My Last Confession

by Helen FitzGerald

  ‘Try and be a bit more sensible!’ she said. ‘But never lose that light you have, and believe me, you deserve him.’

  I went to bed loving myself, but also realising that my mum and dad just knew how to breed happiness. In everything they did and said, they bred happiness, and this was my lucky inheritance.

  *

  It was raining by the time we finished packing the car with all our stuff. I hugged Mum then Dad and we all had tears in our eyes. We drove with the wipers on all the way over to the West End, and had to park an impossible distance from my flat. And even though the parking was a pain, it was great to be back where residents varied in colour and style. I bounced up the close with Chas and Robbie, desperate for my bath, my spices, our home.

  We spent the first day toddler-proofing cupboards and windows and loos and following the Robster around as he found other things that needed to be toddler-proofed.

  That night I put him to bed and walked into the kitchen to find Chas with chilled champagne and a beautifully wrapped present.

  ‘To our new life together!’ he said, popping the cork and pouring the fizz.

  I took a sip and opened the present, with the gooey, lovey-dovey expectation of a newly-wed. The paper was pink and shiny, and so was the rabbit vibrator inside.

  ‘Chas!’ I said, beholding the rubber-eared cock.

  ‘Guaranteed orgasm!’ he said.

  Oh God, not this again.

  I’d never had one. An orgasm that is. Despite twenty-two sexual partners (or twenty-three, depending on your definition), I’d never had one. I’d never even admitted to not having one, not till the first time I slept with Chas.

  We were at Mum and Dad’s house, in the den at the time. Robbie was asleep in the creative room, and Mum and Dad were watching television. Chas had been very patient with me, but as much as he treasured having his hands caressed, he was horny as a bastard and no amount of finger sucking in conjunction with pud-pulling would satisfy him.

  We’d just cuddled etcetera etcetera for nights on end, but this time I knew I was ready and when we finished I sighed happily because it was the best sex I’d ever had.

  ‘That was the best sex I’ve ever had,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I was defensive now. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just that you didn’t …’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You didn’t, you know, climax.’

  ‘Yes I did.’

  ‘Krissie …’

  ‘I did!’ I shouted, getting out of bed in a strop and going to the bathroom. How dare he accuse me of not coming? Of course I had. I was thirty-three and I’d never come so completely for over two decades!

  He was behind me in the bathroom, sheepish. I washed my hands and tried to walk out of the bathroom, but he barricaded the door with his arms. There was a struggle. Me trying to get out from under one arm, the other under his legs, and so on, to no avail.

  I ended up on the floor and crying. ‘I don’t think I ever have,’ I said, my face in my hands, embarrassed.

  I wasn’t sure in the same way I wasn’t sure if I’d been in love before I undoubtedly fell into it with Chas. There’d been times when I missed a man so much I ached. Could have been love. Times when I didn’t eat for days after it ended. Possibly. Likewise I’d had sexual experiences that made me smile for days, ones that made me cry, and certainly I’d regularly made loud animal noises. But Chas spotted a mile away that my noises were never loud nor animal enough to suggest the oblivion of a werewolf-like transformation. And this was what I should aim for, he explained: oblivion – eyes white and flickering, mouth stretched and uneven with all the distortions and discomfort of a human possessed.

  Sounded bloody awful, I’d reckoned, but Chas was always right, always knew best. So that’s why I didn’t mind when he bought me the rabbit that Saturday, the special gel on Sunday, the vibrating eggs on Monday, a lacy Ann Summers number four nights in a row and sporadic buzzers for the following two weeks. We were on a mission to find me an orgasm.

  Initially, we placed the rabbit on the coffee table well after Robbie’s bedtime, to get accustomed to it. In truth, I found the huge rubber penis-shaped object quite frightening, but it remained on the coffee table for at least two Big Brother evictions, oft-times buzzing towards us like a Dalek. So I was no longer frightened of it by the time Chas moved the bunny and his entourage into the bedroom.

