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picking up the camera and holding it in front of her as if it might hide her nakedness and shame.
    ‘Why are you doing that?’ He had still been half-asleep. She thought later that she might have been able to pretend that he was dreaming, but she liked Paul, and had tried to explain.
    ‘I’m sorry. You scared me. It’s . . . It’s just that it helps me try to understand why I’m doing it, when I can see it in the third person.’ She looked down at the camera and saw that her hands were trembling. Paul lifted himself up and rested his head on his palm, his elbow pressing into the pillow.
    ‘Was I that bad?’
    ‘No, it isn’t that. But I’m a Christian. I’m supposed to believe in not having sex before marriage. But I keep doing this.’ She went over to the desk and drew out a large red photograph album. She held it out to Paul and he spent some minutes flicking through it. Twenty-five men in all. Each of them had his own page with his name and the date inscribed in Lee’s neat, looping handwriting. The first was her supervisor at university, an older man, thickset with wispy grey hair, the date just over two years earlier. Paul handed it back to her with a raised eyebrow.
    ‘So you want to remember the boys you fuck? I can understand that. I’d like a photograph of you, too. Something to carry around and look at when I’m down. Remind me I’d done it with a girl like you.’
    ‘No, that’s not it. I mean, maybe a little bit. I just feel like I need to keep a record of this, that’s all. This time in my life. I tried to stop it when I first went to church. Had this bizarre period of celibacy. But it didn’t work. I just couldn’t do it.’
    What she didn’t admit to Paul, barely even expressed to herself, was that she needed the guilt. She had been the first of them to attend the Course. She went with friends from school one Wednesday night in the summer holidays before she started university. An unassuming church sat on a hill above the harbour in her home town. One of her childhood friends was the daughter of the vicar and Lee and a few others had gone that evening out of solidarity. She sat in the hall of the church and listened to the gentle words of the priest. When they were asked to pray Lee could hear the sea in the distance booming against the breakwaters along the front. She thought of all the boys, all the ugly drunken writhing, all the cheating and the guilt and suddenly she found herself sobbing.
    In the discussion group afterwards, Lee sat and listened to her friends talking about how they prayed in secret, how they felt that they needed to believe in something, how the modern world disappointed them. She realised that she had given them little credit for their intelligence. Her friends would sit and listen as she played the piano, stare down at their plates while she and her parents indulged in long and spirited dinner-table conversations; she shone so brightly that they never got the chance. She felt ashamed as she looked into their kind, open faces and saw a huge amount of love for her. The priest sat and smiled as Lee spoke. She told them everything. Every sin and slip and all of the shame that stained her. All of the boys – too many to count – but never any love. The boys who she knew were in love with other girls, the boys whom other girls loved deeply. Her friends waited for her to finish and then they all hugged her. Finally, the priest put his hand down on the soft pile of her golden hair and blessed her.
    She had walked from the church glowing. She felt new-made, humble. Her wickedness seemed a thing of adolescence, meaningless in the light of her new-found faith. But slowly it came back. And she got drunk and fucked more boys and she needed to be cleansed again. So she went back to see the priest and slowly she began to believe very deeply, grew to feel that she had a personal and precious relationship with God. The priest gave her the details of a Course session that took