Folk'd Read online

  He plonked himself down at a free desk, going through his hot-desking ritual of hanging his coat over the back of his chair, taking out his wallet, and fishing a small photograph from its interior to place on his PC. Ellie and Luke, faces pressed together in some trivial moment of fun, stared back at him. He hit a few buttons on the PC and the system thrummed to life, adding its own mournful voice to the cacophony going on around him.

  “Alright Danny,” said Alice, terminating her call with a shudder of relief. They got twenty-eight seconds of wrap-up time between calls. Not thirty. Twenty-eight. Presumably thirty seemed far too rounded-off and arbitrary a number, whereas twenty-eight seconds suggested a figure that had been thoroughly researched by consultants, at great expense.

  “Alice. How’s life on the front lines of telephony customer service lookin?”

  “Like I’d need a stepladder to get to Hell.”

  Danny glanced to the empty seat between them. “Is Cal not in?”

  She coloured instantly. “No,” she replied. There was a pause, which she obviously felt compelled to fill. “He’s…uh, he’s probably sleeping off some drinking session...”

  “Aye. So, did you two –”

  Time was up. Alice’s headpiece began to bleep. She shrugged apologetically, but looked relieved at the interruption.

  “Good morning,“ she said in that horrible sing-song telephonist voice. “You’re through to Lircom. My name is Alice, can I take your customer account number please?”

  Danny fitted his headpiece with a silent sigh. His teased his mouse pointer over the ‘active’ button for a few seconds. Finally he took a breath and clicked. Within a heartbeat, his headpiece was beeping.

  “Good morning,“ Danny sang, in an altogether much more reluctant musical timbre than Alice had just used. “You’re through to Lircom. My name is Danny, can I take your…”

  Time passed in gulps, like he was coming up for air every so often.

  “…your customer account number is the one with the numbers in, yes…”

  “…when I say double click I mean you have to click twice, you see…”

  “…there was a powercut? And when did it end? I see. Well, I’d advise that you wait until it does end before ringing us…”

  “ …no, click twice…”

  It was 12.30pm. Danny went offline with gusto, feeling aggrieved yet again that no matter how firmly you click a mouse button it still just makes a wimpy ‘click‘ noise. There should be a pressure sensor on the fuckers for really vehement clicks that generated a more fuck you type of sound effect - just like there should be a BOOM sound effect that goes down the phone line when you slam down a phone instead of the same standard click-bmmmmm.

  He was about to leave his desk when a middle-aged man with an unfortunate hairstyle and a comfortable paunch meandered over. Thomas, Danny’s boss. He had the office buzzword cliché textbook out and he was running through it step-by-step.

  “Danny, mind if we touch base?”

  “Well, actually I was just gonna go on lun-”

  “It is important.”

  “…sure,” Danny said.

  They walked over to an unoccupied nest of desks. Danny sat down and glanced at the clock. Thomas sat opposite him, flashed him a quarter-second smile, and steepled his fingers in what presumably page 42 of his Line Management for Dicks book told him was an authoritative yet friendly pose. Danny always got that one mixed up with the “Cockhead” pose.

  “You know I like to give you guys a heads-up.”

  “Yes…”

  “Let’s discuss your utilisation levels. Do you feel they’re satisfactory?”

  Danny wondered how obvious it was that he was about to pluck an answer out of the air. Should he mime using a pair of chopsticks to try and pluck a bluebottle from mid-flight, Mr Miyagi style?

  “Yes?”

  “We have a major go-live date approaching fast. Mr Black is very vehement that he wants the very best from the organisation. He wants us to drill down to the bedrock of results, to ramp up our performances. Our target ceilings have shifted, Danny. It’s important to keep ahead. I can’t function if I’m not sure my agents aren’t being kept up to speed with what’s being expected of them on the ground.”

  A long pause. Danny’s expression was so blank he was surprised Thomas didn’t simply get a marker and draw his expression on. That would have been helpful, come to think of it.

  “I’ll leave that with you,” Thomas was going on. “Your appraisal is coming soon, and you need to drill down to what matters. Can we expect to see a little more focus on your change orientation?”

  “Count on it!” Danny said, all but saluting.

  Thomas nodded, satisfied, and walked away. He loved to dangle Mr Black at the staff; like the Chief Executive was going to take a personal interest in Danny’s call answering rates and utilisation levels anytime soon. Yeah, right. He probably couldn’t have picked Danny out of a one-man line-up. He sighed, rose from the identikit desk in the midst of the ghost town of workstations awaiting more drones, and bumped into a young lad of about his age walking in, red-eyed and with premeditatedly dishevelled hair.

