Work Text:
“What do you want?”
It wasn’t exactly the friendliest reception he’d ever had in a confessional, but Lockwood had been kind of expecting it.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said. “It’s been three months since my last confession.”
“What?”
He couldn’t see the priest’s face, only the vague shapes of his profile on the other side of the grill, but he could hear the confusion in his voice.
“I’m here for confession,” Lockwood elaborated, as though speaking to a simpleton.
“Oh, you are, are you?” the priest responded darkly, with what Lockwood felt was an unfair level of suspicion. After all, he had as much right to be here as anyone else. “Well, go on then.”
“It’s been three months since my last confession,” he repeated. “Or thereabouts. Maybe it was four. A while, certainly.”
“Hmph,” said the priest, and then added in a slightly less surly tone: “May the Lord be in your heart and help you to confess your sins with true sorrow.”
Lockwood took a deep breath. It actually had been a while, and although he hadn’t done anything terrible in that time, it was funny how the small things accumulated. Examining his conscience in the church beforehand, he had felt a certain rueful surprise at how much muck had built up in the corners and crevices of his heart in the interim, in much the same way as you don’t notice the grime on a window until you go to clean it; so, for all that his initial motives for coming into the confessional were a little dubious, he genuinely did want to get some things off his chest.
“I’ve been impatient with the children,” he said. “I lost my temper with James last week, for something stupid. And then I had a row with Lucy about it afterwards. And I’ve been selfish, thinking of myself and my work instead of my family. And” —
And on, and on, a mountain of petty imperfections, the very normal, trivial struggles that made up the daily life of a young father of a young family who was learning how to be a good parent with precious little idea of what that looked like. The priest gradually lost the narky attitude as he listened, giving the occasional sympathetic grunt or murmur when Lockwood paused for a breath.
“Is that everything?” he asked when Lockwood finished. He hesitated, but the mischievous urge that had propelled him into the box in the first place was sparking again.
“Not quite everything, Father.”
The priest sighed heavily and muttered something that sounded an awful lot like, “Why am I not surprised?”
“Go on then,” he said in a more normal tone.
“Well, this one is difficult,” Lockwood hedged. “I made an uncharitable comment about a priest.”
“Did you now?” The other man’s sarcasm nearly dissolved the grill, but Lockwood persisted, his tone ringing with innocence.
“Yes. I called him a scrawny, ginger ferret in a cassock.”
“I don’t even wear a cassock,” the priest interjected.
“It gets worse.”
“It always does with you.”
“I once stabbed that same priest in the backside in the middle of a fencing tournament.”
The priest sighed again, and even through the grill, Lockwood could make out the way he covered his face with a hand.
“In my defence,” Lockwood continued. “He wasn’t a priest then. And he was really asking for it.”
“Tony, need I remind you that confession is a sacrament and not to be made fun of?”
Lockwood snorted, his laughter finally getting the better of him.
“Sorry, Quill. It was too good to resist.”
“That’s Father Quill to you,” his friend retorted.
“Isn’t there something in the Gospel about letting no man call you ‘father’ or ‘teacher’?” Lockwood jibed.
“Do you really want to debate scripture with me, Tony?” The words were sharp, but there was a laugh hidden in there somewhere, if you knew where to look. “There are some good bits in St Paul about submitting to authority, if you’d like to hear them. And about not being a nuisance to shepherds of the flock.”
“Did St Paul really say ‘nuisance’?”
“I think ‘burden’ is the most common translation actually, but he’d have said ‘nuisance’ if he’d met you.”
“I believe he also had a few lines about patience.”
This time, Kipps did laugh. “We could probably both stand to reread those a few times. Anyway, how are you, Tony? It’s good to see you — well, hear you.”
“Struggling along.” Lockwood shifted uncomfortably where he was hunched over the kneeler. “Are your parishioners particularly diminutive? I’m getting an awful crick in my neck.”
“Good enough for you, coming in here to make fun of me,” said Kipps.
“Actually, I came to ask if you wanted to come for dinner this week. Lucy is making threatening noises about descending on the parochial house with our entire brood, and I’m not sure your PP could handle the noise.”
“Heading her off at the pass, is it?”
“That’s the idea.”
“You could have phoned like a normal person.”
“I could have. But I needed to go anyway. Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. And besides —”
He broke off and chuckled sheepishly, rubbing his stiff neck.
“And besides?”
“I never did say sorry for stabbing you.”
“Oh God, that was years ago.” The outline of Kipps shrugged. “I’m well over it.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that James has started fencing classes, and good God, if some other kid treated him like that on the piste, I’d break his foil over his head.”
“As a priest, I can’t really condone the use of violence as a solution,” said Kipps drily. “But if your James was winding up the other kids the way I tried to wind you up, I hope you’d intervene pretty sharpish.”
“James would have more sense than to do that,” said Lockwood thoughtlessly. There was a slightly frosty silence from the other side of the confessional. “Sorry,” he added.
“Never mind,” Kipps sighed. “It’s a bit mad, looking back, isn’t it? The things we did. The things we were allowed to do.”
“Yeah,” said Lockwood, who had been known to wake up in a cold sweat from dreams of his sons wearing rapiers and work belts, walking into haunted houses with blank faces and frightened eyes. “Mad.”
“Still.” He saw Kipps’ shadowy figure give itself a little shake. “We’re here, aren’t we? And more than here. You’ve got Lucy and the boys. I’ve got —” he waved his hand at himself, presumably taking in the confessional and his dog collar, and the nebulous, endless queue of people waiting for baptisms, weddings, mass cards and funerals.
Lockwood smiled somewhat wistfully. “Still saving people, Quill?”
“God willing, yeah,” said his friend in his usual, matter-of-fact way. “Anyway, I’ll take you up on that dinner. Monday?”
“We can do Monday.”
“Good. Then, for your penance, say a decade of the rosary and ask Lucy to make that crumble with the rolled oat topping. Now, let’s hear an act of contrition.”
“A whole decade?” Lockwood repeated, outraged. “Now who’s abusing the sacrament?”
“You did stab me, Tony.” Kipps sounded smug. “In front of a lot of people. Anyway, offer it up for priests if it makes you feel better.”
Again, if you knew where to look, there was something genuine in there, a request for help and support balled up inside the joke. It was indirect, but Lockwood could never blame anyone else for being a poor communicator. Besides, this was how they were with each other, never quite saying what they meant, but always understanding it anyway — it was the sort of thing you could get away with with someone who had once almost bled to death in your lap.
“Fine,” he said. “But don’t hold your breath for the crumble.” (Lucy would make it, of course. She would have made it without being asked, because she knew it was Quill’s favourite.)
“Act of contrition,” Quill reminded him.
Lockwood sighed. “Oh my God, I am sorry for all my sins, for not loving others and not loving you —”
As he rattled off the formula, more or less automatically, he heard his friend begin to speak in a low voice, the vague shape of his upraised hand blocking out the faint light that came through the grill.
“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself…”
He bowed his head for the blessing, reflecting that, however mad it may have been to look back at the horrors he’d taken in his stride in his childhood, his younger self would have found it far stranger to see where he was these days: the once proud dead-man-walking now a husband and father, receiving absolution from his very worst rival.
“… and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins…”
He could only imagine how Quill must feel, going from considering himself to have outlived his usefulness at eighteen to finding a place in life where someone always needed him desperately.
“… through the ministry of the Church …”
Was it a relief? A burden? Both? At any rate, he had gone the whole hog with it, and that was typical of the man.
“… may God give you pardon and peace…”
After all, he had always insisted that whatever he did, it had to be done right.
“… and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”