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

by Haydn Wilks

  “I can’t tonight, I’m meeting Emilia.”

  “Fucking hell, look at you, soft lad, dating on the regular. Maybe you’re finally turning into a normal human being.”

  “Maybe.”

  You meet Emilia at Buffalo and sit out back, drinking cocktails and chaining rollies beneath the patio heaters.

  “How was your weekend?” she asks, almost immediately.

  “I was pretty sick,” you half-truth, “spent most of it in bed.”

  Sick. That’s one way to describe you.

  She spent hers with Brianna and the other one. They went to the castle, which she’d been meaning to do since she got here, and you’ve been here the worst part of a decade and never felt inclined to pay it a visit, and you pretend to be interested in its lavishly decorated interior and oil paintings and a World War 2 air raid shelter hidden within its walls, and the fact it looks a lot older than it actually is, and that it was one of several ridiculously lavish constructions thrown up by some ridiculously lavish rich man who made his money when Cardiff was still a thriving port city generating huge sums off coal and empire, and she blathers and drinks, and you nod and encourage her, mind elsewhere, still gunked up with the filth you spent the weekend ensconced in, and after another round of cocktails are ordered, talk moves to Christmas plans, and you realise you have none, and are not in the least perturbed by this, and briefly consider going home when she says she’s heading back to Bulgaria when term ends, but as she rattles through the feasting and frolicking of a traditional Bulgarian family Christmas, you realise you can’t go back home and leave your humming appliances unattended, and that you may never go home again, only venturing out from Cardiff to hunt, to bring back sustenance, and you lose yourself on the thought you’ve become something of a real-life vampire, feasting on flesh, and as you think about that, she’s asked you something, and you’ve not been paying attention, and she frowns, and moves on, and more’s drunk, you both encouraging the flow of alcohol to keep her talking, to mask the fact you’ve no interest in talking to her, and once you’ve lost count of cocktails, you head back to hers and get to it, and it’s not like before, and her pale milky nakedness does nothing to interest you, your mind wading back through the filth, throwing up the worst of the images you’ve warped your mind with to keep on slamming into her, the sounds she’s making are unnatural, forced, drunken imitations, and you call to mind the panic and horror-stricken face of the friend of the NYC rooftop, and then the mother in Chipping Sodbury, at which point you lose it, spluge deep within her, roll over, and feel asleep almost instantly, physical contact between you two severed the moment the carnal act’s finished.

  You’re awoken by the rattle of your phone alarm. Emilia moans with morning sleepiness, doesn’t open her eyes, as you throw your clothes back on, and head to work, through crisp winter streets, your thoughts clouded with some unidentifiable existential misery and deeply-felt sourceless self-pity, which, as you draw closer to the Magic Roundabout, and Atlantic Way, you realise means you’re not fully vampiric, you’ve not lost your soul entirely, and that you’re now somewhere on a precipice between two life paths, the first the way the world wants you to live, in a 9-to-5, with a life partner, with procreation on the agenda, and the second, an uncharted trail through thick menacing woodland, beyond council-paved paths and tax-funded streetlighting, advertising-lined thoroughfares and thoughtless movement in a direction that’s been destined to you, and you realise you want neither, and as you stand waiting for the lights to change at the Magic Roundabout, you think of choosing death, flinging yourself in front of the next car that zooms past, or holding out for a truck, and doing the job properly, but the thought passes as the little green man appears, and he beckons you across, down Atlantic Way, to the industrial estate, along the path this shit sick society has laid out for you.

  You arrive at work and barely notice the fact the others are already at it, headsets strapped in, glancing up slyly from their screens, noting you should’ve been there almost half an hour ago.

  You wonder where the time went, and muse on the metaphor of the path you took to work and your aimless amble through life thus far as dialtone fills your eardrums. A woman’s voice answers. The pre-scripted words leave your mouth as instinctively and thoughtlessly as exhaled carbon dioxide. She says she’s not interested. You inhale, dialtone fills yours ears again, then exhale the pre-scripted spiel, draw no interest. Inhale. Dialtone. Exhale. Call ends. Inhale. Dialtone. Exhale. Call ends. Inhale. Exhale. In. Ex. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. 11. Fag break.

