Not My Idea of Heaven

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.

Chapter Ten

After Being Shut Up

Suddenly, we found that we had acres of time to fill. The meetings had provided a rigid structure to our lives and now the time we had spent preparing for, travelling to and being at them was empty. Obviously, we had all lost our friends and family members who were still in the Fellowship, but I imagine it hit Mum and Dad the hardest. For Mum it must have seemed like a recurring nightmare first experienced in 1970, when she had bravely made the choice to stay with dad in the Fellowship, while the rest of her family had given up following the Fellowship leader, the ‘Elect Vessel’.

He had taken over leading the Fellowship in the 1950s, and brought in most of the strict rules that forced us to live separately from the rest of the worldly people. I suppose Mum’s family would have reluctantly stayed true to him as well, if he hadn’t made a public spectacle of himself, fraternizing with women, swearing and drinking heavily at meetings and conferences.

Dad’s family supported him, as did most of the local Fellowship, but Mum’s parents had had enough of ‘waiting for the Lord to act’. For Mum it was a choice between family and husband. Once she’d made the choice, that was it. She even referred to her parents and brothers as the Open Fellowship, which was the worst thing she could think of saying about them. They were living a life that was as closed off from the world as Mum and Dad, but saying that they were Open was her way of calling them worldly.

The Lord did act in 1970, and the Elect Leader died, but it was too late. The damage was done, and the family split.

I was just a child of seven when we were ‘shut up’, so they kept their feelings from me. I sensed tension in the house, and heard muffled voices behind closed doors that I pressed my ear to. I wanted to know what was going on, but the words that Mum and Dad kept reiterating were ‘God is punishing us for some reason.’ The ‘reason’ was a mystery, but I was growing up with Mum’s mantra ringing in my ears: ‘Let the Lord into your heart and have faith.’ The punishment was exclusion from the Fellowship, the place they still yearned to be. They questioned each other over and over again: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ Then they comforted themselves with the fact that it was God’s will. With prayer, they believed, the answer would show itself to them.

They were so wrapped up in their troubles that they didn’t worry too much about me after that, and I took advantage of this lack of supervision to further my friendships with my worldly mates. I went to their houses, watched television and played computer games.

One day after school I stopped off at my friend Leigh’s house. Leigh lived next door to a boy called Darrell. I went with her hoping for a glimpse of the ginger-haired boy, on whom I had developed a hopeless crush. But, despite my best efforts to linger outside her house for as long as possible, I didn’t see him.

I knew that in her kitchen there was a cupboard full of packets of crisps and I was hoping that she would offer me one. She didn’t. Instead, her mum offered me a pear, which I took. I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t ripe and I almost spat it out, but, not liking to be rude, I crunched my way through the whole damned thing. I was, however, appeased when we were offered the crisps, which we took upstairs with us. Her bedroom was very different from mine. Whereas mine was tidy and quite bare, except for a toy box and book shelves, hers was messy, with clothes all over the floor. She too had a dressing table, but hers was covered with makeup, music cassettes and a stereo player. On her walls were posters of the boy band Bros. I watched her as she kissed those twin brothers on the lips, declaring that she loved them. We were both rotund little girls, but, rather than wear skirts with elasticized-waistbands and baggy T-shirts as I did, she wore short denim skirts and jeans.

Leigh put a tape in the cassette player and she danced around the room, grabbing a lipstick on the way past her dressing table, which she daubed across her mouth while on the move. You may wonder if I was envious of this girl who seemed to have all the things I didn’t. But I was not. I observed her and her posters, her music and her makeup, and I felt slightly repulsed by her. She looked so gaudy, and I couldn’t think of anything worse than standing out like that. I actually felt a bit sorry for her.

My sister’s worldly friend, Natalie, lived five houses down from us. Samantha hung around in the street with her, while I skirted around them on Samantha’s old shopper bicycle. I knew that it would be passed on to me when Samantha grew out of it, so I practised riding it. It was quite a move up from my little bike with stabilizers that Dad had picked up second-hand. Victor had spray-painted this bike red and blue for me.

I soon found that I could amuse Natalie better than Samantha could, and gradually Natalie spent more time with me than with my big sister. I could see that Samantha was distressed at this turn of events, but she didn’t put up much of a fight. She did try to get her own back just once, though. The three of us were playing out and I was being my usual annoying self, butting in on their games, when Samantha suddenly called me.

‘Lindsey, come over here, would you?’ I felt wary. I could see a huge grin on my sister’s face, which immediately told me something was up. It was common for Samantha to have a faraway, often worried, look on her face, but now she seemed alert and very much in the moment. With Natalie’s persuasion, at last I sauntered over. I was certainly not going to hurry. Samantha grabbed my hand when I reached them and told me to open my mouth. No way, I thought to myself. I’m not that stupid. Then they said they had a chocolate for me. Well, that was quite another matter. I couldn’t possibly pass up on this opportunity. Obediently, I opened my mouth, and waited for the treat.

