My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  (Grovel, get down on your knees …)

  Amanda?

  (Fuck’s sake, don’t open another bottle! …)

  Bridget’s other daughter, Rachel?

  I AM CLARICE STARLING. I HAVE NO PROBLEMS IN MY LIFE OTHER THAN THE SOLVING OF MURDER MYSTERIES, THE FREEING OF INNOCENT MEN, THE SAVING OF DUNGEONED HOSTAGES WITH STRAGGLY HAIR AND NO FOOD.

  Shite, I thought to myself as I looked in the mirror later. Jodie didn’t have grey teeth and a red stain on the right-hand side of her mouth, and she never cried in the mirror while snot ran down her face! Shite. Shite.

  Bed.

  38

  Definitions need a set of conditions, or assumptions, to make sense – that touching someone who is spoken for is wrong; that blood relatives learn boundaries and rules over time. But for Amanda and Bridget there were no such conditions, no such assumptions.

  Affair: illicit, secretive, sexual liaison.

  Incest: sexual relationship between blood relatives.

  Affair: secretive sexual liaison.

  Mother: female parent.

  Incest: relationship between blood relatives.

  Affair: liaison.

  Incest: relationship.

  incest illicit

  affair

  blood relationship

  between secretive blood sexual relatives

  The McGiverns had drinks to celebrate the arrival of their Amanda, the ginger-nut girl they had lost. The whole family arrived on that first evening to embrace her – uncle, father, sister. Cars arrived at the house and feet rushed along the oak floor taking turns to hold her, as they would have held her at the hospital if she’d arrived and stayed the normal way. They each looked her over, checked the eyes, the hands, the hair and the nose. There was hysteria, over-laughing, jaw-tingling crying. There was the wetting of the baby’s head.

  *

  Nothing made sense, really. It was make-believe. At the start and at the end, Amanda felt like she was reading lines in a romantic comedy or a family drama or a thriller or a tragedy that was so mixed-genre and strange that it would never get made, but she took her script in hand and her role began – the affair that was not really an affair, the incest that was not really incest – she took her script and the make-believe began …

  Day One

  EXTERIOR, DETACHED SANDSTONE HOUSE, BALLON, STIRLINGSHIRE

  It’s sunny and spring. Daffodils stand yellow along the street. Well-to-do cars park in well-to-do drives.

  *

  INTERIOR, DETACHED SANDSTONE HOUSE, BALLON, STIRLINGSHIRE

  Sunny and spring. Daffodils sit in deliberately bent glass vases on French-polished sideboards. A family laughs and cries as if at a wake. Amanda swirls around the room feeling the confusion that comes with fame – answering questions, being looked at, being checked out, being loved and wonderful and tingling. She swirls around and her face says this is the best day of her life, the happiest, the most exciting, the best by far.

  She meets her uncle, a drunk in a kilt.

  AMANDA: Hello, Uncle.

  UNCLE: Hello, Amanda.

  She meets her sister, a goth with an attitude.

  AMANDA: Hello, sister.

  RACHEL: Hello.

  She meets her father, a teacher with a suit.

  FATHER: Hi.

  AMANDA: Hello.

  And she meets her mother. A woman in a grey trouser suit with a white tailored shirt, black wedges and a set of black pearls, neat but not neat, pretty but more than pretty, smiling but not really, laughing but not really, a set of model features, model legs, model arms, model tits, model everything, and this was her mother? It didn’t make sense. Her mother was a woman of seventy who lived in a concrete box and worked like a dog in a shit job and went to church and wore cardigans and made soup, and yet this was also her mother? This woman who could be her sister, who could be her friend, who liked the same things she liked, black olives and Thai crisps, and looked sexy, and when she laughed all of her teeth showing, and the lines around her eyes bunched together in celebration.

  BRIDGET: Hello, Jenny.

  AMANDA: Jenny?

  BRIDGET: Can I call you Jenny?

  AMANDA: No.

  BRIDGET: What can I call you?

  AMANDA: My name.

  Bridget hesitates.

  BRIDGET: Hello, Jenny.

