Not My Idea of Heaven. Lindsey Rosa

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      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      When it became clear to the Fellowship that Mum and Dad were not going to repent for Victor’s sins they were ‘withdrawn from’.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      Unlike other members that we knew who were ‘withdrawn from’, we did not rush out to buy a television or a radio.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, СКАЧАТЬ