My Last Confession (9 page)

On the way to work I actively entered the contemplative stage of smoking, whereby the smoker admits their addiction by actually purchasing a packet of their own. It was a necessary step, as my thus-far-fun smoking
colleagues
had started saying things like ‘I only have two left’ and ‘I’ve just been out’.

Before I made it to my desk, the receptionist handed me a telephone message that read: ‘Call Amanda. It’s urgent.’

‘Jeremy tried to kill himself yesterday,’ Amanda said when I phoned her from the duty room in the main reception area. ‘Can you get me in to see him?’

After making several calls, I collected Amanda from her home and drove to Sandhill.

There’d been six suicides in Sandhill in as many months, very bad PR, and drastic steps were being taken to avoid further overriding the performance target of three suicides a year. Hence the governor allowed us to go into the ‘sui’ cell. Amanda was the first relative allowed inside since a mother came in during a hostage situation in ’98 and told her son to ‘give that girl back NOW!’ (It worked.)

It was the same size and shape as the others – six by eight, cream-painted bricks with some kind of wood chip sprinkled through, arched at the top, but with absolutely nothing in it except a large clock that ticked and ticked
and ticked and if you didn’t really want to kill yourself before going in there, you sure as hell did after.

Tick Tick Tick Tick. That’s all the two of us heard as we stood at the door of the concrete cell. Jeremy was huddled in the corner. He was absolutely still, his face covered with his arms. He seemed tiny.

Amanda looked scared. She didn’t recognise him, and didn’t know what to do. I pushed her arm gently towards him, and she moved into his corner of the ring.

She crouched down slowly. He didn’t move. She knelt on the floor. She slowly pressed her head into his neck, and nuzzled, and he groaned. She flung her arms around him, enveloped him, and the two of them fell messily into a pile on the floor, clinging to each other, unable to get close enough, howling.

‘I can’t look at you,’ Jeremy said. ‘I’ve ruined your life. I ruin things.’

‘You haven’t ruined anything,’ Amanda told him.

‘You’ve made my life worth living, and we’ll get through this.’

I was on the verge of tears as I watched them – her
trying
to get eye contact, him too distraught to give it – and I wanted to leave their intimacy well alone, leave that space. But I wasn’t allowed, and so I stayed as Amanda talked to him. He couldn’t leave her. She needed him. The trial hadn’t even started yet. He’d get off. They’d still be okay. They’d have their honeymoon. He wasn’t to go anywhere, not without her, not without her.

After forty minutes or so, Amanda was asked to leave and I sat with him for a while.

‘You’re going to survive this,’ I said. ‘You have to. You see how much she loves you?’

‘I didn’t kill that woman. But I killed my baby sister. I deserve everything I get.’

‘You have to forgive yourself,’ I said, knowing that he would never be able to deal with the present unless he confronted his past.

‘But how?’ he asked.

I was stumped. How does someone forgive themself?

Did he need to be forgiven by someone else first?

By his dad, who’d fucked off to Canada to a dot.com family not long after Bella died?

His mum, who refused to see him or even talk to him and who was probably lying to police to keep him locked away, out of sight?

Stuck for suggestions, I found myself asking, ‘Are you religious?’

‘I was baptised Catholic, but after the funeral we stopped going to Mass.’

‘Maybe you should see the chaplain,’ I blurted, and this from me – the worst Catholic in the world – who’d once stolen twenty pence from the collection plate, crossed my arms tight through the sermon and pinched Geoffrey McTavish’s arms till he cried, who’d regularly made up stories as a teenager (
Forgive me father for I touched Shane O’Dowd’s penis behind the tennis shed …
) just to hear Father O’Hair choke in his little box.

‘I’ll organise it for you,’ I said.

I left Jeremy in his horrible sui cell and went over to Agents to see James Marney.

‘I’m going to be your supervising officer,’ I said, trying hard to ignore the queasy feeling in my stomach.

Okay, so part of my job was to protect his children,
and I’d done well in this regard so far. But – until I could talk to Hilary – another part was to help him be
law-abiding
. To do this I needed to get to know the man beyond the crime. I put my past as far to the back of my mind as I could and continued.

‘The parole board have asked me to identify another place for you to live. As long as this is suitable, your expected date of release won’t change. I’ll be working with the police, the housing department and the child protection team to find you a flat. When you get out, I’ll be visiting you regularly and working with you to help you avoid offending. It’s best if we can be upfront. So you need to be honest with me. Child protection will be assessing the situation with your children. If they feel your parents can’t protect them, further steps may be taken to ensure their safety. We need to work together on this.’

