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feet, unable to answer, pulsing one moment with the hopeless desire to plead, the next with the desire to die, until finally I was overcome by fear of actually dying.
    He couldn’t see me in the dark, didn’t know whether I had understood, so he kicked at me, demanding an answer. He kicked me low on the spine and I sat up somehow. All this happened very quickly. He bent over me, and he was the devil and the dearest person in the world all rolled into one. I nodded soundlessly, not knowing how to breathe, utterly confused, not understanding what it was about my father’s doings with me that was so very bad of me. Not for a moment could I imagine that my papa was bad. No, for him to treat me the way he did, I must have been a very bad girl indeed.
    I lay down again in the dark shed, exhausted. He strode out and let the door fall shut. In this moment of complete distress, I could not call my mother. I closed my eyes and passed out.
    When I came to, a panic rose from deep down in my stomach, a primal fear of ever being discovered. I could never confess my guilt, for I understood quite well that I was not to talk to the priest. I was a bad girl who could not be forgiven. All I could do was cover up my badness somehow from all the people around me. Even if I succeeded in convincing people that I was all right, I couldn’t win in the end because God knew my blackness. I was terrified of death, because I believed I would go straight to hell. I was only six and knew no better.
    I walked around as if in a fog. More than half of my waking awareness was busy trying to handle the wild feelings in my body. My life became more and more dream-like as this turmoil enveloped me. It became difficult to tell whether I was dreaming or not. I would wonder in terror whether I had really done the chore, my homework or any other task, or had I only dreamt it? I would do things twice because I couldn’t make out what was real.
    Oh, the terrible noise inside my head, my ears, my soul! I was haunted, imprisoned. Father Janus had become my friend. I had started to trust him and talk to him, but now there could be no more talking! I could not turn to him or to any other priest, could not confess, could not turn to God.
    There was still my mother. Maybe she would do something to make it better. But she was too busy to sit down with any of her children to ask how we were feeling. There was never an intimate chat. She just didn’t have that kind of time.
    So I came up with my own desperate solution after the horror of the coal shed. Someone bad like me could turn to the devil and make a deal with him. With a fervent wish to buy time and avoid the flames of hell, I prayed to the evil one because I needed to rely on someone bigger than myself. ‘Lucifer,’ I began hesitantly, terrified of offending God still further by this switch in allegiance, ‘I need your help. I am a very bad girl. I am so bad that God is not my friend any more. I want you to be my friend. Please help me not to die.’
    My heinous prayer to the devil came out of the deepest desolation and abandonment. After a while, I felt that my prayers had been answered. I survived . But the guilt at my betrayal of God was terrible. It stopped me from breathingand eating, and I started to get things wrong, which in turn meant being derided by my father and the children at school. ‘The idiot! That homework she handed in was four days late!’ I arrived back late from lunch one day, after getting stuck in my baby brother’s high chair. Why did I ever try to sit in it anyway? I couldn’t get out of it and my mother’s amusement at my expense had made me more desperate. I slunk back to school, to be faced by the locked steel gates. There was now only one way to get back in: I had to knock on the convent door and ask a nun to lead me through to the adjacent playground. She took me through in silence. I noticed that the nuns were making communion wafers; so that was where they came from, those