Josie Robs a Bank (and other stories) Read online

  “Yeah.” Grace’s face softened, just slightly. “It’s old and it smells a bit, but it’s home.”

  My eyes roamed across the bookshelf and the little table in front of the television. I wondered what she might watch these days. I remembered Mum saying why we couldn’t see Grace anymore - she’s been led astray. We don’t want her to lead you into temptation too. But we love Grace and we are praying for her.

  “And you’re... you’re okay?” What I really wanted to know was whether or not I could be okay, living like this. Out from under our father’s umbrella of protection, with no husband to guide me, no mother to teach me. There was never enough to eat at home, and I shared a room with two of my sisters, but I knew it might be even more difficult, living like Grace.

  “Of course. I’m free.”

  I winced. True freedom was found in Christ alone; I knew that. And for Grace to say that she was free now, meant she thought of herself as a prisoner before. A prisoner in our parents’ house with a loving family and a church to guide her; that seemed so wrong.

  And yet, it seemed a little bit right. After all, I had left as well.

  I put the laundry basket down, but didn’t let go of my Bible.

  “I’d really like to come in,” I repeated. My hands shook with guilt, and I rubbed my thumb nervously across the small scar on my forearm. It was rude to ask twice. Forgive me, I prayed again.

  Grace’s eyes pierced mine and she shook her head slowly.

  #

  Sobriety’s skirt almost reached her ankles, despite the thirty degree heat. I wondered what she must think of me, here in a singlet and basketball shorts – so immodest. I swirled the wine in my glass.

  “Want some?” I asked Sobie, tipping the wine glass towards her. She stepped back like it was a weapon, and I laughed. But the amusement was hollow, too cruel to be real fun. She thinks you’re going to Hell, I reminded myself.

  “That would be...”

  “Ironic,” I said. Although, she probably didn’t know what the word meant. Our home-school education was limited to what our mother knew, which wasn’t much, filtered through what we older children could remember when trying to wrangle our twelve siblings.

  “A sin,” Sobriety mumbled, looking down. Of course.

  “That never stopped Dad,” I snapped. I had a theory, that our parents had named us all after the virtues they wished they’d had. Dad’s drinking had been our family’s secret shame, but in hindsight, I thought Temperance, Honour, Joy and Valour were just as far out of reach.

  “Never mind. You’re underage anyway,” I said.

  Sobriety nodded. She looked at the ground in a position I knew too well. Once, I had called it humility. Now, I called it shame.

  The wine turned bitter in my mouth, mixing with the bile that had risen. Sobie had grown into the self-righteous girl my parents had wanted me to be, weak and demure but with confidence in her own purity.

  I hated her.

  “My boyfriend will be here soon,” I told her, watching for a reaction. Boyfriend. Not a daddy-approved courtship that was almost guaranteed to lead to marriage within the year. Let her be judgmental about that; let her think I was handing out pieces of my heart to every new man who smiled at me. The truth was, I didn’t even have a boyfriend. Where would I meet someone? Therapy? Work? I was a hairdressing apprentice; there was only one man at the shop, and he was married.

  “What’s he like? Your- your boyfriend, I mean.”

  I stared at her. Now I had to make up a description for this fictitious man, something realistic but shocking to her. “He has a tattoo,” I said. “And... his parents are divorced. I haven’t met his Dad yet, just his Mum.”

  “Does... he live here?” Sobriety shifted her weight.

  Nice. She thought I had just abandoned everything I believed in, and was off “fornicating” every night with my tattooed boyfriend. She probably thought I’d had an abortion too. “No,” I said shortly. “I’m not married.”

  Sobriety nodded. “Okay.”

  I swallowed, angry at myself for letting go of the power I had felt a moment earlier. Who cared whether Sobriety thought I had premarital sex? I didn’t need her approval. “He’s just coming over for a bit. You know, for some drinks. He’s bringing my friend Glen, from work. Glen’s gay.”

  That part wasn’t true either. I didn’t have any gay friends, not yet.

  “Oh.” Sobie said, in her soft baby voice. I hated that voice. It was our Mum’s voice. All the girls were encouraged to be “softly spoken” but it actually meant the women sounded like children. It had taken me years to train myself out of that voice. “Okay.”

  Sobriety twirled her long hair in one finger. It was a gorgeous colour, streaked through with a thousand shades from honey to chestnut. My clients would pay a fortune for that hair. A woman’s long hair is a glory to her, so the Bible says.

  “I’m a hairdresser now,” I told her.

  She nodded. “Did one of your friends cut yours?”

  “Yep.” I stroked a stray piece of my own hair back behind my ear. It was in a bob that wasn’t quite long enough to stay there for long, but I liked having it short. It was far easier to care for.

  I cast about for something else to say, something to make her squirm, but it had lost its appeal now. What I really wanted to know was why my sister had turned into a teenage runaway who’d appeared on my doorstep, forty minutes from where she lived.

  “What are you doing here, Sobie?” I asked.

  She quivered slightly. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Well,” I sneered. “How the mighty have fallen.”

