I never wanted any job where a well-cut suit compensated for a lack of ability. But there were people rooting for me to go out into the world, further than already ventured.

The interview room was recently soundproofed, so the woman at the front desk said. The door swung open: my interviewers. They apologized for lateness, client lunch, and led the way, the tall elegant woman with black hair and Middle Eastern features striding out in front. The stocky, hunched man with badger grey hair followed behind me, closed the glass door and excused himself when he belched. Across the street a seagull stood on the parapet of a nine-storey building. On noticing I made a mental note not to look out the window again. It had been a bad habit in interviews before.

I answered all her questions and admired her for not probing the ignorance of a recent graduate. She sat conspicuously erect throughout, while he gradually slumped with one palm supporting his head.

She handed me a written test to complete within a set time. Between questions – one asked who won the previous World Cup – I daydreamed. Across the way, architecture firm employees worked at their desks. One guy looked back. When I waved, he laughed. The woman returned before I’d finished. She said that was quite alright, which I assumed was a good omen.

Feeling like a fraud in my cheap suit and new black shoes that cut at the ankles I ambled toward the train station and stopped in a small music shop where plastic-bagged second-hand CDs hung from nails in the wall, and the attendant talked about amplifiers to a long-haired man wearing leathers. I picked a CD, and when I went to pay for it they stopped their conversation.

“Do guys in suits not buy music too?”

“Not usually in this shop,” the attendant said.

A letter informed me I’d got the job. Immediately I moved to the city. It was very cold. The night before the first day, I lay on an uncovered faded mattress wearing a ski-jacket, pants and woolly jumper. New home: a second-floor apartment in a tenement block with a bay window view of the Clyde and decommissioned shipyards, a two-inch calibre cannon on wheels in the sitting-room and an old fashioned chamber seat standing in the hallway. My suit hung on a hanger in the wardrobe and an immaculately ironed shirt with safety pins still in the cuffs was draped over the chair. In the apartment beneath, a child cried a few hours before dawn.

Nobody in the office spoke, and every sound I made filling drawers with superfluous paraphernalia seemed, to my mind, to impinge upon a collective calm. Across the pod divider, a Northern Irish guy sat looking attentively at his screen. He wore rimless glasses and his appearance reminded me of the lead singer in a Northern Irish band. Throughout the day we talked intermittently, swapped backgrounds and interests. Others began to politely ask questions, and by mid-afternoon all were seemingly content to work in an office.

Over the next fortnight, pretence and concealment drained me. When you know that every passing day is leading you in a direction you’d rather not go, the denial to yourself and others becomes a kind of disease.

I said very little to anyone, probably giving an impression I was quite dedicated. At lunchtime the Northern Irish guy and I ate together and strolled along the streets for air. One afternoon he took me to a shopping centre café to meet a well-muscled friend in a sharp blue suit. They talked rapidly of big figures for land, Creatine, who was shagging whom, and what their bosses thought of things. They ordered steak sandwiches and I ordered soup.

“Will you not eat something bigger?” his friend asked.

“I eat light during the day.”

“Why?”

“So I can concentrate.”

“Fair enough.”

Fridays, I was told, was Pink Shirt Day. All males were required to wear salmon-pink shirts. On the second Friday, my indirect boss, the guy I’d bored at the interview, noted aloud I was wearing blue. He stared at my breast pocket.

“I don’t have a pink shirt.”

“Buy one.”

“I haven’t got paid yet.”

“You know, when I started working in London, I arrived one day wearing a shirt with a pocket like that. My boss pulled and tore it.”

“Did you hit him?”

“No.”

“That’s what I’d have done.”

That evening we drank after work. The interviewer and his girlfriend joined the party, a blonde girl who drank gin and tonic and worked in one of the competitor companies in marketing. She spoke with an intoxicating London accent of childhood memories of Ireland, of “grandpappy” and thatched cottages.

Soon the Northern Irish guy and I began arguing over a trivial matter, a Gaelic football rule or Orange Order marches, perhaps, and played our roles as stereotypes.

“The fighting Irish!” my indirect boss laughed.

The next morning, a Saturday, I walked my usual route into the city. Behind a shopping centre, across a vast car park, toward the river, I came upon on an alleyway market. At the head of the alley, in the darkness of an old storehouse building, clothes hung on railings. At the very back of the shop, in the midst of a rack of denims, was a navy pinstripe suit. The pants were long enough. Jasper Conran was written on the jacket’s inner lining. I tried it on.

“A steal, love,” a lady said, hauling two full black plastic bags across the concrete ground.

“How much?”

“Twenty.”

“Fine.”

I know a person who works a high-powered job. He wears a suit everyday, works more than the hours he is employed for, eats lunch in restaurants, attends meetings daily and travels to other countries to meet clients. When he meets others in the profession, they talk at great length like women with curlers in their hair leaning on washing lines. I tune out and drink copious amounts of tea. Sometimes he complains about hours and pressure. If I suggest he chooses to work those hours, he is defensive.

During my year at that job, I had two rules. The first was never, under any circumstance, to mention another colleague’s name during conversation with a colleague. People became unnerved. One night I was accused of just that – never mentioning anybody else.

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“So you’re only interested in yourself?”

“If I was interested in myself, I wouldn’t be here.”

“So, what?”

“You’re only doing this because you know I won’t tell anyone.”

“I just think you’re a snob.”

“Fine.”

The second was to hardly ever work after half-past five. My colleagues worked with infinitely more enthusiasm and were rewarded for it. Whenever we were assigned to work out of office, they were assigned lead role, I the role of lackey. The respect I earned derived from honesty: a refusal to wear a pink shirt and be anybody other than myself in circumstances that were undesirable, to continue wearing ties described at different times as archaic, putrid and comical, and to hang on to individuality. On the day probation finished, I followed my boss’s long legs to the boardroom with a sense that my time had come to an end, that, finally, lack of effort would be given the recognition it deserved and the employment contract I never wanted would be terminated. That never happened. Following that, my disaffection for conversation became widely appreciated. My lack of interest in any professional matters didn’t seem to matter. I skipped conferences to retreat to libraries and write. At interpersonal skills training seminars held in big glass buildings, I flaunted every rule in role-playing exercises. I surprised clients by asking personal questions before discussing business matters, which had a positive effect. I paid scant attention to hierarchy.

One Friday evening I forgot my house keys and had to return to the office. When the lift opened, and I stepped into it, a man stood in his pin-stripe suit holding a golf umbrella. He was the Director. He lived overlooking the sea and a golf course, owned a yacht and played golf, and drove to the city in a very expensive car. He was married to an Austrian lady, played around with the administrator and held a tab at the wine bar. He leaned over his desk to watch the legs of a female client pass and did complicated numerical calculations aloud so they’d hear. He was drunk.

“You’re soaked,” he said.

“I don’t mind. So are you.”

“No, I’m dry. I’m clever.”

A pause, and then he said:

“Did you really get that suit for twenty pounds?”

I said I had, and he laughed. The bell rang. The doors opened. We stepped onto the floor together.

Paul O’Sullivan lives in Dublin