Today I am wearing my best skirt! When I say ‘best’, I don’t mean in the Sunday kind of way, but rather the greatest sort of best. This skirt is the greatest because I bought it seven years ago with some of the first money I ever earned from doing writing.

The money was paid to me by a couple of dodgy publishers (they were an actual couple, married, and also dodgy publishers) who employed me, via a small ad in the back of The Bookseller, to ghostwrite a book about hair colour. It was by a hair colourist who the couple declared to be a ‘celebrity hair colourist’, but whose most famous client seemed to be the woman who I was working for.

(Sometimes I think that if I had gone back to New York after finishing my master’s degree, the original plan, I would have done fewer hilarious things, because I would have trusted myself to make distinctions between legitimate things and dodgy things. Rather than surmising that things that seemed dodgy were just exotic.)

My first meeting with the publishers was in Sloane Square, a place I’d never gone before, in a restaurant that seemed like the kind of restaurant where one Mitford sister would meet up with another Mitford sister when they were both in town. The woman spoke with a sexy eastern European accent of indeterminate origin and wore a slash of bright lipstick and her coloured hair coiled under a dramatic hat. She described the project to me and another younger woman who was also new to London, who was also an aspiring writer, and who was also wide-eyed: at speaking to a publisher, at being in Sloane Square, at the lipstick and the hat.

(I don’t think the other writer worked for them; I think she knew the difference between dodgy and exotic.)

After I’d finished expressing my interest in a slavering manner, I walked down the King’s Road, another place that I’d never been before, and saw the skirt that would become my best. It was purple tweed, knee-length, with ruffle at the bottom. Tweed was something I’d had a strong interest in for several years, because it was a sensible fabric to wear in freezing Montreal, and because my best friend Lauren and I both wanted to move to England. Dressing like Mitford sisters seemed a reasonable measure to make that happen, like turning up at the audition for a role in a film in costume as the character.

At £50, the skirt was frighteningly beyond the allowances of my income, which was derived from waiting on tables at a family restaurant in Clapham and which didn’t even cover my rent. I stroked the skirt on the hanger, and then I thought about it for a long while: that maybe this job would lead to a life in which I could afford this sort of skirt and find a restaurant on Sloane Square normal, not dazzling.

For £750, my job was to listen to hours of tapes of the woman talking to the hair colourist about his life, and in particular his views on the hair colour of various celebrities whose hair he’d never coloured, and then arrange the text into something that looked like a book. I learned technical terms like ‘buttery’ and found myself regarding my own hair in the mirror with extreme displeasure: the mousiness.

Every so often I’d go for a meeting at the pubishers’ warren-like office, in a Battersea basement, which was full of copies of books they’d written themselves, sometimes about themselves, and a young Boris Johnson-alike who worked for them in a sort of cupboard and who expressed misogynistic opinions. The publishers also had a really nice dog: big and calm, with enormous sweet eyes that were even wider than mine.

One late evening the couple opened a bottle of wine and got quite drunk and started arguing with each other in a scary, vicious way. I looked at the dog and thought, neither of us belong here; we are too nice. And as soon as I could, made my excuses. The dog stayed behind. This was 2005, so googling people early on in an acquaintance was not yet an instinct, but when I went home I looked them up on our slow broadband connection and learned that they’d both spent time in prison for doing serious things. 

This didn’t make me quit the job, but I did start telling one of my flatmates where I was going and what time to expect me home.

A word I learned from this job was ‘tranche’, as in I will pay you the first tranche, which happened when I went back to Battersea and the woman took me to Sainsbury’s in the dark and passed me fistfuls of cash from the bank machine. In the end the man got mad at me and took my name off the book, because he thought it wasn’t a good enough book about hair colour and he had to rewrite it entirely himself, something I did not challenge because of the serious things that he had done.

But they still paid me all three tranches. And after I received the third one I looked at the money and I thought about the skirt and the next day I fished out £50 worth of notes and did not tell my flatmates where I was going and I went back to the shop where I’d stroked the skirt, and even though it was three months later, it was still there. Maybe because it was purple tweed with a ruffle at the bottom. Every time I wore it I thought, this is a skirt that I earned from writing. I am a writer. Even though by now I’d worked out that most people in England did not dress like Mitford sisters.

And seven years later, I still wear the skirt, at least a couple times every winter. It’smaybe not flattering or attractive. But it’s very warm. And when I see the ruffled hem poking out from beneath the edge of my coat, it reminds me of what it was like to be 23 years old and slightly adrift and working for dubious people on odd projects in strange circumstances and thinking, all the while: well, this is an adventure.