That night I was putting my uniform away in a clothes bag to keep the moths off it ’til September when she stepped in and closed the door quietly behind her. I knew by the folding of her arms I’d been caught before she even opened her mouth.

–  Well, Miss. Have you anything you want to tell me?

–  No. Like what?

–  Like what you’ve been up to? Have you been makin’ free with that mollycoddled Joe Loughrey?

–  It’s nothing to do with Joe Loughrey!

That shut her up but she was calm, too calm. Maybe she didn’t hit pregnant girls? But maybe she was only gathering steam.

–  What do you mean, ‘it’? So there is a baby on the way? You little T.R.A.M.P.! Can you imagine what your father will say?

Ah, the killer blow: wheel out the daddy and the terrible thought that this might be the thing that makes him speak. My face was on fire so I kept my head down and my hair over the whole sorry mess. I was exposed, I was a bad girl, I was going to break my father’s heart. I had forgotten to watch myself. I had become a T.R.A.M.P. like Auntie Eileen, the original bolt of weak material. It was nothing to do with Joe Loughrey, although in that minute I had never missed him so much.

–  And what do you mean this has nothing to do with Joe Loughrey? I thought that was who you were steppin’ out with? Who HAS it to do with, Mary Rattigan?

I would never tell her. I knew that I would never own anything again so completely and I didn’t want to give it up.

–  No one, it was no one!

–  It had to be someone!? Did someone interfere with you? Mary, talk to me, did someone force you?

Mammy wasn’t shouting now, she was whispering. Who did she think was going to overhear her? Good Holy God or His Virgin Mother? And did she just suggest that I talk to her? Now was not the best moment to fall down in hysterical laughter but I couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to control myself.

–  Mary! Did someone make you do something against your will?

I thought briefly of how I’d felt myself take off courtesy of Jacques Bernier. How far away she had seemed. How the stars shone into my eyes and into my heart and how much I wanted to feel like that again and again and again.

–  No, I wasn’t forced. And it was nothing to do with Joe Loughrey.