Ben Elton - Dead Famous

Now Hamish let his body twitch a little, as if he had been sleeping and had startled himself awake. Kelly did not stir as he pulled back the rug, scratching his head, rubbing his eyes and looking around as if to say “Where am I?”

Then he feigned a smile and winked at the camera. “Nearly, eh?” he whispered up at the little red pin light. “I can’t believe it, and it was me that fell asleep first. For God’s sake, don’t show this on the telly. My mates will never ever let me live it down.”

With that he got up from the cushions, put his trousers back on, gently rearranged the rug over Kelly’s unconscious form and returned to the party.

He was greeted with a chorus of leery cheers.

“Sorry to disappoint you people,” said Hamish, “but we both nodded off. I think I went first, if you can believe that.” Hamish desperately hoped that they could.

Then he retreated to his bed and to a very troubled night, as over and over again he asked himself if there was any way that Peeping Tom could have known the terrible thing he had done.

Digital penetration.

Silently in the darkness he thanked God for stopping him before he had done something even worse.

Kelly groaned once and she was awake. “What the f…?” Then she remembered. She was in Copulation Cabin. The Shag Shack, Bonkham Towers, Haveitoff House. Even before the show had started, when Peeping Tom had announced this refinement to the house structure, the press had had about fifty names for it. And now she was in it, in front of the nation. What must she look like?

“Don’t worry,” she said to the camera that hung directly overhead. “Nothing happened.”

She reached out from under the rug for her jeans, grinning sheepishly. Like Hamish before her, she felt obliged to address the camera.

“Was I arseholed last night…? Still you have it to do, eh?”

Kelly’s shapely legs emerged now and she donned her jeans with considerable elegance considering her hangover. “Bet Hamish feels rotten too.”

She smiled once more at the camera, but beneath the smile lay unease. Why did she feel so dirty? Why did she feel such a sad old slapper? Just the hangover, surely? After all, she knew that nothing had happened. Had anything happened? Had she let Hamish get further than he should have done?

Definitely not. She was sure about it. She remembered everything clearly, she had snogged him and then she had crashed out. Going exactly as far as she had intended to go.

So why this feeling? Why this unease?

There was something, something about herself that she could not quite define, except that she wondered… Had anything happened? How could it have? She remembered it all, she always remembered, that was one of her characteristics as a drinker, she always remembered what she did. What she didn’t do.

And she remembered it now. She had kissed him, and crashed out. And yet… She had this feeling that she’d been…

Abused? Was that it? Did she feel abused? Surely not. Never.

It was an illusion. It had to be. The Peeping Tom house was the safest place on earth. There were cameras watching all the time . Nobody would take such a risk under those circumstances. Least of all Hamish. He was a good bloke. And a doctor.

Someone else? Later? No. It was absolute madness. Even as she sat there thinking, she knew that there were five cameras watching her. Five all-seeing chaperons there to look after her. She smiled up at them once more. “Yeah, lucky nothing happened, eh? You’re my protectors, aren’t you, Peeping Tom? My dad don’t have to worry, does he? Nothing’s going to happen while you’re watching.”

In the monitoring bunker Geraldine, who had arrived breathlessly in the small hours to be confronted with the night’s disappointments, was livid.

“That’s not the idea , you stupid cow!” she shouted at Kelly’s face on the monitors. “That’s not the fucking idea at all!”

Kelly emerged from the hut and dived straight into the pool. She did not even take off her jeans. It was a spontaneous action, a sudden need to be clean . And another £500 microphone gone.

Behind the glass doors the house slept. Jazz, Moon and Sally had not even bothered to rise from the couch.

Even Hamish had finally fallen asleep, but his dreams were troubled and studded with guilt. And when he awoke it was worse. Did she know? Did anybody know? What had the camera seen? Nothing. If they had, then Peeping Tom would have intervened, otherwise they would have been compounding a felony. Surely, no. Hamish felt certain that from the outside nothing would have seemed amiss or, if it had, then nothing had been said. Discovery could only come from within. Did Kelly remember? How could she? She had been asleep. She had definitely been asleep.

Kelly did not go to bed. Having changed out of her wet clothes, she made herself a cup of tea and sat down on the green couch, trying to put from her mind the suspicions with which she had awoken.

It was here that Dervla found her an hour later as she made her way to the shower room. Dervla, like the rest of them, had been up late, but she did not want to sleep in, she never slept in, she always wanted to get to the shower room first. She wanted to look in the mirror.

“Good morning, Kelly,” Dervla said. “Things got a bit close with Hamish there for a bit, didn’t they?”

“What do you mean? We were only having a laugh.”

Kelly’s defensive tone made Dervla smile. Perhaps something had gone on, after all.

“Well, you were both pretty drunk, weren’t you? And he was drooling over you all evening, tongue fair hanging out, so it was. If the poor fella hadn’t have nodded off first I think you’d have had to beat him off with a stick.”

“Nodded off first. Is that what he said happened?”

“That’s what he said… Are you all right, Kelly?”

“Yes! Yes, absolutely fine,” Kelly replied, about twenty times too eagerly, and lapsed into silence.

Dervla headed for the shower room, left Kelly to it. She could hear the camera moving about beyond the glass.

“Morning, Mr Cameraman,” she said as she soaped herself beneath her T-shirt. “I hope you feel better than I do.” She slid a slippery, sudsy hand inside her knickers.

Beyond the glass the camera’s electric motor gave a little hum as it pulled focus. Dervla might have heard it had the shower not been running.

The message was already being written as Dervla approached the basin to brush her teeth. The writer’s tone had changed.

“K is your enemy,” it said. “Fucking slut is still ahead. She cock-teases the boys to avoid nomination.” And then the unseen finger underlined the first four words…

“K is your enemy.”

Sergeant Hooper was thinking about ringing for a cab. He had had a long and fruitless day on the murder inquiry followed by a pretty monumental amount of beer and curry and it was time to pull the pin.

It had been a decent night out with the lads, but it was about to go boring on him. It wasn’t that he particularly objected to pornography, although he was not a big consumer of it himself, it was just that he had never seen the point of watching it with your mates. As far as he was concerned, the purpose of porn was to stimulate sex, either sex with yourself or sex with a partner. That was what it was for. To be masturbated over or to be watched with a girlfriend as a way of expanding the horizons of your own nocturnal activities. What he was not into doing was sitting bleary-eyed on a friend’s couch holding a kebab in one hand, a can of Stella in the other and drooling over it with a bunch of pissed-up off-duty coppers.