Next they pulled off his shirt, ripping the buttons as they did so, and finally they wrenched Woggle’s filthy string vest up over his head. Now Woggle was naked. A struggling, shrieking, pale, bony little creature with a great mop of dreadlocks and his beard flying and flapping in the summer sun.
“This is assault! I am being defiled! Get off me!” he shouted.
“I’m being assaulted and defiled by your fleas!” Hamish cried, speaking for them all. “My fucking armpits are bleeding.”
There was a barbecue at the back of the house and the boys had already cranked it up in preparation for the attack. Jazz threw Woggle’s clothes and his sandals onto the fire. There was a strange fizzing sound. “Fuck me!” he cried. “I can hear the fleas popping!”
“Not popping, screaming!” Woggle shouted.
“Let’s shave his head!” shouted David. “He’s bound to have lice.”
“No,” said Jazz firmly. “You can’t mess with a man’s barnet, even Woggle’s.”
“Fascists!” shouted Woggle, but his voice degenerated to a cough as Garry and Hamish began dousing him in flea powder. For a few moments they were all engulfed in a great cloud, and when they had finished Woggle was a luminous ghostly white from head to toe. Even his hair and beard were white as snow.
They left Woggle prostrate and naked in the middle of the lawn. As he turned briefly towards one of the garden cameras, flesh-coloured lines began to streak his death-white face as the tears sprang from his eyes.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 5.00 p.m.
“That was the image Geraldine made me close the show with,” Fogarty told Trisha. “We didn’t show any of this…” He tapped an assortment of the buttons on his editing console and there appeared on the bank of screens the coverage from inside the house recorded immediately following the attack.
The housemates were taking no pleasure from the incident. There was no whooping, no hollering. They were all genuinely sorry for Woggle. Dervla was already making him some herbal tea (which he accepted in silence), and Kelly was planning a tofu and molasses comfort cake. The mood was subdued but resolved. As one, they felt that the men had acted in order to counter a pressing social issue which threatened the wellbeing of the group.
In the editing suite Fogarty retreated to the little kitchenette area to get more of his chocolate from the fridge. Trisha wondered why he kept it cold when he was going to put it in his coffee.
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Fogarty remarked. “They actually deluded themselves that the nation would applaud their ability to police their own community.”
On the screens the self-justification continued.
“We could have gone on strike and asked for him to be ejected,” Hamish was saying, “but what would we have looked like? A bunch of kids who couldn’t handle their own problems.”
“Yes,” said Layla. “The whole point of being here is to discover whether we can work together. If we had just gone running to Peeping Tom with our first group problem we’d basically have failed the test.”
Fogarty shook his head in disbelief. “Incredible. That girl Layla is bright enough, and yet she actually believed all that bullshit about House Arrest being a genuine experiment in social engineering. It’s a TV programme, for God’s sake! How could she not realize that the single and only point of the whole bloody exercise is to attract advertisers?”
“Well, it certainly did that, didn’t it?” said Trisha.
“Oh yes, our ratings shot up and with it Peeping Tom’s revenue.” Fogarty turned his attention back to the screens. “Watch this,” he said. “There’s more that we didn’t broadcast.”
On the screens Woggle came in from the garden.
He refused Kelly’s offer of cake without a word.
He also turned his back on the various offers of clothing and water.
Layla suggested that she read him one or two of her healing poems. “Or else we could hold hands and hum together.”
Woggle did not even look at her. Instead he took up a blanket to cover his nakedness and retreated silently to his corner.
“This is it, coming up now,” said Fogarty. “Dervla’s confession.”
Sure enough, there was Dervla slipping into the confession box.
“Of course I understand the boys’ frustration,” she said. “We are after all suffering quite considerably here. But I did want to say that I feel enormous sorrow over Woggle’s distress and wished that a better way could have been found to deal with his health issues. Deep down I think he is beautiful.”
Fogarty stopped the tape. “Now I believed then and I believe now that Dervla is a lovely, lovely girl and that she was really upset about Woggle. But do you know what that shitty little cynic Geraldine made of it?”
“What?”
“She reckoned that Dervla had worked out that Woggle would be popular on the outside and was trying to curry favour with the public by supporting him.”
“Wow, you’d have to be pretty perceptive.”
“And pretty calculating, which I don’t think she is.”
“On the other hand, she was the only person who didn’t nominate him.”
“You’re worse than Geraldine! She said exactly that! Said that if she didn’t know better she’d think that Dervla had inside information.”
“But that’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is. Let me tell you that if anyone was cheating I’d know. I see everything.”
“But if she did have a secret advantage, and one of the others found out about it…” Trisha stared into Dervla’s deep-green eyes, trying to read the thoughts that Dervla had been thinking in the confession box. Before death had changed everything.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR. 8.00 p.m.
Trisha returned to the station without eating. Having watched Fogarty sucking chocolate for an hour, she had lost her appetite, which she regretted now because it looked like it was going to be another long night.
“Let’s get through Woggle this evening, shall we?” Coleridge suggested. “I don’t think I could face coming back to him tomorrow. What happened after the flea powder attack?”
“The public weren’t happy, sir,” said Hooper. “Within hours of show eleven going out there was a crowd outside the Peeping Tom compound calling for Garry, Hamish, David and Jazz to be arrested for assault. Geraldine Hennessy had to play music into the house to drown out the chants.”
Trisha put the tape Fogarty had given her into the VCR. “People weren’t happy inside the house either. Look at Woggle. He’s devastated.”
“The rest of them don’t look too good either.”
“They feel guilty about it.”
It was clear from the subdued conversation and unhappy faces that everybody was feeling very uncomfortable.
They took refuge in cleaning, frenzied cleaning. With Woggle, the carrier and principal breeding ground, de-flead, it was possible to begin cleansing the rest of the house, which the nine of them did with a vengeance. Every mattress and sheet was taken outside, washed, dried, powdered, then washed again. Every garment of clothing, every cushion and cloth. Everybody showered and applied more powder. They got through ten containers of it, all of which had had to come out of their weekly shopping budget. Not only had Woggle’s fleas half eaten them alive, but they had also cost them the equivalent of eight precious bottles of wine or thirty cans of lager.
Throughout the whole of this day-long cleaning process Woggle remained beneath his blanket in his corner, swaying slowly and singing to himself. A traumatized troll, as one newspaper was to put it.