Cult following, p.20
Cult Following, page 20
His face reminds me so much of someone from my past that I am slammed back into a corrugated barn, nearly 25 years ago.
I am standing on a tyre. About 10 feet wide, it must belong to a tractor or a combine harvester. On the other side of the tyre, facing me, is Maria.
I feel the cold inside my thin clothes, but my face is burning red-hot. Eli stands above me. At 17 years old, he looks almost like a man. He is the size of one and he has the power and authority of an ‘Uncle’. He calls the shots, he is in charge, but there is still the padding of childhood in his cheeks.
We stand in this warehouse at the back of the commune. Concrete floors and corrugated iron, the smell of farm and hay in the air. The eight or nine kids around me are shouting. Eli has told them to. While, at first glance, it might look like they’re frenzied, excited or complicit, everyone is playing a part.
No one wants to be here, in this circle, except for Eli.
Eli explains the ‘rules’. Maria and I have to fight each other. This tyre is our ring, the kids are the spectators.
I feared that Eli had noticed our growing friendship, I sensed that he didn’t like it, as if two ten-year-olds getting close was a threat to the group. In a commune of this size, we had hoped we’d slip through the net, but he noticed.
‘And the fight will go on until one of you can’t get up anymore.’ Eli’s voice pierces through my thoughts.
I feel my blood like it’s trying to escape my body, pushing its way through my skin. I look at Maria and I’m terrified. She has become my whole world in such a short space of time. In just a few weeks, she saved me. And now I have to fight her. Hurt her.
Eli is shouting, whipping up the tiny spectators like a twisted emperor of Rome standing on the sidelines, watching a Christian being fed to a lion. But we are the lions, we are the Christians, and we are children.
Ten years old.
And while the words that come out of Eli’s mouth are full of rage, there is a wetness in his eyes. They are filled with excitement. He licks his lips. The stink of pleasure emanates off him, watching and demanding the destruction of a young friendship. I can almost taste his thirst. Maybe he is more excited by the power he holds by controlling and puppeteering this violence. Maybe by this point inflicting pain with his own hands has become boring.
He should be one of us, but he has been turned: he is one of them.
Maybe growing up here has made it impossible for him not to turn out this way. Maybe what has happened to him – the horrors, the beatings, the abuse – means that he could never be anything else. Maybe he had no one in his corner to say ‘that’s not OK’. No older brother to tell him ‘what they are doing to you is not right’. These things he comes up with for us aren’t a part of Grandpa’s teachings, they are his own machinations. And so maybe the violence and twistedness that they raised him in has become embedded. A part of his blood. His Being. And it is spitting out of him now, scorching through his pupils, producing the dribble on his lips.
I look at her, straight at her. My friend. And as I lock eyes with her, the yells around me start to quieten down, the sounds fade to mute and everything except for her face goes out of focus. The voice in my head screams, ‘I don’t want to do this’ and hers says back, ‘We have to. It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other. So just DO IT!’
It would be pointless to cry, to try and stop it, or to weakly pretend. That will not satisfy the animal in Eli.
I look at her. I feel a rush of rage go through me and my inner voice says calmly, ‘Then let’s do this.’
The sounds come rushing back in and we start to fight. It’s hyperreal and we move in slow motion:
I fall.
She falls.
She pulls me back up to push me back over.
I feel the burn of the concrete floor rip through my fingers.
The slam of my body into hers.
My skin tears.
I hit the ground and as I do so, Eli spits in my face. The spit is ripe and it burns hot and cold at the same time.
I taste blood as she grabs my hand, holding me, supporting me, but pulling me back into the fight . . .
The sounds of this LA bar come back into focus. Have I been staring at this stranger, this man in the back for minutes? Or was it just a second? He locks eyes with me.
‘Bexy, is that you?’ Eli says.
