Just nine months after the invisible man spoke on the wireless and then hid all night behind the bedroom curtain, Bernadette Waters gave birth. She called the little girl Momo, but the fun didn’t last long. The doctors were worried. Little Momo was weak and didn’t breathe well, and she was taken away to be scrutinized and watched over by nuns.

Birdie only saw her through the glass windows on the corridor of the nursery. And the nuns said that Birdie had neglected herself during the confinement, which didn’t help the baby. So in a way it was Birdie’s fault that Momo was sick.

Such an isolated little creature, Birdie thought, when she looked at Momo’s ivory fingers the size of matchsticks, and her eyes still closed to the world. Her magical little button of a nose.

Three months Birdie spent in that convent, scrubbing floors, though she was only thirteen. That’s when Birdie went off buttermilk for life. Never again, she vowed. The buttermilk every day was the worst part of the pregnancy. And no one came to visit her. Not even Daddy. And the only ones who were interested in her were the nuns and the police, and that was for different reasons. They dismantled her. Poking and probing to see would she tell them anything.

Sister Bernard was a young nun then. She kept saying that it would take time, but that Birdie would come round to the idea of an adoption eventually. She was only a child herself.

‘Who ever done this,’ says Sister Bernard, ‘has destroyed you. Can you understand that?’

But Birdie thought it was wonderful. She was a woman. She was a mother. She would soon become the dairy queen.

‘Will I have milk soon?’ Birdie wondered.

‘Of course you won’t,’ Sister Bernard said. ‘You’re only thirteen.’

Momo helped Birdie forget everything. Forget where Momo came from, or who shook the curtain, and who stole the cookie, and how it all happened. Soon, she hoped, the cosmos within her would begin to pour out life to her hungry little monster, her gorgeous little Momo.

‘You can’t call her Momo,’ Sister Bernard said. ‘It’s not a name.’

And as Birdie waited each day for the wonderful flood tide of cosmic love to start flowing through her breasts, the world actually became very narrow. They squeezed her into a tiny room without the infant, and they only let her go to the nursery once a day. Her breasts hurt as if someone had beaten them with a rod. But no milk came.

Life in the convent was organized by numbers. Times. Clocks. Places to go. Things to scrub. A life without climaxes. And cheap curtains.

She complained to Sister Bernard that maybe Momo was missing her and that she should be there more often with her. But Sister Bernard only sneered. At night the baby’s face went beetroot-red from screaming in the nursery. Birdie dangled a yo-yo beside the glass, when Momo was watching, but it only made things worse. She wanted to get a doll but the nun said it was far too soon for dolls, and there was no point pampering the baby since her new mammy was coming in a matter of a few weeks and she would take care of all that.