Thursday was miracle day when I would do IT with Joe Loughrey. After a big hike through the woods around the southern tip of Lough Neagh with the boys and their chaperones, we would stop for lunch, more prayers and talking in ‘groups’ – the word of the week. The groups would be mixed so we could hear what boys our own age, from the same religion, and the same class background for the most part, had to say about the Troubles and how they affected life in Carncloon, and what we had to say back. Fascinating stuff.

Then after dinner, when we’d settled the cons and cons of people blowing ten bags of shite out of each other on a daily basis for twenty years, we were going to have a sing-song. Hymns and popular folk songs as Father Kevin, apparently, was a dab hand on the guitar, a nun on piano and seventy highly bored teenagers trying to ignore that they were trapped in a version of every wedding they’d ever attended.

Dinner would be done and dusted by 6pm every day. Joe and me fixed on 10pm for our meet-up which we’d taken to calling a rendezvous for some strange reason. I suppose it sounded a bit more exotic. Two hours for everyone to settle down and stop acting the maggot. Another two hours to make sure the nuns and priests were done patrolling the corridors and checking the toilets before they risked boiling the milk for the cocoa and uncapping the sweet sherry.

I would go home on Good Friday as a woman. I beat down the desire to write that on the schedule – 10am: Mary Rattigan emerges from the dark side of her life and takes her seat on the bus. Her classmates notice she is different but not how. She sighs and shakes her head at their childish simplicity!

Lizzie and me unpacked. She had brought a red polka-dot gypsy dress and black plastic high heels even though we had been told to bring something ‘modest and comfortable’. She had just hung it on a hanger at the back of the door when Sister Pious clocked it and said no chance, no way, under no circumstances was it to be worn inside the walls of a monastery! Had she anything else? If not, she was to stay in her school uniform. This was a retreat, not a dis-co-theque.

Lizzie burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom. I had to talk to the door. She only opened it to quiz me on whether I’d thought any more about the practicalities of gettin’ a ride?

–  Lizzie! Jesus! How can you go from suicidal to saucy in thirty seconds?

–  I’m a quick healer. Now, the path to the ha’penny must be clear to avoid any fumblin’ …

–  Christ. I’m scarlet. I can’t listen to this. And what are you talking about?