CONDEMNED

Life's too damned short to waste on irrelevances, especially when the judge or doctor has spoken...

“Let us say,” murmured Agatha, tucking her knitting neatly in its bag and scowling at Joshua, “let us say that we knew we only had a week or so to live...”

“We?” interrupted Joshua.

“You, then. Or me. Let's say that I knew that within a few days I'd be breathing my last. That I had some sort of dreadfully predictable terminal condition and my time was running out: my clock running down and no way of winding it up again, and all those things I might have done, loves I might have had, kisses...”

“Now you're being morbid,” protested Joshua.

“I am? How?” frowned Agatha.

“Well, nobody knows time with that amount of accuracy. A doctor might suggest...”

“Not a doctor,” said Agatha quietly. “Say an executioner … a judge maybe, in the olden days when they hanged people... they did, you know, in my life-time, hanged people for murdering … my great uncle Albert was hanged, by the neck until he was dead, and he was told when it would be.”

“I'm sorry,” shuddered Joshua, “I mean, I'm sorry about your great uncle …”

“He died at the appointed hour,” nodded Agatha. “His neck was broken by the noose and he spent quite a few minutes actually dying. Kicking in agony and desperation, but to no end. Just death. He died knowing he was going to die...”

“What had he done?” asked Joshua.

“Nothing. Unless being in the wrong place at the wrong time is something. There'd been a robbery, the Old Imperial Bank on Gladstone Street, and shots were fired. A pretty young girl was killed, only in her twenties and with all her life in front of her, and shot by the robber. My Great Uncle was there. He was in the queue just behind the girl and whilst he was admiring the turn of her neck he recognised the gunman.”

“So why was he accused?”

“They said there must have been an accomplice. The gunman, they said, can't have acted alone. It would have been stupid.”

“Would it?”

“Of course, Joshua! While one man is holding the bank teller up and threatening him with a gun someone else has to be dealing with the money side of things. They said it had to happen like that. They said it was the only way it made sense. And the gunman was my Great Uncle's brother.”

“I can see what made them suspect him, then!” nodded Joshua.

“But the shooter got away. Clean away. When he saw what he'd done he ran like the wind, out of the bank and down the road where he'd left a getaway horse. It was way back before cars were reliable enough to satisfy a man like my Great Uncle's half-brother, and he chose an old nag instead of an internal combustion engine. He disappeared into the wind like smoke and wasn't seen in those parts again. But they knew who he was, and identified him straight away from descriptions. He had a scar from a fight years earlier. He was quite well known as a truly bad lot!”

“But he wasn't your Great Uncle?”

“No. I don't know what you'd have called him. A half-uncle? I'd call him a bully and a nincompoop rather than anything familial!

“So what happened?”

“They questioned everyone, did the plods. Back in those days they weren't so very bright and had very little scientific stuff to back up their suspicions. And when they discovered that the gunman was half brother to my Great Uncle they decided he must have been the accomplice. Eventually it went to court and because the real killer had got away the police tried to prove that old Albert was equally guilty because he must, in their view, have been the accomplice, and the jury and judge believed their account and he was sentenced to hang.”

“That's rotten!”

“It happened. It was all a long time ago and it doesn't really matter any more.”

“You could get him pardoned, you know, posthumously, if what you say is true...”

“I could. It is true. But what would be the point? He's been dead the best part of a hundred years. Nobody who's alive now ever knew him and I'm probably the only person alive who even knows his story. Memories, especially unhappy ones, don't so easily pass from generation to generation, you know.”

“Why are you telling me this then, Agatha?” asked Joshua, curiously.

“Because he knew the time and cause of his own death and had seven days to worry about it once sentence was passed. He had seven days to … I don't know, he never told anyone that I met but I know, I just know, what was going through his mind for those days. Reprieve �" he'd be praying to a God he probably never believed in that a rider would come racing with a clatter of hooves or a screech of Edwardian tyres to the jail with a stay of execution. That maybe his half brother would do the decent thing and own up, take his place in the condemned cell. All sorts of things would be hurtling through his mind. He might even adopt some distracting hobby like knitting!”

“You were knitting just now,” pointed out Joshua.

“And then the prison cleric would arrive at his cell and try to pray him to Heaven. What a sickening charade that would have been! Forgiveness on Earth before God for a crime he didn't commit!”

“Don't!”

“And then the noose round his neck. Can you imagine what that would feel like? Rough rope against his skin, a bag over his head … why let him see anything but its weft and weave at his last moment?”

“Why are you saying all this, Agatha?”

“Two reasons, really. I said he'd been in the queue at the bank, didn't I?”

“Yes. Behind the pretty girl who was shot.”

“You see, he spent his last moments of true freedom looking at the back of a beautiful young woman and really liking what he saw before seeing her fall, bloody and crying out, to the marble floor of the old bank … yet moments before he'd been looking at her skin, how smooth her neck was, how fragrant her hair, the way she moved as the queue shuffled forwards, wanting to speak to her and not being able to … the conventions of the time forbade it...”

“Maybe he hadn't thought anything of the sort!”

“I bet he did! Just like I'm thinking now...”

“What?”

“I'm equally condemned to death, Joshua, standing in my queue of life … didn't my knitting tell you? The doctor says days, but maybe hours...”

“Agatha!”

“And here I am, wasting my last precious fragment of life staring at the back of your neck, my dear old friend...”

“You can see my face!”

“You silly old sod, don't you understand? Before I feel that coarse rope round my neck, before the big darkness falls, before the padre whispers his forgiveness of my many sins … come and shag me, now!”

© Peter Rogerson 21.02.14