I think I fully expected outside to resemble a scene of nuclear devastation – flattened buildings, the stench of death, the hum of marching boots, voices of women screaming and children crying. Instead, when I managed to open my eyes I saw rows and rows of cars. Not like the battered cars in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but gleaming, shiny cars in so many different shapes I couldn’t count. My father and Samuel were already pushing our trolley across some striped lines in the road, towards a field of hundreds more cars. I quickened my pace, desperate to get out of the wind.
Samuel walked in the direction of a large silver car with square lamps at the front. I heard Matt mumble, ‘Oh wow, please let it be that one.’
Instead Samuel opened the door of the battered black Renault estate next to it. Matt looked crestfallen. Even I felt a bit cheated too, wondering how we’d all fit in. My father rode up front. Me, Mom – who carried baby Andy in her arms – and Aimée were in the back seat with Matt and Marc. Vincent and Guy squeezed into the boot space with our luggage. Driving through Paris was horrible. I was still tense and frightened, wondering if we might get stopped at a checkpoint or if a bomb might fall, but from what I could see it didn’t look like any bombs had fallen. Everything was still standing, people walked along the pathways, the roads were wide and well kept. It didn’t look there was a war going on at all.
To me Paris looked unnaturally clean. At the very least I had expected to see people being murdered in the streets, babies thrown from prams, drunken violence and drug use – all the depravities of the ‘system’ I had heard so much about but experienced so little of.
I was really confused but I thought it best not to admit it. I didn’t trust this Uncle Samuel and thought he might be a spy.
After an hour or so we left the city streets behind, the lush French countryside beckoning us on. I began to relax as my mother sang a hymn to pass the journey.
‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.’
We travelled east, to what Samuel told us was the Champagne region. The landscape in Champagne was like green corduroy, stitched from the grapes that Samuel explained made the region world famous. I don’t think an adult had ever taken the time to explain a journey to us before. Usually when we went witnessing no one even bothered to tell us the name of the city, but Samuel pointed out landmarks and buildings. I was beginning to think he might be OK after all.
My brothers and I made a game of staring down the rows of grapes as we flashed by. Each row offered a different view from the next. It was as if each one was a single frame of film and we were watching some strange movie. It made me dizzy and giggly and happy.
‘Here we are, everyone!’ Samuel declared as we drove into a little town up a steep winding hill. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was like a fairytale, with little timber-framed cottages clinging to the side of the hills. When we pulled up outside our new home my eyes nearly popped out of my head.
The house was the most romantic thing I had ever seen, with rustic beams and low ceilings. It even had a log fire, which Samuel lit for us. We all immediately huddled around it, shivering. Our clothes were completely inadequate for the French climate.
Samuel took my mom and me into the kitchen to give us a tour. He opened the cupboards, which to her delight were full of pans, plates and bowls. He’d even been thoughtful enough to buy a box of groceries – bread, milk, biscuits, pasta and vegetables – ahead of our arrival. I could have kissed him.
Before we left Indonesia the senior Shepherd had come to see us and given my father enough money to last three months, telling my father that was the maximum he’d been authorised to give us. Very quickly we realised it wasn’t going to buy much at all. Even if we were careful it would probably only stretch to a few weeks. My father decided the best way to make some money fast was either by ‘parking’ – which meant standing in supermarket car parks and trying to sell literature – or by performing music. I found parking excruciatingly embarrassing; playing music made much more sense to me because performing was what we did best.
We walked to the edge of town, where Samuel had told my father there was a large supermarket. It had a huge red neon sign saying Carrefour, a word I had never seen before. We took a spot by the exit, my dad started to strum the guitar and we sang our hearts out.
A man pushed his trolley outside, packed high with crates of beer. He walked past us, sneering: ‘Crazies.’
He was the first of many.
One elderly woman stopped and stared at my mother, barely able or willing to hide her distaste. ‘Bloody gypsies,’ she hissed at us, before spinning on her heel and striding across the car park.
