Trust (19 page)

Finn wasn’t exactly hiding, but no one knew he was there, crouched on the floor with big puffy curtains around him, squeezed into the space between the wall and the end of the couch. Lots of rooms in Pastor Tim’s house, lots of couches, and today being Christmas Day, lots of people too, visiting in between services at Faith Rise. No one was going to notice him, curled up out of sight. Mum thought he was upstairs with all the other kids but Finn felt safer here. Upstairs was Lily and Grace: dangerous.

He had his new puzzle for company. As he moved the bits of plastic around, trying to figure out how many ways he could make it work, Finn half-listened to his mum, still talking about what had happened at Stella-Jean’s house. She’d told everybody but she was still upset, he could hear it in her trembly voice. She didn’t want to stop talking about how awful it was, having a family who weren’t Christians, how Uncle Gerry never liked her and Jeejee never loved her, how they both said bad things about God. Now Pastor Tim and Gabriel were sitting there on the couch with her. Finn stayed very still.

Pastor Tim’s voice was all round and fuzzy, just like in church. Sticky, like those fuzzy seeds that stick to your socks. ‘You know, Angie, many dear members of our Faith Rise community have families who have caused them, too, great suffering. And this is the message I share with them, from the twenty-seventh psalm: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” The Lord feels your pain, dear girl, and he can heal every wound your family has inflicted on you.’ There was a rustle of movement; Finn twisted carefully around, and could see Pastor Tim’s hands extended across the low coffee table, holding his mum’s hands. ‘Let the love of God, like healing balm, pour into your heart.’

His mum said thank you, thank you, in a warm, wet voice, and Pastor Tim’s hands patted hers. After a while he got up and went somewhere else. Mum was having a little soft cry.

Then Gabriel started speaking, and his voice wasn’t smooth and slidy like it was when other people were around. There was that other edge to it that Finn knew, that angry edge that made him shiver.

‘I know what it’s like to have a family who wants to drag you under,’ he said, snaky and hard. ‘Destroy you, bury you. There’s something else our Lord Jesus Christ said that you should know, Angie. You should learn this by heart. Luke, chapter fourteen verse twenty-six: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and even his own life also, then he cannot be my disciple.” Know
that
truth, Angie. It set me free, and it can free you, too.’

Angie was silent for a few moments. Finn hardly breathed as he waited, wanting so hard to hear Mum say that it wasn’t right, you mustn’t hate your children, you mustn’t hate your mother. But instead he heard his mother take a big deep trembly breath, and let it out,
ohhh
, as though she’d finished doing something really hard. ‘I wasn’t ready to hear that before,’ she said, ‘but – oh, Gabriel, it’s true. It’s so
true
.’

‘Yes, hate,’ said Gabriel, sounding satisfied, like she’d just given him a present he wanted. ‘We have to hate everything and everyone who keeps us from God’s love.’

‘I never understood before that God
wants
me to hate my mother,’ his mum said. ‘All this time I’ve been fighting it – I didn’t know that it was
right
.’

Hate your mother
.
Hate your children
. Behind the curtain, Finn hugged his knees very tight and closed his eyes.
No, don’t. Don’t
.

‘Mothers!’ said Gabriel, almost spitting the word out. ‘Mothers should know how to protect their children, but they don’t. They let the enemy in, and bow down before him thinking that he’s God.’

Finn thought,
That is true. That is the only true thing I have ever heard him say
. His whole body twitched, like he was trying to shake off something crawling and horrible – and suddenly the curtains were thrown back, rings rattling, and Finn was exposed.

‘You little sneak!’ hissed Gabriel, looming above him.

‘Finnie!’ said his mother, leaning over the edge of the couch, her face full of surprise.

‘What sort of child are you, hiding so that you can eavesdrop on your elders?’

Finn quailed.

‘Finnie, why don’t you go upstairs?’ said his mother quickly. ‘Go and play with Grace and Lily and the other kids, honey. It’ll be much more fun than sitting around down here with all the boring grown-ups!’

