Die of Shame

by Mark Billingham

  They watch the routine for a few minutes, then, a little too loudly, Caroline says, ‘Do you think if we stuck a fiver in his box he might piss off and get himself a proper job?’

  Heather grins, shushing, then starts to laugh at the look of fierce disapproval from a woman standing next to them. The woman shakes her head and leads her two entranced toddlers away.

  ‘Seriously,’ Caroline says.

  The robot emits a squawk of disappointment when the first, fat drops of rain begin to discolour the ground around him. Umbrellas go up quickly and the crowd starts to disperse.

  ‘Shall we get something to eat?’ Caroline asks, as they begin to move.

  ‘I’m a bit skint,’ Heather says.

  ‘It’s on me.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Caroline says. ‘It’s amazing how much you can save when you live on raw carrots and lettuce leaves all week.’

  They pick up speed as the rain gets heavier, Heather moving ahead, then slowing to wait for Caroline to catch her up.

  ‘I could murder a Big Mac.’

  ‘Me too, but I thought —’

  ‘That’s the whole point.’ Caroline waves the concern away. She’s walking as fast as she can, but other pedestrians are going past as though she’s standing still. ‘If I eat like a rabbit all week, I can treat myself at the weekend.’

  When the real downpour begins, they follow others into the station to wait it out. Caroline pushes through the soaking crowd and manages to find them a space against the wall.

  ‘Bollocks.’ Her shirt, patterned with flowers, is plastered to her arms and chest and she starts to pick at the sopping material. Heather is trying not to stare at the black bra that is clearly visible beneath; the sturdy cups she could fit her head inside.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Heather smiles and drags fingers through her hair. ‘It’s only water.’

  Caroline stares at her. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘You sure you haven’t taken a few too many happy pills?’

  Heather shrugs. ‘Just in a good mood, that’s all. Any reason I shouldn’t be?’

  ‘No, but your mood’s not usually this good.’ Caroline leans back against the wall. ‘And, you know, the way the last session ended.’

  ‘A lot can happen in a week,’ Heather says.

  Caroline turns to look at her.

  ‘I met up with Tony.’

  ‘What does that mean? “Met up.”’

  ‘He reckons I’d make a good therapist, so we had lunch and he talked to me about it, that’s all.’

  Caroline waits and watches Heather’s eyes dart away from her own. ‘That’s so not all.’

  ‘We had lunch, then we just walked about for a while.’

  ‘Did something happen?’ It’s clear that Caroline has forgotten all about being drenched and uncomfortable.

  ‘Yeah, if you like.’ Heather wraps arms around herself, clutches her wet suede sleeves, unable to keep the smile from her face. ‘Something.’

  ‘What?’

  Pedestrians are still crowding into the station to avoid the rain and, as the crowd shoves and thickens, a man is pushed against Caroline. She swears at him and pushes back, hard. Ignoring the muttered apology, she turns to look at Heather again, waiting to be told.

  … THEN

  There is still an empty chair in the circle, but Tony insists they begin. Heather asks again if they can wait a while longer, but Tony refuses, reminding her that group members need to arrive on time.

  ‘It’s not fair though,’ she says. ‘It’s my turn this week… you know, to talk about shame, and I really wanted him to be here. I made such a big deal about him doing it.’

  ‘You didn’t pressure him,’ Tony says. ‘It looked like support to me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Diana says. ‘And remember what you got for your trouble.’

  ‘Outside the group, I mean. I nagged him.’

  ‘Rules are rules,’ Robin says.

  Tony nods and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ The truth is that he has been half expecting this after the way Chris had left at the end of the last session. The rage and the blame. That slammed door had felt fairly permanent.

  ‘I think you’re the only one who’s bothered,’ Caroline says. ‘That he’s not here.’

  ‘Yeah, because it’s my fault.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘Has anyone spoken to him since last week?’ Tony asks.

  Heads are shaken, but it’s only Heather’s gesture that seems sorrowful.

