My Last Confession (2 page)

When I got dressed on the morning of the interview, guilt, self-hate and nerves competed for the space in my head where my brain used to be. Was my decision to go back to work the right one? Or was Zach’s mum’s choice a better one? Playgroup treasurer? Taxi service for promising young swimmer, gymnast, baby-yoga-ist, sing-alonger and enjoy-a-baller? Maker of time-tabled, organic,
E
-numberless
and aggressively supervised meals? Mother of children who knew their place, their manners, their alphabets and their keyboards? Campaigner against the word ‘just’ as a prefix for housewife?

Or was Martha’s mum right? Casual dope smoker who laughed with her little one, enjoyed every moment she spent with her, even if she sometimes forgot to make
dinner
as such. Then again, as Martha’s mum reasoned, if the wee one was really hungry then she’d ask for food, wouldn’t she?

Or was it me? Rummaging through my clothes saying fuck and shite a lot, sculling a tepid Lavazza, getting ready to leave Robbie behind in his warm
Bob-the-Builder
PJs?

Of all three mums, as I got dressed for my interview that morning, I knew I was the least right.

Expletives done for the moment, I dragged an old social work uniform out of my cupboard – not too ‘I’m-superior-to-you’ 
formal, not too ‘I-can-be-walked-
all-over’
casual – and kissed my boys goodbye.

If I got the job, Chas planned to take the Robster to the studio with him. ‘Don’t be so traditional, K!’ he said. ‘You’re so het up. He’ll be fine!’ Robbie would be given a paint brush and some old canvases and it would be fun, Chas insisted – two boys with paint, hanging out – what could possibly go wrong?

(Ha! I was looking forward to Chas clambering up that learning curve.)

Chas and Robbie waved from the front door of Mum and Dad’s, both beaming at me as I walked along the street and turned the corner. As I disappeared, I heard in the distance that Robbie’s giggling had turned to crying, and it was like when I was breastfeeding and milk would spurt from my breasts when Robbie cried, which was horrifying, but also wonderful, how the connection between us was so physical. We were joined then, and still were because although milk wasn’t spurting from my tits (thank goodness, as I had a lovely black shirt on) his cry went to a place in me that no other cry ever could.

I ran back to him, but by the time I got there Chas had distracted him by tickling him under the chin with a Chinese lantern from the neighbour’s garden. Looking up at me from his laughing, it was clear he was wondering why the hell I was back so soon. So I tickled him too, and kissed Chas on his beautiful perfect painter’s hands, the hands I’d fallen in love with two years earlier 0n the backseat of a Ford. Then I turned and ran all the way to my car with a different kind of pain, the kind that’s more
like an ache because at the end of the day, even as a mother, you’re not indispensable.

It pissed with rain as I walked past two high-rise towers plonked in the middle of a wasteland. Wind channelled its way between them, the towers swaying. I looked up and wondered about who was swaying up there,
twenty-two
storeys high, their stained tea mugs sliding left then right on their kitchen tables. It made me dizzy, so I looked down and concentrated on walking, which wasn’t easy because the wind was pushing me as if to say,
Get out of here, out of here.

The interview was at my prospective workplace, which was in an area of deprivation. If only I’d heeded the warning – i.e. an area that is the puddle of the world; an area with boarded-up windows and unplayed-in
playgrounds;
an area with more wind than other areas just yards away, more wind and no street names, no house numbers and no pedestrian crossings; an area not to be entered lightly, but with a knife and a willingness to use it. People walked on the road, refusing to defer to the moneyed authority of cars. Groups of young men stood on corners dealing, or else eating Greggs steak bites.

I walked past them, wondering if they would notice that an outsider was walking by. Someone from a different place, only two miles away, but a place with house numbers, Lavazza and hope.

The interview went badly. Suddenly I wanted to be home with Robbie more than anything in the world, especially considering the dire state of the office and surrounds. Still, I tried my best to feign enthusiasm as I sat on my
rickety chair in the middle of a large ugly room filled with shite and three interviewers.

In the social work course I did there’d been many important things to learn – risk assessment, anti-
discrimination,
crisis intervention and so on. But one of the most important lessons, the thing that everyone who did the course learned by heart and kept with them for life, was to dress so appallingly that the users at the meth clinic felt chic in comparison.

