On trust

My mother trusted me, or so she even convinced herself, though why she should, I cannot understand. There was little evidence for my trustworthiness. 
 
I was the child who stole sweets from the shop my parents once owned in Healesville, crept inside the store attached to where we lived. A single room, with glass fronted cabinets, and shelves loaded with boxes of cereal, biscuits and tins of beans, spam, and spaghetti and all the stuff that was quick and easy to consume. 
 
There was a tall fridge in one corner filled with soft drink and milk and shelves below the counters stocking loose stuff like sugar and flour. Cleaning agents, soap powder, cakes of body soap and deodorant.  
 
When my younger sister and I were home alone, I led her astray while the others had gone to Mass. 
 
In the shop we filled our pockets with chocolate coated liquorice bullets, a handful of long-lasting aniseed balls, red, green, and yellow snakes one for each finger and a fistful of Smarties, all stuffed into our pockets. Then skulked to our bedroom and gorged ourselves till we heard the family car pull up in the driveway.  
 
The sound of the hand brake ripped into position, and we threw the leftovers out the window. A stupid move because one of my brothers found them there and dobbed on us. The first of my episodes of stealing. 
 
On the second, a few years later when I must have been ten, my mother, refused to believe I was the child whom the milk bar man reported stealing lollies from his counter. More upmarket sweets, this time: chocolate bars and flakes, Violet Crumbles and entire blocks of Cadbury chocolate. These I scoffed alone while walking the nearby streets of Camberwell.
 
Still my mother trusted me, even when she had every reason not to. I was her namesake and something in the name led her to believe I was like her, good and holy, determined only ever to do the right thing.
 
Not so for me, though I could never tell her as much and given she did not want to know, it was easy for me to sneak out the back door at night a decade later after I had fallen in love with my first ever proper boyfriend. 
 
Seven years older than me, he rented an apartment in Highett a couple of kilometres from where we then lived, and I snuck out at twilight before total darkness had descended. 
 
My mother believed I was studying after I said ‘Goodnight. I’m off to my books.’ She never checked on us, my sister and me, before taking herself to bed. Or so I wanted to believe. 
 
My father does not feature in this story. He was there in the background but for once I did not pay him any heed, and most of the night he was sleeping. 
 
I made my way through the back streets of Cheltenham past the school, church, and factories onto the Nepean highway where my boyfriend lived. I spent the night in his arms. Or so I like to say, but you cannot trust me either. 
 
I imagine we slept in the same bed after the usual peremptory sex, but I lacked experience, and he lacked the finesse of other men I came to know later over the years. But it was fun to behave in ways my mother despised. Breaking the laws of chastity until marriage, not letting her in on my secret.
 
As soon as early light crept into the sky, I pecked my sleeping boyfriend on the cheek and snuck through his front door back onto the gently glowing street. There were hardly any cars to accompany me on my long walk home. 
 
Slipping beyond the back door at my home a door we never locked, I tiptoed up the hallway to my bedroom. Terrified that my mother, usually the first up, might suddenly appear. But she did not. Into my bedroom where my younger sister slept. I could trust her then to keep my secret. She opened her eyes and raised herself briefly to take one look at me then slipped back under her blankets for more sleep. I dragged on my nightie and crawled under the blankets. 
 
My mother once told us the story of how during the Second World War when Nazis came to her parent’s home to check on the presence of able bodied men, such as her then young husband and brother, whom they wanted to enlist into their army, the two men hid in the roof cavity while the soldiers went from room to room feeling the sheets on beds to check whether they had been occupied recently.
 
My mother could have checked my sheets. They were ice cold when she snuck her head around our door to say good morning. 
 
‘Time to get up,’ she said. ‘I hope you slept well.’ 
 
Something in the tone of her voice, or in my own knowledge of my night away left me wondering, did my mother know I had spent the entire night away with a man? 
 
She never let on, and I never filled her in on my secret. To me ample proof, she could not trust me.