THE WEEKLY CONFESSION

When she arrived at the church there was nobody to be seen. The building was almost deserted. Apart from some barely audible mumbling from the confessional, there was nobody to be heard either. It was all very quiet.

Glancing down at her wristwatch, she saw that it was exactly 2.30pm, the time she was usually expected. The priest would be quite disappointed with her if she arrived late, as experience had recently shown, and might even decline to absolve her. It was one thing to arrive a sinner, but to depart the church an even bigger one was quite another! She so hated to repeat her confessions.

Sharon Conroy had just turned eighteen. With a shapely figure, a pretty face, a pleasant manner, good taste, and a few additional charms besides, she possessed virtually all the personal advantages for which a young woman of moderate means could reasonably hope. From a very early stage in her church-going career she had built up a considerable trust in Father James' confidence, in his congenially unpretentious manner of first absorbing and then absolving sins. Now that she had blossomed into a highly attractive not to say intelligent person, this confidence seemed even more important to her than previously, and notably as a means of securing his profoundest concern for her sexual welfare. It was he, after all, who had one day assured her that he always took her interests directly to heart.

She sat down on the end of the pew nearest the confessional and, bowing her head, respectfully closed her eyes. It was so still in the church that, excited as she was, she could hear her heart beating. The slightest movement on her part would have seemed like a sudden violence. A few tiny beads of sweat rolled slowly down her back and were absorbed by her underclothes. The deathly coolness of the place was so apparent on warm days like today ... it was a wonder to her that she didn't catch a chill, as she had often feared doing, from these sudden violent changes of temperature. Father James could at least have taken the trouble to warm the place up a bit!

Slowly opening her eyes she glanced towards the confessional, from whence the steady mumbling, now more audible than before, behind its thick curtain indicated that the priest was engaged in absolving an old man, probably the old fellow who had been there at a similar time the previous week; though what it was, exactly, that such an elderly person could be held guilty of ... she didn't have the foggiest idea! Perhaps he gambled or drank immoderately, assuming he had the money? Well, whatever he did, he was evidently a sinner and, as such, Father James would know how to deal with him, to keep him on reasonably good terms with the Almighty. One had to admit that it didn't pay to underestimate the power of redemption, especially where such an experienced emissary of God as this erudite priest was concerned!

After a few minutes had elapsed, the curtain behind which the elderly sinner had been hiding was carefully drawn back by a shrivelled hand, and a stooped figure, scarcely recognizable in the semi-darkness, slowly emerged from his part of the confessional with what may well have been a relieved expression on his ugly face, and straightaway shuffled off down the aisle, seemingly well on his way to eternity. The confessional would probably reek of pipe tobacco and spirits, but what matter! Father James was awaiting, whether in trepidation or stoical perseverance, his next sinner. Her part of the box was empty. Nothing could possibly undermine the favourable effect her perfume was bound to create. Absolution would soon adjust to that!

Gently rising from her pew she briskly walked into the confessional, pulled the heavy curtain across behind her, knelt down before the latticed partition dividing sinner from absolver, straightened her long hair, undid a couple of buttons on her blouse, and softly greeted the balding priest's squat figure, now seemingly reposed behind a mask of inscrutable receptivity. The ceremony had begun!

As usual, in keeping with the solemn tone of these proceedings, she had donned black externals: satin skirt, cotton blouse, nylon stockings, and leather shoes. Her underclothes, however, were bright red. But this deviation from formal solemnity, though never overtly remarked upon by the priest, was nonetheless silently accepted by him in view of the Devil's alleged persistence in tempting young women to wear such items of clothing as encouraged lustful sin, in Father James' vocational opinion: "That deadly poison eating away at our inner life like a cancer of the soul, and consequently rendering introspective analysis imperative as a means to exorcising its demon."

So it was, then, that the confession proceeded according to plan, with all due decorum and little or no allusion to certain previous events. Father James' reassuring intonation, cast in the most exquisite Christian humility, always managed to get around Sharon's innate distrust of authority, especially the omniscient authority which he claimed to represent, and almost invariably made possible a fairly candid reciprocity of exchanges between them. Thus after the opening formalities had paved the way for the young woman's temporary redemption, he continued, quite unaffectedly, to question her morality, alternating, with her responses, between passive receptivity and gentle innuendoes, nodding his sagacious head in confirmation of her disclosures and even occasionally shaking it from side-to-side whenever one of her confessions, more plausible than the last, happened to confirm his deepest suspicions. To be sure, the proceedings were never so confidential as when Father James proffered signs of being genuinely involved with them. For he was known throughout the parish for his fundamental indifference to commonplace occurrences, being temperamentally more disposed to the miraculous and otherworldly, so that anyone who commanded his sympathies in such matters had good reason to consider herself privileged.

As always, following the introductory recitations, verbal confessions, and general absolution, the partition's small centrally-positioned secret door swung back towards the priest and a hand, slightly clammy but not ungraceful, extended its fingers in the general direction of Sharon's thighs. She had taken the trouble, on this occasion, to garb her private parts in spotlessly clean panties (not in partly grubby ones as on the previous few occasions) in case he decided to shine his torch on her the better to survey the root of her sin. It was therefore in her interests, she imagined, to make herself appear the epitome of purity, so as to give him less reason for suspicion and concern. For they had agreed on the necessity of optical investigation as a means not only to verifying her tenuous virginity but - and this was Father James' most radical innovation - to evaluating the extent of her sexuality in relation to the ostensible probity of her confessions. Thus the wayward priest sought to corroborate her proclaimed innocence by instigating a personal investigation of the parts chiefly under suspicion, its being mutually understood that sexual indiscretions were of the greatest concern to the Heavenly Father, considering the nature of the many other sins which only proceeded, after all, from Original Sin, or the fact that there was a sex life at all. Hence, as sex was at the root of everything, including financial greed, it was of the utmost importance that the Heavenly Father's emissary on earth should go straight to the root of the matter, so to speak, in his constant battle with the Devil.

"And your virginity is still intact, Sharon?"

"Yes, Father."

"Let me see, my child." At which point his fingers begin to explore farther afield. "Ah yes now, there it is."

His explorations cause her to smile a little in spite of herself, but, as on other such occasions, she manages to restrain her emotion and pretend to treat this little physical examination seriously, as though pretence, and pretence alone, could secure its continued efficacy, and thereby avoid compromising the old priest's moral sensibilities. However, at this point she changes her position, so that the kneeling becomes a squat and her legs instinctively open to assist the movement of his fingers. Her vagina is warm, moist, relaxed, and his fingers play delicately over its outer parts, around her groin, and through to the contours of her amply seductive buttocks. Then he extends the torch in his other hand and begins to investigate her underclothes, the seductive implications of which are compared or, rather, contrasted with the innocence of her sex: the 'protagonist', as he likes to call it.

"Your protagonist is in order, Sharon, as is your stage. Please readjust its curtains."

This command applies to her displaced panties. The little door swings back towards the mad priest and, without a moment's hesitation, he gives her his dubious blessings.

"Thank you, Father."

"My pleasure," he impulsively replies, quite forgetting himself. "Same time next week."

"Of course, Father."

Outside the confessional, the church is empty as Sharon hastens down the aisle and exits the building with an almighty sigh of relief. It was about time, she thought, that somebody reported Father James to his superiors, in order that he could be straightened out or even defrocked before matters got completely out-of-hand!