  #

  I felt pressure behind the bridge of my nose, as tears threatened to escape. Grace had turned into somebody cruel. Would I be like that too, if I stayed here? Going back would mean punishment, of course, but then, I deserved it. Lord, show me Your will.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My hands felt clammy.

  “What for?” Grace asked. Her voice had gone kind again. It was confusing.

  “I don’t know. Imposing on you.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “If you don’t know what you’re apologising for, then don’t apologise. That’s meaningless. And you’re not imposing; I haven’t let you in.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Yeah,” Grace scoffed.

  “Why?” I wasn’t angry. I had a right to be, I thought. She thought our family was so bad she had to run away to an apartment in the city, but not bad enough to protect me when I came asking for help? That wasn’t fair. But I wasn’t angry with her, despite that. I was afraid.

  I couldn’t afford a taxi back. And if Grace was kind enough to drive me herself, Mum and Dad would know where I had been and why. They’d be livid.

  “What the... What do you mean, ‘why’? Do you not remember what you said to me when I left? You called me a reprobate – a sinner predestined for damnation. In hindsight, it’s so screwed up that a ten-year-old who didn’t know her seven times tables knew how to use words like that.”

  “I don’t remember that.” It may have only been a few years since Grace had been gone, but the memories of that time were fuzzy. “I was a child back then.”

  Grace snorted. “You’re still a child.”

  I didn’t feel like a child. I was mature enough to supervise my younger siblings, and I’d even earned some money teaching piano. Dad told me that young men were starting to show an interest in courting me, but he encouraged me to wait. I wasn’t a little kid anymore, not like I had been back then. Maybe after Grace left, I’d had to grow up quickly.

  “You abandoned me,” I told her.

  “I’m not your mother!” Grace’s voice cracked. “How could I abandon you, when you weren’t my responsibility? You know how many people move out of home when they’re nineteen? I was an adult, getting a job and a pla
ce of my own, and there is nothing sinful about that. But they -” she kicked the skirting board, her wine sloshing in the glass. “They taught us that by walking away from their house, I might as well be walking away from Heaven.”

  Grace’s words sank deep under my skin, raising goosebumps. Walking away from Heaven was exactly what I feared.

  “You hurt me,” Grace said, her voice sad and low. “I knew they would hate me, but you... I came back to try and visit, but you wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. I hesitated. “But you hurt me too.”

  My sister’s gaze travelled to where I rubbed absently at the scar on my arm. It was a souvenir of a hard smack from a ruler when I had disobeyed her once.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  “Yeah. But I’m sorry for that too. I was - just a kid.” Her lips smiled but her eyes were sad. “I was fourteen.”

  I looked at the carpet, where a thread had come loose and pulled across the threshold of her apartment. “I deserved it. I was a brat, and you warned me.”

  Grace reached a hand out to my chin, lifting it so that I saw her face. “No,” she said seriously. “You didn’t. They hurt us both. And it wasn’t okay.”

  I shrugged. “All parents discipline their kids. Spare the rod and spoil the - “

  “- Not all parents beat their kids. And since leaving, I’ve never met a single person who thinks it’s okay to put a moody hormonal teenager in charge of disciplining a pre-schooler. My therapist says... Look, it was wrong, okay? If you get nothing else from coming here today, I want you to believe me about that. Even if I comforted you afterwards. It was wrong.”

  Our youngest brother, Courage, was five now. The same gap as between me and Grace. The thought of him crying in pain made my gut clench. Our sister, Joy, was the one who’d always cared for him the most, but still, the idea that he might now be calling out for me, made my legs want to run back home. I remembered crying for Grace in the days and nights after she left. I remembered Faith coming instead, and how it wasn’t good enough.

  “I really did feel abandoned,” I whispered.

  Grace nodded, and her eyes filled. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  #

  Memories threatened to flood me. The beatings I had given Sobie, and the ones I had received myself. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to ground myself. Five things you can see. Door, carpet, smoke alarm, Sobriety’s skirt, handrail. Four things you can touch. Cold wine glass, rough paint on the wall, soft fabric of my basketball shorts, prick of a loose carpet staple against my bare toe. Three things you can hear. Voices murmuring from the apartment next door, a car door closing on the street, my own breathing. Two you can smell. The wine. The musty damp of my apartment - my home. One thing -

  “What are you doing?” Sobriety asked.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I looked at her, this time taking it all in. The soft, beautifully coloured hair that was frizzy around the edges with sweat of a hot day and a long car ride. The skirt that reached her ankles, “modest” but in a shade of blue that used to be her favourite, and probably still was. I looked at her hands, one still gripping a Bible, and the scar on her arm that I had made before I decided not to perpetuate that cycle.

  “You don’t...” I leaned against the doorjamb, searching for the words. “You don’t have to be like me, you know. To not be them.”

  “What else would I be like?” Sobie asked, her voice hopeful.

  I shrugged. “Whatever you want. You’d just be you.”

  I watched my sister’s face fill with terror at this thought. I knew it all too well. The notion of having to decide everything - from what to eat, to where to work, to who to talk to. It was paralysing.

  “It takes time,” I said. “And therapy.”