I see the faces of my childhood nemeses frequently. I’ve seen Uncle Jude sitting in a café in Stoke Newington, I’ve seen Uncle Jonathan walk past me on the other side of the street in Arizona. In these visions, the imprint of a face appears on an unassuming and innocent person and I’m thrown back into a moment from the past that feels more real than the ground I stand on.
But never has it been this real.
‘Fuck, I thought that was you!’ he says.
There are over 1,500 bars in Los Angeles, yet here he is, in this one.
My skin prickles. I take in the man he is now. The chubbiness of youth is gone. He has thin hair and a slight physique. A man that I wouldn’t look twice at in any other context, but I was so afraid of as a kid. The things he did in the name of them. The things I fantasised about saying to him if I ever saw him again as a grown-up, an equal. And here we are. The universe and serendipity are giving me that chance. The chance to grab him by the scruff of that weak neck and shout in his face:
Did it make you feel a man,
All that shit you did to little girls?
Do you feel like a fucking man now?
But I can’t summon the rage, the righteous indignation doesn’t come. I see a sad, flaccid husk of a man before me. He has no strength and no power over me. All I feel is pity.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he says.
‘No, thanks, I’m good.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he adds.
‘I know,’ I say.
And I really do.
*
The next day, I wake up disoriented, my mouth dry, the slow wooziness of alcohol still in my blood. My face is buried in a musky armpit. I reach out to hold some of the warm skin I am tangled in.
‘Morning, idiot.’
‘Morning,’ I croak.
Content, blissed and validated, I wake up next to my friend.
‘What a night!’ Sofi says.
‘Still in shock. What died in my mouth?’ I ask.
‘It didn’t die, it crawled into mine for its last breath . . . it died there.’
‘Don’t blame it, who wouldn’t want to die in your mouth?’ I say matter of fact.
‘That is the loveliest thing you have ever said.’ She laughs, turning over in bed. ‘What are the chances that we would run into him there? Those assholes have a lot to answer for – how many other people could be walking around, doing who knows what to people? They’re kind of the perfect ingredients for creating psychopaths. Pass me that water?’
‘Yeah.’
She sits up, takes a gulp. I flop my head in her lap, my brain starting to throb a little. I’m grateful I’m still quite drunk.
Hell to pay later.
‘But how many weird things have happened on this trip?’ she adds.
Morning light comes through the window. We sit in silence, our breathing in synch, as we watch particles of illuminated dust.
‘The light – beautiful, isn’t it?’ Sofi whispers.
‘Uh-huh,’ I say.
She strokes my hair and says, ‘I can’t believe that you turned out OK.’
‘I did?’ I say.
‘No. Course not, you’re batshit . . .’
I laugh.
‘Is everyone in your family OK?’ she asks and I feel a real tenderness and concern cut through the boozy haze.
‘Mostly,’ I say.
‘What happened with Kris?’ she asks.
*
Seeing Eli last night kicked off a whole conversation about the kids who had ‘turned’. We spent hours at the bar, talking in depth about Guard syndrome, about kids who mirrored the adults’ behaviour to survive. About how I wasn’t sure if Kris had been taken over by the group and become one of them, or whether he had joined their forces to protect me.
Was there more going on than I, a confused ten-year-old, was aware of?
‘Ah, Kris is amazing,’ I say.
‘Thank God!’
‘I was confused, but there is no doubt in my mind now that he did what he did to look out for me. That’s just him and his nature.’
When Kris had been forced to become a low-ranking shepherd in the Victor Programme, he had tried to use their system to protect us. And it had worked, to a point. But he was also brutally used by the group. During the court case against the Children of God, ‘The Victor Programme’ came under scrutiny. The group shipped the leaders that were culpable out of the country to keep them safe, and made lower-ranking shepherds like Kris take the stand. Kris thought he was there to explain the regime from the perspective of a 15-year-old, but when he was cross-examined, he realised his affidavit had been rewritten. And he was questioned as if he, now 18, had had some sort of responsibility for the Victor Programme and the abuse that had happened in it, when in fact he was a victim of it.
