The Inland Sea

It was Maeve who told me that there were openings at the call center. I thought perhaps the job would be stressful, but I reasoned that it would only ever be temporary. And besides, the fact that Maeve already worked there all but guaranteed that they would hire me.

I was interviewed in a beige room on the seventh floor of a building in Darling Harbour, in the office of the country’s largest labor hire company. Four women were hired that day, and I was the only one who had finished high school. I figured out later that the hiring policy was based on the likelihood that the applicants would stick around, and the four of us didn’t look like we were doing anything else. As we left the group-interview stage and emerged from the elevator into the rush-hour foot traffic on Market Street, a girl with bleached hair and three inches of black roots told me she had failed the spelling test but was pleased that they’d told her she’d receive a call in a couple of days. She made a sound that I think was meant to be laughter. I told her I had studied literature, and she asked me if that meant books.

The actual office was located on the other side of the city. It spanned the second floor of a skyscraper on the corner of Bathurst and Elizabeth Streets, overlooking Hyde Park. Technically, the office was on the same street that I lived on, and I could walk to work, but my stretch of Elizabeth Street was all kebab shops and bars and brothels, as though in