Shame

to the lawn.
    Monika began walking towards the outside door she knew led to the Anderssons’ stairwell. With each step she was conscious that she was walking in his footsteps, that it was his path she was taking. She put her hand on the black plastic doorknob. She closed her eyes and left her hand there. It was a strange thing about doorknobs. She never thought about them, but when she returned many years later to buildings she had lived in before, her hands always remembered the feel of the doorknob. They never forgot. Hands had their own ability to store memories and knowledge. This doorknob had been his. His hands had borne the memory of its shape, confidently pulling open the door each time he came home, and he had had no inkling on Thursday when he left that he would never do it again.
    She opened the door and entered the stairwell. On the left wall, behind glass, was a list of the names of the residents, in white plastic capital letters on blue felt. The Anderssons’ flat was on the third floor. Slowly, she started up the stairs. She let her hand glide up the banister and wondered if he also used to do that. The morning sounds seeped out of the doors she passed, muffled voices, someone running water. Further upstairs a door opened and was locked with a rattling bunch of keys. They met on the stairs between the second and third floors. An elderly man wearing a coat and carrying a briefcase said a polite ‘hello’. Monika smiled and returned the greeting. Then he was gone and she took the stairs up to the third floor. There were three doors. The Anderssons lived behind the middle one. That’s where they were.
    A child’s drawing was taped over the letter-box. Monika bent closer. Incomprehensible lines and curlicues drawn every which way with a green felt pen. Red arrows came out of the curlicues, and at the other end of them someone who could write had interpreted the artist’s work: ‘Daniella, Mamma Pernilla, Pappa Mattias.’
    She moved her hand close to the door handle, letting it hover above without touching, wanting merely to experience the feeling of being really close. At the same moment Daniella started to cry inside, and she quickly pulled her hand back. The sound of another door being opened somewhere in the stairwell made her hurry back down the stairs and out to her car.
    But now she knew where they were.

    He was waiting outside her flat when she came home. Sitting in the deep window seat on the landing. She saw him before she took the last steps up the stairs, and her feet slowed down but didn’t stop entirely. She walked straight past him and up to her door.
    ‘I thought I made myself clear on the phone. I don’t have anything else to say.’
    She had her back to him, and her fingers were searching for the right key. He didn’t reply, but she felt his gaze on the back of her neck. She unlocked the door and turned round.
    ‘What do you want?’
    He looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes and stubble on his chin. She wanted nothing more than to throw herself into his arms.
    ‘I just wanted to see you say it.’
    Monika shifted impatiently from one foot to the other.
    ‘Okay. I don’t want us to see each other anymore.’
    ‘You don’t have any intention of telling me what happened?’
    ‘Not a thing. I just realised that the two of us don’t fit together. It was a mistake from the beginning.’
    She took a step in towards her flat and started to close the door.
    ‘Did you meet someone else?’
    She stopped in the midst of her motion, thought for a second and realised that that was precisely what she had done.
    ‘Yes.’
    The noise he made sounded like a snort. Instinctively she had a need to defend herself; if a person snorted she had earned his contempt.
    ‘I’ve met someone who really needs me.’
    ‘And I suppose I don’t, in your opinion.’
    ‘Maybe you do, but not as much as he does.’
    She shut the door and cut him out of her life. And she knew that every word she had said was true. She had met someone else; Thomas didn’t have to know that he was now dead. Mattias’s weighty responsibility lived on, and it was her duty to take over now. That was the least she could do. It was impossible to undo things, so the only thing left was to try and set right as much as she could. By allowing herself a relationship with Thomas she had attempted to grab for herself the happiness to which she had no right. What had happened to Mattias was the final rebuke. The only