STICK TO THE SCRIPT

She could feel it almost straightaway: the box.

Not the cardboard sort. Not the call centre headset box, or the stale sandwich box in the staff fridge with someone’s name written in blue biro. This was the other kind. The invisible one. The one people built around you in seconds and then expected you to live inside for the rest of the shift.

He was fitting one around her now.

She could feel the labels being slapped on, one after the other, quick as stock stickers in a warehouse. Loud. Difficult. From the hood. Needs watching. Doesn’t know how to behave. The machine in his head had started up before she’d even finished logging in.

The training room had smelt of instant coffee, cheap carpet and other people’s nerves. Rows of computers. Grey desks. Fluorescent lights that made everyone look ill. The kind of place where they wanted your smile in your voice but wouldn’t pay enough to put one on your face.

At the front stood the mentor: short, stocky, built like he still believed he could flatten someone in a pub car park and get applause for it. Rugby-player shape. Hard-man energy. One of those local thugs off TV who turned up in crime dramas to threaten shopkeepers over protection money. Next to him was the other trainer, a Harry Potter lookalike in a company fleece, nodding too much, pretending this was all perfectly normal.

They gave the same speech she’d heard in a dozen different forms before.

Authority. Passion. Urgency.

The holy trinity of pestering strangers for money.

“People don’t give unless you guide them,” the stocky one said, pacing between desks like he owned the oxygen in the room. “You need authority in your voice. Passion in your delivery. Urgency in your close. Then let’s go generate.”

Generate.

As if human beings were just numbers squeezed out of calls. As if sympathy could be manufactured. As if grief, charity, guilt, goodwill and bank details all came from the same machine.

Same shit everywhere, she thought.

Still, when her headset went on and the script flashed up on screen, she felt relieved.

A script meant safety.

A script meant you didn’t have to be yourself. You only had to survive the next few hours by sounding like someone the company would approve of. You read what was in front of you. You hit the questions in the right order. You thanked them for their time. You moved on.

Her first call wasn’t even bad. The woman on the other end listened longer than most. She followed the lines carefully, kept her tone warm, didn’t rush the ask. For a moment she felt almost steady. Hidden. Protected by the words on the screen.

Then he was beside her.

He had a way of appearing without warning, like he enjoyed catching people before they could prepare their face.

“Been ’ere long?” he said.

She turned in her chair. His arms were folded. There was already a smirk there, ready-made.

“Twelfth shift,” she said.

He gave a little laugh through his nose, not because anything was funny, but because he wanted it known he was amused by her existence.

“Then you should know what you should do by now.”

There it was.

Not guidance. Not mentoring. Not correction. Just that tone. The one that assumed stupidity before you’d even opened your mouth to defend yourself.

After the last run-in with a mentor at another place, she knew exactly how these moments went. First came the public correction. Then the poking. Then the attempt to get a reaction. Then, if you gave one, you became the problem.

So she shut up.

She kept her eyes on him and gave him nothing back.

No apology. No explanation. No gratitude for being educated by the great man himself.

His eyes moved over her face, darting from her eyes to her eyebrows to her mouth, searching for something to work with. Annoyance. Shame. Fear. He wanted a twitch, a flinch, a tightening at the jaw. Something he could use to prove to himself that he had power.

He found nothing.

His pupils narrowed. His lips thinned to almost nothing.

“You’re not an expert,” he said. “So stick to the script.”

Around them the room changed.

The call centre never truly went silent. There was always the hum of computers, the cough of a cheap heating system, the odd laugh from someone desperate to prove they were enjoying themselves. But the buzz dipped. People noticed. Heads didn’t turn fully, but ears did. The way they always do in places like that. Everyone pretending to focus on their screen while quietly feeding on whatever humiliation had just entered the room.

She felt it then—that hot, fast-rising thing in her chest.

Not shame. Not exactly.

Rage mixed with recognition.

Because it was never just about a script. That was the joke. The script on the screen was one thing. The script in his head was another. He’d already decided her role in the room. Already assigned her the lines. Already decided what kind of girl she was, what sort of place she came from, how much correction she needed, how grateful she ought to be.

She could feel a reply building at the back of her throat, sharp enough to cut.

But she swallowed it.

She needed one more week.

That was the truth of it.

One more week would help pay toward the maintenance bill on one of her buy-to-lets. Roof, boiler, windows—there was always something with property. People thought owning rentals meant easy money. They didn’t see the invoices. Didn’t see money vanish into repairs before it ever reached your hand. So no, she didn’t have the luxury of telling this man exactly what she thought of him. Not yet.

Shut up, she told herself. Act dumb. Let him think he’s won.

But something in him kept hanging there, waiting, like he wanted to press again.

Then he said it.

“This ain’t the hood.”

The words landed ugly.

Small. Mean. Familiar.

So that was it then. Not just correction. Placement. He’d taken one look at her and filed her. Hood. Problem. Mouthy. Needs taming. And now he wanted her to know he’d filed her there.

She turned to him properly.

Her voice came out calmer than she felt.

“You know nothing about me,” she said. “And yet you tell me I come from the hood.”

His face changed for a second. Not much. Just enough.

She kept going, because now that she’d broken the silence, the truth of him was too obvious not to see.

It would’ve been easy—so easy—to do the same thing back. To size him up in one filthy sweep. Left school at fourteen. School bully. Worked on some site long enough to think shouting counted as leadership. Votes UKIP. Divorced, obviously. Cause with an attitude like that no one would want to fuck him.

The thoughts came quick and vicious, fully formed.

But she didn’t say them.

That was the difference.

She could judge him too. God knows she had enough material. But she knew the filth of it. Knew what it was to have someone look at you and decide the rest.

For one second his whole hard-man act slipped.

The shoulders softened. The mouth rearranged itself. Out went the enforcer; in came the reasonable bloke. The softly spoken one. The one who could later deny there had been any issue at all.

“Give me some five,” he said, lifting a hand with a smile that looked dragged onto his face. “What about a fist?”

Like this was banter. Like they were mates. Like he hadn’t just tried to reduce her in front of a room full of people.

She looked at his hand and did nothing.

No high five. No fist bump. No rescue.

Just silence again.

The proper kind this time.

He let his hand drop.

Something bitter flickered over his face. Embarrassment, maybe. Or anger at being refused the easy reset. He stepped back, gave a tiny nod to himself, and said, not looking at her now,

“Just stick to the script.”

Then he walked off.

She turned back to her screen.

The charity prompt was still there, blinking patiently, asking her to continue as though none of it had happened. Her reflection stared back at her faintly in the dark edge of the monitor: headset on, mouth set, eyes dry and hard.

Stick to the script.

That was all any of them ever said, really.

At work, on the phone, in training, in life.

Stick to the script they hand you. Speak when told. Smile when told. Be grateful. Stay in character. Don’t break the lines they wrote for you before you even opened your mouth.

She adjusted the headset, clicked into the next number, and waited for the call to connect.

This time when she read the script, she understood it better.

Not the company one.

The other one.

And she knew exactly who was following it.

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