move to the nationals in London, whereas Michael, determined to stick to his policy of ‘It’s better oop North’, had a big thing about not doing that; so we had no implied future. In fact, those very words used to pop into my head at times, when I thought about Michael and how much I liked him: no implied future.

Few relationships benefit from the people involved living two hundred and fifty miles apart. When I moved to London
everything
began to work less well, including, for the first time, the sex, with me keen to see Michael roughly every other weekend but less keen to spend the entire two days in bed, which is what he wanted to do. I was glad that he wanted it so badly, while at the same time not wanting it quite as much myself. And I must admit that I wondered what he got up to when I wasn’t there, since Michael was a good-looking boy, and Blackpool a holiday kind of town. There were also complicated amounts of feeling invested in the fact that if I failed in London one of the big obstacles to our living together would disappear: I would be free to move back to Blackpool, or wherever, and Michael would be free to move in with me, which is what he said he wanted. So I at some level
suspected
him of wanting me to fail. I felt I had to soft-pedal my doubts and general downness about the
Toxic
, because he was enjoying or taking comfort from hearing them. Not good, in short.

The day before I moved to London, Michael told me that the business with the staff recommendations shelf had been a scam. He and Amy had switched books so that they could
accidentally-on
-purpose approach customers they fancied, with their chat-up line already scripted. Amy hated Martin Amis, and Michael had never read a single word Angela Carter had written. Kevin, an asexual fattie, had made the only heartfelt choice.

I had a week to go – four working days, to be precise – of my
probationary
three months when I had my second break. It was
pretty
clear by this point that I wasn’t going to be kept on at the paper. Chubby Rory was getting on so well with everyone at the
Toxic
that the editor himself (nickname: Headcase) had even once been seen to smile at him in the corridor, the equivalent for
another
man of inviting him home to be sucked off by his wife. But the waters were closing over my head, and I could tell from people’s polite but disengaged manner of dealing with me, shared by everyone from oily Robin to Davina the diary secretary, that no one thought I was going to be around for much longer. It was partly as a symptom of this state that I was working a
Sunday-for
-Monday shift in what was going to be my last week. Sundays have an odd feel on a daily paper and tend to attract a high
percentage
of the unhappy-at-home; people who find it easier to get their stuff into the paper when there’s less competition; people who can’t (or couldn’t, since it’s changed so much) stand the English Sunday; and people like me, who saw it as one less day with all their colleagues present. It’s also a hard day to generate diary stories, and I was working on two particular duds: a story in anticipation of a Monday-night book party at which two
biographers
who had once thrown glasses of wine over each other would be likely to meet again, and some dreck about a toff’s son who had landed a job at the BBC despite a definitive lack of
qualifications
. I was not feeling at my most Martha Gellhorn-like.

The phone rang. A male voice with a respectable working-class South London accent said:

‘Is that Dexter Williams?’

Eleven weeks before, that would have made me smile.

‘Yes, it is, Dawn Stone speaking, how can I help you?’

There was a longish pause, during which I could hear street noise in the background. He was calling from a payphone.

‘I’ve got something for you.’

This wasn’t unusual. In addition to the regular contacts and suppliers of titbits – or ‘tasty nibbles’, as Robin used to call them – the diary would be approached by people who wanted to get something off their chests and earn a few quid in the process. We got some good stuff this way but these irregular informants also had the potential to be a pain in the arse.

‘May I ask what it’s about?’

‘Yeah, you may. But I’m not going to tell you.’

Six out of seven unsolicited calls are unusable, and of those about half are from the clinically insane. Most of them are men, though there’s a gender distinction in that female nutters tend to witter on, whereas male ones tend to be paranoid (that’s paranoid in the non-colloquial sense).

‘You have to give me a clue,’ I said, thinking: he’ll refuse, I’ll say I can’t help him, he’ll say something offensive, I’ll hang up, he’ll call Nigel Dempster at the
Mail
, and I’ll go back to my nice quiet Sunday-for-Monday biographer’s wine throwing. But what he said to me next made me think different.

‘It’s about Fancy Nancy,’ said my new friend. This got me
listening
. Fancy Nancy was a not-all-that-junior member of the Royal Family with theatrical pretensions (one reason for the
nickname
) who was rumoured to be a closet homosexual (the other reason) and who had become engaged to be married six months before to a hospital registrar, a Duke’s daughter. The couple had met on a country-house weekend: ‘half the time banging away at pheasants, the other half at each other’, according to Robin, who sounded as if he knew the formula well.

