Cult following, p.5
Cult Following, page 5
Growing, stretching, disappearing. Friendly fires across the metal roof.
Finally, the van slows down: we have arrived. Wherever we are, it’s colder here. Even inside the van, I can see my breath.
I can hear my dad outside the van, talking to a man with a funny sing-song accent that I have never heard before. It sounds like a negotiation of some kind: ‘This is where you hook up your water’, ‘This is where you get your electric’. Dad loudly rattles the door of the van open and even though I know it’s coming, the noise shakes through me as the freezing air hits me in the face. I stare out of the van at the huge slice of the starry night sky open above us. Sing-Song Man has gone – Dad would have waited because people are always surprised when they see this many kids getting out of a vehicle at one time. Outsiders often snigger and say, ‘Don’t your parents have a TV?’ indicating that my parents have nothing to entertain them other than having sex. I have heard the ‘Don’t-you-have-a-TV?’ joke so many times but the joke is on them, because no, we don’t have a TV.
They are the devil’s work.
We get out one by one, banging the cramps, slapping the pins and punching the needles out of our legs. And then we see our new home: a bright yellow caravan on the edge of a field, it stands out like a beacon against the dark night sky. Yellow might not be the best colour for going underground but I think it must be at least four-berth, which is luxury – three more beds than we had in the Hendon Home.
Yes! I’ll still be on the floor because I’m the fifth in line to a bed, but it means we will have some space. This is exciting.
Anything is better than the Hendon Home, Uncle Jonathan and his son, Cainan. Any day outside of the commune is a win.
We shuffle into our new yellow home. The lights are turned on to reveal the wooden cabin interior and the brown upholstery with ridges of embroidered flowers on it. They are almost 3D. Their brown leaves look dead, like they’ve been put on a burn pile and are waiting for the fire. Tired, old flowers. We haven’t eaten anything all day but there’s a box of food in the kitchen that must come with the caravan.
That’s handy, I thought we would be skipping dinner tonight.
All eyes look hungrily at a box that says ‘SMASH’ on it.
‘What’s SMASH?’ I ask.
Kate has the box in her hands and reads the instructions: ‘It’s powdered potatoes. It’s mash, but powdered,’ she says.
‘Woah!’ Joel responds.
We’ve had powdered milk for years, powdered eggs and now powdered potatoes? I wonder what else could be powdered.
Powdered stuff is perfect for the End Days as it never goes off.
My mom and dad have gone into the back of the caravan and have shut the brown flower curtains for privacy, turning that area into a ‘bedroom’. But with just the dead leaf fabric to shield them, we can hear their conversation.
‘I don’t know, Rachel. I DON’T KNOW! We just have to wait it out. Someone is telling them where we are.’ Dad is agitated, clearly under stress.
‘All right, all right.’ Mom soothes him in a quiet voice.
Kate boils a kettle and we wait for our dehydrated dinner. I look around at my seven siblings, some standing, some sitting on the floor, some on the seats around the table. All of us are scrawny, we always have been, but the last few months have taken their toll. Maybe it’s because I’m used to seeing us stained by the sun, covered in freckles, red-cheeked from the African wind that comes down from the Karoo Desert. The wind that feels like God is blowing a giant hairdryer on the land: hot, wild and bone-dry.
If I close my eyes, I can almost feel the wind whip through my hair. If I open them, I see the contrast of us now: pale, pasty, skinny. Like old washed-out socks, grey and shrunken from overuse.
The Smash has been shared around the room. We wolf down the powdered potatoes that taste a bit like pencil shavings and glue mixed together. But the food is hot and will stop the stomach squawks that can sometimes get so loud, you can’t sleep. It’s not delicious, but still, everyone is grateful.
We all find our spot in the caravan to sleep. Everyone knows where they are in the pecking order and we don’t fight it out. I get a spot between two beds at the back and while pleased with it, I also hope that no one steps on me in the night to get to the toilet.
What a day, I think as I snuggle into the blanket. Didn’t see any of that coming. Our whole lives have changed.
