My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘No. He doesn’t know I’m here. It was a surprise, remember?’

  I decided not to tell her what I knew: that he’d been violent in prison, and had done everything he could do to get close to me. I didn’t tell her I thought he might want to hurt my partner. If I did, she might help him get away.

  ‘Can you let me know if he contacts you? Ring this number. He left something at the prison that he might want,’ I lied.

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Bagshaw said.

  ‘Do you have any idea where he might have gone? He’s ended it with Amanda. He seemed different somehow, Anne, seemed to have taken a shining to me for some reason. He knows I’m spoken for, although maybe I confused him – I was having troubles for a while – he was very embarrassed when I told him I’d never intended to make him think anything would ever …’

  Anne seemed shocked, rightly so, I supposed. He’d fallen for his social worker and broken it off with Amanda.

  ‘Oh God,’ Anne said, slumping into a seat under the window, looking as though her mind was racing at a million miles an hour. ‘If he’s taken a shining to you, then perhaps he’s looking for you. Perhaps he’s gone to your house. Did you tell him where you lived, anything about yourself?’

  She was right, of course. I had told him things about myself. Where I worked, about my flat in Gardner Street, and an image of the name on the buzzer flashed before me. He’d have found it, no problems, whether I’d told him or not. And what was he capable of, I wondered. Was he guilty of killing Bridget McGivern after all?

  ‘One other thing, Krissie,’ Mrs Bagshaw said as I turned to leave, looking up at me from her chair under the window. ‘As soon as you see him, tell him I’m here. Tell him to come. First thing. Tell him I’ve prepared his favourite meal, as a celebration – mashed potatoes and sausages, with ketchup?’

  God damn it, I was so close to screaming at her. Fucking idiot. Your son is crazy and you’ve set the fucking table and mashed the fucking spuds?

  ‘Will you? Tell him his best girl said so?’

  That last bit sent a chill through me. All this stuff about best girls – it was clear she was as mad as he was. I had to get out of there.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And likewise, if you see him first. Ring me on this number.’

  58

  Father Moscardini had been sitting in the same position, stiff and unable to move, since Jeremy had thanked him for his time. He was in the little wooden confessional inside the large chapel that looked like an ordinary chapel on the inside, but like a prison on the out. He’d been so pleased when Jeremy finally came to him. After weeks of talking their way towards it, he finally came, just before he was released. This would be a good day, the chaplain had thought to himself, when a poor soul forgives himself for a terrible childhood accident and finds peace, at last.

  He’d been sitting in that very spot, ready for the handing out of absolution and inner peace, when Jeremy began.

  ‘Father forgive me for I have sinned. It has been a lifetime since my last confession and these are my sins. I started a fire, when I was eight. It was in the school basement and I’m really sorry.’

  Father Moscardini smiled from his box, absolution was on its way; then Jeremy continued.

  ‘I have killed seven … eight animals. Various ways, various breeds.

  ‘I have raped one man and two women, hang on, no that’s it, that is right, one bloke and two chicks.

  ‘I have killed four people and tonight I’m going to kill a fifth and I hope, father, that you can forgive me in advance for tonight, a few more Hail Marys perhaps?

  ‘The first was Bella, but you know all about that, and that’s another thing I was wondering about. If limbo’s been abolished, is it backdated? Does she get her time waiting back, because she wasn’t baptised, see, not yet? Just wondering.

  ‘The second was a swat whose books won over me.

  ‘… Then that little cook boy, Russell, who went well with lemon grass.

  ‘Do you think it’s normal for a woman to sleep with her mother? It wasn’t pretty, a mother writhing while her daughter licked her nipple. Jesus, it made me ill to the stomach.

  ‘So there you go, father, for these and for the sin I am to commit tonight I am so very sorry, and would like to thank you for reassuring me about the vow of silence the other day …

  ‘… and for your time.’

  59

  Oh God, where is he? I’m at Gardner Street. It’s dark inside. A few ricocheted street lights but otherwise dark and the wooden floor is black with lack of light. I walk down the hall and into the kitchen and see a blackboard and a sink but there’s no one there. I walk into the living room and there are sofas and a television but there’s no one there. I walk into the bathroom, Robbie’s room, the hall cupboard. There’s no one there.

  I walk slowly towards our bedroom and I open the door and jump because what looks like a ghost is my wedding dress, hanging from the door. I take a breath and turn on the light, and see a beautiful rose on a hair clip resting on the chest of drawers. There’s no one on or under the bed or behind the wardrobe and I turn to leave and see my dress again, in the light this time. It’s covered in blood. I stand holding it, stunned, and a drip falls onto my forehead. I look up and see that blood is dripping from the ceiling.

