The Agency
By Brian Wright

illand was fractious and tired, felt sweaty even between his toes, when he finally made it into the office.

Although anticipating at least one serious interruption to his morning journey, he hadn’t counted on it being such a long one. More than an hour standing in the stuffy hell of a train, marooned in the suburbs by the latest city-wide power cut.

On his trudge from the railway terminus in blazing sunshine, the streets in chaos, bus schedules in a mess following the outage, he had passed several people who appeared to be close to breaking point. Zombie-eyed or complaining to themselves in loud voices. They were in for a busy day at work, he thought.

In contrast to the mayhem outside, the agency was as calm and ordered as ever, computers humming, the telephone system already going into overload.

Thanks to the provision of an emergency generator, located in the basement of the building, they had long been spared the suffering of most others in the city. It was just one of the pointers to the importance the government placed on their efforts.

“Afternoon,” Denney greeted him pointedly.

He was Milland’s supervisor and a dogmatic stickler for the rules. Someone to whom work seemed more important than friends and hobbies and, especially, family. He was always the first one in; and Milland sometimes suspected that he merely carried on when the night shift took over at seven o’clock, catching a little shuteye in the early hours, too dedicated to go home.

Feeling a little less like death as the air-conditioning swept over him, thinking about the agonies of his commute, he was inclined to believe the man had a point. No-one would miss him that much anyway, he thought with a spasm of self-pity. The kids growing up to be as cold and self-obsessed as their mother.

That was the trouble, no-one cared about other people any more, he mused, powering up his computer.

More and more youngsters adrift on the streets, drowning in a sea of drugs and hopelessness. Old people abandoned by their families to a wretched and isolated last fifteen or twenty years. Hospitals in a state of collapse. The welfare system unable to cope with the ever-growing number of non-productive mouths.

He’d wondered aloud if what they were doing amounted to much more than a pinprick.

“Every little helps,” his boss, ever the zealot, had countered.

The man was standing next to him now as he got his first coffee of that day. “The third time in less than a fortnight,” Denney said, his face twisted into a smile. “Any more of it and I’ll be forced to put you on a formal warning. I have to repeat to you, Bob, that it’s the slippery slope.”

An unmistakable threat prickled behind the fake concern; and Milland felt a shiver that owed nothing to the air-conditioning.

No-one was safe, he knew.

He stepped around a beggar every morning on his way to work. The man was typical of the army of vagrants that haunted the city - apart from the collar and tie he always wore. His accent, as he begged for money, was politely patrician.

Milland sometimes wondered what had laid him so low: an overdose of stress in his life, or the worsening economic conditions, or just plain bad luck.

The crumpled figure looked more desolate every time he passed by. Not long before the inevitable phone call, Milland had decided, their number plastered over every third billboard in some parts of the city.

He escaped from Denney and went back into the large central room. As he tentatively awaited his first call of the morning, his nerves still twanging, Flitcraft looked over the partition between their desks and offered an encouraging grin.

“The slippery slope speech again, Bob?”

“Yeah. Mind you, could have been worse. He was almost smirking when he said it. He looked as if he hated me the other times.”

Flitcraft chuckled. “Oh, haven’t you heard? We’re back in the lead.”

It was purely unofficial, the race between sections to chalk up the highest hit rate each month. Denney’s moods fluctuated in accordance with the ratings. When, as now, they headed the table, he could almost convince the uninitiated that he was more than just a soulless automaton.

Denney’s arid personality seemed ill-suited to their line of work, its life and death nature. But in fact his success to disappointment ratio was remarkably high.

They all had their bad moments, though. When the caller failed to respond, the occasions when the phone at the other end was slammed down in mid-conversation In spite of the agency’s best efforts, it wasn’t an exact science what they did.

The bleakness of their daily grind took its toll, too, and Milland had been told that not many people lasted beyond five or six years.

That was if the annual testing didn’t catch them out first. He had the uneasy feeling he’d only just scraped through the last time.

Denney, on the other hand, had been with the agency from its inception, ever since the change in government policy that had led to them taking over the counseling of the desperate and suicidal from a clutch of voluntary organizations.

He was akin, Milland supposed, to the sort of nurse who never allowed emotions to get in the way of doing a good job. It helped, mind you, if there were no feelings to begin with.

Those among them of a less Calvinistic temperament, without ice water in their veins, sought refuge in black and often childish jokes, finding something to laugh about even in the grimmest moments.

Flitcraft, after sitting down, asked innocently if he wanted the number of the employment exchange. Milland threw a large paper clip over the barrier.

As they sometimes did, unexpectedly, mercifully, the phones had fallen silent.

Milland heard the rustle of a newspaper on the other side of the partition. Flitcraft’s voice, sounding disgusted, his good humour gone. “It says here that some pipsqueak of a politician thinks the best way to clear the homeless off the streets is to put them all in a camp somewhere. Fucker!”

As if in counterpoint to his words, the wail of a siren came from outside. It was a common enough sound in the city, but this was loud enough to penetrate even into their hermetically sealed environment.

Lucy Murrow, Milland’s neighbour on the other side, got up from her desk and went over to the window. “There’s been an accident,” she called out.

The two men joined her. In the sun-drenched street below, a throng of onlookers had surrounded a parked ambulance. Two perspiring paramedics were loading a figure on a stretcher into their vehicle. The man was unshaven and scruffily dressed and appeared to be very dead.

The car that had presumably knocked him down was resting at an angle across the road. Milland took in the nearby telephone box. It was one of the special ones that could be found all over the city, providing free calls to the agency at any time of the day or night.

“Do you think he was on his way to phone us?” he asked.

Motherly-looking Lucy laughed. “That was a piece of bad luck then,” she said.

