6.

‘William! It’s time for church!’

William groaned. That was the worst of Sundays!

Just-William by Richmal Compton

Millerhill church stood at the top of the hill, like the church in a storybook. It had white painted walls and a steeple raised like a little finger for the attention of the deity. It stood in a ring of macrocarpa and pasture grass kept down by a few of Ross McDonald’s Romneys, which grazed safely throughout the week, depositing black beads of shit that had to be sidestepped, come Sunday, by best shoes.

The interior of the church was a nutshell of polished totara. Bare wooden pews lined up either side of a strip of blue carpet. There was a communion table spread with a white cloth at the front, between a little eggcup of a pulpit on one side and a carved wooden eagle on the other. The eagle bore the heavy weight of The Word, wings spread. It hovered above the sunburnt farmers, their hatted wives and scrubbed children like the hawks that hung on the empty air above the hill outside, waiting for a rabbit to make a careless move. The window glass was white as milk frozen in the can on a winter morning, and permitted no distracting glimpse of the sky. The minister, who had arrived a few minutes before in shirt sleeves, emerged from the door to the Sunday school room in black robe and white tabs as Kate’s Auntie Annie wheezed out some triumphal chords at the harmonium: Diapason, Celeste, Forte Coupler at maximum extension. Auntie Annie had also done the flowers: vast confections of lilies and gladioli gathered from her own garden and around the district on Saturday afternoons.

‘Help yourself,’ the other women said, waving vaguely at the agapanthus and red-hot pokers that popped up around their houses. ‘Take as much as you like. Take some plum blossom. Those plums are useless for bottling.’

Auntie Annie picked armloads and carried them in her Morris Minor to the church, where she snipped and wired according to the season: white and yellow for spring, red for Christmas, orange and purple for autumn, and dry flower-heads and whatever she could scrounge for winter. The results were as good as anything you’d see in a book — better than Constance Spry. The flowers were brocade and satin, they were embroidery and tapestry and incense and choir, in the bare little church.

‘Psalm Twenty-three,’ announced the minister. ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want. Psalm Twenty-three.’ The congregation straggled to its feet. Auntie Annie sang too, her red velvet hat bobbing away as she pedalled frantically, thighs pressed hard against the swell, opening and closing, diminuendo and crescendo. My head he doth with oil anoint, sang Auntie Annie, supplying the soprano descant. She did not need to read the words any more than did the farmers and their wives and children. They knew them all, from ‘Lead Kindly Light’, ‘By Cool Shiloam’s Shady Rill’, ‘Oh God Our Help’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ right through to the triple Amen that closed every service. The hymn books were for prompting only. A lifetime of hymns, four a morning, every Sunday.

Outside the church the dead gathered on a sunny north-facing slope, some sporting fresh flowers, some with plastic roses, which were easier in terms of upkeep, but bore just a hint of convenience and filial neglect. The dead were assembled in family clusters, husband and wife side by side, a blank left on the stone for their children; cousins and neighbours kept up the elbow-on-the-gate propinquity they had shared in life. Magpies squabbled in the macrocarpa. The McDonalds’ Romneys bleated to one another over dry paddocks. Cars like coloured beads slipped along the silver thread of the road on the flat below the hill. The Horse Range receded into a blue haze.

And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

Genesis 7:19

Kate sat in church looking at the bullethole. The minister was reading the lesson from the Old Testament. He looked like a turkey rooster: bald and pink with his white wattles. Kate sat with Maura among the cousins, grandmother, aunts and uncles. Behind them sat the patients.

The patients were driven to church at Millerhill from Cherry Farm. They occupied a double row at the back of the church: two rows of men in ill-fitting cardigans and trousers that seemed to have been worn previously by someone else entirely; men with blubbery lips who dribbled; men who twitched strangely; men who answered ‘Yes!’ when the minister asked a question no one was supposed to answer. ‘Jesus said, “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden.” Are you heavy laden?’ The minister surveyed the congregation and ‘Yes!’ said Charlie with deep emphasis from behind Kate. Charlie smelled of Cherry Farm: of cabbage and floor polish and pee and clothes kept too long in a locked cupboard.

Charlie was odd, but the man across the aisle was worse. Viewed side on, he was tall and slender, with floppy brown hair and a beautiful face. He wore a tweed jacket like Kate’s uncles, and a scarf tossed about his neck, and clean trousers with a crease down each leg. And in the middle of his forehead there was a hole. It was the size of a shilling piece and half an inch deep, as if someone had pressed a finger into the flesh and left their mark, like the hole in a doughnut.