‘That’s disgusting,’ Sofi says.
‘I didn’t even know about it at the time, he was their “patsy” in court, and he was a just a teenager when it all happened.’
‘Did your parents know about this?’ she asks.
‘They were a core part of the strategy team for the court case, so it may have been their idea.’
I move on, and start to tell her about the last 15 years where Kris became the father figure of our family. Our protector. The older brother that sacrificed himself for us.
And sacrificed so much, in so many ways.
He looked out for Kate when she was pregnant; he helped her find her first house. He was amazing with her kids, always round her house to fix things, to make Sunday dinner, to watch cartoons at the crack of dawn with his niece and nephew.
He was a guide for me when I left; he helped me write my first CV, gave me a boost to go to night school and learn secretarial skills, wrote music with me, brought me down to his home in London for weekends on boozy punch and (protectively) freaked out when I started taking recreational drugs.
He sorted my brothers out. He moved them into his own house, put deposits down on flats for them, gave them advice, got drunk with them, showed them his bizarre and often dark takes on movies, screenplays and popular culture.
I tell her about how Kris and I went to South Africa to see our little brothers and sisters who were still in the group and too young to leave. We stayed for two weeks, filmed interviews with them in secret, to use as evidence if we needed to get them out. I was 21 then and he was in his late twenties. We got back and Kris felt he had no choice but to move to South Africa to keep a watchful eye over our brothers and sisters.
Not an easy move – South Africa is not an easy place to live.
He gave up his life with us and his home and his job. I know that him being there, on the scene, never too far away, gave my brothers and sisters a sense of security, normalcy and a guardian on their corner. My parents only allowed supervised visits, he was in a constant contact battle with them. A daily, weekly, all-encompassing battle to look after his siblings.
He stayed in South Africa for ten years, waiting for the kids to reach an age when they could leave, and sending them home to us, where they could be housed, where we could put them through school, in a support network that we can now afford to provide.
‘What a hero,’ she says.
‘I know, he is the brave one for sure.’
‘I don’t know, you can be pretty brave too.’
As she says this, she catches a tear racing down my cheek with her thumb.
Again, we stare into the light. Our thoughts merge and swirl around in the air above the bed we lie in, our shared experience dancing in the dusty light. Days spent in fields, the yogic monks, the stinky meth cook, the children of the Twelve Tribes, the extra-terrestrial skies of Arizona, where we became like one. Our hearts full with the miles we have driven, the beds we have shared, the home we created in our truck.
‘Do you think we will look back on this trip when we are older and think we were fucking nuts?’ I ask.
‘Nah, we will think we were cool.’
CHAPTER 12
In Black and White: 3 Years Before
Every day is like a sick surprise. For months after Maria leaves, every morning is the same. I feel OK the first second I wake up, but just for one second. Somehow my sleep has erased the fact that she’s gone. Then, it hits me all at once, like someone sitting on my chest. Winding me. How can it sting this much, every, single, day? And why does sleep give me that cruel second of peace before daylight slams home the truth?
I wake up in my bed alone.
I lie and look at the ceiling; I feel like I have to physically push the weight off myself to get up in the dark to make breakfast, pull those pots of oats out for the thousandth time, find a seat on the floor of the living room for yet another devotions session. It feels empty. The hole of ‘her’ takes over the whole of me. I am in the same place, the same rooms, but everything in my world is different.
I can’t talk about it, admit my ache to anyone. We were never meant to have that kind of friendship – there would be no empathy for me missing her, just judgement. Once someone is gone, we have to act as if they never existed. If they’re lucky, they are erased; if not, they are spoken about with spite and scorn. They are shunned, possessed by the devil, they are backsliders, they are no longer one of us.
The idea I have to forsake her, our friendship and the memory of it, grows from a thought into a hatred and a spite inside me. It develops into a disgust for my surroundings: the devotions, the Aunties, the Uncles, the group itself.
