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Pip stood just outside the designated smoking hut (he couldn’t help himself even here) at the back of the car park smoking a fag. It took a while. So long in fact that a casual bystander may just possibly have a better look to makes sure that the cigarette was actually lit. Eventually however he finished and made his way back slowly to the main entrance, swiping his staff card across the door entry system and going inside. The remote access door was logged per card as a matter of security of course, each card being unique to that person, and any manager could pull up a report of how many times Pip (or anyone else) had been in and out of the door. In fact, for a short time in the previous year they had based a weekly sweepstake on the results of such a report. Pip knew the card was logged of course, but basically didn’t care.

  He returned to the call centre floor and almost crawled back towards where his team were seated. He sat at his desk and putting on his headset poked the button that put him into “ready”; ready to accept a call that is. Much to his annoyance the phone binged immediately. There was a call waiting.

  “Thank you for calling Regulus Telecom. My name is Tiberius. How can I help you?”

  (Regulus had 12 months before instigated a policy of all agents using their Christian name when answering calls. This had been met first of all with uproar, then derision and finally acceptance. (The three stages any change pushed upon employees by their employer usually pass through, in fact.) Pip of course was having none of it. He had stated that it was a violation of his human rights and that he was prepared to take it as far as he could to not have to use his real Christian name. In reality he didn’t care less, he was just in to resisting for the sheer mischief he could create. Regulus and Pip had finally settled upon a compromise. Pip would give his customer’s a Christian name; just not his own. The problem was Pip decided that this “pretend name” as he referred to it constantly had to be changed on a regular basis or his human rights were still being violated just as much as if he were using his actual name. In the previous twelve months therefore he had been Dave, Popeye, Chuck, then Dave again, Sally (that one really threw customers) and was currently Tiberius. Next month he was going to be either “Pinocchio” or “Fuckbutt”. He hadn’t decided yet.)

  Pip delivered the opening of his call at such a slow drawl that it sounded almost as if he was talking in slow motion. As the voice on the other end of the phone began to describe their probably non-existent problem, or that it was working yesterday and therefore logically it would work forever, Pip began to drift away.

  “So I plugged in the lead… and then it stopped...and when I came back from the shops and… so I … reset… and…. green, not red… and …”

  ***

  Well. I rubbed my chin. This “call centre” thing seemed to be all a little bit odd, and so I drifted through the room listening to a few more calls to get a feel for how normal people answered the phone, not just Pip, and that helped me get the measure of the man. Intriguing. Quite refreshing, in fact, and so I decided to retread my ground, and so I faded and then it was back to the hairdressers, and Les.

  ***

  “Twenty-five years in show business!” Les suddenly said, and the customer in his chair having his hair cut nodded politely but made no sign of taking him up on any form of conversation. Les sighed to himself. Over the course of the next ten minutes he tried the weather, holidays and was the gentleman on a day off, all of which were very firmly rebuffed with at best a “very nice.” or “really?”. Les hated Tuesdays. Nobody wanted to chat on a Tuesday. Now Fridays, Fridays were a completely different story altogether! Couldn’t shut the buggers up on a Friday! No, Tuesdays were just another Monday as far he was concerned, and they couldn’t go fast enough.

  Les finished the cut and took the customer to the small old fashioned till. A fifty pence tip later Les was staring out over the village green again. Sally was sitting on one of the chairs the customers would normally be using, if there had of been any customers. Even the silly old bugger who looked like a mad professor hadn’t been in today. Quiet as the grave, it was. Les looked at Sally. Sally looked at Les. Les considered brushing the floor again, but there wasn’t much point really. He had done it three times already and nobody had been in since he had last done it.

  “Think I’ll go and get some shopping from Hinnerty’s.” said Sally, going into the back of the shop and finding her bag.

  “Okay.” said Les morosely. He really hated Tuesdays with a passion and therefore he was having great difficulty in raising his spirits. “I’ll hold the fort.” He knew that Sally didn’t have the same knack of getting in and out of the general store in less than an hour that he had, and knew that she would be in there for quite a while. Not that it mattered really. They were hardly rushed off their feet as they were towards the weekends. Hardly any time for lunch at all then. No, Tuesdays were a complete waste of time as far as he was concerned, and he was determined to be as miserable about it as he could.

  Sally left the shop and Les wandered into the back through the curtain blind and opened his scrapbook. He decided to do some of his acting practice instead. This would usually involve him trying several different acting methods, working through the exercises in his mind. He had of course tried every acting class, lecture and symposium that he could possibly either attend, or afford. Still the critics considered him to be the acting equivalent of bubonic plague. Any church play or panto he appeared in was more or less doomed to failure as once the critics, or more likely the audience, honed in on his usually dire performance they found it difficult to get past it, and the other actors may as well not have been on the stage at all.

  It was simple curiosity bordering on the edge of morbid obsession. They just couldn't take their eyes off him, and not in a good sense either. They just continued to follow him about the stage in the firm belief that he couldn’t possibly get any worse, could he? Sadly, he almost always definitely did. Les sighed. Twenty-five years and still looked on as a thespian pariah.

