‘I’m sorry. But I’ll come and get you whenever you’re ready.’ I used the same line Marc had given me. I hoped I said it with the confidence he had said it to me, but I doubted I’d pulled it off in quite the same way. Vincent certainly didn’t look convinced, and with good reason. We were both really worried about Marc. A couple of days before he had called home and confided he was in big trouble.
He’d recently got a job with a car rental company as a night security guard. He got drunk on shift with a colleague, taking a company Mercedes for a spin, and ended up crashing it into a wall. He was so naïve he didn’t even realise it was a criminal offence until his boss told him he had informed the police. Of course he was fired too.
He was terrified. He didn’t believe the police were Antichrist soldiers as we once used to, but he still had a fear of uniformed authority. He had no idea what kind of punishment he’d get and if he’d go to jail or not. But the thought that he might do so spun him into panic. On the phone he told me he planned to flee to France and stay with Matt.
‘I hate London anyway. France is easier to live in. It makes sense, right? I can get a job there, can’t I?’ His voice was almost pleading, desperate for reassurance. But this was all completely out of my frame of reference. I had no idea what to tell him to do for the best. I thought running away was risky but I couldn’t bear the thought of him locked up in a ‘system’ prison either. He begged me not to tell my father, not that I had any intention of doing so anyway. Dad would just say he’d told him so, that life on the outside always led to crime.
‘Just do what you think is best. You’ll work it out, you always do,’ I said somewhat lamely as I hung up.
My first night as Thomas’s official live-in girlfriend was bliss. He had cooked me a dinner of fish and salad, washed down with champagne and chocolate mousse. It was all so surreal and, to me, so deliciously classy. I imagined we’d live like this for ever, curled up in our little love nest. Tipsy and blissed out, I fell asleep.
It must have been around 5 a.m. when the phone rang. Thomas woke, reaching over to answer it with a grunt. ‘It’s for you,’ he said, handing me the receiver.
‘For me? Who?’
‘I don’t know. I was asleep.’ He looked at me angrily. ‘Who the hell wants to talk to you at this time?’
I had no idea. For a minute I thought it might be my father calling to demand I come home. ‘Hello. It’s very late. Who is this?’
Matt’s voice was crackly and distant: ‘Natacha, I can’t reach Mom or Dad. Where are they? It’s urgent.’
‘Matt? What? Are you in France?’
He spoke impatiently. ‘Yes, of course France. I need to talk to Mom or Dad. Where are they?’
Thomas stared at me, his face a picture of tired irritation. I was embarrassed and, completely unfairly, annoyed with Matt for waking Thomas up and disturbing our new-found sanctuary. ‘Well? Who is it?’
‘Matt,’ I mouthed, putting my hand over the receiver. ‘Sorry. I’ll get rid of him.’
Thomas grunted again and rolled back over. ‘Please tell him not to make a habit of calling here.’
I spoke into the phone: ‘Matt, you are not to call me here. This is my home with Thomas now. OK? I live with Thomas now. Night, night.’
Without waiting for a reply I hung up the call.
Half an hour later it rang again. Thomas started to stir. I was scared at what he might say. Quick as a flash I leapt across his back to reach it first: ‘Matt, I told you …’
Matt cut me off mid-sentence. ‘Shut up and listen to me. Marc is dead.’
The world went blank.
Chapter 18
A Caged Bird
The days that followed the news were a whirlwind of pain.
We learned that Marc had arrived in the city of La Rochelle the day before he died. He’d gone to meet up with Eman, our old friend from Réunion who had quit the group at the same time as Caleb. He had promised to help Marc find a job.
Later they met up with some of Eman’s friends. They went to a bar, where they drank, then on to someone’s house to get high. Then they went for a drive. We don’t know why. One of Eman’s friends was driving, going too fast and showing off. On a country road he lost control in black ice and wrapped the car around a tree. He survived, but both Marc and Eman were killed. Marc was alive for ten minutes but died just before an ambulance reached the scene. It was the tiniest comfort to know a French farmer had witnessed the crash and held Marc in his arms as he passed.
Matt was distraught. Joe flew out from Bangkok to join him. I assumed my parents and I would be on the next flight out to France. But no.
My father gave me the news. ‘Sorry, Natacha, we don’t have the money for you to go. And even if we did, who will look after the children? Your mother and I have to go alone.’ The words were like a body blow.
I got right up to his face, almost spitting with fury. ‘I need to go. Don’t you get that? Why should you be there and not me? I need to go. Who was there for him for the last few years when he struggled all alone in London?’
My dad’s face contorted with rage and grief. ‘Shut up. How dare you say that in front of your mother. She has lost her son, you selfish girl.’
My pleading came to nothing. I had no choice but to leave Thomas and move back home for a week to play mother to my youngest siblings. I don’t know how I got through the next few days or how I managed to take care of the kids because I was nothing more than a tearful ball of tightly wound fury. I blamed everyone for Marc’s death, but mostly I blamed God. Marc had been an outcast from the moment he decided to leave the cult. He had been so very alone in the world. How could that be fair or right or just or Godly? How could God allow him to die before he had even had a chance to live?
