He waxed lyrical about the power of redemption, the desperate need for truth and confession and penance! She knew she was exposed and she kept a terrifying lipless smile glued on to try and hide the fact. Daddy bobbed like a noddy dog being driven too fast over ramps. Matthew picked at his ragnails.

Father Pat preached on about souls saved, souls lost, about beatings and cruelty, unkindnesses visited and revisited on the children of those who had strayed from the Christian path. He had seen children nearly starve to death in one of the richest countries in the world through the purest neglect.

–  You wouldn’t be able to conscience it, of course, Sadie! There’s no shortage of food in this house, eh?

–  No, Father.

–  Ireland still has its deep Catholic faith, despite its troubles. Shall we pray before I go?

–  Yes, Father.

We all bowed our heads then, and the smell of the strawberry jam and buttercream accompanied us for the rosary. She’d used too much vanilla essence to try and impress the Yankee and must be regretting it now that she’d been taken down by the horns and branded! He blessed us all when we’d hurtled through it like a train.

Daddy asked Father Pat would he say the ‘Salve Regina’ before he left? I was delighted that he had asked for something at last. He had been in my Uncle Peter’s house for the Stations of the Cross when a car bomb had gone off. It killed a girl call Maeve McFadden; she was in Kathleen’s class at school. Her hand had flown in through the window and hit the television set. Daddy saw it fly past and land on the carpet among the broken glass. It was sewed back on and they buried her in her wedding dress. He’s been even quieter since then.

Kathleen says she’ll never be able to put the tiniest pinprick of dark brown blood on the lace cuff out of her mind. Mammy doesn’t care that the car bomb that took Maeve McFadden was the work of our very own IRA. It had gone off by mistake in a Catholic neighbourhood. Someone high up in the chain of command and probably sitting safely on his sofa had hired some boys to do a man’s job, they drove over a ramp too fast and BANG, they never looked back or forward again.

When Father Pat finally got up to leave, Mammy didn’t hang on his handshake for far too long as she usually would. He dipped his huge blunt fingers in the Holy Water fount in the back hall and made the sign of the cross on our foreheads. I waited for Mammy to sizzle but she didn’t. She dropped an uneasy genuflect before she took her uneaten sponge back to the kitchen and set about cutting it up. Cake doesn’t throw itself into Tupperware, y’know?