Born into the Children of God

by Natacha Tormey

  On the few occasions I called home my mother just urged me to ‘get the victory’ or to pray harder. It was all I could do not to slam the phone down on her.

  All I could afford to eat was instant noodles with the occasional cheap bottle of wine that I would drink alone in my bedroom while listening to weepy love songs. I would spend hours looking at myself in the mirror, trying to fathom who I was. Hardly the glamorous ‘system’ life.

  My first Christmas in London was strange but nice. It felt lovely just to be relaxed and watch films on TV. I was obsessed by The Simpsons cartoon. I loved how Bart got away with being so naughty all the time. But I still had to work out how a ‘system’ Christmas worked. Simone at work had bought me an Advent calendar but I didn’t know what it was. I assumed it was a kind of decoration and left it on my dressing table unopened. It was only when I came to tidy it away that a chocolate fell out and I realised you were meant to open a door for each day of the month. It was the same with the crackers. I snapped mine in half myself because I didn’t know you were supposed to pull it with another person.

  From the moment I woke up I was tense and nervous, but I tried to get through each day without embarrassing myself, quickly working out that if if I spoke as little as possible to as few people as possible and turned down social invites my chances of humiliation were significantly reduced.

  Despite this I didn’t do too badly at work and I was moved to the flagship store in Bond Street. Every day I walked past shops with an array of consumer goods on display, offering a tantalising glimpse of luxuries I was denied.

  By then I’d learned to dress better but I still felt tiny compared to the chic, well-dressed women who came into the store. To me they were materialistic bitches, especially the ones who let their boyfriends buy their sunglasses. I was conditioned to believe a woman’s place was to give everything but expect nothing.

  My whole life had been a countdown to my day of glory at Armageddon. Facing the fact that there was no martyr’s paradise and no solid gold mansion was a crushing realisation.

  I had this constant nagging voice: What if I have just turned my back on my destiny? What if they were right?

  Every time I turned on the TV and saw news of an air crash or an earthquake I went cold with fear. Has Armageddon started without me?

  On my way to a training day at head office I travelled by rail through Buckinghamshire. I was absolutely captivated as I looked out of the carriage window at a series of quiet little towns and the rows of houses with neatly clipped hedges, smart curtains and cars parked in the drives. I played a game with myself, trying to imagine who lived in them.

  I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t need luxury. I wanted a home, a family, stability and safety. Knowing how to get there was the hard part.

  Chapter 20

  The Prince Is Dead

  The knocking woke me up. Rain was pounding at the windows and a gale howled outside.

  ‘Natacha, get up.’ The voice was urgent.

  ‘Whaaaa. It’s my day off; it’s OK.’

  ‘Get up! We are all down here. Come down.’

  I was shattered, veering between irritation and dread. The night Matt phoned to tell me of Marc’s death his voice had had the same flat urgency.

  I groaned as I threw on a dressing gown and went downstairs. ‘Is everyone OK?’

  My housemates were sitting on the sofa, looking confused.

  A girl called Sarah spoke. ‘My parents called me early this morning. Davidito is dead. He murdered someone and then shot himself.’

  It had been so long since I had heard the name that for a moment I struggled to work out whom she was talking about.

  ‘Davidito. Davidito? As in Prince Davidito?’

  She frowned and nodded. ‘Yes. Isn’t it awful? I can’t understand it. Why would he do that?’

  I sat down, trying to take it all in. Davidito had been a key figure of my childhood. He was the little boy in the picture book The Story of Davidito. He was The Family’s leader-in-waiting, the chosen one and our general at the battle of Armageddon. He was the boy I had been so jealous of that I hated him, but since leaving The Family I hadn’t really given him a second thought.

  ‘Come to think of it …’ I had a moment of clarity. ‘When did he even last get a mention in a Maria letter?’

  Sarah shook her head, thinking about it for a minute. ‘He definitely got talked about at Victor Camp when I was there. He was playing up, apparently. I remember it because Maria called the house they lived in the house of the open pussy.’

  I let out a bitter little laugh. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me? But he murdered someone? Are you sure?’

  ‘Brutally. The worst bit is that they think he was trying to kill his own mother. But instead he killed one of her friends, Angela Smith. I’m not sure who she is. But poor woman, he slashed her throat. They were trying to arrest him but he shot himself. What a murderous coward.’

