I’m at work and nothing is happening. Blue cubicle walls, blue carpet, pine desks, clocks, ceiling fans, soft disjointed voices, all battling it out in a war of casual monotony.
I have no customers, and I’m sliding quickly towards boredom with my mother’s voice whispering in my head: only boring people get bored. Which is just about the worst thing I can think of. Tess the Boring Girl. Ugh.
I look at Jem sitting in the cubicle on my left. There’s a small partition between us but I can roll my chair around it, close enough to peer over his shoulder. He’s on a phone-call, but i see his eyes drift in my direction.
Stretching my headset cable, I move close enough to him to see little bits of fluff on his dumb Ché Guevara t-shirt. His eyes squint at me, irritated, and moves away from me. Huh, boredom subsiding.
I move closer and again, there’s that irritated squint and shoulder move. I reach over with one hand to poke him right in his beard that’s grown halfway between cool and lazy. He flinches away from my touch, but he can’t move too far because he still needs to see the screen. I readjust my reach and continue with my poking.
He smacks at my hand. I smack him ever so lightly in the face.
This is fun.
“Tessa.” I hear suddenly. “Is there anything else you could be doing? Other than distracting your work-mates?”
Uh oh. Victoria. Bosslady.
“Sorry Victoria,” I say, scrambling for an excuse. “I was just… trying… to keep up team morale.”
“ For who exactly?” she asks.
I turn around, but everyone is suspiciously ‘hard at work’ at their desks, faces looking intensely away from me. Bastards.
“ For Jem.” I say. “He was having difficulty dealing with his customer, and I could see that he was getting frustrated. I was helping to bring him out of that…uh, sphere of frustration, so that he could better help the customer.”
She looks at me with an arched eyebrow that has been plucked within an inch of its life. I stare back at her with what I hope looks like the contentedness of someone who is telling the truth.
Her eyebrow arches further and her top lip starts to lift ever so slightly, the purple of her lipstick contrasting against her teeth.
I smile. Contentedly.
Movement to my left breaks the deadlock. Jem is off his call, his left pointer finger tapping on the table beside him. He’s looking at Victoria very seriously, small indents creasing between his dark green eyes. I’m not entirely sure what’s about to happen.
“She’s right Victoria,” he says, sliding a glance at me. “She was helping me out. It’s an unusual technique, but we’ve talked about using it before, and it actually works really well.” Then he turns to me. “ For both of us.”
Shit. Can’t wait for my next phone-call.
Victoria looks flummoxed, her narrow eyes darting between Jem and I. She has her hands on her hips and her right thumb is rubbing her waist above her belt, up and down, up and down.
“It’s absolutely vital you only use work techniques that we have taught you, Tessa. Absolutely vital. We can’t have you affecting other people’s work, ok? Now no more of this unorthodox…” she swishes her hands in front of her face like she’s performing. “Stuff. Get back to work. If you have nothing to do, find something.”
I smile at her and nod. She looks like she wants to say something else, but luckily, I get a phone call, or pretend to, at least. Victoria doesn’t know the difference. I am happily telling a fake customer about a fake opening time in one of our stores as she walks away, her too-small brown corduroy skirt making weird angles at her hips.
As soon as she gets out of sight, Jem leans over to me and starts poking my face. I take my headset off and stick my tongue out at him. “Ha! Fake customer.”
He bursts out laughing. “Dammit! I always make fun of Victoria for falling for that! Stupid fake customers. Stupid Victoria!” He points at me. “No more poking.”
I roll my eyes. “Fine.”
With that he actually does get a phone-call, and leaves me to my boredom, or not boredom, whatever. I go online and let my eyes wander over the news. My eyes immediately hit on a headline-
“Body of Australian girl, 22, found in Battersea Park over the weekend deemed suspicious”
My heart starts to pump a little harder. I was just in Battersea Park, on the weekend. I was just there. I’m a girl, an Australian. It could have been me. No matter how illogical, I feel it, something odd inside me. I click on the link.
‘The body found in Battersea Park on Sunday has been formally identified as Australian national Selena Matthews, 22. The circumstances surrounding her death have been described as suspicious by London Police. Miss Matthews had only been in London for two weeks prior to her death and Police are appealing to the public for information. Inspector Reyes from the homicide team said that…’
That poor girl. Here for only two weeks, and then dead.
