My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  Fuck, he was watching us somewhere. Behind that tree maybe? In that lane? He knew where I lived, where Mum and Dad lived, where I worked, where Robbie went to nursery, where Chas worked, everything, and could pounce at any moment and hurt my little boy, or my big boy. God help me, I couldn’t ring the police or drive to a station because he was watching, ready to hurt, ready to kill.

  ‘I know you’ll make the right decision,’ Billy said, then hung up.

  *

  I threw my cigarette out the window and rang work to say I’d be late, and drove straight to Chas’s studio, which was empty except for a guy who was chipping away at a huge hunk of stone.

  ‘He’s gone shopping with Madeleine,’ he said, in a not-terribly-friendly way. Clearly tales of my exploits preceded me.

  So that was the wire-ball’s name, Madeleine.

  Shaking furiously, I drove at eighty miles an hour along the M8 to do what really stupid people do on the telly – people you yell DON’T! DON’T! at from your living room. Don’t take them the million dollars, they’ll kill her anyway, probably already have. Don’t keep it a secret, tell people! Tell everyone!

  If only there’d been people yelling at me from their living rooms. Maybe I’d have heard them, maybe I wouldn’t have driven to Sandhill and parked where I usually parked, then gathered a few Jeremy-related papers and two files, given my name to the visits officer, left my mobile in a locker and put my handbag into the scanner.

  But no one yelled at me and no one stopped me, and I did what daft people do, continuing on a lonesome path, thinking that visiting Jeremy was the only way to keep my son safe. Everything else was out the window by now. Losing my job and fighting with my boyfriend were irrelevant in the face of serious criminals making threats against my son.

  Thank God the visits officer was not prone to small talk. I couldn’t have managed a weather- or holiday-related conversation in a million years. I collected my bag at the end of the belt and walked into the glass cubicle to be transported to that other universe.

  The door slid open, and I gave my name, walked to the waiting room, filled out a form – with Jeremy’s name, prison number, my name, car registration – and then entered the Agents’ area. I’d been there many times in the last week, most of them for Jeremy, but also for James Marney, a drug user and a drink-driver. I knew the score.

  ‘Room 12,’ they said, and I walked a little more confidently, my step getting less shaky, my grip less tight.

  When I reached 12, I took my seat against the door of the room and waited, pretending to read over paperwork and shuffle through my things.

  It took about fifteen minutes for Jeremy to appear. He looked a little better this time. The marks on his neck had gone down, the bruising on his face had mostly disappeared, and he seemed less vulnerable.

  ‘What the hell have you gotten me involved in?’ I demanded.

  ‘What? What do you mean? Oh God, did Billy Mullen threaten you?’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Me, my partner, my son. Unless I pass gear on to you …’ I paused and thought for a moment then took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m not going to do that …’

  (Come on now, I’m not that fucking daft!)

  ‘Thank God,’ said Jeremy. ‘That’s the last thing I’d want you to do. Shit, Krissie, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen. That’s what I meant about us both being in danger. I don’t want the stuff. It’s not for me. Billy’s just looking for a way to get it in here. Knows you’re visiting me, knows he can get right inside your life through your boyfriend, Baz, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s Chas. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to think. But we have to tell the officers. We’ll do it together. You’ll be placed on protection. It’ll be okay.’

  ‘We can’t grass,’ he said, fearful.

  ‘He threatened to take my boy from his nursery. He’s only three, Jeremy. I don’t know what else to do, where else to go.’

  ‘Can’t Chas sort it out?’

  ‘If he wasn’t out shopping with someone called Madeleine.’

  ‘I can take a beating, no problems at all,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to let you get hurt, Krissie. You’re the only one who’s kept me going in here, and telling the officers or the police will make things worse for you, much worse. Believe me, I know who you’re dealing with, this Billy guy. Listen to me. Get out of here and let me handle it. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you because of me. I couldn’t bear it if anyone else got hurt.’

