Fragrant Harbour Read Free Page B

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.

Chapter Two
    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.