No, it was better to go it alone. And I had my dolls for company. And I had my growing collection of fifty pence pieces, which I saved in a spare Trócaire box I’d taken from school. If I saved enough, maybe I could get a plane ticket and fly away to America or somewhere. Then I’d write to my granny and grandad and tell them I was safe and happy, and maybe they would come and visit me.

I’d never tell Joe, though. Never, ever tell him where I was.

So it broke my heart, and my spirit, the day I came home from school to find Joe standing in the living room, in front of the fire, the Trócaire box, used to collect money for charity during Lent, on the mantlepiece.

It was May, I remember that. It had been a sunny day. Warm. I’d made a daisy chain at school and I was still wearing it around my neck when I got home. I had a sense of things being, maybe, possibly okay. That things were going to be okay.

Then I saw him. Saw the expression on his face. Thunderous. Not the smiling, genial ‘sound fellah’ everyone thought he was.

‘Would you care to explain this?’ he said, thrusting the box at me, a picture of a starving African child, eyes wide, staring at me.

‘I was just …’ I was trying to think. How to tell him I was saving to run away. How I never wanted to see him again. Or what to say so he wouldn’t know my plan, after all. That I would still have a chance to get away with it.

But I didn’t get past those three words.

‘You were just what, Heidi? Stealing? From a charity? From these starving children?’ He thrust the box at me, so close to my face that I closed my eyes in anticipation of an impact that didn’t come.

‘That’s not what …’

‘I know people feel sorry for you, poor little girl, having lost her mammy.’ He spat the words at me. I felt flecks of his spittle hit my face, his coffee-tainted breath fill my nostrils. ‘But this! This is despicable. I have never been more ashamed of anything in my life. After all I’ve done. After all I do and you steal from a Christian charity from people who have nothing?

‘Maybe you’d like to live out there, Heidi, starving, sick, alone. Then you might stop being such a selfish, moody little bitch! May God forgive you for what you’ve done!’

He grabbed me by the arm so tight that I feared it would break and he hauled me through the house, the Trócaire box in his other hand, and into the street. He let go only to open the car door and then he practically threw me into the back seat, my head colliding with the sill of the door as I fell. The skin of my bare legs burned against the hot leather of the car seat and I tried to curl up.