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

by Haydn Wilks

  Back at home, you ignore the sound of Dave and Emma laughing at Friends in the living room, unbox your Heston Blumenthal Fast-Slow Cooker, tear through plastic, flip through a manual, slip in the silicone lid seal, clip and click the condensation cup and other odds and ends into place, twist and screw, and wire her up, unzip the bag, tumble the baby in, and flip through the manual to the section on suggested cooking options, and begin wondering whether a whole human baby corresponds more closely to a shoulder of pork or a whole chicken. Deciding humans are definitely more closely related to pigs than chickens, both being fleshy mammalians, you dump the baby into the 4-litre removable cooking bowl and set the dials to ‘casserole’ rather than ‘pot roast’. As you stand staring with pride at the sleek middle-class modernity of your brand new appliance, you remember Emilia’s Whatsapp. You want to meet her, but you know from before that the surge within you, that renewal of your spirits, that making of you into a much better man, it all stemmed from whatever nutrition and protein is found within a baby’s flesh. You’ve set it to casserole for 12 hours, and that’s probably the best thing for the bulk of it, but you really out to have a quick nibble on something before going out and meeting her, especially if she’s expecting you to bring Dave and Branston along. A wordless plan formulates. You scan your room for sharp implements, find nothing, then dash downstairs, through the living room, where luckily Joey Tribiani’s just said something stupid-funny enough to keep Dave and Emma laughing and distracted while you dash back out with the Gordon Ramsay carving knife. You bolt upstairs, pop the Blumenthal Cooker open, then grasp the baby’s fingers and hack and saw maniacally at the wrists until its hand comes lose. You carefully let the blood that dribbles out fall solely into the 4-litre removable cooking bowl, while you scan the room for something to carry the thing in without causing further problems. You settle upon the discarded foil packaging from 200g of Chilli Heatwave Doritos, stuff the hand inside, wrap the excess packaging tightly around it, then head back downstairs, through the living room, where Dave’s saying something he thinks is witty in response to some Chandler Bing/Rachel Green bantering on-screen.

  You press a hand against the Doritos-wrapped baby hand in your jeans pocket and wonder what would be the fastest way of preparing it. The question quickly leads you to placing a frying pan upon the stove, splashing some Sainsbury’s own-brand extra virgin olive oil inside it, then pulling the Doritos bag from your pocket, at the very moment you realise you’ve left the pissing Gordon Ramsay carving knife upstairs in your bedroom. You rattle through drawers, and settle on a crummy red-handled knife with spots of rust dotted along its part-rusted blades.

  “What you doing out there, soft lad?” Dave shouts, as Friends gives way to that funny new Money Supermarket commercial. “You making summat?”

  “Yeah,” you shout back, thrill of adrenaline coursing through a nervous system that you can scarcely believe was earlier overwhelmed with anxiety, as you hold the baby’s hand above the sizzling olive oil, and hack flesh from it, letting it fall into the pan.

  “What you making?”

  “Chicken…” you pause, drawing out the ‘n’, trying to think of something normal to have with it; no-one eats meat in isolation. “…salad.”

  “Fancy making me a bit?”

  Ten minutes later, you’re on the sofa next to Dave, Emma in the armchair, flicking at her phone screen, as an old episode of Top Gear plays on the television.

  “I thought you said you were making salad?” Dave says, twirling Barbeque Beef Super Noodles around his fork tines.

  “Yeah. We’re out,” you say, greedily stuffing hacked-up baby hand and noodles into your mouth.

  “We never had none in the first place,” Dave says. “Why the fuck were you expecting any salad to be in the fridge, soft lad? When’s the last time you bought anything?”

  “He just made you food, you should be grateful,” Emma chastises him, without looking up from her phone screen.

  “Yeah, he knows I’m only messing about. No, this is decent, mate. Good bit of chicken. Really juicy.”