A few people took pity on us – mostly the poorer agricultural workers. Perhaps knowing poverty makes one look more kindly upon those who suffer from it.
The cold was making the little ones ill. Vincent developed a horrible rasping cough and baby Andy couldn’t stop crying. My father promised my mother he would fix it somehow. Later he and I walked through the town as he stopped passers-by asking if they knew of any places offering free clothing or other charity items. Most people walked past us or shook their heads blankly. A man in a thick woollen coat stopped. As he talked to my dad all I could think about was how warm it would feel to be wrapped in that coat. He gave my dad a lifeline. ‘There’s a donated clothing centre run by the Catholics. It’s mostly for homeless folks, but I reckon they’ll let you go there. What are you? Some kind of missionaries?’
‘Yes, we are,’ said my father proudly. ‘We are here to warn people of the last days of the world before the second coming of Christ.’
‘Maybe you should think twice about telling them that!’ joked the man as he wrote the address down on a piece of paper and gave it to my dad.
‘Daddy.’ I tugged at his arm. ‘Catholics have lost their way to heaven. We can’t go to that place.’
He gave a sad little shrug. ‘I think … we need to take whatever we are offered. You children need to stay warm. That is the most important thing for me right now. Jesus will understand.’
The next day we found the place, a large hall packed with rows of musty-smelling second-hand clothing. Women in headscarves with children as scruffy as us pulled at the racks, barging each other out of the way to fill up their baskets with stuff.
My mother had gone pale. And that’s when I caught a look on her face. Not regret, but perhaps the acknowledgement that her life might have been so very different.
My father and the boys had already started piling into a rack of woollen men’s sweaters. I followed their lead and started grasping at a rail of women’s clothes. I pulled out a cardigan. It was so soft and warm it felt like touching a hug.
‘Well, Mom, what do you think?’ I asked in a tone that sought approval.
She picked it up with her fingers, examining it for holes, then turned it inside out to read the label. ‘Cashmere,’ she enthused. ‘Not bad work, Natacha.’ And with that, off she went, elbowing rivals aside with the best of them as she fought to find the best clothes for her family.
After that our life became completely dependent on charity. Every day my father would take either Matt or Marc, who were 15 and 14 respectively, and comb the nearby towns in search of organisations that might be able to help us with either food or money.
They went everywhere on foot, even in driving rain or heavy snow.
One cold evening Dad arrived home particularly late and, as was so often the case, empty-handed. Marc had been with him. When the pair of them had left in the morning it was already raining, but by late afternoon a thick icy fog had settled in. Marc had only one pair of flimsy leather shoes with a hole in the sole.
As he stumbled through the door I rushed over to help take off his oversized tweed coat. ‘My feet, they are sooooo cold.’
He couldn’t wiggle his toes and I struggled to get his shoes off. I pulled off his wet socks; his feet were swollen and blue.
I fussed over him, making him sit in front of the fire and bringing him a bowl of hot water to put his toes in. He almost cried with relief. ‘Oh, thank you so much, that’s better. Much better.’
Once both he and my father were settled, I began to prepare the family meal. Mom was busy upstairs feeding baby Andy. There wasn’t really much to do: boil some water and put a packet of spaghetti in it – it was all we had to eat.
I searched through the cupboards trying to find a tomato or a few bits of left-over cheese I could grate over it to make it nicer. But just as I was feeling gloomy about our situation something occurred to me. As poor as we were, badly dressed, hungry and cold, we faced these problems together, as a family. Just us. I carried in the food and plonked it down with a beaming smile.
After a few months, once we began getting government welfare benefits, our poverty eased. My parents had spent their lives deriding all governments as evil, yet now the government ‘system’ was the only thing saving their kids from starvation.
