Julia looked around her, as if she needed others to confirm that what was said had been spoken, and then, uncrossing her legs and, clasping the cold steel of the armrests, pushing herself forwards, she cried, "How old do you think I am, eh? Of course I’ve heard of bloody Macbeth!”
“Well, you know of the witches at the start, right?” asked Bailey.
The older woman began to froth at the mouth, and her left eye twitched with maliciousness as she said icily, “I am aware.”
Bailey simply stared at her with the same cheshire cat grin she wore earlier.
“What?” said Julia, perplexed. “Rah!” she cried, grabbing the front edge of her desk and pulling her stomach tight against it, “You are such a waste of time. Just be done with Rod would you so none of us have to suffer him or his existential problems again. He’s a whiny brat; no wonder he an’t got no friends.” Her eyes, however, soon drifted away from the screen and shot the young woman an inquisitive glance one more. “What?” she asked again.
Bailey waited a few moments before answering, a look of determination on her face, “I’m going to try and be his friend.”
“Terrible idea,” replied Julia immediately. “But don’t let me stop you from digging your own grave; ha! Wait,” added Julia, frowning, “this is your big idea? What a load of crap. You had me going there thinking you actually had a cookie in that pretty head of yours. You don’t need to be his friend for his data, so what’s in it for you?”
“What’s in it for me? Why must everything me transactional for you, Julia?” asked Bailey.
“Because popularity is cheap.”
“Who’s talking about popularity? I’m on about friendship.”
“Ah, to be young again.”
“Why must all old people be so patronising.”
Julia scowled, biting her lip. “What did you want with me, eh? Just to insult me?”
“I wanted help with this situation, but I think I know what to do now,” Bailey said, smiling, her eyes glinting. “This guy just wants a friend. I was worried because we aren’t meant to befriend the callers...But what harm can it do? Perhaps if I become his friend then he’ll realise that he isn’t a bad person after all.”
The older woman’s face creased like a mayonnaise splattered paper bag, sending shivers to all who were unfortunate enough to have by chance glanced at her in that moment. Thoughts of the past suddenly swirled in her mind like dead leaves rejuvenated by the late summer breeze. “She can’t be serious,” she thought to herself, “this won’t end well.” And then, after considering it for a short while, a sinister smile curled upon her wrinkly face. “Perhaps,” she went on thinking, “this is a chance to rid this brat once and for all and return the office to how it once was – a profitable enterprise.” She straightened up as straight as her crackly bones and joints would allow, and twisted her head to the young girl, restraining her own emotions from getting the better of her and casting away her eyes from the one who made her feel less than desirable, and said, forcing back the same sort of grin, except this one was more twisted and skeletal, “What a wonderful idea.”
“This is the most you’ve ever spoken to me,” said Bailey with a smirk, and she turned to face her screen as well with a ‘hmph’ of self-satisfaction. “I’m sure our goals align,” she added. She hovered her hand over her mousepad and made the gesture to reactivate the microphone on her headset, which then flashed red immediately to signal that her line was active.
“Hello? Bailey?” spluttered the voice on the other end of the phone.
“Rod! Are you alright?” asked Bailey breathlessly, her hair covering half her face.
“Yes, what’s going on? I couldn’t hear you for the past five minutes.”
“I had to talk to my colleague about what you said, that’s all. You were saying somethings that were making me think you were in danger,” said Bailey. “Are you in danger?”
“No,” replied the young man.
“That’s a relief,” breathed Bailey, “I was worried for a second.”
Rod’s heart skipped a beat, and he could not help but smile ear to ear at this sign. He was almost delirious with contentment, with imaginations and fantasies of the future of their relationship. “Even though we’ve been speaking for weeks, I still don’t know much about you, and I -”
“Rod,” interrupted Bailey, her brows furrowed, “I thought we spoke about this. An operator can’t reveal too much about herself or-”
“... ‘Or they risk criminal prosecution’, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before,” said Rod flippantly, turning around and pressing his back against the door with a sigh. After a few moments of awkward silence, he blushed and slid a hand behind the crux of his neck and tickled it lightly, with a wide, embarrassed smile, and said, “Sorry.”
“Why do you want to know about me anyway? I’m not that interesting,” she asked as she thought simultaneously about what she had just said previously to Julia about what she wanted to try. How was she going to develop a friendship with a caller?
“So, I am just another caller, then. I knew it,” pouted Rod. “I thought I was special...”
Bailey gritted her teeth. “He does this a lot and it's annoying. Is this why he doesn’t have any friends?” she thought, “If I’m going to be his friend I have to actually help him, and to do that I have to tell him the truth. But I have to be careful not to upset him. How do I do that?” She pondered further for a few moments, and then said, “Listen, Rod, I like you, but don’t you think that it’s a bit weird that you keep calling a suicide hotline to talk to me?”