And this is why no friendships are allowed. Because the seeds of doubt blossom from experiencing unconditional love. They grow when you can share questions, when someone witnesses and recognises injustice with you. They flourish from the freedom, even if in secret, of sharing rage, pain and fury. I am not as weak as I was when I was ten and this world convinced me of my own madness.
When I couldn’t grip on to my siblings anymore for my sanity, Maria was my person, the one who could see the very deep crack in this world they created, the one who could recognise the insanity that lay behind it. It was Maria and my love for her that convinced me that the madness was not in my head.
It was in theirs.
*
The office is small and dark, tiny windows barely allow natural light onto the numerous desks crammed into the space. When the adults work here, the florescent lights are always on. I keep them off. This is where I prefer to be. Out of the way. Alone. I sit on the beige carpet, papers spread out in front of me, my afternoon’s work. I have worked in the office long enough for my parents to trust that I will ‘just get on with it’. The paperwork is simple: Collate. Staple. File. Every day is the same.
The only thing that has changed since Maria has gone is that my parents have made a new outsider friend, someone we would call ‘A Big Fish’ or ‘A King’. He has said that he will help our home record some of our family music using his equipment, so every now and then me and two other girls go with him to sing our family songs on tape. Short breaks out of the house. Short breaks from this.
The work in the office is mundane. And it doesn’t take long for me to get distracted. But I know I can make up the time if I need to. The office has computers, a phone, the fax and piles and piles of papers in filing cabinets. I open the top cabinet; the smell of ink and toner is not unpleasant as I run my finger across the different coloured carboard dividers. The second cabinet clatters open when I pull its silver handle, there are a few folders lined up. My finger stops on a dark blue leather folder with a label that says ‘Press Clippings’. It’s clear that someone has taken some time and care with this. I sit on the floor behind a desk, hidden from the door, should anyone use it.
I thumb open the leather folder and flip through the first few pages without pausing; every page has cut-outs of news articles stuck onto it. Pieces of see-through tape hold together their history of us. As I flick through, I realise there are hundreds. Sometimes three or four stuck on a single page, sometimes there are articles so long, they are cut up over a few pages.
Big bold black titles shout at me from grey backgrounds:
‘Sex Cult in Tiny Village’
‘Crazed Cult Leader Abuses Children’
‘Orgies and Prostitution for Christ’
Black-and-white photos accompany the articles. Many of them are of my parents. I look at my mom and dad’s faces, smiling in different places in the house, sometimes outside; their ‘worldly’ haircuts, blazers, my dad’s ‘prop’ moustache, my mom’s wide smile.
My dad’s face sits next to text that reads:
The group’s leader is 41-year-old former fireman Gideon Scott, self-styled ‘House Shepherd’ of the British branch of the Children of God, which shares the same leader, David Berg. Mr Scott, whose wife Rachel is a psychologist, has 11 children. He said yesterday: ‘We have nothing to hide. We threw open the house in accordance with what Jesus has said.’
Mom’s not a psychologist, is she? I know she went to university but I thought she dropped out. Maybe it sounds better to say she is one. My dad goes on in the article:
‘We are a normal Christian group, and there are many millions of Christians whose beliefs are as real and as full as ours. We allow free love between consenting adults, and our children can have sex if they are over 16, but not with mature adults. I don’t believe in contraception, I suppose that’s why I have 11 kids – and as far as I know, they are all mine.’
I flip the pages onto an article titled ‘Hookers for Jesus’:
Soon after the cult’s inception it moved to Britain, where the practice of attracting new recruits by seduction earned its proselytizers the name ‘Hookers for Jesus’. The cult was accused of kidnapping and brainwashing young people, denying them contact with their families while they were indoctrinated. More recently, it has been associated with allegations of sexual abuse, and several state authorities in Australia had begun to investigate.
