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

by Haydn Wilks

  You settle in and sip your drink and look around hopelessly, eyes flitting from the toddler to her mother to the shit on television, settling on that, as her mother drunkenly blathers on about something, cracking the rest of them up. Her brother’s asking you questions – “What d’you do, mate?”

  You’ve just been fired, you answer semi-honestly.

  You let the wine smooth over your inherent fucked night fostered social awkwardness, and the odd scene somehow feels wholly normal, not even registering more than mild mirth at Emma saying she was going to put her sister and her niece up in your room, but you’d left it locked, and that her brother’s taken Dave’s room, and that there’s maybe some way someone can take the sofa or something, and as voices chime in offering to switch to less comfortable sleeping arrangements to make the best of a cramped Christmas in Cardiff for the whole whatever-Emma’s-surname-is clan, you’re staring at Steve Mulhern on the television, his impossibly thick make-up and bright eyes, as he leads minor celebs through some naff gameshow-type very-ITV variety thing, and then there’s a cutaway to a miserable piece about the misery of the homeless out on the streets at Christmas, and as voices rise and talk over it, you glug back what’s left in your wine glass and feel this is all some weird confirmation of what the year’s been building to, a Christmas miracle, and you dwell on that, watching Ant and Dec make sad sympathetic eyes as they dole out shit-looking food in a glum-looking homeless shelter, and you twist the words, thinking ‘Christmas massacre,’ and a dumb smirk spreads across your face as Emma’s brother leans over to refill your wine glass, and he takes the smirk to be a response to whatever the fuck they’ve been just saying to each other, and he says, “See, Rhys agrees with me!”, and Emma and sister laugh and mock-pissed-off slap at his arms, then Emma reaches across to slap your shoulder, as her mother says, “Give over!”, and you sip heavy on the refilled wine glass and ponder what the fuck this is all leading to.

  Conversation and drinking and the ITV thing all continue, into ad breaks, and bumpers that tell you the show’s called Text Santa, and you realise the gist of it is some Comic Relief knock-off where celebrities arse about for ten minutes at a time and then look all glum about the plight of those less fortunate, and everyone at home’s meant to flit between being fully entertained and heart-wrenchingly overcome with empathy, and text donations, and as the next piece is on refugees packed in to some shitty terraced house in Northern England, Holly Willoughby looking all sad at them, Emma’s brother makes some comment about “if it’s that’s fucking awful, why do you they even bother coming over here?”, and Emma’s mum says, “oh, give over!”, and her sister says, “yeah, he’s right though,” and Emma’s like, “I don’t know, I feel sorry for them,” and you’re suddenly touched in a place of humanitarian empathy you thought you’d dulled completely, as much out of spite for the family at your side as for a genuine desire to make the world a better place, or anything daft like that, and as Emma’s brother starts prattling on about terrorism, you think of the nature of asymmetric warfare, and the complete lack of comprehension of its nature and its effects that are displayed, perhaps wilfully, by the politicians of all stripes in Westminster, and you begin thinking of acting on that feeling, and cancelling out all the bad you’ve done, putting yourself last minute on Santa’s nice list, heading to London on the first train in the morning, watching some YouTube how-tos on improvised explosive devices before you go, and bringing in the new year with a literal bang, seeing what that does to shake this sick fucked society out of its gluttonous Christmas complacency, and as you’re lost in that reverie, conversation rising around you, wine making your head light as you drain off the second glass, and Emma makes some comment about you getting through that quick, and her brother, clearly eager for a male ally, tops you glass up, and tells her “give over, he’s got a way to go to catch up with you three,” and her mother starts laughing and rocking upon the sofa, saying “oh, I don’t know about you lot, but it’s gone right to my head,” and you sip more of the cheap white and think, no, what you’re proposing is a way of justifying the fucked you’ve done, a way of making it all part of some grander moral crusade, which it never was, at any point, and which masks your true intentions in pushing the whole sordid thing to a climax now, no, that’s simply as false and hypocritical and pathetic as any of what your proposed final actions are supposedly going to be responding to, and you sit in stern contemplative silence long enough that Emma’s mother’s prompted to say, “gosh, you’re quiet,” and as your face flushes red and you think of something to say back to that, Emma’s brother’s cut you off with, “well, he can’t a word in edgewise with you lot nattering on!”, and boisterous conversation rises up again, and your eyes flit across the toddler, and are then forced, hard reset, back on the television, as the commercial break gives way to the television studio, and Stephen Mulhern looking all sad and serious beneath his caked-on make-up, and the next piece is on an orphanage for disabled kids in south London, and you smile at the sudden senselessness of the ideas that brings to mind, and realise that that’s it, the only way forward, the only suitable climax to this fucked up story, plunging deeper and darker, deeper and darker, ending this tale in a way so horrifically, senselessly, maniacally fucked, that all that came before seems like something out of a J.K. Rowling novel, and that thought sends a grin across your face, and the wine’s gone to your head, and the family are again commenting on the oddness of your smile, and Emma’s brother’s again defending you, and suddenly you start to speak, and you’re rattling words off, barely cognisant of them, but they fit in perfectly with the mood of the room and the tone and the flow of whatever it is the rest have been saying, and they’re soon roaring with laughter, and responding, and you’re laughing along with them, and the mood is full of mirth and festive cheer, while your mind’s on tomorrow, and Christmas Eve, and London, and the final stage of this fucked up tale which will chill this fucked up sick society to the very fibre of its bones.