He’d obviously decided on a different tack since the pre-release case conference. He stared at me, through me, and was steadfastly silent. As I looked into his eyes, I tried not to see him watching hardcore porn and asking his sons to touch his penis; I tried not to see Sarah’s
stepfather
locking the en-suite door, not to hear Sarah
knocking
and crying from inside it as I did as I was told.

‘James?’ I prodded, but he wouldn’t answer. He hated my guts.

Despite my efforts, the feeling was mutual.

I suggested he should go back to his cell and think over if he wanted to get out at all, and then headed over to the social-work unit. Situated in a separate building in the middle of the prison and looking like a run-down
country
cottage, the social-work unit was filled with chatty
admin staff and an eccentric mixture of oddball social workers who seemed to do nothing unashamedly for very long periods of time.

After being offered biscuits and chocolates by the friendly receptionist, I caught up with the prison housing officer, who’d located a one-bedroom council flat for the lovely James Marney. Police would check it out and let me know if it was suitable. I then asked to see Bob, the prison social worker who’d been at the pre-release
meeting
. His office was in the eaves of the building. Classical music was playing from the radio, a large shop-like
display
of food was carefully arranged on a table in the
corner
, and Bob was having a power nap at his desk. He woke to the sound of the door shutting – ‘Good morning, Miss Donald!’ he said – and offered me one of the Turkish delights he’d bought during his fortnight in Istanbul, then issued me with an invitation to the next work-book-club at the Beer Café. Bob told me that Jeremy Bagshaw had returned from his interview with me at Agents, made some phone calls, then jumped off the second-floor landing of the remand hall. He wasn’t hurt badly because the net caught him at first-floor level, Bob told me, but when they’d left him alone in the health centre for five minutes he’d tied the sleeves of his shirt around his neck, ripped the body of his shirt and tied it to the leg of the bed, then spent the next four minutes trying to strangle himself because there was no height for
hanging
. He’d maintained a long, determined pull against the leg of the bed – pull, pull, head away from the bed, away, until the air was less and then nothing. I wondered how anyone could do this. I understood jumping off a
building
or kicking a chair, when one quick and irreversible
movement is all it takes, no turning back. But
maintaining
the effort throughout, when you could change your mind and just stop, just live, seemed incredible.

It hadn’t been a success, Bob said, because the
uniforms
in the health centre corridor had put their booklets down and turned around for a Code Blue.

Bob finished a game of mini-basketball (he had a net set up on his office door) and then escorted me to the chaplaincy.

Father Moscardini was a good-looking Scots-Italian man of about forty. His clothes were well ironed and he was trim and smiley. His wee room contained loads of cookery books and biographies. The radio was on. Father Moscardini was nothing like Father O’Hair or any of the other unhappy-looking priests I’d met as a child. He loved his job, and found giving comfort to men who were often at their lowest very rewarding. He’d just come back from performing a wedding for one of the inmates.

‘They seemed very much in love,’ the priest said. ‘It was very moving.’

‘I want to talk to you about Jeremy Bagshaw,’ I said, explaining his situation and his tragic past. ‘He’s worried about opening up.’

‘He needn’t be worried,’ Father Moscardini said. ‘I’ll go over and see him this afternoon.’

Something weird was happening to me. It started
innocently
enough, as an interview disguised as a manicure, but it was snowballing into other girly pursuits such as buying perfume and browsing in wedding-dress
boutiques
that I’d accidentally parked in front of.

‘When’s the big day?’ the assistant at Giuseppina Botti asked me.

I replied that I hadn’t set a date yet. Even if I had, I would probably buy a reasonably priced trouser suit that I could wear again to various occasions and was I still talking out loud? If I was, the assistant wasn’t listening; she was checking my sizes.

I had only ever worn a dress once, and it hadn’t been pleasant. I’d spent the whole evening with a scowl on my face hoping to God I didn’t have to run for a fire exit. Dresses were nonsensical, and yet the white gloriousness I was trying on was making me flush. Touching the raw silk of one in particular seemed to bring on the swelling sensation I had recently come to understand.

I tried on several, but in the end it was the V-neck
mermaid
sheath with vertical passimentarie detail and
floral-embroidered
bust that spoke to me so loudly I paid £1,320 for it, on Visa. I’d return it, no doubt, but I couldn’t resist taking it home with me, even if just for a few days.

Why did I do that? Something very strange was
happening
to me. Maybe it was the chaplain who’d
reminded
me of the world of ritual I’d forsaken, or the tragic newly-weds, or moving in with Chas, or maybe it was Robbie, who was sleeping much better, and life was
getting
easy again, and I wouldn’t want that, would I?

I snuck in the front door, got changed into my dress, crept into the spotless living room and went ‘Boo!’ Chas and Robbie were hugging on the sofa watching the Tweenies. Robbie lunged at me with his Nutella on toast and covered the whole of the vertical passimentarie detail in chocolate spread.

