In St Angela’s, a lot of my classmates didn’t know that I was adopted, and most of those who knew assumed it had happened just after I was born. There were a few from Gardiner’s Hill School who knew my original name and my whole story, but I eased them out of my life as fast as I could. They hadn’t been nice to me in primary. I might as well have had a label around my neck, or a bell to ring. The kids hadn’t known the difference at first. Their mothers were the ones who wouldn’t let me come for sleepovers, who told their own children about how, when my birth mother brought me to school, I had had scabies and lice and a nose that never stopped running, and how they had had to complain to the teachers about it, and how I was often left hanging around on the side of the road, and if my mother showed up to collect me, which half the time she didn’t, she was drunk, if that’s all she was. And hadn’t any shame about any of it, which was the worst thing nearly, and how in the end the school had had no choice but to call in the Health Board, and wasn’t that the lucky day for the poor misfortunate because weren’t the Fitzpatricks only after applying to become foster parents because they weren’t able to have children themselves, sure God help us.

The stories followed me right through primary, and whenever lice came into the school, the mothers and the children stared at me. Secondary with the nuns at St Angela’s had been my great escape from all that, from the knowing looks of outsiders, even if I was never able to silence the voices in my head.

Just after 12.20, I heard the jangle of a bunch of keys behind the great door and, instinctively, sat straighter in my chair. I might be about to tell a pack of lies, but the ‘no slouching, girls’ rule was harder to break. The door opened, a crack at first, then wider. I stood as a rail-thin, silver-haired woman in a calf-length grey wool skirt and what looked like a hand-knitted grey round-necked jumper, with a starched white round cotton collar inside it, came into the passageway. She wasn’t wearing a veil. She didn’t have to. She had nun written all over her. I caught a flash of neon green. The other woman was there too, watching from the inside hall. The nun looked to be in her late sixties, but nuns often looked a decade or more younger than their age. This one might be pushing eighty.

‘Thanks for seeing me, Sister Bernadette,’ I said, taking a chance with the name.