My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘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.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ He accosted me before I had a chance to de-tobacco in the bathroom.

  ‘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.

  19

  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, thi
s 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.

  20

  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 t
o 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.