  FADE TO BLACK

  That was how it began, Amanda’s fucked-up movie. And it ended on the fifth day.

  Day Two

  There was some explaining to do. The stuff you do after the first meal out, when you talk over exes and find out if the other is a heartless bastard, a needy cling-on, a proper freakazoid.

  Amanda and Bridget were at a restaurant in Bridge of Allan and it was formal. Small tables with ironed cloths and not enough noise. Couples sat miles apart, thanking the Lord that they were as they had nothing to say to each other anyway, small bloody meat was piled cumbersomely onto plates with sprigs and spuds in layers, and wine that cost £18 a bottle chilled in silver ice buckets. They had two bottles and stopped worrying about the lack of noise after a while because they had some explaining to do.

  Well, it was Bridget who had to explain and she knew that it was an impossible task, actually, explaining why she’d left her, then married the man anyway and made a replacement. There was no way of explaining that. Although she tried – ‘I didn’t know what I was doing …’ ‘I was young …’ ‘My mother pressurised me, she knows she made a mistake too …’ But she couldn’t justify having given Amanda’s life to two sets of people – first to the Kellys, that ‘nice couple in Glasgow that liked cats’. Bridget started …

  ‘Puddles died,’ Amanda said. ‘She was run over by my school bus when I was seven. I felt the bump.’

  (She wasn’t going to make this easy.)

  ‘And they liked holidaying in Spain?’ Bridget continued.

  ‘I got food poisoning. We never went back.’

  ‘… Had a big extended family?’ Bridget was wavering, but didn’t know how to stop.

  Amanda was silent. She wanted to be brat-like, angry, to say ‘I hate them all’, except she didn’t; she really liked her large extended family, a lot.

  ‘What’s Rachel like?’ Amanda asked. Rachel was the second person to have received the gift of Amanda’s life, and Bridget sensed that this would be a difficult subject, and should perhaps be dealt with before rather than after two bottles of wine.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Bridget said, and the dynamic changed a bit. She wanted to cry, obviously, wanted to bang her hands on the sheets of her bed and weep, and Amanda realised that she also had some things to explain.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had a very happy life and I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you and I don’t want to argue about who did what when and all that bollocks. I just want us to be mates, if possible, and if that means we don’t talk about stuff for a while, then so be it.’

  They stayed for a third bottle and didn’t talk about any of that stuff for a while.

  They sat at the table and shared the same wine, ate the same food.

  ‘I had nothing but ice cream when I was pregnant with you.’

  ‘What kind?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘Chocolate Chocolate Chip.’

  ‘Häagen Dazs?’

  ‘Häagen Dazs … oops, sorry.’ Amanda had accidentally kicked Bridget under the table. ‘You’d only stop moving about if I finished the whole tub.’

  Amanda took some dessert from the laden spoon that Bridget had offered. ‘It’s so rich,’ said Amanda as her lips moved the cake from the spoon to her mouth.

  *

  They ended up on the sofa of Bridget’s living room. It was an even larger house than her grandmother’s. Huge and posh and old, and the night lights around the gorgeous Stirling Castle filtered onto the garden and into the living room.

  ‘I should never have left you, with your red hair all spiky …’

  ‘I prayed for you, when I prayed … let my mum be safe and ha
ppy.’

  ‘I still do.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’re so beautiful.’

  They were holding hands, stroking arms and cheeks, crying openly with no thought of tissues, when Hamish and Rachel walked in.

  Rachel was eighteen. She was muscular and lean, obviously very fit, had taken to goth black clothing and make-up, which added to her general air of discontent. She stood at the door with her arms crossed.

  ‘Hi, Amanda,’ Rachel said awkwardly as she beheld the women de-nestling and standing up guiltily from the sofa.

  ‘How was the band?’ her mum asked.

  ‘All right. I’m going to bed,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight, Rachel,’ said Amanda.

  After Rachel left, Hamish hovered at the door, wondering if he could leave too.

  ‘Amanda’s moving to London,’ Bridget said by way of bringing Hamish into the conversation.

