“I mean, I thought it would be cool to have a little of your cheese,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” Layla replied. “Half of it, actually… But that’s totally cool. I mean totally, except you will replace it, right?”
“Sure, yeah, absolutely, whatever,” said David, as if he was above such matters as worrying about whose cheese was whose.
“Later,” said Andy the narrator, “in the girls’ room, Layla confides in Dervla about how she feels about the incident involving the cheese.”
Layla and Dervla lay on their beds.
“It’s not about the cheese,” Layla whispered. “It’s so not about the cheese. It’s just, you know, it was my cheese.”
DAY THIRTY-ONE. 8.40 a.m.
“I’m honestly not sure if I can continue with this investigation,” said Coleridge.
DAY THIRTY-ONE. 2.00 p.m.
“Actually it was Layla’s cheese that gave Geraldine her first crisis.”
Trisha had returned to the monitoring bunker to speak once more with Bob Fogarty. She and Coleridge had agreed that Fogarty was the person who knew most about the housemates and also about the workings of Peeping Tom. “Why was there a crisis over the cheese?” she asked Fogarty.
“Well, because the duty editor resigned and took both his assistants with him. I had to come in myself and cover. Don’t you call that a crisis? I call it a crisis.”
“Why did he resign?”
“Because unlike me he still had some vestige of professional pride,” Fogarty reflected bitterly, dropping a square of milk chocolate into his cup of watery foam, something Trisha had never seen anyone do before. “As a highly trained, grown-up adult, he simply could not continue to go home to his wife and children each evening and explain that he’d spent his entire working day minutely documenting a quarrel between two complete idiots about a piece of cheese.”
“And so he resigned?”
“Yes. He sent Geraldine an email saying that House Arrest was a disgrace to the British television industry, which, incidentally, it is.”
“And what did Geraldine do?”
“What do you think she did? She leaned out of her window and shouted, ‘Good riddance, you pompous cunt!’ at him as he got into his car.”
“She didn’t mind, then?”
“Well, it was very inconvenient certainly, particularly for me, but we soon got a replacement. People want to come to us. We make ‘cutting-edge television’, you see.” Fogarty’s voice was bitter with sarcasm. “We’re at the sharp end of the industry, we’re hip, challenging and innovative. This is, of course, an industry where they thought it was challenging and innovative when the newsreaders started perching on the fronts of their desks instead of sitting behind them… Damn!”
Fogarty fished about in his cup with a teaspoon, searching for the square of chocolate. Trisha concluded that he had been intending only to soften the outside rather than melt it completely. People develop strange habits when they spend their working lives in dark rooms.
“God, I was jealous of that bloke who left,” Fogarty continued. “I came into television to edit cup finals and Grand Nationals! Drama and comedy and science and music. What do I end up doing? I sit in the dark and stare at ten deluded fools sitting on couches. All day.”
Trisha was discovering one of the great secrets of House Arrest. The people who worked on it loathed the people they were charged with watching.
“It’s all just so boring! No one is interesting enough to be looked at the way we look at these people, and particularly not the sort of person who would wish to be looked at. It’s catch twenty-two, you see. Anyone who would want to be in that damn stupid house is by definition not an interesting enough person to be there.” Fogarty stared at his bank of television monitors. A long, sad, hollow silence ensued.
“It’s the hugging I hate most, you know,” he said finally, “and the stroking … And above all the endless wittering on.”
“You should meet my boss,” said Trisha. “You two would really hit it off.”
Fogarty fell silent once more before resuming his theme.
“If that lot in the house had any idea of the contempt in which we hold them from our side of the mirrors, the cruel nicknames we give them… ‘Nose-picker’, ‘Sad slap’, ‘the Farter’… If they knew the damning assessments we make as we chop up their comments to suit our needs, the complete lack of respect we have for any of their motives… well, they’d probably wish they’d all got murdered.”
DAY THIRTY-ONE. 3.00 p.m.
Coleridge and his team were becoming increasingly frustrated with Woggle. The problem was that he kept getting in the way of the other housemates. The people at Peeping Tom had thought him such good telly that large chunks of what footage remained from the early days of the show concerned his exploits and the other housemates’ ever more frustrated reactions to them.
“If it had been Woggle that was murdered we could have made a circumstantial case against any of them,” Coleridge complained. “I’m sick of the sight of him myself and I didn’t have to live with the man.”
“You can’t blame the producers for pushing him,” Hooper said. “I mean, for a while there the country was obsessed. ‘Wogglemania’, they called it.”
Coleridge remembered. Even he had been aware of the name popping up on the front pages of the tabloids and on page three or four of the broadsheets. At the time he had not had the faintest idea who they were talking about. He had thought it was probably a footballer or perhaps a celebrity violinist.
Hooper ejected the video tape that they had just finished and put it on the small “watched” pile, then took another tape from the colossal “have not yet watched” pile and put it into the VCR.
“You do know that the ‘have not yet watched’ pile is just a satellite of a much bigger one, don’t you, sir? Which we have in the cells.”
“Yes, I did know that, sergeant.”
Hooper pressed play and once more the sombre Scottish brogue of Andy the narrator drifted across the incident room.
“It’s day four in the house and Layla and Dervla have suggested that a rota be organized in order to more fairly allocate the domestic chores.”
Coleridge sank a little further into his chair. He knew that he couldn’t allow himself another mug of tea for almost fifty minutes. One an hour, fourteen pint mugs a working day, that was his limit.
DAY FOUR. 2.10 p.m.
“I want to have a house meeting,” said Layla. “So would it be cool if everybody just chilled? So we can all just have a natter maybe?”
Across the room Moon’s bald head poked out from the book she was reading, a book entitled You Are Gaia: Fourteen Steps to Becoming the Centre of Your Own Universe.
“It’s dead spiritual, this book,” Moon said. “It’s about self-growth and development and personal empowerment, which at the end of the day I’m really into, if you know what I mean, right?”
“Yeah, Moon, wicked. Look, um, have you seen the state of the toilet?”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s not very cool, right? And Dervla and I…”
“I’m not fookin’ cleaning it,” said Moon. “I’ve been here four days and I ain’t even done a poo yet. I’m totally fookin’ bunged up, me, because I’m not getting my colonic irrigation, and also I reckon the electrical fields from all the cameras are fookin’ about with me yin and me yang.”