They all laughed, Flitcraft loudest of all, and for the first time Milland observed signs of strain on the other’s face. He wondered if, like him, Flitcraft was already thinking about the imminent annual review.

Returning to his desk in a reflective frame of mind, he sighed when the phones started up again.

His first call of the morning was one of the bad ones, the young man at the other end mumbling away to himself, not listening to a word he said. Milland suspected it was a hoax.

They got them occasionally, from very drunk or very stupid people. In spite of the cameras inside the phone boxes, the draconian penalties levied on anyone found guilty of abusing the system. After a few minutes, the caller rang off with a shouted obscenity.

He slammed the phone down with an oath of his own – and all at once became aware that Denney was standing over him.

“Now, now, Bob. Don’t you know the customer is always right?” With the rictus of a smile at his own joke, before pursing his lips. From experience, Milland knew it was the prelude to a lecture.

“He was playing the fool,” he muttered in self-defense.

“That is beside the point, Bob. We live in a free society. Unfortunately there will always be those who regard that as a mark of weakness, who will seek to play games with the democratic process. It’s one of the penalties of allowing people to exercise choice.”

Then he brightened, his voice lowering to a purr. “And that is exactly why we train you so well, so that you can influence the decisions our customers make. Help them to help themselves, so to speak.”

In spite of his dislike of the man, Milland found himself nodding in agreement. Perhaps it was the secret of the other’s success, he thought, struck by the almost messianic gleam in the deep-set grey eyes.

“So remember,” Denney continued, “there is no excuse for us to lose our tempers. Dignity at all times. It’s the least we owe them.”

He saw there was a young woman standing behind his boss. Denney motioned her forward. “This is Miss Laverick, Rebecca. She’s just joined us.”

The girl was pretty, in a brightly-coloured dress, and several men around the room were staring at her with interest. Flitcraft was practically hanging over the partition. Milland was put in mind of a fresh bloom in a bowl of wilting flowers.

The girl only had eyes for Denney.

In spite of the rigorous psychological profiling and preparation they all went through beforehand, it was always a shock to the trainees, the harsh reality of it all.

And yet, in spite of her air of faint unease, the young woman looked resolute, keen to prove herself to her new master. Other females in the office wore the same expression, as if they were determined to appear tougher and more durable than the men.

“Oh, by the way,” Denney went on, “the boffins have come up with a revised methodology for getting through to our customers. It’s an improvement on the current thought reform process. There’s talk of a team in this branch being used to pilot the project. I understand we are in pole position.”

He’ll wet himself with pleasure in a minute, Milland thought.

But Denney was already lumbering towards his next witticism. “Anyway, we’ll discuss performing the reform, or is that reforming the way we perform? Ha-ha, in more depth tomorrow. And now, my dear, I’m all yours for the next couple of hours.”

As he steered Rebecca towards his cellular office, Flitcraft called out in an undertone after them, “And this, my dear, is where your brainwashing begins.”

He disappeared from sight and Milland could hear him flicking through his newspaper again.

His friend whistled. “It says here that the second biggest electronics firm in the country is about to go under. And someone on the box this morning was predicting another cut in welfare payments. Say what you like about this place, Bob, but we’ll never be out of work.”

He suddenly sounded anxious. “Don’t you think?”

If only it was that simple, Milland told himself. He wondered what Mary would say, the kids, if he came home and told them he’d been sacked. Mary would probably throw him out on the street.

He felt a surge of fury and revulsion and fear. Please God, he didn’t want to become one of them.

He jumped when his phone shrilled out.

Wanting to take out his anger on someone, anyone, he felt grateful when a gaunt and weather-beaten face appeared on the tiny video screen.

The subliminal message embedded in the agency’s advertising was designed to attract only the incorrigibly indigent or the irreparably unhinged. Even so, they quite often received calls from people who were just going through a bad patch: office workers who had had a particularly lousy day, young girls complaining about their abusive boyfriends, widows seeking solace.

But that wasn’t their job.

Selection, in fact, was the one area in which they had relative freedom, no hard and fast rules to follow. It was left to the judgment of the individual operative to decide whether or not to proceed.

Milland himself stuck to the principle that anyone in a decent suit could safely be turned away. Luckily, with tact, most of the unwanted callers could be persuaded to go elsewhere for assistance or comfort.

By contrast, the regulations with regard to consent were unyielding.

Every call was monitored and the slightest contravention on the part of the operative meant instant dismissal. The customer had to assent on three separate occasions during the conversation to the proposition put to him or her.

As Denney was so fond of saying, it was the price of living in a democracy. The right to a choice. The government and its supporters, the general public, wanted it no other way.

And so, reassured by the shabby and abject figure in front of him, Milland went into his well-practiced routine, the sincerity drilled into his voice.

He knew he was winning the battle when the man at last said in defeated tones, “Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do,” Milland responded, feeling as if he really meant it for once, still fuelled by resentment of Denney, of almost everything in his life.

After putting down the phone, he went over to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. When the almost indiscernible wail of a siren came to him, he wondered if it was one of theirs, and pictured the vehicle howling through the congested streets, the medic with a full syringe at the ready.

The automatic door of the phone box clicking open. The submissive or bewildered occupant hustling into the cool of the special ambulance. The plunger striking down.

Denney had re-appeared from his inner sanctum, having been asked to assist one of the operatives with a tricky call. He was visibly annoyed about the interruption.

Rebecca remained in his office, a large notepad on her lap. Her eyes were still fixed on their boss. Milland was declaiming, “Haven’t you grasped yet that they’re like children? You have to be firm with them …”

Flitcraft’s voice floated across the partition, talking to a customer, “There’s no reason to go on living, Harry. You do know that, don’t you?”