All This Could End by Steph Bowe Read Free Book Online Page B

select group of people. And that your options in life are either to try and become part of that select group of people or to work hard, remain poor and allow yourself to be subservient to them. So that’s when he chose another path.’
    And Nina knew all to well that was when they began picking pockets, rolling servos, robbing banks. It started out small, just out of necessity, then grew and grew and grew, until he was stealing thousands and thousands of dollars. Until he didn’t need money anymore. Until he just did it for the thrills. Because it was thrilling. Because after a while, you get desensitised to crime, to the violence, to how bad it is. You forget how much you’re hurting people (or, worse, you start to enjoy it). It’s heady, the risk of being caught, getting away in a chase and feeling bulletproof. That’s how it seemed Sophia felt. But for Nina it was painful. She’d been part of three bank robberies, and dreaded the next.
    She stopped listening. Sophia made crime seem such a logical decision. She made other people out to be the wrongdoers. And she made money into such an insignificant thing. Why not take it from other people? Given all the unfairness of the world, claimed Sophia, how could a stray wallet or the contents of one bank’s tills even matter? Despite her mother’s best efforts, however, Nina had managed not be brainwashed. She did not believe in Sophia’s worldview. On the contrary, she knew how profoundly wrong it was.
    When Sophia told Nina and Tom these stories about her childhood, they were like fables, epics, good-versus-evil stories, all about love and life and death, and her family were always the good guys regardless of any bad things they did. Nina didn’t doubt Sophia’s recollections of crimes they had committed (sometimes she had to convince herself they were exaggerated, for her own sanity), but she did doubt the glowing image of Sophia’s dad in her stories. How could a good man turn into a criminal, and raise a criminal? How could he have been a good father if his child became a criminal? Unfortunately, Nina never got the chance to meet Sophia’s father and decide for herself how good a person he was. That’s always how it is, isn’t it?
    Sophia began her life of crime at seven (they didn’t have her robbing banks until she was twelve, tall enough to pass for an adult). She was far better at most crimes than her father was—she could make a person hand over money faster, she could be more discreet when she lifted a wallet. Perhaps it was her age (it freaked people out more, being robbed by a child, or by a pretty teenager), and starting so young, she’d had more time to perfect her craft.
    But Nina always wondered: was it Sophia’s destiny from birth to become a criminal? Or was she a monster created by circumstance, fed by a sense of indestructibility?
    Thomas certainly wasn’t indestructible. As a child, Nina had known that he was dead, but not how he had died. Shortly before she turned fourteen, when her mother was out one day, Paul told her that particular story. Thomas was shot in the shoulder by a police officer while he and Sophia had been robbing an armoured van. Seventeen-year-old Sophia got away while Thomas was arrested. Nina often asked herself how Sophia had managed to abandon her father like that? Why hadn’t she tried to get out of crime then, and start a normal life? If Nina were to abandon her family—not if but when Nina left her family, for her own good—she’d do it so she could escape this. But Sophia was different. She was probably worse than her own father. And would probably abandon her or Tom if a similar situation arose. Nina could hardly bear to think about it. The only explanation she could come up with was that Sophia lived by a different set of morals, and that she was very very deluded.
    Paul’s account ended with Thomas spending a few years in prison and dying at fifty. As far as Nina could tell, once Sophia’s father was in