I was frightened. I wanted to see the face of God and I wasn’t going to. The backyard looked grey, like the bins, and the crumbling bricks along the backyard wall looked sooty and black. The broken concrete on the ground made me feel there wasn’t any colour anywhere, just the dirt in the cracks. Only the cock’s bright red bits on its head looked like drops of blood. I looked up in the sky, the blue had gone overcast and grey. It was hot and heavy, with spots of rain falling and drying up before it could get wet. The beady eye fixed on me and scratched its claws on the ground. When God turns away from you, there’s a wind and you feel someone else is watching. The clothes pegs shook on the washing line and there was a white ruffle of feathers. The back door banged shut, I was on my own. I looked up for God and couldn’t see him. I lifted up my arms to the clouds floating over the roof of the church, and remembered that’s what Moses did. For a moment I thought I have seen the face of God. It’s Charlton Heston. I had to cross myself because it wasn’t true. He was Moses, a murderer. I glanced at the cock and it was walking away from me past the upturned metal bucket, so I thought I better keep on going. I turned up again to the heavy grey-white clouds and saw a dark smudge forming above a lip, then eyes and the white face of Charlie Chaplin, looking detached and kind and helpless. I couldn’t make him look down at me, he drifted away into the clouds.

My eyes were welling up with tears.

Why are you crying? I said to myself.

Because the devil had won.

Canon Byrne was gone and my mum had switched off the telly to tell us off. My dad was standing by the door, half in, half out, and stood back to let me through, his hand on the back of my head pushing me gently into the room.

‘There he is,’ she said. ‘And who took him the wrong way?’

Manus and Connor didn’t even bother to look at me. They knew it was my fault. I sat down as quickly as I could.

‘And what happened on the way home?’ she said.

That’s when Connor gave me daggers with his eyes and Manus looked at the floor.

‘Are ye animals, or have you no fear of God?!’

‘Ah-ah! Calm down,’ my dad said to her. ‘Just talk to them. They are children.’

‘The curse of God on the child brings the devil to this house!’

My dad stopped it. ‘That’s enough! God is not cursing anyone here,’ he said. ‘They will choose for themselves.’