They drove back to Glasgow that evening and dropped Hugh at the train station.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, as he left them. ‘Go home and forget about the whole bloody business.’
They watched him shuffle his way into the station, sticking a hand in his pocket and pawing out a few coins to pass to the young fella squatted at the station entrance, a paper coffee cup his begging bowl.
‘Where do you want me to leave you?’ Tony asked.
‘How about we get a bottle of something?’ Karen suggested. ‘There’s an offie across the street.’
She arrived back with a bottle of Southern Comfort and two litres of Diet Coke. They drove to Karen’s flat in Paisley. Once inside, they stripped off their clothes as Hugh had instructed and put them in a hot wash. They sat in front of the fire, wrapped in bed sheets, and drank half the Southern Comfort before Karen moved across and straddled Tony, her mouth sweet, her tongue cold in his mouth as she kissed him with an urgency, a hunger, which surprised him, even as she pulled the sheet off him and pushed him back onto the floor.
They made love there. Tony had the sense he was discovering her body anew in that moment, as if their proximity to death had somehow enflamed their desire to live, to breath, to feel. He tried to dispel from his mind the vision of Martin Kelly, kneeling in his grave, the thought that his body was cooling beneath the earth even as theirs blazed in a moment of climax.
They lay together, Tony’s head resting on her chest, his hand on her stomach. He could hear the rapid beating of her heart begin to slow, and felt his own breathing synchronise with its rhythm. He imagined himself happy, imagined them together like this, somewhere at home, a Donegal winter wind blowing outside.
That was what he would remember in years to come, when he was both alone and lonely. This last time together. The heat of her body, the scent of her perfume, of her skin, the gentle lift and fall of her breast beneath him with each breath, the saltiness in his mouth as he raised his own head and kissed her, the light of the flames dancing across her flesh.
Chapter Two
‘Sins of the flesh,’ he muttered, as if trying out the phrase, his tongue struggling with the words. Such an archaic formulation, he thought: sins of the flesh. How else to describe it? Even alone now, did that still qualify as a sin of the flesh, when that flesh was his own?
He ran through the shopping list of his sins, a habit since childhood, as he waited for Father O’Brien to shunt back the wooden slide of the confessional box. He could hear the low murmurs of the conversation being conducted to the other side of the confessional, alternating between the modulated timbre of the priest’s deeper, softer tones and the hushed sibilant whisper of the lady who occupied the other box.
The confessional was dark and close, rich with the heady sweetness of the wood polish which he himself had used just the previous morning on the kneeling boards and frame when he’d done the weekly clean of the church.
He was surprised by the thud of the wooden slat sliding back into place; he’d not heard the muted rhythmic Act of Contrition from the other side.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ he began and, saw again, unbidden, Martin’s white body, the red flowering of his wounds, the narrowness of his grave, itself as dark as a confessional. He stopped.
‘Go on, Tony,’ the priest urged softly.
‘I have sinned,’ he repeated. ‘It’s been a month since my last confession. I’ve offended God by…’
The laundry list failed him now. Spoken unkindly of someone? Watched porn a few times? They seemed infantile somehow.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m, ah, I’m away for the day, tomorrow,’ he managed, his mouth suddenly dry, the walls of the confessional nearer to him than he’d realised, the edge of the kneeling board digging into his knee.
‘Very good,’ O’Brien said, a little quizzically. ‘Do you want to confess before you go?’
‘I was going to… I’m meeting a few friends from way back.’
He could see the silhouette of the priest through the mesh that separated them, his head nodding, bowed as he read from his breviary by the weak light that leaked through the curtains of the box.
‘Very good,’ the priest repeated. ‘I can get someone to cover the funeral