Gods.

I've spent my whole life being chased by other people's gods, and running away into the shadows until they get sick of trying to recruit me to their cause.

There was the Catholic god when I was young: austere and vengeful in the tales told by my mother as she recalled her upbringing under his auspices - sanctioning twisting of hair, striking with a cane and refusing to bury those who have ever been divorced. Like the airbrushed London gangsters of the 1960s, he only punishes those who are asking for it.

I tried to talk to this god, but I saw him for what he is. He cast a shadow over the very sick beginning of my life when I could have fallen at any minute from my slender tightrope. Death being at least as likely a possibility as survival, I was christened at the age of three hours. That my father had sidestepped the Catholic church was (literally) a sin to my grandmother, and I always assumed I'd never really been forgiven.

I spent time melting away to the sanctuary of an upstairs room, or trying not to let my breathing be heard, when Jehovah's Witnesses arrived at the door brandishing their dogma, repeated for posterity in innumerable copies of Watchtower.

There has been the need to raise my voice in the street - the last bastion of those with no further argument - to the proselytisers who care about the destinty of my mortal soul.

Then there are the African gods, whose roots are not suspended in the sky, but preserved in every cat, person, stone and house that has ever existed. The fatal lack of of empirical observation condemns those, too, though: while those with the power to see such things can tell a sick tree from a healthy one because of the strength of its life force, I can only see a tree.

I've spent forever either fleeing such gods, or frozen in terror at the thought of them. Now, the ironic thing is that I've lifted a fragile, reluctant woman onto the pedestal from which gods stare down icily, and just as she was warming to her role as my arbitor, she had to leave.

So I am, once again, without religion - and without religion, it was observed, man is nothing. This time, though, it has been wrenched from my grip instead of relinquished voluntarily. The scorch marks are striped and sore on my fingers: stigmata.