‘Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out,’ the Bible says. Maybe God knew what I wouldn’t admit – the sin was always in me.

I want to breathe. I need to breathe. I need oxygen. I need to live.

I am trying, thrashing. My hands are fisting the bed sheets trying to gain purchase on something, on anything, on this life. The voice again, indistinct, muttering words I cannot hear. But they are not words of love. I know that much.

This person is weighing me down, I realise, jabbing their bony knee into my chest, close to a wound that’s not yet healed, that I can feel start to pull and strain against the pressure. Everything is tearing. Everything is burning and still they don’t stop. They keep going. I try to suck air in, even the smallest amount. Just enough. I just want enough. I don’t need more. I just want to live.

But I can feel it all slipping away. A dizziness washes over me, tingling. A sensation, almost as if I’m floating, as if I could just drift away. And the pain stops, you see. My lungs stop burning. I stop needing to breathe in. There is a moment of relief.

Of false hope.

There is a moment where I’m between this world and the judgement that awaits me.

Then the darkness stretches out in front of me.

Chapter Nineteen

Heidi

Then

Joe McKee was a clever man. He was very good at making people believe he was a nice person. I learned that very quickly. People always smiled when they saw him in the street. They would stop to talk to him, and he would listen intently to their news and offer his nuggets of wisdom, or reassurance or condolence as appropriate.

I quickly lost count of the number of times I heard people say: ‘You’re a sound fella, Joe,’ and they’d pat him on the back. Sometimes they’d slip a shiny fifty pence piece into my hand and tell me to treat myself to something. They’d give me a sympathetic look and pat me on the head. I’d smile and thank them, because that was what was expected, but I never bought sweets, not with that money. That money always felt like a consolation prize.

I’d started to think that the whole world must have known was what happening in my house. That they couldn’t be oblivious to the fact that I was a troubled child, that something was badly wrong. I started to think that they either didn’t care or maybe, worse than that, this was something that happened to all little girls and just nobody ever talked about it.

Like how nobody ever talked about the fact that Santa wasn’t real. I learned that one quickly too, the year my mother died. Instead of the lovingly wrapped pile of presents under the tree, there were some books and a selection box. New underwear wrapped up in crinkly Christmas paper. Pants and vests. Nightdresses, when I preferred pyjamas. A board game, something we would have to play together, because I never, ever asked anyone to come back to the house with me. I was too scared to. Imagine they found out? Imagine if he hurt them, too?