Dead Famous

DAY FIFTEEN. 9.00 p.m.

“I simply cannot believe that they have just made the whole thing up about Woggle,” Layla told the assembled press on the morning after her departure. She had spent all of the preceding night looking at tapes of the show and press cuttings collected for her by her family. It had been a grim business. She discovered that what coverage there had been of her had made her look like a snooty, self-obsessed airhead. Much of that impression had been given in the first handful of shows, for increasingly during the second week Woggle appeared to be the only issue of any real interest in the house.

“It was so not all about Woggle,” Layla protested. “There were nine other people in that house – interesting, strong, spiritual, beautiful people. It has fallen to me to speak up for all of us. We have spent our time under House Arrest interacting, talking, loving, hugging, being irritated and inspired by each other. Woggle, on the other hand, spent his time in the house being a dirty and unreasonable slob and spreading disease, and it is so not all about him.”

But as far as the public were concerned it was, and that morning even more so, because that was the morning that Geraldine put her Woggle policy into drastic reverse.

The sensational news became public about halfway through Layla’s press conference, and as it swept through the room Layla saw the interest in her and anything she might have to say diminish very rapidly to zero.

Geraldine had had to act, and act quickly. Woggle had been a colossal success, but he was now in danger of being an even more colossal failure. If the other inmates walked out now, as they were perfectly entitled to do, Peeping Tom would be left in default of seven more weeks of nightly television that it was contracted to deliver to the network. Peeping Tom would be bankrupted. Which was why Geraldine sent the old press clippings of the photo of Woggle kicking the girl to the police.

The incident had happened four years previously, and Woggle had looked quite different. He had been a little chunkier and had a pink Mohican haircut, but if you looked closely at the large nose and the bushy eyebrows and the spider’s web tattooed on the man in the picture’s neck, there was no doubting that it was Woggle. Actually Geraldine had been surprised that the papers had not dug it up themselves, but since Woggle had never been caught or identified it would have taken a good memory for faces to recall four years previously, when the photo had been splashed across all the front pages with the headline “WHO ARE THE ANIMALS?”

It had been a hunt-saboteur operation that got out of hand. Woggle and a number of fellow Saabs had invaded a kennels in Lincolnshire with the intention of freeing the dogs. The master of hounds and a number of stable hands had confronted them and an ugly row had developed. The Saabs struck first, trying to force their way past the master, and when he refused to yield they had knocked him to the ground with an iron bar. A general fight then broke out, and Woggle had waded in with his boots and a bicycle chain. This was a side of Woggle of which the people in the house and indeed his fans the viewing population had no idea. There was much about Woggle of which the housemates disapproved (everything, in fact) but it would never have occurred to them that a propensity for violence was one of his faults.

But, on occasion, it was. Although as Woggle and his old animal-liberationist colleagues sometimes pointed out, “We’re only ever violent to humans.” Like most zealots, Woggle had his dark, intolerant side, and while he valued the wellbeing of dumb creatures and even insects most highly, he was singularly unconcerned about his fellow man. Therefore when he had found himself confronted by a stable hand wielding a rake, he waded in and whacked her. The fact that she was only fifteen and weighed less than he did did not concern him. Chivalry was not an issue when it came to defending foxes. As far as Woggle was concerned, if you were a fox-murderer, or an associate of fox-murderers, you had sacrificed your right to any consideration. It did not matter if you were small and blonde and cute, you were fair game and deserved what you got. And this girl was small, blonde and cute, which was why, when the newspapers were choosing between the horrific images of violence taken by the master’s wife from the upstairs window of her farmhouse, there had been no contest. It was an image that briefly shocked a nation: the jolly blonde pony-tailed cutie in gumboots and a Barbour jacket spread out on the ancient cobbles of the stable yard with blood in her hair, while the ugly, crusty, pierced, punk thug lashed out at her with his great steel-capped boots. It had been a public relations disaster for the Saabs, compounded by the fact that the fifteen-year-old in question was a dog-mad, fox-loving member of the RSPCA who regularly petitioned the local hunt to switch to the drag method.

Woggle had brought the press clipping to show Geraldine on the last night before he and the others were scheduled to go into the house. He had been delighted to have been chosen and had not told Peeping Tom about his past until this point, in case it counted against him. He was very much looking forward to going under House Arrest, not least because it guaranteed him full board and a dry roof, which was quite a tempting prospect after months spent in a tunnel. Now, however, he was worried that the subsequent notoriety might cause him to be identified as the man in the picture and possibly get him arrested.

“So why are you showing me all this now, Woggle?” Geraldine had asked.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe if you knew about it then if anybody says anything you could say that you’d checked it out and it wasn’t me but some other bloke with a spider tattoo.”

Woggle, like all the other house inmates, had been so taken in by Peeping Tom’s protestations about the contestants’ welfare being their first concern that he actually thought that Geraldine would be prepared to lie to the press and the police on his behalf. In fact her only concern on being confronted with Woggle’s confession had been whether she could possibly get away with letting a person who was wanted for assault into a highly pressurized and confined social environment.

In the end she had decided to risk it. It had only been a scuffle at an animal-rights protest, and Woggle looked like such a peaceful old hippie. Besides which, there were only hours left before the game started, and Woggle was potentially such very good telly that she simply could not face the idea of giving him up.

“We can always deny any knowledge of it if the cunt goes mad and bops someone for eating a ham sandwich,” Geraldine said to Bob Fogarty. “I mean, the cops and the press never caught him at the time, so why should we have recognized him now?”

So Geraldine had hidden the old clippings in a drawer and thought no more about them. Until day fifteen, when she found Peeping Tom in a situation where, having made a hero out of Woggle, she needed, as she said at the emergency planning meeting held in the small hours of the morning, “to get the cunt out sharpish”.

It did not take long for the photograph of Woggle kicking the teenage girl to find its way back to Peeping Tom Productions. Geraldine had sent it to the police at 9.15 a.m. with an accompanying letter explaining that she had received it at the office that morning from an anonymous source.

By 9.30 one of the press ringers at Scotland Yard had alerted the papers and by 9.45 they and the police had been beating a path to Peeping Tom’s door. Inside the house, knowing nothing of these developments, the mood was very sombre.

Woggle had spent the night under his blanket in his usual corner. The others had been drinking out in the garden until the chill had forced them in at around four. They all felt very sorry for themselves, Woggle because he had been assaulted and defiled, the others because their lovely exciting adventure was being ruined by Woggle.

When it came, relief for the eight and disaster for the one struck like a thunderclap.