Joe wasn’t sure if she was smiling. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘That’s the truth.’ He reached out for Trude’s hand once more, as if holding it could earth him, deflect the pain, drive it into the ground.

‘And was that the end?’ Trude said.

‘No,’ Joe said. ‘No, it wasn’t.’

He began to cry, man-size sobs that wracked his slender body. He couldn’t say what happened. What words to use? What order did the pain come in? The shame?

‘I understand,’ she said. She leaned over, stroked her fingers across his face. ‘You poor thing.’

‘I was a child.’

I am a child. Frightened and confused. Fresh and raw, as if it happened yesterday. Lying in bed with the corner of the pillow stuffed in his mouth so no one would hear his screams. Alone.

‘Homosexuals.’ She spat the word out.

Joe had never known Trude angry, and he didn’t want to hear it now. He wanted to curl up and be held, rocked to sleep, an innocent, there, there. Fourteen years old. Small for his age.

He hated himself, for what Father Ciarán had done to him. He’d wanted to punish himself, slam his fist against a treetrunk, his head against a wall. A hard pain that helped drive away the other, the soft, agonising ulcer inside him.

He took up boxing. He didn’t say why.

‘You’ll have your nose broke,’ his mother wrote at the time. ‘Cauliflower ears.’ It would be a fitting punishment. He had sinned, had made himself unworthy of all grace. His sin, his secret, had cut him off from love and trust.

He thought the other boys went through this and it hadn’t worried them. He thought he’d have to grow up, get over it, like they had. He wanted to hit Father Ciarán so hard his teeth would clatter across the floor like dice. Fight with your brains, the first rule of boxing. Joe had raised his fists at the priest, had glowered at him, saw the beads of sweat breaking out on his nose, the broken veins in his cheeks.

‘We lock them up,’ Trude was saying. ‘Degenerates.’

He was just a man. A pitiful coward.

‘What happened to that priest?’

Boxing filled his mind and dulled the pain.

‘Was he punished?’

Joe looked up at Trude. She was smiling, tender, and he was here, with her. A pitiful boy.

‘What’s that you said?’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Nothing,’ Joe said.

‘And you never told a soul?’

‘Who would believe me?’ Joe said. His own daidí didn’t, had floored Joe instead. ‘He was a priest. Like God himself.’ He lay still on the blanket, blinking at the sun in his eyes, listening to Trude’s gentle breath and the rustle of the breeze in the fronds. ‘Boxing saved me,’ he said, though his voice was low. ‘And the birds. Deadened the pain. Lifted me above it.’