1.

The air is cold and damp. It seeps though the pores of my skin and rushes in like its being chased by the Devil, ice-filled flames and stuffed down my throat with arctic weathered pitchforks as I breathed in and out; struggling to make the clouds of steam warm my hands when I blow on them as I walk the streets of a city I had last visited, on a purely pleasurable basis, some five years before.

I had made my way to London on limited funds. I knew a couple of people who would have loaned me a bed for the night, Hell, they probably would have insisted that I stayed at least a week, taking me to dinner a few times, a couple of parties, introduce me to the new girls in town and convince me to settle a while and all the time getting me drunk on expensive single malt whisky as I sat drooling over some woman named Estelle, or Vanessa or even if I had been unlucky to be in Samantha’s company and knowing the women she liked to party with, a piece of gutter trash fresh out of senior school named Candy, all expectation and hope drained out of her by a father who singled her out for attention and whose mother joined in on the act. This though was not the time for parties, this was not the place to get drunk and it certainly wasn’t the time to call on Samantha; even though she lived five minutes from where I stood checking my hastily drawn map and wondering absent-mindedly somewhere at the back of my head who she was doing tonight, she always liked company, she liked the dark hours, sometimes she liked me.

I had taken one of the later trains down to the decaying capital. Some called it vibrant, the place where it was all happening and the fun times, especially if you were rich enough, never stopped. I was never that rich. I was always a little more than a month away from being on the streets and I wasn’t going back there again, alone, frightened, easy prey…not for me, not again. A friend that I trusted, too few of those really, a real friend, someone who no matter what would never find me to confess to, no matter if they knew they were dying and had very little time left on Earth, had purchased the ticket in cash for me and had handed my ticket over to me in the time honoured way of avoiding my eyes. My eyes, when I was fifteen a girl I was besotted with, ginger, athletic, liked the same kind of music as I did, told me I had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, she had leaned forward, kissed me gently on the lips and then leaned back again, smiling like a tiger cornering a tame and exhausted rabbit and sensing easy pickings and told me of course that the eyes may be beautiful but the face was dead, unfeeling and she wouldn’t be seen on the streets in  daylight hours with me and my ashen looks if I was the last man alive. She came to me the night she was murdered in the park; her last thought was one of confessing, of apologising over and over again until the voice faded. I didn’t sleep for four days and nights after that. The exhaustion was overwhelming but I didn’t want to see her face, not like that, again. Eventually the body will always give in and with the help of illegally purchased suppressants I made it so that I didn’t dream at all but I lost my job because I slept for a week.

I’m only five minutes from Samantha’s. O.K. she would be pissed off if I knocked on the door now as she is no doubt entertaining a friend, she always entertains a friend, even me on two occasions, she never minded my ashen, grey pitted face, she also would be happy to confess everything in the end and as long as she died happy in her bed with a smile as wide as the Thames and her legs probably even further, I would be content to hear her final mortal words and offer any comfort needed, after all she is my friend!

The matter at hand is too important. I didn’t come all the way to London to see Samantha, avoiding any stares from those wanting to engage in a conversation I wasn’t ready to give way too, avoiding the bright intrusive lights that shone and burned with human rage like the personal tool of an over excited torturer or member of the Gestapo asking for information over and over again. Samantha could wait, perhaps when I found what I needed to, to close the door on a soul who badly needed to confess their sins, then perhaps I would call on Samantha, offer her a watery smile, watch in silent amusement as she curses me over and over again for the lateness of the hour and then turf her latest acquisition complaining into a taxi as she made me share her bed, no funny business, she would just want to make sure the dead stayed dead and I was still alive somewhere.

I walked away from the direction of Samantha’s place by the Thames, I resolved in my head that I would make sure I went there in the morning before heading home, give the acquisition time to have her breakfast and be told that she would be seen again at some point but not for a while, Samantha would be busy, Samantha was always busy. I never made it back the next day.

I hated the month of November. Even as a child the air seemed to be a crawling spectre pushing its spiked talons, its dank and dismal breath down into the pit of my stomach and making it hard to think, all thoughts on survival, on getting home and away from the enclosing seasonal nightmare. November was also the month in which my grandmother died. I was seven. My mother told me she died quite peacefully in her sleep, a smile could be seen, so the Doctor said, on her lips and she looked better that she had done in years after suffering with acute angina and severe back pain. My mother, always the one to see the good in people thanked the Doctor for his kind words and the way he had looked after my grandmother through the last three years of her life, never realising for one minute that he had been slowly poisoning her. Not for a financial gain of course, what would be the point, we had no money, my father had been unemployed since the great strike of ’19 and what little my mother bought in was barely enough to feed the five of us, let alone line the pockets of a Doctor who had wavered off the course laid down by law. No, he had done so just because he could. My mother never suspected a thing, no one ever did. He went to his grave twenty years later a pillar of the community, a respected man who served his patients with diligence and care and who left all he owned and his house to the poor of the parish, he died a loved man. He died a loved man who confessed to me on the night he died, swearing, cursing me, blind with panic and hatred, calling humanity the great stink and all those he had killed were undeserving to have lived and breathed in the same clean air as he. He was one person who after he confessed I lost very little sleep over…after all, he had murdered my grandmother.