  I run into the close and see that the hatch to the loft is not closed properly. Mrs McTay is arriving home with her shopping and watches as I grab a chair from the kitchen, stand on it and yank the hatch open. I haul myself up and into the attic. I feel around in the darkness and listen.

  He jumps out at me with the yell of a monster, and pins me down on the loose boards.

  I will never hurt you, he says, still pinning me, my girl. I will never hurt you.

  But he will. He’ll hurt anyone who dares to betray him.

  Looking in his wild eyes, I now know he killed Bridget McGivern.

  I’m lying face up and I see a painting. It’s beautiful. Black liquid pours from it onto the canvas and floor. Oh God, it’s Chas. His eyes are closed, his head’s down, and blood is dripping from where his fingers have been sliced clean with the jigsaw that’s buzzing behind me.

  I scream when I see them on the floor, five little piggies in a deep black puddle.

  Now that Jeremy’s pinned me down he doesn’t seem to know what to do next. He’s looking at me, like a baby would, into my eyes, searching inside of me and I look up at my Chas, his eyes closed and dead, and I suddenly find what I need to find. I remember what Chas has said to me over and over again, about not looking properly at what’s before me, about things not always being quite as they seem.

  ‘Your mum’s here. She’s cooked mashed potato and hamburgers with ketchup.’

  ‘What?’ Jeremy says.

  ‘Your best girl, she’s here, she came all the way to get you, and she’s waiting for you, at the Clyde View Apartments, top of Clyde Street, number 12.’

  ‘Hamburgers?’ he asks.

  ‘Sausages, I mean sausages.’

  ‘She’s here? Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And she gave the alibi that got you out.’

  ‘She did? Even though …’

  ‘Even though it was a lie. Go to her, Jeremy. She’s waiting for you.’

  He loosens his grasp and I feel the wet of Chas trickling towards me and I am crying because my life is melting in that loft and I can do nothing about it.

  He loosens his grasp, and his look moves away from my eyes to something elsewhere, and he stands up like some alien who’s been called back to the ship, and wanders slowly out of the puddle, down the hole, down the stairs, out.

  ‘AMBULANCE! AMBULANCE! MRS McTAY! RING 999!’ I scream.

  I jump to my feet and go to Chas. He’s supposed to be at the opening, but instead I’m holding onto his body and yelling for help. He’s still. No movement. I untie his legs and I gently slap his face but he doesn’t respond. I pull at the wire but it won’t budge. I take my T-shirt off and hold it on h
is fingerless stump, meaty and red, and watch the loft fill with thick hot blood. I bang my foot on the floor and yell.

  I can’t un-gag him, take his blindfold off, or even check if he’s alive. I know what I have to do is hold hard onto his spurting stump.

  It feels like hours before Mrs McTay finally appears through the hatch. ‘Ring 999, run! And get some ice!’ I yell.

  She doesn’t ask why, she knows, because as she bends her head down to exit, she is confronted with five fingers that are not attached to anything. She screams. She suppresses the instinct to vomit, disappears, and moments later she’s back with a bag, frozen peas and a frozen leg of lamb.

  ‘Wrap them up!’ I say as I hold Chas’s chop, which spews between my fingers. And she does, she bags fingers with peas and lamb, and we hold bits of Chas and pray in that dark loft until the siren comes.

  60

  Jeremy sits at the dinner table in Clyde View Apartments opposite Anne, looking at his mashed potato and sausages with ketchup, and he can’t take a bite.

  ‘Take some,’ his mum says. For the first time in years, she’s sober.

  But Jeremy can’t take a bite. It’s been too long in the waiting and he’s not sure he can leave the waiting, so he takes a sip of his wine instead. His mum doesn’t seem to mind waiting till he’s ready, and eventually he is. He eats fast.

  ‘It would have been Bella’s birthday today,’ Anne says, looking into Jeremy’s eyes just as he realises. She holds his hands tighter to stop him fighting, to help him not fight, and he doesn’t have it in him anyway, he feels so bad and so weak.

  *

  She couldn’t leave him in prison. She’d known that since he phoned and said he’d been speaking to this social worker: ‘This best girl, and I know what to do, even from in here I can sort it out.’ She knew that even inside he was too destroyed to do anything but destroy. Knew his forehead gashes and neck-bruisings were like those he’d inflicted at holiday camp when he’d wanted to come home, smashed his head again and again against the rocks on the back beach, and he did come home, she had to take him home. Knew that Bridget was like his poor dog, Bobby, who she had walked and cuddled too much. Knew he’d destroy like he did the boathouse in Cornwell, the baby in Oxford, the breasts in Crinan, whose owner he then cut from ear to ear, and stabbed twenty-three times.

