‘You know,’ he said, ‘we don’t where I come from have any wicked being. We think of him as someone who disciplines people.’

‘When they do something wrong?’ I said.

‘When they don’t tell the truth,’ Busola said.

But the devil still liked to do what he was doing before, my dad said, only now he went round keeping people quiet so there wouldn’t be any singing and no one would tell the truth. So what we had to do to keep the devil off was not shut up but speak up.

‘That devil’s sneaky,’ Manus said.

‘Like the Wizard of Oz?’ I said.

Connor lifted up and shook his head, ‘He’s only hiding because he’s frightened.’

‘What’s he frightened of?’ I asked.

‘Himself,’ Manus said.

But we’d be safe from him, my dad said, because when we found ourselves singing and laughing and calling out it meant we were doing what we were supposed to and he couldn’t do anything about that. He would just have to stamp his foot on the ground and disappear.

‘Bedtime!’ my mum said from the door.

‘Can I go up and say my prayers, too?’ I said, because if my dad was wrong about the devil ... I didn’t want to be on the wrong side.

Nana was in her nightdress with dark stockings on over the bottoms of her legs. I was lying down in the bed next to Busola with my eyes shut and our hands up by our noses praying. Nana was kneeling on the floor with her elbows on the bed praying over us. She had a hairnet and wispy, grey-black curls that straggled down over her ears. There were brown blotches on her hands and on her face where she was old and the skin ran down in creases from her neck to the middle of her chest where there was a cross. I wasn’t sure I should be there because the threads of blood and bare skin and freckles on her arms made me feel she was undressed and I shouldn’t be looking. I tried to keep my eyes shut, but she was looking back at me like she knew I wasn’t praying properly.

I shut my eyes really tight and listened to her and Busola saying the prayer for going to bed, Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake – I peeked through one eye and she was still watching me, so I closed it – I pray the Lord my soul to take, Amen.

‘God bless and keep you,’ she said. But she didn’t get up, she went on praying silently as I listened to her breathing, the speaking under her breath with her tongue moist in her lips, the feeling of Busola’s arm getting heavy on top of me as though we were both dead.