The Sinful Man

The Sinful Men

Chapter One

  When Troy was a boy his mother had told him that he needed to shower everyday to wash away his sins. “Little boys are wicked and deceitful,” she would tell him as she shoved him roughly into the bathroom with a bar of caustic soap. Growing up he was the only person he knew who had a lock on the outside of the bathroom door and pan scourers for “proper deep cleansing”.

  And then on Sundays she would drag him round to confession, to tell some dirty old bastard, who probably got hand jobs off the altar boys, that he had been a bad lad.

  “Did you… abuse your own body?” The priest would ask, almost a little too eagerly.

  “Yes father,” he would replied quietly, burning with embarrassment as the old pervert panted away.

  “Did you… did you… touch… yourself?”

  “No father,” he had said once, “I ate twenty seven choc ices and a jar of sweet and sour sauce full of monosodium glutamate. Do you know how much sugar, fat and salt that is? I feel a little sick to be honest.”

  Father hadn’t liked that, but that was fine. Troy had stopped going to confession when he got so strong that mother couldn’t break his grip on the downstairs banister.

  “You’re a sinner!” She would shriek at him. “You’ll burn in hell! I don’t know what your father would say.”

  “He’s not dead you psycho, he’s in jail,” he would yell back.

  “Don’t you speak about your father that way,” she would sob, “he was a saint… and the cancer-”

  “There was no cancer, he rammed a Securicor van, killed the driver and ran off with eighteen grand!”

  “Liar!” Around this point she would start thrashing at him as she shrieked unintelligible things about what a good man he was and how dare he besmirch the good name of his own father and that he was going straight to hell. And then she would storm off to church without him.

  Not that any of that bothered him anymore.

  Sure he had grown up unbalanced, but hey, who hadn’t.

  Besides it was a long time ago now, and he no longer showered to get rid of his sins, they wouldn’t come off. A fact for which he was exceptionally thankful.

  Troy was rather fond of his sins, and had spent some time building up a sizeable collection. He even had a list of sins he still hoped to attain. Much like a boy scout working towards his next merit badge, Troy was always thinking of the next sinful act he might commit. 

  In truth the list had started as a joke with some friends. Around the time he turned nineteen Troy’s fingers became a lot lighter and, like a magpie, he would steal anything that caught his eye.

  That whole period was brought to an end when he was caught by the police stealing a Bentley, which, it turned out, belonged to the chief constable. His only option had been to remove his clothing when they pulled him over and claim he had amnesia.

  The miraculous thing was that it actually worked. He just seemed to have a way of speaking to people, of making them believe what he was saying.

  Basically he was a lying bastard and he loved it. Troy and three other friends with similar gifts had sat down together and compiled the list. The first one to complete the list won, and there would be no boasting until the competition was over. It had all been in the name of fun, but Troy had taken to the challenge and loved every day of it.

  Springing with happiness Troy turned off the shower and dried himself. As he stepped out of the cubicle he refrained from catching his own reflection in the mirror. It’s not that he wasn’t attractive, quite the opposite in fact, but rather his own image of his body was quite poor.

  He knew it was silly, and that he was in great shape; smooth skinned, muscular and slightly tanned, but the more he looked at himself the less he liked it. A shrink would probably blame that on his poor upbringing. Negative attitudes towards sex. Domineering matriarchal figure. Patriarchal absenteeism. Being forced to talk dirty to a horny old paedophile every Sunday morning and calling it salvation.

  But what the hell, there was something wrong with everybody right? At least Troy liked to put a positive spin on things. He didn’t have issues with his own body; rather, he was a perfectionist, striving to be the best physical specimen he could be.

  But that said, he is a very good liar. Could he have even fooled himself?

  Troy didn’t care for such self examination, especially not when he had another sinful act to cross off his list. Much of the steam had cleared from his rather spacious, luxuriously decorated bathroom. And it wasn’t just the bathroom either his entire apartment was well done out and paid off in full the day he bought it.

  Suffice to say Troy had money. He would never be drawn on where he may or may not have got all his money from, or if; indeed, there was any money at all. But when he had a beautiful young woman sat next to him in a bar, sipping on an expensive champagne cocktail and asking: “so, what do you do for a living?” he would always reply: “I work in the city.”

  It was a wonderful excuse, because it was so vague and everybody seemed to think that they actually knew, a: what that entailed, and b: which city he was speaking about. He himself only had a faint idea that it had something to do with stocks and things, though whether “the city” was an actual place or just a reference to any specific city he neither knew nor cared.

  Carefully he picked up the dirty clothes form the bathroom floor and dropped them into the laundry basket along with the wet towel, before selecting a bathrobe from the selection hanging from hooks on the back of the bathroom door. They where all stolen from various hotels around the world. Today he chose the one he had taken from a small place in Paris: white with the Eiffel tower embroider over the left breast.

  Singing cheerfully to himself he wandered through to the kitchen and flicked the switch on the coffee machine. A brief rummage in the fridge yielded a slice of chocolate gateau which he had been saving. He put the cake down next to the coffee machine and moved through to the bedroom while he waited for the coffee to brew.

  Troy kept the list on the book shelf in his bedroom in its own special box made of black leather. It was stylish and discreet and looked damned expensive. It had been. Just to keep in the spirit of things he had bought it with money he had “misappropriated” from his employer. God that was an amazing word. Misappropriated. It said to the world: “I stole it; you know I stole it, and I got away with it too.”

  The actual list itself always seemed a little bit of an anticlimax, given that it was typed up on a twenty five year old computer and printed out using a dot matrix printer. It was about twelve sheets long and still bore the strips with holes in that ran down the sides.

  With a twisted sense of pride he began to read through them, noting the ones he had to complete and smiling at the ones he had already crossed out. Half way down page eight he found what he had been looking for: make a nun break her vow of chastity.

  He smiled to himself. That one had been meant as a joke, there was no way he ever expected that to happen. But he had just been to visit his mother in that scary old convent she shipped herself off too when a young sister caught his eye. More than made up for having to deal with his mother that was for sure.

  Gleefully he ticked it off, and then wrote afterwards: “and then her vow of silence!” It was childish, he knew, but he couldn’t resist.

  From the kitchen came the gentle “Ding” of the coffee machine, but he stayed put. Nostalgia had him, and he couldn’t not finish reading the list and remembering all the good times. Theft was his speciality, but he had branched out and done other bad things.

  What was it his mother had said to him before she disappeared to live with all the scary nuns? Oh yeah.

  “You’re a sinner Troy, through and through.”