  Lost in your thoughts, the others start talking of bed, and in a wine-fuelled desire to end it all, you say you don’t mind giving your room up, not remembering until you’ve said it that your mattress is soaked in defrosted residue and scattered with laptop guts.

  “Nah, it’s fine, really,” Emma says, and her brother’s going to take the couch, she and her mother will share her own room, and her sister and the sweet little toddler will take Dave’s.

  “Say goodnight,” Emma’s sister tells the toddler, and she looks up at you, smiles sweetly, waves goodnight.

  “Goodnight,” you smile back at her, and she grimaces, sensing something sinister in your smile.

  Emma’s sister laughs it off, and her mum laughs as well, and they head upstairs, and Emma’s brother tries to get a conversation flowing, as he reclines on the sofa and pours himself another glass of wine.

  “Sorry, mate, I’m feeling pretty done in,” you say, and soon you’re in your room, sitting upon the now-dry bed, brushing smashed up laptop guts out of the way, alone with the low hum of the fridge-freezer, wondering where to go from here.

  You lie atop the mattress and bring up details on your phone, of the St. Barnaby’s orphanage, for disabled kids, SW4, and then you’re pricing up train tickets, and seeing how much that’ll set you back, and thinking of all the money you blew getting to Southwold Road and spending the night in Branston – spending the night in Branston, you smirk – you decide instead to price up a Megabus, and get one leaving at 4.30am from outside the Hilton in town for a very-reasonable-at-the-last-minute £12.50. You pick up the Gordon Ramsay carving knife and lie upon the bed, admiring it, meditating on the finely crafted blade, letting time slip by, eyes wide open, mind wide awake, as midnight becomes 1am becomes 2, and then you rise from the bed, creep noiselessly across the landing, enter Dave’s room, slash Emma’s sisters throat open in one quick motion, stab the toddler in the face, and realising you’ve felled them with less noise than expected, and you can still hear Emma and/or her moth
er’s heavy snoring as sister & niece bleed out all over Dave’s room, you head back to your own, retrieve the frozen-solid carcass from the fridge-freezer, creep noiselessly into Emma’s room, then batter mother & daughter maniacally over the head with the carcass, pounding skulls, as Emma screams, rolling out of bed, her mother done, head half-caved in. You lunge at your housemate with the Gordon Ramsay as she tries to get away from you, plunging into her chest and back, over and over, till she falls to the carpet, gurgling on her own blood, then you head downstairs. Emma’s brother’s eyes open as you enter the living room, ITV still on, playing some late-night bingo call-in thing, and he mumbles, “Alright, mate?”, and you launch yourself across the room at him, and plunge the Gordon Ramsay down into his chest like it’s Excalibur, slash up, take a few minutes to wash the mess of blood of yourself in the bathroom, before you head out through crisp mid-winter mid-morning, realising once your halfway from Cathays to town that you might’ve left the front door open.