And tomorrow, we might see some whales.
*
This is the soggiest place I have ever been to. Everything is deep green and sodden. The grass is like a mattress or a sponge that’s been soaked through and wants to swallow your feet. Bouncy and drenched. We have been here for a week, and every morning we wake up to a low fog and an icy wrapper on our campsite that’s normally gone by midday, leaving a glossy shine on everything.
I was wrong, there are no whales here. But there are sheep that have whooping cough or bronchitis. They live behind a fence right outside our caravan and they cough all night long. The first night, we thought it was a group of old men – Kris said it sounded like they had been smoking their whole lives. When we saw it was a flock of sheep, we found it hilarious. Kris suggested maybe the sheep liked to smoke too. But it’s not funny anymore. The coughing seems to never stop, which means we never really sleep.
But the one thing I was right about is that this is a holiday camp. There is a sign that says so on the front of the campsite. And there isn’t really anyone else here except for us, which means we have the run of the place and the huge shower rooms to ourselves. I step into the freezing shower room, my small feet immediately in pain from the cold metal and concrete. I push the shower tap on; it goes for 15 seconds before I have to push it again. It takes many pushes to get the hot water to flow out of its metal head. I try to avoid the ice water shooting out next to me as my teeth try to jump out of my jaw.
This is my first winter. I have never experienced the cold before and once you have it in you, you can’t shake it off. It’s nothing like the heat. The cold gets inside your bones and makes a home and won’t leave. The contrast to how we grew up, in blistering hot countries, shocks my body. I think about how hard it was to cool down in every place we lived in before. When I was two, I would sleep on a stone floor in India to keep my face cold – no blanket, no pillows, nothing. I would rest my cheek on the floor and when it would heat up, I would turn my face over, like flipping a piece of bacon. It seems like a different life, a lifetime ago. Everything was in technicolor, so hot it could crisp up my memories. Now it’s wet and foggy and icy and cold – and we’re ‘on the run’.
‘Owh, JOEL!’
The sharp sting of a wet towel rips through the top of my leg. That’s going to bruise. He spins the towel round, preparing to take another crack at me. I scream and run out of the shower room.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I laugh as I run.
Joel never misses an opportunity to disobey. And to drag me into mischief with him. He chases me around the caravan site till I can’t run any more and then lays another blow on my leg.
‘You need another shower,’ he says. ‘Quick, do it before Dad sees!’
I am covered in mud and freezing.
‘Do you prefer it here to the Hendon Home?’ I ask Joel as we walk back to the shower room.
‘Yeah, of course. The Hendon Home was horrible!’ The way that came out amuses him. ‘The H-endon H-ome was H-orrrible,’ he repeats.
‘I like it here too. Even though Dad’s here as well, it’s still better,’ I say as we walk in to see Kate putting a towel around her head.
‘You must be missing your boyfriend, Cainan,’ Joel teases me.
‘Ugh, no!’ I say, upset that he would say something like that. But Joel never misses an opportunity to torment me either (and now he uses Cainan, Uncle Jonathan’s son, to do it). ‘He wasn’t my boyfriend, he was gross,’ I add quietly.
‘Uncle Jonathan wanted him to be your boyfriend, he wanted you two to Make Loooooove,’ Joel says, knowing that will upset me.
‘UGH!’ I say, but I know he’s right – Uncle Jonathan had been trying to get me to do that with Cainan.
‘I think there’s something wrong with him,’ Kate adds.
Kate would know, she knows about these things.
‘Uncle Jonathan has lots wrong with him,’ I say quietly.
I think back to the many ways he tried to humiliate us: whacks with the wooden spoon, the yelling, facing the corner silently, drinking the dishwater if you didn’t do the dishes properly and the worst punishment of all – the one where you have to hold your hands behind your head and stay upright on your knees for hours at a time until it feels like your limbs are on fire. Burning all through your thighs and upper arms. If you dropped, the time started from the beginning.
‘Yes, Uncle Jonathan does, but I am talking about Cainan,’ Kate says.