  You avoid talking, concentrating on the flavour, the intense burst of divine, succulent, tender meat. Something beyond anything available in any supermarket, a commodity far outside the bounds of consumerist society. You are eating the flesh of God Himself; the world-manipulating apes who’ve reshaped the planet on their image. It tastes incredible, and as the ecstasy of its flavour subsides, you’re left with the brilliant warm glow of pure vitality and energy, a man reborn.

  “What time we meeting them girls then, soft lad?”

  Plans are set, the Dorito bag with baby’s hand bone in it’s stashed in your room, and you’re as up for a night out as you’ve ever been. Dave suggests getting some tinnies, and you bop to the shop, soul ablaze. You chat enthusiastically, crazily, as you stock up on bottles, 3 for £4, at Tesco – a Cobra, a Kronenbourg, a Stella.

  “Wifebeater,” you laugh, supping the Stella on the way back to yours. “Why d’you reckon everyone calls it that? Do you reckon there was one notorious wifebeater what had Stella linked to him, or what?”

  “Well, it’s just fucking heavy, innit, lad?” Dave says, trying to keep up with you, gulping his lager back.

  Back at yours, you pound through your third while Dave’s still on his second, then head out into town, to Brew Dog, to crazy strength craft beers served by the ¾ pint.

  Branston arrives, then the girls, and you’re lording it, king of the convo, far ahead of Dave and Branston, stringing the girls along, all sorts of shit flowing out through your mouth, enticing them, drawing the lads on, setting up banter, knocking it down, dominating, alpha.

  The night wears on, other places are gone to, and you wind up back at Emilia’s, buzzing, alcohol only partly to blame for the euphoria you’re lost in, you take control, and her nakedness doesn’t phase you, it brings out more from within, and you shag her, cum, shag her again, cum, and she’s cummed twice as much as you have by the time you squirt your fourth load out and pass out, and then morning comes, and you awaken from a sweet deep slumber, her beside you, and go at it again. She eases into Sunday, takes a shower, and comes out dripping wet, a little pink towel all that’s covering her beautiful pale Bulgarian whiteness, and you smash her again, she screaming approval, and then you head home, bouncing, to fish an arm out of the Heston Blumenthal Fast-Slow Cooker, hack it off with the Gordon Ramsay carving knife, and lie on your bed, gnawing it, smirking, loving it, in love with life, in love with yourself, in love with Emilia, in love with the world.

  “Thank you, baby,” you say, mouth full of its flesh, laughing at the absurdity of all that is and all that’s ever been.

  Sunday passes comfortably, you get to bed at about 11, don’t even think of starting your computer. You walk in to work Monday morning, and on the way realise you only smoked cigarettes Saturday night when others had sparked up first, and it was socially appropriate, and you’ve not had one by yourself, and nor have you wanted one, since you did the deed up in Chipping Sodbury.

  You attack the phones as soon as the day starts, and bamboozle three stay-at-home mums into life insurance reconsideration, send them over to advisers, and on the 11 o’clock fag break, you go outside, enjoy the fresh air and the chat, but don’t partake in any smoking yourself.

  You eat your baby flesh sandwiches on lunch break, smash more leads through, establishing yourself firmly at the top of the leaderboard, 8 leads to Jake’s paltry 6. The day goes on, more leads go through, and you leave there on a superhuman 16, Jake languishing far behind on 9, which is a good day for him, a good day for anyone; but you’re not anyone. You’re Rhys fucking Davies.

  Whatsapps are exchanged with Emilia, plans to meet the following night. You go home, watch TV with Dave and Emma, a movie, tell them you’ve already eaten when dinner plans are floated, then go back to your room, and chomp through a leg until you pass out.

  Tuesday brings you and Emilia to a bar, and within a cocktail, she’s suggested goin
g back to hers, and you go there, and you smash, several times again, then head into work directly from there, but feel your energy flagging. You just about hold out not smoking on 11 o’clock fag break, but with two leads just about mangled through, you’re gasping for a fag by lunch time, and then you head back in, and achieve nothing more for the rest of the day.

