‘Hey, it’s a joke.’ Lisa smiled bitchily at Mercedes, compounding the damage by making her seem like a bad sport as well as hairy.

To piss off both Ashling and Mercedes, Lisa was extra-sweet to Trix. It was a power-generating technique she’d used in the past – divide and conquer. Select a pet, shower them with intimacy, then suddenly abandon them in favour of another. Rotating the position engendered love and fear. Except for Jack, she was going to be nice to him all the time. He was the only thing in her life that was giving her hope. She’d discreetly studied how he responded to her and it was different to the way he treated the other female staff. He was amused by Trix, polite to Mercedes and seemed to positively dislike Ashling. But to Lisa he was respectful and solicitous. Admiring, even. And so he should be. She’d been getting up even earlier than usual this week, taking extra care with her already pampered appearance, expertly applying gossamer-thin layer after gossamer-thin layer of fake tan to give her a golden glow.

Lisa was clear-eyed about her looks. In her natural state – not that she’d been in that for a very long time – she was a pretty enough girl. But with huge amounts of effort she knew she’d upgraded herself from attractive to fabulous. As well as the usual attention to hair, nails, skin, make-up and clothes, she popped huge amounts of vitamins, drank sixteen glasses of water a day, only snorted cocaine on special occasions and every six months had a botulism injection in her forehead – it paralysed the muscles and gave a lovely wrinkle-free appearance. For the past ten years she’d been constantly hungry. So hungry that she barely noticed it now. Sometimes she dreamt about eating a three-course meal, but people do the oddest things in dreams!

Despite her confidence in her looks, Lisa had to admit that Jack’s girlfriend had come as a bit of a shock. Lisa had blithely assumed that she was being pitted against an Irish girl, which would be a cake-walk. But she wasn’t too discouraged. Tearing Jack away from his passionate, exotic girlfriend was currently one of the least taxing aspects of her life.

Finding somewhere to live was much more of a challenge. All week, after work, she’d been viewing places, and nothing remotely suitable had come along yet. Tonight she was viewing an apartment in Christchurch, which didn’t look too bad. Though the rent was expensive, it was in a modern complex and it was walking distance from work. The downside was that it would mean sharing with someone, and it was a while since Lisa had shared with anyone, especially a woman. The owner of the flat was called Joanne.

‘It’s great living here because you can walk to work,’ Joanne enthused. ‘Which means you’ll save £1.10 each way on the bus-fare.’

Lisa nodded.

‘Which is £2.20 a day.’

Lisa nodded again.

‘Which is eleven pounds a week.’

Lisa’s nod was slightly reluctant this time.

‘Which adds up to forty-four pounds a month. Over five hundred pounds a year. Now, the rent. I need a month’s deposit, two months paid in advance, and a two-hundred-pound deposit in case you disappear leaving a large phone bill.’

‘But –’

‘And what usually happens is that you’d give me thirty pounds a week towards groceries. Milk, bread, butter, that kind of thing.’

‘I don’t drink milk –’

‘But for your tea!’

‘I don’t drink tea. Or eat bread. I never touch butter.’ Lisa put a hand on her slender hip and looked at Joanne’s rather larger one. ‘Besides, how many pints of milk can you buy for thirty pounds? You must take me for an idiot.’

Back on the street, Lisa felt wretched. She missed London so badly. She hated being here and having to go through this. She had a perfectly good flat of her own in Ladbroke Grove. She’d give anything to be there.

Yet another shock-wave of exhaustion and displacement hit. In London she was inextricably woven into the fabric of fashionable life, but she knew nobody here. And she didn’t want to. She found them all so irritating. No one turned up on time for anything in this lousy country and one person even had the cheek to say, ‘The man who made time made plenty of it.’ As a magazine person it was her prerogative to be late.

Desolately, she trailed back to her horrid little hotel, wishing Trix had been able to fix up a dinner with someone semi-famous for this evening.

She hated having free time, her ability to process it had atrophied. Though it hadn’t been that way for ever – she’d always grafted hard and been ambitious, but once upon a time there had been something more. Before the constant looking over her shoulder at the hordes of younger, smarter, tougher, more ambitious girls swarming up behind her had distilled her life to a focused treadmill.

She had a few more flats and houses to look at this weekend – the time would pass fast enough. And tomorrow she was showcasing a couple of hairdressers, getting her colour done in one and having her hair cut in another. The trick was to have a few that were cravenly obligated to you, so that if one couldn’t squeeze you in for an emergency blow-dry, another could.

She’d made a bargain with herself. She’d give herself a year to make a rip-roaring success of this joke of a magazine, then surely the powers that be in Randolph Media would recognize her contribution and reward it. Maybe…

After three speedy post-work drinks, Ashling got up to leave, but Trix implored her to stay out.

‘C’mon, let’s get twisted and bond by trashing everyone we work with!’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can,’ Trix urged earnestly. ‘All you have to do is try.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’ But Trix had a point. While Ashling certainly had bitchy thoughts, she rarely gave vent to them because she had an edgy suspicion that what goes around comes around. No point trying to explain that to Trix, though, she’d laugh her head off. ‘I mean I’m going to see my friend Clodagh.’

‘Get her to come here.’

‘She can’t. She’s got two kids and her husband’s in Belfast.’

Only then would Trix relinquish her.

Ashling jostled through the Friday-night throng and hailed a taxi. Fifteen minutes later she arrived at Clodagh’s, for pizza, wine and a bitching session about Dylan.

‘I hate when he goes away to these bloody dinners and conferences,’ Clodagh exclaimed. ‘And he goes to far too many for my liking.’