These three had pushed the lesson a bit too far, however. Take the style and elegance of committed Christians, quadruple it, and you have the three social workers who interviewed me that day. Commendable, determined
ugliness,
taken to the limit, from tip to toe, in greasy hair, bad teeth, and clothing too small or too large but worth it for the price.

As they sat opposite me, bombarding me with questions, I remembered why I’d felt so good when I left social work. Social workers were intensely serious and quite often they had bad breath.

I had done the wrong course, was going for the wrong job, I thought to myself as I licked the back of my hand and smelt it.

(Oh … coffee tongue. Maybe not.)

The questions were the same as for my first interview ten years earlier, and I answered them half-heartedly,
rambling
on about the things I remembered from the relevant sections of my diploma. I made an attempt at humour: ‘My weaknesses?’ I repeated. ‘Well, there’s my
perfectionism,
which can be a bit difficult, and I’m a workaholic, can’t get enough of work, you know … which can also be a bit hard. And then there’s my cocaine habit …’

My boss-to-be, an expressionless forty-something with a voice so soft and therapeutic that I wanted to strangle her, did not flinch. The two men bookending her bit their lips, bless them.

I left the grey building thanking the Lord that I’d fucked it up so badly. Who’d work in a place like
that?
Where would you go for lunch?

But when I got home they’d already phoned with the good news. I was now a criminal justice social worker or, in sexier terms, a probation officer, parole officer,
shit-kicking,
hard-talking, bad-boy-breaching administrator of the law. If it’d been America, I’d have had a gun and a uniform – that’s how goddam sexy my new job was.

The next day, Chas bought me a police uniform and a toy gun, and he was mightily pleased, if a little sore, at how quickly and naturally my shit-kicking-bad-
boy-breaching
attitude had taken hold.

Mum and Dad were happy for us. We were starting a new life together, like they had, thirty-seven years earlier. A couple of nights before we moved out, we found ourselves all sitting around looking at their wedding photos. They got married in Bali, long before it was fashionable and the likes of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall tied the knot – or not – there. Afterwards, they partied with four friends till the wee hours before falling asleep on the beach.

‘We were so in love!’ Mum said, smiling, because they still were, after thirty-seven years together. They still sought each other out at parties ahead of anyone else, still had stuff to say over formal restaurant tables.

‘Chas is a lucky boy,’ Mum told me, and we hugged.

‘I don’t deserve him,’ I said. At this she pushed my fringe back, oddly fond of my forehead and eyebrows, and told me that I had no self-awareness, and that everyone was always inordinately pleased to see me. She told me that, at Christmas time, aunts and uncles and cousins would sit at the table not saying much until I arrived and then conversation would suddenly start. I brought laughter to people, she continued. Did I not realise that Chas was flat as a pancake without me? Withdrawn and sad.

‘Try and be a bit more sensible!’ she said. ‘But never lose that light you have, and believe me, you deserve him.’

I went to bed loving myself, but also realising that my mum and dad just knew how to breed happiness. In everything they did and said, they bred happiness, and this was my lucky inheritance.

It was raining by the time we finished packing the car with all our stuff. I hugged Mum then Dad and we all had tears in our eyes. We drove with the wipers on all the way over to the West End, and had to park an impossible
distance
from my flat. And even though the parking was a pain, it was great to be back where residents varied in colour and style. I bounced up the close with Chas and Robbie, desperate for my bath, my spices, our home.

We spent the first day toddler-proofing cupboards and windows and loos and following the Robster around as he found other things that needed to be toddler-proofed.

That night I put him to bed and walked into the kitchen to find Chas with chilled champagne and a beautifully wrapped present.

‘To our new life together!’ he said, popping the cork and pouring the fizz.

I took a sip and opened the present, with the gooey, lovey-dovey expectation of a newly-wed. The paper was pink and shiny, and so was the rabbit vibrator inside.

‘Chas!’ I said, beholding the rubber-eared cock.

‘Guaranteed orgasm!’ he said.

Oh God, not this again.

I’d never had one. An orgasm that is. Despite
twenty-two
sexual partners (or twenty-three, depending on your definition), I’d never had one. I’d never even admitted to not having one, not till the first time I slept with Chas.

We were at Mum and Dad’s house, in the den at the
time. Robbie was asleep in the creative room, and Mum and Dad were watching television. Chas had been very patient with me, but as much as he treasured having his hands caressed, he was horny as a bastard and no amount of finger sucking in conjunction with pud-pulling would satisfy him.

