Shame on You: The addictive psychological thriller that will make you question everything you read online

by Amy Heydenrych

  ‘Zanna, I . . .’

  ‘Please. Just don’t. You won’t believe the shit storm I’m dealing with right now, let alone the impact this is going to have on my career.’

  Please, no, it can’t be.

  Zanna throws her phone against the bed. A headline screams out the white screen WELLNESS DARLING’S EMPIRE BASED ON FAKED CANCER.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Is it true? Or should I say, is it all not true?’

  ‘I, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Let me spell it out for you, then. An unnamed source has accused you of killing his fiancée through your irresponsible eating plan. Thanks to you, she decided against chemotherapy and followed your “healing plan” to the letter. Well, she’s dead, and he smelt a rat and went digging through your medical records. Nobody knows who the hell he is but the records are legit, and they show no evidence of cancer. Ever. Every single person in the world will soon forget about your attack and remember you for faking cancer. Cancer of all things, Holly! Jesus Christ, my grandmother died of cancer. Tell me this isn’t true.’

  That’s when she realises, killing her is too easy. He wants her to suffer, just like his fiancée did.

  ‘Zanna, let me explain.’ The shame twists in her stomach. Nothing could be worse than this feeling, of disappointing someone she loves once again. The image of her father’s thin mouth and her mother’s disappointed, downward gaze burns in her skull. Zanna is moving further and further away from Holly; she can tell by her crossed arms and furious glare. No matter what she does, this brokenness will always lie between them, a wall with jagged edges.

  ‘What’s to explain? You either had cancer, or you didn’t.’

  ‘Everything I believe in is true, the diet, the raw philosophy, whole foods. But the cancer . . . it’s complicated, medically. I can explain everything.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, Holly! I don’t think you get how big this is! There are legitimate, authorised documents doing the rounds online that show that you never had a trace of cancer in your body. “No evidence of disease.” My phone is ringing off the hook. Your sponsors want to pull out of supporting you, and your publisher has released an announcement saying that it will recall your book until the matter is cleared up. But it’s not going to clear up, is it?’

  That day when she left home for good, her mother hugging her stiffly, her father so angry he couldn’t even talk, Holly thought she had seen the worst. Anxiety, fear and shame have been her loyal companions, following her from Exeter to London, circling her in the shadows as she drugged herself to sleep. It seemed a worthwhile price to pay for her fame, her success. Now, an unfamiliar emotion prickled at the edges of her consciousness: regret. What carefree life could she have lived if she had never uttered the word cancer?

  ‘Please let me just explain to you, Zanna,’ she begs. ‘You’ll understand I promise.’ What she means to say is ‘don’t leave me, please love me’. She’s never seen Zanna cry – her expressions range across a wide spectrum, from bemused to bitchy – but now she seems close. She ruffles her dirty hair and gathers her things.

  ‘Listen, Holly, I’ve always loved you, OK? But I just need some time to figure out how to get my head around all this. In the space of twelve hours you have had a psychotic episode, assaulted your doctors, and been revealed as a fraud. There’s a hashtag doing the rounds of people waiting for you to wake up and react to your allegations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yep, #whenHollywakesup is trending in the UK.’

  ‘Fuck. Zanna, please stay. I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘I can’t do it, babe, not tonight. I need to go home, sob quietly with a tub of ice cream and watch the Kardashians for a while. At least the Kardashians never lie. But until I decide what I’m going to do with you, follow my advice: don’t touch your fucking phone, don’t read anything, and whatever you do, don’t share any comments with anyone. Until this situation calms down, you need to behave as if you don’t exist. You understand?’

  She whirls out the doorway in a fury of stale perfume. Thanks to Zanna, Chanel No.5 always smelt like promise; it was synonymous with her growing success and their blossoming friendship. Now, mixed with the acrid stench of sweat, it’s taken on an added note of fear.