  I had a sudden flash of angry loyalty towards my prince. ‘Just hang on. We don’t know the circumstances yet. Why would he hurt someone for no reason?’

  I called my parents, who were as shocked and confused as I was. They told me Mama Maria had put out a very brief, business-like statement to all Shepherds, confirming the events and expressing condolence for the ‘much loved’ murdered woman. She’d said virtually nothing about her dead son except that he’d been ‘corrupted by outside forces’ – something I suspected was tellingly cold.

  I went to a local Internet café to try to find out more. The story was all over the US media. Bit by bit I learned that most recently he’d been living with his mother in Portugal, which is where her secret leadership HQ had been based. Most of his childhood had been spent constantly moving around with Grandpa and Maria. They’d spent time in Portugal and also in the Philippines, but because Grandpa was a wanted man in several countries they didn’t ever stay anywhere too long. Davidito’s childhood had been hell, his every thought and move monitored and controlled to mould him into the perfect prince.

  I honestly could not believe what I was reading. I learned he had fallen in love with a young woman called Alexia. They met in a commune in Europe and fell in love and married within the group. But Davidito was of course expected to set a good example, meaning he and Alexia were ordered to ‘share’ each other sexually with others. It was something the two young people, who only wanted to be with each other, hated. In the year 2000 they ran away. Davidito went so far as to put out a statement saying, ‘We cannot continue to condone or be party to what we feel is an abusive, manipulative organisation that teaches false doctrine … You have devoured God’s sheep, ruining people’s lives by propagating false doctrines and advocating harmful practices in the name of God, and as far as I can see, show no regret or remorse.’

  My parents claimed they had no idea about this. At a time when Mama Maria was labelling teens who left as ‘apostates’ or ‘backsliders’, the embarrassment of her own son leaving was something she had done her utmost to hush up.

  He got a job as an electrician and called himself Ricky Rodriguez in an attempt to build a new life. But he was deeply depressed and consumed with rage. He felt his ‘mission’ was to find his mother and bring her to justice. But when other second-generation ex-members of The Family began contacting him he snapped and hatched a plan to murder her. He got as far as Angela Smith, one of his former nannies.

  With a bolt of horrible realisation I worked out who Angela was. She was in The Story of Davidito, naked with the little prince during their ‘love-up sessions’. I felt sickened as I read how since ten months’ old poor Davidito had been ‘initiated’ into sex, used as a twisted experiment by all the adults around him – men and women.

  Before committing the murder Davidito had recorded a suicide video. Someone had put it on YouTube. He spoke of his mission: ‘There’s this need that I have. It’s not a want. It’s a need for revenge. It’s a need for justice, because I can’t go on like this.’ Calm and lucid, he stared at the
camera, his hatred for his mother ringing out loud and clear: ‘Well, Mom’s gonna pay. She’s gonna pay dearly … you’re a sick fucking pervert, and you don’t have anything better to do with your life than to fuck up your little kids …’

  Tears ran down my face as he went on. It was as if he was talking to me directly: ‘Ah, I’ve tried so many things trying to somehow fit in. Somehow to find, you know, a normal life. Everybody who I talked to about this says, “Well, you know, everybody has their problems.” But those people who say that don’t have a clue as to what actually went on. I mean, ’coz they weren’t part of the cult.’

  For me it was patently clear the abuse had caused him to do what he did. But, as always, The Family refused to admit the truth, blaming the usual – the system and the devil – for corrupting him. I realised for the first time just what an evil man Grandpa was. And Mama Maria? She was sick.

  I was consumed with rage at my parents. How could they not have known? I was just a child when I saw the Davidito book. They were adults. How could they not have recognised what filth it contained? They both went into denial, insisting they had no idea children were abused. They kept saying they couldn’t get their heads around it and needed to see evidence. I was incandescent. What more evidence did they need?

  ‘But what about the book?’ I spat at my father over the telephone. ‘Did you think those pictures were normal?’

  He sounded crestfallen. ‘We were hippies, Natacha. I didn’t understand it.’

  My father tried to make it better by reassuring us that he’d never taken those publications as something to be copied. If he felt that, surely so would the majority of others. ‘If bad things happened, then I am sure it only happened in Father David’s house,’ was his rationale.