The other patients had names like Charlie or Arthur, but the man with the hole on his forehead was The Professor.

‘He was such a brainy man,’ Kate’s mother said. ‘A professor at the university. But he cracked up, like Tom.’ His brain, as frail, as pure as a porcelain cup, had become too full of facts from all that swotting and when it got too full, it cracked. The Professor had tried to shoot himself when he cracked up. The bullet had entered his forehead, rattled around the white bowl of the skull and reemerged, leaving him alive. He sat silent at the back of Millerhill church.

Kate’s mother nudged her. ‘Don’t stare,’ she said. But who could help staring? He held his hymn book in slender fingers. Beside him the other patients sang lustily, not caring if they were out of tune or saying the right words. The Professor retained a distant dignity, looking more like a real prince than Prince Rainier of Monaco who, despite the gold epaulettes, bore an unmistakable resemblance to Mr Budd at the dairy, like someone who could strip off his uniform, pop on a grocer’s apron and say, ‘That’ll be two and threepence, love.’ The Professor stood at the back of Millerhill church like the prince in Cinderella: so noble, so tragic, so brainy.

Her mother nudged her again. Kate tried to concentrate. She looked at her Bible, reading odd bits and examining the blurred pictures of Canaanite temples at Megiddo and olive trees by the Sea of Galilee. Immediately in front of her sat her cousin Graham. His neck was pink where his hair had been clipped the night before with the silver clippers. Auntie Izzie had done all five of the boys, lining them up for a trim like sheep on a stand. The light through the milky windows shone clear through Graham’s ears. ‘Red sails in the sunset,’ Kate would have said, if this were not church and whispering were not forbidden. They shone on either side of his skull like iridescent insect wings. She would have liked to touch them. She liked ears: dogs’ ears that folded back when a dog ran; cows’ ears round and ruffled in contrasting fur, brown and white or black and brown; the ears of ponies. She liked looking ahead at the world bracketed between the ears of a pony. She liked the way ears did the talking for an animal deprived of speech, flicking back and forth in surprise or alarm or anger or simple curiosity. She liked her cousin’s ears glowing in church, and the two bumps at the nape of his neck when he bent his head to watch as Bruce beside him surreptitiously allowed one of his ferrets to crawl up the sleeve of his church shirt. She could see the bulge of its slinky body wriggling across the shoulders. Its pink nose whiffled at her from Bruce’s collar. Its pink eyes regarded her coolly, then it dived back into the tunnel of grey serge. Bruce loved his ferrets, not seeming to mind that they stank and nipped. He gave them names: Pinky and Whitey and Fang. He poured them from hand to hand as if they were water.

At last the minister said the prayer to bless the children and they could leave the adults to drink the miniature glasses of blackcurrant cordial and eat the squares of sliced white bread Auntie Annie had arranged on the communion table on a pink china plate.

The children clattered out with Alison McDonald, who was sixteen and in love with Kate’s oldest cousin, Pete. Graham said he’d seen them pashing in Pete’s car up behind the planny on McDonald’s Road. ‘The windows were all steamed up,’ he said, ‘and when I looked in, Pete told me to bugger off.’ They were unsure what was most shocking: the pashing, the steam or the swearword.

Alison led the way to the Sunday School room. They had to be quiet, as every word could be heard through the varnished wall. She pulled out the felt board with its little figures of men who wore tea-towels on their heads and Mary in her veil and a selection of animals, and, very quietly, she told them one of the stories. Moses dropped by his mother into a river in a basket, Joseph put into a hole by his brothers, Noah building his ark.

She lined up a pair of sheep and a pair of felt giraffes. ‘So Noah found two of each animal,’ she said, ‘and put them into the ark.’ A giraffe’s neck flopped from the board.

‘What about the other animals?’ said Kate. It was something that had bothered her ever since she had seen the illustration in the Children’s Bible where the waters were rising around a flock of sheep, peacefully grazing unawares.

‘Which animals?’ said Alison, re-attaching the giraffe’s neck.

‘The ones that didn’t fit in the ark,’ said Kate.

Alison looked in the box for the dove.

‘He could only take two,’ she said. ‘Two of everything. That’s what God said to him.’

‘So did all the other animals drown?’ said Kate’s girl cousin, Rosemary.

‘And the other people?’ said Bruce. The ferrets were asleep in the pockets of his jacket. ‘Did they drown?’

‘They’d been wicked,’ said Alison. ‘That’s why God sent the flood.’