We’d just cuddled etcetera etcetera for nights on end, but this time I knew I was ready and when we finished I sighed happily because it was the best sex I’d ever had.

‘That was the best sex I’ve ever had,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ I was defensive now. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just that you didn’t …’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You didn’t, you know, climax.’

‘Yes I did.’

‘Krissie …’

‘I did!’ I shouted, getting out of bed in a strop and going to the bathroom. How dare he accuse me of not coming? Of course I had. I was thirty-three and I’d never come so completely for over two decades!

He was behind me in the bathroom, sheepish. I washed my hands and tried to walk out of the bathroom, but he barricaded the door with his arms. There was a struggle. Me trying to get out from under one arm, the other under his legs, and so on, to no avail.

I ended up on the floor and crying. ‘I don’t think I ever have,’ I said, my face in my hands, embarrassed.

I wasn’t sure in the same way I wasn’t sure if I’d been in love before I undoubtedly fell into it with Chas. There’d been times when I missed a man so much I ached. Could have been love. Times when I didn’t eat for days
after it ended. Possibly. Likewise I’d had sexual
experiences
that made me smile for days, ones that made me cry, and certainly I’d regularly made loud animal noises. But Chas spotted a mile away that my noises were never loud nor animal enough to suggest the oblivion of a
werewolf
-like transformation. And this was what I should aim for, he explained: oblivion – eyes white and flickering, mouth stretched and uneven with all the distortions and discomfort of a human possessed.

Sounded bloody awful, I’d reckoned, but Chas was always right, always knew best. So that’s why I didn’t mind when he bought me the rabbit that Saturday, the special gel on Sunday, the vibrating eggs on Monday, a lacy Ann Summers number four nights in a row and sporadic buzzers for the following two weeks. We were on a mission to find me an orgasm.

Initially, we placed the rabbit on the coffee table well after Robbie’s bedtime, to get accustomed to it. In truth, I found the huge rubber penis-shaped object quite frightening, but it remained on the coffee table for at least two Big Brother evictions, oft-times buzzing towards us like a Dalek. So I was no longer frightened of it by the time Chas moved the bunny and his entourage into the bedroom.

He devised other exercises: just touching each other with no penetrative sex for five days; female-perspective porn that didn’t involve harsh nipple-twisting and too much pink thrust; shower attachments and lengthy
periods
alone ‘just to learn’.

I’d love to say I didn’t need my rubber friend in the end; that all I needed was a new, blank mind and the love and patience of a man who smelt of everything good in
the world – toast, cut grass, the smoke of a roaring campfire. But I can’t say that, because Chas was out painting in his studio, and I was alone and pressing hard on my bunny’s ears when I suddenly found myself to be the scariest, ugliest werewolf on the moors.

I was thirty-five, and I knew, at last.

A few days later, Chas and Robbie got ready for their first day together at the sculpture studio. There were many things Robbie needed to be official Painter’s Assistant. Paintbrush? Tick. Huge old T-shirt? Tick. Ridiculously large beret? Tick. By the time Robbie was ‘dressed for work’, his teeny chin and his wee white neck were the only bits of him that were actually visible. After kissing and giggling at the front door, we parted ways. Before I headed down to my car, I watched them walking up Gardner Street hand in hand, blissfully happy.

It took me twenty-five minutes to drive to work, then another twenty-five to park. The car park was packed with the cheap cars of council employees. The building was an old textiles factory that architects had somehow managed to convert into something even more depressing.

I found my way to the reception area, and stood at the bench wondering how to achieve eye contact with the person whose nose was ten inches from mine. A cough? A fingernail-tap on the bench? Words?

‘Hi, I’m Krissie Donald,’ I said, expecting this
information
to be enough to initiate action. It didn’t even initiate eye contact.

‘In Hilary Sweeney’s team,’ I said. ‘Criminal justice.’

‘No one told us,’ said the lucky-result-of-a-policy-
to-employ
-locals.

After I fake-smiled, she begrudgingly opened the
trapdoor
that separated agitated clients from agitated typists, and led me through the messy admin area, out the back and up two floors, to a small office crammed with four desks.

‘There, have that one,’ she said, then left.

I sat at the empty desk for half an hour before three people filtered in.

‘Fuck me!’ said the first. ‘They’ve finally filled it then!’ He was forty-five, six foot six and – I soon learnt – had three degrees and did stand-up comedy in his spare time, most of which appeared to be in the office.

