Dead Famous

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.”