‘It won’t be for long,’ my father asserted, assuring us that the Apocalypse was still on track. It was just that the situation in France wasn’t quite as bad as Grandpa had feared. He warned us that this didn’t mean we could relax; we still had to be on our guard at all times.
In order to qualify for the benefits, the local government officials insisted we children had to attend intensive French language lessons.
It was my first real encounter with other children outside of The Family. I was struck by their smart school uniforms, which made me nervous, because uniforms always meant soldiers or other ‘system’ dangers, but I was also a little bit jealous. Our second-hand clothes marked us out as different. I liked the girls’ skirts and their smart blazers, and I was in awe of the confident way they spoke to each other. They looked so grown up, and although I felt like an outsider I was beginning to glimpse that perhaps we, not them, were the ones out of step.
I think we would have been badly bullied were it not for Matt and Marc’s popularity. Matt had my mother’s good looks, with a long dark ponytail and big brown eyes. He was a confident, funny joker, a natural leader of the pack. Despite this also being his first time mixing with outside children he had no problem making friends, somehow making it into the cool kids’ gang. I suspect they found his difference and background a bit edgy, much in the same way my mother had found my father’s background attractive when they first met. Marc was quieter than Matt, a brooding, sensitive type. Looks-wise he took after my father: he was tall with dark eyes, olive skin and thick black hair. He was a ladykiller.
Mom was thrilled when Joe graduated from the Teen training and flew out to France to join us. Sadly, to me he had become a stranger. The brother I had known was gone … He didn’t play or joke with us; he rarely even spoke unless spoken to first.
Joe only stayed a couple of months before deciding to return to Thailand and to a girlfriend he had left behind there.
As the year drew to a close we were still desperately poor, but we’d managed to kit ourselves out with hats, scarves, jackets and woollies, so we were warm at least. I had seen pictures of snow before, most memorably the snow-capped mountains in our weekly screening of The Sound of Music, but seeing it thick on the branches of the pine trees and carpeting the garden was magical.
That year we spent our first Christmas together as a family. On Christmas Eve I was so excited I could hardly sleep, the first time in my life being happy had kept me awake. When morning came I rushed in to wake up the younger ones.
‘Aimée, wake up. It’s Christmas. Come on, sleepy-head. Guy, time to get out of bed. Come on. Let’s go build a snowman.’
Like giddy lambs we tumbled down the stairs, to find my parents already standing in the kitchen sipping hot coffee.
I looked at my father hopefully. ‘Daddy, please can we go out and play before we say our prayers? Please.’
I really didn’t expect him to say yes. Back in the communes I’d have got the fly-swat for even daring to ask.
He beamed a big fat indulgent smile: ‘Go on, get out there. And make sure that snowman has a hat on or he’ll get cold!’
Vincent and Aimée cheered. Mom secured their knitted bonnets under their chins and made them put on their mittens.
‘This is going to be the best Christmas ever,’ Vincent declared.
And it was. After lunch of a roast chicken, vegetables and potatoes – not much, but a feast to us – we walked through the town as the snow fell in perfect round flakes. In the market square there was an outdoor carol service. We took our places alongside the systemites. They didn’t seem so different to us – children rosy cheeked and bundled up in winter coats, their moms and dads relaxed and happily holding hands. Thoughts of death, destruction and Armageddon didn’t even occur.
When the service ended we walked back home, happy and giddy as we scooped up snowballs to throw at each other.
That was the best day of my life.
Chapter 13
Stirrings
I eyed the glass suspiciously and sniffed it. Its smell was sweet, with hints of nutmeg and vanilla.
‘Go on. It won’t poison you.’ Marc laughed.
I wasn’t so sure. Eggnog – even alcohol-free eggnog – seemed to imply it had eggs in it, and I didn’t like eggs.
I took a tiny sip. It was thick and cloying, and its texture was just a bit too close to Aunty Rebecca’s horrible scrambled eggs.
‘Urgh!’
It made my head shake from side to side in a spasm of revulsion.
