Claire drops her silver bracelet through the slot, hears it splash down into a pool of devotional coins, and draws her own candle from the rack. She pauses. Nobody died and nobody is a saint. It is not clear what she ought to do – what she is trying to do. She has touched her candle to the flame of another. Now she holds the long slim shaft of it lightly, balanced like a spear across her palm.

WOULD YOU RATHER

Even after I’d chopped my hair off, a gesture of aggressive self-fashioning to make me look more punk, more like Lori Petty in Tank Girl, people would ask me to babysit. Maybe they saw my ugly crop, the sweatband of acne it left exposed, and thought I was a safer bet than a pretty girl.

My easiest job was the Fishers. Mr Fisher was a colleague of my father’s. The kids were just babies, fast asleep before I arrived. The monitor on the coffee table never made a peep, so I’d watch TV, or read the smutty book I’d found hidden among the John Grishams on their shelves. Afterwards, Mr Fisher dropped me home. In the car with him and his musky, heady aftershave – nothing like my father’s Old Spice – I’d imagine him making a pass at me. He never did.

‘Where did they go?’ my mother would be waiting to ask me. ‘Were they drunk when they came back?’

‘I don’t know,’ I’d say, truthfully. Were they drunk or just happy? How could you tell?

Once, Mrs Fisher asked after my brother, Liam. This was when he’d been suspended from school. One of the sixth-formers had seen him throwing stones into a tree. She’d gone closer, expecting to see a ball stuck up there, or maybe a squirrel, but it had been a Year 7 with his head cut open. It turned out Liam had been picking on him for months.

‘What a difficult time,’ Mrs Fisher had said. ‘Your poor mother. Give her our best.’

‘And what did you say to that?’ my mother asked.

I told her I’d said thank you.

‘Christ Almighty. You need to learn when you’re being insulted.’