Finn went slowly up the carpeted stairs and sidled into the room where the kids were watching a movie on the enormous TV. Something with princesses, and Grace was sitting up in a chair that had all gold on it, like a throne, with her yellow party dress spread out around her. Lily was sitting in the middle of a big couch, in a dress just the same but blue, with other girls crammed in by her, trying to be the ones who sat closest. There were a few boys there too, not on the couch. Finn sat on a chair a little bit away from everyone.

Some private signal went between Grace and Lily, and pretty soon no one was watching the movie any more. They were circling Finn, too close, and firing questions at him, first Grace, then Lily, and Lily again, then Grace.

‘Where does he stay at your house? What room is he in? Are you allowed in when he’s playing guitar? What about when the band is practising? Does he practise just with your mum? Does he close the door? Does he go into her room and close the door?’

Grace reached out her shoe, a pretty shoe, and tapped Finn’s sneaker with it. ‘What does he look like when he’s not wearing his special cripple shoe?’ she asked.

They were all standing too close to him, Grace and Lily and the other kids, all of them in the room at the top of the stairs. Finn hated being crowded in like this.

‘Does his cripple leg look horrible? Is it all twisted up and
deformed
?’

‘I don’t know,’ Finn muttered. Why did they care about Gabriel and his stupid leg? He tried to move away but the others wouldn’t let him, they all crowded close.

‘We can’t hear you, Finn!’ Lily jabbed him suddenly with her elbow. ‘Tell us!’

‘
I don’t know
,’ he yelled, raising his head. The encircling faces were alight, hungry. ‘I never
see
him!’

Grace gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘You never see him! What, is he invisible? Do you think Gabriel’s
invisible
?’ The other children joined in, laughing at him.

‘He always has the special shoes on, all the time,’ said Finn desperately.

‘He has to take them off
some
times,’ said Grace knowingly. ‘He has to take them off to have a shower, doesn’t he? He has to take them off to go to
bed
.’

Lily put her face right up to his. She had slightly popping-out eyes, just like Pastor Tim. ‘Does your mum take his special shoes off for him? Does she? When they go to
bed
?’

‘
Oo-ooh
!’ chorused the other kids, thrilled to bits.

‘Hey, Finn? Tell us! Does your mum —’

He had to get
away
. Finn shoved Lily aside, then another kid; he made a dash for the door and was almost to the stairs when Grace, in her yellow dress, caught up with him, slipped in front and wouldn’t let him past. He tried to dodge around her; she was faster. To the other side, but she was there first. He could hear the others behind them, laughing. She had him trapped.
Get away, get past.
Finn raised both arms and shoved Grace, hard, out of the way.

Grace seemed to take off, flying, arms windmilling as she landed on a step halfway down, and then to the bottom, where she stumbled a few paces before folding gracefully to the floor like an origami bird. Lily began screaming and the other children joined in. They were clustered now in a shrieking crowd at the top of the stairs, clutching at each other, while slowly, stiff-legged, step by step, Finn went down. His eyes were fixed on Grace lying there, still. Still – except for one hand, which reached down and smoothed the hem of her yellow dress so that it sat nicely just above her knees, then rested again like a delicate seashell at her side.

A thunder of feet as the grown-ups came running. They were all calling out, all yelling at once, and the kids were still shrieking from above. The racket pinned Finn back against the wall. As Helen threw herself to the floor, snatching her fallen daughter into her arms, Grace’s eyes fluttered open, and she shot a quick triumphant look at Finn before allowing her lids to half-close again. ‘Mummy,’ she whimpered piteously.

‘What happened?’ cried half-a-dozen adult voices.

Lily’s voice rang like a bell. ‘Finn pushed Gracie down the stairs!’

‘No!’ It was Angie. His mum was coming toward him, her face bunched up with fright. ‘It must have been an accident! You didn’t mean to push her, did you, Finnie?’

An awful, avid moment of silence. Finn nodded, slowly, up and down. He had to.
Yes.
Up and down.
Yes, I did.
Angie made a sound that was like something being torn, and her legs went sideways, as though she was going to fall over, but instead she stumbled backwards and knocked into another person, who propped her up.

‘He was talking about Gabriel,’ said Lily in the ringing tones of someone who’d heard preaching all her life. ‘He kept telling all these horrible stories about Gabriel’s poor leg. He was calling him a
cripple.
Gracie didn’t want to listen so he pushed her down the stairs.’