  You go home, stay in your room, gnawing through the second arm. You turn your laptop on, jabbing the screwdriver in the fan casing to get it going, and resist the temptation for bile and semen, and instead watch an Adam Curtis documentary, Hypernormalisation, about how fucked the modern world is, and what the reasoning is behind it.

  Wednesday morning, you start the day by chewing the baby’s left cheek off, make your sandwiches with stomach meat, go into work, smash 4 through before 11 o’clock fag break, don’t smoke, Whatsapp Emilia, smash another 5 through before lunch, and end the day on 18, drawing the shocked congratulations of all around you, though you kick yourself, wishing you’d managed 20. You walk home, part Keith at the Magic Roundabout, look at the hooker you’d previously considered obtaining the services of, but this time wonder how much she’d charge to let you impregnate her, and how if you could get enough money behind you to get a harem of similar whores, you could have your own baby meat factory, churning out food for yourself. But as you get closer to home, you realise the stupidity of this plan, the 9-month gestation before you’d get even get your first hint of return on investment, and all the babies you’d have to pilfer to keep you going in the meanwhile. You come home and stare at the munched up mess of a baby carcass still stewing in the Heston Blumenthal Fast-Slow Cooker, and as you lift its sad half-gnawed head out, you notice a weird smell, and as you bite into its right cheek, you notice the flesh is becoming denser in flavour, and you realise it’s probably nearing expiry, and as you bite through flesh and gnaw around its ears, you realise you’ll need to invest in a fridge for your bedroom if you’re going to keep this nonsense up.

  Emilia Whatsapps you again just after you’ve bitten too far beyond the ear and hit the hairline, and as you pluck fine baby hair from between your teeth, you message her back, agreeing to meet at one of the cocktail bars on Mill Lane named after a Pacific island.

  You go back to hers, shag fuck into her, her screaming in ecstasy, you two entwined in pure blinding love. You pass out, wake up, fuck again, then head to work, managing four leads before the 11 o’clock, but yielding to the urge for cigarette, and then getting nothing else for the rest of the day.

  After work, you walk Keith to the train station, telling him you need a winter jacket, but instead head on into town, to John Lewis, in search of something along the lines of a mini drinks fridge. There, you stand and frown, arms folded, as you’re torn between an affordable beer cooler, £129.99, with a pure transparent glass front, and a bright orange Smeg FAB5RO 50’s Style Minibar Cooler Fridge, which would keep your haul much better hidden, but would also cost you a bank-breaking £679. You realise you can’t actually go through with the purchase at this moment anyway, given the weird awkwardness that would ensue should you return to the house with Dave and Emma home hauling a refrigerator, so you instead wander around town, feeling hungry, thinking of the baby, but then thinking of how odd it tasted the day before, and how you might make yourself sick continuing to gorge upon it, and settling instead for a KFC.