‘Could they swim?’ said one of the Crawford twins. They had no names. They were The Twinnies, duplicated like Freddie and Flossie in that fascinating Bobbsey fashion. They wore identical pink skirts and fluffy angora cardigans and would have been impossible to tell apart, except that one twinnie wore her pink hair-ribbon on the left and the other wore it on the right.

‘I can swim,’ said the left-ribbon twinnie. ‘I can do a starfish.’ And she spread her arms to demonstrate.

‘But where did they swim to?’ said Kate. ‘Because there wasn’t any land, was there?’

‘No,’ said Alison. ‘The water covered the whole earth. That’s what the Bible says. But Noah and his family were safe in the ark.’

The lucky little felt family stood on the deck of the ark with its jaunty red-and-yellow trim and its livestock: two cows, two pigs, two lions and two giraffes, one of which seemed to have lost its stickability.

‘So they couldn’t swim to the edge?’ said the starfish twinnie.

‘No,’ said Bruce. ‘They all drowned. Aargghh!’ And he clasped his throat and gagged and fell on the floor thrashing. The starfish twinnie’s brow crumpled in concern.

‘Did all the ponies drown?’ said Maura.

‘All of them, except the ones Noah saved. Don’t be silly, Bruce. Get up off the floor.’

‘Crocodiles wouldn’t drown,’ said Gus Todd. ‘There’d be two of everything except crocodiles. There’d be heaps of crocodiles in the water.’

‘Only two,’ said Alison. ‘Two crocodiles.’

‘Did all the children drown?’ said the starfish twinnie. ‘The ones that couldn’t swim?’

‘Yes,’ said Bruce. ‘God killed them all. That’s what she said.’

‘And the kittens?’ said the other twinnie. ‘I’d have held on to my kitten.’

She knew about drowned kittens. They all did: that squirming sack dunked in the creek when the numbers in the milking shed threatened to become too many. They knew that handful of wet fur, the pink tips of noses and eyes tight shut and barely born. They had watched them slip out of the mother cat’s bottom and seen them suck, the mother cat’s paws making bread dough in the straw and purring as if it were the most wonderful cosy thing in the world to lie in a warm nest with kittens in a row, suckling. They knew to keep such things secret if the kittens were to avoid the sack, the dark pool under the willows, the eels unreeling from beneath the bank with their rows of needle teeth. They all knew about drowning.

‘There was a kitten on the ark,’ said Alison. ‘Two kittens. There were two of every kind of animal and for forty days and nights they floated on the flood.’

‘What did they eat?’ said Gus.

‘They had food on the ark. God told them to take lots of food.’ The giraffe had fallen off again so she gave up and put it back in the box.

‘Like hay and that?’ said Rosemary. ‘You’d need a lot of hay for that many animals.’

‘Yes,’ said Alison. ‘Hay. And oats.’

‘And meat for the lions,’ said Graham.

‘Yes,’ said Alison. ‘And on the fortieth day, what do you think Noah did?’

‘They could have fished for meat, I suppose,’ said Gus. ‘There’d be heaps of bodies in the water. They could have put a line over the side and hooked a horse or a zebra and fed that to the lions.’

The starfish twinnie was crying quietly by the felt board. Tears oozed down her cheeks and soaked into the fluff of her Sunday angora cardigan. Alison held up a black bird.

‘That’s a starling,’ said Gus. ‘I shoot starlings.’

‘It’s not a starling,’ said Alison, pressing it into place alongside a puff of white cloud above the ark. ‘It’s a raven. Noah sent out a raven to see if there was any dry land.’

‘Is a raven bigger than a starling?’ said Gus.

‘I think so,’ said Alison. I’ve never seen one.’

‘Starlings are hard to hit,’ said Gus.

‘What kind of gun have you got?’ said Bruce, climbing back onto his chair and looking interested.

‘It brought back nothing,’ said Alison. Her big squiffy eyes were looking faintly desperate. (‘Astygmatism,’ Kate’s mother said of Alison. ‘All the McDonalds have problems with their eyes. Cousins married first cousins.’)

‘Slug gun,’ said Gus. ‘Point seven seven.’

‘Was everything still under the water?’ said Graham.

‘Yes,’ said Alison.

‘Even the mountains?’ said Maura.

‘Everything,’ said Alison. ‘That’s what the Bible says. The whole world was flooded.’

She held the dove in her hand but both the twinnies were crying, their faces puckered, their noses running, their identical pink mouths open like the mouths of birdlings in a nest.