  He had tears in his eyes by the time he stopped talking, and I felt so sorry for him I wanted to hug him.

  ‘Tell Billy Mullen I refused to take it. I’ll sort things this end. I’ll make sure you have nothing to fear, you hear me? You’re safe.’

  ‘Jeremy, you’ll get killed.’

  ‘Tell him. Tell him I said no, and if he wants to know why, he can deal with me direct.’

  ‘What will I do with the stuff?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it. But don’t tell anyone.’

  I gathered my things to leave as he stood up, but before he got to the door I said, ‘I think you’re a good man, Jeremy.’

  He didn’t look at me, just stood at the edge of the door.

  ‘I’m not a good man. I deserve to be punished.’

  I sat in the car park of the prison, mind buzzing, white vans driving in and out, police vehicles driving in and out. What next? I wondered. Jeremy was right about grassing. In prison, it’s worse than slashing or raping or being a beast. It’s the unforgivable thing. And grassers never live long, not if they’re dealing with the big yins. A year or so ago a prisoner told security a lawyer was bringing stuff in. They caught the lawyer. She’s still doing time. The informer – a small-time shoplifter from Greenock – was found dead in the Clyde a week after his release. If Jeremy or I informed, we’d both end up underneath the same boat.

  I dialled Billy’s number again.

  ‘He refused the drop,’ I told Billy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He refused to take it.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Billy, his tone bemused rather than threatening.

  ‘I won’t go to the police.’

  ‘Good! That’d get you in even deeper shit. But I don’t understand. What did he say exactly?’

  ‘He said if you want to know why, you can deal with him direct.’

  ‘Right. Fuck. I’ll get back to you.’

  Before I could say anything, he hung up.

  *

  I drove to work, hoping that Danny and Robert would be there, but Robert was out doing home visits and Danny was so monosyllabic and unforgiving (‘Hi,’ he said, without smiling) that I signed myself out on home visits, which I did, but not to clients.

  First I visited my own home. It was dark, but clean after my frenzied sweep the night after the party. I put the heroin or cocaine or whatever it was in the plastic container I used for my secret stash of cigarettes. I shut the lid on the container tightly and did what I often did with horrible problems – hid it. After I’d placed the container back above the kitchen wall unit, I determined to forget all about it. Those cigarette packets did not exist.

  Then I visited Chas’s studio in Hillfoot again, an industrial space with scratchy walls, a skylight, a wee bathroom and a sofa in the corner. Chas had a room at the back of a gallery. It was filled with paintings leaning in towards the wall, hidden from view – canvas backs, bolts, wood and cloth the only visible elements.

  I walked towards Chas’s room and there he was, putting a flower in Madeleine’s hair, then gazing at it. A tiny rose it was, attached to some kind of hair clip or wire. He was not working like a dog, which is what he was supposed to be doing. Not working and not crying about our argument or mourning the loss of me and our family, but putting a fucking flower in wire-ball Madeleine’s hair and gazing at her.

  I couldn’t believe it. Chas had left me. He’d left Robbie. All this shite about us falling in love over and over and l
earning stuff about each other and not giving up on each other was total unadulterated bullshit.

  I found myself walking over and staring at them in silence. They stared back, as if I should be the one to say something first.

  ‘Hello,’ said Chas, after a while.

  ‘I’ve been having a lot of trouble,’ I whimpered.

  ‘It follows you around, Krissie.’ His tone was not encouraging.

  ‘Is it over, Chas? Are you sleeping with her?’ I asked.

  ‘How can you come in here and ask me that? God, this is typical of you, taking one tiny bit of information and flying with it as if it’s the truth. When are you ever going to stop jumping to conclusions? Not everything is as it looks on the fucking surface.’

  ‘What? Why are you being such a bastard? Who are you? I need you and you’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m not being a bastard. I just need some space. You were out of control at the party, K, calling my friends cunts. You need to get your head together. And I need to get the opening over and done with. Just try and get your head together in time for the opening, okay? We can sort it all out then.’