‘Shite!’ I said.

‘Shite!’ Robbie said.

Chas stood nervously at the bathroom door as I banged at the bodice with a wet flannel. It would have been very helpful for Chas at this point if there’d been a little guy at the bottom right-hand side of me ‘
interpreting
for the male’:

CHAS: Are we getting married?

ME: No, I’m just going a bit mad and this dress spoke to me and now it’s ruined and I can’t take it back!

LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: No, because you haven’t asked me, bastard.

CHAS: I thought we didn’t believe in marriage.

ME: We don’t.

LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: What’s not to believe in, prick?

CHAS: Robbie made a shop at nursery today!

ME: Really?

LITTLE GUY INTERPRETING FOR THE MALE: Really? You’ve changed the subject already? That’s it? That’s all you have to say when I’m standing here in a
stunning wedding dress that’s covered in Nutella and my hair’s all frizzy and my mascara has smudged and I’m a mad spinster lady. I’m Miss Havish-(snort)-sham!

Chas grabbed my hand and escorted me into the living room.

‘Tell Mummy how much money you made, little one!’ Chas said to Robbie.

‘I made Miss Watson fall over!’ Robbie said.

‘You didn’t check what he packed,’ said Chas, relaying what happened after I’d dropped Robbie at nursery that morning.

Robbie had waved me goodbye, touched the window as he always did, then run to the yellow room. His friends Mark Campbell and Evie Brock were setting up shop at the large plastic counter. The children bought, sold, pinged the till and filled their trolleys with glee until Miss Watson came in to make the play more structured and noticed that the only thing left to buy was an Anal Probe.

Little Evie had bought the Twelve Inch Black Dildo, the Nipple Stimulator with Chilli Sex Gel, the Turbo Tongue, and the Slide and Ride. Mark Campbell had bought the Cone, the Three Way Rabbit, the Lusty Licker and the Small Thai Beads. He was laughing like mad because the crotchless edible underwear was vibrating on top of the eggs that had turned themselves on at the bottom of his blue plastic trolley.

‘Buzzy things!’ Robbie said, smiling widely as I gazed inside his sex-toy-crammed Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase.

‘Oh God,’ I said to Chas. ‘I am the worst mother in the world.’

Jeremy had never been a religious man. His mother hadn’t encouraged any kind of faith. She’d sent him off to a
nondenominational
boarding school as soon as she could, leaving him to seek comfort in success, rather than in God. But after Krissie spoke to him about forgiveness, Jeremy realised he wanted and needed the non-judgemental
confidence
of another.

So Father Moscardini visited Jeremy every day after the terrible low that had caused him to try and squeeze the air from his own lungs. He sat in the interview room in the hall and listened as Jeremy talked about seemingly irrelevant things, like his work, music and cookery. The priest was a sensible, kind man, and he didn’t freak Jeremy out with Bible talk.

Neither did he rush him.

‘When you’re ready, we can talk about the harder things,’ Father Moscardini said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

At the same time each day, Jeremy spent an hour
talking
about ‘easier things’, like falling in love with Amanda, feeling safer and calmer each time. After a while, Jeremy began to realise he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t evil, and he wasn’t unworthy. He was a man, and a man could be forgiven.

A few hours after the seventh daily visit from Father Moscardini, Jeremy rang the buzzer beside the door of
his cell and asked to be escorted to the chapel.

It took a while, but eventually an
officer
came and let Jeremy out of his cell.

‘You have as long as you need,’ the officer said. ‘Father Moscardini’s okayed it with the hall supervisor.’

The officer led him past B hall and opened a bare metal door beside the segregation unit. Inside, a long concrete hallway led to another nondescript metal door. The officer opened it.

Jeremy was shocked when he saw the chapel. The huge cavernous space had been so well camouflaged and was completely at odds with every other building in the prison compound. A feeling of welcome overcame him as he took in the vast and beautiful place of communal worship.

Seeing the small confessional booth in the corner of the church, Jeremy walked towards it, took a deep breath and opened the door.

‘Are you there?’ Father Moscardini said from the
darkness
. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s safe in here. Nothing you say will ever be repeated.’

‘Father, is it bad to love someone with everything you have?’ began Jeremy.

‘It’s wonderful. Love is the most wonderful gift we have. It’s bottomless.’

‘But it hurts.’

‘Would you like to talk about your sister, Jeremy?’

Silence.

‘Jeremy? Are you there?’

He wasn’t. It was too hard. He thought he could, but he couldn’t. The very word ‘sister’ had made him want to vomit.

‘Take me back,’ Jeremy said to the officer after
stepping
out of the confessional booth. ‘Just get me back to my cell.’