  It couldn’t have been more different, the reunion of father and daughter. Hamish felt nervous and uncomfortable, which made him business-like and back-patty. He didn’t have an immediate connection with Amanda. She hadn’t grown in his stomach, been pulled from his bosom, taken from his hospital room. She was a story he heard about later, one he had no say in but paid for as he watched the woman he loved grieve her loss. Jenny, Amanda, whoever she was, was a stranger to him. She made him feel uneasy. He should love her, the way Bridget obviously loved her. He should want to hug her, talk to her, feel sorry for her, get to know her. Instead, all he felt was worry: that Bridget would sink into depression again, that this stranger would make their happy family explode from within, that his beautiful Rachel would feel pushed aside.

  Hamish asked whereabouts in London because he had stayed in Holland Park in 1988, or was it 1989. Anyway, it was very expensive.

  It had been comforting, talking on the sofa with Bridget. But standing around in the formal living room was dreadful. Amanda felt ill to the stomach. She felt like a burglar, coming into these people’s lives all of a sudden, going through their drawers.

  ‘It’s late,’ Bridget said. ‘We should both get some sleep after all the excitement.’ She left Amanda to sleep in the guest bedroom.

  ‘Goodnight,’ Bridget said, hugging Amanda warmly and crying. ‘Goodnight, my wee ginger nut.’

  *

  Amanda woke at 6 a.m. and wrote a note before leaving in an awful hurry. She did not want to be seen on that sofa, did not want to talk to anyone.

  ‘I’m at the Lock House by Crinan,’ she wrote. ‘My mobile’s 555 978548. Thanks.’ She was about to sign her name, but didn’t. She didn’t feel like Amanda any more, but she didn’t feel like Jenny either.

  *

  ‘Mum?’ The first thing Amanda did once she got back to Crinan was ring Glasgow. Her voice wasn’t hiding anything.

  ‘What is it, my darling?’ Mrs Kelly asked. ‘Are you okay? How’s the honeymoon?’

  Amanda had intended to tell her lovely mum, but she couldn’t. She felt terrible, lying, but she knew she’d feel even worse telling the truth.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I love you, Mum, do you know that? I love you and I love Dad and you have given me a wonderful life.’

  ‘Honey, what is it?’

  ‘Nothing, Mum, PMT,’ she lied. ‘I just love you, that’s all.’

  ‘We love you too, honey. Have you got Evening Primrose?’

  ‘I have. I’ve got it.’

  ‘How’s Jeremy?’

  ‘Oh, he’s down south for a bit. His mum’s ill. He’ll be back today probably. I’ll tell him hi when I see him.’

  ‘Is his mum all right? Perhaps that’s why she felt she couldn’t come up for the celebrations? Oh, Mand, I wish you’d called sooner – are you all right by yourself?’

  ‘Yes, she’s fine, yes, no, I am too, I’m just tired and hormonal and he’ll be back soon. He’s a good man, Mum. I love him.’

  ‘Take the Evening Primrose …’

  ‘I will. Bye.’

  ‘Bye, darling. Ring me again and drink lots of water. Your dad’s just out in the garden and tell Jeremy to tell his mum we said to get better …’

  ‘Will do. Bye, Mum!’

  *

  ‘Jeremy?’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘It was amazing, hard …’

  Amanda had phoned Jeremy after the first meeting in Ballon. They’d talked for hours and he was everything she needed: understanding, kind, patient. He asked all the right things and offered all the right things and she felt safe and loved when she hung up.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘She’s getting out soon. She knows I’m here, so it’s been worth it, but she hasn’t wanted to see anyone … I’ll come up tonight.’

  ‘No, listen, stay till she gets out. Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘No, but maybe I’ll get a chance when she’s being discharged.’

  ‘You should wait then.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jeremy asked. ‘I’ll come, I’ll drive up now.’

  ‘No, try and see your mum first. Anyway, it’s kind of something I need to do by myself. Is that okay?’

  ‘Of course it is, my love. Ring me any time, if you need to talk. And tell me if you want me there – I can be there in five hours. Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You’d think one of us could have a normal mother—child relationship!’

