“Hullo, Tom.”

“Hullo, Kelly,” said Sam, the soothing voice of Peeping Tom.

“Um, I just wanted to ask you about the party last night and… um… when I went off to the um… the little hut with Hamish.”

“Yes, Kelly,” said Peeping Tom.

“Well, I was a bit drunk, you see… Well, actually I was very drunk, and what I wanted to ask was… Did anything happen? I mean, I know nothing did, I’m sure nothing did, and I love Hamish, he’s great, but, well… I can’t really remember and, well, I just wanted to know.”

“Why don’t you ask Hamish, Kelly?”

“Well, he was drunk too and… Well, it’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it? Saying to some boy ‘Did we do anything last night?’”

“Peeping Tom reminds you of the rules, Kelly, that no outside influences or information are allowed to housemates. This includes retrospective discussion of an individual’s behaviour. Peeping Tom expects you to know what you did.”

“I do know what I did, I just want to know what…”

Kelly stopped. She sat in silence for a moment, her eyes seeming to plead with the camera.

Trisha looked hard at Kelly. What had she been about to say? Could it have been “what he did”?

“Please, Peeping Tom, I’m not asking for detail, all I’m asking is whether anything happened in the hut.”

There was a pause. “Peeping Tom will get back to you on this, Kelly.”

“What!” Kelly gasped. “Just tell me! Surely you don’t have to think about it! I mean, you were watching. Did anything happen?”

Kelly’s voice was shaking. “Is this a gag? Are you having a laugh? Like when someone crashes out at a party and wakes up with their head shaved and toothpaste smeared all over them? Come on, I can take a joke. Did I make a fool of myself? Did anyone make a fool of me?”

“I myself was not on duty last night, Kelly. We must consult with the relevant editors. You can wait in the box if you wish.”

And so Kelly sat and waited.

Trisha and Fogarty watched her waiting.

“She doesn’t look very comfortable, does she?” Fogarty observed. “She thinks that she got drunk and did the naughty, naughty. She didn’t, of course. You’ve seen the footage. Very boring.”

Finally the voice of Peeping Tom returned. “Peeping Tom has spoken to the editor concerned, Kelly, and we have decided that it is within order for us to assure you that you and Hamish kissed and cuddled, after which you both fell asleep under the blankets and no further movement was observed.”

Kelly looked relieved. She had just wanted to be reassured. “Thanks, Peeping Tom,” she said. “Please don’t show this, will you? I mean, I was just being stupid and I wouldn’t want to say anything about Hamish because he’s great and I love him… You won’t show it, will you?”

“Peeping Tom can make no promises, Kelly, but will bear your request in mind.”

“Thanks, Peeping Tom.”

“And of course as you’ve seen, we did show it,” said Fogarty, “or at least an edited version. Geraldine loved it. She said it was terrific telly. ‘A sad, drunken old slapper pleading to be told she didn’t make a twat of herself the night before,’ was how Geraldine put it. Said it happened to her all the time, that she was always bumping into blokes at parties who claimed to have shagged her rigid the previous Tuesday and who she didn’t know from a bar of soap.”

“Quite a character, isn’t she, your Geraldine?”

“She’s a slag. That’s all.”

“Strange how Kelly thought that she could say all that on camera and then ask you not to show it.”

“I know, they all do that. Amazing, really. They actually think we’d put their wishes before the prospect of a bit of good telly. They’re always creeping into the box and saying, ‘Oh, please don’t show that bit.’ I mean, if for one moment they stopped to think, they might ask themselves why we spent over two and a half million pounds setting up the house. I don’t think it was to provide them with a nice shortcut into showbusiness, do you?”

“No, but then stopping to think isn’t really what these people are about, is it? They’re too busy stopping to feel.” Trisha realized that for a moment she had sounded exactly like Coleridge. She was twenty-five years old and had started to talk like a man in his fifties, going on seventies. She really would have to get out more.

“It’s pathetic, really,” said Fogarty. “They even thank us when we give them some little treat or other, usually designed to get them to take their clothes off. It’s Stockholm Syndrome, you know.”

“When captives fall in love with their tormentors.”

“Exactly, and begin to rely on them, to trust them. I mean, how can that girl not have realized that as far as we’re concerned she’s a prop, an extra, to be used, abused and utterly misrepresented as we see fit?”

“I suppose it is pretty obvious, now you come to mention it. But I suppose it’s not just the housemates who fall for it. The public believes in you too.”

“The public! The public, they’re worse than us! At least we get paid to bully these people. The public do it for fun. They know they’re watching ants getting burnt under a magnifying glass, but they don’t care. They don’t care what we do to them, how we prod them, as long we get a reaction.” Fogarty stared angrily at the screen upon which Kelly was still frozen. “The people in that house think that they’re in a cocoon. In fact it’s a redoubt. They’re surrounded by enemies.”

DAY TWENTY. 6.15 p.m.

“It’s two-fifteen,” said Andy the narrator, “and after a lunch of rice, chicken and vegetables cooked by Jazz, Sally asks Kelly to help her dye her hair.”

Geraldine stared at the screen showing various camera angles of Kelly applying shampoo to Sally’s mohican haircut prior to dyeing it.

“A new low,” mused Geraldine. “I thought Layla’s cheese was our nadir but I reckon watching some great lump of a bird getting her hair washed has got to plumb new and unique depths in fucking awful telly, don’t you? Fuck me, in the early days of TV they used to stick a potter’s wheel on between the programmes. Now the potter’s wheel is the fucking programme.”

Fogarty gritted his teeth and continued with his tasks. “What shot do you want, Geraldine?” he enquired. “Kelly’s hands on her head? Or a wide?”

“Put Sally up on the main monitor – the close-up of her face, through the mirror. Run the whole sequence, right from where she bends down over the basin.”

Fogarty punched his buttons while Geraldine continued her reverie. “Tough time for us, this. Eviction night tomorrow but no eviction. That cunt Woggle has deprived us of our weekly climax. We are in a lull. A low point, a stall. The wind is slipping out of our fucking sails, Bob. The Viagra pot is empty and our televisual dick is limp.”

Andy the narrator emerged from the voiceover recording booth to get a cup of herbal tea. “Perhaps I could tell them what everyone had for pudding,” he suggested. “David made a souffle, but it didn’t really rise. That’s quite interesting, isn’t it?”

“Get back in your box,” said Geraldine.

“But Gazzer didn’t finish his, and I think David was a little bit offended.”

“I said, get back in your fucking box!”

Andy retreated with his camomile.

“Always trying to grab himself a few more lines, that bastard. I’ve told him, if he does one more beer ad voiceover he’s fucking out. I’m going to get a bird to do it next time, anyway… Stop it there!”

Fogarty froze the image of Sally’s face. Dribbles of shampoo foam ran down her temples; Kelly’s fingertips could be made out at the top of the screen. Sally’s hand was at her mouth, frozen in the moment of inserting a segment of tangerine into it.

“Run it on, but mute the sound,” Geraldine instructed.

They studied Sally’s silent countenance for a few moments, as her jaw moved about, her lips pursed and her cheeks became slightly sucked in, then the lips parted a fraction and the tip of her tongue licked them.