He had to.
Because if Marc failed in the outside world, then what hope of escape was there for me?
Chapter 16
Happy New End Time
‘Ten, nine, eight …’ The countdown had already begun. All around us fireworks exploded to a backdrop of music and laughing voices.
I looked over at my father. He was nervously checking the sky for signs of Armageddon.
My mother reached over and gripped my hand.
‘… five, four …’
I took a deep breath. We could be dead in seconds.
‘… three, two …’
This was it. The End Time was nigh. Everything was about to be plunged into a blackout. Chaos would reign.
‘Happy New Year!’ The night sky lit up in a myriad of colour and noise as champagne corks popped.
It was the year 2000, the start of a new millennium and a worldwide party.
My family stood in our garden staring at each other, wondering when? If?
After a few minutes the fireworks began to subside. The lights were still on in the house. There was no screaming or panic, only the sound of ‘systemites’ having the party of their lives.
Vincent laughed out loud. ‘Sooo, looks like we’re still alive? Happy New Year to you all.’
We laughed with him, although I don’t think Dad was entirely relaxed yet.
Mama Maria had warned us to expect Armageddon at the stroke of midnight. She sent word that all followers should be ready and prepared for the great battle.
Once a warning like that would have sent me into panic and had me practising my thunderbolts. But that was before the endless drills and training for two other Armageddon prophecies that had failed to come to pass, back in 1993 and then again in 1996. This time I didn’t really believe it. Throughout December I had helped my parents carefully stockpile our food supplies, candles and survival kits, but I had a nagging feeling none of it would be needed. My parents didn’t voice any doubts to me but I had a sense they weren’t as fully on board with it as they once might have been either.
My father was still looking at the sky, unsure if the fireworks were actually bombs in disguise. I thought I caught a glimpse of sadness in his eyes. Part of him wanted the prophecy to be true. He had spent his life waiting for the time to be God’s soldier and martyr. At that very moment he should have been striding through the air, protecting his family, waiting for his battle orders, saving lives, saving the world.
Instead he picked up baby Chris (who had been born a couple of months after we arrived in Réunion) and went and sat on a garden chair, lost in his own thoughts.
My mother sat next to Vincent and me as we pretended to relax and enjoy the atmosphere like normal people. None of us dared voice the words that echoed around our heads like a clanging bell. The leadership had got it wrong. Again.
When I woke up the next morning with the sun streaming through my window I burst out laughing. The world, despite the global hangover, was still as it was. Three times now they had told me it would end. Three times it hadn’t. I knew now beyond all certainty that The Family had been making it all up.
I swore to myself that I would not listen to their lies any longer. I was determined to join Marc and live my life my way.
Mama Maria had begun to loosen the rules in a bid to stem the flow of people leaving. The strict sobriety rules had been relaxed. My parents now enjoyed a glass of red wine over dinner. She’d also ended the ban on members contacting biological families, owning property or inheriting wealth. That turned out to have some wonderful consequences for us. My father’s friend Silas had inherited millions from his parents. Silas had known my father since the very early years of the group. I knew he came from a fabulously wealthy family and I had never understood why he’d chosen to live as a missionary in such abject poverty. But, despite his new-found wealth he clearly still had the generous hippy values. He invested in a couple of properties on Réunion and gave us one to live in rent-free.
It was without doubt the most stunning house I had ever seen, with a huge kidney-shaped pool in the garden. For the first time in my life I had the luxury of a bedroom to myself. But overall I was still an unhappy teenager and very much a prisoner. It felt like all I did was clean up after others and look after the babies. I was like a housewife. My mother was pregnant yet again and not able to do much. I resented the burden falling to me and wondered why she insisted on constantly having children when she was clearly exhausted and struggling to cope. Andy was four and a half and Chris two and a half. Between them she was run ragged.
In early May she gave birth to twin boys Louis and Laurent. They were adorable and I loved them on sight, but as I looked at their peaceful sleeping faces all I could see was more work for me.
