Creepy and Maud by Dianne Touchell Page B

either. I was never bothered by these pauses when it came to church questions. Church questions require pauses. It gives the answers, when you get them, a certain authority. My mum was pretty then, too, and information from attractive people is much more believable. When she told me, with all the authoritative weight of pauses and prettiness behind her, that animals don’t have immortal souls because they don’t have proper hearts, I cried all the way home.
     
    Years later, when I put the same question to her while she was nursing a fresh puncture wound from Dobie Squires, she was less sure. All she said was: ‘I fucking hope not.’
     
    Mum didn’t know the answer, really, but felt obliged to make something up that sounded at least partially consistent with the negligible amount of doctrine she had managed to absorb. Good on her for having a go. But I can date my resistance to church pants and church attendance from the processing of that information. Animals don’t have souls. I suppose that’s why we can eat them with impunity. I never looked at my guinea pig the same way again, though. And I was angry with God for withholding a real heart from Chuckles.
     
    All this is how I’ve ended up in a religious school. Dad went along with it because he thinks I’ll get a bettereducation at a private school. I know this because he often says from the head of the dinner table, ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school,’ and Mum wraps both hands around her tumbler of red and nods like a sage. This is supposed to be the panacea. After every problem at school or with school, Dad will intone: ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school.’ Not that any of the problems at school involve me. But any and all problems, from uniform violations to girls drawing dirty pictures, inspire the production of one of those expensively produced parent flyers and guarantee Dad’s dinner-table mantra. (A recent flyer revealed that better education is not the only thing you get at a private school—apparently, a better grade of weed is available in private school toilets.)
     
    Religion seems all too fragile and easily offended to me. It’s not that there are more rules in religion than in other things. It’s that it doesn’t cope well when the rules are broken. It sends flyers and has meetings and rewards guilt and exclusivity. And then, before you know it, it’s bombing buildings. If you ask me, God seems awfully sensitive. Maybe he is a girl!
     
    I got to thinking about religion again after Maud’s nanna died. Especially when my mum baked one of her famous sausage curries (with sultanas in the sauce) and took it next door. She looked really happy when shecame back from delivering it. Within a week, though, she was bitching about the fact that they hadn’t returned the casserole dish. She even asked Dad to go get it. He refused. It soon occurred to me that Mum didn’t really want the dish back. She could build years of acrimony from that ‘stolen’ casserole. The casserole dish, and what was in it, was a symbol of Mum’s agenda. Every now and then, during a wee nip, I’d hear her muttering, ‘I even put sultanas in the sauce.’
     
    The casserole dish became a prisoner in a holy war. Maybe Li deliberately kept it. Maybe it was just forgotten. Either way, Mum loved being able to hate the theft of it. Over a very short period of time, that casserole dish grew in size and importance. It had a five—no, ten—litre capacity. It was the only casserole dish Mum ever had with a true fitting lid. It was the most expensive casserole dish Mum had ever bought—an investment. No, it was a wedding present, irreplaceable and with great sentimental value.
     
    Did you know that the word religion comes from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’? I read that somewhere. Probably in my Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM). To bind. And since we are more bound by