CAST:

The Hardparcels live in a detached house with furnishings that are expensively unpleasant.

Neighbourhood Watch reports include a disproportionate volume of entries concerning the Hardparcels and police sergeant Clarissa needed psychotherapy within a few months of the Hardparcels’ arrival. The local fire-station lists house and family as a ‘hazard’.

Teen son Keith has the looks, personality and intelligence of something found in a gutter, with the libido of a rutting monkey. He identifies with reptiles and his room is filled with their tanks. Some are venomous, usually ones that escape.

Keith goes out with Denise. No-one else will.

He likes fiddling with mechanical things and Denise.

His best friend washes little but has surprising amounts of money. The friend’s overworked probation officer is trying to find explanations other than the worst while his mother blames everyone else, especially the Hardparcels, for the incidents involving her son and is loathed by her loved ones.

Angela’s cooking has given the family food-poisoning more than once and she is unnervingly cheerful, even though kitchen equipment blows up when she uses it. She maintains an energetic cliché-filled e-mail correspondence with lots of friends who ignore it and has fond memories of early life in a children’s home.

Terry manages a company producing artificial manure with a profligate and problematically innumerate accountant. Though the staff spends much of the working day devising booby-traps into which he unerringly falls, business is good. “Buyers line up for it. Amazing, with all the real cow dung around.” He is a collector of Victorian light bulbs and child nudes. His family bewilders him, and he them.

The family dog is part poodle, part wire-haired dachshund, resembles a lavatory brush, takes sexual advantage of every available ankle and bites when thwarted. It may be said that a dog is a man’s best friend, but Flotsam isn’t.