My Last Confession (8 page)

When Jeremy walked into the interview room to see me for the third time, something had changed.

‘You’re looking a bit better,’ I lied. He looked freshly bruised, and broken.

‘Thanks,’ he said, taking his seat cautiously.

I decided not to press him about his bruises. There was no point. He’d talk to someone when he felt ready. Instead, I spent the next twenty minutes doing the ‘final interview’, which involved reading over what I’d written so far and making alterations where necessary. I hated doing this, but he had a right to hear it. I imagined how I’d feel if someone read their version of my life story to me. Pissed off to the point of head-butting is how I’d feel. But being completely upfront about what I’d written was the right thing to do, so I soldiered on, telling Jeremy to stop me if he had any queries or issues whatsoever.

I was about to read Jeremy the conclusion – that he was aware a life sentence would be the only option available to the court should he be found guilty, and that in my opinion he would find this sentence very difficult, but that there appeared to be no issues in relation to
self-harm
or suicide – when Jeremy suddenly reached out and slapped my hand and the report down to the table.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, suddenly scared, his hand still on mine.

Jeremy looked over my shoulders to see if anyone was looking and leaned

in towards me, the terror on his face sending a chill up my spine. His words came out almost in a whisper.

‘I’m in danger,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m in danger,’ even softer this time.

‘What is it?’

But he was crying so hard he was unable to get the words out, and I found myself moving to the other side of the desk without even thinking about professionalism and distance and being seen as a soft touch, and putting my arm around him.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Tell me.’

‘Please, just go back to your seat. If I tell you it might happen again … or worse.’

‘Tell me what’s happening.’

‘I can’t, I’m in danger. Krissie, listen to me. We’re
both
in danger.’

What the hell did Jeremy mean, we were both in danger? He’d rushed from the interview room after blurting that out, leaving me confused and worried and in desperate need of advice. I drove as fast as I could back to the office, but when I got there Danny was on home visits, Robert was at Shotts Prison, Penny was banging things around on her desk (and in any case was the last person I wanted to talk to), my boss was still off sick, and my boss’s boss was in a risk management meeting with his boss and the police.

I hate being new. You spend days pretending to read things people give you, meeting people you immediately forget, wondering how to go about asking for a stapler that works. Throughout my four-storey office building, everyone but the smokers stuck to their sections like
rabbits
in winter, scampering out to collect every now and again, but otherwise hibernating in their miserable dark holes. Secretaries were really spies disguised, checking on overuse of staplers, amongst other things, and taking notes. Bosses were formidable giants behind closed doors, rarely available, especially at times of crisis. They weren’t to be confused with those of us who did the work, who visited the prisons and the hospitals and the houses, and whose names would be in the paper should anything go wrong.

I decided to wait for my boss’s boss – allegedly called Peter McDonald – to get out of the meeting, tell him about what Jeremy had said, and then settle on how to proceed.

Anxious and worried at my desk, I dialled reception to leave a message for him, hoping he’d call me back with the advice and support I urgently needed.

‘How did you get this number?’ came an accusing voice.

‘It’s on my phone list as reception.’

‘Well, this is the concierge.’

‘Oh, okay. You might want to change the phone list.’

‘Just cross it off yours.’

‘But then other people might do the same.’

‘No one has ever phoned this number instead of
reception
before, only you.’

And so it went on till the woman at the end, obviously from the concierge and not from reception, hung up on me.

I decided to scrounge a fag, walk to reception, and ask them myself.

‘Can you let me know as soon as Peter McDonald gets out of the risk-management meeting? I need to speak to him urgently.’

‘What about?’

‘I’d like to speak to him personally.’

‘What’s your extension?’

‘I can’t recall, off hand. Something with a 3 and a 1?’

‘If you don’t know your extension, how can I call you to let you know when he gets out of the risk-management meeting?’ She recalled my words in deliberate detail, to make a point.