I remember the pressure Jonathan put on me to do things I didn’t want to do with Cainan, the time he put me and Cainan in the same bed and told me to take my clothes off as he watched. Someone had walked in the room and I ran through the door with my clothes bundled in my hand.
‘He is NOT my boyfriend,’ I say, stung by both the memory and Joel’s suggestion.
Kate says kindly, ‘I told you that he was a Watchout.’
‘Watchouts’ are what we kids secretly call the adults that you need to ‘watch out’ for. You can usually spot them right away. We had become attuned to their behaviours early on. (As an adult, I would later find out that the real name for a Watchout is a pervert, paedo or child molester.) To begin with, older siblings would let you know who they were, but before too long, you could spot them yourself. Watchouts have a couple of tells: they might look at you for a bit too long or take too much of an interest in disciplining you. Sometimes, and these were the most difficult Watchouts to spot, they were the ones that were kinder to you than other adults. But really, those Watchouts were rare.
You don’t have to be kind to do what you want to do to the children in our homes.
Most homes would have at least one Watchout. If you lived with one, you knew to try not to be in a room alone with them, or get on the wrong side of them. Stay with your pack and stay off their radar. The kids most in danger from the Watchouts were the older children who didn’t have brothers and sisters to teach them, or the kids who were from smaller families that didn’t have a wolfpack to protect them. The ones that were in the worst situations, of course, were the ones whose own parents were Watchouts. There had been a time when Uncles were allowed to marry their own daughters and some actually did. We are lucky, we are a strong pack – we’ve always looked out for one another and kept each other safe.
So far.
There are no Watchouts here. We can relax, it’s a holiday camp.
*
We ended staying in our bright yellow caravan for nearly two months. The last month at the campsite went by in a blur of cold and sickness. Now we’re back on the floor of the van and we’re on our way to start a new commune called ‘The Birmingham Home’. It’s only been a few hours, but already it’s like the holiday home was a dream that’s quickly fading. Maybe we never went to Wales, maybe we’ve been in the van this whole time, but I know in my bones that isn’t true because I feel so weak. My limp limbs remind me of the gastric flu I got on the campsite. I haven’t played in a while, I don’t have the energy. And I feel the cold much more than I did two months ago. The flu meant I couldn’t keep food down for a very long time. I bend my legs as I lie on the floor of the van. They are tiny, little sticks in baggy trousers – the same trousers I have worn almost every day since we went underground.
The Birmingham Home, The Birmingham Home . . . I mouth these words over a few times; they feel funny in my mouth.
‘I wonder what the next house is going to be like?’ I whisper to Kate.
‘Sshhhhhhhh.’ She shoots a gentle warning as she strokes my hair.
I had heard Mom and Dad talking about a ‘farm’ earlier. I imagine a warm fire, woolly blankets, a roasted chicken, singing and big comfy sofas to lie down on. Everything glows red and smells amazing. I hold Kate’s hand and smile.
We have good things ahead, I can feel it.
*
‘A UFO could have landed in here, it looks like the site of a space wreck,’ Josh says as we all stand around the edges of the disaster that is supposed to be a living room. We can see straight through to the floor below.
‘We come in peace,’ Joel says, laughing.
Kate tries the light switch.
‘No electricity,’ she says, unsurprised.
We are at the farm. This doesn’t feel like a home. It’s a collection of barns that have been under attack, like bombs have ripped their way through the bones of the building. My dad can fix anything, but this feels too far gone. No heating, no electricity and giant holes in the rooms.
My mom walks into the shared disbelief of her children.
‘We will all sleep in one room for warmth. We’ll get the gas fire and put it in the middle and you can make a circle around it.’ As she says this, the wind eerily changes tune as it whips through the holes in the house. ‘This will be warm and safe in no time,’ she adds weakly.
We nod in agreement. I look at Mom trying to make this OK for us. She is always trying. She is always pacifying Dad, soothing him, standing by his decisions. If any of us kids have the tendency to ‘people please’, it’s an echo of her. She is the buffer between us and him. It’s tough when it comes to Mom, hard to know just what to think or feel about her, it’s confusing, but I have always wanted to protect her.