The incessant flicker of the intense, deep-coloured light of the toilet seemed in sync with the beat of the young man’s raging heart, which seemed to drop into his stomach with the splash of a large boulder, ruining everything inside with acidic spray. His skin turned all the ghastlier and goose bumped as his lungs shrunk like shriveled cabbage, his breath becoming all the hoarser as he fumbled for the words to reply to this offense, for he percieved it as an assault on his worth as a human being. He forgot all about his desire to urinate, and, consumed by this sudden rage, he clutched his phone with both trembling hands and opened his quivering mouth to speak, but something held his tongue from making its first instinctual movement. As sweat trickled down his rounding oval face, the skin in which was scarred and acned from years of abuse, both self-inflicted and without, he watched the images imprint upon his mind each painstaking second with terror. Instantly, guilt pervaded the core of his being and supplanted the anger which had so consumed him in that moment; his scowl and crunched face softened considerably, and tears welled up behind his tired, red eyes as remembrances of the past flickered into view. “It really is true,” he said to himself, although loud enough to be audible to an astute observer, “the mind’s eye really does exist: what you imagine the brain thinks it sees as though it really was there.” He breathed in deeply the stale, fecal air he had accustomed himself to, but which a stranger not well-acquainted with his particular toilet would at least attempt to hold their breath at, and forced himself to resist his impulses; the same impulses which he would have acted upon had he not put himself in debt to retrain himself. He ran his hand through his overgrown, curly hair and tilted his head to the ceiling as he exhaled slowly. “I don’t want to lose her too,” he thought.
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“You’re not saying anything,” muttered Bailey anxiously. She fiddled with her hands like a bored schoolchild, or more accurately, like a girl confessing her feelings to her crush. Then she grew pale and added, quietly panicking, “I didn’t say anything to upset you, did I?”
For a moment Rod wanted to make the girl sweat, to push the button that would make her feel as broken as he did, to say that which could induce in the woman a sliver of the emotion he felt so strongly every day; but he resisted, if only to prolong the friendship a little longer. “I used to work in a similar field as you,” he said dispassionately.
Bailey did not say anything but frowned instead in confusion. She wondered what this had to do with the question she had posed a moment ago, but she had got him speaking about something other than how lonely he was, and had not upset him enough to ask for another operator, so she felt satisfied. “If he wants to talk about his past, then that’s fine.” Her eyes automatically drifted to the bottom right corner of her screen, wherein the swirl of three-dimensional icons slowly rotated along an axis, “maybe I’ll learn something new about him, like, why is he the way that he is? I wish they had the clock reinstalled. It can’t take that much time away from calling to check the clock. It’s all about the numbers to this company, unfortunately. Metrics.” She looked over at Julia and laughed softly, distracted by what she was doing. “How ironic,” she muttered absentmindedly.
“I know,” said Rod and he laughed as well, although with a sad undertone, before continuing, “I know deep down that you can’t offer me the friendship I want.”
“I don’t think you it’s friendship that you want,” Bailey interjected.
“I don’t know what I want,” said the young man. “I know that I’m weird -”
“You’re not weird,” said Bailey, her eyes glistening with sympathy. “You’re just -”
“Weird. I’m weird. I know that I am. Listen, I just act without thinking. I feel so strongly about things that I just act and I don’t think about it before I do it. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is one of the few times (I can count on my hand) where I haven’t done anything crazy to scare someone off,” Rod said quickly, his mind flickering with images of the past, “and at the same time I have such a desire to speak to you that it motivates me to actually do something and not just hole myself up in my head.”
“Your head?” asked Bailey, perplexed.
“No, listen,” he snapped, and then, inhaling and exhaling deeply and slowly, he said, “sorry, I just have to speak before...”
“Before what?” said Bailey, casting a confused glance at Julia, who met her eye with a raised eyebrow and then a mocking smile. She quickly turned away, frowning.
“...Before I do something stupid,” he said mournfully. He clutched his head, his face a contorted mixture of anguish and shame, and stumbled the short distance to his dotty, yellow-stained sink, and twisted the crusted handle next to the tap. He dunked his head beneath the tap, his left ear touching the base of the ceramic, and his lobe drooping down the steel ringed black hole, and clutched the edge of the sink as a torrent of crips, cold water jetted down into the drain, tickling and molesting his crevices with its fingers.