  ‘OK. Well, I’ll call him again tomorrow,’ Tony says. ‘But for now, we need to crack on. Heather?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to do it now.’

  Robin sighs, loudly.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you, of course.’

  ‘You’re being stupid,’ Caroline says.

  ‘Shut up,’ Heather says.

  ‘Nobody else made a fuss.’

  ‘You haven’t even done it yet.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him in private, if it’s so bloody important?’

  ‘Caroline’s right,’ Diana says.

  Tony raises a finger and waits until they are all looking at him. ‘Look, it’s Heather’s call, ultimately, but whatever happens, I don’t want this session to be all about the one member who isn’t here. We’re —’

  All heads turn when the doorbell rings and all eyes follow Tony as he gets up and hurries from the room. Walking through the kitchen towards the front door, he can hear Robin grumbling loudly behind him.

  ‘Somebody wants to make an entrance…’

  The bell rings again just as Tony opens the door and it only takes him a second to see what’s happening. Before he can say anything, Chris is already past him, moving quickly, and by the time Tony gets back to the conservatory, he is sitting on his chair. Arms folded. Good as gold.

  Tony remains standing. He takes a breath, then steps across until he is standing next to Chris. He says, ‘You can’t stay, you know that.’

  Chris lifts his head slowly, says, ‘This is my chair.’

  Tony looks down at him, well aware there’s little point in asking the usual question. Chris has clearly not had a good week, a good day, a good hour.

  Eyes like glass beads and the smack-sweat stink.

  ‘Has she done her bit, yet?’ Chris waves a hand in Heather’s direction. His words are slow, if not quite slurred, but the effort involved in preventing it is apparent. ‘I didn’t want to miss her amazing story, whatever the hell it is.’

  ‘Jesus, Chris,’ Heather says.

  Chris suddenly leans so far forward that it looks as if he might tumble off his chair. He says, ‘Jesus, Heather.’

  ‘You need to go,’ Tony says.

  Chris puts a hand on the floor to steady himself, then uses it to push himself back upright. ‘This is my chair, though,’ he says.

  Robin stands up. ‘Do you want me to give you a hand, Tony?’

  ‘Yes, for God’s sake throw him out,’ Diana says.

  ‘It’s fine.’ Tony leans closer as Chris’s head starts to drop. ‘You know how this works, Chris. I can’t allow you to be part of the session when you’re like this. So, just leave and I’ll talk to you tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘Well, I think he should be thrown out permanently,’ Diana says.

  ‘That’s not how it works,’ Tony says, sharply.

  ‘Just look at him.’

  ‘The tendency to relapse is part and parcel of the disorder, OK? It is not a failure. Yes, I need to remove him from this session, but no, I’m certainly not going to give up on him, in the same way that I wouldn’t give up on any of you.’

  Diana says something else, and then Robin chips in and for a minute or two, they talk about Chris as if he isn’t there, which to all intents and purposes is the situation, until finally Heather raises her voice.

  ‘Please let him stay.’

  Tony looks at her.r />
  ‘Just for… ten minutes, all right? Just let me say what I need to say and then he can go.’ She looks at the others in the group. ‘I mean, as long as he doesn’t open his mouth, as long as he doesn’t contribute to the session in any way, then what’s the harm? I just need him to be here so I can do this, that’s all. Can’t we just bend the rules, just a bit, you know? Ten minutes, that’s all, I swear, and then I don’t care if you kick him out on his stupid junkie arse.’ Now she looks back to Tony. ‘Please, Tony. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  Tony thinks for a few seconds, then slowly shakes his head, but it’s more in disbelief than refusal. He says, ‘It’s up to the rest of the group.’

  Heather looks across at Diana, because she knows that’s where the greatest resistance is. ‘I’m asking, Diana. Just ten minutes.’

  Diana takes a moment and is about to speak when Caroline says, ‘Oh, I couldn’t care less. Let’s just get on with it.’

  ‘Only until Heather’s finished her story,’ Robin says. ‘And as long as he keeps his mouth shut.’

