My Last Confession (16 page)

‘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.

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.

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.

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 …’

She loved me too,
Amanda thought to herself.
Didn’t she?

As the eulogy drew to an end, Amanda snuck out of the church. She was an impostor. She had always been an impostor. She longed to walk behind the pall bearers as they carried the coffin out, to drive in the main car, to stand at the front at the cemetery and throw dirt on the coffin. But she couldn’t. Her rightful place in this woman’s life, as always, was nowhere. Amanda walked down the steps of the cathedral, beside the empty hearse, and to her car.

She’d long been an atheist, but as she drove home she prayed out loud. She prayed that someone was listening. She prayed that Bridget was at peace. She prayed for
forgiveness.
She prayed that justice would be done, that her husband would be released, and that the police would find the monster who’d killed her beloved Bridget.

Who killed Bridget McGivern?

FUCK! I had woken late, trudged my way into the kitchen and stubbed my toe on the blackboard I’d placed right in the middle of the room when I was pissed as a fart the night before. What a drunken idiot. Who killed Bridget McGivern? Incident room! Jesus Christ, I needed therapy. I needed detox and therapy. I also needed a drink of water because my mouth had been invaded by rabbit fluff that’d been mixed with rabbit shit and rabbit sawdust. I put the blackboard back in Robbie’s room and brushed my teeth for seven minutes.

I’d never really experienced a proper break-up. I’d watched two friends go through it, though. One, Laura, was surprised by it on an unusually hot afternoon. She’d come home from work with an organic chicken to find him gone. Three years living in the same flat, never a hint of unhappiness, and all she had was a huge and
extortionately
priced chicken, which she still cooked, and this surprised me as much as his leaving surprised her. That she just got on with it, even roasted some potatoes Delia-style, which isn’t easy, didn’t run fast on roads looking for him, stand on bridges in snow begging, stay under her dark duvet till she was crusty. She just got on with it, let him go, like that.

The other friend wasn’t surprised by it, because she
orchestrated it. Bored with twice-weekly encounters and arguments over Sky Plus management, Jane found it
simpler
to fuck the brains out of the guy at the corner shop than just politely ask her husband to leave.

I’d never experienced it because I’d never been in love, and I surprised myself, actually, because I never thought I’d be more sensible than organic Laura or Sky Plus Jane, but I was. I was sensible, despite the previous night’s madness, and I decided I would think this thing through and save it, which, I knew above all else, required the support and advice of my mother.

‘Where’s Chas?’ Mum asked when I arrived at the door the next morning.

‘Can I say hi to the Robster first?’ I asked, kissing her.

Robbie and Dad were in the back garden. Robbie was digging a hole with his wee garden fork. ‘I’m building a tree,’ he said. ‘Then Granddad’s going to make a new tree house.’

‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ Mum guessed when I came back inside. ‘Sit down, have something to eat before you go to work. Where’s Chas? Robbie says he paints all day and all night’

‘We’ve split up!’ I said, then cried and blew my nose melodramatically for quite some time.

‘What? How? Tell me, darlin’.’

‘I kissed someone at our party!’

Mum and Dad were long-suffering. I’d long been a
difficult
daughter. I’d always got into trouble as a kid, teenager, and now as an adult. They’d always been there for me, with words of comfort and advice, always at the end of the phone, on their way over …

Until now.

‘Right, Kristina, that’s it.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘You moved out less than a month ago and you’ve already stuffed it up?’

I bawled with resolve at this. Little did she know, I’d not just fucked up my relationship, I’d also:

‘How can you say that?’ I yelled at her. ‘How can you be so heartless?’

But she didn’t back down, or sit down, or change her body language and tone to her normal motherly forgiving one. Instead, she stood over me with pointed finger and said: ‘Chas has done everything for you, and you’re a silly brash girl. Personally I don’t think you
deserve
him.’

‘But you said I did deserve him!’

‘I’ve changed my mind since you’ve moved out! And
I’m telling you, if you don’t get off that self-obsessed arse of yours now and go beg his forgiveness, then I’ll punch you in the face.’

‘You will not,’ I said, daring her tight face, which was mightily close to mine.

But she did. Without a moment’s hesitation, she put her little mumsy hand into a fist and punched me on the nose, and while she gasped as if she had not intended to make contact, it bloody hurt, but more than that, it scared the shit out of me. Mum had never so much as smacked me on the back of the hand.

‘We’ll look after Robbie. You go beg that poor boy to come back, and tell him I said I don’t blame him if he doesn’t.’

She opened the door and waited till I was gone,
slamming
it in my face and leaving me and my tissue on the step.

What was I supposed to do? Go back to the studio again? I sat on the stone wall in the front garden for a few minutes, then I got in the car.

What would I find when I went in? Him touching her? Playing with her hair the way he does? Telling her all the right things?

