Joe walked back to the convent, let himself in, footsteps clicking on the flagstone floor. His shoes had metal caps, tapped as he walked. The nuns now, their shoes were silent. You knew they were close by the click of the rosary beads and the smell of their laundered habits.

‘Good evening, Father.’

‘Good evening, Sister.’

Joe didn’t know them all by name for the nuns never stopped to spend the time of day with him. Sometimes, he thought, a little common or garden friendliness wouldn’t go amiss. Just for one day, take him off his pedestal and ask, Father, do you have a family at all? Or, how are the boys at the club? The birds that you watch so keenly? He might be nearer to God than them, but he was still a man, and lonely. Pierre understood that, had stepped forward to be his friend and Joe was grateful, willing to overlook Pierre’s misdemeanours.

He walked into his cell, a small room in the basement, with a single bed and a table and chair. He wanted to talk to his mother, to his daidí even, to Pat Junior, little Bridey. All of them. He didn’t think his last letter had got through. He’d never had a reply, that was for sure. He sank to his knees by the side of the bed. Please God, help me through this. Tried to think of Jesus wandering in the desert, knowing the fate that was to befall Him. At least, Joe thought, I don’t have that to contend with. Still, he wondered again if he was cut out for a solitary life. He took off his clothes, pulled on his pyjamas and lay on his bed.

When Father Murphy had come round for tea after benediction on the Sunday of his fourteenth birthday and peered over his half-moon glasses and asked his mother Bridey for an ashtray and a tot, Joe knew he had come for a purpose. Joe’d thought about souls as if they were a trade, like any other. Souls went on forever and ever. You never ran out of souls. The church wasn’t poor, had never gone out of business, and though the priests and nuns banished their worldly wealth, so Father Murphy said, he looked plump and well on the housekeeper’s cooking, smoked sixty a day and O’Sullivan stood him the cost of a Guinness and chaser in the pub. What else would a man want? A priest couldn’t take a wife, but Father Murphy lived with his housekeeper, and that seemed much the same.

‘Have you prayed to your guardian angel?’ Father Murphy said.

Joe nodded.

‘And you’re choosing this of your own free will?’

Joe looked at his mother, and behind her the picture of the Sacred Heart. He nodded.