  Holly’s fingers graze her bandages. Twice he has touched her, violated her. Did his hands weave her new stitches or wrap the bandages tightly around her face? He could have got rid of her there and then, and put both of them out of their misery. He wants something more. A sudden violence in her wants to pull the bandages off and rip the stitches out. She’s a lost cause now.

  This time, Holly’s private room is marked by the conspicuous absence of flowers. She quivers in her hospital bed alone, with the bare surfaces staring blankly at her as her only audience. A sound. A creak. Her body jolts into motion, jumping onto the cold floor in nothing but her backless hospital nightgown. The sound comes nearer, just voices and the wheel of the cleaning trolley. She needs contact with something out there. Against Zanna’s advice, she reaches for her phone, hands shaking.

  When she received her first negative comment online, it haunted her for weeks. It was so silly at the time – some follower (with her account set to private) – called her chunky and asked if she should really be advising others on a healthy lifestyle. The words taunted her late at night, just as she was trying to get to sleep. No retort she ever thought of felt good enough. She felt sullied, and nothing had the power to wash the dirt off.

  She used to find comfort in the knowledge that it is impossible to live online without offending someone. Who knows why people say the things they do. That means nothing now. When thousands of angry comments mention your name, the shame bubbles under your skin. It’s not about them anymore, it’s about what is wrong with her.

  The comments on her Instagram are predictably vile. What sickens her more is not the content, but the volume and extent of them. The #JusticeforHolly girls are at the forefront of the army, posting emotional clips about how betrayed they feel, adding several hashtags so as many people see them as possible. Rage makes her hands shake – it’s all so nauseatingly strategic. She can feel their footprints on her body as they step higher on the social media ladder. Somehow, they found pictures of the times she occasionally craved a pill that didn’t taste of ground herbs. This violates her more than any insult ever could. They must have been watching her all along. That day they came to visit, they let her humiliate herself, showing off her recipes and lifestyle, when all the while they knew the truth. This must have been what she saw in Brooke’s smile. This was the ammunition fuelling her smirk.

  The more she checks, the more the hatred keeps coming. A catastrophe in slow motion. Death threats, rape fantasies, nobody deserves to bear the brunt of such imagined violence. Not even Holly. Some followers have taken the time to write abusive comments on photos dating back three years ago. The pictures taken in hospital that mention her cancer are particularly bad.

  Don’t do anything.

  It’s not too many, no, maybe fifty at the most where she mentions cancer? She wasn’t that wrong, was she? She deletes them all in a fever. She has to get rid of the helplessness screaming beneath her skin.

  Not that any of the vitriol has affected her followers. They’ve grown in the thousands since she last checked. Usually she would post a sweet little clip of her blowing a kiss over a green juice saying, ‘Wow! 650,000 followers! Thanks for the love, you guys!’ Now she feels a new rush of rage, and wishes she could film herself pouring a green juice on the ground, pulling her middle finger and saying ‘Fuck you!’

  Fuck you all.

  Strange, but so liberating to whisper under her breath. The loving, glowing circle of followers she once had has morphed into an ugly mob overnight. The reality of it tastes bitter on her tongue: if there is one thing everybody loves more than a goddess, it is a goddess in ruins.

  Chapter 31

  Holly then

  It starts with a
lump. She feels it before bed while standing naked in front on the mirror. It is hard as muscle, unmistakable.

  She lies in bed that night, breathless and restless. Reading doesn’t help, nor does trying to think of something else. Her grandmother died of breast cancer, so did her aunt. At the back of her mind, she always expected one day it’d be her turn. Now, her fingers find their way to the lump until she has memorised its size and shape. She thinks, here it is, the moment everything changes.

  The next day she skips breakfast and rushes out of the house before her mother can ask any questions. She holds her breath on two buses, wishing one of the bastards sitting down could give her their seat. She’s a sick person now, she needs it. I could faint right here, she thinks, then they would all be sorry.