  Sobie nodded. “Do they make you take medicine? The - the therapists. Mum said most of the world is on antidepressants now because they don’t have Jesus.”

  I sighed. My neighbours came up the stairs and unlocked their apartment, with a curious look towards Sobriety and her laundry basket. I nodded a hello.

  “Sobie,” I said. “Nobody makes me do anything. I do take meds, because they help. And for what it’s worth, I take the pills and I have Jesus.”

  She froze at that, casting a judgmental eye over my outfit, my wine, and what was visible of my apartment. Anger bubbled up in my stomach.

  “Did they tell you I’d lost my faith?” I asked, but it was a rhetorical question. “They don’t know the half of it. My faith is stronger than ever. But God is kinder now.”

  “I don’t know what you believe,” Sobriety admitted.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you still a Christian?”

  Sobriety didn’t reply, but stood there staring at the carpet, quivering slightly. But I wanted to know. What could pull her from my parents’ clutches, make her accept that her friends would now shun her, her siblings may never talk to her again, unless one day they turned up at her door with a laundry basket of belongings? I wanted to know what it was that made her yearn for more, like I had.

  #

  Grace’s question shook me. Of course I am, I wanted to say. But I was here, wasn’t I? The doubts were big enough for me to run away. I had prayed the whole way here, but how could I know if He was listening? What if I was running away from His will for my life?

  “Grace?” I asked. “If you’re still Christian, why did you leave?”

  Grace sipped her wine and smacked her lips together. “Well. You wouldn’t remember, but there were several people who left the church around that time. It was a whole thing, this big church split where one of the men asked to see the records of finances, because of donations that hadn’t gone to a homeless shelter where they were supposed to. Dad went on and on about how it was inappropriate, the man wasn’t an elder, and he wasn’t trusting the authority of the pastors. He acted like they’d been burning Bibles or something. I asked him whether the money had been used for the homeless shelter, and he said that wasn’t the point. He said that, as a woman, I shouldn’t even be asking such questions.” She shook her head. “It was... The hierarchy. They just wanted power. I realised they were all hypocrites. And I knew that if I stayed, I’d be trapped forever, ‘submitting’ to a guy just like Dad. What about you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. How could I explain to Grace, that it was such a small, stupid thing that grew and grew? Questioning one thing somehow became questioning everything. I shook my head.

  “Pride,” I mumbled. “And discontentment.”

  Grace’s voice grew hard again. “Are you talking about me, or you?”

  I looked her in the eyes, my big sister, remembering the nights she whispered an extra bedtime story to me under the blankets with a torch, long after I was supposed to be asleep. I saw it then, the judgment we had heaped upon her, and the way she still carried shame.

  “Me,” I said. “You - you didn’t...” I didn’t know how to find the words.

  Grace waved a hand, freeing me from the apology I hadn’t managed to put together. “I know. What were you discontent about?”

  I chewed my lip. “You remember Anna Jones? She was -”

  Grace snorted. “ - My best friend for a time. Yeah, I remember.”

  “Yes. She’s going to university. She still lives with her family, and is courting Solomon, but she’s doing a nursing degree.”

  “Wow. Good for her.”

  I shifted, running my thumb along the edge of my Bible, and wondering how to tell Grace about our parents’ reaction and all the comments I had overheard. What’s the point, if she’ll be married soon? It’s not even a Christian institution, can you imagine who she might fraternise with? Poor Solomon, his family must be so worried. And the worst - They’re making an idol of education.

  I quoted Timothy. “In like manner also
, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.”

  Grace raised her eyebrows. “An old favourite, especially for you. Adorned with sobriety. I think I got in trouble once for braiding your hair. You were only about seven.”

  She didn’t understand. She had read the same Bible as I had. The same Bible our parents read, and Anna Jones, and her parents. Yet somehow, we all found our focus in different things; we’d all come to different conclusions about it.

  I tried again. “I just kept thinking about that line - ‘let the woman learn in silence with all subjection’.”

  Grace sighed. “Yeah. All subjection. It’s messed up.”

  I shook my head. “No. I meant... Let the woman learn. It repeated in my head, over and over. That page in my Bible...” I opened it up to show her, where the page was coming loose and the words had faded a little from running my fingers across them so much.

  “I want that,” I croaked. “But Dad would never...” I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I had done this, given up my whole life and travelled all this way, for four words.

  I looked at my sister in silence. In subjection. With my eyes, I begged her again to give me a chance. But if it be Your will, I prayed, may you close this door and accept my repentance.

  “Curiosity is not a sin.”

  Grace stepped back to free up the doorway and took another sip of her wine.

  Christmas Eve

  The night before Christmas, I unwrapped my little sister’s presents. Mum was in bed already, or she hadn’t got up yet. Dad was watching TV in the den, with the door shut.

  The living room was dark. I waited for my eyes to adjust and stood for a while next to the Christmas tree. I looked out the window, where multi-coloured light danced a routine across the neighbours’ roofs. The house across the road had too many LED reindeer, there would be no room for a real sleigh to fit on the tiles. But I stopped believing in Santa over a decade ago, back when I was Ivy’s age.