The closest I ever come to any kind of bad touching is when I am twelve, on a retreat weekend to prepare for my Confirmation into the Catholic Church. It is a set of circumstances so clich\u00e9 that my overwhelming urge now is to roll my eyes and never think about it again except occasionally, and when I do remember it is with dull surprise, as though I am hearing a story about someone else. Nothing really happens in it, after all. One of the guys running the retreat centre (dark hair, part Italian like me, he says, early thirties at a guess) takes a fancy to me and holds my hand a few times, stands close enough for me to know I\u2019m uncomfortable without knowing why. There are a few comments from the other kids, darker in tone than anyone realises in our cusp-of-adolescence-innocence, about me having a boyfriend, and he\u2019s an older man too. When I tell my mum about it later, when I get back, saving it until just before bed because there is still a shame in it, and it is easier to say in the dark, she asks me in a voice that I will only later understand is thick with fear and potential panicky fury, \u201cWhat did he do?\u201d Nothing, I say. And I tell her the whole of it. Nothing really happened but whatever did, it probably wasn\u2019t right. My best friend\u2019s mum was one of the supervising adults; I was safe. Nothing ever really would have happened. The next day, my mum, sick with relief, will ask my friend\u2019s mother about it and she will say, yes, she had picked up on it, she had kept an eye out. My mum tells me the man seemed like he was a very lonely person. I was safe. There\u2019s so much worse that could have happened.<\/span><\/p>\n Worse does happen, that year, and if it\u2019s someone\u2019s fault then it\u2019s Philip Pullman\u2019s. I\u2019m sitting in church, the Saturday evening six o\u2019clock service, which we get to go to when mum is tired or we beg especially hard, because it\u2019s only half an hour long and there are no hymns. Our priest begins the service \u2013 he\u2019s a liberal priest, as they go, in years to come he will do a sermon that comes as close as he\u2019s allowed to giving homosexuality the thumbs up \u2013 and tells us who we\u2019re praying for this week. And from nowhere, the thought \u2013 clear as a bell, in a voice that is and is not mine \u2013 \u201cYou don\u2019t get to tell me who to pray for.\u201d And the split second before it lands, \u201cOh my god, he was right.\u201d The he is Philip Pullman, the thing he is right about is religion, and from that moment my belief is irrevocably, painfully altered. The final voice of the three that plagues me in that moment is the one that thinks to record it. \u201cOn Saturday 9th August, 2003, I stopped believing in God.\u201d (Not true, I will find out. Not nearly true.)<\/p>\n It is a blow to my still-shaping sense of the world because for several months, I have been talking to God. And God has been listening. Not talking back, of course, that was reserved for Joans and Bernadettes and Th\u00e9r\u00e8ses of Lisieux, and even I am not presumptuousness enough to aspire to sainthood (save, of course, the occasional idle wondering whether I could be the second Mary, but that\u2019s for the drama more than the kudos.) But God has been listening. I can feel it with a clarity unlike anything I have known before. When I pray, He lends a kindly, attentive ear: when I ask dutifully for him to look after those I care about and then desperately to make things a little better, that maybe we could have not quite so many arguments, that maybe I could be better, kinder, selfless, possessed of virtues I know already I do not have. It is like picking up a phone and knowing with absolute certainty I will get through first time, no waiting. I have acquired, in those months, something close to serenity. Perhaps it is even grace.<\/p>\n