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.
DAY SEVENTEEN. 8.00 p.m.
It had been two days since Woggle’s exit, and the House Arrest experience had returned to the basic formula of whining, backbiting and wondering who fancied whom.
“It’s day seventeen in the house,” said Andy the narrator. “After lunch, a meal of pasta and vegetable sauce, which Sally cooks, the group talk about first love.”
“Well, it’s gotta be Chelsea FC, hasn’t it?” said Gazzer. “You never forget the first time you see the Blues.”
“Because they’re so shite,” Jazz opined.
“Even when they’re shite they’re beautiful.”
“We’re talking about proper love, Gazzer,” said Moon. “Not fookin’ football.”
“So am I, gel. Let’s face it, the love a bloke has for his team transcends all others. Think about it. I fancy loads of birds, all blokes fancy loads of birds, ’cept poofs, and they fancy loads of blokes. Gay or straight, men like to put it about a bit, full stop. But when it comes to football, you only ever support one team, don’t you? You’re faithful, Moon, it’s true love.”
Watching from the depths of the monitoring bunker, Geraldine Hennessy could see that without Woggle life in the house was beginning to look dull. She needed to do something quickly to pep things up. Her solution was to give the housemates more to drink. “What is the number-one interest people have in watching these programmes?” she asked her production team at their morning meeting the next day. There was silence. Geraldine’s minions all learned quickly that most of her questions were rhetorical.
“To see if any of the inmates shag, am I right? Of course I’m right. When you get down to it, that’s what it’s all about. But basically it never fucking happens, does it? Nobody ever actually does it! We all keep up the pretence that it’s going to happen, us and the newspapers and the bleeding Broadcasting Standards Commission, we all pretend that it’s all so bleeding titillating when it patently isn’t. But nobody ever actually does the business. And why is that, I ask myself?”
She was indeed asking herself, for her cowed minions remained silent.
“Because nobody is ever pissed enough, that’s why! Which, in a nutshell, is the problem with reality TV! Not enough booze! Oh, we can give them hot spas and massage rooms and nookie huts and all that bollocks, but in the long run no one is going to do the nasty, insert the portion, prise open the clam, heat up the sausage or cleave the bearded monster with the one-eyed lovesnake unless they are completely arseholed!”
Everybody shuffled their papers and looked embarrassed. They all knew that they were involved in a fairly tawdry exercise, but they fervently wished that Geraldine would not revel in it quite so much.