As Ayo promised, the bell resounds loudly above the birdsong. Holly can hear the creaking of footsteps. Talking. Does she even know how to be with people anymore? The only person she’s seen for the past few weeks has been Zanna, and she’s sure Zanna would agree that she hasn’t exactly been value-adding company.
‘Hey, Holly! Get here quickly before Tara eats all the toast again!’ A slim, dark-haired girl no older than twenty-one holds her hands up, laughing. She looks strangely familiar. Holly scans the smiling faces at the table. This feeling of familiarity is not limited to Tara, it applies to all of them. Every single person here is a public figure, or has been.
Holly’s used to making small talk with celebrities and smiling for photo opportunities at events, but this feels different. Free of make-up and tailored clothing, they all seem like they are at a summer camp. Still, she unconsciously touches her face, aware of her diminished place among the beautiful.
On the table in front of them is a colourful spread of chopped strawberries, raspberries, apples and bananas. At its centre is a loaf of fresh bread, with dollops of melted butter and marmalade. Holly’s stomach cramps in response. The smell is too good to bear.
‘Come sit here, Holly. Here’s some fruit salad, some yoghurt and some toast. Oh, and try the blueberry jam. It’s a worthwhile favourite.’
‘Oh, um, I can’t. Anything with gluten is like poison for my condition.’
The table goes uncomfortably quiet. Ayo says in a level voice, ‘It may be over in London, but everything is a little bit softer in this mountain air. Maybe we can relax your rules a little for the first few weeks here, just to see how it feels.’
Dammit, she hasn’t even spent five minutes in the company of these people and she’s already established herself as the complicated city girl with a list of special requirements. She’s not used to meeting new people under this relentless cloud of darkness. She used to be described as ‘a breath of fresh air’ or ‘a ray of sunlight’. When she walked into the room, everyone’s faces would turn towards her like a field of sunflowers. It wasn’t just her good looks, however; it was that something extra, that intangible magic that made her Instagram light up and spread like wildfire. People drew close to her so that they could claim some of that magic for their own. If she were asked to pick whether to get her beauty or her magic back, she’d pick the magic. Every single time.
She expects them to look away from her, anywhere but her precariously healing face. Instead, all their eyes remain intently locked on hers. Ayo clears her throat, ‘Let me introduce you to the crew. We’ll get to know each other a bit better after breakfast, but you can get to know their names for now.’ She gestures to the dark-haired beauty with big brown eyes peeking through a jagged fringe, ‘This is Tara, who joined us from the United States and has been here almost as long as I have, but you’ll hear more about that later. Then we have Verushka, a CNN journalist originally from South Africa. Finally, we have Alan, who also hails from London.’
They all hold out their hands in greeting, as if it’s so natural to just reach across a table and touch another human being. Holly has been so isolated from people for so long that she realises how strange this is. How blindly trusting we are of each other. Although she could not feel more uncomfortable, something about this feels reassuring. She resolves to fake being normal until it happens on its own.
Maybe it’s the change in altitude, but the food tastes different here. Every piece of fruit bursts with flavour against her tongue. The hot bread swells and fills the aching places. How freeing it feels to relieve food of its responsibility to transform and perform, and just let it soothe her. She panics a little as she swallows the last of her second slice of toast, and gulps down a cup of tea but she can’t lose it now, not here. This is all she’s got. She can’t overthink it.
Holly follows the rest of the retreat guests down the stairs and into the living room. They walk in clear alliances that don’t include her. Verushka and Tara giggle over a shared joke, while Alan and Ayo speak in serious, hushed tones. Two pairs with no space for her.
The words of her father ring in her ears. What have you got that could possibly make others like you? Nothing.
A fire crackles softly in the corner and a few chairs have been arranged in a circle. There is a glass of water at the centre of the room, as well as some biscuits and a box of tissues. Holly crosses her arms defensively. Places like this expect tears, sharing and long, needy hugs, all things she is not sure she’s ready to give just yet. She takes a deep breath and thinks of how shattered Zanna looked the day she found out about the lie. She has to make an effort, if only for her sake.
Everyone else sits comfortably, excitedly even. Tara takes out a notebook and Alan turns off his phone. Ayo clears her throat.
‘OK, now, before we open, I’m going to explain some things for the benefit of Holly and maybe as a reminder for the rest of you here. We open the meeting every time by going around the circle and saying our name, our real name, and a word that summarises what shamed us. So, I would say, “Ayo. Sex” for example. Now usually a word immediately comes to mind when you think about what you were shamed for, but that word can change. Your shame can mean many things at once or feel like different things every day. Contrary to what your particular band of Internet trolls may think, the moment of your shaming was and continues to be complex and multi-layered. Don’t agonise over it, just say the first word that comes to mind. Nobody here will judge you.’
They whip around the circle in seconds. There’s no friendly greeting to soften it. They just spit out their name and their so-called crime.
‘Ayo. Sex.’
‘Tara. Porn.’
‘Verushka. Plagiarism.’
‘Alan. Sex.’
Holly’s eyes widen as she remembers Alan’s sex scandal. God, it was embarrassing – she saw the footage all over the place! She stifles her laughter through a cough. Suddenly, all eyes are on her.
‘Oh. Shit. I mean, it’s my turn, isn’t it? Well, um, hello my name is Holly.’ Wait that’s Alcoholics Anonymous. She isn’t ready for this yet. ‘Uh, Holly. I was . . . well, it’s hard . . . I’ve been accused of something I didn’t do. It’s all really complicated and I’m kind of here because of the way people treated me and not because I did anything, if that makes sense?’
Ayo frowns, ‘Holly, I specifically asked for you to say one word.’
‘But I’m different from’– she gestures weakly across the circle – ‘everyone here.’
The room feels stifling, almost angry. Ayo turns towards her, ‘No, Holly. You are not, and the sooner you realise that, the better. In this space, we are all the same. We are all recovering from being shamed, no matter how good or honest we think our intentions were. Notice I didn’t ask you what you did; I asked what you have been shamed for. So please, try again.’
This is harder than Holly thought it would be. She holds in the urge to run. If she can just last here for a few days, then she can sneak into town, call Zanna and get the next train home. Surely, she’ll understand?
‘OK, fine. Holly, lying. There. I was shamed for lying.’ As soon as she utters the word, heat creeps up her face and makes her eyes water. Guilt.
Ayo beams in her direction. ‘Well done, Holly. You’ve come out and said it in front of a group of strangers. How did it feel?’
Strange. Sickening. Like rubbing bicarbonate of soda and apple cider vinegar into a gaping cut.
‘It felt fine.’ She’ll do what she must to survive this place. For now, it is her only hope.
‘Don’t worry. It will get better in time.’ Ayo takes a deep breath. ‘I have a reading on shame from the series of Just for Today meditations. We follow a similar twelve-step programme to organisations like Narcotics Anonymous – I was inspired by their compassion. Tara has agreed to do the honours today. Over to you . . .’
Tara’s voice is deeper and fuller than Holly expected. There is a calmness in her speech that betr
ays her slim frame. That’s what it’s like. Whenever anyone is called on to read they become the sweet, striving soul they were when they read out their first word, fresh-faced and chubby-cheeked, free of the pockmarks and scars that living in the world brings.
‘Shame can strike those who are successful, those who fail, those who are socially unacceptable and those who act too proud. It has the power to demean, control and regulate. It is a spell that can bring the strongest to their knees if they don’t fit into what society has deemed normal. Our first step towards recovery is to accept our past mistakes and move forward, rejecting shame and embracing our flaws.’
The words leave a silence that curls around them. Everyone else appears serene, but the quietness makes Holly’s skin crawl. How does she reject a feeling that has infested every aspect of her life? She doesn’t want to accept who she’s always been; she wants to be someone better. That was always the point. She feels like a house overrun with cockroaches – the only way to clear the filth would be to burn it down. Her thoughts are broken by a voice in the circle of silence. It’s gentle Ayo. ‘So, Holly, usually after we have done a reading, we go around the circle and talk a bit around what the reading has brought up for us. Is there anyone who would like to begin?’
Alan puts up his hand with the eagerness of a schoolboy. However, as soon as he opens his mouth he holds himself with the commanding manner of a parliamentary speaker. Holly remembers his voice from countless news bulletins and, more recently, from an excruciating public apology.
‘I am struggling with this, Ayo. Surely public shaming can have its place when a person does something wrong? Look at me, for example. I cheated on my wife with a prostitute and was filmed performing all manner of sexual acts. This isn’t the way a husband or a leader should behave. Don’t I deserve the public humiliation?’
Holly stomach jolts as she pictures the insults and threats gathering on her phone, switched off and stashed at the bottom of her suitcase. Outside this calm room, the hatred towards her still exists. Her name remains a slur.
‘I don’t think that rejecting shame means not taking responsibility for your actions,’ Ayo says. ‘You apologised and were genuinely sorry, and discarding negative feelings of shame will help you move forward. In fact, this space exists to give you the space to do so.’
Tara holds up a manicured hand. Her pink nails are decorated with small, heart-shaped crystals. ‘I think what Alan is trying to say is that it’s hard not to feel like you deserve it sometimes. I mean, I consciously chose to make money early in my career through porn. At the time, I never imagined I would win a beauty pageant and someone would find the footage.’
Ayo shakes her head, ‘Tara, firstly, you made a mistake out of desperation as a young, vulnerable woman, never mind how sick it is that our society feels the need to judge a woman’s “purity”. And as your reading said, it’s about forgiving ourselves for what we have done in the past, no matter what others say. Are you getting ready to forgive yourself?’
Holly turns along with the rest of the group to look at Tara. Her hair hangs as a shield over her face.
‘I want to say yes, and during the day when we’re walking in nature and laughing I think I’m close. But the moment I try to fall asleep it holds me in a noose, choking me.’ She starts crying again. ‘And no matter how hard I try, a feeling sneaks up on me, even in my happiest moments, that I could take a knife, a rope or pills and just end it all.’
Ayo shuffles across and puts her arm around her. Holly’s struck by how normal they look in that moment. They could be two friends who have just met and bonded on a yoga retreat. Nothing hints at the horrors that have brought them together. She is the only one branded by her shame, the only one whose sins have made her ugly and easy to isolate in a crowd.
‘Does anyone else feel like Tara?’ asks Ayo. ‘Does anyone contemplate just ending it all?’
It’s not so much the suicide itself that Holly fantasises about. She has no interest in how she’d die and how much it’d hurt. When pain consumes your reality it all becomes the same, just variations of the same tune. Whether the attacker is herself or someone else is inconsequential. The torrent of abuse all has the same destination. So she dreams about death itself, about that endless clean landscape uninhabited with feeling. She wants to swim in the negative space. If it was as easy as activating a switch, she would have chosen death weeks ago. She raises a shaking hand.
Holly looks up. Tara has lifted her hand, so has Alan, so has Verushka. Ayo looks at them all and raises hers too. In that quivering, exquisite moment, in the middle of paradise, they push their palms to the sky in a salute to the simplicity of death.
Chapter 42
Tyler
Today is a better day than most. He has just wrapped up a fascinating six hours performing a complex surgery, hammering bone and stitching up small slits of skin. He enjoys the harrowing operations the best, the ones that leave lesser surgeons awake and sweating the night before. His fingers tingle with the thrill of small, detailed work. The closeness of death wraps around his shoulders, comforting as a blanket. It feels warming to disengage. When everything is going well, the person is never a father, sister, lover or mother. They are simply a pathetic broken puzzle of skin and bones that needs to be brought to order again. When you get it right, it hits you harder and deeper than any drug. You reach the ultimate high – you spit in the face of death. When you get it wrong, well . . .
His visits to the café opposite Holly’s apartment have been different. She didn’t slink out the door at her usual times. He sat in the café one day until it closed and the waitress with the perfect eyebrows asked if he wanted to grab a drink (he didn’t). He tried calling Holly’s publicist for an interview opportunity and she shut him down, saying she is taking a ‘well-deserved break’. Not that he needed any confirmation – he felt it, a dark, creeping feeling of rage. The little bitch was gone.
In her wake, she has left a legacy akin to the worst kind of cancer. As fast as it is removed, it takes root and grows somewhere else. All over the world, skinny white girls jut their hipbones towards the camera, preaching the purity of the latest organic food trend, prophesying warnings about toxicity. There are slight variations on the theme – the yogi, the dancer, the athlete, the model, the girl who seems to be drinking coconut water on a new island every week. Raw till four, fully raw, high carb low fat raw, vegan, flexitarian, paleo. They’re all the same. They demonise food to justify their fear of feeling full. They look back with nostalgia to a simpler time that they never knew. These silly, silly little girls feed themselves with the adoration of others, and he has a responsibility to stamp it out.
As expected, Holly’s scandal had resulted in a rash of inflamed, emotional opinion pieces about how she has ruined various lives. One writer blamed her relapse into anorexia on Holly, casually linking to her blog at the end of the story so the readers who reflexively shared her article could ‘follow her recovery’. He ill-advisedly clicked on the link to find her so-called recovery is tentative at best. Her Instagram page is a claustrophobic catalogue of calorie counts of what she eats every day. It is all a vile exercise in attention seeking, an effort to stake a claim in the conversation and, in so doing, grab an elusive portion of Internet fame. It’s all fruitless, like grabbing at air.
Tyler is the one who set this chain of events in motion. Only he can own the pain that Holly has caused. Only he wrenched his rage out of the comforting cocoon of the Internet and into reality. Before he took action, everybody else was quite happy to fawn over her and laud her distorted outlook as an advanced form of reality. The injustice of it burrows into his nerves and makes him grind his teeth.
He happened to stumble on a call for people to testify against the wreckage that Holly had made of their lives. Not to testify in court, but to testify in the only trial that matters – the trial by media. He shouldn’t have felt so driven to respond: that slimy reporter could recognise his voice; his employer could question
his intentions; Holly could see him and squeal. Yet in the wake of all she has done, who would believe her? And doesn’t he want to smoke her out of that hole she is hiding in anyway, and ensure she disappears once and for all?
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
More than that, the thrill of outing Holly has worn thin. He needs something more to feed on. It’s not about her anymore; it’s bigger than that. He needs someone to listen to his point of view and finally say, yes Tyler, you were right and Holly was wrong.
This desire has brought him to this path that snakes through the Royal Arcade and into New Bond Street. London is tentatively warm. His heart is a burning sun. He swings his arms and smiles at the tourists peering into the window of Louis Vuitton. He blares his favourite Kanye West song, ‘Homecoming’, through his headphones.
Even the stench of male cologne from the nearby Abercrombie & Fitch store cannot taint his mood. He greets the doormen at Claridge’s warmly. Today he gets to set the record straight. He feeds the buzz with a trembling hand, in the hope that this will silence it for good.
Victoria, the correspondent for the entertainment channel, sits at a corner table, flicking through her phone. Two burly men and an acne-marked woman conspire over black coffees at a table nearby, feet crowded with big, black bags. They must be the film crew.
‘Victoria?’
‘Tyler! Thank you for joining me! And I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine what this recent news is bringing back for you.’
Typical tabloid hack – trying to prise out the emotion before he’s even sat down. If she were a real journalist, she would wonder if there was any connection between Tyler’s career as a surgeon, his vendetta against Holly and and the identity of the man who cut her with a scalpel in the street. But she’s just an empty-headed, overworked media whore who is too concerned with making good television to read between the lines. And by the way she is flicking her hair and focusing on his lips, he knows he’s got her.
Shame on You: The addictive psychological thriller that will make you question everything you read online Page 19
