Читать книгу Not My Idea of Heaven - Lindsey Rosa - Страница 14

Chapter Nine

Bound by the Rules

We all took it in turns to have Fellowship members to our homes on Sundays for a meal. Sometimes we had to have them after the morning meetings for the ‘Break’. I really liked the ‘Breaks’. Sausage rolls, crisps and sandwiches would come out on trays, like a kind of buffet. The other kids and I would run around stuffing food in our mouths as we played. I especially liked the evening meal. If it was Mum’s turn we would arrive home from the last meeting of the day and open the front door to the smell of meat and potatoes roasting in the oven that Mum had left on using the timer. Then it was a rush to get the table laid for ten or twelve visitors.

Mum used the best cutlery. It lived in a wooden canteen that Mum and Dad had received as a wedding present in the 1960s. I loved to open the lid and look at the dull shine of the stainless steel. I hoped that one day Mum would give it to me so that I could feel proud when I entertained the Fellowship.

My place would be set at a little trolley on wheels. If I was lucky, the visitors would have kids, and we would mess around the whole evening while the adults talked endlessly. More often than not, I ended up lying across Mum’s knee, exhausted. I’d drift off to sleep in that position, feeling secure with the drone of voices washing over me.

Mum and Dad groaned when we were told it was our turn to go to the Walkers’ house for dinner and we went with a feeling of dread. Once, a Fellowship member visiting the Walkers for lunch had found a hair in his cup of tea. This news had spread like wildfire through the Fellowship and now no one wanted to go to their house. It did not help that all the family had greasy-looking black hair – it wasn’t even as if the hair in the cup of tea would be clean!

So when I heard that Colin Walker was coming to live with us I was mortified.

This was my first experience of Fellowship members being ‘shut up’.

I had heard that it was a terrible thing, but I couldn’t see why. If it meant that Fellowship members came to stay at our house, well that was exciting to me. Victor’s bed was replaced with bunk beds, which were squeezed into his tiny room. Our house was buzzing with anticipation. We’d never had anyone to stay before. Colin arrived with one suitcase and was grinning madly. To me, a four-year-old, he looked like a huge gangly stick insect, with the Walker mop of black greasy hair on top. I soon grew to love having Colin around and forgot to check for greasy black hairs in our tea cups. From then on, my games became even more adventurous. I had two brothers to tease.

Colin had an obsession with lawn mowers and would bring them home to dismantle in the back garden. Mum was furious about it. The garden was her territory, and here he was, spilling oil and leaving rusty engines all over the lawn. He’d work away out there for hours, but we never really knew what he was doing. The lawn mowers never seemed to work.

The strange thing was that Colin’s mum, dad and sister never came to visit. And they lived only a few streets away. When I asked Mum why no one came to see Colin she explained the big secret. She told me that his sister, Lois, had ‘given in to temptation’. I was too young to be told what she’d done, but I could tell it was a serious matter.

Colin’s family stopped coming to the meetings and no one in the Fellowship saw them. Colin was old enough to leave home, and free of sin, so he was encouraged to go to a Fellowship household that hadn’t been touched by the Devil.

Then, after a few months, as suddenly as he had arrived, Colin moved out and everything returned to normal. Apparently, Lois had left home, taking her sins with her.

I never thought anything like this would happen to us.

After Colin left, we went back to visiting the Walkers every so often for dinner, but Lois was never mentioned again.

I was just glad that my own sisters were still around.

Being so much older, Alice was almost motherly towards me and treated me like a baby doll. One day she said she was going shopping in the town and asked if I wanted anything. I said, immediately, ‘The star-shaped transforming figure.’ I had seen it on the toy pages of the Argos catalogue. It was a solid plastic device in light lilac and I thought it would change my life. I waited impatiently for her to come home and almost wet myself with excitement. At last she appeared and, with a flourish, produced a package for me. My heart sank. Where was the cardboard box? What she handed to me was a soft tissue-wrapped parcel, which I opened. Out fell a pair of suede, fake-fur-lined mittens. Oh, the disappointment!