  “You watched the last episode of Klan yet?” Jason asks the group.

  Some have, some haven’t, or that’s what you guess from the little attention you pay to the exchange of words, the transfer of oxygen into carbon dioxide, the smoke-tainted life gasses passing in and out of the chests of your co-workers, out of your own. Jason directs a question at you – something along the lines of: “You’re awfully quiet today, Sicko, what’s up?”

  And you instinctively boast of having spent the night at Emilia’s, and rattle off in excessive detail the mechanical process you ended the night with, keeping the mental internal, drawing laughs with invented details incorporated from the filth waded through at the weekend.

  “She sounds almost as fucked up as you, Sicko,” Jake laughs, as smoke time finishes. “Sounds like you might’ve met your match.”

  You return to the screen and the headset and the dialtone and the respiratory process. At some point between 11 o’clock fag break and lunch, Barney and Jim call you into the office, say words relating to your lateness, your eyes and mind glazed over during the in- and exhalations, then back to the dialtone, respire, until the day expires. Back home, along Atlantic Way, turning at the Magic Roundabout, staring at the prostitute on the corner until she looks your way and scares your eyes, home, Dave and Emma in the living room, Hollyoaks, upstairs, refridgerated humming, screwdriver jabbed in the laptop casing, and a thought grips you, some malice, some demon within, your heart fluttering, out of tempo, out of sight, out of mind, to CamWhores, scrolling down through the list, to one with few viewers, and she sits there, some East European slut in a negligée, not a world away from Emilia, and you top your account up, throw tips at her, get her naked, fingering herself, and you force a hand free from flidding her vagina to tap at the keyboard and tell her your plans for Christmas.

  I want to spend it with you, honey xxx

  No bullshit.

  Wats your real plans?

  Throw more tips, twenty credits. Her hand recoils from the vagina, she sits staring glumly into the webcam, pausing, before typing: nothing special. Just a normal day. Why? What about you?

  You don’t have any family to spend it with?

  Her face furrows. She’s pissed off, cut deep, exposed: no.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  You keep typing.

  Straddle the webcam. I want to see inside you.

  She frowns harder. Types. What?

  Pull your flaps back and straddle the webcam. I want to see your insides.

  Dave knocks again. “Hey, soft lad, open up!”

  You frown at the impossibility of not answering him, at the danger of him barging suddenly into the room, seeing the appliances. You think of the wasted credits, as the screen alternates between too-close darkness and an extreme close-up of her pierced pussy lips.

  You answer the door.

  “Fancy a pint at the Woody?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Dave says.

  His head moves forward, trying to look inside. You push back against him.

  “Hey, calm your tits, soft lad. I was only wondering what you were getting up to in there.”

  In the silence, you hear the fridge-freezer hum. You think the biggest mental fuck you could muster for the cam whore right now would be to leave her straddling the cam for no-one, leaving her perturbed by your odd requests and probing questions, the mind fuck compounded by your sudden disappearance.
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  “Fuck’s sake. Alright.”

  “Fucking hell, soft lad, you’re not in the Christmas spirit much, are you? Sorry I asked.”

  Pub. Beers. It Box. Dave tries it on with some girls. You tell them you’ve got a girlfriend.

  “You could’ve played along, soft lad. Been a wing man.”

  You Whatsapp Emilia while he’s in the toilets. I want to see you tonight xXx.

  She replies as Dave returns to you. I can’t tonight. Tomorrow? xXx

  Home. Wanking, pounding, throwing credits at cam whores, having them defile themselves, telling you the details of their Christmas plans, you using each piece of information as a build-up to delve deeper, beneath the skin, cut it back, make them real uncomfortable.

  Do your parents know you do this?

  What do you think they’d say if I sent them this video?

  Frowns become anger. There’s not enough credits in the world to stop the sullen black-haired slut booting you.

  Fuck off, weirdo.