‘My name’s Krissie Donald. Hilary Sweeney’s team. Why don’t you look on your list?’

‘Because I’m very busy.’

As I waited back at my desk, Danny’s phone rang and I answered it. I learned from what happened next that this was a big mistake. Social workers should never answer each other’s phones.

It was one of Danny’s probationers, a fifty-something drinker called Chris Campbell, who began by saying he wanted to apologise for missing his anger-management class.

‘He better not breach me, ’cause I’ve rang and all, no?’

‘Why did you miss it?’ I asked.

‘Some bastard eye-balled me down the Green.’

‘You got into a fight?’

‘He eye-balled me.’

‘Okay, I’m just writing out your message for Danny … “Chris Campbell rang to say he missed his
anger-management
class ’cause he was busy fighting down Glasgow Green.”’

He yelled at me for a while – social workers are all the fuckin’ same and all cunts, etc – and as he ranted, my phone rang. I couldn’t get him off the line to answer it because he stated crying.
He
was the cunt, wasn’t he? A cunt and a waste of space and maybe he should just end it all?

Eventually, my phone having rung out three times, I promised to rewrite the message slightly: ‘Danny – Chris Campbell rang. Says he’s having a tough time and will come in first thing tomorrow.’

I immediately dialled reception to be informed that my boss’s boss and his boss had finished their meeting and left the building.

Shit.

‘I asked you not to let that happen!’ I said, having raced back down to reception.

‘I rang your number three times. It’s 3153, by the way,’ she said.

In the old days, before I embraced the maturity and wisdom that came with motherhood and true love, I would have taken the bitch by the scruff of her neck and shaken her, or at least said something cutting and witty about her weight. But I had grown, even with a murderer from the most dangerous prison in Europe trusting me with secrets he shouldn’t, and instead I said, ‘That’s right, you did,’ and took a seat beside her at reception to wait for the boss’s boss to return.

I waited for two hours beside the receptionist, who fiddled awkwardly with her pens as I breathed heavily down her neck. Occasionally she answered the phone, and was incredibly friendly to everyone. She made a point of making points.

Social workers rushed in and out on child-protection investigations, grabbing children’s car seats from a row piled up opposite the photocopier. Women and men yelled in interview rooms – at each other, at their workers. Receptionists answered phones and talked about the weekend. Meanwhile, I waited.

And waited.

But the boss’s boss and his boss did not return and before long I was alone in the locked office, and when I left it was getting dark and someone had scratched ‘Fuck You’ on the bonnet of my car.

I had to go home. I needed to talk to Chas. He would make me feel better, tell me how to handle things, give me a hug.

‘Hello to you too.’

‘I said I needed to be at the studio for seven!’

‘Oh God!’ I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. Chas only had a few days to get things ready for his exhibition, and everything was riding on it.

‘Is this how it’s going to be? Robbie’s asleep. You haven’t seen him since eight o’clock and you come in here twelve hours later without even apologising!’

He put on his coat as we began Fight Two.

‘Sorry, Chas, you need to listen to me. I’ve had the worst day –’

But he was already out the door, the keys to the studio in his hand.

He’d be gone as long as it took, painting whatever the fuck he painted until he felt calm again.

And so I was alone with my problem. I peeped into the nursery where Robbie was sleeping with his bum up in the air. His perfect mouth was slightly opened and resting on the pillow and his huge eyelashes curled up towards his eyebrows. My boy.

After throwing yet another pizza in the bin, I remembered my pre-pregnancy stash of fags. They were hidden in a plastic container above a wall unit in the kitchen. I smoked all seven of them in a row, stale and revolting as they were, and then lay awake all night, drifting in and out and wondering if I’d been drifting in and out, or
simply
been awake all night. Chas didn’t come home.

