Ben Elton - Dead Famous

“Starbursts, they’re called now,” said Jazz with mock contempt. “Get with the plot, girl. You probably still think a Snickers is a Marathon. It’s fucking globalization gone mad, that is. We have to call our sweets the same as the Yanks do. There ought to be protests.”

“And what was wrong with Mivvis and Rockets anyway, I’d like to know?” Dervla added. “We enjoyed them.”

“We are the last generation,” said Jazz solemnly, “that will have known the joys of truly crap lollies. No kid will ever again be asked to suck the red and orange stuff out of a block of ice and be told that it’s a treat.”

In the monitoring bunker Geraldine was already getting frustrated. When she had supplied them with ice cream it had been in the hope that they might eat it off each other’s bodies, not talk about it.

“You’re a philosopher, Jazz,” said Dervla.

“What’s that, then? Irish for wanker?” asked Gazzer.

“It means,” said David, “that there are more things in heaven and earth than you could ever dream of.”

“You don’t have any idea what I dream about, Dave mate.”

“Naked women?”

“Fuck me! You’re fucking clairvoyant, you are. You’ve got a gift.”

But Jazz was not being diverted so easily. He had struck on a subject which he knew his book on comedy would recognize as the stuff of top routines.

“It’s like these days everything is pretending to be something it’s not, nothing is happy as it is. Take Smarties, not happy any more, now you have to have little mini Smarties and great big fuck-off Smarties.”

“And of course fookin’ Smarties original,” Moon chipped in.

“Well, that is, of course, your Smarties Classic like with toothbrushes, David . Everything has to pretend it’s something else, and it won’t stop, you know, not now it’s started. Everything we love will change, get repackaged and flogged back to us as an improvement… Fish-fingers. I’ll bet you one day they start doing mini-fish-fingers, giant fish-fingers…”

“Ice cream fish-fingers,” said Dervla.

“That’s coming, I swear that’s coming,” Jazz replied.

Dervla was laughing now. “It’s salad dressing, but in a bar!”

“You got it, girl!”

“All your favourite breakfast cereals, in a series of bite-sized soups!”

“Yeah, all right, all right.”

Jazz was taken aback to have had the comic baton wrested from his hand so easily. He was supposed to be on the roll, not Dervla. She was a trauma therapist.

In the monitoring bunker Geraldine’s impatience was growing. “Come on!” she shouted. “Get your kit off and get in the sweatbox, you cunts!”

Perhaps they heard her in the house, or else maybe they had got drunk enough by this time, but for whatever reason the conversation now turned to the forthcoming task.

“So how are we going to do it, then?” Sally asked. “I’m not just getting undressed in here with all the lights on.”

“Do it in the bedroom, then,” said David. “It’s dark in there.”

“No way,” said Dervla. “They have infrared cameras or whatever. We’d look like flipping porn stars, so we would.”

“Very nice,” Gazzer observed.

Kelly flicked a look across at David, just a look, and a little smile. If he noticed he did not return it.

“I don’t give a fook, me,” said Moon pulling off her shoes.

“Well, I do,” said Sally. “Just because the sweatbox represents a legitimate ethnic experience doesn’t mean we have to do a striptease.”

“Why not?” said Moon. “That’s the only reason they’re making us fookin’ do it, ain’t it?”

“I don’t know, Moon,” said Hamish. “They’ve given us sheets to cover up with if we have to go to the loo.”

“Ah, but that’s just for show, a mask to hide their true agenda,” Dervla said.

“Exactly,” Moon concurred. “Which is for us to show the lot and if possible have it off as well.”

“You can be so cynical, you,” said Hamish.

“Hamish,” Moon insisted. “They’ve supplied us with fookin’ chocolate-flavoured condoms , for God’s sake.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide.” Garry laughed. “If anybody wants to see my knob they only have to ask. Quite frankly, sometimes they don’t even have to ask.”

“Yes, well, I do not have any desire to see your penis,” said David. “We have to do this task or we get half-rations next week, but that’s no reason for us to feel obliged to allow our bodies to be exploited.”

“Fookin’ hell, David,” Moon sneered. “You wander round the house in your little pose pouch the whole time exploiting what a great bod you’ve got, which I’ll admit you have, but you still look a right ponce because you’re obviously so fookin’ pleased with it, and now you won’t even get your kecks off for this week’s task.”

“A man in his underwear, Moon,” David responded, “is no more naked than a man in his swimming costume.”

Geraldine crushed her styrofoam cup in her hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake , you precious bunch of cunts . Get your KIT OFF.”

Eventually the task had to be begun, and so they all made their way into the darkened bedroom and began to strip off with varying degrees of bravado. Dervla was easily the most cautious, keeping her undies on right up to the point of entering the sweat-box, before throwing them off in a flurry and scuttling inside.

Geraldine was fairly satisfied. “I think we got one of her tits, didn’t we?” she asked. “Certainly her bum. We’ll stick that in the trailers. The whole nation’s been waiting to see a bit more of sweet pure little Dervo.”

Inside the sweatbox the darkness was absolute. Dark as the grave, as the newspapers were to remark the following morning.

And it was hot. Very, very hot.

Following the instructions given, Jazz and Gazzer had laid out a false floor made of scented pine wood, underneath which were electric heating units, which had been on all afternoon.

“Ooh, it smells dead lovely,” Moon remarked.

“Ow! This floor’s burning my bum,” squealed Kelly.

“You’ll get used to it,” Dervla assured her. “Give yourself a minute to acclimatize.”

The floor was indeed hot on their bare flesh, but not unbearably so. In fact it was rather pleasant, exciting almost.

“Sweet Mother of Jesus,” Dervla voice continued in the darkness. “Now I know why they call it a sweatbox.” She had been inside for only a few moments, but already she could feel the perspiration streaming down her skin. Her forehead and armpits were instantly dripping wet.

“Well, it’s giving me a sweaty box, that’s for sure!” Moon shrieked, and they all laughed with her. “Oh, my God! Who’s arse was that!”

“Mine!” three or four voices answered simultaneously.

They could all feel their flesh gliding across each other’s but the darkness was total. Nobody knew whose bottom belonged to whom.

“Four hours,” said Hamish. “We need another drink.”

Somehow, and with much groping about, plastic bottles containing warm Bacardi and Coke (mainly Bacardi) were handed round.

“I could get to like this,” Garry remarked, and to varying degrees he spoke for them all.

In every sense, the party was warming up.

Having spent the day reviewing the footage from the very first day in the house, Coleridge and Hooper turned once more to the tape of the night of the murder. The same images that Geraldine, the Peeping Tom production team and 47,000 Internet subscribers had watched live less than forty-eight hours before. Those same strange, fuzzy, bluish-grey pictures that the night-sight cameras had transmitted from the boys’ bedroom. A bedroom that seemed innocent and empty, entirely normal, save for the weird-looking plastic box in the middle of the room, a box which they knew contained eight drunk, naked people, the only evidence of whom were the strange bulges that seemed to undulate against the polythene walls from time to time. It was an eerie and depressing sight for the two policemen, knowing as they did that one of those living bulges was shortly to die.