I hope it was a good two weeks.
I wonder what she was like. I bet she was pretty. I see her, this dead girl Selena, forming behind my eyes. A girl with short blonde hair, and a gash in her throat. Blue eyes that don’t see.
I bet she was a runner, a good runner. I can see her, blue eyed Selena, winning a race, hugging her mother who looks just like her (only heavier around the middle, looser around the face). Her mother who will look in the mirror now and forever see her dead daughter. Wow, that is so morbid Tessa.
I have this raw feeling that I can’t quite locate but I feel like I should be able to help. Fix it, somehow. Like, it could have been me, but it shouldn’t have been her.
My skin is slightly crawling, like the fine blonde hairs on my arms are trying to rip out their roots and get away. I’m young, I’m Australian, I’m new to London. From the outside, this dead girl and me are the same. Were the same.
I could have died that night in suspicious circumstances.
I’m not one of those people who have accepted death. I’m not that… mature? Is that the word? Do you grow accepting of death? I’ve only experienced it once. Not the act, but the aftermath. The…gone-ness. My Grandmother died and she was just… gone.
I am yet to accept the gone-ness of death.
“What’s wrong with you? Your face looks weird.” Jem jolts me out of my head and I realise I am looking at the computer with my eyebrows raised and my mouth open. I close my mouth, lower my eyebrows and pretend to be a normal person.
“I’m… I don’t know. Just, read that.” I point to my screen and wait, rather impatiently for him to finish reading.
“Oh man, you know her?” He asks.
“No.”
“Oh, uh, So…?” He says with a confused look on his face.
“So it’s sad don’t you think?”
“Why because she’s Australian? One down, twenty-four million to go, right?”
“Jesus Jem, that’s not funny, even for you! What’s wrong with you?”
He grins. Too late, I realise that I am rising to his bait beautifully.
“It’s sad that she died,” He says. “But people die every day, there are deaths in every single newspaper, but this one, because she’s Australian, this one upsets you?”
“No, it’s not that… well maybe it’s that. I just think it’s sad. She was so far away from home, and alone, and she had only been here two weeks!” I point at the screen to prove my point.
“All death is sad.” he says, shrugging.
“Yeah, I know, I just-”
“And hey, found on Sunday morning, right? So Saturday night, she’s Aussie, so she’s probably drunk, ” He grins again. “You know some people really do hate drunken Australians falling their way through the streets of London, and maybe this girl was just the final straw for someone.”
“ UGH!” I say, pushing him slightly so his chair rolls away from mine. “That’s a horrible thing to say, completely stereotypical and has nothing to do with anything!” Again, too late, I catch myself rising to his bait. I can be such an easy target.
He laughs at my pathetic attempts at pushing him away. “ Stereotypes spring from truth. I’m just saying. Look, wait…”
He’s back to leaning over my shoulder and reading the rest of the article that I didn’t get to, his finger underlining the words.
“Here!” He taps the screen.
“Selena had been celebrating a friend’s birthday with a group of people in a nearby pub the night before she was found murdered. She left alone, and friends say that she was quite intoxicated.” He reads aloud.
“If she wasn’t, she might be alive right now,” he continues.
He sees me about to refute this and opens his mouth again.
“No-one’s saying that it’s her fault that she’s dead, just that maybe it’s a little irresponsible to be very drunk when you’re a girl by yourself in a big city- a strange big city at that. You see Australian girls doing it all the time.”
“Oh my God! You’re such a judgemental prick!”
“Oh you know you love me.” he replies, with a smirk.
“Whoever killed her would have done it even if she wasn’t drunk, or Australian. And, by the way, Mr judgy, you get drunk all the time, last time I went to the pub with you, we lost you – ”
He looks like he is about to interrupt, so I hold my hand up.
“-We lost you and we found you out on the street being taken for a ‘walk’ by that weird girl who looked like she’d come directly from a satanic cult, remember? You had no idea what was going on. Lots of people drink, not just Australians, and this girl shouldn’t be blamed for doing something everyone does, just because she died whilst she was doing it. ”
Jem narrows his eyes. “I rather enjoyed that walk.”
I laugh, before feeling a little sick inside.
“Anyway,” He says, the small smile on his face making his dimples appear. “My point is that the dead Aussie girl was still lured more easily for being drunk, I mean you don’t have a comeback for that can you?”