  And she knew that he would keep on finding a replacement to devour and protect with blood and that the next one he’d chosen was Krissie Donald.

  *

  Anne sits at that table in the Clyde View Apartments in Clyde Street and watches Jeremy’s shocked face, and then his uncomfortable face, and then his rather desperate face, reaching, begging, gasping for life. It takes a long time, and she doesn’t take her eyes away from him because she took her eyes away from him once before and she will never do that again.

  He looks at her mostly, but sometimes at nothing when he thinks this might be the last time he can make that effort to get it in, get it in, get the air in with harrowing noise and no thrashing because he doesn’t have it in him. He’s too weak and he feels really really sick, Mummy.

  Anne holds both his hands gently now. Her son’s eyes soften and Anne can see, for the first time in twenty-four years, the eyes that made her cry with joy when they opened for the first time in the labour suite, the eyes that used to transfix her as they gazed up from her breast, the eyes that had gleamed high on the baby swing, that she had wiped bubble-bath from with a soft yellow flannel.

  ‘I forgive you and I’m coming with you,’ Anne whispers.

  A tear makes its way down Jeremy’s cheek. He smiles at his mum, then sinks head first into the mashed potato.

  Anne strokes her boy’s soft hair and then calls the police.

  ‘There are two people dead at number 12 Clyde View Apartments, Clyde Street, Glasgow,’ she says. ‘Jeremy Bagshaw … and Anne Bagshaw.’

  She hangs up and looks at the boy she brought home to the flat in Tower Bridge, introducing him to his room and his panda and his tiny cute baby-grow thingy. She kisses him on the head, then takes a large, laborious mouthful of the potato that frames Jeremy’s head. She chews and you can see that it’s hard to swallow but she manages, seven times, her fork scraping the fluffy spud that has oozed from the edges of her beloved boy’s face.

  She rests with her son around that table, their hands linked once more, ready now to say Happy Birthday Bella.

  Happy Birthday. appy Birthday

  61

  When the paramedics prise Chas’s hands free and remove his blindfold, I’m sure he’s dead. His face is grey, not white, and he’s still.

  I pour tears onto him as we drive and I wail unhelpfully as the ambulance roars towards the hospital and I can’t hear what the paramedic is saying.

  He’s something, stop shouting, you need to calm down, shut up. Have I just been slapped … ‘HE’S ALIVE FOR GODSAKE!’

  I hear that bit, finally, and my grief shuts down momentarily. Can I allow it to? Can he be okay, my painter man, who has pictured me in every beautiful thing he’s ever seen?

  I float alongside his trolley, then wait for hours in a brightly lit corridor room, where other families also wait, some not for long because they’ve been given good news, others longer because they haven’t, and if they leave it will be real.

  What news will they deliver to me? Will he die here, my Chas?

  I think of love stories, the circle of meeting and falling again and again. Would I never meet Chas and fall in love with him again? Walking towards him in my dry-cleaned wedding dress? Smiling when he renders my gadgets redundant? Looking up as he cuts the cord of our little girl, perhaps? Making up after he’s bought a motorbike and decided our friends are all boring?

  *

  It’s three in the morning when a doctor comes towards me with a face that makes me jump to my feet and scream. ‘He’s OKAY!’

  ‘He’s okay. It’ll take a while, but he’ll be okay.’

  I jump, we all do, hardly noticing the straggler from the last sad group watching us, wishing, and then finally leaving into the dark empty night.

  I’m sitting beside him a moment later. His hand has been saved by peas and lamb, a dinner we won’t be having for some time.

  I hold his face in my hands and put my cheek to his.

  ‘I love you!’ I say into his warm sleeping ears. He mumbles something that I don’t hear.

  ‘What, darlin’?’ I ask.

  ‘Is everything going to be okay?’ he asks, just as I used to, sometimes in the middle of the night.

  ‘Yes, baby boy,’ I reply. ‘Everything is perfect because you’re going to be okay and I love you more than anything in the world.’

  ‘More than pizza?’ he asks.

  I hesitate, then smile.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you …’

  About the Author

  Helen FitzGerald is one of thirteen children and grew up in Victoria, Australia. She now lives in Glasgow with her husband and two children. Helen has worked as a parole officer and social worker for over ten years. Her first novel, Dead Lovely, was published in 2007 and My Last Confession was published in 2009.

  By the Same Author

  DEAD LOVELY

  THE DEVIL’S STAIRCASE

  BLOODY WOMEN

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2011

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Helen FitzGerald, 2009

  The right of Helen FitzGerald to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under whi
ch it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–28326–2