BIRTH OF AN ATHEIST

Liz Milne

Josie really wanted to believe in God, but somehow, when He didn’t smite Tristan da Sousa down after he’d ‘accidentally’ touched her bum in Sunday School for the third time, she just couldn’t.
            Dragged to church most Sundays by her unwilling, barely believing parents who only went themselves because it was the ‘done thing’, Josie had learned the verses the Sunday School teacher had chalked onto the worn and cracking blackboard at the front of the small, rather stuffy room that had been set aside to appropriately indoctrinate the congregation’s collective offspring.
            ‘I’m going to heaven,’ a younger (six-year-old) Josie had declared proudly. ‘Because I’ve got the longest hair, and God says that girls’ hair should be uncut so it is a glory to her.’
            ‘That’s vanity!’ scolded the Sunday School teacher, an involuntary hand caressing her own ear-length bob.
            ‘But it’s in the Bible!’ protested Josie.
            ‘Not in the verses I’ve taught you. It’s prideful to be vain – I have taught you that one!’
            ‘But you also said that all scripture was God-breathed.’ Josie wasn’t backing down. ‘And that means that every word of the Bible is true, you said. So if it’s in the Bible that girls should have long hair, and my hair is the longest –’
            ‘That’s enough!’ The Sunday School teacher’s face was a funny colour.
            Not really red, not quite purple. Josie would have found it funny if the teacher’s expression hadn’t been really quite scary, a bit like Daddy’s when he put his face up close to Mummy’s and talked in that funny hissing way through his teeth. His face went that colour too.
            So Josie did what she did when Daddy’s face did that.
            She hushed up and went to hide at the back of the classroom.
            That had been the first time she’d had a question.
            But the last was definitely when Tristan got handsy three times and no one said or did anything: not the other kids (too scared that he would punch them); not the Sunday School teacher (it was amazing what she couldn’t see!); and, apparently, not God either.
            So the fourth time Tristan’s unpleasantly warm, sweatily moist, hopeful fingers reached towards her behind, Josie (now twelve) whirled, hoicked her knee firmly into his balls, just as Mum had taught her, then punched him right in the eye.
            ‘Oh,’ she said to herself. ‘At last, I’ve found something to believe in. Me. Me and my left knee.’