  He knew all the theory, of course. Classical acting. Putting your own experiences into use when creating a character. Determining “the truth” of the part. Hard to do when it was a bit part in the annual village pantomime, but especially difficult when you were playing the part of Humpty Dumpty of course, but just about possible. Les had considered it to be summed up by the statement, “The truth of the egg.” The local paper however summed up his performance as, “eggs-cruciating”. Les still didn’t find it funny three years later, but of course as per usual he had kept the clipping and put it into his scrapbook. One day… one day… Yes, Humpty Dumpty had been a little difficult to portray successfully, but he considered his interpretation to be quite true to the essence of Humpty Dumpty. He hadn’t had to break into a sweat too much about it, really. Egg sandwiches were his favourite, after all, but you soon became bored with them if you ate them every day.

  He was also fully up to speed with the art of method acting, and although he used it from time to time and practised it frequently, he was also loathe doing so as it often found it getting him into trouble. He had once stayed in the character of a mad axe murderer as his method acting by mail course had instructed him to, and had ended up half scaring his partner Darren to death. As well as that somewhat concerning incident it also certainly hadn’t helped him when he played the part of a tree in Snow White the year before. In fact, it had made cutting hair very difficult, the end result being that he had developed quite a bad back after practising being a tree whilst standing in a draft. Tended to make you cautious of some acting classes, did a bad back. Trees too.

  He remembered with a smile the course on method acting he had undertaken, and how they had been taught the importance of above all staying in role. It was only at the end of the week long course that it had become apparent that the teacher and one of the teachers had accidentally swapped roles, and true to the Stanislavski School of method acting both stayed in that persona for the whole week's course. The result of this was that the course leader was in fact one of the
students and the man who was actually meant to be teaching the course was in fact method acting the part of one of the students. Needless to say, not many of the people on the course learnt very much apart from the course leader who marked himself as achieving a satisfaction factor of eighty-five percent.

  Les had also considered being an extra, but the name itself put him off. Les was an actor which was very much pronounced actor, and didn't like the implication that he was “extra” to anything, it really being as far as he was concerned a synonym for being surplus to requirements, and Les didn’t do surplus to requirements. Not in any way whatsoever. Plus, it didn’t actually involve any acting at all either. Definitely not for him.

  Yet Les had such self-belief that it was verging on delusional. He had in his mind no doubt whatsoever that one day he would be a huge star. So the scrapbook continued, and so did Les. He peeked his head around the door from the back of the shop. Still no customers. He made himself busy for the next thirty minutes or so washing tea cups repeatedly, watching for punters, but primarily daydreaming. He found himself trying to justify his firmly held belief of his rise to stardom too. He wasn’t a bad man. He just wanted to be famous. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask? In his dreams he saw him being interviewed on the breakfast TV settee, on the Jonathan Ross show. On Coronation -

  His daydreaming was rudely interrupted as the door shot open and Sally returned to the shop bearing a small brown carrier bag presumably full of groceries. Les glanced at his watch. She had only been gone for about forty minutes. Not bad for a visit to Hinnerty’s.

  “Sorry I was so long, Les.” Les just waved his hands in dismissal.

  “No problem, Sally. It’s not as if you have missed anything. Les thought it was very likely that Sally had fallen prey to one of Mr Hinnerty’s tall stories. This was confirmed a second later.

  “Mr Hinnerty was telling a fascinating story that has been on the television about a magical nanny, a kite and a spoon filled with sugar.” Les pursed his lips. Sounded a whole lot like Mary Poppins to him. The less remembered about his portrayal of a policeman in the civic theatre’s version of that particular tale the better. In fact, he shuddered as he remembered it. The greasepaint. The lights. The soot. The incident with the kite.

  “Just stepping out for some fresh air.” Les said, shuddering at the memory. Sally glanced at him over the top of the trashy magazine she was reading, the headlines on front of which seemed to be displaying an unhealthy interest in what Simon Cowell was currently up to, as well as the first pictures of Posh Spice potentially, well almost possibly, attempting a smile.

  “Okay.” she said, chewing on her sandwich. “Don’t hurry back.” Les nodded and stepped outside. Not many people about he thought, glancing around him. Les liked to walk around the green in his quieter moments. It was a lovely old fashioned village and it was very relaxing. There were rarely many people about, and so he was free to wander around the green and left pretty much to himself as he did so.

  ***

  I stopped to think a while. I knew what Les wanted now, but I was not sure how to achieve it. After all, he could not act. That much was blatantly obvious. I was not sure what to do. What I really needed was for him to make a wish.

  I faded and went once again to visit Rudge, who was once again in the cellar unfortunately.

  ***

  “...And the curious thing is the polar bear never even batted an eyelid!” The smoking club cellar roared with laughter as the local postman finished his tale. Rudge appeared at the bottom of the cellar steps bearing yet another tray full of drinks, and made his way around the thirty or so people gathered in the cellar for yet another evening of Smoker’s Club. The atmosphere was at best foggy, and most of the people gathered about the upturned beer crate and barrel tables were smoking some form of cigarette or a pipe. Rudge finished delivering the drinks, a small hip bag on his side containing the takings and the change. It was more or less a mobile till. He also held a small note pad and what looked like a bingo pen to take further orders. He wrote a few more down and made his way to the steps out of the cellar. Smoking Club was definitely proving popular, but keeping it a well-guarded secret was proving to be more difficult all the time, especially as it grew in popularity.

