Excerpt from Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

To make it worse, I was not the only person who had been taken on to do "my" job. This was standard management practice at The Toxic, part of the culture: you would give two people the same job description and resources, see who came out on top, and then sack the other one, usually by moving them sideways and down to a job they couldn't possibly accept. As a management technique this was impressively horrible. The person given the same job as me was a chubby public school boy called Rory Waters.

On my first day I arrived a careful three minutes early to find him sitting at the next desk, already typing something (what? what?).

"Er, I'm Dawn," I said.

"How d'ye do," said Rory.

"This is Rory," said Robin, arriving out of nowhere and looking, as usual, like the obvious murder suspect in a production of Agatha Christie. "He's just joined us, and he'll be helping us out a bit here too. I'm sure"--this with a hint of menace--"you'll hit it off famously."

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 other 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 that was completely unlike what I'd expected and for which I had no aptitude. Every morning I woke up feeling as if something I'd swallowed 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 knew only 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, tokenized, objectivized, 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 as I was 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 backward. 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.

Copyright 2002 by John Lanchester. All rights reserved. This book, or parts therof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission.