The Shame Fairy
This story originally appeared in 3AM magazine.
Part One
The first time Harriet was paid a visit by the Shame Fairy (had it been the first? she wondered, a lit broom sweeping her body at the thought of how many times in her yawn-and-stretch she must’ve pushed notes down the back of the bed to be found by landlords or hotel maids or by her mum and dad) was in the year of Marcus. In a band where he played lead ukulele, Marcus Browne was a ‘good catch’, said her friends, corrected later to ‘match’. He always slept on top of her like he’d fainted. She’d lift the clamp of his arm and slide out, then edge into the bathroom, where she cleared the corners of her eyes, scraped her soup-yellow tongue and slowly, roundly brushed each tooth. She’d burrowed back under his arm by the time ‘they’ woke up.
He’d not said much for most of the visit, not said “cool” but “fine” when she told him people were going back to a friend’s room for shisha after the bar closed. In her own room, she cajoled him into saying what was up. He wanted to talk: about trying new things in bed. Throughout the talk she kept pulling the covers over her red face. He kept pulling them down saying he didn’t like when she did that.
“I want you to tell me I’m bad.”
“You’re bad.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah — hold on… All right: more.”
“You’re naughty, really. You are a bad boy. You’re such a not good person.” Slopping to one side behind a duvet rumple as she whinged out the Oh: “Oh I dunno Marc!”
“You said you’d give this a try. You wouldn’t even try the shisha.”
A sore, almost vindictive tone when he abruptly said to tell him his dick was small.
“Why ever would you want that?”
“I knew you didn’t have this in you.”
“Is it small though?”
“Well. Well I suppose it’s rather average.”
“Yeah… yeah: you have an average-sized dick, don’t you. Don’t you? Marc — don’t — or, should I try something a bit?”
He withdrew his arm when he woke up, and her back stayed cold after he returned from the bathroom. Propped on her elbows, she squinted at him smoking at her desk and pensively patting his beard. He’d said on one leg, trying to unhook a trainer, “You do have an absurd amount of pillows.” She picked the softest to cuddle as she tried to lie-in then lay staring at the receipt or label that’d materialised. The writing on the paper was in a curly, wedding invitation hand:
What the hell did you call that?! You’re the one who’s bad. Bad at not being a fuck-up.
All the best
Seeing him look towards her hand, she sucked the note into her fist, on which she leaned back. “Marcus, where d’you… think this is going?” He focussed off her hand and onto the tobacco in his teeth or on his lip.
She hummed a query, unacknowledged over the spelunk-and-drill of male weeing, as she probed her fingers under the minuscule pillow she’d shared with — not her boss, an equivalent head waiter of another dinner service, Big Colin. Though like the rest of the staff he knew she lived near the hotel, and though she did have a free house, she’d claimed it was getting fumigated and suggested a top-floor room, with its pristine bed on which they landed achingly full of leftover booze and cheese, and where she gave in to his cheap move of, “Are you ticklish? You ticklish huh? Huh! Huh!”
Surprised by his re-entry (he hadn’t flushed) she dropped the note. It lay in the path of his hot-pink socks, which he still had on from last night.
“I said we’re outa time for any more-”
He slapped the air with one hand, tickled it with the other. Reading out a text from his pals on reception that housekeeping were on their way, he walked over the note. It dropped from his big damp foot at a more readable angle.
Did Big Colin fart when he came? Wait — did you? Dunno, thought I smelled something.
All the best
Before she excused herself to the en-suite, she waited for Sam to secure his bedroom door behind them. He’d let her into the flat with a finger to his lips for the sake of his flatmates. Nowadays ‘My place or yours?’ didn’t make any difference to her. But she’d had to use the toilet at work, and hadn’t managed to get back to hers since. Instead of having a shower — her make-up might run, Sam might take it as an invitation to join — she dabbed herself cleaner with wet loo roll, a second sheet to dry off, not that she ever planned for encroachments into that whole neck of the woods. She roared the tap to hide the flush and six hours later did so again to hide her flush of the note. At the sound, Sam groaned under his hair into his pillow before trying a push-up.
Collapsing back: “…Hey.”
“Hey!”
“What time’s it gone?”
Since she’d told herself she liked the look of urgent men — Sam, hair tied back, marching through the Zara stockroom being importantly angry — she couldn’t mind too much when he said he ought to be getting on with his day. Her too: she might be back in time to do Sunday laundry. Pinching bobbled duvet flesh, she skipped and waved to shuck off the cover and a moth flew in the air. Far from any sign she’d not changed her bed in too long (most days the flat’s steepled wireframe was draped in her sheets) the white moth carried another message. Businesslike, Harriet marched round the bed to pluck from the floor the soggy, still legible note. Hand on her hip she re-read what she’d found at Sam’s:
I find it interesting he doesn’t stay over at yours any more. Remember when Magda used to do yoga in the living room in the mornings? Then he’d stay over. And you’d pretend it was because he liked the omelettes you made him for breakfast! Those greasy, chubby omelettes!
All the best
For a time, instead of drowning notes, she’d burn them in the ceramic canoe of Magda’s incense holder. Even so, the following morning, turning her pillow, like when you turn over a rock or crumbly log in the woods… She looked online for a jewellery box big enough, with lock and key. Today’s note went to the front of a long Filofax queue. The ones at the back crackled to the touch. (Harriet’s nonetheless prolific output could be explained by her unspoken sexual ethic of ‘It’d be rude not to’.) One note midway could be read through its network of softened crumples: ‘Seen from behind your behind has a ginger goatee’: wedding, groomsman, B&B with a mirror wardrobe. Come Micah — he of the beige skin and family estate and stripper ex — she braved asking whether she was too vanilla. His only reply was to laugh, the ear-splitting laugh of the never-shushed. The next time he’d summoned her over, she thought he might find it hot if she called him ‘daddy’ in bed. He probably found it less hot when she fumbled and called him ‘dad’. She slotted back into place the list she’d found under his pillow of the ways her actual dad would’ve reacted had he walked in on them. Between that list and the next wodge of notes was a millimetre and a year, to Cliff, a school ex, who’d rung in tears, having been dumped for the first time in his life. She agreed to meet — who cares if he was on a rebound? — and during the sex she cried out to him in a moment of genuine joy, but using his old pet name: “Oh fuck me cuddle-monster.” That night her pillow sat inches taller, and in the morning she found a whole sheaf, page after page just of the word ‘lol’. Down about Cliff, and because Micah had a way in the office of looking attractively nonchalant when he talked about serious things — “The guys at the Treasury are gonna shit a brick” — this said while scratching the back of his head with his full palm — she accepted Micah’s on-the-day invite to his and his sister’s birthday drinks. Micah’s gravelly murmur came from the living room, next door to the bedroom, in the sunny morning whose note she’d found before he did. As she read it, a laughing voice through the wall groaned out its words at the exact same time: “Oh Mikey, not again. Mrs Magoo?” Harriet skidded across the hardwood, ready to nab the Shame Fairy. But at the sight of Claudette’s oily smile and pageboy fringe, she knew she was only Claudette, and though Claudette’s ears reddened through the beige tone she and Micah shared, the three of them still went out together for hangover brunch.
Harriet picked Zaff for her turn to finally try something: to see what the fuss was about. Pillowy Zaff — always so grateful! — had one night, as they clutched each other’s decelerating sweaty chests, blurted, “I love you,” then apologised, again and again, like it was the worst thing you could say to a person. He’d emailed to say he was back in town for a few weeks; she drafted her reply in which, unable to spell it out, she settled on the excuse of a joke: ‘I’m thinking of giving you my backstage pass.’ On the promised night, they showered together and he was tender and gentle, used scented oils and a Jill Scott album, and she came intensely, more than in years. Spooning afterwards, he said how glad he was they’d reconnected after his silly, stupid, silly outburst, which had been a heat of the moment thing, literally, come to think of it, and, with no hope of prevention, out before she’d grasped what was going on, she did a long airy fart. That night she thought she actually saw the Shame Fairy.
Even at breakfast Zaff was drifting off to retell the story, eyes unfocussed, like it was true story from a hard life ago. “You know when you’re a kid and your mum blows a raspberry on your stomach? It was like that. But on my balls.”
She tried to focus on her whirlpool stir of his coffee, on recalling what she’d seen in the top corner of his bedroom. A tensely fidgeting darkness, like the lamp-thrown shadow of an agitated moth, within which had glimmered a toucan’s beak for a nose, a pair of impractically small but thick and white bird-wings, hairy chin, knobbly knees, elbows old as rocks…
Unbowed, Harriet still stood with guys outside of last-order pubs, dancing around their plans for where to head next, got up at 1AM to shave her legs, switched between Micah and Sam, drafted messages to Cliff but replied to Colin, leafed through her jewellery box, regretful, hopeful. Regretful: after she and a friend’s friend Tim got drunk and slept together and so began sleeping together, she’d woken from a dream about hiding on a yacht to see the full M of his hairline as he gathered his trousers in search of more clothes — so the end was here already, just as things were getting started. She fell back to her dreaming, though the yacht had sailed, only to rock awake at the head. He’d lifted her pillow on one side and was trying the other. She forced her head back, giving off a sweet girlish smile while thinking what to say had she been too late: a joke, the notes are just jokes! Using hands as dustpan and brush, Tim knelt to sweep tumble-hair out of the way from under his bed, saying in a constricted voice that he wasn’t giving a hint or owt, she could totally hang around and they could watch some telly maybe. She made listening hums but the underside of the bed bulged from her moving on top — when he got off his knees she was twisted away with an arm running down the back of his mattress. He located her phone for her: it’d fallen behind the stack of his marking on the bedside desk; with her checking her notifications, he might have enough time… Phone ignored, she narrowed her freckled shoulders under his duvet: “I know this is odd, considering. But can you turn round as I get dressed?” He would’ve, had he not seen her shrunken but wide eyes (last night she’d suddenly remembered she needed to take out her contact lenses, though for some reason this required a shower). Gently he pulled the duvet; once he had it down to her hips he saw the square she held like a name sign at Arrivals — always square! who the hell writes on square paper? To ease the way he made to grab it from her, he laughed first. Why was he so pleased with the note? She pressed it to her breasts. His hand wavered in the air then dropped; if someone had to see it, there were worse people than Harriet. After a card-player’s glance, she passed it over.
“Mine don’t have pictures.”
A charcoal sketch of Tim from hours before: arms like rickety stilts on the mattress, shoulders dotted with pink crayon to suggest his back acne.
‘Bacne,’ read a caption below.
Tim sniffed then shrugged, glad to be let off relatively lightly. Had he not been able to get it up, he might’ve found another set of Victorian naturalist’s watercolours, two to a side, elegantly numbered or lettered different perspectives on the lipped sea-creature moue of his flaccid penis. Those always restarted the cycle, one set in motion, he confessed, following a first and last date with a woman he’d spent months stalking online before their drink then afterwards jolted at the mere sight of in his contacts book (though never to the point of deleting), the subsequent note captioned, ‘Feeling cock-a-droop’.
Harriet slotted today’s in with the rest into his hollowed-out Bible. “Guess I ought to feel flattered. You always manage with me.”
Clapping shut the hardcover: “Yeah that won’t make a difference.”
When, for no reason he could fathom, a date never messaged back after their meal out, he consoled himself he’d at least avoided later humiliation. He found a note anyway, of a dopey version of himself at the restaurant, the grid of packaging creases still visible on his shirt. He gave up dating, relying instead on getting drunk around other single people. The notes he’d find those mornings-after… pictures of dead relatives watching, nanna, grandpa, so many they seemed like a flipbook of aghast facial expressions. He gave up altogether and settled for being a looker. He’d never thought of himself as a looker though he’d assumed he would eventually become one. He looked at them from afar in gyms and cafés, looked down at them walking alongside the bus. That shirt reappeared, in a note he found about his work commute, when he’d had to stand while a pretty woman sat in the seat below and in front, and she looked up and smiled, and he looked down and smiled, and they kept swapping smiles for the whole journey, the sprints of the train blowing air through the carriage that made her hair separate and wisp around her face, him hanging one-armed from a strap and flexing the bicep in his rolled-up sleeve — see, he still had it! But, too soon, too late: she stood to get off, and caught his eyes with hers and pulled his downwards, towards his crotch, where all this time his fly had been wide open. From looking at real women he switched to unreal. The Shame Fairy did leave fewer notes, particularly if Tim’d wanked over a memory or even a fantasy. The only times he was guaranteed a note after wanking is when he looked at porn for longer than five hours-
“Five hours?”
A blush like an egg cracked down Tim’s head, but Harriet, not appearing to notice, trotted on.
“Don’t think outside of sleep I ever do anything for that long.”
Tim became spitefully frank: “It’s for that long coz there’s times I sorta wanna get a note? Like I’m doing it for the note. The edging’s the vehicle.”
“Etchings?”
She didn’t smirk at her pun — she reddened at her mistake, as far as he could tell: she was hiding. In surprise he laughed. From under the covers she laughed back.
To listen to her laugh again, he explained how his drought had come to an end when he gave in to his mum setting him up with a nice young woman from their village, with whom he reached a base per date, till the night of the fourth, when the memory of those Victorian watercolours, the thought of more to come: “It gave my willy the willies.”
No, no more watercolours — a single-panel cartoon that used open brackets to animate the pump of his bum in its last, frantic, hopeless efforts. Caption: ‘So that’s the sound of one hand clapping.’
“See? Whether I’m settling down with someone, or I’ve been single for so long I feel like a ghost, there are the notes. Why are they so sunk in? What’s fucked me up?”
She’d make them breakfast, not omelettes but French toast, which they ate on her sofa next to each other but apart. They knew what each other’s genitals tasted like but felt weird if their shoulders touched. When Magda yelled bye, Tim muttered, “At last,” and Harriet got out her jewellery box. Acknowledging her point, that when you first found a note mightn’t be the same as when you first got one, he asked, rhetorically, where all of it’d started. As fast as a prepared answer she said she assumed it was the first time she’d kissed with tongues: another Sam from when she’d had a Saturday job at the local marina, hidden below decks, feeling through her tights and his jeans the awkward cartilaginous ‘Hello, excuse me!’ of his erection — the same Sam who’d then said she’d been gross to her one-time best friend Leigh.
For Tim, though, shame didn’t start at thirteen, he had to go further back. Whenever he and his family watched TV together and the man and woman on-screen ignored his mental pleas and closed their eyes, closed in their faces, and joined the rings of their lips, Tim’s dad would cough and clear his throat and keep doing so for the length of the kiss or godforbid the sex scene, but he’d never change channels, because to change it was to acknowledge it. When his sister Clara was home from her first term at uni, she’d spotted in the TV guide one of the foreign films she’d discovered out there, within the first ten minutes of which a couple had sent their hands under clothes, slowly at first, then, with a sudden upsurge, faster and harder, and Dad’s cough was duly summoned. But the scene wouldn’t cut, it kept going, following the couple as they staggered from kitchen counter to hallway, from hallway to stairs, relentless, thorough, apparently breathing by using each other’s lungs. Dad had to resort to stabbing through the remote control, which revealed itself not to be dustily padded with a raft of pointless buttons, but full of traps: he changed the contrast, boosted the audio, put on tracking, set the video to record (face rubber-red from coughing, the couple swinging on a chandelier like trapeze-artists fused at the hips), getting the TV to do all manner of format changes except change the channel, so that by the time Mum returned from checking on Nanna, assuming it’d be safe, Tim, his dad and sisters, minus traitor Clara who’d snuck off, were glumly transfixed before a TV that showed a lurid CAT-scan of a sex scene, the couple coagulating then separating like red-blue meniscus, the sound and dialogue EQ’d to monstrous muffled demon talk, which would’ve been indecipherable had Dad in his fumble not managed to switch on the captions for the Hard of Hearing. Mum took out the primary remote from the sofa-cushion ravine and switched over.
Mind-blown Tim waited in his pyjamas clutching his door-frame. Only last week Greg Almond had jadedly shared around the playground that, after midnight, the Adult Network holding-card magically dissolved into fifteen minutes of preview content. Rocking and muttering, Tim watched through the banisters for Dad to finish with his programmes. Having lurked back a step into the dark when lights switched off and Dad creaked past, Tim snuck down barefoot, with a glance to where in the hall the clock stood. Making sure to use the right remote, he switched on the TV, and the first channel to appear had a blond old woman showing off her thighs in suds, on a loop, while the ticker promised more preview content tomorrow. Tim skipped a few channels before he turned Sky off and shamefacedly, oddly heartbroken, went back upstairs.
(But something further than that, murkier, pushed way down: something about standing in the warm gust of a caged fan behind the swimming baths while they stared up at the sudden adult among them, who was bent double to slap Fiona Jen on her pale thighs, telling her, “Pull them up! Pull them up! Hide your shame!” when she wasn’t telling Tim and a vague other, he could never picture whom, presumably another of Fiona’s invitees who’d said yes they did want to see something — or had they invited her? — “And you boys ought to be ashamed!”)
“Exposure… Exposure…” Harriet drummed her lips, before she picked up Tim’s mug with a slight lean to offer a fifth tea.
The grim suspense as each of them built to these confessions, the jaw-clenched thrill of release after — he took away both mugs and pulled her back. She shuffled to him with a smile as if admitting to some minor wrong. The sex was more often sober than not, better than not. Yet in the front hall, him in a dressing gown, her in a jacket, neither was sure if they were meant to kiss goodbye, and so settled for a hug.
He wasn’t sure either what else to say as he held the door: “So. There’s a hand that draws the pictures.” Now they’d swapped notes he knew she’d seen the Shame Fairy. Not wanting to explain how or when, she transposed her shame onto him: “So. You’ve found a way to summon the Shame Fairy at will.”
His voice quivered, not with shame but with what comes after: “Then I wanna see it too. Catch the fucker that’s been… been saying those things about us.”
Part Two
Harriet didn’t watch porn unless she had to. The pushily extreme close-ups made her think of the mass production of sausages, and she’d straddle Marcus to block the laptop from view. But thinking of Tim’s fuller lips, his drowsy baby eyes, more sadly about his widow’s peak, she recalled the way his forehead had sprouted an instant birthmark, then messaged him and brought up his porn nights-in, his porn weekenders, his pornodysseys.
He admitted he’d be more uncomfortable playing away than at home. She logged him onto her laptop then squeezed his shoulder from behind, as though he was about to email in his notice. After a while scrolling, and his eventual, slightly implausible choice of a considerate, tender, female-centred clip, he didn’t seem to mind her watching him go at it; and he certainly wasn’t hindered by that perennial problem of his.
Not so much as a draught bothered the dusty web-strands hanging from her ceiling. And her pillow revealed nothing, nor his, as he reported back when, once again, he didn’t stay over.
If not beds, they continued to share: secrets, fantasies, the key to her jewellery box, their computer log-ins (about once a month her browser history was haunted by searches on IBS). He said of her leather diary, “Well Victorian,” and squinted at the new title she’d given it, the secretly polysemic ‘Notes’. She elaborated on the findings he read: “I’m not a hostile enough audience to you. We need more like a court, a jury. The opposite of giving a speech and imagining everyone else naked.”
She texted that she had an idea but elaborated no further than a time and location. Carrying a ukulele case, she met him outside the White Duck, where he’d already seen the chalkboard listings, the Open Mic Night tonight. He held off thinking in advance of what he might be able to sing well.
Under their table she unbuckled the case and pulled out a short rod. It telescoped longer and finished in a net. At ankle level she passed over the butterfly net or pool skimmer just as the bearded-and-bald compère read out: “Harriet Alvarez!”
“This is my first time reading, ever,” she said off-mike, checking the tripwire at her shoes, going unheard till she put the mike to her lips at, “so sorry in advance.”
Her thin, already childlike voice wobbled. The piece of paper wobbled in her hands. Whether from the hot lights over the stage or her lack of glasses, she peered across the crowd in vain.
“The poem is called ‘My Boyfriend’s Porn History.’”
A few people laughed in that raggedy, poetry-reading way, till she said, “Ah. There he is.”
Clothes crunched as people turned to look where she was looking with hand-shaded eyes: Tim sat in the corner by the stage, agleam with immediate sweat. The laughter didn’t stop at the sight, it just refined, sorted the social laughers from the experts, those older men and one old woman at the bar who laughed even louder now the subject had been identified, alone at his stepladder of a table looking nowhere but at Harriet. She wiped forehead with forearm then repeated her poem title before jumping in with, “‘Facial.’”
His blood lurched back from his body a step.
“‘Bukkake facial.’ ‘Latina’”
The heads in the audience turned in profile to him then face-on to her and then back, like wedding guests during a cringy Best Man’s speech. None noticed Tim was holding upright a net as tall as the rafters.
“‘Latina facial.’ ‘Latina facial compilation.’”
The laughter gave way to tuts of disappointment, even some er-huh’s of disgust. One solitary moustached man dared unhunch off the bar to glance at Tim, sending over a smile of appalled sympathy. Tim returned the beam of his hot eyes to Harriet.
“‘Facial with gargle.’ Jeez, ‘Anal to facial’. But then — and this one’s kinda tragic — simply, ‘Beautiful woman’.”
All laughter had withdrawn. But what looked like a face-off between her avenging smirk and his humiliated grin was really the staring smiles of mutual support. For her for saying words in public she’d hardly dare in private; for him for being the test subject; and both in pleased embarrassment as well, even though what she’d said hadn’t been strictly true, the title that referred to him as her boyfriend. They only uncoupled their stares to scope overhead, where speakers and spotlights were the only things that leaned in for a look at the show. The compère patted Tim’s shoulder on his way out, like a bouncer pats a drunk before he’s kicked off the stoop. The doors hadn’t even shut behind when they heard the man add: “I would love to be a fly on their wall tonight.”
To soften his feedback on her attempt at a flytrap, Tim swung Harriet’s hand as they walked: “My local does an Open Night, silly. Our mates go there. My sisters go there. We don’t know anybody at the White Duck.”
She didn’t text him for a full day, let him chase her with whichever further pointers he might condescend to give. Checking her phone for any, she flushed rather than blushed and smiled at the picture he’d sent: him in glasses with the caption, ‘I’ve joined the Four-Eye High Club. You and me can look nerdy together.’
More and more when they got up or home, neither of them found a note. “Soon we’ll be farting in front of each other.” (“We will not.”) Before the Shame Fairy stopped visiting altogether, he rang his parents to say he wanted to introduce them to someone. While he was ringing their cottage door, Harriet whooshed her breath like she was about to dive into ice water. It was bad enough her nipples showed through her sheer t-shirt, let alone that the slogan on it was ‘Happy Girthday’. Tim squeezed her hand in the mantra rhythm of his murmured, “The more ashamed we are, the better chance we have.”
Tim’s dad opened the door on her t-shirt; he cleared his throat like a chainsaw pull. “Sandra!”
“So lovely to meet you Mr Travers!”
“Timothy.” Nod.
“Sir.” Nod. “Sorry: Dad.”
Sandra was still roaring the fan and sizzling pans for this first visit of a ladyfriend since her son was at uni. Tim’s dad hovered between kitchen and living room, back of one hand on his hip, glasses slipped to the end of his nose, sceptical face lit by the phone he held at the end of his low-slung belly. Waiting to see whether he’d sit and join them, Harriet held hands with Tim, deep in his lap. Since the front door the longest she’d detached from him was to shake hands with his dad, lingering her grip to the point of clamminess. He’d dropped it the moment she traced his palm with her little finger, dropped like a shell that contained a crab.
Coming in with a tray of drinks was Tim’s mum, a curly-haired, near-mulleted woman with a serious drawn face, who told her son to sit up. He dropped his shoulders to reveal a scarf of bruises. Harriet had spent a grisly morning methodically giving him hickeys, saying ‘yeck’ after each as if he tasted of envelope. Mr Travers saw the red mottle and — threatening a cough — stared at his wife as she passed his wine. Although both parents had demanded on the phone a full briefing, they repeated the interrogation, with Mr Travers asking how they’d met. Harriet grimaced and then winced at Tim for permission.
“Afraid it was in a sauna.”
“Health spa or…?”
“An adult sauna.”
“I’d have thought,” Sandra said, “most saunas would be for adults only, no, dear?”
She didn’t say much else, even throughout dinner, though she was yet to flash Tim one of her glares. Harriet praised her cooking — learnt, Sandra explained, on the hippy trail to Kabul — only so she could warn her husband that such food was an aphrodisiac. She corroborated with rapid nods, smiling at him as she breezily knocked back her glass, which gave her vampire fangs of red wine. Mistaking Harriet’s high colour for drunkenness, Sandra said, “Aphrodisiac? Chickpeas?”
By ice-cream-time, Mr Travers had retreated behind his iPad with a spoon and wary peer over the top. Tim stared hard at Harriet. She stared back and shrugged, before scrambling her eyes around the kitchen. They sized-up an urn, marked ‘Nanna’, as a step too far, then settled on a card-framed photo of son overlapping dad, both wearing the same sewn brown badges on grey pullovers.
“Yes, that’s right. I was Tim’s headmaster.”
At the sight of mini-Tim — edges softened, eyes even bigger — Harriet suppressed saying ‘aw’.
“Wow. I can totally see where Tim got his good looks.”
She winked at Mr Travers, with both eyes. She’d never been able to fully wink except by doing a staggered blink. She tried again, more slowly.
“If you’re tired, I can make you a coffee.” Harriet loosened at the hips and narrowed her eyes, having rallied for when Mr Travers asked his follow-up: “And how do you like your coffee?”
“Like I like my coffee. White, and strong. Men! I mean men!”
Perhaps, Tim thought, this fiasco of an evening might do the job anyway. When, after splashily delivering Harriet a mug, his dad didn’t sit down but left with only a nod, Tim knew they had the one and worst tactic left.
He’d warned Harriet his mum would stay up as long as they did; and they needed to get to his old room, next to his parents’ room, ideally before either parent fell asleep. The moment a door upstairs softly clicked, Harriet switched from vampy to silent shrugs at Mrs Travers and her climbing yawns. Tim said they ought to be heading to bed too, the first thing anyone had said for minutes. His mum gave them an illegible smile, contained entirely in her flaring nose.
Having sex in his childhood bed, Tim and Harriet didn’t fake their sex noise — to do so would’ve been to embarrass his parents more than shame themselves as planned. They let go and made noises they wouldn’t even have made in private with each other, so ended up half as loud. Compensating for this was the amount of headboard-banging on the shared wall. It sounded like someone continually hammering and giving up on a hammering a nail. Should the headboard falter, it was egged-on by the bedsprings’ heehaw-heehaw.
The morning found no notes under their pillows. “Result,” said Harriet, “it’s not come early.” When she led Tim into the kitchen by hand, his parents kept their puffy eyes on their respective iPads. He felt an almost nostalgic seizure at his dad’s words: “We need to talk.”
“Yes sir.”
Dad cocked arms out of his dressing gown sleeves; mum’s purple bud of a lower lip bobbed at the ready. Harriet looked at the kitchen ceiling, ready too, the tall net behind her back like a knife.
“Do you believe,” Sandra began, “in other beings? Spirits?”
Tim, in a trance of expectation: “Beings how?”
“Your mother and I are coming to terms with — with your nanna’s cottage being haunted, by nanna.”
“She came through last night!”
Dad held out a hand to rub mum’s knuckles and wedding band as she squared up to telling her dream.
“I know you’ll say this is like the homeopathy for the dog or another of mummy’s blue spells. But it was so vivid. There were some — what are they called, dear?”
“Spiritualists.”
“Theosophists with me doing a round-table.”
“Séance.”
“Except I had to wait my turn.”
Those queued ahead of her — mother of a Tommy missing on Flanders field, a Count of East Europe whose twin had died in utero (“such sad, sad people”) — took so long with the head-scarfed, mole-lipped medium (“like a gypsy”) that by the time Tim’s mum got her turn, and asked to contact her own mother, she’d started to wake.
“And the regret, Timmy, I felt, when I came to just lying in bed. The missed chance of it all. But then, staring at the ceiling, tears rolling down my temples, when I was about to drift back off: your nanna’s message!”
She rapped the crumb-sticky depression next to her iPad.
“The séance table knock! Banging the table over and over, like she was desperate to get across her message. Maybe I had fallen back asleep, but it even followed me there, nanna banging, banging, asking me to forgive her and — and I do forgive you.”
Harriet needed to laugh and needed to not laugh. Her skin rosied to a level Tim assumed was shame till he’d joined her upstairs, following her spluttered “Excuse me” and dash from the kitchen. (Tim’s dad, seeing her cry like his wife: “Sensitive girl after all.”)
“Sorrysorrysorry!” Harriet spoke between sweaty, grimaced, pillow-smothered cries of laughter.
“Didn’t you feel something?” Tim was talking in a rush before his parents heard any cries that dodged past her hand. She shook her head behind it. “Like shame, but not shame? Or what’s after it?”
Really she’d just been embarrassed. “No offence.”
“No worries. I was embarrassed. But there’s something else. Confession’s not the same as exposure, Harry. We can’t summon the Shame Fairy expectantly. Even if you’ve been dreading exposure it’s gotta blindside you to work. Look!”
He’d been pointing to what she’d exposed under his pillow but now he glared at her. The pace and depth of the wooden creaks always warned him which parent was on their way upstairs. Harriet’s hooty expression back was hysterically tense.
“Harriet? Harriet!”
Followed by his dad’s voice: “Perhaps a change of t-shirt for the pub?”
Before folding the note as the door opened, Tim managed to flash it at Harriet: a picture of him wiping his nose and her scrunching her face, each subtitled:
You last night: “[a man in bad shape on his tenth flight of stairs]”. You last night: “[constant whimpers like in the gaps of a crying fit]”.
All the best
“So does this one go with mine or yours?”
Tim wasn’t sure Harriet had heard through her bathroom wall; he lodged the note in her Victorian diary, which he browsed more and more slowly. Fifteen minutes ago she’d reciprocated his tracing of her belly by reaching back to trace his thigh but then gotten out of bed for another shower first. Also in the bathroom his toothbrush crossed necks with hers; in her wardrobe hung a supply of his ties and shirts for school. The more often he stayed over, well, the more likely they’d be to catch the Shame Fairy.
First had come the drum of the shower. He was still listening to its unbroken sound. His fingernail turned the button-lock of the bathroom door. As he silently entered, the flanks of her bent white legs stood out most, leaning away as she made to get toilet paper with the hand her phone was in. His phone was also to hand; the star of its camera light was the first thing she saw coming.
Her face made three Os. Not faltering he grabbed her by the arm then pulled her to the tiles before straddling the toilet to video the contents. Screaming, she slapped at the flush, slammed the lid like it was the front cover of a diary then wrapped the bowl in her arms.
A cloud passed across the bathroom light: avid Tim and knelt Harriet looked flatter, more leaden to each other. The unused shower still roared but not so loudly she couldn’t hear the cheerful ping. When she saw the video in their friends’ group chat, she howled his name.
He didn’t respond, stamping his one foot here, there, explosively clapping cupped hands.
“That quote you’d copied out,” he said, a chalky toothbrush glass squeezed over his heart, “in the Notes on your notes.” He hurried to her dresser where he shook out a transparent plastic tub of Roses chocolates. With a silent cartwheel, the Shame Fairy sluiced from the glass into the tub. “‘Only because its skin gets irritated does a baby mind its own shit. To teach a baby not to want to sit in shit, you have to teach it something it wouldn’t know otherwise.’”
Warily she completed his paraphrase. “That shit shame is the first shame.”
Her tone and face hadn’t cooled yet. She rode out her rage by looking at the kind of bell jar display he handed across.
“But — it’s so much smaller.”
About the size of a hornet, the humanoid figure had feathery white wings. Darker triangles stood for merkins on the groin and armpits, or were a felt bikini to hide the same. Harriet secured doors and windows then clicked-out the net before Tim reopened the lid. With a pencil he peeled back the felt: the Shame Fairy was doll-smooth. It did a little jig at them. At all times the Shame Fairy was in a deep ruby blush.
They yelled down asking whether it had anything clever to say. Then they laughed at it. They took turns using the pencil to poke it, rubber-end first, then with the spike of lead. Curving at one hip to avoid their pokes, it finally responded by raising a finger, once, twice: wait no wait. Very fast and seriously it scribbled on a pad held to its chest, then it looked at them with a note held double-handed in the air: a picture of Tim’s nanna. He replaced the lid and shook the tub as though it contained lottery balls. Each time the Shame Fairy hit the plastic it let off a dramatic gasp.
After their celebratory night-out and fuck at Tim’s place — they’d planned to do it in front of the Shame Fairy but got so drunk on cocktails they missed the last train back to hers — she had to find her handbag and shoes, which meant leaving past his housemates: the one in the dressing gown who always looked surprised over his cereal, dribbling milk as he made serious conversation, the one in the pantsuit eating toast on her feet to keep any conversation short — why in a suit? — shit, it was Monday!
Harriet’s loud tights and askew halterneck and day-old mascara felt stickier and all the more out of place among the street’s anoraks and brollies. Smellably a bit drunk still, wobbling from her one high-heel and one low-heel, she walked sheltered from the rain by just an outsized, clearly a man’s zippy hoodie — Tim’s favourite. Sitting opposite on the train, a fluffily white-haired woman in green gillet nudged her husband, then mouthed, “Look”, for Harriet to see as much as him. Somewhere down the line, the Shame Fairy swooned. With a bright delighted face, the husband fixed his tie and fisherman’s hat and sat up straight, adding a well-done wink to Harriet while his wife pretended to bosh him on the head with a tubed Readers’ Digest. The Shame Fairy coughed and hacked. Off the train, then off her feet: hoisted onto the shoulders of further men and women, many in their own disarray. When they weren’t carrying her at a march with forward stares they softly backhanded passersby on their phones or in newspapers — look who it is! our champion! — their chant building from the station all the way to hers via Boots for aspirin and cranberry juice: “Harri-et! Harri-et! Harri-et!” When she asked at the counter for the morning-after pill, the man wouldn’t hand any over till he got to shake her hand. Down the aisles, people meercatted into view to give her recommendations, OK-signs, grimly pumping applause. The Shame Fairy trembled, holding its rocky elbows. The top hashtags became #HarrietGotSome, #GoHarriet!, #PrincessHarry. Beyond messaging her girlfriends she livestreamed a speech with all of last night’s juicy details, to her manager, her old teachers, her parents, their eyes moistening above clasped and kissed hands. The Shame Fairy staggered around as if the tub yawed like a ship.
It never quite perished though. If they let it be for long enough, they’d hear again the faint buzz, as of a moth passing by, and see it idling in aerial circles, arms folded behind its back, glancing its forehead off the tub’s panelled sides. And not even idling: from its flat bum came a strand as thin as fish poo to drape on the underside of the Roses lid in a mosquito coil. This Harriet took especially personally.
From their bed Tim stared at the tub with voluptuous rage. “I get the same urge — you ever get that urge? To kick a pigeon when you’ve had an incredibly shitty week.”
They’d debated into the early hours on how to avenge their pride — filling the tub with water, boiling-hot water, or overlapping their glasses to create a death-ray with the sun — when Tim, tub clunking to the floorboards, dehoused the Shame Fairy and slapped from high above. The first slap was mindless and imprecise, but he slapped again, then Harriet joined him, the two of them alternating like smiths at an anvil, biting lips and goggling eyes as they slapped down hard onto the fairy’s crunchy body. Already having towered over it, they grew as big as their shadows and soon had to crouch because of the ceiling at their backs. A thin voice drew like wire out of Harriet: “How d’you like it? How d’you like it? Not so big now.”
She was still yelling when Tim pulled her hand down.
“It’s dead. It’s over. Shame is over.”
Windows of shops filled with hypertrophied hearts, stuck with arrows or clutched by bears, or the hearts themselves with mouths of their own in a smug smile. Roses everywhere.
“Seeing as we simulated the rest — meeting the parents, you moving in, calling what we are by name… thought we may as well follow through.”
She passed over a bumpy white envelope with a kiss — her gift to him being the keys she’d gotten cut — then she smacked her lips and pulled a face before fetching the chocolate ice cream. As for Tim’s gift to her, he was just going to come out and say he loved her. When he said it over the brown-streaked bowls, it felt awkward and false, as inevitable. Hurriedly he sat up to kiss her across the table then he detached, nostrils high.
“The fuck was that?”
Fallen onto the sofa, they moved hands under clothes, faster and harder. The more frantically each searched, the more the other flinched from the invasive touch. With her bones weighing on top of him painfully, they kissed: it was like French-kissing someone after dentist’s anaesthetic. Touching tongues together felt as inappropriate and probably unsanitary as touching eyeballs.
Hurried to the bedroom, they tried to ignore the genteel shock of seeing each other naked, like when you board a train to find a passenger topless. The sight of each other’s genitals wasn’t gross exactly — each set looked placid, quiet, like things you might stare at in a rockpool as you wondered in a sun-trance how they lived their lives.
“Will we see what’s on the telly?”
Harriet rolled off Tim in grumpy relief. “Yes, please, yes.” Their skins peeled off each other with the sound of two orange segments being separated. “Let’s see what’s on.”
They lay on their sides in opposite directions, a closed bracket and an open bracket: both on their phones and ignoring the news.
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