Words and silence are not so different, after all. Words, like silence, are almost empty, but not quite. There is always something murmuring deep within them, in the dark gloom at the bottom of the grid in their gutter. Some drip, drip, drip. Echoing.

Do you have life insurance? Don’t worry; I’m not going to sell you any. Seeing as you are not there. I’ll have a rest. I’ll tell you a story while I’m taking it easy. You can erase this message if you like. Or listen. It’s up to you.

There once was a woman who worked in a call centre, a place where people made and took phone calls. The woman telephoned people who lived in another country, a country far away from her own. She felt she could hear the sound of distance on the phone lines, particularly during pauses, a kind of hum that the satellite added, the infinite drone of outer space. She could speak the language of the country far away very well, better than some of the people who lived there. It was cheaper to pay her and her friends to do the phone calling than ask people who lived in the country far away itself to do it, even though the phone calls had to travel to space and back. She made calls to try to sell people insurance. The people did not like the calls, though; they did not like any strangers calling them. And they did not want to be told that they had not insured their life. They told her to fuck off, or left her hanging on the phone: they would put the phone down and pretend to go and get ‘the head of the household’, who would never arrive. She did not mind it if this happened, as it gave her a rest.

The company the woman worked for used auto-dial telephones. This meant that when she finished a call, the machine would dial the next number as soon as she put the receiver down. So she never got a rest, she never had a chance to stop, unless people left her hanging on the phone as a joke, or if she got through to an answer machine. If she struck lucky, and her call did go to an answer machine, then she would be rewarded with a moment of silence, a chance to take hold of her time again.

The people she telephoned in the country far away, when they listened to their answer messages later, would always be puzzled by her message, a long recording of nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly. Nearly nothing, except for the faint sound of a call centre in the background. The faint sound of many distant hands tapping on keyboards and many distant voices talking on the phone.

She was told by the people who ran the call centre that she had to try to be more like the people in the country far away, so that they would stop putting down the phone, and maybe even start to buy some insurance. So she was given lessons in the culture and history of the country far away, and she was given a name like the names in the country far away, and she was given a personality like the persons in the country far away, consisting of a list of favourite things to talk about if the people wanted to ‘chat’ with her, things from their own country that they would understand; a favourite food, a sport, a pop singer, a television programme. Her voice was changed so that she pronounced words like them. After a while she started to enjoy changing herself in this way; so much so that she began to change herself even more than the supervisor in the call centre asked her to.

She would become a new person every day. For each person she became she would create an elaborate story. One person she invented was an old retired female jockey who lived in a disused water tank in an ivy covered abandoned railway station in the quiet countryside of the country far away. This old woman made her living through writing children’s stories about eccentric country folk and their animal friends. It was beautifully peaceful in her railway station, she loved the silence, the fact that she did not have to speak to anyone for months on end. The old woman ate blue-veined cheese made from her own cows, cows all named after battles of old forgotten wars, who all wore woollen socks on their hooves to keep the noise down if they crossed the tarmac road. When the call centre woman, the woman who had invented all this, called people in the country far away, she sometimes pretended to be this old woman. In her whispering voice she asked people about their favourite type of jam, whether she could knit them anything out of ivy, and read out excerpts of her own children’s stories to them. She told them in an intimate whisper that she was ringing from her water tank just down the road from them, and that it was dark and quiet inside, and that it smelt of her favourite smell, the smell of wet rust.

The woman who worked in the call centre originally came from a small town on the coast of her country. Every time she returned to the town, she would notice the clock in the main railway station, stuck at eighteen minutes past four. Her town had declined so much over the years that it ceased to care about matters such as railway clocks. When she saw the clock she always tried to imagine the moment when it stopped ticking years before, maybe that was the moment when the town was left behind, the moment that time itself stopped for the whole town. It was said that the clock had stopped in the great flood. When she was a child, an enormous wave flooded the whole town, destroying everything near the sea front. Many people were killed. Afterwards, the scientists were able to tell how fast the wave had reached certain parts of the town by the clocks and watches found in the wreckage, each one stopped at the moment the salt water drowned it’s intricate mechanism.

The call centre worker knew very well the value of time. It was a precious, jewel-like thing. And thinking of this one day, she asked a person she was calling this question: what if a flood swept through the whole world, a flood that did not drown people, but only drowned things, including all of the complex and vulnerable clock workings everywhere. And, by doing this, what if it also wiped time away? What if, because of the end of all the clocks, the word for ‘time’ itself was then not needed anymore, so that time would not be spoken of at all, as something valuable, which can be wasted, which can be saved? She told all of this to the adolescent boy on the other end of the line, who, after listening quietly, said he had to go and get ‘the head of the household’. He rested the phone on the hallway table and walked away.

As she listened to the silence, waiting for the receiver to be picked up again, she thought about the roaring flood that would sweep away time. After it eventually subsides, she thought, the flood will leave nothing of itself: nothing but harmless puddles trickling away down the grids into a vast silence. But would not the trickling, even one drip, be more than nothing? Is there not always something inside silence, something murmuring, if you really listen hard enough?