I’d had bad dreams that Chas wasn’t real, that he told loads of women the same stuff he told me. After all, how could he be real? How could that floatation tank feeling he gave me be real? That feeling of being constantly
surprised
and interested by what he had to say? Of being so proud to show him off to my friends and colleagues? Of lying on him in bed, nuzzling into the perfect amount of hair on his chest? He was too good to be real … I needed him back … I was going to go in. But first, before
going in to beg with heartfelt speech using eloquent prose including some of the above, I tried to look in through a teeny window just to check he was there (liar! I peered to check if
she
was there).

I couldn’t see him, so I went around to the other side of the building. I jumped up, but the window there was too high, so I found a crate and stood on it, then looked down through the window and into the small kitchen. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear Chas on the other side …

‘… You are my best friend, my light …’

My gasp caused me to fall from the crate.

When I got up I could hear whispering and giggling in the toilet. I ducked as quickly as I could and listened …

… to a kiss noise.

Kiss-kiss noise.

Mmm, from her.

Mmm, her again.

I fell off the crate again and bashed my forehead. Furiousness fired me all the way back to Mum’s. This Madeleine was his best friend, his light … she had a job he understood, one that didn’t make her drink when she was stressed, who was relaxed and safe; she’d probably had orgasms all her life, without batteries, and she had no children to complicate matters.

I drove back to Mum and Dad’s house and lied to them.

‘He wasn’t there,’ I said to Mum. ‘I need to get to work.’

I kissed Robbie goodbye as Mum tried to apologise for the punch, which she hadn’t actually meant to do. Had my nose grown? Did she need glasses? She was so sorry, but so glad I’d sorted it out.

‘Good,’ I said.

I did very little at work. I was furious all day.

And that night, after collecting Robbie and putting him to bed, I reverted to the Laura Plan of break-up management, whereby the chuckee submerges him or herself in unrelated business such as chickens or murder investigations.

I sat on the window sill with my wine and my cigarette, cigarette, cigarette, and after the tenth cigarette (fourth wine) I quietly retrieved the blackboard from Robbie’s room and placed it by the window so as to not stub my toe the next morning and looked at the columns I had drawn the previous evening. I would do this
methodically
, because that is how Ms Foster would do it (I could see my reflection in the kitchen window and it was uncanny, the likeness), one suspect at a time, and the first column was Jeremy, but I knew what there was to know about him, so I would begin with the second column, which was Mr and Mrs Kelly.

MR AND MRS KELLY … Jealous? Betrayed? Bitter? Angry? Torn? Worried?

I’d written this on the blackboard the evening before and had decided to check them out for myself. I’ve never stopped being surprised by how much people are willing to tell social workers. You can sit down with someone and ask them without any foreplay if they want to kill themselves, if they have Hep C, if their father beat them, if they were sexually abused by a neighbour, if the house they lived in had a landline and a satellite dish, and they will tell you, mostly, unless they have enough money and arrogance to be unused to rude prying thirty-
five-year-olds
taking smug judgemental notes about them.

I discovered that Mr and Mrs Kelly had neither money nor arrogance. Mr Kelly had worked in construction. Mrs Kelly had been a part-time dinner lady. The people in their neighbourhood were used to social workers
knocking
at doors and asking things like this:

How’s Amanda getting on?

I’ve been doing Jeremy’s pre-trial report, and I was just worried about Amanda.

How are you?

How did it feel when you found out she’d tracked Bridget down?

You didn’t know she’d found Bridget?

How did that feel?

Oh, you have a satellite dish!

Let me know, won’t you, if there’s anything I can do. And thanks.

Hmm, I thought in my smug judgemental way as I drove back to the office. Hmm.

They were ordinary people, Mr and Mrs Kelly. They lived in a shoebox and shopped in bulk. They said they didn’t know anything about the reunion of mother and daughter till after she was murdered, which is why they’d never been questioned. But what if they were lying? What if they’d found out and watched the love of their life run off to another? Watched the person they’d devoted themselves to never settle because they were never enough? It’d drive a person mad, drive them to Crinan with kitchen knives.

There was nothing on the system about them, and no previous convictions according to Bond, so I did some proper work for a change while Danny ignored me in his blind inimitable way.

After work, I struggled through my new single-mother routine. Collect son, thank parents, pretend to be happy, check messages from Chas (none), play, cook, clean, do washing, bath, story, pretend to be happy, put Robbie to bed.

Drink and smoke.

‘Krissie! It’s ten to ten o’clock at night. I’m in bed!’ Amanda said. ‘What the fuck are you doing, investigating shit like this? How dare you? My mum and dad would never do anything bad! Do you hear me? Stay out of this, I’m fucked off with you. They didn’t even know I’d found
her! Oh, and they were at church. Ask Aunty Jean and Uncle Brian. No don’t. Just stay out of this for Christ’s sake.’

All right. All right. So they were nice, none-the-wiser and at church with a hundred people. I crossed the
second
column from my board and moved on to the next.