“What can you see?” asked the person at the other end of the line. “I mean, really. Where are you?”
Gloria hung up. You weren’t supposed to hang up.
When Gloria went for the job at the call centre she was shy. She tried to make herself shrink. She wore a loose black top, a dark brown skirt and flat shoes. The call centre was a square box between roundabouts on the edge of a ring road just outside Newcastle. It was clever, she thought, the way it seemed to have no windows when in fact from the inside you could see out. If Gloria stood up she could see some bullocks in a narrow field. She liked the way they changed position, arranging themselves like compositions for her benefit, sometimes running up and down the field shaking their young wild heads. It was unusual to have a view in this kind of work. Most people sat in cubicles, boxed in by thin screens.

The job interview had been hurried and officious. So many people didn’t stay, the interviewer said. What were her plans?
“I’ve left school,” she said, “my family is here. I’ve got no plans to go anywhere.”
The truth was she didn’t know. She had passed exams. She could go to university if she wanted, but she couldn’t imagine sleeping in a narrow bed in a strange town. Her parents told her to take things slowly, to take a year to think about what she wanted, to dream a little. Friends from school were going to Mexico, to dig ditches in China, build schools in Malawi, but Gloria had never been on an aeroplane, and she was unlikely to go to somewhere where they spoke a foreign language when she found the idea of York, or Warwick alarming. And she loved her family. She liked the way they sat still, understanding one another, always thinking the best of each other. Most families were at each other’s throats.
She had been for other jobs. She’d answered an advert for a receptionist in Mal Maison, a swanky hotel on the edge of the river Tyne, just by the sleek bone of the new bridge. They asked her for an interview. She had worn a red velour top that was old for her age, but which her mother had thought looked sophisticated. The interview only lasted five minutes. Gloria sat on a velvet chaise-longue in a bakelite room with a crisp, ice faced young woman behind a desk who had taken down her details with a silver fountain pen, then said they would be in touch.