Shortly after the mitten incident Alice married her childhood sweetheart, Mike Edmonds. She left the house crying her eyes out. What was all the fuss? I wondered. She was only moving round the corner! She drove off with her new husband in his car, dragging the tin cans behind it that had been tied on by my brother and his friends. White clouds of shaving foam drifted into the air, ruining the carefully sprayed message ‘Good Luck!’ It was a time of great celebration and joy in our house.

Such joy.

It’s hard to remember when I first noticed a change in our house. Certainly for the first few weeks after Alice left I was still reeling with excitement. Now I had to share a room with only one sister and had a new house to visit. Alice seemed a little reluctant to let me come and mess up her nice new house, but it was arranged that I would have breakfast with her, one Sunday morning, after the Supper. I couldn’t wait!

Well I was in for a shock. At home we ate our cereal first, then hot stuff, such as baked beans on toast, or fishcakes. I sat down at Alice’s table and waited for my breakfast to arrive. She wasted time asking me how everyone was at home and if I was missing her. I just wished she’d hurry up; I was starving. Finally she brought it out and I grabbed my spoon in readiness.

What!

Where was my cereal? In front of me was a plate. Not a bowl, but a plate! I looked at the crisp slice of toast dripping with butter and honey.

It wasn’t right at all, but I was so tempted. Pushing my confusion aside I stuffed the warm food in my mouth. Mmmm. Crisp on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. Just how I liked it.

Alice may not do things the same way as Mum, but she knew how to make good toast!

I wish I hadn’t cared so much about that toast and had told her that I missed her. But I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see her again for a very long time.

As a six-year-old, I wasn’t told what was going on. I just had a sense that things were not quite right in our house. What happened was discussed by a committee of male priests behind closed doors. But what I can say is this.

Radio and recorded music, which might expose us to worldly influences, were banned, so the first job my dad did when he bought a car was take out the radio-cassette player and store it away in a drawer, to put back in if he ever sold the vehicle. My brother was not like my dad. He bought a Fiat Strada when he was eighteen and didn’t remove the radio. He just wanted to do what other teenagers did. Someone in the Fellowship noticed and accusations of sinful behaviour were made. Mum looked under Victor’s bed, found some music cassettes and threw them out.

If only that had been the end of it, but it wasn’t. There were further accusations, including something about a deliberate car crash outside a meeting room, and a trip to the cinema. I don’t know what was true and what was not, but it didn’t really matter. Mum and Dad thought that the priests were just looking for a reason to punish them, and Victor was the scapegoat. Mum and Dad were considered troublemakers themselves, speaking up about things they thought were corrupt. It didn’t pay to question those in charge.

At the last meeting I ever went to, I stood outside in the car park with my friend Stelly – two little girls in their best dresses and matching headscarves among the hundred or so cars. We did not rush about as we usually did. I looked at her. She was perfect: a good Fellowship girl.

‘It’s going to happen, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Lindsey, you are not going to be “shut up”,’ she replied. ‘You’re just not.’

She sounded so sure.

I never saw her again.

‘Bastards!’ Samantha shouted. We were supposed to be in bed but the pair of us were sitting at the top of the stairs, leaning forward, craning our necks to peek down through the gaps in the banisters and get a good look into the hallway. Her profanity must have been heard, but no one looked up.

We watched two men being ushered into our front room. Through the open door we saw Mum and Victor rise to greet them, then Dad shut the door firmly behind them. There was nothing more to see, so Samantha and I returned to our bedroom. Unusually for me I asked if I could get into her bed. She sounded glad that I’d asked. I got in under her bedcovers and snuggled up against her warm, soft body.

I felt so scared. I had a terrible feeling inside.

Mum knitted cardigans, booties, and bonnets in readiness for the birth of Alice’s first baby. I watched her place them side by side on her bed and I admired the soft white woollen garments. She wrapped them in tissue paper and carefully packed them away in a shoe box. This was a symbol of hope: we would be returning to our rightful place in Fellowship any day now, and the present was ready for that day. We waited for the call to come.

On Monday morning I got up and went to school as usual. I did my school work and played with all my friends. When I got home the house seemed changed in some way. Mum wasn’t rushing around trying to get the dinner on the table. When Dad burst through the door he wasn’t complaining about the terrible traffic on the M25. We ate our dinner calmly. And Dad did not leave the house.