  The bus arrives at the Royal Devon Hospital without incident. Without an appointment, waiting to speak to a GP takes hours. Hours she doesn’t have, as she looks at the clock. It’s already 10 a.m., the time she usually unlocks the shop. She feels the vibration in her pocket, over and over again. She ignores it. Let them wait.

  Later, she arrives at the shop dead-eyed and quiet. Nothing will be the same again.

  ‘Holly! Where the fuck were you? Do you know what trouble it was to find another key? And we already had customers outside the door waiting for the new Ivy Park merchandise!’ Andrea, the store’s deputy manager, fumes before her. She could have got Holly’s job last year, but Holly got the break instead. Any mistake now takes a lifetime to live down.

  ‘I had an emergency, OK?’

  The other shop assistants circle, feigning disinterest. They smell a brawl and know which horse they’re backing. The stronger one.

  ‘Actually, Holly. It’s not OK. Tell us where the fuck you were. We have a right to know.’ Come to think of it, Andrea should have been manager. She is edgier, more in touch with what the cool girls want. Her hair is dyed pink this month – she flicks it now for maximum impact.

  ‘Ands, I said leave it. It’s private.’

  She stands still.

  ‘No.’

  So she gathers them around and in their tightly spun circle shares the devastating news.

  Holly has breast cancer. The very first lie. It came out so simply when they were standing there wide-eyed and speechless. It was like they wanted to hear it. Telling them that she had a lump in her breast that may or may not be cancer was more confusing, less dramatic. It didn’t feel quite bad enough to earn their sympathy.

  Their arms fold around her. Their tears soak into her shirt. Andrea tells her to go home, please, take some time to process all of this. For the first time, she feels like the only girl in the room.

  She has to have surgery to get the lump removed. This is a small, harmless procedure that involves cutting out the mass and a biopsy to confirm there was no evidence of cancer. It seems such a feeble solution, so she tells her new friends a different story, just slightly embellished, one that makes them gasp.

  ‘You have to have surgery and chemotherapy?’

  ‘It seems so. They will remove what they can but it seems like this is an aggressive form of cancer that is spreading rapidly.’

  Who would have thought the terminology would come so easily? Years of eating microwaveable dinners in front of Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med have given her a looseness of tongue when it comes to medical terms. She’s said it aloud before she’s even had time to think about her own lie. But now it’s out there, it feels so natural that she can feel the tumour spreading through her. She grabs the counter next to her to steady herself.

  Excitement and fear cause the same physical reaction. A pumping heart, a quickness of breath, difficulty in concentrating. The closer time inches to the day of the operation, the more uncertain Holly is as to which emotion is taking over. All she knows is that she doesn’t sleep at night, but wakes up earlier and doesn’t tire of serving customers throughout the day. Everything is imbued with fresh meaning.

  She glows with the warmth of the coven of concerned women who have surrounded her with their attention. Her chest pains, her sleep, her eating patterns, even her digestion, all matter. Her audience expects something of her, so she begins to perform. Her everyday actions have new gravity. When she’s alone, she imagines what her actions would look like in their eyes. If she leaves her phone alone for a minute, there is a message or a call waiting. ‘You OK, hun?’ She is part of something now, a tribe.

  She and Andrea hang out most nights. They have curry evenings, go to the pub or just cram onto foraged chairs in somebody’s garden with the other girls from work. This is the secret world she was missing out on all along. Now it is presented to her on a plate as a ‘distraction’. After years of obscurity, people start to see her and listen to what she has to say. Holly always felt like an alien but it turns out she’s read the same books, watched the same shows and listened to the same music as all these women who once ignored her.

  It’s not often women receive affection so openly and readily. From nursery, love always requires an exchange, usually involving giving something up. Starve yourself to be skinny and gain admiration. Hide your real opinion and earn new friends. Give away just enough of your body to be classed as sexy, but not a slut. These are the tricks that other women innately know, but not Holly. She has only understood how to get love when she got sick. Women are loved most when they are weak.

