DANIEL

My last confession as a priest. I have it by heart.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Nine years this town has told me everything it's done. I'll carry every word to my grave.

My own sin is shorter. I want to belong to one woman instead of a parish.

I haven't met her. I'm leaving anyway.

ROS

The grille's gone from the confessional overnight, and that's the most indecent thing I've ever seen in a church.

It isn't a church. St Brigid's has been deconsecrated; the bishop signed a decree and handed it back to the world. Now it's a building site with stained glass, and in six months it has to be the best bar in Bristol.

I'm the architect. My practice is me and a second-hand plotter, and this job is the whole of my portfolio.

Still. The grille. My client is the man who used to sit behind it, and thinking about his hands on it does something unprofessional to my pulse.

The confessional stands against the north wall, where it has stood since the Victorians: dark oak, two doors. Until last night a brass screen divided it, so the person kneeling could talk to the person sitting without either of them seeing a face.

This morning the screen is gone. The two seats face each other, knee to knee, and a small brass lamp hangs where the screen used to be. It's a booth for two.

It's exactly what I drew. Down to the lamp.

The grille is on my trestle table, polished to gold. Beside it, last night's list.

I leave him one every night; the contract says the client gets a daily schedule. My client never comes in daylight and never answers his phone, so the schedules have got cheeky.

WHAT I'M DOING TO YOUR NAVE, THURSDAY

1. Front pews up. Sorry, pews.

2. Chancel tiles: lift, number, try not to cry.

3. Confessional: grille out. Joiner refuses, says his nan would come back for him. I'll do it myself with the big crowbar.

Under number three, in a small upright hand, there's an answer.

Done. It shouldn't be taken apart by someone who's afraid of it. D.Q.

My face goes hot. Then the back of my neck.

Weeks of this. Every night I write down the job I'm dreading, and every morning it's done, properly, by a man I've never met. The pulpit unbolted. The Stations of the Cross lifted down and wrapped in blankets, as if they might catch cold.

I know his handwriting better than my own mother's. I've never heard his voice.

I came in before dawn to catch him at it. The nave is grey and empty. Up in the roof, the pigeon I call the Clerk of Works shuffles along his beam and drops his opinion of me on the north aisle.

"Thank you," I tell him. "Noted."

Then I inspect his work.

Not a single split. The screws are in a labelled jam jar. I open the left-hand door, the one that used to be the priest's, and sit down to check how the light will fall on a face.

I pull the door shut behind me. It's black in here.

My knee is two inches from somebody else's.

"You're in my old seat," says a man's voice in the dark.

I say a word this building hasn't heard since it was built.

The voice doesn't flinch. "Good morning, Rosalind."

Nobody calls me Rosalind except my mother, when I've done something unforgivable, and HMRC.

"How long have you been in here?"

"Since four. You don't usually come before seven."

"I came early to catch you."

"Then you have."

His voice is low and unhurried, the kind that makes you lower yours. Even in the dark I can tell he's big; the box has got smaller around him. He smells of brass polish and cold stone, and under that, soap. My pulse is going in my ears.

"You went through my hold point," I say.

"I don't know what that is."

"A stage in the works where everything stops until the architect has looked at it and signed. Nobody goes past a hold point without me."

A pause. "Nobody?"

"Not the builder. Not the client. Not God, if He wants it plastered by March."

"He's usually more patient than that."

"I'm not."

"No," he says, and I can hear that he's pleased about it. "I'll remember. But you were going to do it with the big crowbar. It was on the list."

"I'd have been careful."

"You'd have been frightened of it. Everyone is. They think it's going to tell them something."

"It's a sheet of brass with holes in."

"Then why are you whispering?"

I am. I stop. "Because you are. Why is my client sitting in a cupboard in the dark at half past five, Mr Quill?"

"Habit. I sat in this box three hours every Saturday for nine years. It's the only place in Bristol I can think."

"You're on the wrong side for it now. That's the penitent's seat."

"I know which side I'm on."

It's the first thing he's said that isn't calm.

There's a brass handle by my hip and the whole grey nave on the other side of it. I could open the door. I could go back to my trestle table and be a professional woman with a site file.

I don't open it. In the dark, I move my knee the last two inches until it rests against his.

His goes absolutely still.

"Then confess," I say.

"I won't do the words," he says at last, very quietly. "They aren't a game to me. They never were." Another pause. "But you can ask me one thing, and I'll answer it straight."

"Why did you leave?"

"Because I wanted something I'd promised to give up."

"What?"

"To be one person's," he says. "Instead of everybody's."

"That's not a sin," I say. "That's a dating profile."

He laughs. It's low and rusty and surprised out of him, and I want to make it happen again immediately.

"It was a sin for me," he says. "I'd made a promise. So I gave it back properly, with the paperwork. I didn't break it."

"Did you find her? The one person."

"That's a second question."

"I'm the priest. I'm allowed a follow-up."

"You're not the priest, Rosalind."

"I'm in the priest's seat."

"Yes," he says. "I noticed."

Somebody hammers on the west door, three times, hard enough to shake dust out of the roof.

I open my door. He opens his a second later, and we step out into the nave at the same time.

