I stood on the basketball court that night and thought seriously. The ball was hard and cold, and it bounced with the sound of an outsized steel ball-bearing. Yet it seldom came near me. There were times when I could have walked away unnoticed from the court. Even when I seemed in full view of my team-mates, my thin body might have been as transparent as ice. I tried to think of myself as containing something solid and enduring. I still imagined the space inside me as containing a soul. And even at the age of eighteen I kept the image of my soul that I had first acquired as a small child. My soul was a buoyant object shaped like an Australian Rules football. Its surface should have been white and delicate like a petal but it was more often grey and soiled. Knowing from theology that my soul belonged to the spiritual order of things, I had come to imagine it as superimposed on my lungs and stomach and liver - a pale wash on a separate sheet overlaid on the full-colour diagram of my insides. I got no reassurance from thinking of my soul. It belonged more to God than to me. And it was too little distinguished from the souls of others. When the basketball team lined up to be photographed - all of us practicing Catholics of the late 1950s - the men around me had thrust their chests at the camera as though they hoped the photograph would show the rows of white football-shapes floating inside rib-cages.