As she hid there, nothing but coarse material between her and them, she realised that she didn’t believe in God. No loving God could treat her this way, could take so much away from her, could abandon her here in this place.

Less than four years ago she had lived in a grand house on Belfast’s Malone Road, a short walk from Methodist College, the school she had been attending since she was eleven. Her father ran a linen brokerage, buying and selling the locally produced material. He was not as rich as those who owned the mills, but he made enough to buy a very presentable home for his wife and only child, and he drove an expensive car. Neither Esther nor her mother had any inkling of his financial worries arising from the decline of the worldwide linen trade. Not, that is, until Esther heard a gunshot as she walked up the drive to her front door on a sunny May afternoon, then heard her mother’s frantic screaming.

They never ruled it a suicide, but rather a tragic accident caused by carelessness while cleaning his legally owned pistol. As Mrs. Mooney struggled to gather the pieces over the following weeks, she discovered correspondence between Mr. Mooney and the bank that had provided the mortgage for the house. He had been three months in arrears. There was also a notice from another lender that they intended to seize his car.

Nothing was left. All savings burned up in vain attempts to keep the business alive. Creditors circled, debtors fled. Esther and her mother moved to a small rented house closer to the university. Mrs. Mooney would not go to the council to ask for a house in one of those dreadful streets in the west of the city. She covered the rent with the small funds she had put away, and she fed and clothed them both with the meagre salary she earned in the receptionist’s post she had been forced to accept from a friend of her late husband.

Esther went back to Methody, but things were not the same. Her school friends looked at her differently. She was no longer one of them. Not only was she marked by bereavement, but by near poverty. When she asked her mother if she could leave that school and go to another, Mrs. Mooney refused. And they would continue to attend the same church. They had lost a husband and father, and she’d be damned if they would also lose their standing in the area. Esther pointed out that their standing was already lost, and her mother slapped her hard across the cheek and sent her to bed. She wailed for an hour while Esther covered her ears.