The Confessor

Charlo holds the lighter to the end of the paper and watches the flame climb, blackening its path and leaving little glowing embers in its wake. He’s done with the gardening for the day, but he’s not due to clock off for another few hours, and what the nuns don’t know won’t hurt them.

He squints through one eye as he takes a puff, watching the black lighten to grey, little flakes of ash lift up and hang in the mild autumn air before they’re snatched away by the erratic breeze that comes and goes between the trellises. A shadow falls across the corner where he’s skulking and he shifts the joint quickly behind his back.

Somehow Old Dom has made his way down the path behind the roses, dragging the stand that holds his IV drip like some old-time prisoner with a ball and chain. He’s been here a while, Charlo knows. Can’t have long left. The old guy’s skin’s white and thin as paper, and Charlo has a momentary thought that he might catch in the breeze and flitter off like ashes. He shambles across to Charlo’s little nook, his IV stand bumping over the rough earth.

“May I?” He gestures, with the exaggerated politeness of the old, to the hand that’s concealing the joint.

“Sure,” says Charlo, “can’t hurt you now,” and they both smile in a sad, gentle sort of way that goes along with the autumn afternoon and the mellow tang of smoke as Old Dom takes a deep, grateful puff.

“Ah,” he says, exhaling, and it’s a sigh of satisfaction and melancholy so deep Charlo feels like he can see the emotions as solid things in the curls of smoke hanging in front of the old man.

“I wasn’t always like this,” Dom gestures to the drip, then to his own wasted body, skeletal in the flapping hospital pyjamas. “I used to be a builder, you know. Big, strong man I was, back then. Built half this city, me, men like me. Different world then, son,” he chuckles, taking another long, relishing pull. “No bits of paper for this or that, permits, regulations. Didn’t matter as long as you got the job done.”

Dom passes the joint and Charlo takes a deep, companionable drag. The comforting sting catches at the back of his throat, a soothing burn. If it had a colour it’d be green, he thinks; a dark, forest green, the shade of bracken after rain. He watches idly from the crumbled archway as the nuns cluster and hop about the garden like crows, their black skirts dragging wings. The patients loll in wheelchairs, barely conscious, or clutch canes and walkers as if those are all that root them to the here and now, like they’re warriors taking a last, lonely stand. The weed does its magic, fusing images and ideas in an effortless stream and he’s thinking of Valkyries, hovering over the battlefield, vulturing the dying, and then he’s back to crows and nuns again, pulling at the patients as if they’re worms.

Old Dom gestures for the joint, leans in confidentially, like he’s got a secret to tell. Charlo tilts his head toward the old guy, but he’s not really listening, lost in the warm wash of his own thoughts as Dom’s words swim around him like fishes, nipping and nibbling every now and again, swimming away with a flick of their tails.

“The whole building trade run by them. Still is. And those guys up at City Hall, you can bet they get their kickbacks. Cops too. So who are you going to tell? Anyways, they always done right by me, so what’s it bother me anyhow, is how I always looked at it, you know?” The old guy shrugs, and Charlo smiles back at him to say, “Sure, that’s just how it is,” but his mind’s on the men who built this place, the hospice, back when it was a convent, years before he or even Old Dom were born. He can picture them, in their strange, antique clothing, smoothing the mortar as the walls grew up, scraping their trowels in clean, satisfying sweeps. Charlo’s fingers brush the crumbling brickwork as if he can feel the warmth their hands left there, though a part of his mind knows it’s only a trick of the late autumn sunshine.

He returns to himself when Old Dom passes the joint, and he notices the old man’s eyes are red and rheumy with tears.

“And so I poured the concrete in and watched them disappear,” he’s saying. “I don’t even remember how many. I tell you son, there must be one under every tenth bridge in this city. We didn’t ask questions, not if we knew what was good for us. Only the problem is,” the old man’s voice comes out hoarse, and catches in his throat, turns into a tearing cough that seems to rip its way out of him from somewhere so deep it should be slicked in blood, and he leans on the rough stone wall to steady himself, wheezing so painfully Charlo winces.

“Only problem is,” he says again, once he’s got breath enough to make the words, “I can still see their faces. They didn’t go quietly, you could tell that, son. Shot in the chest, the guts. Eyes wide open, staring, what’s the word?” Old Dom stretches his teary eyes wide like a guppy, so Charlo can see the tiny red veins standing out swollen and angry against the dirty blue-grey of the sclera. “Outraged. Except if they’d popped them in the head, of course. You’d think that’d be worse, but it was a relief, not to see those eyes.”

Charlo knows there’s something wrong about what the old man’s saying, but his mind’s reached that nice distance from things where he can just watch the words as though they’re solid, turn them over in his hands like stones from the garden and see the grubs wiggle underneath them. Now he’s thinking of faces covered in thick, grey liquid that washes over them like milk, smothering and slowing until it starts to harden, and the dead faces of Old Dom’s past are stone angels in a churchyard, staring accusingly at passersby who lay cheap supermarket flowers on neighbouring graves, oblivious.

Charlo flicks the ash from the burnt end and watches it drift in slow motion to the dusty concrete at their feet. He’s floating in that nowhere place where time stops and starts on its own whim, and sometimes it just pauses for a while. It happens now, and Charlo and Old Dom are held in the moment that ebbs out of time like a ray of sunlight falling on stone. Then a cloud moves across the sun, and the world starts up again, and Charlo realises Old Dom’s crying for real now, tears forging streams through the age-spots islanding his cheeks.

“So then I came home, and he was in my apartment, just sitting there, grinning like he owned the place, and I couldn’t stand it. Not after all he’d done. I still had my toolbag from work in my hand, and before I knew what I was doing I had the lump-hammer out and I was swinging and swinging at that stupid grin.”

As the old guy speaks, it’s vivid before Charlo, the kitchen with its stained lino curling up in the corners, the plastic-topped table and the man crumpling down off a cheap metal stool while Old Dom swings and swings with his lump hammer and teeth and blood splatter on the formica cabinets with their doors that don’t quite shut.

He’s watching it all play out in front of him like it’s a TV show, and now he’s looking at Old Dom’s mouth telling the tale, fascinated how the chapped brown lips can form themselves around words like that, how breath can form into something so solid and distinct.

“So I waited til 5 the next morning, and I got in the car with him wrapped up in garbage bags in the trunk, all sealed up with duct tape, and hidden under my work gear and a piece of old carpet, in case the cops stopped me on the way to the job,” Old Dom’s saying, and they’re both seeing it now, as if it’s happening before them, the car bumping over the cobbles, turning down side streets to get to the building site right as the sun comes up.

“I knew I’d have just enough time to get the mixer on and put him in there before anyone showed,” Old Dom finishes, his shoulders sagging, like he’s put down something heavy and he’s tired out. “Sure enough, as I’m smoothing over the surface with a plank, the boss arrives. ‘You’re here early this morning, Dom,” he says, and I say something about how I want to make sure we get the job done so I get paid on time, and that’s the last that was ever said about it.”

Old Dom gestures for the joint, and Charlo passes it over, watching the old man’s hand shake, and thinking about all the things people’s hands do that don’t leave a trace, and how funny that is.