Bailey heard a loud hush drown out the line and mistook it for static. Her heart again began to sink. Why was she putting in so much effort? Why had she not hung up yet? She had every right by law and company policy to terminate the call. A friendship with a caller? That was unheard of in this line of work. Was it because of the breakup? Why, she had plenty of other men she could talk to – what was so special about this one? People were replaceable. Bailey shivered all of a sudden at this assessment and glanced with disgust at the older woman. “I’m starting to sound like her,” she thought with horror. “You’re easy to talk to,” she said abruptly, more out of fear where her ruminations would lead to, “I don’t have to put in as much effort to be as nice to you as I do other clients – I mean callers! With other people, on the other hand, they have to put in so much effort to fake it the more they seem compatible with the person on the other end of the line just to remain professional. I think it is bizarre if you ask me.” Bailey wiped the sweat off her forehead.
“I don’t understand why you care, though,” the young man replied with a downcast air. “Put Julia back on the line,” he then added abruptly.
“Eh?” said Bailey.
“I want to compare your skill level in talking to callers between you and Julia,” chuckled Rod. “I have years of experience in the field of mental health so perhaps I can give you some pointers.”
Bailey was stunned. “Where’s this coming from?” she thought. She looked over at Julia, who was complaining to another colleague about their lack of compensation this month, and grimaced. “She’s busy,” she finally said.
“Busy with what?”
Bailey sighed. There was no point staying professional now. “Complaining about the lack of pay, yet again,” she groaned.
“You guys don’t get paid?”
“No, but that’s not the point,” said Bailey through pursed lips. “Anyway, you were telling me about your past. Let’s not get sidetracked.”
“Okay, well...”
Suddenly, the young woman’s legs twitched, and she felt a searing pain as her bladder filled completely with warm liquid. She shot up out of her seat, her face contorted with pain, as she motioned to the computer to immediately transfer the caller to Julia’s line. “Sorry about this,” she said to Julia, “I’ve got the runs.”
The older woman’s face twisted as well as she scrambled to pick up her headset. “Damn you,” she hissed at the young woman as she left. “What do you want?” she cursed down the line.
“I wanted to speak to you about Bailey,” he said. “What kind of woman is she?”
“Eh?” blurted the older woman, her eyebrows raised high upon her wrinkly forehead. “You’ve got some nerve wasting my time.”
“You want her out. Isn’t that right?”
Julia scanned the office, eyeing the door before replying, “She said something to you, eh, that she wasn’t supposed to?”
“What’s it mean to you?” said the young man.
She narrowed her eyes and curled her lips, and said, “That woman’s a fraud.”
Rod’s heart sank. “I knew it,” he thought bitterly.
The silence confirmed Julia’s suspicion, and she chuckled, and said, “Did she tell you why she was off this past week?”
“No,” he replied, his throat dry and his heart thundering with imaginary explanations, “why?”
“Oh, she didn’t tell you? The woman isn’t obviously good at building relationships,” said Julia, clasping her second paper cup. She sipped its black, bitter contents and grimaced.
“Bailey is good at the job,” the young man retorted, clutching his aching chest, “she has been the past four weeks I’ve known her.”
“Damn these young brats,” she spat, “you think you know someone after a few weeks of talking to them.” Julia coughed hoarsely. “Saying that, I did marry my ex-husband after a couple of months,” she thought somberly. She shook her head, “regardless, I’ve had enough of this pest. I’ll destroy his little, fragile ego once and for all and put a stop to his constant calling for good; and I’ll show that naive little girl that these callers can’t be helped by sinking to their level and relating to them,” she added, twisting her face into a frightful grimace.
She felt Blockhead Martin’s fiery gaze instantly upon her, for he had been called that since his school days because his head resembled a block it was so square and hard, which was back then accentuated by the roundness of his lower half, but now, since he had acquired the gym-going habit all insecure men aspire to at least once in their youth, many thought his epitaph will eventually read, ‘Here lies Blocky Martin.”
However, Julia certainly did not agree with the change of name, for she thought his current name suited him perfectly; the man, in her eyes, was a dimwit through and through. She ignored his stare and continued to contemplate the words she would use to destroy the young man on the other end of the line. “Do you like her?” she finally said.
“What do you mean?” gulped Rod.
A twisted smile appeared on the old woman’s wretched face. “I’ve got him,” she thought menacingly. “She has a boyfriend, you know,” she said flippantly, leaning forward. She rested her hand on her chin and continued with her torment, as though she had a knife in his heart and desired to twist it slowly, “So I don’t know what you’re after,” she added with a slight chuckle.
“Why do you have a problem with me?”
“A problem? I don’t have a problem with anybody,” replied Julia. “I just want you to stop calling. That’s all.”
“Why? This is a suicide hotline. I’m suicidal so hence I call.”
“Yes, but all you want to do is talk to Bailey.”
“Because she’s my own age!” cried the young man in exasperation, “What’s wrong with that?”
Julia tapped her forehead with one of her bony fingers in frustration. She looked over shoulder at Blockhead Martin, who was picking his nose and staring dumbfounded at what he had picked up on his foraging, and said, “What about Martin?”
“Martin?”
“Blockhead Martin?”