I was cranky and irritable with Robbie the next morning. Obsessed with gathering toys to take to nursery to set up a shop, he filled his Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase with God knows what. He wouldn’t eat his porridge, and
refused to stay still as I put his clothes on and brushed his teeth. I raced around after him at a hundred miles an hour, my voice taking on an evil-witch-from-hell tone as I got more exhausted with each lap of the flat.

For the first and last time ever, I smacked him. On his hand. He stopped still and looked at me with eyes that were disappointed and betrayed while he prepared for the cry of a lifetime.

So when I dropped him off at nursery, I not only felt awful for condemning him to spend the day with young nursery nurses who didn’t love him, but I also felt awful because I’d just smacked my darling defenceless
three-year-old.

Jeremy had berated himself after he’d left the interview with Krissie the day before. How could he have done what he just did? Worried Krissie like that by telling her she was in danger? He liked her. She was honest,
non-judgemental.
And he hadn’t meant to worry her.

It was the last straw, so before he got back to his cell he asked to make some phone calls.

He hadn’t heard Amanda’s voice since he saw her after the arrest, in a brown brick station in Glasgow. The time before that was better. He’d waved goodbye at the house in Crinan, both of them tearful because they didn’t want to be apart, but filled to the brim with love and
happiness
. Yet here he was on a blackened phone in a Victorian prison hearing her voice again. ‘Goodbye, Amanda,’ he said, as he drank her in. ‘I just want to say goodbye.’

The next call was harder for him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told his mum when she finally answered. ‘I’m just ringing to say I’m sorry, for the past, and now.’

Initially, Anne Bagshaw hadn’t moved as the phone rang over and over again, messages filling the answer phone with weepy desperate beggings:

‘Please talk to me, please forgive me.’

‘Mum? Please pick up … It’s Jeremy. I didn’t mean it.’

‘I deserve to be punished, and I want to be, but I want you to know how much I love you.’

‘I want you to know I didn’t mean to ruin your life.’

‘Please pick up, let me hear your voice before I leave, you have to hear me say how sorry I am. I’ve been
speaking
to this social worker, this best girl called Krissie, and she’s helping me. I know what to do. Even from in here I can move on. I can sort things.’

Stunned and mortified, Jeremy’s mum put down her glass of gin when she heard her son’s last message. Picking up the phone, she listened to her son speak and her eyes changed for the first time in twenty-four years, the ice dripping round the edges.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jeremy said. ‘I’m just ringing to say I’m sorry.’

They were both silent for a moment.

‘Amanda would be better off without me.’

‘Jeremy?’ said his mother. ‘Are you okay?’

But he’d hung up, gone. She stared ahead, knowing that she could no longer lock him away. The time had come to see him, talk to him, perhaps even forgive him.

A few moments later, Anne Bagshaw booked a flight to Glasgow.

A few moments after that, while heading back to his cell, Jeremy plopped himself over the metal rail of the
second-floor
landing.

He woke up some time later with his nose through the hard wire and several officers and nurses beneath him.

They got a stretcher onto the wire and placed him on it, and he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t moving because he couldn’t or because they’d told him not to. The prison
jiggled
as he was carried – all ceilings and lights and worried faces – and stopped when he got to the health centre, a
stone building in between his hall and the social-work unit. The next thing he knew there were five people around him filling in booklets.

‘You know, if you’d really wanted to do it, mate, you’d have jumped from the top.’

He’d only jumped from the second-floor landing, one storey to the net. Which was why he was sore, but barely injured.

They barraged him with questions that were
accusations
really:

Do you feel like killing yourself?

Have you tried to kill yourself before?

Have you ever scratched yourself?

What are those marks on your chest?

Jesus, Jeremy thought to himself as the booklets were filled in. You’re even punished for wanting to kill yourself in prison – don’t do this, don’t do that, you silly boy, you useless idiot, you’ll be watched for this, four times an hour.

Eventually the uniforms left to confer with each other, and Jeremy was left alone in a cell that was not a suicide cell, and which therefore had sheets, wooden bunks and all the usual trimmings.