For the next year I barely left Thomas’s apartment. We lived in a small flat near the beach. It was just fifteen minutes’ drive from my parents’ house but I only visited once every couple of months, and even then I stayed for as short a visit as I could get away with.
Since Marc’s death I had been in a very dark place. After two short-lived attempts at getting a job, first as a barmaid and then a waitress (both jobs only lasted one evening), I gave up even trying. I was so messed up that just stepping outside the front door sent me spinning into a panic.
I suspect my fear was something Thomas knew he could take advantage of so he could keep me in check.
Thomas was big into tantric sex, so our love-making sessions would go on for hours, always with candles and New Age music. Most of the time I was there physically but not mentally. I would bend my body obediently into the next strange position he ordered me into from the copy of the Kama Sutra he kept by the bed. Sex was a difficult thing for me and I often felt scared or tense without knowing why. I also sometimes had flashbacks about Clay. But I obediently did whatever Thomas asked me to do even when I hated it. It’s hard to describe the feeling of being pressured to do something sexually that makes you feel sick, and hating yourself for it even more because you agreed to do it.
If I had been older and wiser I might have realised that a man his age was probably only attracted to a dysfunctional teenager like me for one thing – sex.
Thomas had quite a big group of friends, all in their mid to late thirties like he was. Because I was odd and socially inadequate I did not fit in one bit. Most of them barely bothered to talk to me. His ex-girlfriend was part of the same group and he seemed to take a nasty pleasure in flirting with her in front of me to try to make me jealous.
I recall one party in particular. It was a poolside barbecue at one of his friends’ houses. Thomas was doing his usual flirting with his ex while I sat in a corner alone. I remember at one point late in the evening, when they were all drunk, he and the ex were playfully laughing and groping each other and he pushed her into the pool. The ladder was near where I was and I will never forget the way she looked at me as she climbed out of the pool with her curly dark hair and wet shirt clinging to her breasts
. She smirked at me with a victorious look on her face. To me she looked like the embodimemt of a she-devil.
I felt totally wretched and had a bad headache to boot. I asked Thomas if we could go home but he said no and told me to go and lie down in a room inside until he was ready to leave. I didn’t think I had the choice to demand we go so I did as I was told, while he continued cavorting in the pool with his ex.
When we finally got home in the early hours of the morning he started to talk about her, telling me about the things she used to do to him in bed. I told him it was upsetting me but he made me listen as he went on and on. He said if I really loved him I would try to be as good at sex as she was, beginning now. I still felt poorly and was holding back tears at his attitude but I made love to him that night all the same because he was all I had in the world and I was desperate not to lose him.
When Thomas suggested we leave Réunion I heartily agreed. He thought Thailand, so popular with backpackers and full of busy hotels and restaurants, was a good place to find work. I readily agreed. For the first few weeks it was bliss. Thomas even proposed to me, getting down on one knee in a bar and presenting me with a cute little diamond ring.
We managed six months before we completely ran out of money. I had assumed he’d take care of that side of things. I didn’t really have any idea how anything worked on the outside and I had been brought up to expect a man to look after me. We had been staying in a cheap hotel but hadn’t paid for the past two nights. The manager was threatening to throw us out onto the streets.
With my heart in my mouth I put my last few coins into the payphone and dialled home.
‘Bonjour.’ It was my father.
‘Dad, it’s me. I can’t talk for long. I’m so sorry, Dad, and I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate, but I need some money. It’s really urgent. We need to …’
‘No.’
I hadn’t even got to explain why. ‘But Dad, you don’t understand. We haven’t got anywhere …’
‘I said no. You made your bed, Natacha. Now lie in it.’
With that he hung up on me. I don’t think I could have hated him more.
Next Thomas rang his mother. He had better luck. She offered to buy us two flights to her home in Lyon the next day. France, the country of my grief, had definitely not been on my agenda. Nor had living with Thomas’s mother, whom I’d never met. But it was our only option.
No one came to meet us at the airport, which I thought was an ominous sign. Fortunately Thomas had a few francs in his wallet, enough for the bus back to his mother’s house.
When we got there he rang the doorbell while I stood a polite distance behind. She came running to open the door to the porch, throwing her arms around his neck and smothering him with kisses. ‘My baby. You’ve come home! How wonderful.’
She picked up his bag and ushered him in. He followed her. Neither of them said anything to me. His mother was already summoning him into the kitchen where she promised she had his favourite dinner ready. He seemed to have forgotten all about me.
‘Thomas?’ My voice was a scared squeak. They both turned to look at me. The tiniest glimpse of annoyance crossed his features.
‘Mama, this is Natacha. My girlfriend.’
I smiled my most engaging smile. She looked me up and down. I clearly wasn’t what she had in mind for her son. She air-kissed me on both cheeks, the look of distaste on her face all too apparent.
‘Come, I imagine you will be hungry too.’ As I followed them, she turned to Thomas. ‘So, does she know how to cook?’ she asked as if I wasn’t there.
That night we slept in Thomas’s old bedroom. It was exactly as it was when he was a boy. Football and karate trophies lined the shelves; faded posters of racing drivers adorned the walls. I wondered if all boys in the ‘system’ world had bedrooms like this. If we’d had a normal childhood, would Marc have won football trophies too? The thought of Marc was too much and I started to cry.