  He devised other exercises: just touching each other with no penetrative sex for five days; female-perspective porn that didn’t involve harsh nipple-twisting and too much pink thrust; shower attachments and lengthy periods alone ‘just to learn’.

  I’d love to say I didn’t need my rubber friend in the end; that all I needed was a new, blank mind and the love and patience of a man who smelt of everything good in the world – toast, cut grass, the smoke of a roaring campfire. But I can’t say that, because Chas was out painting in his studio, and I was alone and pressing hard on my bunny’s ears when I suddenly found myself to be the scariest, ugliest werewolf on the moors.

  I was thirty-five, and I knew, at last.

  4

  A few days later, Chas and Robbie got ready for their first day together at the sculpture studio. There were many things Robbie needed to be official Painter’s Assistant. Paintbrush? Tick. Huge old T-shirt? Tick. Ridiculously large beret? Tick. By the time Robbie was ‘dressed for work’, his teeny chin and his wee white neck were the only bits of him that were actually visible. After kissing and giggling at the front door, we parted ways. Before I headed down to my car, I watched them walking up Gardner Street hand in hand, blissfully happy.

  It took me twenty-five minutes to drive to work, then another twenty-five to park. The car park was packed with the cheap cars of council employees. The building was an old textiles factory that architects had somehow managed to convert into something even more depressing.

  I found my way to the reception area, and stood at the bench wondering how to achieve eye contact with the person whose nose was ten inches from mine. A cough? A fingernail-tap on the bench? Words?

  ‘Hi, I’m Krissie Donald,’ I said, expecting this information to be enough to initiate action. It didn’t even initiate eye contact.

  ‘In Hilary Sweeney’s team,’ I said. ‘Criminal justice.’

  ‘No one told us,’ said the lucky-result-of-a-policy-to-employ-locals.

  After I fake-smiled, she begrudgingly opened the trapdoor that separated agitated clients from agitated typists, and led me through the messy admin area, out the back and up two floors, to a small office crammed with four desks.

  ‘There, have that one,’ she said, then left.

  I sat at the empty desk for half an hour before three people filtered in.

  ‘Fuck me!’ said the first. ‘They’ve finally filled it then!’ He was forty-five, six foot six and – I soon learnt – had three degrees and did stand-up comedy in his spare time, most of which appeared to be in the office.

  ‘I’m Robert,’ he added, before telling me a joke that answered any questions about the level of political correctness in my workplace (low).

  ‘Are you crazy? Must be fucking crazy to be in this place,’ said the second, Danny, a gorgeous-looking guy with shaded glasses and very shiny shoes. ‘Like your top, by the way,’ he said, sitting down at a desk opposite me and turning on his computer.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  The computer started speaking to him and he pulled out a tampon-shaped object and began sucking on it. ‘Windows on,’ said the computer. ‘Outlook. Open … Inbox … You have five new messages …’

  ‘Is it new?’ he asked me.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said. The talking computer had made me forget the topic of our small talk.

  ‘Your top?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, while six-foot-six Robert made a Shhh gesture at me, then snuck around behind Danny to place a device under the receiver of his phone. Unaware, Danny sucked his nicotine inhale
r again, then picked up the phone, which exploded so loudly that I felt immediate gratitude for whoever invented panty liners.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Danny grabbed a stick from under his desk and whisked it around behind him till it smashed Robert in the knees.

  That’s when I realised that Danny was completely blind.

  After that, I could hardly take my eyes off him. The way he typed, read Braille, put numbers into his wee electronic talking book, answered the phone and talked.

  ‘He’s too sick to come in, is he, Mrs Thom?’ he said to the mother of the 9 a.m. non-show. ‘So is he dying? Bleeding? Has his voice box been shot?’ (A muffled response.) ‘No? In that case put him on.’ (More muffle.) ‘Well, get him out of bed!’

  Danny waited.

  ‘Peter. Last week I gave you a second formal warning for being aggressive and racist in reception …’

  Another interval.

