Ten days later, the package finally comes. It is a small brown padded envelope, her name and address typed on a white label. The postmark is the Netherlands. Inside is a blister pack of tablets, one round and four oval. No instructions, no warnings, and nothing to identify the sender. She pops out the round tablet there and then, in the hallway, and tries to swallow it down but her mouth is too dry. She feels it stuck at the back of her throat. She makes it into the kitchen and pours a pint glass of water, drinks the whole thing down. The glass has a dried scum of lace at its neck and the water tastes stale. She can still feel the sensation of the tablet, lodged. There was a fresher, a geography student, who died after taking diet pills that he bought online. Boiled alive: that’s what the newspapers said. There was a photo of him in his hospital bed, face so swollen he appeared to have no eyes, the skin on his torso and arms peeling off in raw red patches the size of sycamore leaves. His parents had released it as a warning, a deterrent to others.

It is the last day of April and she has, by repeated calculations, less than one week remaining. 11

A memory: aged eleven, a Junior Strings weekend away in Carnlough. On Sunday morning the Catholic children go to Mass in the big church on the Bay Road; the handful of Protestants are supposed to stay in Drumalla House and sing hymns with the cello teacher. She goes with the Catholics: the walk along the rocky shore, the sweet shop in the village afterwards. The sense of something forbidden. Her friends line up to receive Holy Communion and she copies them, kneels and opens her mouth and lets the priest place the dry disc of wafer on her tongue. She chews, swallows. Afterwards they tell her she’s going to Hell. They are falling over themselves to tell her. She’s committed a Mortal Sin, and because she can’t go to Confession she can’t be forgiven. And she chewed. They are beside themselves with glee. She cries. The cello teacher tells her it’s nonsense, tells the others they’re being silly. Tells them that, incidentally, the word used in John Chapter 6 to describe the consumption of the Eucharist can be understood as ‘to gnaw’ or ‘to munch’, so there they go, and now enough of all that. They say they were only joking.

She hasn’t thought of it for years but it surfaces now. The dusty room they practised in, the bars of sunlight. The pebbles on that little rocky shore. The gules of light in the stained-glass windows of the Catholic church. 12