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

  Cold Calling

  HAYDN WILKS

  Copyright © 2017 Haydn Wilks/Dead Bird Press

  Dead Bird 008

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781520335698

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HAYDN WILKS

  THE DEATH OF DANNY DAGGERS

  Cardiff. The last few days of summer.

  Danny Daggers is about to die. He just doesn’t realise it yet.

  A Leeds University student with a very popular YouTube channel, Danny Daggers is taking his alcohol-downing stunts on tour.

  He’s about to find out that not everyone’s a fan.

  Ji Eun is a Korean student doing work experience at the South Wales Post.

  Rory Gallagher is the alcoholic veteran journo who’s mentoring her.

  Carnage in Cardiff might be just what they need to begin and revive their respective careers.

  Tom and Joseph work at one of Cardiff’s many call centres.

  Tom is fed up of working boring jobs and living for the weekend.

  Joseph is just happy to have a job.

  Then there’s the Amstell brothers.

  Simon’s just escaped from prison. And he happens to be the father of Joseph’s girlfriend’s son.

  And his brothers happen to be psychopaths.

  These stories collide and intersect over a frantic few days of heavy drinking, drugs and ultraviolence, set against a backdrop of dystopian modern Britain.

  AMERICOSIS:

  COMPLETE SEASON ONE (VOL. 1-5)

  A naked man arrives in New Mexico claiming to have traveled through time.

  He says that he's America's savior.

  A bizarre sexually-transmitted infection in New York takes control of people's bodies and burns them out in an incessant drive to infect others.

  And a Presidential candidate is conversing with angels.

  His aides think he's crazy.

  The electorate might not agree with them.

  It could all be madness. It might be the apocalypse.

  FURTHER INFORMATION

  www.haydnwilks.com

  www.deadbirdpress.com

  You were born the year the Berlin Wall fell. For your generation, it’s impossible to conceive of life outside capitalism. It feels as permanent and natural as gravity or the four seasons. You were born into a system and you’ve inherited its world view. A person’s beliefs are shaped by their society. No pre-industrial revolution European intellectuals were openly atheist. Human civilisation is an echo chamber. Imagine how ideas that are emerging now will get amplified and distorted over time.

  These are the thoughts that fill your head as you stare into the computer screen; at names and addresses and telephone numbers; black details on slow-blinding white.

  You’ve been here 10 months. That might not sound much of a milestone, but it’s a record. You’ve lasted nowhere longer than six months before.

  Another milestone’s approaching – by the time you’re 12 months into the job, you’ll be 28. You’ll have survived 27, the age rock stars die at.

  Dialtone gives way to answer phone in your headset. A record appears in front of you. The dialtone returns. You hit Alt + Tab with your left thumb and forefinger. Google Maps. Back to the dialler. You highlight their postcode with your mouse. Ctrl + C. Alt + Tab. Ctrl + V. Double click. Street View. You’re looking at their house when the woman answers.

  “Hello,” she says, sounding suspicious.

  “Hi,” you say, looking at her semi-detached home on a new build estate somewhere in Derby. “I’m just calling you back from Go! Life about a free life insurance policy review we’re currently carrying out for you.”

  “What do you mean, calling me back? I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to you before.”

  The idea behind telling them you’re calling them back is to make them think they’ve in some way initiated contact, or at least spoken with you previously. The truth is all the names and addresses in Go! Life’s database are bought, the bulk of them from parenting websites. New parents are likely to be considering changes to their life insurance policy; their contact details are worth their file size in gold.

  “Perhaps your husband spoke to us,” you say, attempting to quell her suspicion.

  “My husband’s been dead six months.”

  Silence.

  “Sorry,” you mumble.

  You click ‘hang up’. You feel like shit until the eleven o’clock fag break rolls round – even more like shit than usual. And you always feel like shit.

  You’re a piece of human excrement in the great sewer system of the Cardiff call centre circuit.

  “Any of you lot seen Klan?”

  “Klan?” Craig asks, tapping cigarette ash.

  “No,” Jake says, “I’ve heard it’s meant to be good though.”

  “Yeah,” Keith confirms, “it’s well good. It’s about this KKK family in America in, like, the ‘20s, or ‘50s, or something. It’s boss.”

  “Me and the missus been watching America’s First Monster recently,” Jake says. “Any of you lot seen that?”

  This is what people talk about; Netflix series, 100 hour marathons locked into a contiguous false reality, something to distract them from the dull slow death of the reality they’re actually engaged in. You smoke and pretend to listen, pretend to see nothing wrong in the way they let their lives ebb away while fake lives are played out in front of them; lives of Colombian drug lords, American biker gangs, cancer-ridden chemistry teachers who turn to brewing crystal meth. Condensed into a movie, into a 3 hour maximum momentary distraction, is one thing; dragged out over a century of hours, such exploits leave you restless, anxious, acutely aware that each binge-watched episode is bringing you an hour closer to death.

  “That’s that thing about that serial killer, innit?” Keith says, referencing whatever show Jake just brought up.