‘Shh,’ said Alison. ‘It was all right because: see? Here’s the dove. That showed it was all right. It’s bringing back the olive branch. Don’t cry.’

The sobbing was gathering strength, a duet perfectly pitched.

‘The ki— ki— kittens!’ hiccupped the twinnie with the hair ribbon tied on the left. The twinnie with the ribbon tied on the right simply opened her mouth wider and howled.

The hymn next door had trailed off into the long drawn-out bleat of the Aaaamennnn.

‘There!’ said Alison quickly. ‘And that’s God’s promise that it will never happen again!’And she stuck the rainbow to the board.

‘Now, let’s go and play Stiff Candle,’ she said. ‘Shh, twinnies. Shh …’

She did not want anyone to hear the twinnies crying. Most particularly Pete, who had told her last week that he wanted heaps of kids, a whole football team. One of the reasons she had agreed to take the Sunday School was the opportunity it gave her to leave the church, children gathered about her, demonstrating her maternal side.

And [the prophet Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them and cursed them in the name of the Lord.

And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

And he went from thence to Mount Carmel …

II Kings 2:23–25

The children, released, run into the sunshine while the adults turn to the consumption of the holy Ribena and the sanctified sliced white. They run and squeal along the concrete edges of the graves, ducking behind the trees around the dunny raising clouds of flies. They run and yell, ‘Over here! Over here! Tag me!’ Their legs are quick and can leap high, they can dodge and feint, because they are not, after all, drowned or paddling for dear life, bedraggled and mewing on the flood. If you want to escape, all you have to do is cross your fingers and yell pax! Then nothing and nobody can get you.

In the back room, Kate is left alone. The children’s squeals have receded and there is a pious murmur from the church next door. The Sunday School room is small, with a fireplace set diagonally into one corner. The fireplace is never used and the grate is splattered with floury droppings from the starlings that nest every year in the chimney. There are some hooks by the door where the minister has hung his coat, and a table by the window with the Sunday School box and its felt inhabitants. The room smells of dust and old wood and musty birds’ feathers. Against one wall is a cupboard. The upper shelves hold Auntie Annie’s jealously guarded collection of jars and vases and florists’ wire. On the lower shelves are the books.

They are piled anyhow, abandoned and unread. They are different from the books at the Library in Oamaru, with their shiny plastic covers to keep them clean. They are books from the olden days: books with covers embossed with garlands of flowers. When Kate’s mother was a little girl the church had functioned also as the district’s lending library. Now a big Bedford bus lumbers down from Christchurch every four months and comes to roost in the middle of the school basketball court. People come and choose books from the shelves inside: travel to distant places, biographies of famous people, love stories, and some economic history for old Stevie McGregor, who lives alone up on Millerhill Hill, votes communist and bikes every Friday night into Waikouaiti for his groceries. He never bothers with a bike light but everyone knows to keep an eye out for him, materialising like a startled night bird in the headlights around some corner on the road.

The books in the cupboard behind the church have been forgotten. No one reads them. No one takes them home. They have fallen out of fashion and lie in the cupboard, solid and solemn, with thick creamy paper, slightly toasted at the edges. There are real books and storybooks. The real books are sad: one is about Little Pearl, the China missionary’s daughter, who was very good but got sick and died and everyone from the chief missionary to the Chinese cook cried. Or the two Margarets who had been killed in Scotland for going to church. They had been tied to sticks and slowly slowly the tide had risen until one drowned while the other Margaret sang hymns to cheer her up. Then the water covered her too and she died. The real stories do not have pictures. The storybooks are more cheerful, with pictures of little boys in caps and boots and little girls in bonnets and pinafores. Their print is big and round and at the top of each page there is a subtitle in thick black letters that tells you what the story on that page is going to be about:

We must find them!

Murray finds a chum!

All a Mistake!

All the pictures have titles too:

Till dawn, the heroic girl fought her awful battle.

Marcia lay stunned, motionless, insensible.

These are the books belonging to Millerhill. Each place has its own books. Whenever they visited their great aunts in Dunedin they were given a copy of Coles Funny Picture Book to read while the adults sat in chintz chairs in the living room and drank tea. Kate and Maura looked at pictures of the Smacking Machine, which had a wheel with many rods attached. The bad boy stood with his bottom to it, his mouth stretched in an agonised grimace, while the teacher in his long black robe laughed and turned the wheel. They turned the page and examined the picture of the Boy Who Smoked, who was dark and sunken, and the Boy Who Did Not Smoke, who was smiling and sturdy.