The day after, it was the same. The phone didn’t ring. Again, we ate our dinner calmly. And again Dad did not leave the house.

Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

‘Why is this happening to us?’ Mum asked no one in particular, over and over again. We were now ‘shut up’, so there was no one to answer her.

Victor left home. He handed me and Samantha £200 each. It seemed as if he was going away for ever. When Lois left her family they were let back into the Fellowship. But this didn’t happen to us.

We didn’t know when Victor was coming back, so Mum said I could have his room. Now I had one all to myself ! Mum stripped off the hideous classic-cars wallpaper and put up something more to my taste – something girly. I painted pictures of flowers on the chest of drawers and hung my ‘Pears Soap’ poster on the wall. It didn’t take me long to settle in!

Alice was still our family and we loved her dearly. But now she was married she had her own household – one that was free from sin.

There was no argument. No fuss. No one made anyone do what they did. Barbed-wire fences and padlocked gates were not put up around our home. And there was always the phone. But that was the end of our relationship with Alice. In fact, it was the end of our relationship with everyone in the Fellowship. No telephone calls, no Sunday dinner with other families. No meetings. It was just the way things were done. These were the rules and the rules were everything. Mum and Dad just accepted them.

And so did I – for a while.

It took me three long years, a third of my life, to work up the courage to make contact with Alice again.

One sunny afternoon, I came home from school to an empty house. Mum worked now. We needed the money and she needed the company of other adults. She had a job at the local hospital, working in medical records, and that was how she’d found out about the birth of Alice’s first baby.

No one told us. It was as if we no longer existed.

The news of the baby started me thinking about what Alice’s life might be like. I fantasized about finding her. She’d give me a big cuddle and say it was all over. God had sorted it out and we were welcomed back.

In the empty house, I picked up the phone. My heart was thumping. I had found her number in the directory a few days before and already had it scribbled down on a scrap of paper, hidden at the back of a drawer. A guilty secret.

I dialled the number.

Brrr-brrr, brrr-brrr, it purred.

I almost put the phone down. What was I doing? I began to feel God’s eyes looking directly at me.

‘Hello?’ a woman’s voice said. It was her, my sister.

‘Hello,’ I replied. ‘It’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me, Lindsey.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘Do you want to speak to the priests?’

The police? I thought. Does she want me to speak to the police? I’d made a big mistake. I put the phone down and never told anyone about what I’d done. I’d sinned. That night I prayed for forgiveness.

I’d never knowingly heard the word ‘priests’ before. I had no idea what it meant. When I did hear it again, I froze. All of a sudden I really wanted to know what a priest was.

Victor had also become a distant figure. It was just the four of us now, living in our little bubble, between worlds.

The waiting brought out the nervousness in Dad. He didn’t rush about, but he’d twitch annoyingly, a lot of the time. He’d often pace about, fingers clenched together behind his back. His long legs and straight back took his broad, shiny, bald head somewhere over six feet. From up there, he’d loom over Mum, hoping to grab a rare cuddle.

Mum wasn’t always very affectionate, but her face was built for smiling and that helped her get along with the worldly people she worked with. She could chat away for hours with anyone, given the chance. Dad was friendly, too, but his unrest made it harder for him to let go. He was happier discussing practical matters, like the traffic and work. He was an authority on organization, which suited his clear, strong voice. Mum spoke well, too, but, like both Victor’s and mine, her north London accent became more apparent when she was chatting excitedly.

Samantha was a mixture of the two: soft and cuddly like Mum, but tall like Dad, with a large broad face. When she grinned, it was so complete that her eyes would almost disappear. She’d look at people secretly without turning her head, taking everything in from the corner of her eye.

When it became clear to the Fellowship that Mum and Dad were not going to repent for Victor’s sins they were ‘withdrawn from’. This is the ultimate rejection by the Fellowship, from which there is no return. Mum and Dad had taken Victor’s sins upon themselves by refusing to believe that he had done anything wrong.

The Fellowship may have abandoned us but there was no way that Mum and Dad were going to abandon the values of the Fellowship.

Unlike other members that we knew who were ‘withdrawn from’, we did not rush out to buy a television or a radio. Mum and Samantha did not throw their headscarves away. I still did not eat with the other children at school. In many ways nothing had changed.