  On the day of her operation, it feels as though the whole town is holding its breath. She walks through the quiet weekday streets, her coat trailing behind her. Her overnight bag is hooked over her shoulder, containing cute Beauty and the Beast themed pyjamas, a gift from the Topshop girls. It’s a clear and crisp day. Everything feels hyper real, while she feels as if she was made of air.

  As she walks through the automatic double doors and up the stairs, leafing absent-mindedly through a brochure on diabetes, every motion feels iconic, like the beginning of a new life. A nurse calls her to the front desk and gives her a few forms to sign and directs her to the ward upstairs.

  A few hours later, snug in her hospital gown, she turns the camera on herself, showing the operating theatre sign in the background. She pulls a thumbs up and gives a radiant smile. Click, click, post. Her Facebook and Instagram friends burn bright in support. She feels radiant beneath the glow of it.

  When it is over, nobody comes to visit. This is expected, as Holly has asked for no visitors, not even her parents. She is still smarting from her father’s intimation that her ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ triggered the tumour in some way. Even when the girls beg and plead to bring her some flowers, she remains stoic. This is traumatic enough as it is, she tells them, she would rather face the hard parts alone. What she really wants to avoid is a group of girls fussing next to her bed, hysterically shrieking the word cancer.

  The second lie: Holly’s tumour was always benign, the doctor calls it a fibroadenoma. So confident is he in his diagnosis that he tells Holly that, while they would test it to be certain, she can rest assured it was not malignant. There are no cancer indicators in her blood to suggest anything wrong. The removal of her tumour was a precaution, nothing more. But there is always a very slim chance still, right? The doctor could be wrong.

  The next week, she returns to the hospital to get the rest of her stitches removed.

  Her ribcage still aches with every step, even though the only evidence of her operation is a tiny, bandaged cut on her left breast. As the doctor pulls out the last of the stitches, he calmly confirms that his diagnosis was correct. There’s no evidence of disease in the lump they removed, Holly is perfectly well.

  She walks in a daze towards the elevators, towards a new life where her lie has come to an end. The sign to the Children and Young Adult Oncology Ward catches her eye. Just one look, she thinks, just to see what her alternative future would have been like. The pastel walls are soft and welcoming. Everything is quiet except for the gentle ticking of machines. Hairless, grey-skinned girls and boys float through the wards like ghosts. However, all
Holly sees are the colourful bursts of greeting cards and gifts. All she hears are the soft words of comfort from nurses and family members. Jealousy pulses through her. The doctor has not only removed her tumour, he took away all of this as well.

  She walks downstairs on shaking legs and sits down at the hospital café. She asks for a carrot juice and a large Greek salad. Watches the people go by. She reaches for her bandage, still excruciating to the touch. It doesn’t have to be over. Not just yet. Everybody can still love her. Everybody can still hang on to her every word. She shuts her eyes and makes a decision.

  Chapter 32

  Tyler

  The heavy brown doors of the hospital swing open and release Tyler back onto London’s streets, heart pounding and mind buzzing. He did it. He really fucking did it. Potential fizzes in every direction. Bankers pace to the nearest bar; tourists squint at the tube map as they try to find the route to Covent Garden; goths crawl their way back to Camden. The city will be alive for hours yet – the question is, where to go?

  Or rather, how to find a place where he doesn’t see Frankie. He wanders into Paddington station, grabs his usual from Starbucks and sits on a bench to watch the passengers go by. Train stations remain the only places where he feels completely relaxed. Everybody here is between destinations, anonymous. He could be just like any of them, on his way home to his chaotic den of a family. He can picture it for a second – Frankie with her hair piled on top of her head, passing him a screaming toddler as he walks through the door so she can grab a glass of wine. These so-called stressful moments, the ones people merely survive through, write self-pitying Facebook posts about and take for granted are the ones he craves the most. They were violently snatched away from him, and he doesn’t have any of it now.