Алекс Баркли - I Confess

‘Do you want me to bring you up a drink?’ said Edie.

‘Stop!’ said Clare. ‘Stop worrying about us. Do what you have to do and I’ll be back down.’

‘OK,’ said Edie. ‘See you in a while.’

Clare stood up and walked over to the window that overlooked the rear garden. She leaned in, and tilted her head.

‘ Bonjour , Clare!’ she said. She smiled, and it quickly faded.

The Sisters of Good Grace Convent

26 October 1988

Patrick was pushing the lawn mower across the grass at the front of the convent, his arms fully extended, his head half-bowed between them. It was the last cut of the year. It was a mild afternoon and his black-and-white football jersey and black tracksuit bottoms were stuck to him. As the severed blades of grass flew up around him, he was thinking about all the As in Maths he had got and how he would make millions that he would grow into hundreds of millions. He stopped for a moment, and glanced up at the convent. He could see a shadow in the window of the library and he knew it was Clare and for the first time, his heart skipped. She came every Wednesday afternoon and the nuns always let her because she was one of the smartest girls in school and she had run out of books to read. Patrick knew that half the time she was in the same corner, looking out the window. Always in the same place — sitting on top of the table, the book on her lap, her feet on a chair, looking up from it to look down over the garden. He didn’t think she was going to come today. He thought she might be too embarrassed. Last week, Sister Consolata had made a show of her in class. She had caught her in the middle of writing I HEART PATRICK in her homework journal and she’d picked it up and said to the whole class, ‘Oh. You love Patrick, do you, now?’ and Clare’s face had gone as red as he’d ever seen a face go, and he knew his had done the same from his corner of the classroom. And Sister Consolata had said to her, ‘Do you want to finish it, Clare? It must be far more important than anything I’ve got to say. You’ve only one letter to go. Go on — pick up your pen. What comes next? Pick up your pen! If it’s so important! Pick it up!’

Clare picked up her pen and her hand was shaking.

‘What’s next?’ said Consolata. ‘P-A-T-R-I–C?’

Clare was just crying, staring down at the page.

‘What comes next?’ Sister Consolata was saying to her.

And Clare said. ‘K, Sister,’ and everyone was trying not to laugh and Patrick’s face was hot but at the same time, he wanted to take his hands from on top of the desk and slide them under it.

He was surprised that Clare had come back to the convent today. Her love of books must have been greater than her embarrassment or greater than her shame or greater than her hatred for Sister Consolata. Or maybe it wasn’t her love of books, it was her love of him. He looked up at the window again, and she was still there. He waved up at her, but the sun was so bright, he didn’t think she could see him. Then he remembered she was getting French grinds from Mademoiselle Autin, the visiting French teacher and everyone loved Mademoiselle Autin because she looked like a movie star. It didn’t make a whole pile of sense to him when Clare was already top of the class at French.

He bowed his head and kept mowing. He thought about the future, where he had his own home, a mansion, and he would stand at the window, and wave down at a student like him, then come down, and give him a bottle of Coke in the heat, and a one-hundred-pound tip, and explain to him how he could turn that into a fortune, so he could become a millionaire too. He would tell the boy he could use the pool if he wanted to, and he could bring his friends if he wanted to. Then he would head back into the house where he would stand at the bay windows at the back, and watch his beautiful wife — looking like Wonder Woman and Jessie Crossan — walk towards him in a bikini that was still wet. Then he thought of Clare with her even bigger breasts. Then he thought of her short frizzy hair and the darkness of the hair all over her — on her arms and above her lips and by her ears and he thought of how she was shorter and fatter. Then he thought of how she was closer.

Shafts of bright sunlight slanted through the gaps in the blinds of the library windows. He was hidden behind one of the tall bookshelves, his crooked left arm above him, his forehead resting against it. In front of him, just below his eyeline, spread open on a gap he made on one of the shelves was a brochure for Playtex bras.

In his other hand, he was holding his dick as he stared down at a pretty brunette in a white bra that was more modern than the ones he brought in off the washing line for his mother. His breathing was fast and shallow, and his hand was working harder and harder, and he could feel the tightness of the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, pushed down at the back, and the breeze from the window drifting across his skin and he closed his eyes at the feeling, and breathed the air deep. His forehead shone with grease, and sweat. He smelled of cut grass and petrol. His legs shook. He lifted his eyes from the page, and pictures of Jessie flashed into his mind until he went back to the model, whom he didn’t know, and who didn’t bring him any guilt, and then he fought again for Jessie to get out of his head, because she did something to his heart too, and she had been hurt, and he was as bad as any man who would do a thing like that, and he groaned, and he clenched his teeth, and his eyes were back on the model, on her breasts this time, and no face was in his head. His eyes went lower but the photo ended at the model’s waist and he found himself thinking about Clare and all the hair she might have and how he would cup his hand tight around it and search with his fingers for where it was wet and he could push a finger inside her.

He gripped himself tighter, lost in how that dark hot hole would suck his finger deep and how his finger would suck back and how he would have to push harder to go further and how that hole wouldn’t want to let his finger go until it knew that he was putting something longer and harder in there and he looked down and it was so much longer and harder than any finger and his breath quickened and deepened and there was a rushing sound in his ears that happened when his body was reduced to one body part, and breath, and nothing could break through.

She was standing beside him. To his right. A chill shot up his spine like a yanked piano wire. He stopped breathing, then turned his head. It was Clare. His breathing started up again at the relief it wasn’t Sister Consolata. Clare’s mouth was open, her eyes wide, widening again when they moved down his body to where his dick was still hard, still in his hand. She looked up and their eyes met. Patrick looked down and back up at her. ‘Do you want to...’

Clare’s eyes were like dolls’ eyes broken, open, but she was frowning too and Patrick felt like his heart had leapt to the base of his throat, and it was lodged there and that it was wrong, but, still, that it needed to be there, like the pin in a grenade.

‘Sorry,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Sorry... I thought...’ He was pulling up his tracksuit bottoms when the elastic snapped back against him and he came and there was so much of it and it shot past and some of it landed on the edge of the shelf. They both gasped.

‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Sorry... I thought you... I thought you... liked me.’

Clare’s eyes fluttered with rapid blinks. She took two steps backwards.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ said Patrick. He was about to reach out for her with his sticky hand and they both froze. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Please. Don’t. I’ll be dead.’