  None of that matters now, you think. You’ve moved out of the shadows, into the mainstream. You’ve announced yourself. Christmas is ruined. Christmas is ruined, you think, and you start laughing, and realise suddenly you’re still brandishing the blood-soaked Gordon Ramsay, and you toss it into the front garden of a terraced house as you walk, mind focused on the final stage of your descent – or ascent, depending on your viewpoint – to the rank of the truly depraved, the truly maniacal, the most horrifying cunt this country’s ever seen.

  “Did you not make a note of the number?” the Megabus conductor’s saying a short while later, once the mad rush of action’s long ebbed out into morning calm, and the bus has arrived, and your standing in front of it, poking at your phone screen.

  You find your reservation number and board the bus, then sit, staring out the window, as the bus rolls out of Wales, down the M4, across the Severn Bridge, to Bristol, and waits about a bit for more to board, the day brightening, you briefly considering getting off for a cigarette, but deciding such trivial delights are far beneath you now, not becoming of the thing that you’ve become.

  You sit and stare out the window as the bus rolls on, and flat southern English fields roll past, this verdant land, this sweet green England, you its least expected conqueror, a citizen who had too much, too much low-pay low-reward call centre work, too much shit television, too much junk food, too many frozen bags of shit from Iceland, too many Nectar points, too many, too much, of all of it. You are the antidote to England, the Celt-perverted scourge of modern Britain, the last sane man on airstrip one, the last real voice of authenticity in the age of double-speak. You are Cameron’s Brexit gambit. You are screaming tabloid headlines telling the proles to blame the immigrants. You are the privatisation of the Post Office, of the railways, the looming sell-off of the NHS. You are the eternally disappointing England football team. You are the decades-long reign of Elizabeth II. You’re Princess Diana’s car wreck in a Parisian tunnel. You are Gazza’s knackered liver. You’re The Sun journalists dotting cans outside his house for a photo-op. You’re the Hillsborough disaster. You’re the corpse of George Michael, of David Bowie, of John Lennon. You are expenses-guzzling MPs. You are airstrikes over Syria. You are the bungled hanging of Saddam Hussein. The defence of the Falklands. The fall of the British Empire. You’re the Opium Wars with China. You’re the tens of millions dead from Indian sub-continent harvests diverted to feed British troops battling to keep our holdings out in Asia. The partition of India, the destruction of Palestine. You are exactly what this country deserves, what this country needs, to wake up to itself, to the horrors it’s inflicted, the horrors that formed it, the horror it is. You are everything that’s wrong with Britain. You are the consumerism-warped spawn of Thatcher. Brick-cladding on bought-out council houses. Cuts to disability benefit. A second Scottish referendum. You are GMTV, Strictly Come Dancing, The X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent. Saturday afternoons on the terraces, Saturday evenings in the pub, Saturday night’s out clubbing, banging ecstasy, field raves, or else slumped at home in front of the television, the two slow deaths afforded of a British weekend. You are the falling value of the pound, the sense that Britain is somehow superior to all its European neighbours, to the scores in Africa, Asia, Latin America, we enslaved, that built this country, this green pleasant land, this England.

  The green and pleasant country bleeds into the grey dystopia of the world’s first great megacity, dilapidated, dying, over-gentrified Boris Johnson’s London, home of the Arab super-rich and the Russian oligarchs, the money laundering capital of the world, the place were global finance concocts its schemes to keep the planet enslaved. The Megabus rolls on through it to Victoria, Christmas Eve early morning traffic barely slowing its progress. By half-seven, your standing in the coach station bearing the name of that last great female monarch, Victoria, the Empress whose dominion the sun never set on.

  “The sun’s setting now,” you mumble to yourself, shuffling through the station. You smirk at the genius of your words, at the spirit of Shakespeare residing in you. “It’ll all be over by Christmas.”