  Diana sits back slowly and flashes a thin smile in Heather’s direction. ‘It’s your funeral.’

  Tony says, ‘All right then,’ and sits down. He’s by no means sure that Chris is even aware what’s happening, but he repeats the ground rules to him anyway, a little louder than he might otherwise. He tells him that if he is carrying any drugs on him he must take them outside and leave them there, but Chris shakes his head. Then, just as Tony is reaching down to pick up his notebook, Chris looks up suddenly.

  He stares at Heather and appears to focus.

  Tony sets his notebook a little nervously on his lap. He takes a last long look at Chris, then gives Heather the nod.

  … THEN

  ‘It was ten years ago, maybe a bit more… I was in my last year at college, anyway. Trying to make up for the lack of work I’d done in the first two years, same as most people, I suppose. Trying to salvage something.’ Heather aims for a smile, but it’s there and gone; the blaze of headlights speeding past, then only darkness again. ‘I don’t think I would have, mind you, even if things hadn’t turned out the way they did and I’d stuck at it… but there was no chance, in the end.’ She shakes her head. ‘Some people always manage to shoot themselves in the foot, right?

  ‘I met this man.’ She says it quickly, like it’s the hardest bit; the step over the edge. ‘And I’m deliberately saying “man” because back then I certainly wouldn’t have thought of myself as a “woman”. I was still a girl, still felt like a girl anyway, and I normally knocked about with lads. So, I met this man… older, but you’d probably worked that bit out already. You know, a lot older, twenty-odd years, but all I can tell you is that it didn’t feel like it, because we clicked, simple as that and it never seemed to matter. He was married, and you’d probably worked that out as well.’

  She pulls a face – how stupid was I? – but when she turns her head in the direction of the other group members, she is unable to look directly at anyone. She fixes instead on the spaces between Robin and Caroline, Chris and Diana. ‘That did, matter, obviously, even if I told myself back then that it didn’t. He said that it didn’t and I believed him. Even though he always went back to his wife and kids every night, I thought that he was basically just waiting for the right time to make the move, you know? I never doubted for one second that we’d end up together, that one day I’d be the wife and we’d have kids and all the sleazy stuff was just a process we had to go through to get there. Afternoons in hotels, the back of his car, the usual.’

  She searches for words. ‘A necessary… evil.

  ‘I swear that none of that stuff felt sleazy though, not back then. Because I was in love with him. You really need to believe that if what happened later on is going to make any sense. It had never been like that with anyone before, never has been since. Wherever we had to meet, it was perfect, you know?

  ‘I’d’ve done whatever he wanted, fucked him in shit, it didn’t matter.’

  She closes her eyes for a second or two; momentary regret or some remembered excitement that still shocks her, it’s impossible to tell. Her fingers are wrapped around the edge of her seat by the time she opens her eyes again and says, ‘Now, you’re all pretty smart and at least this bit of the story is fairly predictable, so you won’t exactly be gobsmacked to discover that he didn’t leave his wife and we didn’t ride off into the sunset. He didn’t love me as much I loved him, simple as that.’ She hesitates. ‘Well… maybe he did, who knows, but he certainly wasn’t brave enough to be with me long term. At the time it just felt like he’d had his bit of fun then ended it and settled for an easy life.’

  Her eyes narrow. ‘The path of least resistance.

  ‘And I was… destroyed.’ She shrugs, helpless. ‘I know that sounds stupidly melodramatic, like maybe I was just immature and maybe I was, but God’s honest truth, there isn’t another word for how it made me feel. What he’d done to me.’ She winces as she swallows. ‘I didn’t eat, I didn’t wash, I didn’t… get out of bed for Christ knows how long. I thought about doing all sorts of stupid things, you know? I emptied pills into my hand and stared at them. I froze my tits off standing on bridges. I looked at all those freaky websites that tell you exactly how to make a noose and what to do so you won’t be found in time… and then one day something inside just shut down.’ She clicks her fingers, studies the chewed-down nails. ‘Like a switch had been turned off… or on, maybe.