  He glanced at the sculptor, who smiled at him!

  I wanted to punch things – him, her. They were a team, against me. My Chas, my life, who’d loved me always, was in a team with some other chick, right in front of me.

  I tried to recall some anger-management skills, time out, breathing, closing eyes. I tried, but instead I found myself getting the A4 photos out of my bag and flicking through them and not showing Chas the really worrying drug-related ones, or the note, but the photo of me kissing Danny.

  ‘Well, your friend took this photo to hurt us. So, as it turns out, I was right,’ I said looking at the sculptor girl. ‘Your friends are cunts.’

  36

  My relationship was obviously over. I howled on the way back to the office, and then tried hard to distract myself with work. I had a lot of it to do – an interview for a court report, calls to doctors and community service officers, appointment letters to clients, and case notes. So I got on with it as best I could, hoping that the distraction would take away the reality of my situation.

  At five o’clock I switched off my computer and a sick feeling immediately overwhelmed me.

  Chas had left me.

  I still had drugs in my kitchen.

  I needed to calm down, think things through a bit, talk to someone.

  I needed a manicure.

  Before going to collect Robbie, I found myself telling Amanda about Chas. She filed as she talked me down – a drunken snog at a party, stress, drink. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed, she said, nothing to worry about. ‘You just need a day to cool off. Just give him a day. Neither of you are going to lose what you have for a wee flirtation or whatever. It’s trivial. You’ll get through it. After all, it’s not as if he’s in Sandhill for murder.’

  And it came back to me, a bird flying into a window, bang. Worker–client. And Amanda wasn’t the worker (even though she was now gluing tips for money), she was the client, and at the end of the day Amanda would always be completely uninterested in anything I had to say about my own problems.

  What also came back to me as Amanda turned the conversation back to her own hellish life was perspective – which wasn’t a bad thing, to google ‘famine’ when you feel sorry for yourself – and I immediately snapped into a slightly less unprofessional role to focus on my client.

  ‘Have you heard any more news about the trial?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. I’m just praying his mother will come to her senses. But I think Jeremy wants to be in prison,’ said Amanda. ‘He wants to punish himself. And he wants to protect me.’

  ‘From what?’

  Amanda hesitated, torn. But then her expression changed and I knew she was about to spill something important.

  ‘I have to tell someone. God, I have to talk about it. It’s driving me crazy. No one knows. No one but him,’ she said, her eyes wet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He doesn’t want people to find out. He thinks it would hurt me too much. He thinks they’ll assume I killed her, that it gives me a pick of motives: abandoned child, scorned lover, deranged deviant … God, maybe I am all of those things.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Find out what?’ I asked.

  ‘I did something really strange. I can’t explain it. When I think about it, I want to throw up. What sort of person am I?’

  ‘Tell me what you did.’

  ‘When I visited Jeremy after he was arrested, I told him,’ said Amanda. ‘I’d been alone in Crinan while he was down south, I was alone in that shitehole of a place and so much had happened. He knew I’d found my natural mother on that second day, but so much else had happened that he’d had no idea about until I spoke to him in the police cell.’

  ‘What else happened?’ I said, intrigued.

  ‘I can’t say it out loud.’ Amanda looked nauseous.

  ‘Whisper it, then,’ I prompted gently.

  ‘It’s too awful.’

  ‘Just whisper in my ear.’

  She looked around nervously, leaned in and whispered, ‘I told Jeremy there was more to it, more to it than just meeting her, but he wouldn’t let me explain to the police because he didn’t want people to know.’

  ‘What?’

  She moved back, looked me in the eye, took a breath for courage, and said, ‘He didn’t want people to know that I’d … slept with her.’

  ‘Slept with who?’

  ‘With Bridget.’

  ‘Bridget McGivern?’

  ‘… Yes.’

  37

  Amanda had slept with her mother. Bloody hell.

