“And what about people who say that telly is dumbed down? That we need more, I don’t know, history programmes and classic drama-type stuff?”
“Well, certainly there is a place for history-type stuff and all that classic drama malarkey, but at the end of the day politicians, teachers and social workers need to be listening to young people, because I don’t think, right, that history and stuff is really very relevant to what young people are interested in today.”
“Big up to that,” said the hip late-night guy. “We like that!”
“Because at the end of the day,” Billy continued, “what politicians and teachers and stuff need to do is connect with what kids are really into, like the Internet. We think that the Internet and the web are terribly important, and of course these wicked experiments in reality TV like House Arrest.”
By the time the show was ending and the final band was being introduced, Coleridge had fallen asleep. He woke up to the vision of a sweating American skinhead wearing only board shorts and 90 per cent tattoo coverage shouting “I’m just a shitty piece of human garbage,” at the screen.
He decided it was time to go to bed. Geraldine had had a lucky escape with her show, that was clear. By rights, it seems, it should have been a flop.
David, on the other hand, had not been so lucky. He was the fall guy, the national joke, and Geraldine had made him so. If David had known this, Coleridge reflected, he might have been tempted to take some kind of revenge on Peeping Tom, but of course he could not have known, could he?
DAY THIRTY-THREE. 10.15 a.m.
The picture of Woggle on the map on the incident room wall was almost completely obscured by the numerous tapes that terminated on it. Trisha had just completed the pattern by running a ribbon to him from Dervla, with the words “pubic hair row” written on it.
Dervla had seemed so determined to be quiet and serene, so like the muse in an advert for Irish beer. But you couldn’t maintain that if you followed Woggle into the bathroom.
DAY EIGHT. 9.30 a.m.
“It’s day eight in the house,” said Andy the narrator, “and Dervla has just had a shower.”
“Woggle!” she shouted, emerging from the shower room, clutching a bar of soap.
“Yes, sweet lady.”
“Can you please remove your pubic hairs from the soap after you have finished showering?”
It was their own fault, of course. Woggle would have been quite happy not to shower at all, but the group had made a personal appeal to him to wash thoroughly at least once a day.
“That way in a month or two you might be clean,” Jazz had observed.
Now they were paying the price for their finickiness. Woggle’s matted pubic mullet had never seen such regular action, and the unaccustomed pressure was causing it to moult liberally.
Dervla waved the hairy bar of soap in his face. She had thought hard before confronting Woggle. Quite apart from the fact that she did not like scenes, she also knew from her secret informant that Woggle was a very popular person outside the house. Would having a row with him alienate her from the public? she wondered. On the other hand, perhaps it would do the public good to get some idea of what she and the other housemates were having to deal with. In the end, Dervla could not help herself: she just had to say something. Woggle tended to do his cursory ablutions in the middle of the night, and, being first up, it was always Dervla who encountered his residue.
“Each morning I have to gouge a small toupee off the soap, and the next morning there it is again, looking like a member of the Grateful Dead!”
“Confront your fear of the natural world, O she-woman. My knob hair can do you no harm. Unlike cars of which you have admitted you own one.” In one single bound Woggle had got from his lack of social grace to her responsibility for the destruction of the entire planet. He was always doing that.
“It’s got nothing to do with fucking cars!” Dervla was shocked to hear herself shout. She had not raised her voice in years. Hers was a calm, reflective spirit, that was her thing, and yet here she was shouting.
“Yes, it has, O Celtic lady, for your priorities are weirding me out, man, messing with my head zone. Cars are evil dragons that are eating our world! Whereas my hair is entirely benign, nonvolatile dead-cell matter.”
“It is benign non-volatile dead-cell matter that grew out of your scrotum!” Dervla shouted. “And it makes me want to puke! Sweet Virgin Mary Mother of Jesus Christ, where does it all come from! We could have stuffed a mattress by now! Are you using some kind of snake oil ointment down there?”
Unbeknown to Dervla, Woggle was actually a little hurt by her attack. Nobody ever credited Woggle with having feelings because he seemed so entirely oblivious to everybody else’s. But Woggle actually liked Dervla, and he fancied her, too. He had even been to the confession box to confess his admiration.
“There is definitely a connection between us,” he said. “I’m fairly certain that at some point in another life she was a great Princess of the Sacred Runes and that I was her Wizard.”
Confronted now by this attack from one he clearly rated so highly, Woggle attempted to assume an air of dignified distance. “I remain unrepentant of my bollock hair,” he muttered. “It has as much right to a place in this house as does every other item of human effluvia, such as, for instance, the pus from Moon’s septic nipple ring, which I respect.”
It was a clever ploy. Moon had insisted that the whole group look at her septic nipple the night before and had won herself no friends in the process.
“Hey! Leave my fookin’ nipple out of it, Woggle!” Moon shouted now from where she sprawled on the purple couch. “I’ve told you. How was I to know that dirty bastard in Brighton was using shite metal ’stead of gold, which he said it was. He said it were fookin’ gold, didn’t he? The bastard. Besides, I’m using Savlon on my nipple and I don’t leave what comes out of it all over the fookin’ soap.”
“Yes, don’t try and change the subject,” Dervla insisted. “Moon’s doing what she can about her nipple infection and you should clean the soap after you use it. And not just the soap: clean out the plughole too. It looks like a St Bernard dog died there and rotted.”
“I shall clean up my hair,” Woggle said with what he assumed was an air of ancient and mighty dignity.
“Good,” said Dervla.
“If,” Woggle continued, “you promise to renounce your car.”
DAY THIRTY-THREE. 2.30 p.m.
Every time the “not yet watched” pile of tapes began to look a little smaller and less intimidating, somebody brought up more from the cells. They seemed to go on for ever.
“It’s day eight, and Jazz and Kelly are chatting in the garden.”