‘You have my attention,’ I said, sinking slightly in my chair and swivelling it around to look out over the largely empty
newsroom
. Across the office a columnist was watering a plant on her desk while holding a phone receiver to her ear with her shoulder. ‘Where and when would you like to meet?’

A coffee bar on Gloucester Road about three quarters of an hour later. I said he’d be able to recognise me by my yellow coat and the copy of the Sunday
Toxic
under my arm.

Duncan – as he turned out to be called; Saint Duncan, as I
prefer
to think of him – was a very tall, short-haired, fit, neat man of about twenty-five with an air that wasn’t military but also wasn’t the opposite of military. He’d done three years in the Household
Cavalry and been invalided out with pneumothorax trouble, having nearly died of a collapsed lung during exercises in Canada. He wasn’t insane, but he was angry. He’d just lost the job he had had since leaving the army, and that job – at this point in the story the soundtrack swelled with hosannas of praise – was as a footman at ‘The Palace’: that’s Buckingham Palace. There had been a row, he had been sacked, and now it was
payback
time.

St Duncan had overheard a screaming match between Fancy Nancy and his fiancée, the upshot of which was that she was now his ex-fiancée. He had overheard another reference to this later in the day from another, more senior Royal, whose name he rather sweetly wouldn’t give.

‘It’s 100 per cent kosher,’ he said. I said that I would talk to my boss, check the story out, and if it stood up and we ran it we would pay him
£
10,000 in cash. And then I did – though I say so myself – a clever thing. I went back to the office, took off my coat, put my bag down, put a piece of paper in my crappy typewriter, and didn’t say a word about what had happened. This was
partly
the rat-like cunning all journalists need, partly the need to make sure how I felt before I mentioned anything to Robin or Derek the Pink Pig (his deputy, on duty that Sunday). So I wrote my wine-throwing story and my BBC dimwit story and went home.

The big event in the daily life of any newspaper is called
conference
. This is when section editors – News, Features, Foreign, Sport, Diary, Editorial, Op-Ed, and so on – sit around a table with the editor and deputy editor and discuss what’s going to be in the paper the next day. It’s a big deal for all concerned. There are lots of opportunities to squash and be squashed, especially for those with a rich variety of techniques for weeing on other people’s ideas.

At the
Toxic
, conference was at 11 o’clock. At ten-thirty, Robin used to have a diary conference before conference, so that he did not have ‘to go naked into the conference chamber’. (Robin,
incidentally
, was one of those Englishmen who it is hard to imagine ever being naked.) For the Monday I had dressed up very
carefully
in a dark-red Chanel suit, my most expensive ever clothes purchase by about 300 per cent, and much too eighties and
power-dressy for me now (though it still fits). I was in full face paint and armour, and when Robin asked, ‘Any tasty nibbles?’ I was, for the first time, the first to speak. The Dexter house style was to seem as understated and bored as possible, the more so the hotter the story seemed.

‘Teensy something about Fancy Nancy,’ I said. ‘X-th in line to the throne. Apparently the wedding is off.’

There was a certain amount of shifting in seats and eyebrow raising. Robin naturally looked as if he was about to fall asleep.

‘Source?’

‘Sorry – can’t.’

‘Cash?’

‘Ten.’

‘Quality?’

I shrugged and looked modest. This meant somewhere between good and very good.

‘Details?’

‘Screaming rows. She threw a wobbly on Thursday and said it’s all over. By Friday the other members of the Firm had been told.’

‘Hmmm. Anything else?’

I shook my head. We moved on to other business but I could see Robin was convulsed with curiosity about where I’d got my story and whether he could trust me enough to raise it himself in conference. My isolation from my colleagues, their lack of interest in me and my life, worked to my advantage: they had no way of knowing where on earth this might have come from, so finally had no choice other than chalking it up to my journalistic skills.

An hour and a half later, Robin came over to my desk on the way back from conference.

‘Mentioned your story to David and Peter,’ he said. David was the editor; Robin never used the nickname Headcase. Peter was Peter Stow, the paper’s royal correspondent, by general consent the most humanly repellent in the business, and a considerable power at the
Toxic
. ‘Peter said it was total bollocks. Don’t worry – all that means is he hadn’t already heard it.’ And with that he swanned back to his office. No one breathed a word to me for the rest of the day. I went home early, took Tuesday off – as I was scheduled to do, since I’d worked Sunday for Monday – and
spent it seeing my friend Jenny, having a massage at the health centre, buying a dress from Joseph that I took back three days later, and, intermittently but with conviction, crying. On Wednesday on my way in to the office I saw the front page of the
Toxic
screaming out from news-stands:

in seventy-two-point type. Underneath was written:

‘By Peter Stow, Royal Correspondent’.

