She rushed into the room, dragged me down from the top bunk, and smacked me hard on the backside. She said I was a vain and rebellious child, and she would not have me dragging her girls into sin and from the path of Light. She said it wasn’t surprising given the antics of my mother, with her fashionable dresses and orange hair and high heels and lipstick, and she wouldn’t be surprised if what they said was true, and that Mum and Dad were divorcing and Mum was never coming home again because she could not live The Way anymore. She waved a little key at me and I realised it was the key that could lock their Telecom green phone.

‘You will make no more calls from this house. You can see your brother and sister on Sundays. I will not reward this kind of behaviour.’ She triumphantly put the key down the front of her dress, and goodness knows she may as well have put it in the Cracks of Doom from The Lord of the Rings as between those two enormous melons.

But it wasn’t the key to the phone that upset me. It was what she said about Mum never coming home. Because these nasty words matched up with the words I heard in my nightmares at night. Jesus seemed to have decided to use Aunty Jean as the prophet of misery. Those words were out in the air now, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

CHAPTER 17

The Hodgesons were very kind to Ruthy. Sister Hodgeson asked her to call them Aunty Ada and Uncle Ken, but she was so used to hearing them called Brother and Sister Hodgeson by Mum and Dad she just couldn’t do it.

Sister Hodgeson sat down with her on the first night with them and made a list of all of Ruthy’s favourite foods, the games she liked to play and the books she preferred to read. She was allowed to watch television with them for the whole evening if she wished and stayed up half an hour later each night than we were allowed at home. She was allocated a seat of her own in the television room, and a rug and pillow on it to snuggle up if she wanted to. Next to it was a small side table just for her, that always had a drink and treat on it. When she went to bed, they both came into her room with a chair and took turns reading a story to her.

They bought her new clothes, new books and five new exercise books. For the first three weeks after Mum left, she turned up at Sunday school with a new outfit on each time. This freaked Caleb out, who said they must think she belonged to them now, but Ruthy told him not to be stupid. It was just that they had never had a kid of their own and they were enjoying playing happy families.