‘I’m Robert,’ he added, before telling me a joke that answered any questions about the level of political correctness in my workplace (low).

‘Are you crazy? Must be fucking crazy to be in this place,’ said the second, Danny, a gorgeous-looking guy with shaded glasses and very shiny shoes. ‘Like your top, by the way,’ he said, sitting down at a desk opposite me and turning on his computer.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

The computer started speaking to him and he pulled out a tampon-shaped object and began sucking on it. ‘Windows on,’ said the computer. ‘Outlook. Open … Inbox … You have five new messages …’

‘Is it new?’ he asked me.

‘Sorry?’ I said. The talking computer had made me
forget
the topic of our small talk.

‘Your top?’

‘No,’ I replied, while six-foot-six Robert made a
Shhh
gesture at me, then snuck around behind Danny to place a device under the receiver of his phone. Unaware, Danny
sucked his nicotine inhaler again, then picked up the phone, which exploded so loudly that I felt immediate gratitude for whoever invented panty liners.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Danny grabbed a stick from under his desk and whisked it around behind him till it smashed Robert in the knees.

That’s when I realised that Danny was completely blind.

After that, I could hardly take my eyes off him. The way he typed, read Braille, put numbers into his wee
electronic
talking book, answered the phone and talked.

‘He’s too sick to come in, is he, Mrs Thom?’ he said to the mother of the 9 a.m. non-show. ‘So is he dying? Bleeding? Has his voice box been shot?’ (A muffled response.) ‘No? In that case put him on.’ (More muffle.) ‘Well, get him out of bed!’

Danny waited.

‘Peter. Last week I gave you a second formal warning for being aggressive and racist in reception …’

Another interval.

‘PETER! It’s irrelevant whether or not asylum seekers are using up all your social workers. The point is you’re breached, mate. You’re going back in.’

With this, my new blind hero hung up his phone, sucked once more on his nicotine inhaler and continued our conversation.

‘It’s nice, the top, but it doesn’t go with those trousers.’

My third colleague was large, serious and over fifty, with an accent that smacked of ‘doing the job for
charity
’. Her name was Penny and she was immensely active with her paperwork, her face red and sweaty with the effort of it.

The boss, Hilary, was one of the three who had
interviewed
me. While her male seniors at least had smiles to suppress as I’d made inappropriate quips, she’d had no such problem. Smiles were for clients only and did not indicate joviality.

After a reasonably relaxed morning with my three
colleagues,
Hilary sat me down in her office, which was directly opposite ours, for my first
supervision
session, much of which centred around diarising future supervision sessions. With twelve fortnightly meet-ups inked, Hilary then talked for an hour without pausing, enjoying the sound of her own voice so much her mouth frothed with the pleasure of it.

‘Transparency is essential’, she said, ‘to our robust packages of care, which combine effective monitoring and a therapeutic approach that addresses and
ameliorates
the issues surrounding the risk of recidivism.’

I nodded at appropriate intervals, trying hard to
understand
what the hell she was talking about, and praised the Lord when she handed me two report requests and let me loose.

Back in the office, Robert was pinning chocolate
wrappers
to Danny’s ‘Wall of Shame’ and Penny was banging heavy wads of her paper around her desk and huffing.

I sat down at my jiggly desk and looked at the first report request, a home background report for Jason Marney. A sticky note on top said: ‘Overdue! Case Conf, Sandhill, 4 p.m.’ Jason Marney was a widower of
thirty-nine,
and had spent twelve months behind bars for lewd and libidinous practices against his children. Fuck, a sex offender. I’d hoped to avoid those guys. He had four offences – two indecent exposures ten and eight years
back respectively, one indecent assault at a swimming pool two years ago, and the lewd and lib. According to the indictment, he’d made his four- and six-year-old boys watch hardcore porn with him and got them to take turns touching his genitals. Blah. Serious, big-time
stomach-churning
blah. Still, I consoled myself, the report was a basic one. Mr Marney wanted to be released to his
parents
’ address in Toryglen. All I had to do was check that the accommodation was safe and suitable, and then beg Hilary not to allocate me as his supervising officer after his release. It’d be a push, but I could visit his parents before the 4 p.m. case conference.

The second report request was a pre-trial report for Jeremy Bagshaw.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was this case that would almost ruin my life.