  ‘So, I went another way.’

  She leans forward slightly and begins to talk a little faster. ‘There was someone else,’ she says. Another big step and now she has momentum and it can’t be stopped. ‘And this one was a lad…

  ‘He wasn’t at college, he already had a job, but he was the same age as me and we’d been seeing each other quite a bit before all this. He was great, you know, sweet and all that… but the truth is I always knew he liked me more than I liked him. All the same, I was happy to let him take me out, buy me stuff, you know? Happy enough to shag him when I felt like being generous, and let him take me on holiday… and then, when I met my married man, I dropped him like a hot brick. I was a selfish cow and I chucked him, and I know he felt every bit as awful then as I did when the bloke I dumped him for finally dumped me.

  ‘So… when that switch was thrown, I called him. I called my lovely, dependable ex-boyfriend, and he told me to come round and I knew straight away that he still felt exactly the same. He was just so happy I was there, that it was his shoulder I wanted to cry on.’

  Heather takes a breath and holds it, and it looks as if she would welcome that shoulder, any shoulder now, but she keeps pushing forward.

  ‘I cried, because it was easy enough…

  ‘… and when I’d finished I told him the man I’d been seeing had raped me. I told him that I’d been trying to leave and he’d raped me… and I couldn’t go to the police, please don’t make me go to the police, because I didn’t want everyone to know, and I felt dirty, and there was nobody else I could tell except him. I told him every sick detail, and I made it as nasty as I could, to where I could see it was like punches landing, and he was pretty much in bits by the time I’d finished.

  ‘By then, it was almost like I believed it myself.

  ‘I pressed the button, then I sat there and watched him get angrier, working himself up until he was kicking at the walls and smashing stuff in his flat. Telling me he’d sort everything, that he was going to make the bastard pay for it, and I’m going, No, you can’t, don’t be stupid, but only because I knew that’s what I was supposed to say. I knew he wasn’t really listening and that he’d already made his mind up to teach the bloke a lesson.

  ‘Which of course is exactly what he did.

  ‘He beat him to death two nights later outside a pub.’ She gnaws her bottom lip for a few seconds. She slides her feet forward until her training shoes are perfectly parallel. ‘He had an iron bar or something in his coat pocket, and th
e man I’d falsely accused of rape, because he’d had the nerve to go back to his family, had an abnormally thin skull. Shitty luck for all concerned, as it turned out.

  ‘Well, everyone except me.

  ‘He never mentioned my name, not once. Never told anyone why he’d done it. Never said a word, even after they’d sent him to prison.’ Now she looks at Tony, the first member of the circle with whom she’s made eye contact since she began. When she speaks again, her voice is steady and low; drained of colour. ‘He’s still in prison, while I sit here every Monday night feeling sorry for myself, because my benefit money’s a day late, or I want a better flat, or I didn’t have any real friends to come to my stupid birthday party.’

  There is one more half-hearted attempt at a smile, but it’s not even close. She straightens in her chair and one hand flutters up at her knee, just for a second or two.

  She says, ‘That’s it.’

  Tony leans to lay down his notebook. He takes a long swig from his water bottle, then sits up and looks around. Nobody seems keen to speak, but the circle is crackling with energy and none of it is positive.

  Shock, condemnation, fury.

  Even Tony is struggling to formulate the simple and standard thank you, to acknowledge the courage necessary to say… what Heather had said, but he is saved the trouble when Chris lurches from his chair.

  The others watch as Chris moves slowly across the circle towards Heather; casual, deliberate. He looks a lot steadier than he did when he first came in, though the aimless smile is nowhere to be seen.

  Tony stands up, says Chris’s name.

  Heather shakes her head and lifts a hand to let Tony and everyone else know there’s no need to step in. That she’s been expecting whatever is coming and is fine with it. It’s only when Chris is standing over her, his legs pressed against hers, that she turns her face away just a little and closes her eyes. Flinches.

  The circle holds its breath.