Cold Calling: American Psycho meets Crime & Punishment on the Cardiff call centre circuit

by Haydn Wilks

  “Yeah,” you say, not really listening. You suppress an urge to spit lager into his face.

  “Know what I mean, getting a bit sick of living round here now. It’s been like, what, six years since uni now?”

  “Almost seven.” Term began just before your birthday.

  “Right. Fucking seven years like, and three years in uni on top of that, ten years – ten years! A fucking decade us pair’ve spent in Cardiff. You wouldn’t get that for noncing the queen, like.”

  “Nah.”

  “Fucking bollocks, like, are these two ever gonna finish this game of pool, or what?”

  It doesn’t look like it. “I think they’re playing last bag.”

  “Last bag! Them two are the last ball bags playing that, like. It’s a busy pub, if you wanna play fucking kids games go fucking Charlie Chalks or something, Kidzania or something, fucking coming in here, playing last fucking bag… shall we stick a quid in the It Box?”

  As Dave suggests, a pound is slid into the It Box, and he selects from the bevvy of flashing games on its touch screen.

  Pub Quiz.

  “What’s the difference between a sheer coincidence and destiny?”

  “B.”

  “Are animals animate?”

  “D.”

  “Are apes in common with us?”

  “A.”

  “Are birds synonymous with reptilian evolutionids?”

  “B.”

  “Game over.”

  “Huh?”

  “You fucked it up, lad.”

  You stare at the screen, repeating the options in your mind.

  “‘No they aren’t’, B. Or maybe it was ‘no it’s not’, A.”

  “You fucked it up, lad.”

  He’s rifling through his pockets.

  “Have you got a 20 pence piece on you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fucking hell, soft lad, you’ve got about three pound in silver by there, what are you, a fucking buccaneer or something?”

  You snarl, withdraw the currency, slip off enough to pay for one more game.

  “Fucking hell, big spender by here, loading the machine up.”

  You grit your teeth and click Try Again.

  What do you choose; glass him in a pub and make it look he attacked you, or let hate marinate and bump him off while he’s sleeping?

  “Let’s get some shots in after this.”

  Second one. You read the words on-screen: “How old would Hitler be if he’d travelled in a time machine to 1984 in 1938?”

  “C.”

  You press D.

  “I told you it was C, dickhead. Alright, what shots we having?”

  Leprechaun Shandy and Mother’s Tits are served in front of you. You down both in quick succession.

  “What are them girls at over there?”

  You look across at them: two, side-by-side, near the fire exit.

  “Think they’re heading outside for a cigarette,” you say, stating the obvious.

  “You got smokes on you?”

  You pause, consider lying. Don’t. “Yeah.”

  “Fancy crashing me one?”

  “Yeah,” you say, trying your best to sound unannoyed about it.

  “Sound.”

  You follow him outside. He sidles up to them.

  “What are you ladies at of an evening?”

  “Just a quiet one, I think.”

  “Care to louden that one up a bit?”

  He’s on his hands, doing party tricks; back-flips and such. You suppress an urge to vomit. You look at the other one; she glances back at you, smiles. You look at Dave’s antics and try to act like you’re enjoying them.

  “So what do you do?” she asks once there’s a lull in them.

  “I… work… in… tele… communications…”

  She slowly nods, glances at the table, looks away from you.

  Some time goes on, it ends, you’re back at home, Dave’s in his room, you’re in yours, and you’ve completely lost the earlier impulse, that desire to interact with and influence the world. You opt for the passive instead, the pre-recorded, the gangbang, the bondage, the mock-abductions, then from the mainstream, to its off-cuts, and efukt, and girls puking after gagging on cocks, wiping tears off their eyes, storming off set naked as the crew of sleazeballs laugh, you pumping your cock hard, fruitlessly, as the desecrated disappear off camera, until finally the desecration and humiliation and tears and trauma’s enough to force yourself to climax - Semen. Passout. Wake-up. Fuck.

  It’s 9.20am: you skip showering, throw on the clothes closest to the bed, smash it out the door, running, pounding pavement, to the Magic Roundabout, slowing down Atlantic Way to smoke a cigarette, stumbling in the door, all eyes upon you, the clock hovering at just later than 20 to 10.

