‘Actually, Vanessa,’ the Examining Brother said, creaking forwards in the best cane chair, ‘we aren’t told that the fruit Adam and Eve partook of in the Garden of Eden was an apple.’ I nodded, bowing my head, and picked at the scarlet hair dye that stained my cuticles. Brother Barry Hepworth looked around the audience of sixty Brethren and Sisters with barely contained triumph. He had wanted to set me straight for years. This was my punishment for reading Malcolm X when I was fifteen and declaring Jesus’ soul-man blackness in Sunday school.

My family were terrified. We were all crammed into a cousin’s home in Rowville for my baptism into the faith. Solemn but happy Brethren and Sisters spilled from the lounge room into the salmon-coloured kitchen, lining the halls with fold-up camp chairs and balancing note-filled King James Version Bibles on their knees. If you read the Bible correctly, they preached, baptism is the only way to salvation.