stood for it too, except Saint fucking Dervla, of course.”
“I don’t agree,” Fogarty replied. “Firstly, we couldn’t have broadcast it if we’d done that. Secondly, it would have been all steamed up anyway, and thirdly, it wouldn’t have been half as exciting even if we could see, because it’s the anonymity that’s so intoxicating. We don’t know who’s who and nor do they.”
“When I want your opinion, Bob, I’ll ask for it.”
Inside the box the darkness was as intense as the excitement. Dervla felt Jazz slide across her. She felt his taut skin and beautiful rock-hard muscles against her own bare flesh.
“My God,” she thought. “He doesn’t know it’s me he’s sliding over.”
Jazz was pretending to be a snake, hissing and writhing. She could feel his muscular stomach in her lap as he giggled and wriggled across her and then… then she felt his penis dragging across her thighs, big and heavy, obviously already semi-hard. She could not resist it. Through the darkness she placed her hand in its path, palm upwards, deliberately letting him glide into it.
Then very gently she squeezed. It felt wonderful in that coal-black anonymity to be doing something so outrageous. She could feel herself sweating all the more as Jazz stopped his wriggling and slithering for a moment and allowed the object of her attentions to grow bigger and harder in her hand. In that moment, for Dervla, Jazz was no longer the beery-leery jack-the-lad fly-boy king of clubbing cool that she knew and was beginning to rather like, he was a Greek or a Roman God, a living, breathing version of all those wonderful works of art she saw on her summer holidays in Europe. He was a fantastical nighttime love muse.
Then she heard his voice and of course it was only Jazz. “Is that you, Kelly, you naughty, naughty slapper, you?”
“What?” said Kelly’s voice from the vicinity of Jazz’s feet.
“Ah,” said Jazz. “So not Kelly, then.”
Dervla gave a tiny gasp and let go, shocked at her audacity!
She had been gripping Jazz’s penis! That was terrible! Absolutely terrible. She would have to face him at breakfast in the morning! Her, the chief objector to crudity. The Lady High and Mighty. The good girl of the group. What if he knew it was her?
He did know.
Her tiny gasp had given her away. Even amongst the general grunting and giggling, Jazz had caught its tone.
“Who, then, I wonder,” he said, and then he sang a line of “When Irish eyes are smiling.”
Dervla felt herself go crimson in the darkness. What if he told Peeping Tom? What if he went into the confession box and told the nation that she had grabbed his penis in the darkness and squeezed it until it was hard? Then her thoughts were interrupted, because Gazzer made them all roar with laughter.
“Fuck me, I’m glad Woggle ain’t in here!”
Everybody shrieked. It was such a terrible, terrible, madly hilarious thought, to be stuck in a crowded sweatbox with Woggle. To have to feel him, smell him.
Dervla laughed too, and suddenly she didn’t care about having touched Jazz. In fact she was proud of it. She hoped he did tell. She knew the other inmates thought her a prude, and it was certain that the public thought so too. It wouldn’t do her chances of winning any harm at all to add a bit of generous, good-humoured ladette behaviour to the mix. Jazz thought that she was beautiful, he had made that clear often enough, and she
“Hey, Jazz,” she called out jubilantly into the darkness. “I just felt your willy!”
“Any time, fine lady, any time!” Jazz shouted back and again they all roared.
In the camera corridor the one operator on duty recoiled as if he had been electrocuted.
Larry Carlisle had been covering the entrance to the sweatbox viewed across the living room and through the open door of the boys’ bedroom, which had been left slightly ajar. Now, as he twitched involuntarily, the lens of his camera swung wildly upwards covering, for a moment, nothing more interesting than the ceiling. Fortunately for Carlisle nobody in the monitoring bunker was watching his camera feed at that moment because a much better picture of the shadowy box was being supplied by the remote hot-heads in the bedroom itself. Quickly Carlisle regained control of his camera and returned its focus to the proper place.
But he still had to struggle to stop his hand from shaking on the controls. Carlisle could scarcely contain his bitter anger.
They shrieked, they laughed, they whooped. Nobody could quite believe that Dervla had been the first to get so specifically raunchy. It emboldened them all, seeming to give the whole game genuine class.
The cleverer, more manipulative people in the box realized that Dervla’s sudden sexiness was a pretty clever trick in terms of the public’s perception of her. There was nothing that kept up audience interest better than surprises, particularly sexual ones, and Dervla’s grabbing of Jazz had certainly been that. Moon, David, Hamish and Garry all realized that Dervla had raised the stakes and they would have to lift their game accordingly.
Moon decided then and there that she would later confess to Peeping Tom that she had had intercourse inside the box and had no idea with whom it had been. She resolved to admit to this whether it had happened or not, but actually she thought it probably would happen, because now the touching and feeling began with a vengeance.
“So are we going to play this identification game or what?” shouted Jazz.
“Yes!” came the reply.
“OK, then, go for it!” Jazz shouted. “Everybody move around and nobody talk, OK? And when you’ve had a really good squirm, cop a feel and guess who you’ve got.”
Suddenly it was all shrieks and giggles and boozy lust as they slipped about together.
Hamish was almost beside himself with excitement. This was the reason he had come into the house. Like Moon, he wanted to have sex, and then he wanted everyone to know about it. With Kelly, preferably, but frankly any female partner would do. He felt a hand stroking his back, gently teasing his sweaty spine, gently running all the way down to the cleft of his buttocks. Was this the one? Should he turn about and try to make love to whoever was touching him?
He heard a whisper in his ear. “Sally?” It was David’s voice.
“You’ve been in this house too long, mate,” Hamish whispered back.
“Fuck!” David barked, snatching his hand away as if Hamish was a red-hot stove.
“Shhh!” whispered Jazz from nearby.
David was annoyed. His mistake made him feel vulnerable. He wondered if Kelly had heard. All his doubts flooded back once more. Was she laughing at him in the darkness? Was she thinking to herself that Boris Pecker would not have minded at all who he found himself feeling up? Would she tell? Would she suddenly blurt it out and tell? David wanted to leave the sweatbox there and then, he wanted to run. But perhaps that in itself might provoke Kelly.
“Funny how he couldn’t take a bit of sex,” she would say. “I would have thought it would have been right up his street.”
“Up his arse, more like,” Gazzer would say after Kelly had explained, and then David would be a laughing stock, a national joke. David decided he had better stay put. He reached for one of Geraldine’s artfully placed plastic bottles of warm, strong booze and drank deep.
Hamish was not going to make the mistake that David had made. It was a woman’s thigh he was holding, for sure. So soft and smooth and not too firm. Kelly? he thought. Possibly, but just as easily Dervla or even Moon. Not Sally, he was delighted to conclude, and probably not small enough for Dervla, but you couldn’t be sure. Whoever it belonged to it was fun to touch and squeeze. Hamish was feeling much better about himself now. Kelly’s kind