  “Alright Cal?”

  “Alright? I’m sitting on the cusp of damnation staring down into the crimson pit of Hades with nine demons sitting on my back playing cup and ball with my eternal soul. God save me, Danny, from this purgatory of mediocrity.”

  Cal had watched ‘Withnail and I’ some years before whilst high on what could only be described as a smorgasbord of drugs, and hadn’t liked the Richard E Grant “Withnail” character so much as sort of absorbed him through a screen-to-person osmosis.

  “So…did you and Ali-”

  “Danny, please! I can’t possibly listen to this!” Cal announced, putting his fingers an inch from his ears and brushing past him in the general direction of the staffroom. He could see Alice’s head swivelling to follow him even as her eyes remained steadfast to the computer monitor, which was a pretty impressive trick, he had to admit.

  “Good luck with the demons thing!” Danny called after him.

  Cal turned, all traces of trained actor gone. “Ach, cheers,” he said in a genuinely pleased way, as if Danny had just wished him luck on a driving test.

  Danny rolled his eyes and blew out a breath. This, he thought, was why call-centres didn‘t work. On one side, you had overeducated employees doing complex work for monkey-hit-feeder-bar wages and having to invent interesting personality quirks to pass the time between regretfully shagging one another.

  In opposition to that, by and large, you had incredibly nervous bosses, with much less education, suddenly promoted way beyond the capabilities of their interpersonal skills on the basis that their stunned gratitude would guarantee some infinitesimal degree of employee loyalty. This in an industry where toilet rolls had longer terms of service than staff. And had to put up with less shit.

  Danny left the office floor for the adjoining corridor, walking past a poster which happily proclaimed the company slogan: LIRCOM – YOUR GATEWAY TO A BETTER WORLD.

  Underneath this were the words: OF BUSINESS.

  ***

  The home phone rang. Danny picked it up. “Hello?”

  “What the Christ about ye?”

  Danny grinned. A typical Stevey greeting, that. He could just picture him now, the tosser - in that dopey jacket and those ninety-five pound trainers. He’d been heartbroken to take the price tag off the fucking things. “Not bad mucker. What’s up?”

  “Not much. Few of us gonna go out later tonight.“ Steve paused and a trademark lilt came into his voice. “It’s an uh, it’s a special occasion…”

  “Oh aye? What’s that?”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Um…“

  “Forgot the rest of the joke again haven’t ye,“ Danny said, his grin only broadening.

  “Sorta.“

  To give Steve credit, there wasn’t a hint of embarrassment in his voice at admitting it. Danny t
hought for a moment, but only a moment. “Day with a Y in it?” he suggested.

  “Nah.”

  “Opening of an envelope?“

  “No.”

  “Jesus, we’ve been through your entire back catalogue. Don’t ask me.”

  “Ach fuck it,“ Steve said cheerfully, undaunted. “I’ll remember it later. Anyway, ya comin?”

  Danny licked his lips. “Um…”

  Right on cue, Ellie entered the hallway, baby Luke in her arms. Well. Mostly in her arms; his teething pangs had been slowly notching up the severity scale this last few days and currently he was 70 percent or so out of her arms, red-faced and squealing indignantly at the unfairness of existence.

  Ellie registered Danny on the phone and deduced the caller and purpose of the call instantly. She managed to raise an eyebrow without actually raising one, hefting baby Luke up like an anti-beer talisman. A long spit curl of drool pooled from his mouth to the thin carpet below.

  “Ah Christ,” Steve swore, “she’s there, eh? Code talkin time?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “What do you call them things without backbones?”

  Danny wondered for a moment how much of Shakespeare's collected works those monkeys at the typewriters would be able to produce before Steve would come anywhere close to identifying the word invertebrates. “Alright, I get the point,” he said.

  Ellie smiled sweetly. “Who is it, love?”

  “It’s Steve, ya demented fishwife! You fuckin’ tell her I said that lad!”

  Danny smiled back, just as sweetly. “It’s Steven. He says hello.”

  “That’s nice,“ Ellie replied, juggling Luke effortlessly from one shoulder to another in a manoeuvre Danny had never mastered.

  “Tell her you’re going out with yer mates to get plastered! Big fuckin’ wimpy bastard ye!”

  “Well, you know Steven,” Danny said, his hand clamped firmly over the speaker.

  “Is he asking you to go out?”

  Danny blinked as if flabbergasted by her clairvoyance. “Why, yes…yes, I believe he is.”

  From somewhere around his chin came a muffled, “Fuckin’ better believe it!”