  ‘PETER! It’s irrelevant whether or not asylum seekers are using up all your social workers. The point is you’re breached, mate. You’re going back in.’

  With this, my new blind hero hung up his phone, sucked once more on his nicotine inhaler and continued our conversation.

  ‘It’s nice, the top, but it doesn’t go with those trousers.’

  My third colleague was large, serious and over fifty, with an accent that smacked of ‘doing the job for charity’. Her name was Penny and she was immensely active with her paperwork, her face red and sweaty with the effort of it.

  The boss, Hilary, was one of the three who had interviewed me. While her male seniors at least had smiles to suppress as I’d made inappropriate quips, she’d had no such problem. Smiles were for clients only and did not indicate joviality.

  After a reasonably relaxed morning with my three colleagues, Hilary sat me down in her office, which was directly opposite ours, for my first supervision session, much of which centred around diarising future supervision sessions. With twelve fortnightly meet-ups inked, Hilary then talked for an hour without pausing, enjoying the sound of her own voice so much her mouth frothed with the pleasure of it.

  ‘Transparency is essential’, she said, ‘to our robust packages of care, which combine effective monitoring and a therapeutic approach that addresses and ameliorates the issues surrounding the risk of recidivism.’

  I nodded at appropriate intervals, trying hard to understand what the hell she was talking about, and praised the Lord when she handed me two report requests and let me loose.

  Back in the office, Robert was pinning chocolate wrappers to Danny’s ‘Wall of Shame’ and Penny was banging heavy wads of her paper around her desk and huffing.

  I sat down at my jiggly desk and looked at the first report request, a home background report for Jason Marney. A sticky note on top said: ‘Overdue! Case Conf, Sandhill, 4 p.m.’ Jason Marney was a widower of thirty-nine, and had spent twelve months behind bars for lewd and libidinous practices against his children. Fuck, a sex offender. I’d hoped to avoid those guys. He had four offences – two indecent exposures ten and eight years back respectively, one indecent assault at a swimming pool two years ago, and the lewd and lib. According to the indictment, he’d made his four- and six-year-old boys watch hardcore porn with him and got them to take turns touching his genitals. Blah. Serious, big-time stomach-churning blah. Still, I consoled myself, the report was a basic one. Mr Marney wanted to be released to his parents’ address in Toryglen. All I had to do was check that the accommodation was safe and suitable, and then beg Hilary not to allocate me as his supervising officer after his release. It’d be a push, but I could visit his parents before the 4 p.m. case conference.

  The second report request was a pre-trial report for Jeremy Bagshaw.

  I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was this case that would almost ruin my life.

  5

  Jeremy Bagshaw had spent most of the previous two weeks trying not to cry. It wasn’t okay to cry in Sandhill. In fact, it was the opposite of okay. Tough guys going for you, officers laughing at you, and worst of all, other criers assuming closeness and seeking you out.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ a scar-faced emaciate had said to him the previous day.

  He’d looked back and thought, ‘No, you don’t.’

  For the whole two weeks, he’d been alone in his cell twenty-three hours a day. He spent the other hour walking in a concrete circle, wondering why he’d bothered to leave his cell at all – what with the rain, the hateful looks of the officers sitting watching, and the imminent threat of death from the toughs who circled the quadrangle like piranha.

  He’d seen prisons like Sandhill on television, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite so grim – five stone ‘halls’ in a row, each a cavernous rectangle bordered with closed steel doors three storeys high: brick and stone and steel, all hard and cold like the officers who dotted the landings.

  Inside his cell was a bunk bed, a desk, a television, a junkie (invariably) and a toilet. Jeremy was thankful for the latter when he learnt that only two years earlier he’d have found a swirling bucket of shit instead.

  For twenty-three hours each day Jeremy stared at either the television or the underbelly of the top bunk, and thought of Amanda.

  *

  Amanda, whose Scottish accent had lured him from one end of the Stoke and Ferret to the other, then from one end of the country to the other. She was sitting drinking cheap cider when he first clapped eyes on her, and by the end of the night she was dancing in Kensington Gardens and singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ louder rather than better.