  You return to the prefabricated world of internet porn, none of it interesting you, you beating your cock harder, fruitlessly, to the endless sound of the fridge-freezer’s hum. After an hour, you throw its doors open, pull a frosted skull out, cavities in its cold dead cheeks where you carved the flesh out. It propels you back to the laptop, back from death vid subreddits, you watching more ISIS burnings, Middle Eastern stonings, brutal Mexican cartel murderings of sexy Latinas, on and on for hours, until the sun comes, and you realise this wank will never finish, and you howl at the laptop, a primal scream, something awakening deep with you. You grab the laptop, pull it closed, and slam it twice upon the desktop. You throw the freezer open, slam the laptop inside, slam its door shut, then stare at your curtains, naked, cock hard, sunlight faintly ebbing in from the awakening world beyond. Deep breaths, inhalations, exhalations, then you throw the door open again, throw the mildly-chilled laptop onto the bed, pull the main hunk of frosted carcass out after it, then slam it down onto the laptop, over and over again, repeatedly, the iced carcass holding fast, as the laptop cracks and fractures beneath its poundings. The casing splits in two, and as you beat harder, its finely-manufactured metal guts seep out.

  A bang at your door snaps you free of the madness.

  “What the fuck are you playing at?” Emma screams. “I’ve got be up for work in a couple of hours.”

  “Sorry,” you pant, sense returning to you. “My laptop… broke. I was trying to fix it.”

  “Fucking hell,” she mutters, waddling away from the door, leaving you standing over the shattered laptop, cock flagging, becoming flaccid, battered frosted baby corpse still into your hands.

  You move from that to work in a daze, barely cognisant of anything, inhaling, exhaling, falling asleep on 11 o’clock fag break, awakened by Jake as he returns: “Back to work time, Sicko. What’s up with you? Heavy night?”

  Inhale, exhale, more calls. Lunch. Wander, through industrial units, lost within them. Return forty-something minutes late. A Whatsapp from Emilia: Where do you want to meet tonight? xXx

  The work day ends. You stagger into town, dazed, fatigued. Alcohol helps you struggle through, mumbling to whatever Emilia says, paying no attention to any of it, until that ends, and outside, she says “Bye,” and turns away from you, without so much as a goodbye kiss, let alone the expected invite, and you stumble home, that quickly forgotten in the fog obscuring all the world from you. You reach your home, see the half-defrosted carcass laying beside the smashed-up laptop guts upon sopping bedsheets. You groan, shove the carcass back into the freezer, brush the bulk of the laptop guts off the bed, lie face down atop the soaked ice-chilled sheets, and collapse immediately into slumber, disconnected images of horror, shattered frozen corpses of young ones, waking several times from it in panic, almost screaming, turning over in terror, falsely intuiting several heart attacks, slipping in and out of consciousness, seeing cam whores hatching evil plans to seek vengeance upon you, speaking to their pimps/slave drivers, whispering with Emilia, with Dave, with Emma, your Mum, your family, Christmas dinner, a roasted baby’s arse pride and centre of the tablespread, until you wake for real, with panic, as if a bucket of water’s been thrown over you. After a few sharp inhalations and exhalations of breath, you realise the sensation’s simply been caused by the cold damp bedsheets you fell asleep upon. You check the time on your phone – 9.20. You’re already late

  No time to shower, no desire to smoke, you dress and proceed directly to Atlantic Way. You sit down, place the headset on. Jim’s hand falls upon your shoulder. You shudder.

  “Can I speak to you in the office a minute, mate?”

  Next, you’re on the street, proceeding back along Atlantic Way, having been fired. The conversation was terse, a perfunctory rattle through all you’d done wrong; the repeated lates, the failure to hit sales targets. You pull out your phone. No message from Emilia. You realise she said at some point she was going back to Bulgaria soon, perhaps even today.

  You’re a fucking mess, you admit to yourself. You have no doubt you smell odd, that you reek of all your misdeeds. You think of the only thing that brought you respite, the only thing that led you to becoming a half-way respectable member of society. You tap your phone to the notes, to saved addresses. You chain smoke and walk to Cardiff Central, repeating the address chosen at random, no memory of the couple’s voices or your phone call with them: Mr. & Mrs. Ecclestone, 24 Southwold Rd., Brampton.

  You enter the station, groan to yourself, loudly, as passengers heading to and from trains bustle noisily all around, you waiting for a ticket machine to come free. Then you stand in front of it, tap ‘B’, ‘R’, and two options appear: Brampton [Cumbria]; Brampton [Suffolk].