The name was accompanied by a naff little crest, as if to suggest to the unalert reader that Peter himself was royal too. When I got to the office I went straight to the loo and cried for fifteen
minutes
. I managed to get to my desk without making eye contact with any of my colleagues. As I sat down, a presence loomed behind me. I turned. It was Headcase.

‘You’re late,’ he said. He stood with his hands in his pockets and flexed up and down on his feet. Then he said, as if
addressing
a larger audience, but without looking up,

‘It’s Peter’s byline, but it’s your story, and it’s your job.’

That was my second big break.

Two days later I got home from work to find Michael sitting on my doorstep in the rain with a huge duffel bag beside him and his box of camera equipment under his bum. He said, ‘Apparently they have bookshops in London too.’

The joke was that when I did eventually get the sack it turned out to be my third big break. This was ten years later.

Some things had changed in the intervening decade. Headcase had ‘a nervous’; he spent six months in a bin and left journalism. Peter Stow dropped dead. Robin got his job only to be sacked when the
Toxic
decided to hire his disaffected opposite number from the
Express
. Berkowitz was briefly editor of the
Sensible
before falling victim to its famously toxic office politics and
taking
a job editing a magazine called
Asia
in Hong Kong. Chubby Rory now edits Dexter; when we meet at a party, we fall into each other’s arms with cries of ‘Babycakes!’

As for me: I moved from Dexter to the news desk, won an award for pieces about the
Herald of Free Enterprise
, moved to Features, was poached by
The Times
, then left after three months to be features editor of the
Sensible
; did that for two years, then moved to the same job on its sister Sunday (more pay, more
status
, less work – don’t you love Sunday journalism?), then took on a job as features editor of the
Sentinel
when my former immediate boss was refused a sabbatical to write a book and so quit instead. This new job was an ‘executive’ one, meaning more money and perks in the form of a car, and putting up with management
bullshit
about budgets, conferences, strategies, market research, and the rest. Then our editor moved to edit the
Guardian
, and a man called William Pinker arrived, and two days later I was fired. Then Berkowitz called up and offered me a job in Hong Kong at twice my old salary.

At thirty-four you know a few things about yourself that you don’t in your twenties. I am, I discovered to my own surprise, a man’s woman. To me this doesn’t feel like it’s my fault: men like and trust me, whereas women don’t, or not quite in the same way. These things tend to be mutual. I have only one real
girlfriend
, Jenny. She was a contemporary at Durham. She looks the same as she did then – short, dark, clever-looking – and is now a theatrical agent. I once looked in her fridge and found nothing but a single portion of Lean Cuisine lemon chicken, a month past its sell-by, a smelly pint of milk, and a half-empty, corkless bottle of Rosemount Chardonnay that had long since turned to vinegar. I told her about Berkowitz’s offer the day after he made it, over lunch in a Thai restaurant.

‘But what about Michael?’ she said.

I had given her the reasons for being interested in Berkowitz’s job offer, which were, in order, a complete change of scene, the inherent interest of the job itself, money, and the effect on my future – specifically, the idea that whatever happened, I could get a book out of it. I would go to Hong Kong a features hack who’d been around for a while, a known quantity, and come back
eighteen
months later a thirty-something
femme sérieuse
with an
important
book about Asia under her frock. In fact, the book would be so easy to write it was almost a pity I’d have to go out there to do it.
Tiger Pit: A Young Woman’s Look at Asia. Time of the Tigers. When
Tigers Awake. View from the Tiger. That’s Enough Fucking Tigers
. How many photogenic young female Asia experts can there be?

‘But what about Michael?’ Jenny said again. I said:

‘I know, I know.’

But the truth was, I didn’t know. Michael and I had fallen into that limbo which overtakes young(ish) couples when they don’t marry at a reasonably early point and instead drift into the
condition
of being with each other open-endedly, with no plans for children.

‘Maybe it’ll give him a kick up the bum,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if there won’t be plenty of things to take pictures of in Hong Kong. He’ll have to choose. We can’t just potter along indefinitely. We can’t stay together out of inertia. He either wants to stay with me or he doesn’t.’