“ How are you going with luring the beautiful Ali? Maybe you should get her drunk.”
Ali is the girl Jem is in LOVE with. Blonde, tanned, and Australian Ali. She is actually incredibly cool, and I don’t think Jem has a chance at all, if only because he is too shy to talk to her.
Jem looks at me with wide eyes “What, so I can kill her?”
“Or, you know, talk to her.” I counter.
Jem looks at me with narrowed eyes and I can see another excellent debate about to begin, but that wonderful noise we all hate went off, indicating a customer on his phone line. He narrows his eyes a little further, points at me rather sharply, before turning around and answering the call.
Good. I class that as a win.
I turn back to my computer. My fingers tap on the mouse. I don’t want to read the newspaper anymore because I don’t want to think about that poor girl or anything else awful right now. I need the weird feeling in me to subside. When I don’t want to think about something, I think about travelling. It’s a portal to my happy place, like a train from Sarajevo to Budapest, or Dubrovnik to Mostar, Belgrade to Bar. I can almost feel the cool, musty air blowing past me as the train pulls up, an old train with red velvet seats and big windows.
There would be a river below us, but it’s not brown like rivers back home, it’s green and translucent. An older Serbian lady would join me in the cabin. She lives in Spain now, having escaped the troubles years before, but she is coming back to visit family and friends not seen since she left. She has her son with her, aged 8, with black hair and green eyes, and I help him with his English.
My headset beeps loudly and sends my brain careening away from my fantasy. I have a phone call. So, yeah, I work in a call centre.
I studied Fine Arts at University back home, specializing in Photography, but unsurprisingly, there aren’t too many jobs here in photography for an Australian girl fresh out of university on a working visa. Not that I’ve found yet, anyway.
The call centre is kind of perfect because they’re used to a high staff turnaround and it’s not something I love, so I can feel comfortable with leaving when I can afford to travel. It’s also inbound, which means we aren’t hassling anyone, people only hassle us.
We’re customer service for Tesco Supermarket and all of its subsidiaries. We take calls from all over the UK and Ireland, so anything you want to know about Tesco Supermarket (and it’s subsidiaries), I’m your girl.
Jem sits to my left, and the closest other person to me is kind of front and to the right of our pod. That’s Penelope, the quiet girl who never laughs and as far as we can tell, only eats dumplings.
The break room is ahead of me, the room of free pizza on Fridays, and dirty dishes every other day. To my right is another separate pod of employees and next to them, a huge, somehow constantly clean window through which I can see the grey, grey sky.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fair share of frustrating phone calls being on the other end of the line, but being the one in the call centre, you only get to have those frustrating conversations. All day long we deal with angry people, impatient people, upset people, complicated people, and more angry people. A lot of the time the angry people have a fair reason to be angry, but unfortunately, being at the bottom level, you’re not given any way to fix any of the problems, and you’re not the reason the problems exist.
You definitely have to have a sense of humour to work in a call centre, which is why Jem and I get on so well. Our mid-call yoghurt throwing battles are an excellent example of this.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have my boss Victoria. For her, the call centre is the centre of the universe. If you say ‘thanks for calling’ instead of ‘ thank you for calling’ at the end of a phone call, it’s like there’s been a death in the family.
She is also most definitely not a fan of me. It’s kind of my own fault though, because although I try my hardest to please the customers and do my job the best I can, I don’t care about the job itself that much.
I might reset someone’s gift card if I think they got a shoddy deal. I might authorise refunds or out of expiry sale prices because it’s the fair thing to do. Sometimes I might log out of my phone a minute early to catch the better tube. Sometimes Jem and I might have yoghurt battles while we’re not on calls. Sometimes when we’re on calls too, if I’m being honest.
I don’t think it’s only this anti-procedural stuff, but probably the way I view the world. Sometimes I’ll be in the break room with Jem and mid conversation I’ll catch her staring at me, eyebrows creased into a puzzled frown. She asked me once how I could possibly see my life being a success, when I spend so much time traveling. We are very different creatures.
I see traveling as part of creating a successful life. Traveling fills my dreams, day and night, and fuels the fire within to learn more about the world. I’m here, right now, learning more about the world, and I love it. But if I want to travel more, I need more money, which means I need this job, which means I try my hardest to stay on Victoria’s good side, most of the time.
Yoghurt battles aside, obviously.