Forgive me

“How dare you?” the priest yelled.

I shrugged.

“The confession is sanctified. It is between the penitent and God. You had no right…”

“Why do you need a confessor then.”

“What?”

“If it’s between the penitent and God, why does the penitent need a confessor?”

“The confessor’s role is to listen and to understand, not to judge.”

 “So you help people to avoid the judgement of their fellow men.”

“No, we enable them to admit their sins, to unburden themselves.”

“And then you let them go free because…?”

“If we didn’t then people would never confess their sins.”

“So what good is it to society if criminals can unburden themselves without consequence?”

“Look I am not going to argue with you. It is unconscionable that you taped that conversation.”

“It is unconscionable that you are not going to tell the police!”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“No, but I can.”

“No you cannot. Neither morally nor legally."

I knew he was right on the second count. My problem was more with the first.

"Give me the damned tape!” he said.

I laughed. “Tape? What century are you in?”

“So delete the file you little bastard!”

“Or what? Will God strike me down? He won’t, you know. He’s known to be quite ineffectual in that regard.”

“So you won’t delete the file?”

“Only if you report him to the police.”

“The man is dying.”

“His wife is dead.”

“It’s decades in the past.”

“She lost decades of the life she deserved, and he got away with it for decades when he should have been in gaol.”

“You are a despicable human being.”

“I am not the one defending a murderer.”

“I am not defending him.”

“You are protecting him then, which is worse. Protecting him in this world on the spurious basis that he will be judged in the next world, the existence of which has never been proved.”

“Pah, you are a fool and an idiot!”

“Ah, insults. The last resort of the weakest argument.”

He turned and walked away.

…

I had never liked my father. He spoke quietly and was regarded as a good man by his students and fellow teachers. At home though the controlling side of his nature seeped out like slime from under a stone. His witticisms were always cruel, barbative. He took pleasure in humiliating my half-brother and me, and in sarcastic criticisms of my mother’s every action and statement.

People would say how good he was. That he brought up his first wife’s son, my half-brother, alongside me, his second wife’s son. We knew though that our role was to be the vessels into which he could pour his bitterness at his failure to achieve the academic career he always felt he deserved. He never acknowledged or understood that he just wasn’t clever enough to make the grade, so to speak, as a lecturer of literature, let alone as a professor.

People spoke in undertones about my brother’s mother who had killed herself when he was eight years old. She wasn’t intellectual like her husband...she always seemed a little strange...she dressed like a pauper when it was clear he was on a good wage.

We realized eventually that she had dressed like that because he wouldn’t give her enough of an allowance to both feed and clothe us and to dress herself more fashionably. He treated my mother, his second wife, the same. Somehow though my mother made the best of it, ignored his rudeness and stood up for herself, and for us, so that he slowly retreated into a self-regarding ill humor. Then, unable to effectively vent his bile, he would ignore us for weeks at a time. We were heart-broken when she died of cancer at 55, but by then we had left home and made our separate, emotionally difficult ways into the world.

My brother was 10 years older than me but we were always close. Forever damaged and unsure of ourselves after childhoods overwhelmed with criticism and derision. It was so even then, when we were 50 and 60 years old. I was able to manage the old man’s transition to a care home and to visit occasionally. My brother though refused to have anything to do with him.

I called my brother to say I had come across something I really felt I should share with him. Something about the old man. He came around and we had a few beers before he finally asked me to tell him what I had on the old bastard.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and found the file.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked.

“I have no idea what it is so no, not all,” he smiled.

“It’s pretty awful.”

He shrugged. “Let me have it.”

I played the file.

…

“Forgive me father for I have sinned...”

I imagined the priest nodding, waiting for the platitudes of someone whose life, he imagined, contained little that required forgiveness.

“I have not always been a good man. I have been loose with my tongue, sometimes cruel.”

He paused, as if reminding himself he was dying and that he needed this to escape purgatory.

“My first wife…”

“Yes,” the priest said. A quiet murmur.

“I killed her.”

A small intake of breath from the priest.

“I strangled her with a rope in which I had made a hangman’s noose. Then I hanged her from a banister so it looked like she had done it herself. I wrapped her cold hands over the back of a chair so it had her fingerprints on it then kicked it over next to her so it looked like she had climbed up then kicked the chair away. I even though to scuff the back of her shoes on the stairwell. I thought that was rather clever.

“Of course I had been expressing concern for her mental welfare for some time so no-one suspected me.”

“You have sinned indeed, my son,” the priest muttered.

…

“Enough,” my brother said, waving his hand. I turned it off. We were silent for a few moments.

“Is the priest going to report him to the police?”

“Of course not,” I half-laughed. “Confessional privilege.”

“But if you play them the file?”

“Confessions to priests can’t be used as evidence. Especially as I didn’t have either party’s agreement to record it.”

“So he’ll get away with it? He killed my mother!”

I nodded.

“Why did you record it?”

“I thought it would be funny.”

“Funny?”

“I mean ridiculous. That he would be pathetic and self-pitying. Something we could deride from a distance.”

“We should make him face up to it.” He clenched his fists and pressed them into the table.

“No sense us going to gaol. I’m sorry I played it to you. I just had to share it though.”

“No, I mean, talk to him, tell him we know.”

“Honestly,” I said. “If I go into that room, I’ll kill him.”

He nodded. “Me too.”

We looked at each other.

“I’ll talk to the priest,” he said. “Get him to tell someone.”

“Good luck with that.”

“I have to try.”

“You know what he’s going to say.”

“I have to try.”

He stood up.

…

It was a few days later. I had washed up and sat down as I usually do, to mindlessly watch television until 10pm. Time passes, we get older, nothing happens.

My brother called.

“Forgive me brother for I have sinned,” he intoned.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I am confessing.”

“Confessing what?”

“The priest has, um, died.”

“Father…?”

“Yes. Himself. I tried to make him see. That she was my mother. That I loved her. That he was protecting a criminal. That God had nothing to do with it. That it was his responsibility as a human being…”

“Oh dear…”

"Yes."

"He wouldn't have responded well to that."

“Indeed.”

"You wouldn't have responded well either."

"No."

"Did you...?"

"Hmmm..."

“Oh dear.”

“Indeed.”

“I am just guessing now...but...like your mother?”

“The rope, the chair. Yes.”

Silence.

“You’re not recording this are you?” he said.

“No.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“I’ll tell a priest,” he said, then paused. “One day.”