It took me a while to figure it out. My mum and dad weren’t what you’d call super big on the facts of life. I mean, I knew the important stuff, like touching yourself makes you go blind, and even kissing can send you to Hell, but stuff that married people do—that was still a mystery. I knew it must be disgusting, though. All the words for it were swears. Even thinking about it was a sin, and learning about it at school was wrong, which was why I wasn’t allowed to be in sex education classes. No, sex was like toxic waste, only to be handled by specialists. So the thought of Miss McDonald (I refused to call her Mrs. Lumb) actually having sex with Mr. Lumb, the Games teacher—who everyone called Lumbo because of his big muscles and tiny little elephant eyes—was just too revolting to imagine. And yet I kept imagining it. There were all kinds of things at the clay pits; all sorts of rubbish that people had dumped; piles of newspapers and magazines. Some of them were called Knave, and Penthouse, and Playboy. Those were sex magazines, I knew. I wasn’t supposed to look at them. But I couldn’t help it sometimes. I wanted to know. And Mousey, of course, knew everything. His brothers had already told him the lot.

Frankly, it was disgusting. I knew people had to make sacrifices, but honestly, this was too much. Between Mousey and those magazines, I soon knew more than I wanted to. And the worst of it was that, once those pictures were in my head, I just couldn’t stop seeing them—except that instead of the women in the magazines, I kept seeing Miss McDonald, and instead of the men, all I saw was Mr. Lumb.

I had to do something about it. But I was a kid, not nine years old. What could I do? I waited. I talked about it with Mousey. Mousey didn’t seem to care as much. But then, Mousey didn’t go to Church. He didn’t know about demons and stuff. He didn’t even know about the sin of self-abuse. And so I watched Miss McDonald and her horrible husband coming to work together. I saw them talking in the yard when she was on supervision duty. When she was still Miss McDonald, I used to go and talk with her as she drank her coffee. Now she talked with Mr. Lumb instead, and laughed, and sometimes slapped his arm, and I was no longer her special friend.