The Protestant boy, Derek Birthistle, didn’t remain in the classroom for the catechism examinations, and he didn’t come into prayers either. He waited in the cloakroom, and once when a girl complained that a pair of scissors was missing from her schoolbag Derek Birthistle was sent for by Sister Sullivan because the schoolbag had been hanging in the cloakroom and he’d been sitting beside it for three-quarters of an hour. But Derek Birthistle hadn’t taken the scissors: it turned out in the end that there hadn’t been a pair of scissors in the girl’s schoolbag at all. The girl had developed the habit of telling lies, and her parents said the nuns should have known they wouldn’t have the money for buying scissors.

‘Tell Derek Birthistle to come in now,’ Father Pierce commanded at the end of the catechism examination, when Joey Feerick had finished singing. While everyone was waiting he asked a few more catechism questions. Then he said:

‘Well, Derek, I hear your father did great work over in Dungarvan last week.’

Mr Birthistle was a clerk in Burke’s the auctioneers and was often to be seen carrying papers on the quays, hurrying between Burke’s warehouse and the office where he worked. He was small, with a waistcoat, and he had the same clever eyes as his son. Derek Birthistle was the cleverest boy in the class, but it wasn’t because of that that the nuns and Father Pierce reserved a special manner for him. They wanted to save him from perdition, Tom heard a girl saying one day: you moved an inch nearer heaven if you saved a soul from hell.

‘Well, we had a great time with the catechism, Derek,’ Father Pierce said now. ‘Were you all right in the cloakroom?’

‘I was, Father.’

‘Well, that’s great. Joey, will you sing another verse for Derek?’

Joey Feerick sang another verse of The Meeting of the Waters and Tom wondered what it was like having to spend all that time with the coats in the cloakroom, and the damp smell that was there on a wet day. Derek Birthistle had told him that on one occasion a lay sister brought him down to the kitchen and lifted him up on to a table so that he could watch the bread being made. Sometimes if they passed through the cloakroom the lay sisters would give him raisins or marzipan.

‘There’s a terrible old carry-on coming into the town, I hear,’ Father Pierce said when the singing came to an end again and there was time to put in before the bell. ‘I hope none of ye will be begging coppers to spend on the like of that.’

They knew he was joking. There was no one better than Father Pierce at pretending he was serious.