The twins were bad sleepers. As soon as one drifted off the other one woke up, or if one started crying the other followed suit. I got into a routine of taking them out for a walk in the pram before bedtime to try to get them off. It had the added bonus of helping me escape for a while.
I was lost in my own thoughts when I felt someone looking at me. ‘What lovely children! Are they yours?’
I looked up into the most stunning aquamarine eyes I had ever seen. They were set into the face of a Greek god. He introduced himself as Jean-Yves, a local island boy. He was half Creole and half French.
After hastily explaining that they weren’t mine but were my little brothers, Jean-Yves asked if he could walk with me.
Before long I was jumping out of my bedroom window every night to meet him. At first we hung out on the streets, snatching kisses wherever we could. But then he introduced me to a man called Bear. Bear lived alone in his shack and was happy to let kids come and hang out there, drinking and smoking weed. At first I didn’t want to go, assuming Bear had some kind of ulterior motive. But for once I was wrong. He was just a lonely man who enjoyed the company and genuinely believed that if kids were going to do that, they should do it somewhere safe and not on the crime-ridden streets. We spent many fun hours hanging at his shack where Bear always made a point of listening to my problems. I hated leaving but I knew I had to get back at a reasonable time to avoid detection. Jean-Yves would walk me to the house and watch until I had hoisted myself over the fence, crept across the front garden and climbed into my window.
My days were intolerable. I was desperate to be with Jean-Yves. If I wasn’t changing nappies or feeding babies I was out witnessing with my father. He had a battered old van now and would drive it around the island’s villages, trying to sell cult propaganda to disinterested shopkeepers. Witnessing wasn’t the fun day out it had been as a child. These days it was pure humiliation and anger as I stood there listening to my father spout a theology I believed in less and less every day.
My life cheered up a bit when we took in a rescue dog called Gypsy. When she arrived she was filthy, with matted brown fur and covered with fleas. She was a mess, but I was instantly in love. She became my best friend and confidante, a kind of canine replacement for my far-away brother.
In early summer Marc came back from London for a short visit. Things were extremely tense between him and my parents. They pointedly didn’t ask him about his systemite lifestyle. They didn’t want to hear about any of the bad things he’d got up to, which I could understand, but he clearly had so many problems and worries that he needed to download. The strain on his face was clear. But they didn’t give him the opportunity to talk. I was really angry with them for this. OK, so they hadn’t cut him completely adrift like Mama Maria had ordered the parents of ‘ungrateful backsliders’ to do, but they were not exactly offering much practical or emotional support either. He made it clear that he was in dire straits financially and barely able to make ends meet, but my parents told him they weren’t giving him a penny, reminding Marc they had warned him this would be the case. He was the one who had chosen to leave and now he had to face the consequences of his actions.
Matt and Sienna had just gone back to Fran
ce, to the relative safety of Uncle Samuel’s house in Paris. Samuel was still a member of the cult but he was unusual in that he didn’t judge and had a real sympathy for the young people who were leaving and trying to make their own way in the world.
I felt wretched, like I was losing everyone I loved. I blamed my parents for forcing them away.
‘I hate Mom and Dad. This is their fault,’ I complained to Marc on his last night. ‘If they didn’t let Mama Maria tell them what to do all the time we’d all be happy.’
Marc shook his head sadly. ‘No, we wouldn’t, Natacha. We lost that chance years ago. This is just how it is. You tell me when you are ready to leave and |I will fly back here and get you. OK? Just say the word and I will be there.’ He threw me a wink. ‘Don’t leave it too long, though, eh? They might get you married off. Or you might run away with your Creole lover.’
I’d confided in him all about Jean-Yves. ‘Ha, ha. I’m not that stupid. I don’t want to get stuck on this island all my life.’