Marc laughed again. ‘Not for you, then?’
‘No,’ I said, regaining my composure. I was suddenly mindful of all the other teenagers around me. ‘Maybe next time.’
I was reasonably confident there would be a next time. I had just hit my teens, 13. The end of the world was still nigh; supposedly it would begin any time that year. All that mattered to me was that it didn’t start this week because Marc and I were at a Family-run teen camp in the Belgian Ardennes. It was the first time I had been away from home and I was super-excited. Tonight was dance night.
A Latin disco number, produced by The Family’s own music and meaning team, played at full volume. We weren’t allowed to listen to any music that hadn’t been either made by our own musicians or approved by the leadership.
The prettiest older girls were holding court in the middle of the dance floor. Shaking their hips suggestively and flicking their long hair, they would twirl towards the boys. The atmosphere was so sexually charged it felt electric. This wasn’t the type of gross flirting we saw the adults do before they had sex. This was different. This was thrilling to be a part of, even though I felt on the fringes, not really knowing what to do.
The camp days were spent listening to lectures about how to fight the devil’s temptations, or hearing testimonies from adults who had led depraved, drug-fuelled lives before being saved by The Family. We were at the age at which The Family thought we might start rebelling, so the camp was organised to remind us of our role as ‘witnesses’ to the end of time and to help us be more spiritually mature. But it was also a lot of fun. Growing up I had never played sports before; our PE lessons consisted of swimming, playing games like hide-and-seek or tag, or doing aerobics to cult-made exercise videos. At camp they had real games like football and volleyball every afternoon. I didn’t play because I didn’t want to look even less cool than I already did.
Instead I joined the organised walks on trails through the pine forests. I was going through my poetic, melancholic phase, convinced I was the deepest and most misunderstood girl in the world.
Some of the older boys were camping on the lawn outside the lodge we had rented for the week. This provided plenty of opportunity for couples to get together. It was obvious that the camp leaders knew what was going on, but they didn’t mind. They actively encouraged it.
I was very nervous and shy. I had just got my first period, which only added to my adolescent insecurity. Thank goodness
Marc didn’t mind me hanging around with him. Matt was at the camp too, but he was busy doing his own thing and hitting on girls. He didn’t want gawky little sister tagging along and cramping his style.
A euro-techno pop song came on, all synthesised beats and cheesy words of love. Caleb was on the other side of the dimly lit room effortlessly talking to a group of girls. I felt a pang of jealousy – they were close enough to stare into his beautiful brown eyes. I had to make do with admiring his athletic physique. He was gorgeous, funny, popular – and out of my league.
He looked over in my direction and waved. I had half started to wave back when I realised his wave was meant for Marc. What an idiot. I could feel myself blushing deeply as he made his way over to us.
‘Hey, man,’ he said to Marc.
His eyes really were beautiful. And his shoulders were even broader up close. It was like staring at a teenage Richard Gere.
‘Hey, Caleb. How’s it going?’
‘Hi …’ I said weakly, running out of words.
‘Cool, talking to the chicks, dancing. You? Knocking back a few ’nogs, I see.’ He nodded at my brother’s glass.
Marc laughed. I smiled, not really following their conversation, but staring in adoration instead.
‘That German kid drank his body weight in eggnog – then thought it would be a good idea to show some of the girls how many press-ups he could do. Last time I saw him he was throwing up in the garden.’
‘Smooth. Yeah, the girls all love that stuff!’
More laughter.
‘Actually,’ Caleb went on, ‘I came over to ask a question. I wondered if I might have a dance with your little sister.’
I couldn’t believe my ears. Marc began to answer, but I didn’t give him the chance.
‘Yes. I mean, yes, you may.’ I grinned at Marc. I sensed Marc had set this up. He knew I had a crush on Caleb, but I didn’t care. I held out my arm, inviting Caleb to escort me the dance floor. I felt like a princess with my handsome prince at my side.
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