  “Yeah,” Jake says, “Ed Gein.”

  “Have you got to the end of the first season yet?” Craig asks.

  “Yeah, we just started on Season Two last night.”

  “So d’you see that bit where he chops that cheerleader’s clunge off?”

  “Yeah,” Jake laughs, “that was well grim. Sounds like something you’d enjoy, Sicko.”

  ‘Sicko’ – Jake’s addressing you. You smile meekly at him, tapping your cigarette ash, you having drifted out of conscious listening to their bland prattling on.

  “What you get up to last night? Wanking over webcams again is it?”

  You smile and you laugh and you go along with it. You tell them that’s exactly what you did because it gives them something to peg you with, something to attach to you. There’s no point being a wallflower. People will put up with all manner of perversion, all manner of fucked-up-ness, they’ll positively revel in it, but what people won’t tolerate is boredom. At least, boredom beyond the job description.

  You finish up your cigarettes and head back inside and get on the dialler and field calls and field calls and field calls and then break for lunch, and head out to a Gregg’s with the boys, chat shit about football and UFC and how fit Michaela looks today, with that cropped top revealing the tribal tattoo in the small of her back, and how her job seems pretty pointless, wandering about the office, shuffling papers around, and that it seems Barney and Jim just gave her that position after she failed miserably as a cold caller on the outbound dialler, that they’re just employing her to give the lads in the office something to ogle, a little eye-candy to keep morale up.
/>   “Probably more likely so that they can perv on her themselves,” Jake remarks.

  More cigarettes are smoked, then the cold calling is returned to, the automated dialler throwing you through rendition after rendition of your truth-dodging opening spiel: “Hi, I’m just calling you back from Go! Life with regards to a review of your life insurance policy we’re currently carrying out for you…”

  Of the hundreds of calls you make during the day, just two show sufficient interest to be passed on to an advisor, and neither of those leads lead to anything.

  6pm comes, and freedom, and the long walk up Atlantic Way, Keith ambling along beside you, bitching and moaning about customers being a cunt to him, taking each rejection personally, barely taking any consolation in the fact that Michaela is walking a little ways ahead of you both, and you can therefore spend the ten-or-so minutes down Atlantic Way staring at the way her light denim jeans perfectly display that tight little arse of hers. Staring at it gets you so worked up by the time you reach the Magic Roundabout, a zany council-sanctioned art installation of a bunch of signs tossed atop a roundabout at odd angles, where Keith turns off towards the city centre and Queen Street station, to catch a train back to whatever shit Valleys town he lives in, that, as you stand, traffic streaming past, waiting for the lights to change, and the road to be crossed, you stare at the prostitute you see here at the same time every day, and start to wonder if you oughtn’t accost her, make an offer. It’s something to do, some release from the tension, something different, a break from the endless drudgery, the monotony…

  She’s looking up and down the road at the cars streaming past, arms folded in her brown leather jacket, black miniskirt beneath it, dyed blonde hair, and as you stare at her, she senses your eyes on her, and looks in your direction. You immediately look away, as the lights change, and you walk, too chastened and irritated at your cowardice to think of anything else.

  Home.

  Emma’s on the couch watching Hollyoaks.

  “Good day?” she asks.

  “Shit,” you say, smirking at your quick-witted honesty. “You?”

  “It was alright,” she says, and she proceeds to delve into some kind of actual explanation of how her day was and who she dealt with at the coffee shop and how some co-worker you may or may not have heard of before pissed her off, and while she’s saying all this you move from the living room doorway to the kitchen, and you fill the kettle with water, and you ask her if she wants a cuppa, and she pauses her story long enough to tell you she’s ‘alright, thanks,’ and then you pour boiling water into your mug, splash a little milk into it, squeeze the teabag hard against the mug’s side with a spoon, drop the bag into the bin besides the sink, then move back through the living room, to the hallway, up the stairs, and into your bedroom.

  You place the mug besides your laptop and hit the start-up button, then grab a scissors and flip the laptop over, jabbing the scissors into one of the holes in the fan’s case fast enough to knock the blade and get the fan moving before the computer boots up with an error message telling you to check the fan’s working properly, which would force you to restart. You try and recall how long the laptop’s lasted you now. Too long, you conclude, blowing onto your mug and taking a sip of tea. It takes an age for Windows to load, and as you stare into the screen and wait, you wonder how many hours of your life have been spent staring into computer screens. You realise the supreme role the computer plays in your life: it is your provider of sustenance, of entertainment, of companionship; your work, your income, your window to the world, the bars that obscure the real world from you, your friend, your lover… the computer is all. “And what are you going to be for me today?” you say softly, smiling at the ridiculousness of speaking out loud to the computer, at the fleeting thought of one of your housemates overhearing you, Dave’s possible reaction being the one that entertains you most: “What the fuck are you up to, lad?” he’d say, in that overly-dramatic Northern English way of his, “Talking to your computer?”

