Jesus was suspended in front of the big stained-glass window. He wore the sort of skirt that girls wrapped around their swimsuits in summer. Yesterday, Matty had gone to the library again as Mamma had said, looked at the photo of Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist, hanging upside down with his feet in stocks. He was wearing an old-fashioned swimming costume, his head near the top of the tank of water, a padlock on the front. The Chinese Water Torture Cell. Matty imagined Jesus wriggling out from the nails in his hands and feet, sticking two fingers up.

I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

It always smelt the same inside. Cigarette smoke and incense and perfume. All sorts of people came here – an African lady in long robes, a Sri Lankan boy in a blazer, Irish, Italian.

‘Let us take a moment to reflect on our own sins,’ said Father James. It went quiet, apart from the sounds of a baby doing little wolf-howls, and a truck roaring outside.

The day before First Communion two years ago, Matty had sat in the cramped cupboard, Father James on the other side. You couldn’t really see him but you could hear his soft Scottish voice. Mamma had said that you had to tell him any bad things you’d done or thought, and Matty had lightly kicked the wooden leg of the chair, totally stumped.

‘Just tell him you’ve eaten too much chocolate,’ Dad had said.

‘But I haven’t.’

‘No matter. The man’s not to know.’

‘But I’d be lying. So then I’d have to confess that.’

‘It’s just a formality, you smart-arse.’

‘When did you last go to confession?’

‘I’d have to book the man out for a week,’ he’d said, with a darkly amused look.

In the end, Matty had blurted something to Father James about pushing a boy over at football, which was not totally a lie and not totally the truth. ‘You are absolved from your sins,’ he’d said, from behind the wooden panel.

Matty stared at the thick neck of the man in front. Sins. What were Dad’s? Mamma now seemed to think he’d done something bad. Mrs Jackson definitely did. Was it just him dying that had made her angry, or something more? Matty looked up at Jesus again. Imagined Dad strung up there on the cross, except less skinny, not all stretched with his ribs showing like an Ethiopian child off the telly. Joe the Drowned. Matty the Fatherless.