I thought if I did my first communion it would make up for it. I’d only meant to get the taste, but it swallowed down the wrong way when Busola tripped me up and I’d gone into a coughing fit. People turned round in the pews and looked, ‘Sit down and shut up,’ Busola said, ‘for God’s sake!’ I could see a smirk on her face even though she kept it closed, like she was going to be an angel and I didn’t even believe in God. I gave her a kick and she opened her eyes. ‘You’re a pagan,’ she said. I didn’t know what that was, so I ignored her and put my hands back together and my head down and tried to think who God was.

‘Don’t just nod at me,’ my mum said. ‘Are you going to do it? Do you want God in your life?’

‘Yes,’ I said, standing in front of her with my hands in my pockets and my fingers crossed. Yes, because God washes away your sins, and sin divides you from yourself, and who wants to go to hell?

‘About time,’ Annie said. She was my aunt and I had to be nice, so I gave her a blank look.

But it meant I had to do Saturday mornings with the nuns. They didn’t know who I was. They weren’t my aunts but they wanted to smack me like my mum. They wanted to get up close, and cling to my hair like bats in their black clothes. It was too much. As soon as they came flapping into the room I was on the run, I had to do my catechism on the hoof. Who loved me? Who died for me? Who do I owe? I never asked for anyone like that. I wasn’t stopping for it, I wasn’t going to be grabbed.

Anyway, they didn’t like me, turning up to their classes not knowing anything at my age.

‘How old are you to be coming to catechism?’

I said nothing.

‘Are you baptised?’

I had this way of not saying anything in case the answer came out the question and I could work them both out together. But the question was enough, they were telling me I didn’t belong.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

It was the best way of making them lose interest. I didn’t want to be there. The questions were in bold type and the answer was plain it wasn’t going to be nice with the nuns.

‘What’s a boy your age doing in this class?’

I looked for the door. If I made a dash for it, that would get back to my mum. The best I could do was make myself invisible. Say nothing, don’t let them see what I’m thinking.

‘What the devil are you playing at?’