  You return home, depressed, stare at the mangled mess of half-hacked-up baby carcass in the Heston Blumenthal Fast-Slow Cooker, slam the lid shut, start the laptop up, jabbing the screwdriver into the fan casing to get the fan going, and get immediately into the hunt for something to draw forth the ejaculate. Three and a half hours later, you’re sat naked in front of the laptop screen, belly plastered with semen, mind reeling from the descent into the depths of the internet you’ve just taken: through PornHub and RedTube and YouPorn and all the rest of the mainstream, from amateur couples filmed from propped up cameras, engaged in tender, passionate lovemaking not at all dissimilar to that in which you and Emilia have been recently engaged, to guys getting their dicks sucked and cocks rode by two girls at once, then to one girl taking on two dicks, bent over, to gangbangs, bukkakes, sweet Japanese things being tenderly made love to while wanking tub-stomached men in a circle around the coitus couple step up one-by-one to unload in the sweet girl’s smiling face, to efukt, and porn mishaps, tantrums and tears as nude broken actresses stagger cock-broke offset as producers laugh and cajole at them from the anonymity and safety afforded to the camera-holder, to the more outlandish, the internet’s lesser-trampled back passages, girls engaged in coprophagia, and when that fails to satiate, to bring forth an end to the trip, you side-step sexual activity entirely, cock growing harder at its consequences, at stonings in Iran, beheadings and immolation in Syria, and once the screams and burning carcass of a terror victim has left you at the edge of an abyss into which your prostrate refuses to push you, you return to the detritus of societies more similar to your own, and /r/imminentdeath_nsfl, scanning screenshot thumbnails for a pretty one, and finally bring forth the long-threatened jism, as a pretty 20-something brunette New Yorker tumbles backwards off a high-rise, and her screaming friend rushes to the wall she’s slipped off, training the cameraphone instinctively upon her descent, your cock exploding as she collides with a car parked on the street below, half-crushing it as she showers the sidewalk in red splatter pixels of guts and viscera.

  You stare at the screen, breathing heavily, as the little arrowed semi-circle invites you to play the video again.

  Never, you resolve quite firmly, feeling disgust and shame now the drawn-out act’s been completed, and sex and death have become thoroughly confused within your mind.

  The door rattles as Dave’s fist slams against it.

  “Open up, soft lad! Friday night, what you saying?”

  He barks his and Branston’s plans for the evening through the door.

  You pay no attention, staring at the arrowed semi-circle, the odd ouroboros of internet self-cannibalism, the pact with the digital devil only you and your ISP and any concerned agencies of Her Majesty’s law & order are concerned with.

  You stare into the screen long after the knocks and Dave’s “you can’t spend your whole life wanking off, soft lad. C’mon, I know you’re in there” have subsided, finishing with a “suit yourself, soft lad,” and you stare at the white self-eating snake of a replay option against the dark final image of the fucked up video, and sink into deep immobility.

  Thoughts flit across your mind of fishing some of the remains out of the Heston Blumenthal, chewing off a bit more of it, but you decide the risk of rot’s too great, that you’re better off spending your weekend in recovery from all the vileness you’ve exposed yourself to.

  So sometime later, you muster the willpower to leave the swivel chair, fall onto the bed, pull the covers over you, and lay there slipping in and out of slumber for the better part of an entire weekend, phone buzzing with ignored Whatsapps, door battered a couple of times on Saturday with Dave’s invites, you hearing him tell Emma that he’s almost certain you’re not dead, “he’s probably just wanking off again,” and the whole weekend passes you by upon the bed, belly still matted with dried semen, mind slipping between the spheres of bedroom seclusion and vivid fevered dreams, maternity wards, cribs overflowing, wailing, screaming infants, the breast-feeding woman of the house from Chipping Sodbury, face frozen in the way it was when she hit the floor after you clubbed her with the cherub, though whenever you slip out from the dream into your room, time ticking ever upwards, to 12, then back to down again, through the weekend days, you wonder if you ever actually saw that expression, or a false memory’s not arisen, and in those moments of wakefulness, you wonder if the expression is something your own sick mind’s given rise to, if it’s some strange spiritual perversion from her offspring’s flesh, and as you flick back and forth between the bed and the room and the illogical flutter of dreams, the filth your three-and-a-half hour wankathon led up to burns be
fore you, the images of hot young things’ untimely deaths, all culminating in that tumble off a NYC rooftop to car roof and the splattering out from within which follows, and from there you slip into dreams of necrophilia, murder, moving from the Chipping Sodbury wife to Michaela, Brianna, the tangentially connected women of your life, but not Emilia, the sole genitally connected woman your life has known in a lifetime of cell death and replenishment and mental growth and renewal and spiritual decline and moral decay, and in this mad fluttering of fucked-up disconnection, an alarm rings out, your eyes open, and it’s Monday morning, 8.20am.