‘Why is it funny?’ they asked their mother. And she said it was a book from the olden days and they thought different things were funny then. The books at Millerhill were also from that foreign place called the olden days, where a little boy called Murray sacrificed his dearest possession, a stuffed toy he called his ‘’ickle ’amb’ in the collection plate at church and the mischievous little Irish girl, Pixie, finally received the school prize for Kindliness and Consideration because she had been ‘content to suffer for the sake of others’.

Kate knows about this place because each Sunday during the holidays when she went to Sunday School with her cousins she removes one of the books. She chooses the one with the prettiest cover, wraps it in her cardigan and hides it under the waterstand while she runs to join the others.

‘Tag me! Tag me!’ she calls as the harmonium wheezes the three part Amen and the men emerge from the church to talk lambing and rugby and how many inches of rain they’ve had that month, until the minister comes up for his bit of a chat. He’s a brainy chap, a real Rhodes Scholar, but he does his best with the lambing and the rainfall, while the ladies circulate with tea trays laden with cups and some nice Albert Squares. They’re all going home to roast and three veg, the leg left in the oven on low, the brussels sprouts all peeled with a cross cut in the stem. The patients stand to one side and the ladies say, ‘Go on, Charlie, help yourself.’ And Charlie takes four Albert Squares and puts two under his hat for later.

Kate is standing by the water tank in the shadows behind the church, tagged and turned to wax. The tank is rusted and sad. It oozes water in a long brown runnel down one iron leg as if it is old and has peed itself. Behind the tank, the boards of the church are coated in green lichen and there is the smell of damp and sticky snail trails.

‘Over here!’ shouts Kate, for her arms are tired with being held stiff. ‘Over here!’ The other children squeal and scatter like chooks in front of Graham, who is It for now. She considers ignoring the rules and running to join the flock, but it is not permitted. She must stand turned to wax, thinking about drowning, thinking about the people in the train who fell into the river, the year when the Queen came and the town was filled with boxes full of flowers with perfect names — gladioli, carnations, gypsophila — and she had a gold medal to pin to her jersey. That was when the river poured into the train and all the Christmas presents were torn from the racks and all the people drowned so that carnations, gladioli, gypsophila became the flowers for dead people. Kate stands looking down into the valley as water pours from the heavens and water pours in from the sea. A towering wall of water like the Tidal Wave or Tsunami on the Weetbix card. Graham had sent away for the book and glued in all the cards in the Great Disaster series. The Titanic going down, dwarfed by the iceberg. The buildings toppling in San Francisco, the volcano tossing flame and burning rock into the air above a tiny white city. Worst of all was the tsunami, one of Nature’s Most Fearsome Spectacles! The wall of water stood over a sandy beach where tiny palm trees bent before the force of its coming and people the size of ants ran hopelessly from its fall.

She sees the McDonalds’ Romneys tossed into the water, tiny hooves flailing, the gum trees on the flat torn from the roots, the houses in their rings of macrocarpa torn from their foundations, the barns and paddocks, school and dairy factory drowned and broken, and above them floats the little boat with its smug red and yellow trim and its privileged cargo. The water fills the valley until the hills are covered, the water is rising around her ankles, around her knees and up to her stomach, she can’t breathe, she can’t …

‘Go! Go!’ says Rosemary, hitting her hand. ‘Go!’ And she is freed at last to dash away from the water tank, the drowned valley, around to the sunny side.

Pixie O’Shaugnessy was at once the joy and terror of the school. It had been a quiet, well-conducted seminary before her time, or it seemed so at least, looking back after the arrival of the wild Irish tornado, before whose pranks the mild mischief of the Englishers was as water unto wine.

Pixie O’Shaugnessy by Mrs George De Horne Vaizey

When Kate and Maura stayed with their other cousin, Bernard, out at Weston, they also went to church, but then it was to the Basilica. It was grand and snowy white and the priest wore robes of green and purple and the women of the congregation had black lace scarves that lent them an exotic, gypsy air. The floor was of white stone and hard on the knees when they knelt, and they had to kneel properly, on both knees, or Auntie Mary poked them in the back. Around the walls hung little theatres where Christ fell repeatedly, and there were whips and anguish and trickles of blood. At Christmas, in the Nativity at the back of the church, a life-size Mary and Joseph knelt before the baby Jesus in his white robe, lifting his arms to be picked up from a manger filled with real straw.