Thomas was getting undressed. ‘For god’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’
‘I don’t think your mother liked me.’
‘Of course she did. You are so paranoid.’
But I wasn’t. In the days that followed his mother progressed from her initial rude indifference to outright hostility towards me.
She doted on Thomas, treating him like her little prince. For his part, Thomas was happy to be waited on hand and foot, choosing to spend his days watching television. I felt trapped – I had escaped Réunion only to be marooned beside him on his mother’s couch.
I felt as though it was a battle between Thomas’s mother and myself for who could be the most important woman in her son’s life. She was determined to ensure it was her, not me.
We would close ourselves away in his bedroom and have whispered arguments. Even Thomas had to concede the situation was not healthy.
But things really came to a head when I came downstairs wearing a short skirt. She called me a tart, we started shouting at each other and it ended with her slapping me hard across the face.
I was mortified and told Thomas that if we didn’t get our own place I would leave him. We agreed to move to Cannes, on the French Riviera – we hoped its glittering tourist industry would give us a good chance of finding work and establishing a place of our own.
His mother wept dreadfully the day we left. She shot me a look that said: ‘You did this. See what you have done to me.’
I could barely contain my relief at leaving.
Cannes seemed like the fresh start we both needed. It was sunny, beautiful, glamorous and full of possibilities. Thomas went on benefits, appearing to have zero interest in working. We found a tiny little studio apartment, one room with a little kitchen. At last we had a place to call our own. I hoped happiness would soon follow.
For me this was the beginning of a long process of trying to work out how the world worked. Having been locked away in communes all my life the little things that people need to know to get through life were a mystery to me. Everything was a problem. For example, I needed to replace my French ID card before I could look for work. But I had no idea how to go about it. I didn’t want Thomas to think I was stupid so I mostly tried to work it out for myself. It took me ages to figure out whom I needed to contact. Ringing them in my broken French to ask what documents I needed was horrible. The woman on the other end of the phone was impatient and told me to bring my birth certificate. But I didn’t even know what a birth certificate was. I asked my dad but the one he had was from Thailand and was invalid. So I had to go through the whole process of trying to order an original. It was such a complex nightmare.
Thomas and I began talking about getting married and starting a family. I wanted to marry him, of course. But partly it felt like I needed to because marriage and children was part of my ‘happily ever after’ life plan. It’s what I assumed normal people did.
I was shopping one day when I saw a ‘help wanted’ sign in a window. I went inside – mostly out of bored curiosity.
The store was lined with hundreds of pairs of designer sunglasses. An older woman stood behind the counter, smoking.
‘Hello, darling. Can I help you?’
An enormous pair of bright red spectacles, the same colour as her abundant lipstick, framed her face.
‘Hi,’ I stammered, not sure what to say next. ‘I’ve come about the job in the window?’
‘Wonderful, darling, wonderful. Please, come. Sit down. My name is Manon. And you are?’
She held out a bejewelled hand in my direction. One of her rings was an enormous cluster of diamonds and emeralds.
‘Natacha,’ I said, awkwardly clasping her quiver of bright red fingernails.
‘How charming. Tell me, darling, how much you know about sunglasses,’ she asked expectantly.
‘Um, not much,’ I said, staring around the shop at the vast array of styles.
‘But you can learn, yes?’
She was beaming at me in a very disarming way. We just clicked
from that moment. By the time I left Manon’s shop I was a full-time employee.
Thomas wasn’t very receptive to the news of my job.
‘Who will clean the flat and cook food?’ he demanded. I thought he would be pleased to have the extra income.
‘Well, we’ll just have to share the cleaning. And it won’t kill you to occasionally make your own dinner.’
‘And what about the baby?’
‘What baby? Thomas, I’m not pregnant. And we’re not even married. At least this way we can save money for our wedding.’
I took his attitude as yet another sign of his controlling manner.
He tried a new tactic.
‘Well, maybe there won’t be a wedding. Maybe I’ll throw you out on the street. Maybe I’ll hook up with one of those bored rich sluts from the bars …’
‘Maybe you’ll grow up, Thomas.’
That shut him up. He retreated to the couch and turned the television up loud.
At the shop, Manon quickly became my role model and confidante.
I shared with her my doubts about my relationship with Thomas, which, rather than improving, seemed to be in steady decline. He really wasn’t the man I had hoped he was when we first met – in fact he was more of a boy than both Caleb and Jean-Yves put together.
Manon would listen to me patiently, nodding her head through clouds of cigarette smoke.
‘But you are not his property, Natacha. There is no wedding certificate, his baby is not in your belly, nor his name tattooed on your arse … is it?’ she asked, worried for a moment about what I might answer.
‘No!’ I burst out laughing. ‘No, Manon, I promise you his name is not tattooed on my arse, or anywhere else for that matter.’
She really was a breath of fresh air, a world away from the submissive aunties I had grown up with.
She even helped me open a bank account by using her home address – something I had no idea how to do.
‘A woman must have her own money, Natacha,’ she counselled.
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