  ‘I have chocolate at mine,’ Amanda said, flopping down on the grass beside Jeremy.

  ‘Then we must go and get it,’ he said, standing up and pulling her towards him.

  The B & B was a small, grotty building nestled between two large hotels. Amanda unlocked the front door, led Jeremy through the hall, into the kitchen, and rummaged through the cupboards. There were baked beans, tinned tomatoes, bread, but no chocolate.

  ‘You lured me here under false pretences,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Indeed,’ she replied, pushing him against the fridge and kissing him violently.

  Jeremy fell asleep beside her later that night. And when they woke in the early hours they were surprised to find each other even more attractive sober, surprised also to find that they were naked and that a woman in her twenties was staring at them from her bed under the window.

  ‘Hello,’ Jeremy whispered, looking into Amanda’s eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ Amanda replied.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone quite like you,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I’ve never met anyone quite like you. Say my name.’

  ‘What is it again?’

  ‘Jeremy.’

  ‘Jeremy,’ she obeyed.

  ‘Say it again.’

  ‘Jeremy,’ she said bluntly, then more softly,’ … Jeremy.’

  ‘Jeremy and Amanda …’ – he paused – ‘… are being watched.’

  The room-mate’s cat-eyes were shining with unashamed voyeurism.

  ‘Let’s go get that chocolate!’ said Amanda.

  They got dressed and walked four blocks in search of Lion Bars and Crunchies. Eventually, a twenty-four-hour supermarket appeared and as if by magic it had Lion Bars, Crunchies and seven different types of condoms.

  Jeremy was taken aback when they got to the B & B and Amanda put the Crunchie in his mouth before kneeling and putting the condom on his penis, because the woman in her twenties was still in the room, sleeping in her bed under the window, only two or three feet away.

  Jeremy saw the room-mate wriggle and he tried to warn Amanda, but there was now a Lion Bar in his mouth, one which had been elsewhere first and which did not taste the better for it. He could not say, ‘There’s a geeky type over there, and we’re naked except for a well-travelled chocolate bar.’

  But he didn’t need to warn her because Amanda knew the girl w
as there, knew she was pretending to be asleep in the bed but readying herself with the bristles of her soft rubber hairbrush.

  ‘Sally?’ Amanda said, but the girl’s eyes remained shut. ‘Sally?’ Amanda said, crawling over to the bed under the window and placing her head under the duvet.

  Jeremy was in love! He watched the bump under the duvet sway and grind and then watched the girl’s head do the same, her eyes open now and beckoning him.

  He was in love. What man wouldn’t be?

  ‘You’ll never handle her,’ the room-mate said flatly when Amanda left to ablute afterwards.

  Jeremy covered himself up, suddenly self-conscious.

  When Amanda came back in, she jumped onto the bed with such energy that Jeremy found himself saying, ‘I love you!’

  She snuggled into him and wondered if he would be like every other guy – who loved the whacky side of her that fucked like crazy and jumped onto beds, but after a day or two started to find her insatiable desire for adventure exhausting and irritating.

  But Jeremy wasn’t scared off like the other guys. He didn’t think she was crazy or whacky, just honest and spontaneous. If she wanted something, she found a way to get it.

  ‘I want to drop E at the Chelsea Flower Show,’ she said a few days after they met, and together they wandered through flowers so glorious they’d wanted to cry.

  ‘I want to have chicken and champagne in Hyde Park at 5 a.m.,’ she said, and so the bubbles rose with the sun.

  And if she needed something, she asked for it.

  ‘Please hold me.’

  ‘Please make me some soup.’

  ‘Please stand up and sing me a love song from beginning to end.’

  Jeremy felt alive with her. They explored the city together. They went to the movies. They took buses to unknown places, breathed in the world, saw and did new things. He watched her jump naked onto the bed at least twenty times after their first encounter, and reckoned he could have watched her jump naked onto beds for ever.