Dead Famous

DAY TEN. 3.00 p.m.

Woggle was sitting in his corner ringed by the other housemates.

“My fleas are forcing you to address your double standards,” Woggle protested. “Would you hunt a fox?”

“Yes, I fucking would,” said Garry, but the others had had to admit that they would not, David, Layla and Moon even to having been vaguely active in the most recent anti-hunting campaigns.

“Fox-hunting is an abomination,” David said with his usual air of quiet superiority.

“Yet you would hunt my fleas,” Woggle said. “Explain to me the difference between a fox and a flea.”

Clearly nobody really knew where to start.

“Well…” said Kelly, slightly nervously, “foxes are cute and fleas aren’t.”

“Oh, don’t be so silly, Kelly,” David snapped.

“She is not being silly,” said Woggle. “She has articulated a universal truth, for it is the shame of humankind that we judge the value of a life in aesthetic terms. That which we find beautiful we nurture, that which we find ugly we destroy. Oh, cursed are we, the human virus that infects this perfect planet.”

David had clearly had enough of this. He wasn’t having the moral high ground pulled from under him. “Foxes do very little harm. Hunting them is a sport, not a necessity, that is what makes it despicable and utterly unacceptable to decent modern people living in twenty-first-century New Britain.”

“Fox-hunters say foxes do lots of harm. They say that foxes are vermin,” Woggle replied.

“I deny their claims.”

“Where’d you live, then, Dave?” asked Gazzer, who was always interested in a wind-up. “On a farm?”

“I live in Battersea,” David replied angrily. “But that’s not the…”

Gazzer and Jazz laughed at David’s discomfort, which made David furious. He loathed the way people pretended that you had to live in the country to understand anything about foxes.

“This is a serious debate,” he snapped. “It is not about cheap point-scoring.”

Woggle agreed with him and pressed his advantage. “The difference between foxes and my fleas, comrade, is that my fleas irritate you and foxes don’t. But the fascist farmers and the Nazi hunters claim that foxes irritate them. They claim that foxes eat the chickens and terrorize the hedgerows.”

“I absolutely refute their claims,” David insisted, “but the point is anyway -”

“The point is, O Adolf of the insect kingdom, the point is, Herr Hitler, that, whether foxes are rural terrorists or not, I would not kill them just as I would not kill my fleas, bite me though they will. This is because I am a morally developed individual, whilst you, on the other hand, are a vicious murdering bastard hypocrite scumbag member of the Gestapo who should be letterbombed.” Woggle’s thin nasal voice had become firm; he obviously meant what he was saying. He actually leapt to his feet.

“Your concern for animal welfare,” Woggle shouted, the flesh around his bushy eyebrows suddenly glowing red, “goes exactly as far as the point where your own interests are threatened, and no further. You are just like the tens of millions of vile scum in this country who would ban fox-hunting and seal-clubbing but happily gorge themselves on factory-bred fried chicken and mutated beefburgers! If you would hunt my fleas I suggest you do so with due self-knowledge. I suggest you wear a red coat, O Genghis Khan, and blow a bright horn. I suggest that you smear the blood of my dead fleas on the faces of your young after the kill and have a party to celebrate with stirrup cup served in beakers carved from the hooves of slaughtered stags! For you are no better than Lord Blood Sport of Bastardshire, David! You, who profess to care so much, are in fact the self-appointed Master of the Peeping Tom flea hunt!”

The curious thing was that when Woggle’s flea rant was broadcast at the end of the first week of House Arrest, most people watching managed to find common ground with what he said. The anti-fox-hunters, of course, welcomed their most prominent ever national spokesman, while the country sports people hailed a man who forced urban animal activists to confront the selective nature of their agendas.

Woggle was like the Bible: everybody claimed he proved their point. And people just loved him. Suddenly it was as if Woggle was the nation’s pet dog, dirty, smelly and intrusive, but somehow rather loveable.

If the nine other inmates of the house had had any idea of the extent of Woggle’s popularity outside the house they would not have done what they did. But sealed off as they were from the outside world, they never dreamt that this flea-ridden crusty who could not sit down without leaving a stain was becoming a hero.

It wasn’t fair, of course. Geraldine knew that it wasn’t fair, but not surprisingly she didn’t care. Geraldine knew that nobody could have lived with Woggle and put up with it. The fact was that the other nine inmates had been incredibly tolerant; most people would probably have killed Woggle already. But, like life, television is not fair and Geraldine, having unwittingly created a national craze, was happy to edit towards it.

She therefore chose not to broadcast the patient and fairly considerate efforts that the housemates made to persuade Woggle to wash his clothes, clear up after himself and above all to deal with his fleas. She did not show how Kelly brought him blankets in the night and Dervla ensured that his dietary requirements were included on the house shopping lists. She showed only moments of the lengthy discussions that Garry, Jazz and Woggle had about football, a passion they all shared. No, Geraldine cut straight to the day when Garry, Jazz, David and Hamish leapt on Woggle as he lay in the garden and forcibly stripped him, burnt his clothes and covered his writhing, protesting form with flea powder.