  ‘Does anyone?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Day Three

  Amanda knew Bridget would come. She waited by the window and watched the families watch the water rise and fall and she knew she would come, and she did.

  There wasn’t a particular moment when it moved from something suitable to something not. It wasn’t one of them in particular who stroked an arm in an improper way, who lingered for too long after a cheek kiss. It was both of them, swimming in each other for those days, unable to remove their gaze from the other’s eyes, attaching. It was if they had been transported back to that moment twenty-eight years earlier when they lived on the same food and water, when they were suddenly naked and bloody together, then torn apart. They would not be torn this time.

  Amanda started to understand the appeal of the country in the hours she spent with Bridget. Two whole days and two whole nights in the green, with no noise and no cars and no neighbours. Two whole days and two whole nights alone, together, to talk about the stuff they’d avoided earlier.

  Bridget told Amanda about the weeks she spent in bed after giving birth, about how much she regretted her decision, and how hard she tried to reverse it. She told her about marrying Hamish at the local register office some years later, and how the love they had for each other was always clouded by the event that marked the beginning of their life together. She spoke about the guilt she felt at wanting another child and how this guilt might have affected the way she mothered her second-born. When Rachel came out, Bridget said, her mouth seemed gnarled, and no amount of pillows in the right positions made mother and daughter work together. When a bottle was finally offered, Rachel gulped with desperation. Scary, almost, how she drank, and how peace only seemed to come from the plastic, and not from anything Bridget could do.

  ‘Sometimes I think I was trying so hard not to see you when I looked at her, that I ended up failing the both of you,’ said Bridget.

  It continued this way. Through potty training and homework and Higher exams, Bridget felt useless in the teaching and in the comforting. It was her dad who could cuddle Rachel and find her other shoe. Her dad who could sit beside her and not be aware that their arms were touching.

  All Bridget could do was tell her she loved her.

  ‘You too, Mum,’ Rachel would say.

  Day Four

  INTERIOR, LIVING ROOM, LOCK HOUSE, BY

  CRINAN, NIGHT

  Bridget and Amanda are huddled on a leather sofa. A photo album with family shots of Bridget graduating and getting married is open
on the table beside a half-empty bottle of whisky. Amanda holds Bridget’s hand gently and files her nails, then puts the file in her lovely brown manicure set. She stops and looks at Bridget. Hair is stroked, eyes are looked into, and before they know it they find what was denied them all those years ago. The softness and fullness of it. Amanda unbuttons with a trembling finger, watches the response and invitation it gives her, and puts her mouth to it.

  Day Five

  INTERIOR BEDROOM, LOCK HOUSE, BY CRINAN, MORNING

  Amanda lies awake and watches the woman beside her. Her breasts fall to the side slightly and her chest moves up and down with her soft breathing. She sleeps prettily, no open mouth or snoring, and she is naked.

  Amanda creeps out of bed.

  *

  EXTERIOR, OBAN, MORNING

  Amanda leaves the car at the hire depot. She looks down the road, in the direction of the Oban train station.

  FADE TO RED

  39

  When Amanda saw Bridget next she was in a wooden box in the Dunblane cathedral.

  She hadn’t heard from any of her biological family since Jeremy’s arrest. After all, if not for her arrival on the scene, Bridget might still be alive. She certainly wasn’t invited to the service, and she had tried to keep away, but couldn’t.

  Creeping into the back of the cathedral, Amanda sat in an aisle seat. Upfront, she noticed the people she’d met in Ballon that first night – the drunk uncle and the sister and the father. She hoped they wouldn’t turn around and see her. If they did, what would they do? What would she do?

  Amanda looked at the coffin and thought: I ruined that woman’s life … twice. I brought her nothing but tragedy.

  And now she was in a box. Gone, again.

  Lost, found, lost.

  ‘A generous, loving woman, who gave everything to her family,’ Hamish was saying at the pulpit, ‘to her daughter Rachel and to me. A woman who gave up her teenage dream to work with Doctors Abroad to live a happy and settled life with the people she loved and cared about …’