Dead Famous

DAY SEVENTEEN. 10.00 a.m.

Layla had been back at work for only an hour when she left again.

Back at work? It was incredible. Terrible. Devastating.

During all the time she had been in the house, and indeed ever since she had received the thrilling news that she had been selected to join the House Arrest team, Layla had hardly dared to think of what she would be doing three days after leaving. Of course, she had allowed herself to dream a little and in her wildest fantasies had imagined herself juggling offers to model gorgeous clothes and to present exciting television programmes about beauty products and alternative culture. In her worst moments of fear and doubt she had feared being lampooned in the tabloids and having to go on radio chat shows to defend her dippy-hippie ways. What she never ever imagined, however, was that she would be going back to work.

The brutal fact was that nobody was interested in her. The story of Woggle’s rise and spectacular fall had been the Peeping Tom story of the first fortnight, and now even that was becoming old news. The show had moved on. Layla had been useful to the press only in so much as she could talk about Woggle, and now that this one small nugget of notoriety had disappeared, she was just the beautiful but vain hippie one who got chucked out first.

The one who wrote shit poetry. The one who was obviously entirely and completely absorbed in her own beauty and wonderfulness.

That was how Peeping Tom had presented her, when they presented her at all. As a snooty, stupid cow whose one redeeming feature was that she was highly shaggable. However, since the Woggle story had placed matters of the heart firmly on the Peeping Tom back-burner, even that tainted card had been totally underplayed.

Added to all of this was the fact that Layla’s final act in the house had been to go into the confession box and to tell the world that she had clusters of septic flea bites around her anus. This had been the sole snippet of Layla’s last rant that Geraldine had chosen to broadcast, and it considerably dampened her immediate sexual allure on the outside.

Layla had gone into the house with a chance of stardom and she had emerged just two weeks later as a desperate wannabe who had turned into a sad loser. Even her friends were looking at her differently.

“Couldn’t you have stopped the others from being quite so mean to Woggle?” the more radical of them said. “I mean, in a way he was right. What is the difference between a fox and a flea?”

“I think you should have let David read your poem for you when he offered,” her mother said. “I’m afraid that refusing did look rather precious, dear.”

Layla felt that her life was ruined, and for what? Nothing. She was despised and, more pressingly, she was broke. Peeping Tom did not pay its contestants (except the winner). They were given a small stipend to maintain their rent or mortgages while they were in the house, but that was it. Ex-contestants were expected to fend for themselves, but the only offers of paid employment that Layla had received since leaving the house were to pose nude for men’s magazines. In the end, with weekly shopping to be done and bills to be paid, she had no choice but to ask for her old job back, which had been as a shop girl in a designer clothes shop.

“What do you want to come back for?” the manager said, astonished at Layla’s enquiry. “You’re famous, you’ve been on telly, you must be rolling in it.”

Nobody believed that Layla, who had been on telly every night for a fortnight, could possibly need a job in a shop.

But she did, and they were happy to take her back, thrilled to have a famous person working for them. Thrilled, that was, until they found themselves with a shop full of idiots with nothing better to do than snigger from behind the dress racks at somebody who had been on the television.

“I voted for you to leave,” said one mean-looking teenager. “I rang twice.”

“I saw one of your nipples in the shower,” said another.

“Do you reckon Kelly’s going to shag Hamish, then?”

They all called her Layla, or, worse still, Layles. They knew her name, they knew her, or at least they thought they did.

A middle-aged man brought her a small bottle of walnut oil, which for a moment Layla thought was nice, but then he asked her to go out with him and she realized that people thought that the sort of girl who went on House Arrest (and got chucked straight off) was the sort of girl who would shag you for half the ingredients of a salad dressing.

At shortly after ten a photographer from the local newspaper arrived. “Must be the quickest ‘Where are they now?’ feature in the history of showbiz,” he said, snapping away without asking.

The shop manager had called the paper. “I thought you’d be pleased, Layles. I mean, after all, you must have done it for the publicity.”

Layla put down the jumper she had been trying to fold for some time, took £9.50 from the till, which was pay for one hour’s work, and went home. Once there she picked up the phone and asked Directory Inquiries for the phone number of Men Only magazine.

They were delighted to get her call. “What we wondered was would you do an erotic shoot with this beautiful girl who had her kitchen done up on Changing Rooms? We thought we could call it Celeb-lezzy, you know, just as a joke, like.”

Layla put down the phone. She was so angry. Angry with Peeping Tom Productions, of course, but particularly angry with the people who had nominated her for eviction. She tortured herself by watching the tape over and over again. There they were sitting in the box, so smug, so self-important. They had sealed her fate, they had doomed her to being the first out.

David. Dervla. Garry and Kelly.

Kelly was the real humiliation, that little ladette slapper had had the gall to nominate her.

Dervla she hated also. Those weasel words from the confession box burned into her soul. “She’s a lovely, lovely girl, a very gentle, caring and beautiful spirit, but I feel that in the end her loveliness would be able to blossom more beautifully outside of the house.” What a stuck-up, hypocritical Irish cow. The truth was she had wanted Layla out because she hadn’t wanted someone better looking and more intelligent than her grabbing the sensitive male vote.

Dervla and Kelly. For some reason it was the women that hurt the most. Probably because Layla felt that she was so much better at being a woman than they were. They should have supported her, they should have made her their champion against pseuds like David and yobbos like Garry and Jazz. Their rejection of her was, she felt, almost sexist.

Dervla and Kelly. Those were the two she really hated. But particularly Kelly. That same Kelly who had nominated her and then hugged her and kissed her when she was voted out, and said she loved her. Kelly, who had pretended to be upset, who had so compounded her humiliation for all the world to see.