In a way, it almost feels like she is one of us, like she is being led around too, like she doesn’t have much choice in this. She’s always pregnant, always breastfeeding, always giving birth. Even when it seemed like there was a break between kids, those were the years she gave birth to stillborns. And she has spent years being really unwell. She lost most of her hair and got so thin. I remember watching her in bed too weak to rise, wanting to save her but not knowing how. Was it our fault? Did we, her many children, each take a piece of her when we were born? Maybe it’s not just me, maybe we all feel a sense of protection and guilt when it comes to Mom.
*
It’s the middle of the night and the room glows red from the gas fire. Everyone is asleep and there’s a symphony of night sounds: breathing, squeaks, shuffles. I move very carefully towards the glow of the gas heater, moving my feet as close as I can. This close up, I get about three minutes of warmth through my socks before my feet start burning. I know the white heat is coming, but I need that warmth. Bang! When it comes, I rub my feet quickly and try not make a sound as the burn hits. As the pain subsides, there will be a good five minutes of warm feet.
Heaven.
The world outside looks like it’s moving in slow motion. The wind has died down and the house itself has magically gone quiet. I see something through the window that’s too slow to be rain and too big to be hail – it’s snow. Josh and Sam prayed for snow this morning because we had never seen it and here it is. I move towards the window and touch the glass. Big chunks of the sky are floating down and settling on the ground, like manna from heaven.
It’s so beautiful.
‘Get back to bed!’ My mom’s voice cuts through the dark.
‘It’s a miracle,’ I whisper. ‘We prayed for snow and look!’
‘Back to bed,’ she says again gently.
The boys are going to be so pleased, I think, as I shuffle between two bodies to get some sleep. Their prayers must have been powerful ones, because when we wake up the next morning, there is over four feet of snow. Mom comes from the north of England, where it snows all the time, and even she says this is a lot. Josh and Sam are giddy, packing the snow together in their bare hands to turn it into weapons. Our cries of delight turn to shrieks of pain as the cold gets inside our fingertips like tiny icy knives under our skin. We don’t last very long, but the snow does – it settles for weeks.
Every day, we make more progress on the house, patching up the floors, painting walls. We only have a limited amount of time to work each day because the winter sun is transitory. It seems to want to hurry to bed in the afternoon, maybe it feels the cold too.
‘BexyBoots . . .’
It’s Kate’s sing-song voice as she shakes me through my bundle of blankets.
‘Yes?’ I say excitedly, sitting up.
‘Happy Birthday,’ she says, putting her hand on my shoulder.
I had nearly forgotten. Our group has never celebrated birthdays, but my brothers and sisters do. It’s something they learned when they stayed with our grandparents all those years ago. For years, my parents haven’t told our grandparents where we live. Any mail they send gets forwarded from other people’s addresses for safety, all set up in case they send money. But this means that about six months after your birthday, you get a card from Grandma and Grandpa. They never forget. There is usually a cheerful cartoon on the front. Sometimes there’s a big number on it and inside, in their handwriting, there’s a message saying how special you are and that they love and miss you. At the top, it always says here’s five pounds for you next to a piece of sticky tape torn away from the empty card.
They always remember us.
So now, Kate remembers everyone’s birthday and always does something for each of us. And I know since it’s just our family here, she will do so 100 per cent today. Eager to get my working day out of the way so we can have my celebration, I get up. The sun seems to linger. It goes by so slowly for the first time ever. Finally, we sit down for dinner and then I see it. Kate brings in a cake for me. It’s a big ‘R’ made out of powdered milk, water and sugar, with one of our safety candles sticking out of it. I look at my brothers and sisters – their faces are glowing, everyone has a massive smile as they sing in unison. As we cut up the ‘cake’, Kris leans over and says to me, ‘Nine years old! You’re getting so grown-up, BexyBoots.’