Gasps, murmurs. And then Gabriel’s arm whipped out, a striking snake; he grabbed Finn by the shoulder and spun him around, bending him face forward, folded in the middle, in that grip Finn knew to be inescapable. He struggled anyway, twisting around to try to get free.

Gabriel gestured Angie to come forward. As she did, Finn caught a glimpse of her anguished face before Gabriel swung him around again and then tapped, twice, on the backs of his legs, bare below his shorts.

‘Punish him.’

His mother started crying. ‘He didn’t — No, it wasn’t —’ Their voices sounded somehow as though they were talking only to each other, yet Finn could
feel
all the others, every single person in that crowd: their hot eyes, their eagerness to see him hurt.

‘ “Withhold not correction from the child”,’ said Gabriel. His voice didn’t even sound angry now, just cool and hard. ‘He could have killed her. You must punish him, Angie. You.’

‘But he’s just a little boy,’ she pleaded.

‘It’s the
enemy
inside him, and you know it!’ Gabriel said more loudly. ‘Proverbs nineteen: “Chasten your child while there is still hope, and let not your soul spare for his crying.”
While there is still hope
, Angie! Will you not save your own child?’

Angie was still crying. Finn, twisting his head, could see her stepping closer, jerkily, as though forces were struggling inside her. Her face was screwed up tight, she raised her arm, and turned her face away as, with a tortured exhalation, she brought her hand down on to his bare legs. Not very hard; it didn’t have to be hard to hurt him, shame him. Finn cried out wildly with the shock of her betrayal.

Four times, she did it, while Grace and Lily and all the other children watched. While Pastor Tim and Helen and all the other adults watched. With the second smack her crying seemed to grow less, and her resolve greater. After the third, she looked at Gabriel and he told her with his face,
one more
, and she raised her hand and smacked Finn one more time.

Then she stepped back, and Gabriel let him go, and Finn rolled himself into the smallest ball he could form, arms curled around his head, trying to hold himself together.

SIXTEEN

Susanna groaned. ‘Oh, can’t you just stay there at the sewing machine for a few minutes longer, sweetie? I just need to get the arms right.’

‘No, Mum,’ said Stella-Jean severely. ‘I can’t
pretend
I’m doing something just so you can take four hours to draw it. Take photographs, why don’t you? Don’t most artists do their drawings from photos?’

‘Working from photographs isn’t the
same
,’ Susanna moaned. She knew she was sounding petulant but it was so frustrating. Here she was nearly at the end of the summer holidays and her ‘Women and Work’ idea was still nothing more than a collection of sketches, most of them incomplete.
And all of them second-rate, if that.
‘I took a whole lot of photos of my friend Andrea from book group, working at her potting wheel, but they just don’t have the — I don’t know. The
vitality
.’ A life drawing class, that’s what she needed, like Jean had suggested months ago.
I could’ve enrolled in a summer school, and had weeks with a life model. Why didn’t I do that?

‘If we’d gone to
Bali
for the summer, you could have had all the women you needed, working away right in front of you,’ said Stella-Jean snarkily. ‘Women in Bali are working all the time. And for a few bucks you could have paid someone to pose for you all day, if you wanted.’

Susanna refused to rise to the bait, even though she was sick of hearing about how they should have gone to Bali. Stella-Jean had been crabby and argumentative for weeks. Bored, that was Gerry’s theory, without her brother to scrap with, Seb being away at a tennis camp his coach was running down at Portsea. And no Finn to look after, Angie having rung a few days after the Christmas Day fiasco to announce they were going to Tasmania for the holidays; Gabriel, she told her sister rather frostily, had been invited to be the musical director of a month-long Christian youth symposium. Or something like that. Susanna had mostly felt thankful to have a break, and concentrate on her art.

‘Just one more sketch?’ she wheedled. ‘Half an hour?’

‘Sorry, Mum, but I’ve got to get over to Tessa’s. We’re trying to build up stock for the market next Sunday, it’s the first one since Christmas. You’re taking us, yeah? And picking us up?’

‘I suppose so, if it’s my turn.’ Susanna and Tessa’s father Leo alternated the chauffeuring duties.