  You repeat the mantra – Ecclestone… Southwold… Brampton… - and try to picture the stations the ticket machine’s conjured up in response to it. [Cumbria]= north?[Suffolk]= south? You assume the Suffolk Brampton to be closer. Hit it. The price appears: £118.50. You slot in your debit card. Some minutes later, you’re on the platform. Two hours later, you’re at Birmingham New Street. Half an hour later, you’re on a train bound for Cambridge. Flat Middle England stretches out endlessly and featurelessly beyond the window. Inner monologue ceases. Some trance has fallen over you, which you only break to note reminds you of the trance of deep concentration that falls over endurance hunters, African tribesmen who still practice the oldest method of hunting known to man, before your species developed the capacity to craft tools, when the only way to kill our prey was to run after them, and keep chasing, until the animals dropped dead from exhaustion. Hours, days, in pursuit, kept going by our ability to carry water with us, a sheer physical outlasting of weaker species. This thought, and its profound implications, are all that touch your thought in the hours between Birmingham New Street and Cambridge, between the Midlands and East Anglia, through Nuneaton, Leicester, Milton Mowbray, Oakham, Stamford, Peterborough, March, Ely – half-known names, towns and cities with lives unfolding; good, honest, decent, hard-working British lives, lives spent working in offices, or at trades, or for the NHS, framed by trips to the pub, or the shops, evenings sat in front of the telly, watching soaps, sports, all one continuous uninterrupted sprawling culture of empty action, procreation, joy and misery, sequestered in the odd evolutionary cul-de-sac of modern England. Cambridge comes, and its already three o’clock.

  In the calmly decored sandstone pleasantness of Cambridge station, LED information boards tell you the next connection to Ipswich doesn’t arrive until 15:44, more than half an hour away. Physical pangs and cravings call out within you, now the trance you rode the train in’s slipped. You enter M&S, pick out a chicken, chilli & mango salad sandwich, ready salted crisps and 100% freshly squeezed orange juice meal deal, then exit the station, roll a cigarette, smoke it, roll another, smoke that, then return to the station, to the platform, to Ipswich, eating slowly, trying to picture the Ecclestone family, knocking their door, bursting into song, pretending to be a Ca
rol singer, belting through ‘Away in a Manger’ in near-soprano, Mr. & Mrs. Ecclestone appearing, smiling, in front of you, Mrs. Ecclestone swaddling her babe in arms, then as Mr. Ecclestone turns to retrieve money from the house, you’ll push pass Mrs., rush into the living room, grab a poker from the grand fireplace, thrust it through Mr.’s right eye socket, into his brain, killing him instantly, then you’ll batter Mrs. across the head with it, causing her to drop the baby, with a satisfying crack of its skull on the original old stone flooring, you’ll bash her until she stops moving, maybe even whip your dick out and skull fuck her motionless corpse, then grab a bag full of presents from beneath the Christmas tree, pour them out, locate the wrapping paper, swaddle the baby in it, shove him into the back, then bound back out onto the street, back to the train station, back to Ipswich, then to Cambridge, to Birmingham New Street, and arrive back in Cardiff by midnight, ready to feast upon the flesh of the Ecclestone young.

  You smile as this scenario plays out in your mind, and Ipswich draws ever nearer, through Dullingham, Bury St Edmunds, Elmswell, until you arrive, just after five o’clock, move through the station, your smile becoming a sneer, the moment the long day’s been building to drawing close. You board the 17:17 to Lowestoft, commuters at the work day’s end now forming the bulk of the passengers. The sky darkens as your body tenses, staring out the window at it. Strange flashes of numbness shoot down the left and right sides of your body in turn, your mouth becoming dry, you swallowing to force the creation of fresh spittle to combat it, tensing and unclenching your fists, tapping your feet, trying to shake the numbness of. You pass through Melton, through Wickham Market, through Saxmundham. Darsham follows, and is followed by Halesworth. Then the soft RP accent of the pre-recorded train announcement chimes in, with what you’ve been waiting all day to here: “The next station is Brampton. Brampton. Request stop only.”

  Request stop only. Fucking hell.

  You leapt to your feet, to the front carriage of the train, and accost the conductor in a fevered panic. He smiles as words are forced out through your desert-dry mouth.