  You get down, quick, boot the computer up, strap the headset on, get to dialling. You stare into the screen, headset filling mostly with unanswered dialtone, the occasional conversation breaking through, chances to rattle off that well-practiced spiel, Rhys Davies, calling them back from Go! Life, getting “sorry, I’m not interested”s, and the first session of the day fades to fag break at 11, but as you rise for respite, Barney approaches you, gazing sternly at you with his non-lazy right eye, while his fucked left one lollygags listlessly in its socket: “Rhys, could we have a word in my office please?”

  You follow him into the office. Jim’s sitting behind the desk waiting for you, gym-pumped biceps folded up in front of him.

  “What time did you get in today?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “Bollocks, mate. It was closer to ten.”

  “Nine-forty.”

  “Okay. What did we say last time?”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  “And what did we say would happen if you did again?”

  “Ummm… I didn’t intend on doing it, so I forgot that part…”

  “We said you’d get an official warning. One more, you’re out. Now get out there and make some phone calls.”

  The cunt’s made sure your little chat’s taken up your ten minutes allotted smoking time, so that you’re stuck on the dialler till lunch, each fresh burst of dialtone deepening your anger, lusting for that sweet nicotine release, and you get it two hours later, and eat, and return to the dialler, and calls, and empty false conversations, and 4pm fag break follows, then two hours more of calls, and then home, and Emma on the couch watching Hollyoaks, and you head upstairs to your room, to the computer, bile followed by ejaculate, the evening passes, sleep, wake-up, Atlantic Way, dialler, phone calls, fag break, phone calls, lunch break, phone calls, 4pm, phone calls, home, Emma watching Hollyoaks, bile & ejaculate, sleep, weekend, listless, bland, out with Dave Saturday night, dickhead Branston showing up, them pair embarrassing themselves in pursuit of girls, somehow succeeding, alcohol deepening your depression, as you lie in bed and wank the early hours of Sunday morning away, watching filth while Dave engages in the real thing, his electro-house sex mix disturbing the wall between your bedrooms, Sunday, Monday, Atlantic Way, phone calls, fags, phone calls, home, etc., etc., etc., etc., weather growing colder as August falls to September falls to October.

  Your birthday passes without incident.

  Nothing of lasting importance occurs. Nothing but the slow whittling away of your life through dull repetition. Some leads are generated, enough to stop you being fired, but not enough to hit the minimum target that would result in a slice of commission and a bonus appended to your monthly salary.

  Somewhere within this dull mess, a chain of call backs is entered into: a woman in Cardiff, 15 Arabella Street, seriously considering a review of her husband’s life insurance policy, actually in the throes of renewing it. You call her back after 5pm, get no answer. Call back the next day. She answers, says her husband’s back late from work, to call tomorrow. You call again, she’s interested. Gets a quote. Says she’ll discuss it with him. Call back again. Call back the following week. She’s already renewed. She’s apolog
etic. Her husband grips the phone. He tells you to stop bothering them. You tap the address into your phone: 15 Arabella Street. You sit and fume through the rest of the day’s phone calls, that strung-along long-winded rejection, cutting so much deeper than the simple terse rejection you usually get. You suppress the anger, the rage, make a mental note to do something with the address, send them an unwanted Dominos delivery, or unordered taxis, then swallow the rage, fold it up and let it bubble within you, as day passes into night passes into day passes into weekend passes into day passes into night passes into day passes into...

  Thunder hits the door to your room.

  “Oh, soft lad, you inside?”

  The handle goes; Dave’s out in the corridor, ragging it back and forth.

  “Oh soft lad, it’s not half-seven yet, you can’t be wanking off already.”

  You click ‘X’. Kprincess ⚧??♥♛♥♥♡♥♡’s live cam show disappears. You rise, turn the lock, face Dave.

  “Fucking hell soft lad, didn’t your mam warn you you’d go blind if you spent your whole life wanking off all the time?”

  “I wasn’t wanking,” you meekly protest, though you know that your demeanour reeks of interrupted masturbation.