At Bernard’s house they played science games because Bernard liked science. They gathered moths in old preserving jars and poured mixtures from his chemistry set onto them to see what happened. They made explosions with baking soda and red food dye to blow the corks from bottles. Bernard collected stuff and made model aeroplanes out of balsa wood and delicious glue. A Fokker Eindekker hung in one corner of his room, and on the shelf beneath lay his principal treasure: a real dinosaur tooth his father, Kate’s Uncle Frank, had found in a lump of limestone at Weston Quarry. Bernard thought it might have come from an ichthyosaur or maybe a plesiosaur. He had printed the names on a bit of paper under the tooth. Bernard’s books stood beside the tooth: Rupert Bear, who was a strange white bear in checked trousers, and Now We Are Six, with the pictures of the little boy who looked like a girl, and Cuthbert Caterpillar setting off for the Pink Tea at the Queen Bee’s castle. Gentle things alongside that huge incisor with its savage cutting edge from the mouth of some creature that had once swum, predatory, above where they sat now in a companionable row on Bernard’s chenille quilt, reading ‘I am Sir Brian ker-splash!’

Everywhere around them had once been under the ocean. The garden, the road, the hills, the distant mountains. The limestone from which Kate’s father had made their garden wall was made up of billions of tiny shells. There were places on the hills around the town where the shells were still visibly shells, exactly like the cockles and pipis at Friendly Bay, only conveniently crushed by millennia to exactly the size for feeding chooks. They collected bucketfuls to make the hens’ eggs nice and strong so they did not smash in the nest. The hens ate their grit not knowing that they were eating dinosaur bones, or that their hen runs had once been under the sea. Everything about them had risen dripping from an ancient dinosaur ocean.

This was a different kind of fact to the fact of Noah. Noah was true, but the giant tooth on Bernard’s bookshelf was true too.

When Agnes was thirteen a rich man asked her to marry him. Agnes said ‘NO!’ It would be wrong for her to marry anyone, because she had promised her love to Jesus. The man was so angry he had Agnes killed. She was a martyr — that means she died for Jesus.

Dear Saint Agnes, help me to suffer rather than do anything bad.

A First Book of Saints by Father Gales

At Bernard’s they also encountered saints. Auntie Mary read them a story about a saint every night before they went to sleep. There was St Teresa, who was too little to do big things for God but who made her bed and shelled peas with great love instead. There was little St Agnes who said ‘NO!’ when a rich man asked to marry her, though she was only thirteen. St Francis, St Margaret Mary, St Patrick and St Benedict had all loved God and become saints, which meant that even after they were dead they had a job to do, looking after things. There was a saint who helped Auntie Mary find her car keys. God was naturally too busy to be bothered about such trivialities, but saints were available upon request.

You had to be very good to be a saint, and you had to be Catholic. Presbyterians could not be saints, even if they had been tied to sticks and drowned singing hymns. At Bernard’s they said their prayers, leaving off the end of the Lord’s Prayer, because Catholics stopped short at the request to be delivered from evil, without adding ‘for thine is the kingdom’ and the compliments Presbyterians clearly thought necessary to ensure divine favour. When they had said their Catholic prayers their aunt turned out the light, closed the door and went out to play cribbage in the kitchen with Uncle Frank and Kate and Maura’s father. From the bedroom they could hear the chink of glasses and the sound of adult talk, 2 for his heels, 15 for 2, 15 for 4, and a pair for 6, the pegs advancing hole by hole up and down the board.

Bernard stood, arms spread, on top of the wardrobe. ‘Banzai!’ he whispered, so as not to disturb the adults, and he leapt down onto the bed. It bounced hugely and grandly and tossed its pillows onto the floor. Maura followed, nightie billowing around skinny legs. Kate awaited her turn, balanced on the tallboy. On the wall hung the picture of Jesus in his crown of thorns. Blood trickled down his forehead and his eyes were twin bruises, clenched tightly against the pain. But if you looked at him for longer than a second, the eyes opened. They stared back at you. Kate scrambled up onto the wardrobe, keeping her face studiously averted. They had three jumps each, then tucked themselves in, Maura on one side, Kate on the other, and they tickled Bernard, who lay in the middle. Bernard had a penis that stood up when tickled, small and pink as a birthday candle. He possessed the enchanting ability to pee precisely on huhu beetles or slaters. Kate and Maura had tried to emulate him, standing legs astride to direct the flow away from socks and shoes, but somehow they never managed it with quite Bernard’s casual flair. They tickled and giggled and then curled to sleep, while Jesus opened and closed his eyes at the foot of their bed.