I had a momentary, nightmarish image of myself, white as a corpse, spraying blood and vomit out in great, rasping gulps as the congregation watched in horror and amazement and my father stood in shocked silence with the plate of wafers in his hand.

I almost fainted there and then. Maybe I was being punished, I thought, with desperate, guilty logic. I thought no-one had seen me in my mother’s bedroom; I had not confessed it-could not confess it to my father, not even at the confessional-and I had thought in my wicked stupidity that I had escaped punishment. But God had been there all the time, God had seen it all and now He was going to make me drink blood, and I knew I was going to faint, really faint, because I could almost taste the dull slick of blood in my throat and if I defiled the Host I’d be damned for ever and ever…

With a tremendous effort I swallowed my terror. I had to go on. I had to go through with the ceremony. If I didn’t my father would find out what I had done because I would have to tell him-and the thought of what he would do to me then goaded me out of my paralysis and set me half running towards the church. It wasn’t blood, I told myself furiously. It was just cheap wine. And it wasn’t the dead flesh of some old, crucified corpse. It was wafers, wafers because bread went stale too fast; I’d seen them in the casket Father kept in his special vestry. I looked up and saw the church’s maw ready to engulf the six of us, dressed in white for all the world like six little white Hosts, and I suppressed a blasphemous urge to giggle. Mentally I thumbed my nose at it:

(I don’t care…I’m not scared…

You can put your stupid wafers you-know-whe-ere)

Then I really did giggle, so loudly that my father glanced sharply at me and I immediately turned the giggle into a cough. I was feeling much better already.

We waited for what seemed like hours as the service droned on and on, my father’s words like the heavy, sugar-soaked wasps in the apple orchard. I fixed my eyes on the two girls sitting opposite me to the left of the aisle: there was Liz Bashforth, plain and red-faced in a white dress several sizes too small, and Prissy Mahoney, whose mother had ‘lost’ her husband ten years earlier. Rumour had it that there hadn’t been any husband, only a fine-talking Irish good-for-nothing who had run away to London, leaving his ‘wife’ and daughter to fend for themselves. Either way, Prissy’s mother seemed to have fended for herself all right, because Priss was dressed in a brand-new Communion robe with lace and white ribbons, white gloves and little white shoes. As I looked shyly at her over my hymn-book I could see the way her hair fell loose in two neat sheaves over her breasts. The word made me blush a little, but I was at an age where my curiosity about girls by far exceeded the little real knowledge I had and I found myself looking at her again, my eyes creeping relentlessly towards the little swellings at her beribboned bodice. She looked back at me almost smiling, and I turned away hastily, blushing deeper. But I always looked again.

I was hardly paying attention when at last my father gave the signal for the Communion. I stood up hastily, taking my place in the line without taking my eyes off Prissy. As we made our way towards the altar I noticed that she was still aware of my looking at her, flicking her auburn hair over her shoulder with careless precision, her hips rolling in a childish parody of seduction.

I was so enthralled that for a moment I hardly noticed that the other boys were watching her too, with audible sniggers. For a moment I was genuinely bewildered; then I froze in shock. There was blood on the back of Prissy’s white communion dress, seeping through the shiny silk just at the point where her legs met her body: a small irregular keyhole where blood had trickled slowly through the fabric during the hours she sat on the bench. I felt a sour panic cramp my stomach and the whole of my body was suddenly coated in slick ropes of sweat. It was as if my blasphemous thoughts about the Host had taken shape; I stumbled in the aisle, fascinated and horrified at the bloody keyhole in the back of Prissy’s dress, unable to take my eyes from it. I was reminded in that nightmarish instant of my father’s musical toys and I imagined Prissy Mahoney as the dancing Columbine in her blue-and-white dress, set into perpetual motion by my own sacrilegious thoughts. I saw her begin to move, at first jerky and graceless, then with the inhuman fluidity of her awakened mechanism, her hair flying, her bare legs kicking obscenely at the air, her breasts jiggling loosely at the lacing of her bodice while all the time she smiled her parodic, gruesome smile and the blood flowed down her legs as if it might never stop…

Much later I learned about menstruation and, although I never lost my disgust of the thought, I came to understand that poor Prissy was not the monster my twelve-year-old self thought her. But then I was totally ignorant and I simply knew that God was watching me with an eye as huge and pitiless as the sky; knew I was damned for mocking the Host and for daring to come unshriven to Communion. The sign was blood, like the blood of the chalice and the blood in the heart of the wafer, blood which was the legacy of the Original Sin, blood, blood…

They told me later that I collapsed screaming to the floor of the aisle. My father was as icily composed as ever, ordering me to be removed to the vestry while the others took Communion and then carrying me home to bed without a single comment. I lay in bed for twenty-four hours while rumours chased from one end of the village to the other: I was possessed by devils (why else would I have fallen into a fit at the sight of the Host?); I was insane; I was dead.

No doctor came to see me, although my father sat by my side all the time with his Bible and his rosary, praying through my fever and delirium. I do not know whether I spoke in my sleep-if I did, I cannot remember, and my father never spoke of it-but when I awoke the next day he hauled me out of bed without a word, washed and scrubbed me and dragged on my Communion clothes. In silence we went to the church and, in front of a good-sized crowd of onlookers, I took the wafer and the wine without the slightest incident. Thus the rumours were-not silenced, for in a village community no scandal is ever really dead-muted, at least when my father was within earshot. The official story was that I had suffered a slight epileptic seizure, and this was judged an adequate excuse to keep me away from school and the influence of other boys. My father’s eye, like God’s, was on me all the time; but he never mentioned the episode in the church, and for the second time I felt an uneasy, contemptuous elation at my narrow escape. As I grew older I forgot the incident altogether.

Until now.

Prissy Mahoney had been dead for twenty years; my father was dead and I would never again set foot in the village of my birth…so why should I feel the events of that long-forgotten summer so close, so immediate? I was a fool, I told myself savagely; that was all. There was no-one to judge me now. No-one.

But my mood had changed, and although I tried to recapture my earlier feeling of carefree, shameless joy I could not, reaching Cromwell Square just before dawn with a sour stomach and heavy eyes.

I looked into Effie’s room as I came in and was shaken by the bitter depth of my reaction as I saw her, white and peaceful among her tumbled sheets, innocent as a child. What right had she to look innocent? I knew her, and that narrow, talismanic keyhole of flesh between her legs; knew her sickening impurity. The hypocrite! If she had been a real wife I should not have had to make my bed with a Haymarket whore tonight or walk home in the cold dawn pursued by the Furies of my remembrance…