  From time to time the brewery would lay on special events and promotions, and tonight was one of those nights. The occasional guest beer or new flavour of crisps Rudge could cope with. The last promotion had been quite trouble free too, and had simply involved giving out vouchers with set purchases of particular beers which could be redeemed for plastic garden furniture. Rudge had considered it to be a tenuous link at best, but the Smoker’s Club had nevertheless taken full advantage and now all the smokers were nestled on small cheap white plastic garden chairs. Hardly the height of comfort thought Rudge, but they were free and more importantly easily stacked against the walls on the day the brewery delivery arrived.

  It was of course the usual tale in the lounge upstairs. The beer was never quite as good as it promised to be, and Rudge decided to leave the usual three customers to their usual braying about this that and the other which usually after a period of about thirty seconds or so seemed to turn into a wall of white noise. He had made a good job of servicing the smoking club downstairs, and so he decided to wander outside for a breath of fresh air.

  He reasoned that the only three customers he could actually admit to wouldn’t miss him much, if at all, and so he found himself standing outside the front of the pub in the dark, taking in the crisp air. It wasn’t too cold, he thought to himself, but he wouldn’t be out here for too long. A cool breeze blew across the green, and an empty crisp packet blew about his feet. He knew it wasn’t one of his as it didn’t have “Multipack - not for resale” marked on it, but he picked it up anyway.

  ***

  I decided to leave Rudge to it. Again, I knew what the man wanted, and what he needed, but once again, just like the hairdresser I could see no way of granting him a wish that would be elegant and yet achieve its aim. It is often said of the jinn that we are careful and proud of our work, of our granting of our wishes, and this is true. If Rudge could only make a wish, then it may just help me out a little.

  I sighed silently to myself, and decided to visit Pip again. I was dreading my return in case we were in that dilapidated car once again, but it was not the case, for happily I found myself a guest at a meeting.

  ***

  Pip sat in the share option meeting staring at the ceiling, counting down the time until he finished work. The company representative Mark (A 2:2 drinker’s degree in Geology) was running through the company share options scheme, as indeed they did every year. In truth it was quite a lucrative deal, money being taken from the share savers wages each month and used to buy shares in Regulus, and although it would never reach the heady but completely unsustainable dot.com boom of the eighties, it was still as Pip considered it, a nice little earner. There was one huge fly in the ointment however. Pip wasn’t eligible for the scheme because of his sickness record. It was a set in stone company rule that anyone with more than three weeks’ sickness per year was not eligible for the share option scheme. Such a mere technicality did not stop Pip attending the meeting, however. After all, it was time off the phone, the meeting scheduled to last for an hour.

  Mark, the trainer, didn’t know that Pip was ineligible for the scheme of course but he did wonder why the small sullen looking guy lurking at the back of the room kept asking apparently irrelevant questions. The reason was simple, of course, and was shared by the entire call centre agents present in the meeting, which was about twenty of them. Their purpose was simply to extend the meeting beyond the hour that was allocated for it. The longer the meeting took, the longer the golden aim of staying off the phone was being achieved.

  So far they were running ten minutes over, and although Mark was aware of this he also still had about five minutes of legal stuff to cover that was a necessity. The call centre floor manager Lesley (2:2 drinker’s
degree in politics) had warned Mark of two things. First of all, not to over-run. The agents were required to be back on the phones as soon as possible, and two: every agent would actively resist this with the last breath of their body. Yet he could not stop now. The legal stuff was important and he couldn’t omit it, though he was beginning to wish he hadn’t included the PowerPoint presentation slide of yachts and fast cars, which were a theoretical investment opportunity from the cash generated by the share options screen in the past, though not necessarily the recent past.

  Sadly, they had spent rather too long on these slides, as first Pip had been terribly interested in the make and model of the sports car, and then the yacht.

  “Is that a Ferrari 458?” Pip had asked Mark.

  “I believe so.” Mark was wary the moment Pip had entered the room. He felt like an antelope in a cage at the zoo looking at the door of the enclosure just as a lion was led in. Pip looked quizzical.

  “In blue?” He asked. Mark looked at the slide. It was indeed blue.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t normally see them in blue.” Pip said, a vague smile forming at the edge of his lips. There was almost an unheard rustling amongst the agents listening, as if they were bracing themselves for what was about to be a massive piss take, though it would probably not be as legendary as the meeting that was for training the call centre staff on a new model of modem that all customers were about to receive. This was about a year earlier. Pip had been on fine form then, the meeting that was scheduled for four hours eventually running over to three consecutive days. In fact, Pip still refused to support this latest modem whenever he got one on a call from a customer, on the grounds that “the training didn’t make sense.” This had been of course because Pip had managed to divert the discussion over to whether man had actually landed on the moon or not. For two and a half days. Tales of this meeting were still discussed in hushed tones amongst the other agents on an ongoing basis, and great things were expected from Pip on this and any other meeting ever since.