‘Yuk!’ I spat on the ground with disgust. Far from the smooth, creamy chocolate I had expected, a Polo mint had been placed on my tongue. I hate sweets of any kind, apart from chocolate and fudge, so what might have been a nice surprise for most people was like a kick in the stomach for me. I’m not sure whether Natalie knew of my pet hate and had assumed that this was a nice surprise for me, or whether she was in on Samantha’s despicable plans. Either way, it exposed a side of Samantha that I hadn’t seen before. I was very impressed. She was more like me than I had thought!

I continued to build my friendship with Natalie, and we discovered that we got on really well. We must have looked an odd pair: I with my knee-length skirts and Hi-Tec trainers and she with her trendy jeans and Reeboks. We did have one thing in common, though, and that was our long hair. We both wore it tied back in a ponytail. The only difference was she did it out of choice, and I did it because I had to.

It didn’t take me long to become a well-established part of Natalie’s life. Every day after school I would rush to her house and knock for her to come out and play. She was two years older than I, so sometimes she had homework to do. So then I waited, hanging around in front of her house until she had finished.

I guess it was the natural course of things that I should go into her house. We played in the street. We played in her garden.

‘Are you coming in, Lindsey?’

I didn’t give too much thought to my reply. Not nearly as much as I probably should have done.

‘Yep.’

And that was it. I was in. Surrounded by all the tempting things that I might have had access to before if Kerry’s mum hadn’t walked in on us or if I’d stayed friends with Leigh.

I got into the habit of going to Natalie’s house every day after school. I knew that Mum wouldn’t come until dinnertime to pick me up, so I had hours to kill and it wasn’t long before I asked if I could watch the TV.

At first I couldn’t really grasp what I was seeing. I couldn’t distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. Anything with people in I thought was real life, but I did wonder how I was able to watch them. Did these people not know their lives were on telly. I felt much more at ease with the cartoons. At least I could see that they were drawings, even if they were moving. ThunderCats was my favourite.

One afternoon, I sat down in my usual position from where I could see Mum if she came up the garden path. I was looking forward to watching ThunderCats and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but Natalie had something else in mind.

‘Let’s watch a video,’ she said. That sounded fine to me. I certainly wasn’t going to let on I hadn’t the faintest idea what a video might be.

‘Which film do you want to see?’ Natalie asked.

Oh dear! I thought.

My eyes darted between the two homemade videocassettes she held out to me. I had seen Watership Down and the musical Annie at Kerry’s house, but that experience was not helping me in my decision. Natalie had seen lots of films, and I was afraid that, if I didn’t take matters into my own hands, she would remember that what she really wanted to do was to go outside and play. If that happened my opportunity to watch television would be gone. I had to move quickly.

‘Which do you want to see?’ I enquired.

‘I don’t mind. I’ve already seen both.’ She was beginning to sound bored already.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s that one there?’

‘Pinocchio,’ she said, eyeing the cassette in her left hand. ‘It’s about a little boy whose nose grows bigger.’

It didn’t sound particularly promising.

‘What’s the other one?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Dirty Dancing.’

I knew plenty about dancing – I loved my ballet books – but I couldn’t begin to imagine why a dance would be dirty. Whatever it was, it sounded more interesting than a little boy with a big nose.

‘Let’s watch that,’ I said, trying not to let my excitement show.

Natalie put the cassette into the machine, undoubtedly wishing she were playing outside, or doing almost anything else at all.

Well, I’m glad I didn’t choose to go outside and play, because I learned some things that day. As the video images stuttered into life I sat with my eyes glued to the television screen. I didn’t want to miss one single moment.

‘I’m not sure you should be doing this,’ Natalie’s mother said.

‘It’s fine,’ I mumbled. In front of me, men and women gyrated, their bodies grinding against each other.

A women’s voice was singing, ‘And if I had the chance I’d never let you go.’

Natalie’s mother left the room.

For the next two hours, I imagine that I am Baby, and that I am dancing in Johnny’s arms. I am falling in love for the first time. And my lover is a fictional man called Johnny played by a film star. I am nine years old.

I found out later that the actor’s name was Patrick Swayze, when Natalie bought me a full-length poster of him. I carried it home, rolled up tightly under my arm. It felt as if it were burning a hole in my side. Like a guilty criminal, I crept into the house, scurried upstairs and pushed that piece of filth under my bed, far out of sight. Every day for the next week I unrolled the paper and kissed the mouth of the man who looked back at me. I didn’t care if his name was Patrick Swayze or Johnny Castle, the dance instructor he portrayed in the film. I was his Baby.