  I went back to the office and sat at my computer for a while, and was shocked to discover reams of research about adoption reunions, some of it arguing that up to fifty per cent can result in obsessive emotions and often in sexual attraction. It even had a name – genetic sexual attraction – and was a time bomb, apparently, with IVF and suchlike. There was a case in one country where a brother and sister, adopted by different families at birth, found each other and fell in love. They were forced to be sterilised.

  After googling like crazy I began to understand it, an automatic and assumed physical closeness, intense, unyielding, but without the boundaries that come from dug-out roles that take slow years in the digging.

  It wasn’t as crude as an incestuous fuck. It wasn’t abuse. It was clutching, melding, no time for thinking, no way to stop.

  Still, bloody hell.

  It was late. I had to collect Robbie.

  *

  Robbie had had a great day with Mum and Dad. They’d visited the park and the soft play area. He’d eaten well, and fallen asleep in Dad’s arms at six o’clock.

  ‘Can we have him overnight?’ Mum asked. ‘Seems mad to move him.’

  I kissed Robbie’s forehead and snuggled into his warm chest. My little bloss.

  ‘Can you do me a favour, though?’ I asked. ‘Just lock the doors and keep an eye out. There’s lots of creepy people about.’

  ‘This job’s making you paranoid,’ Mum said.

  If only she knew.

  ‘I love you guys,’ I said, hugging Mum and Dad goodbye, wanting to tell them everything, but not wanting to worry them more. ‘This job is a nightmare, but I think it’ll get easier. Thanks so much for helping me out.’

  I looked around me when I walked out the door. The street was empty. Robbie would be safe, wouldn’t he? Anyway, where would be safer?

  *

  When I got home to my empty flat, I drank a whole bottle of wine in twenty minutes. With no food in my tummy, my brain turned to mush immediately and I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, thinking:

  You have two choices, Miss Krissie Donald. You can STOP. Just stop for a moment and THINK. If you do this, you will see that Amanda’s affair with her biological mother is of no consequence to you. You will see that Jeremy’s unforgiving parents are of no co
nsequence. You will see that his guilt or otherwise is of none either.

  What is of consequence to you, Miss Krissie Donald, is that there are threatening photos, a letter of bribery and two packets of drugs in your kitchen. Also of consequence is that the love of your life is not in your kitchen. He is with someone else, giggling. Easy. Two things to sort. Sort them out. Deal. Deal with THEM. One at a time. Write a list. One. Two. Then deal.

  Was someone talking sense? If so, I’d stopped listening after the fifth glass of wine and started listening to a far more intriguing voice that whispered in my ear from my lonesome window sill, a voice that spoke to me of Jodie Foster and Hannibal Lecter, telling me to go and get the large blackboard from Robbie’s room and place it in the middle of the kitchen floor with several half-used pieces of thick colourful chalk.

  You’re going mad, Miss K, the voice of reason persisted, but I quelled it with a red skull of liquid and, with the serious mouth of Ms Foster, wrote on the incident board of my new incident room:

  Who killed Bridget McGivern?

  I’d paid over £30 for unnecessary nail endeavours that afternoon while Amanda told me the most shocking story I had ever heard. Or was it? Was it more shocking than the one Jeremy had told me? Or Robert’s one about the man with dementia and his well-hung three-legged dog? Well, at this point, two weeks into the job, it was my most shocking, I thought to myself, or at least an equal first. As such, it required discussion and thought and note-taking and some re-reading of theory like Oedipus and Schmedipus and Electra and abandonment and attachment and all that shite.

  Who killed Bridget McGivern? I had written at the top of my incident board.

  (Of course there is something to worry about. Take the drugs to the police, you fucking idiot …)

  Jeremy? I wrote in column one.

  (Ring 999 …)

  Amanda’s parents, Mr and Mrs Kelly? I wrote in column two.

  (Beg Chas to take you back …)

  Bridget’s husband, Hamish?