I was seven when my grandmother died; she was the first that confessed to me.

I have made it sound like I have been destined for a career in the church all my life; nothing could be further from the truth. True atheist, a man who lost his faith, funnily enough in the same city as I was in now, albeit on the other side on the other side of the Thames and in an area that would make Samantha drool with the prospect of finding a very posh woman which to share her bed. It is almost laughable to imagine me as some sort of priest, a man who’s quiet and gentle demeanour made the parish relaxed and conforms to their faith tightly. If God does exist, then why would he employ me to do his work? I am not his Personal Assistant, I am not in charge of his public relations and I wouldn’t defend him in court after the stuff I have seen and endured; the confessions I have had to listen to and not judge. I can never judge, it makes me too ill to sit there in a darkened room, my bedsit, or in the bright blistering sunlight of summer’s day. The negative thoughts turn and wriggle like worms caught on a fishing line, the more I dwell on the person’s confession, the more I feel ill, the bile eventually rising enough to spill out over my teeth and tongue and make a mess in a toilet that stinks more than any cess pit you could imagine. The stomach aches for days afterwards and if not for a drink, perhaps more than one bottle, I would die just as many times by my own hand…and who would then hear my confession? The Devil?

I refuse to believe I am doing some sort of higher authority’s work, it’s just somehow my brain is wired to understand those who are departing this world and the final message they have to impart, the apologies they make and the happiness they feel when they know I cannot repeat their words to anyone, their secret safe with me, till the day I die. I tried once to explain what I had seen but I was beaten severely by my father for making my mother upset. The night my grandmother died I was awoken by a strange heaviness on my bed. Thinking that my father had let the dog from next door into our house I reached out to pet the strange hound, one eyed, drooling with utter delight out of the side of its mouth and smelling of overfilled drains. I couldn’t feel the dog in my half closed eyes state and propped myself up wearily onto my pillow to see my bed ridden grandmother as plain as day sitting up in her patterned nightdress and staring at me with hollow eyes and with an expression that I took to be a mix of guilt and fear.

Confession is an evil, oh Hell, to those that say it cleanses the soul, that it is the right thing to do, keep those damned ideals to yourself. I find it helps you sleep at night, it gives you peace in the final moments of your otherwise worthless existence but when you confess to me, when you lay your life story, all the wrongs you have committed and found in disgrace a smile as you die; I take on that mantle for you, I am carrying a burden so heavy that it is taking away my own far from perfect soul. Confess, confess, confess. I confess right here and now in this God-forsaken city, one that allows its citizens to be locked up if they should fall into homelessness, locked up in a modern day version of the work house but never seen again, no chance of parole or redemption, this is my confession, your words are killing me.

Her confession was the first, blank eyes, the fear of what was to come, she had no idea who I was and I was frightened, I was a little boy of seven, more interested in the act of throwing stones at the already smashed windows, hoping to hit the one piece of glass that was standing out erect, defiant and cold, hoping to take it down, hoping to see the final piece of iceberg like glass jutting out of its groove in the window frame. I was more engrossed in kicking a ball against the corrugated doors that were supposed to keep people out of the empty houses, of playing marbles, of chasing a dog down the street and petting it, rubbing its fur in my face when finally I captured it. I would rather have been beaten by my father for a year than sit there and listen to that strange confession, a woman who belittled her child, made fun of her in her later years when the cabbage brain stopped functioning properly, the uncertainty of who was my mother’s father, the glee in the fornication and the breaking of the established unwritten post-Victorian hangover rules, the freedom from war manifesting itself in sex, confess…confess…tell me more, for it is making me sick and I am scared, my small mind outraged and disgusted, fascinated by the reality of it all and charged with knowledge that could break my mother’s heart.

I looked across the small narrow street, the confession awaited me somewhere down that alley, he didn’t know he was going to die tonight, they never do but I get a glimpse of them, I see their faces before the final smile and I know that this man is going to die by my hands, or at least I hoped he would, just enough pressure round the throat to snap his bloated clerical neck as he recounted his sins, may I have mercy upon his tarnished soul.

Ian D. Hall 2016