There he is.

He's taller than the box allowed for, with grey at his temples already. Black jumper, sleeves pushed to the elbow, brass polish in the creases of his knuckles. A still, attentive face, and a mouth that has spent years not saying things.

He looks at me like a man who has been looking for a long time and has only just been given permission.

Then his hand goes to his throat. Two fingers, just under the knot of it, where a white collar would sit. They find nothing, and drop.

I file that.

The wicket in the west door swings open, and a man in a waxed jacket steps through with his phone up. Sixties, pink, pleased with himself. Filming.

"Morning, Father."

"Daniel," says Daniel. "Good morning, Geoffrey."

"Just a few pictures for the licensing committee." Geoffrey swings the phone along the confessional, then on to me. "A bar in a confessional box. The bishop will want to see that. And who's this, at half five in the morning?"

The heat comes up my chest. I open my mouth.

Daniel crosses the nave. He doesn't hurry, and he doesn't touch anyone. He just stands so that Geoffrey's phone is pointing at a black jumper instead of me.

"Your objection gives your address as number nine, opposite," he says, low and even. "You sold number nine in March. You live in a bungalow by the sea. I'd withdraw it before Friday, rather than have the committee ask why you lied on a form."

Geoffrey's mouth works. The phone goes down. "How do you—"

"Go home, Geoffrey. Mind the step."

Geoffrey goes. He minds the step.

I look at the box, then at him. "Did he tell you that? In there?"

He turns. His face has changed. Not angry. Final.

"Nothing anyone ever said to me in that box will leave me. Not to save this building. Not to save my life." He says it the way I'd quote a load calculation, as a fact that holds things up. "It's on the Land Registry. Seven pounds."

I laugh. I can't help it. "You looked up his house."

"I look up everyone who objects to you."

"To me?"

"To the bar."

"You said me."

"I said the bar."

"You definitely said me."

His fingers go to his throat again. He catches them halfway and puts the hand in his pocket.

"Everyone in this town thinks I know what they did," he says. "I let them think it. That's all I've ever done with it."

The sun comes up behind the east window, and its one red pane lays a square of red on the stone between us.

"Does it itch?" I ask. "Where it used to be?"

He doesn't pretend not to understand. "Every morning."

I shouldn't. He's my client, and the most talked-about man on this hill, and Geoffrey's footage is on its way to a bishop.

"Can I?" I say.

He goes completely still. "Yes."

I step into the red light and reach up, and I put two fingers in the hollow of his throat, where the collar sat.

His skin is warm. His pulse is going hard under my fingertips, much harder than his face is letting on.

He doesn't move. His hands are fists at his sides. He's holding himself still with everything he's got, and I can feel exactly what it costs him, right there under my fingers.

"Nobody's ever touched me there," he says.

"In two years?"

"Ever." It's barely a voice. "That's where it was. Nobody was allowed."

I don't move my hand. I'm not sure I could.

"I've been in the organ loft every morning for three weeks," he says. "Listening to you argue with my pigeon. I've wanted to come down every single time."

"Your pigeon is a menace."

"His name's Augustine."

"His name is the Clerk of Works, and he has no respect for my drawings."

The corner of his mouth moves. It's not a smile yet. It looks like one that hasn't been let out in years.

"I should take my hand away," I say.

"Take your time," Daniel says. "I've nowhere else to be."

The nave goes very quiet around me.

Four years ago, on a wet night in October, I came into this chapel because it was the only place in Bristol where you could say something out loud and have it go nowhere.

I sat in that box in the dark and told a stranger the one thing I've never told anybody. And the voice on the other side of the brass said, Take your time. I've nowhere else to be tonight.

A thousand people said things through that grille. He wouldn't remember. He couldn't.

I've never told a soul I'd been inside St Brigid's before I took this job.

I don't tell him now. I take my hand away, slowly, and I watch him breathe out for the first time since I touched him.

The building inspector comes mid-morning and finds nothing to complain about, which has never happened to me in my life. The joiner comes after him, looks at the confessional, crosses himself, and says he'll do the pews instead.

Daniel's gone by then, the way he always goes, before the town is properly awake. Before lunch the council emails to say Geoffrey's objection has been withdrawn.

In the evening, when the joiner has gone and the nave has turned blue, I pick up the grille. It's heavier than it looks.

I hold it up and look through it at the dark inside the box, the way he must have looked for nine years. All those small holes, and nothing behind any of them but a voice.

He'd have heard me through this. Crying, and then, mortifyingly, laughing.

He won't remember. I tell myself so twice, which is how I know I don't believe it.

I sit down at my trestle table and write tonight's list.

WHAT I'M DOING TO YOUR NAVE, FRIDAY

1. Bell tower survey, 6 a.m. Client to attend. Bring the key.

The tower has been locked since the diocese left. There's only one key, and I know whose pocket it's in.

I look at the list for a long time. Then I add a line.

2. Bring the rest of that confession.

Up in the roof, the Clerk of Works makes a noise like a disappointed aunt.

"Nobody asked you," I tell him.

I carry the list across the nave, open the confessional on his side, and pin it to the oak at the height of a man sitting down.