It was my mum, grief-stricken, my aunts, soaking with tears down their faces. The man on the cross was someone dead in the family, and Good Friday was when he died. I was there too, crying at the foot of the cross because I was frightened and the surge of the crowd separated me from my mum at the funeral. Then the words stopped, and everyone went wild. It’s hard to be without God. Everyone was pressing forward, all the statues covered in black. I looked up at the cross, dripping blood from the thorns and nails. My dad turned up his nose and wouldn’t go, he called it ‘the blood and wig-hair melodrama’. Strangers groaned and my nana wept. A hole opened up in the middle of my chest and I clutched at people I didn’t know to stop it pulling me under. A bell rang and stifled it. I pushed back against the wetness of the bodies, sobbing until I got out the church.

Buses were passing, the street was still there. The shops were closed, the sun was shining. I was on my own.

‘Never again!’ I said out loud. A passer-by over the road glanced at me, I was shivering. I’d seen Jesus crucified and I didn’t want to be there ever again.

‘Are you going to do your first communion?’ I nodded at my mum because I had to. Everyone was busy opening out the Guinness and fish and chips and beer and lemonade and being noisy coming in from church. I didn’t want to tell her I’d already gone up when she was in hospital and tasted the wafer and wine they gave you when you kneeled at the rail. I wasn’t supposed to, but everyone else did and I followed. I kept my head down and my hands together while I tried to see my way back to my seat and if I’d been found out. I had to step over Busola who was kneeling with her eyes closed in the pew. ‘That’s a sin,’ she said, without even looking up at me, ‘you’ll go to hell for that.’