  “Shame it’s tonight. We’re going to dinner…” and clocking his expression her mask of uber-niceness slipped for a moment to reveal hidden pits of Hades he had no wish to explore, “the dinner you’ve been so eagerly anticipating all this time. At my parents. Tonight. And anyway,” she carried on briskly, as even little Luke seemed to sense this was a wise time to limit the decibel level, “even when that’s over you promised you’d smooth out that bump in the garden for me – Michelle was tellin’ me that wee green fountain in B&Q would go lovely there.”

  “Oh yeah…so I did,” Danny admitted. Balls. Why did he agree to these things? In what parallel universe was working on a garden for the potential reward of humping a fucking fountain from B&Q and then trying to install the inevitably awkward bastard a good idea?

  Ellie winked at him and swept out of eye-line, bringing Luke with her, ready to plonk him in his high chair and attempt to wave watery brownish muck under his nose for an hour until he realised that a) it was food and b) that he was meant to eat it. Danny put the phone back to his ear.

  “Prick! You’re a prick! Why don’t ya just stick on a saddle and sit with a wee nosebag on, eh? Jesus Christ. Pathetic, man. Pathetic.”

  Danny was composing a reply along the lines of fuck you when Ellie poked her head back into view again, Luke having been safely deposited in his Throne of Despair.

  “Danny?”

  “What?”

  “Can you feed wee Luke a second? I want a word with Steven.”

  All the colour drained from Steve’s voice.

  “She wants a what?” he said.

  ***

  Even the front door was posh, Danny thought glumly, with plenty of fancy glass and wee bells and whistles all over the place. Ellie rang the doorbell and after a few seconds he could see a shape scurrying to answer it. He half expected it to a maid or something but no, it was Christina, Ellie’s mother. As always when he saw her the taste of tin flooded his mouth.

  “Darling!”

  “Hello, mummy,” Ellie replied. They kissed on both cheeks, each standing too far apart so they had to lean in in an exaggerated way. Danny tried not to roll his eyes at this, or notice the change in her inflection. She didn’t like having the posh voice thing pointed out to her. Didn’t like it with italics on.

  “And here’s my widdle mansy wansy woo-woo!” Christina exclaimed, enthusiasm positively dripping out of her. Danny wondered had she practised this in the mirror before they arrived. He watched neutrally as Ellie’s mother poked her head in the pram and fussed over Luke. For his part, Luke looked up extremely dubiously at her.

  Danny could practically see his tiny, mad little baby brain working. On the plus side, she was paying him attention, and little Luke was nothing if not an unapologetic narcissist. On the minus side, she was clearly mentally ill. Kids aren’t mugs. They can spot nutters.

  The wailing began. Danny did a fist pump, fist hidden safely in his pocket at the time. Christina removed her head hurriedly.

  “Ah ha ha…“ Christina said, nervously wringing her hands as Ellie reached in to coo and soothe the wee fella. “Probably finding it all a bit strange to be at a big house!”

  Danny gritted his teeth at this. One-nil. He expected nothing short of a whitewash on that particular score tonight. Christina turned, appearing to acknowledge him for the first time as if he’d been standing behind a fucking bush or something, when he’d been in plain sight the whole time. Was that two-nil? Oh what the hell. Give them it. This was their sport, and they were fucking world-class at it.

  “Christina,” Danny nodded, the metallic tang squatting on his tongue. “Good to see ya.”

  “Danny,” she returned, so very very politely, so very like her daughter earlier when he’d been on the phone to Steve. Danny pushed that particular thought further away.

  “How goes the…call-answering?” she inquired, as though she were a member of the Medieval Spanish Court asking him was he absolutely quite sure that was really the fastest way to India?

  “Ach same old same old. How goes the…“ and Danny realised he was going down a conversational dead end. Christina didn’t have a job, unless arranging luncheons and appearing in Ulster Tatler could be counted as one, and if it could, she was seriously overworked.

  “How’s life?“ he amended weakly. Ellie flashed him a warning look. He gave her an eyebrow-shrug in return.

  “Is Daddy putting the finishing touches on as usual?” Ellie interrupted, whether Christina was actually intending to answer Danny or not.

  “Oh you know him. Everything has to be just perfect for his little girl and his darling grandchild.”

  Danny resisted the urge to cup his balls and belch loudly just to reassure himself that, yes, he was still here, and yes, he existed.

  “Look at us all, out here on the doorstep!“ Christina cackled merrily at this hilarious situation. She had a wonderful laugh. It was like the noise a dog made just before it threw up. “We’ll all freeze! Let’s go in and get settled in, shall we?”