It fucked Peggy and Greta off. All of it. They would rant about it at meetings and to Diane. And then they ranted about how no one in the meetings understood. There were hardly any of them left in the meetings, and how would anyone else feel being treated like this? If the boot was on the other foot? No one spoke back in meetings, so they never found out.

Being this angry made them crazy – it hurt their head. And one night they found themselves with a bottle of wine on the bench of their flat and both of them looking at it like it held all the answers, and luckily (‘Was it luck?’ Diane said) it hit them like a truck – everything that came after a drink, all the ways drink was not the solution at all. All the pain and the hardship came smashing back at them like it was in the room with them, playing out all around them like virtual reality, and they took the wine bottle out onto the street and put it on the pavement outside their house and came back inside and realised they needed to do something very quickly to make them not angry anymore. And, eventually, like months later, after a lot of hard work, Peggy said to Greta, ‘It’s gone.’ And Greta stopped what she was doing and felt around in her body and it was gone. They were still angry, it was still fucking unfair – it just wasn’t crippling them anymore. They hadn’t noticed the fight leaving, just that it was gone now.

About six months later they saw the ad for the call centre. They wouldn’t have applied if they’d still been angry. If they were still fighting how unfair it was, they would have seen the ad as another example of how fucked everything was and how now they had to apply for this job that was so far beneath their skills.