Not My Idea of Heaven. Lindsey Rosa

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

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