  You move past Sainsbury’s, through a shopping arcade, to a huge monolith of a great old train station, to its basement, and the Tube, the world’s first subterranean public transport system, that century-and-a-half old relic of how special this city, this country, used to be, burrowing into the Earth like some master race of ants, feasting on the royal jelly of all the rest the world’s blood, sweat & tears. You ride the Victoria Line to Brixton, bring your phone up to try and find out where that orphanage was, and suddenly the pissing thing cuts out on you, its screen black, battery out. Game over.

  Half an hour later, you’re in a Wetherspoons, on your fourth free coffee refill, having polished off a Full English, watching Londoners and foreigners eat their way through morning, wondering what you ought to do now. You consider heading to the Houses of Parliament, the Mall, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square… then you think briefly of giving up, heading back to Cardiff, but then you remember the mess you made of Emma’s family back there, and the fact that you probably left the door open, and realise that option’s as dead to you as that family is.

  The coffee’s making you jittery and the weight of focus its forcing your mind into has become weirdly blurring, so you approach the bar and order a pint of a real English cask ale, a special on tap from a local brewer. You drink your way through that, and then an IPA, and think of how its heavy hoppiness was originally meant to ensure the safe transit of booze to our boys ruling India, and the whole stupid descent of the country into twenty-first century hipsterdom, and craft beer, which is the same shit as cask ale, and how pop will eat itself, and the country’s ourorbos, and then you get back on the Tube, head to Trafalgar Square, then sit in the middle of it, on the steps leading up to the National Gallery, watching tourists take selfies in that great wide expanse, that monument to Empire, Nelson’s Column rising up at the end of it, fucking the sky.

  How does this story end? you ask yourself, fearing the brutal anti-climax of a manhunt finding you sat here, before you’ve done anything to push it further, to reach the heights of brilliance you’re capable of, the depths of depravity your soul’s ready to sink into, the true meaning of Christmas you’re ready to rain down over God’s chosen land.

  Morning ebbs into midday ebbs into afternoon in cold nothingness, no ideas coming to you, the buzz of the booze long worn-off, and finally you rise, and walk to Leicester Square, closed in with cinemas, overrun with tourists, on to Piccadilly Circus, and more of the same, and Oxford Street, heaving with last-minute Christmas shoppers, and it strikes you to do something now, before the moment passes.

  You move swiftly along the street to John Lewis, figuring that symbol of middle English class-conscious consumerism, with its parternered staff, the place you’ve purchased your appliances of death, is as good a place to bring the story to a close as any. You scan the utensils for your signature Gordon Ramsay-brand carving knife, your Leatherface’s ch
ainsaw, and see it ensconced in thick plastic sheeting, impossible to open with ease. You want to prise it open there, one final slash and dash through the store to cap it all off, but you realise you’ll have to purchase it first, and something about waiting in a huge snaking queue to the checkout before this climax explodes into wild slaughter is dispiriting, so bloody pathetically British, that you slump instead outside, and meander from Oxford Street to Bond Street, past stores selling suits and luxury brands, all hope deserting you, losing the license to kill you’ve granted yourself, and you feel tears well up within your eyes, something so hopelessly empty and depressing about the predicament you’ve now forced yourself into, out here in London on Christmas Eve, enslaved by your own cowardice, incapable of carrying the narrative any further, and your mind flits instead to flinging yourself into the path of an oncoming Tube train, and just ending it in utter Anna Karenina-style self-destruction, and how such referencing of Russian literature is probably more deeply meaningful than anything else you can think of doing, especially if you did it near Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, but that idea feels so hackneyed and clichéd, that you wander on, and think of going to Hackney, or taking a Hackney Carriage, a black cab, that symbol of the city, or a Routemaster double-decker – and doing what?

  You stop in the centre of the street and realise you really are a by-product of your culture, your society, the shit that’s spawned you; you’re completely unoriginal, bereft of any ideas of your own, regurgitating the spirit of punk rock societal destruction, none of it having any more meaning than something to make people a bit disturbed by over the festive season, quickly forgotten in the New Year, especially as your misdeeds will occur too late in this year to make it onto end-of-year retrospectives, and will have been long forgotten in all the march of unexpected horrors the following year’s sure to bring.