  “Why the fuck else would you have your door locked? Actually, that’s a question I don’t want to know the answer to.”

  “Why are you knocking anyway?”

  “I was just checking you were alive after last night.”

  Last night? You get a shudder as images appear before you, snatches of the previous evening.

  “And it’s a Wednesday night, lad. Student night. Fancy a few bevvies in town or what?”

  Every night’s student night, you think as he talks you into it. It’s a student town.

  A while later you’re at Buffalo, in the beer garden out the back. Dave’s stealing another clump of tobacco from the Amber Leaf box you stupidly left perched upon the benchtop.

  “What do you reckon to them pair over there?”

  You turn and stare across at the beer garden at a table at the sheltered end of it; girls. You talk to them: Dave gets a number; you don’t. The night wears on, more booze is consumed, until you stumble back home and pass out face-down on the bed.

  You swear off drinking when you wake with woozing head and tumbling tummy. You make it into work on time, even managing to grab a sausage roll from Gregg’s on the way.

  Days pass without much of anything else happening. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday…

  “What did you do at the weekend?” Jake asks.

  “Nothing.”

  Sweet nothing.

  Dave fucked off to visit his brother in Middlesborough. Just you and Emma in the house. She had a couple of friends round for a bit on Saturday, then they disappeared into town. She stumbled back drunk around five with you still at the laptop. You stayed in your room pretty much.

  Monday becomes Tuesday becomes Wednesday.

  “Come on soft lad, student night,” Dave insists.

  You go to the Union. There’s a band on. You’ve never heard of them. Iranian Punk Rock. The name, not the genre. Some twee, soft-to-the-core indie band from Kent or Swindon or some other stuck-up southern English shithole that’s a lot more shit than it realises. Dave’s performing again, dancing cartwheels around girls, you grinning and doing your best to force your way through small talk with ugly mate after fat friend after rotund companion after grotesque accomplice. You get steaming drunk and still make it up for work in time. Bleary-eyed, you spend the day staring into the screen - your life-giver, your sustenance. When you get home that night, you stare into your own screen, blank from corrosive call centre acid poured over corroded hungover emptiness.

  As you sit naked staring into the screen, three-quarters of an hour later, belly hair matted with spunk, you try and remember when the last time you Skyped your mum over in Camarthen was. You scold yourself, reminding yourself she won’t be there to Skype one day. Your instinct propels your hand from your dick to your desk; touch wood. You think about that odd compulsion you get, whenever you think about a loved one dying. Touch wood. Apparently the superstition was passed down from the Celts; they believed the negative energy of dark thoughts would pass from their touch to trees, to roots and the earth. Superstition. Absolving oneself of the pressure of rational human thought, of responsibility for one’s actions. This thing happens because I perform this ritual. We live in this bizarre world of arbitrary rule chains, where if you don’t perform these actions, or do perform these others, hexes, curses and voodoo will descend upon you. Except we don’t. We live in a world governed by the rational, clean laws of science. But what’s the difference really? You think about ghosts and the time in the graveyard on Halloween when you were -- how old? Dean was driving, but feels like ages ago, must’ve been 17 -- and you and the boys wrote out letters and numbers on that bit of paper in lieu of a Ouija board and used a glass pilfered from your mam’s kitchen to attempt a séance, and the glass had moved, and accusations had flown back and forth between you all about who’d been pushing it, and that had resulted in the whole thing dissipating and not happening, then you think of the video you made of it, on your old digital camera, when a digital video camera with a flash memory card was such a novelty, and the weird interference you’d gotten on the video, bleeping noise cutting in like when a phone’s held up to a speaker, and a faint voice whispering over the top of it, a voice deeper and darker than any of the boys’. And the computer had conked out with sparks, the hard drive blown, and all evidence was lost long before YouTube made uploading it to the net for posterity possible. And then you think of how no serious scientist nowadays would ever investigate such a thing, and you wonder if it’s always been like that, the scientists and elites, in their own world, with their own knowledge, while the peasantry whittle myths and cower from shadows, perhaps seeing something there that the elites and scientists are too sequestered in their own interpretations of life to notice, or perhaps fooling themselves, victims of ignorance. You look down at the mess you’ve made on your belly, thigh, and dick shaft, and curse the fact that you need to put on clothes before going to the bathroom to clean it up because of your housemates. You glance at your bed and wonder if it’s really worth the effort cleaning up now. Your eyes move to the clock in the corner of the computer screen: 4:48 AM. Long past time for bed.