The next morning when he left for the airport I had an awful sense of foreboding. I couldn’t shake it off for the rest of the day. It was like a black mist – just this horrible gut-wrenching feeling something awful was about to happen.
But I wasn’t the only one suffering.
It hit Vincent very hard. He was 14 now and still the fragile, difficult boy he’d always been. He was rarely to be seen, usually hanging out in his secret weed-smoking den in a little hollow between the rocks at the bottom of the garden. I worried he was smoking a bit too much, but when I tried to challenge him about it he fobbed me off. There was no way I was going to report him to my parents, so I didn’t share my fears with them. Besides, my selfish head was too full of Jean-Yves and finding new ways to sneak out and meet him to worry about Vincent.
I wish I had, because three weeks later Vincent tried to suffocate himself with a plastic bag. He panicked when he ran out of breath, and yanked it off.
It was the first of two more suicide attempts, each one worse than the next. The second time he overdosed on aspirin. He told my mother what he’d done and fortunately started to vomit them up. He looked and felt truly wretched afterwards and promised me sincerely he’d never try anything so stupid again.
He seemed to be a bit calmer and happier after that, but he was lulling us into a false sense of security. In his own mind he was determined to do it again.
We were all sitting in the living room when he walked in, dazed and shaking. He started to speak but then started convulsing and fell to the floor.
We all ran to him at once. His eyes were rolling in the back of his head and he was making an awful groaning noise. The children were crying and screaming. I remembered some basic first aid from survival training and got him into the recovery position, checking his airwaves to make sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit. Everything was a blur as Dad lifted him into the back seat of the car. I got in beside him and we drove to hospital. Dad’s knuckles were white, gripping the steering wheel as he sped around hairpin bends. I was absolutely terrified we wouldn’t make it in time.
Vincent was rushed into emergency surgery to have his stomach pumped. He admitted to the doctors he had drunk a bottle of white spirit. Fortunately the hospital was new and had good facilities. As we sat in the waiting room my dad put his head in his hands and wept.
When Vincent came round, he refused to come home. In the only way he could show how serious he was about not doing so to my parents, he asked the doctors to admit him as a mental health in-patient instead. He stayed there for the next six months, insisting it was preferable to home.
Vincent’s pain only served to make me hate my parents even more than I already did. They didn’t have the faintest idea why he was so unhappy. ‘What would make him do that?’ my mother asked me the night we came back from the hospital. I wanted to throttle her.
They couldn’t see what damage the cult upbringing had done to their children. I began to think of it as wilful ignorance on their part and lost all respect for them.
After a night of drinking at Bear’s house with Jean-Yves, I was climbing back into my window, my shoes in my hand, when the light came on. My father stood there looking at me. ‘You are drunk. So this is what you do at night? When your mother told me I hadn’t wanted to believe it. But look at you, a filthy little drunk who cavorts with local boys. I am so unbelievably disappointed in you, Natacha. Of all my kids, I expected better from you.’
I was in no mood for a lecture. ‘So what if I am, Dad? What are you going to do about it? Beat me? Go on then.’
He didn’t flinch, just stared at me with a look that said disgust, disappointment and failure all rolled into one. ‘Go to bed. This stops. Tonight. I’ll be damned if I’ll see another backslider in my household.’
At his departing back I shouted, ‘I don’t care what you think. Don’t you get it? I don’t care.’
I fell into bed and cried myself to sleep. My father ignored me for days, refusing to acknowledge my presence. I had always been such a daddy’s girl, but now I honestly did not give a monkey’s what he thought of me.
Because I couldn’t sneak out any more, Jean-Yves dumped me. That hurt me much more than my dad’s silent treatment.
Chapter 17
A Door Opens
I was 17 and a half. The half mattered a great deal because it meant six critical months away from being 18 – the age when I was going to leave home. I absolutely detested my parents these days. It took all my effort to be polite to them. I loved my younger siblings dearly, but I was seething with resentment that my life offered nothing more than feeding and changing them.
