‘Bless me Father,’ I faltered. I had been forced to repeat the mantra so many times it had finally slipped.
‘For I have sinned,’ the priest reminded me.
‘For I have sinned,’ I repeated. ‘This is my first confession and these are all my sins.’
There was a silence.
‘This is all secret, isn’t it?’ I leant in closer to the grille that separated us. It was Father Gillroy on the other side, the new priest. He was very enthusiastic and made time in his life to smile.
‘It is,’ he said.
I waited a bit longer, not sure what to say next. We’d been given a list of sins – arguing with your brothers and sisters, answering back, taking the name of the Lord in vain. I wanted to say, ‘All the things on the list, Father.’ But none of them were quite right. I didn’t have sisters. I never answered back because I preferred to sulk. I didn’t say God or Jesus, I said bloody hell. So I said: ‘I stayed up late.’
‘That’s not a sin, my child.’
‘It might be,’ I said. ‘Because I was listening to my mother and she was talking to a man.’
The outline of the priest on the other side of the grille flickered as he moved forward in his chair.
‘I’m sure that you did nothing wrong,’ he reassured me. ‘Just listening to your mother and a neighbour talking, I expect.’
I could tell I had his attention now.
‘A plumber,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ He seemed relieved.
‘But he’d finished the plumbing hours ago.’ I paused, remembering what had happened next. ‘Then she went to talk to Dad.’
I connected with the priest’s fishy eye and I saw that he recognized me, so I said again: ‘This is all secret, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course. Only God is listening.’
‘Dad’s in the tree, we go and talk to him there.’ I waited for my accolades. I assumed because of the angels in heaven and the Holy Spirit, I would be rewarded for having my own personal ghost. I felt so much better for telling him. Now I understood what this confession business was all about. I was working out things I’d not understood before.
‘In the tree?’ the priest enquired. ‘How do you mean?’
‘That’s where we talk to him, since he died,’ I said.
I waited for the priest to ask for details, to give me my due praise. He didn’t. The relief I’d felt moments earlier vanished and was replaced by red-faced embarrassment.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Anything else to report?’ I could tell he was trying to change the subject subtly and bring it back to my confession.
‘I’ve done everything on the list,’ I blurted out.
He seemed happy enough with such a broad spectrum admission.
‘Say one perfect Hail Mary and one perfect Our Father and listen to the words as you say them.’
And that was that. We’d been taught confession was just a little chat with you and the priest and God, and so it was. But it left me feeling peculiar. No one had said anything about that.
I knelt in the church trying to ignore the fact that because I had taken so long in the confessional there was now along the hallowed pews a row of girls, their heads dipped supposedly in prayer, whispering, ‘How many sins did you tell him?’
The crinkled-up nose of Katherine Padley poked under the wall of my hair.
‘You’re just supposed to do three or four off the list,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said. I felt indignant. ‘But I did the whole list.’
She looked bewildered and wrinkled her nose up again, then she seemed to understand something that I didn’t. She patted my arm in that special way the women at the funeral had done when they had supported the grieving family members under the elbow and led them to and from their seats in the church.