  You wake up, shower, clothe, walk, strap on headset and stare, remove headset and listen to Barney’s morning pep talk, something about spinning plates simultaneously without shattering one, then it’s back to the headset, back to the dialtone, back to terse conversations and rejection, outside for a cigarette, back to the chair, bounded by the headphone, dialtone, terse conversations, rejection, a slight sign of interest; a scheduled callback, dialtone, rejection, piss break, repeat.

  Lunch.

  You’re off wandering the industrial estate, chain-smoking, trying to walk off the endless slow creeping death of sitting too much; it’s probably not working.

  Back to work.

  Dialtone, terse conversation, rejection, afternoon break time, bawdy discourse, something approaching acceptance; something approaching acceptance but not quite acceptance. Then it’s back to the chair and the headset for another two hours of the same as the three two hour blocks that came before it. Then it’s home, past the Magic Roundabout, Keith heading off to the train that’ll carry him back to his shit town somewhere in the Valleys.

  Home.

  Emma’s on the sofa watching Hollyoaks. You brew some tea, offer her some. She tells you about her day. You retire to your room and load the computer up, jabbing the scissors into the fan case to get the fan going, choose to chase bile before ejaculate, bore your way through both, sleep, wake up, work, dialtone, rejection, dialtone, rejection, home, Emma watching Hollyoaks, load computer up, bile, ejaculate, sleep, wake up, work, rejection, dialtone, Emma & Hollyoaks, computer, bile, ejaculate, sleep, wake, work, rejection, home, Hollyoaks, computer, bile, ejaculate, sle
ep, wake, work, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection,

  weekend.

  “Fancy going for a few pints over at the Fox, Sicko?” Jake asks you.

  “Alright.”

  “They should just glass the fucking lot of it,” Jake says 40 mins later, 3rd pint in front of him.

  “Wha’d’you mean, send the Scottish legion in?” Craig smirks.

  “Nah mate,” Jake says, “glass it, with a nuke. That’s what they call it; thalidomide rain. Nuke the cunts into oblivion and layer thalidomide rain over their shithole fucking country.”

  “Won’t that fuck up everywhere else though?” Keith says. “Fallout and that?”

  “Fuck it, price worth paying,” Jake says, reaching for his pint and knocking a fair bit back. “Cigarette?”

  You follow the boys out to the beer garden, walking bringing forth tipsiness. The conversation continues outside.

  “What I don’t get though, is you get these ones coming over here, and we’re just standing back and letting ‘em in,” Craig says, shaking his head, taking a drag, “have you seen what the fucking Somalis are like, like? Why the fuck would you want a load of fucking Somalians coming into your country? They fucked their own country up good and proper, why the fuck would you want any of them over here?”

  “It’s the Polish that get me,” Keith says, the pint of Carlsberg half-drunk in his hand pushing him to get in on the convo. “What do they need their own shops for? Polski Sklep, like, what’s the point? Why can’t they just shop in Tesco’s like everyone else?”

  “Polish women are alright though,” you contribute.

  Two and a bit hours later you’re fucking steaming and the boys are talking about moving on somewhere else. You move elsewhere with them, into town. More bars, more drinks. Lloyd’s bar: booming EDM chart music, Craig and Jake making moves on the dim lit dancefloor, Keith trying to draw you into conversation to shield himself from his own fear of women. You say that you’re going to the toilet and walk outside, then stagger back through Cardiff pissed, smoking your last two cigarettes in quick succession, taking a meandering route towards your home, winding up on a street off Albany Road, spotting an ajar door, taking a second to cross-reference the number with the street it’s on: 15 Arabella Street. 15 Arabella Street. You stare at the ajar door, letting booze bubble up and smother your thoughts.