  What is life? you think, taking another sip of tea and placing the mug back down besides the laptop. You click the icon in the centre of the screen and tap your password in, then you’re staring and waiting again for all the start-up applications to load into the system’s memory. This is your leisure time, you remind yourself. This is your escape from the drudgery of the work day. And how do you spend it? How many minutes have been lost staring into the screen, waiting for the thing to start up?

  You double-click the icon for Google Chrome and nothing happens. You lift your tea to your lips and sip again. In impatience, you double-tap the icon again. Nothing. Double-tap. Nothing. Double-tap. Nothing. Then six windows load up all at once. You ‘X’ away five of them, then you stare at it, at the rainbow colours of Google’s logo on white, the black-outlined search box beneath, all the world but a word or phrase away, all the knowledge of all human existence, all of it, all of it condensed into that space, into that search bar, and you lift the tea to your lips again, and you think, you wonder, if you shouldn’t ought to do something different, if you shouldn’t ought to do something new. There’s a world in the white in front of you. You sip your tea and repeat that to yourself. There’s a world in the white in front of you. And the only thing you’re inclined to pump into the white is bile and ejaculate.

  Bile first. You cycle through Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, one of your fake accounts, one you keep purely for grieving, and you throw insults and troll and bait and piss people off and make them irrationally angry, and it makes you feel you’re doing something, having some effect on the world, doing more than dully staring at a screen showing Hollyoaks or Klan or America’s First Monster or Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or football, or any of the other myriad distractions people stare at to make them forget how empty and shit and meaningless their existence is. The exchange of bile excites you, triggers something positive within your brain chemistry, something that propels you to transition to exchanging different bodily fluids with the internet, and you’re clicking your way through soft-porn subreddits, getting worked up, and with these thoughts flitting in your mind, that you want to do more than just stare, you navigate to CamWhores, to rows and columns of screengrabs, adjectives and girls’ names spliced with symbols beneath them; x.x.Lu$tyLucy.x.x., M( . )ist Meg( . )n, #%ClammyChloe%#, but something about their whiteness repulses you, reminds you of the great bovine dying breed of masticating masturbating cud-chewing post-empire pre-full-collapse Brittania you were born into, forced into, against your will, so you click the ‘Asian’ tab, scroll down past Filipinas, staring at the thumbnail tits and arched backs and arseholes as they pass, wondering how many of these are forced into it, how many are in control of their own destiny, and you note with sadness they’ll be making much more than typical living wage out there, with relatively-rich white working class fuckless desperados like you chucking tips at them, and as your mind struggles with this sad fact of life, you scroll back up the page, double-click a smiling cutie’s thumbnail to open the most popular current stream, and after a few seconds of buffering, you’re greeted with a petite Filipina’s naked ass turned toward the camera, her delicate hands ramming a salmon pink dildo in and out of it. You tap your hands on the crotch of your jeans as your manhood swells up beneath them, your engines revving into life. The top picks are always good to get things going, they’ve usually put on some sort of a show to get enough views to propel them that high up the chart, but it doesn’t get you off anywhere near the same as finding a low-ranking lonesome girl, making her yours with a few tips, then squirming into her mind…

  Your dick swells stronger just thinking about some of the fun you’ve had on this website, the terrified looks, the beautiful real emotion forced into the streaming fakeness of the whores in front of you, when you cut through the bullshit pretence that they’re enjoying this, that they’re as turned on as the fuckless dweebs filling up the chat at the side of the screen with compliments, throwing endless five, ten, twenty credit ti
ps, their recipient taking the odd break from ramming the pink dildo in and out of her arse to thank them for it, and in this maelstrom of growing engagement you click the back button, scroll back down to the bottom of the page, and find a channel marked with a sweeter-than-average thumbnail, and a flashing number beneath that tells you there’s only less than ten users logged on to her channel.

  Double-click.

  She stares into the screen, those placid black eyes, black hair falling sleek across china white skin. There’s no more than five dickheads jabbering away in the chat at side of screen. You drop a tip - a single token, to get her started. She smiles. You smile back, unseen by her. Then your door is shaken almost off its hinges by the hammering of a fist against it. You ignore it. The hammering continues.

  “Hey, soft lad, open up! What you doing in there?”

  Dave.

  You frown, want to ignore, but the hammering continues. You pull your pants on, jeans up, thrust a T-shirt over your head, and throw the door open.

  “Fucking hell, soft lad, d’in’t your mum tell you you’d go blind if you spend every evening wanking yourself stupid?”

  “I weren’t wanking,” you say meekly.

  He looks at the dishevelled state you’re in.

  “Bollocks you weren’t. Anyway, now you’re done with it, how’s about we go smash a few pints down the Woodie?”

  .“I dunno, man, I’m pretty tired from work. This weekend was a bit of mad one.”

  “Yeah, too right, I’m fucking gasping for a pint now, mate. What you saying?”

  “I dunno, man.”

  “Fucking come off it, soft lad. One quick pint and a game of pool. Beats staying in wanking off all night.”

  Pretty soon you’re at the bar, drinking Carlsberg.

  “I tell you what, right, this thing in Brazil, it sounds mental, but I’d be fucking well up for it.”