Then out of the blue my escape route revealed itself, or rather himself.
I was buying groceries at the store when I found myself staring at a strongly muscled back in front of me. I didn’t really pay much attention but he’d obviously spotted me because after I’d paid for my shopping he offered to carry my bags. He introduced himself as Thomas, a 34-year-old chef from the French city of Lyon, who worked in one of the local hotels. He was gorgeous, with a mop of unruly blond hair and a cheeky smile.
As we said goodbye he asked if he could meet me on Saturday evening at a popular bar. It was the first time I had ever been asked out on a proper date. I didn’t hesitate in saying yes.
On Saturday evening I spent ages in my room getting ready, then walked downstairs into the living room where my parents were both sitting reading. My mother looked up. ‘Why are you dressed up?’
My father turned to her. ‘Because she thinks she’s going out somewhere, but she’s not. Go back to your room please, Natacha.’
I gave him a fake smile, more of a lip curl. ‘No. I’m going out. And that’s because I am an adult now so you cannot stop me. I don’t know what time I will be back. Au revoir.’
With that I turned on my heels, slamming the door as I went. I was a little shaky when I got outside, expecting to hear a ‘Naaaataaaachha, get yourself back in here now.’ But there was nothing.
Thomas was charming, funny, and seemed quite the epitome of sophistication. I couldn’t really believe my luck and never questioned why it was that a man so much older and apparently successful was interested in a 17-year-old girl who knew nothing.
He told me he loved me on our third date. I said I loved him too. I did – with an all-consuming passion that blew me away. I thought back to Caleb and Jean-Yves and wondered what I ever saw in them. They were little boys; Thomas was a man. And I’d already decided he was going to be my saviour.
One week short of my eighteenth birthday I walked into my parents’ bedroom and gave them the speech I had been rehearsing in my head for months.
I told them I was leaving them, leaving The Family and moving in with Thomas. It didn’t come as much of a surprise. They both just looked at me in silence as I spoke. When I had finished my dad simply said, ‘We won’t stop you.’
In some ways I wished they had, or at least tried to talk it through with me. They
didn’t ask me any questions about how I felt about Thomas, how he felt about me, what our future plans were – none of the things any sensible parent would want to discuss with a teenage daughter moving in with her boyfriend for the first time. Just like they were with Marc, they simply didn’t want to know about anything we did outside The Family, so deep was their disappointment. It was as if I had turned to a life of crime. I thought I had been a good daughter. I had always helped my mother run the house and take care of my siblings. But it was as if any good I had done had been wiped away simply because I did not want to stay in the cult – their cult. I was their child. Wasn’t that enough to make them love me unconditionally? That it clearly wasn’t was what hurt me the most.
Inside I was a quivering mess. I was doing my best to convince myself and everyone around me I was grown up enough to be able to make such a big decision. But even I knew I was kidding myself. In reality I was a little girl playing at being an adult. I had no idea how relationships were supposed to work. I thought that doing all the cooking and cleaning, like my mother had done, was probably a good start. Thomas lapped that up.
Sex wasn’t brilliant. I still didn’t really enjoy it. Thomas had an almost pornographic sex drive and wanted to do it two or three times a day. I had been raised to believe a woman’s duty was to service a man whenever and however he liked it, so it never occurred to me to refuse him.
Thomas drove over to pick me up the day I moved in. He looked uncomfortable as he shook hands with my father and kissed my mother briskly on the cheek. ‘I’ll look after her,’ he mumbled. Their faces were like stone. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, quickly throwing my bags in the back and urging me to get in. ‘Let’s go then, Natacha. Shall we?’
Since coming home from hospital Vincent hadn’t made any more suicide attempts, but he was certainly no cheerier. I hugged him and kissed the little children one by one. They were all lined up on the driveway, waiting to see me go. Vincent looked truly furious with me. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ he asked.
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