I couldn’t stand the guilt for longer than a week. With one last kiss of regret, I screwed the poster into a ball and tossed it in a neighbour’s dustbin.

I’m glad I watched Dirty Dancing that day. I felt that I had definitely made the right choice.

I may not have been able to stand the guilt of having the poster in my own house, but that did not stop me wanting to watch the film again. And again … After I’d seen it for the third time, Natalie’s patience snapped. ‘For God’s sake, Lin, let’s go outside and play.’ I was crushed by her bluntness, but I knew when to stop pushing my luck!

Instead, I relived the film over and over again in my head. In the privacy of my bedroom, concealed by my duvet, I held an imaginary man and kissed his lips. This was as close as I could expect to get to a member of the opposite sex for many years to come. I hoped to become a Fellowship girl again very soon, and if that happened I would meet my husband at the age of nineteen or twenty.

I continued to go to Natalie’s house and became a regular fixture on their sofa in front of the TV. It really annoyed me when her dad and brother wanted to watch the motor racing. What a load of rubbish! I thought. It was noisy and as far as I could see no one was testing their own strength. It was cars doing all the work! I liked it better when Roseanne was on. Or The Cosby Show.

One Saturday afternoon Natalie’s mum poked her head round the living room door.

‘Do you want something to eat, Lindsey?’ She understood that I was in no hurry to leave. In the back garden she was preparing a barbecue for friends. It was really time for me to go home, but I had never eaten a barbecue meal before, and I was always tempted by food.

‘Yeah,’ I said happily, ‘I’ll have something.’

‘Lindsey,’ Mum said when I arrived home. ‘Dinner’s on the table.’

I ate two dinners that night. My belly was fit to burst, but I didn’t care. Patrick Swayze put his arms around me and I felt good.

I was becoming good at being two different people. At home I behaved like a Fellowship girl who listened to Dad reading the Bible and said my prayers at night. Outside the house I took part in the worldly things that my friends were doing without feeling guilty.

The Fellowship taught me always to expect that God would punish me for my sins, but it also taught me that anyone under the age of twelve was free of responsibility for their actions. As far as I was concerned, I could do pretty much anything and God would forgive me.

Natalie was older, but often looked to me for what we were going to do. When I was nine and she was eleven I thought it would be a good idea for us to start smoking. We picked half-smoked stubs off the ground, pocketed them and headed towards the school gates.

I did what I had done many times before, and scrambled over the top of the gates, dropping to the ground on the other side with a heavy thud. There was a gap underneath, but I had found out through bitter experience that, while Natalie could slide gracefully underneath, I couldn’t.

We legged it up the school driveway and dashed around the corner, onto the field, and over to a thin row of bushes, carefully avoiding the school caretaker as we went. Once we were well hidden we began. It was more a case of inhaling a mouthful of acrid smoke and trying not to cough our guts up when it hit the back of our throats.

Following that initiation, we smoked on and off for a while, until even we couldn’t overlook the fact that our regular supply of cigarettes came from dirty pavements, and filthy gutters. My habit didn’t last long, and, after that, another nine years passed before I touched another cigarette.

Soon, Patrick Swayze wasn’t the only man in my life. Everywhere I went I thought I saw the boy of my dreams. The boys of my dreams. At school, in the supermarket and in the museums I visited with Dad. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know them, and never would. I created their personalities in my head and thought I knew them. I watched my worldly friends practise kissing with the boys in the playground and, while they were crying over their breakups, I was kissing the back of my hand and hugging my pillow. I was trying to ensure that I would never be rejected; sometimes, though, I let my guard down.

The boy I had a crush on, Darrell, was a friend of Natalie’s and lived just around the corner. One autumn evening, Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to a bonfire party Darrell was having at his house. Mum had warned me never, ever, to go out of the road, but I avoided being disobedient by entering his house through the back garden gate, which opened onto my street.

I watched fireworks shoot into the sky from beside a giant bonfire, which was steadily burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes. I couldn’t count how many sins I was committing, but I knew that Satan must have been in my heart, because that night I went to bed dreaming about Darrell. The trouble was, I think he fancied Natalie, and resented the time I spent with her. I knew she was glad to have me to play with, as she definitely did not fancy him. But, despite this knowledge, I could not stop thinking about Darrell.

One day I was loitering in the street waiting for Natalie to come out and play, when he appeared in our street.

‘All right?’ He half nodded in my direction.

‘Yeah, fine.’ I felt myself blushing.

‘Want a go on my skateboard?’ he asked.

No, I most certainly did not, but I said yes, anyway. He handed me the board and I knelt down on it, trying hard not to let my bum show as my skirt rode up. I pushed off with my trailing leg and that was it: I was whizzing along. This felt good. What have I been worrying about? I asked myself, grinning. I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Darrell thinks I look good.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.