Dead Famous

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.

“Very nice,” Geraldine observed. “I love a bit of muted mastication, the editor’s friend. Right, chop the tangerine off the front and run that sequence mute under Kelly’s dialogue about finding head massage sensual.”

Fogarty gulped before replying. It really seemed as if this time he had had enough. “But… but, Kelly made that comment to David while they were having the rice, chicken and vegetables that Jazz cooked. If we drop it over Sally’s face it will look as if… as if…”

“Ye-es?” Geraldine enquired.

“As if she’s getting a thrill out of massaging Sally’s head!”

“While Sally,” Geraldine replied, “with her grinding jaw and tense cheeks, sucky-sucky lips and little wet tongue tip, is positively creaming her gusset, and we, my darling, have got what can only be described as a half-decent lezzo moment.”

The silence in the monitoring bunker spoke loudly of the unease felt by Geraldine’s employees. Geraldine just grinned, a huge, triumphant grin, like a happy snarl.

“We are in a ratings trough, you cunts!” she shouted. “I’m paying your wages here!”

DAY TWENTY-TWO. 6.10 p.m.

“Such a shame there was no eviction last night,” the young woman was saying. “The last one was terrific, although I was sorry to see Layla go. I mean I know she was pretty pretentious, but I respected the integrity of her vegetarianism.”

“Darling she was a poseur, a complete act, I hated her,” said the man, a rather fey individual of about thirty.

Chief Inspector Coleridge had been listening to them chat for about five minutes, and did not have the faintest idea who or what they were talking about. They seemed to be discussing a group of people that they knew well, friends perhaps, and yet they appeared to hold them in something approaching complete contempt.

“What do you think about Layla going, then?” said the man, whose name was Glyn,