  ‘Oh no, Daddy. It happened. And it happened to me too.’

  Finally I told him all about Clay. The line went silent.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  I snorted with derision. ‘Tell? Did you ever see what happened to the kids who told?’

  I gave up the conversation. It was going nowhere. I knew they were genuinely devastated by my revelations, but I was in no mood to forgive.

  Poor little tragic Prince Davidito had died his martyr’s death just as prophesied. And to me he had in a way died fighting the Antichrist. But it wasn’t the system that was evil; it was The Family.

  In the coming weeks I spent every spare hour in that Internet café furiously Googling any information I could find. Websites set up by ex-members had sprung up, detailing story after story of abuse, beatings and brainwashing. It felt comforting to know I wasn’t alone, but it sickened me to my core to know that my family had spent our lives as part of something so terrible.

  But much worse was to come. Next Davida went public with her story. She was the daughter of Sara, one of Davidito’s nannies and the main author of The Story of Davidito. Davida’s father was Alfred, Grandpa’s personal assistant. She and Davidito had been brought up to call each other brother and sister, but she claimed they had been forced into sexual contact with each other from a very young age. Grandpa was obsessed about continuing his own bloodline, so Davidito had also allegedly been forced to have sex with Mene, Grandpa’s granddaughter. Most horrifyingly of all, Davida went so far as to claim Davidito also had sex with his own mother – Mama Maria. I almost vomited on the floor when I heard that. But, as usual, my parents defended her, pointing out that she fiercely denied this was true. This is something she continues to deny to this day.

  Yet for me the truth was darker. In the early 1990s Davidito had been forced to undergo psychological evaluations to ‘prove’ that childhood sex with adults had no negative effect on him.

  I felt sick to my guts as I remembered how in France we had got on our knees to pray for The Family to win a big court case in London. That had happened in 1995 and concerned grandparents who had attempted to win custody of their grandson from their cult-member daughter.

  I typed it into Google. And there it was, all over the Net. In his summing up the judge had clearly stated that child abuse was rife within The Family.

  Yet inexplicably, after a major PR offensive by The Family, the child was returned back to them. After the court case ended Mama Maria had issued a lukewarm apology, blaming any abuse on a handful of members who had ‘misinterpreted’ Grandpa’s teachings.

  To me this was absolute rubbish.

  As if all this wasn’t enough for me to take in, I found out what had happened to Mene – the inspiration for my role model Heaven’s Girl. The poor girl had been tortured and abused to the point of insanity. She had a breakdown and was eventually shipped off to live with her grandmother.

  It hit me that this was also something the adults must have known about. What about the Mene letters I’d studied in Word Time? Didn’t we learn that she’d been beaten for her own good? To help her? These people were depraved.

  Everything I thought I knew, everything I ever believed, had been taken away from me. It was as if a huge rug had been pulled out from underneath me and all that was left was a gaping black hole.

  My own life was falling apart. A couple of months earlier I had left the relative safety of the sunglasses store and got a job in a mobile phone store. My new boss was a nasty bully. She was a spinster and seemed to be very bitter and twisted about the fact that she’d never married. She hated me on sight and found fault with everything I did. She yelled at me constantly, but the worst was when she threw some lever-arch files at my head. A few days after that she made a joke in front of the other staff that she wanted to punch me so hard that it would send me over a building.

  After weeks of coming home in tears I was signed off sick. I plucked up the courage to bring an internal grievance against her, probably the first time I’d ever stood up for myself, but when it was time to decide whether to take my case to a full employment tribunal I backed out and quit my job. I didn’t have the confidence or strength to go through with it and I just wanted out by that stage.

  The pressure to find new employment was immense, not least because I now had Vincent to look out for. He was the latest escapee to what we laughingly nicknamed ‘the backsliders safe house’. Vincent was 17 now and had just come out as gay. My parents struggled with it at first because male homosexuality was considered an excommunicable offence within The Family, but they tried to accept it. I didn’t care as long as he was happy. He was rebelling in a general teenage way, and smoking weed in his secret reading hideout at the bottom of the garden. My parents didn’t really know how to deal with him, so they suggested he join me in London. It was great to see him, but I felt that the weight of the added responsibility was very unfair. After all, who would have to be there for him when things went wrong? Having left the cult he was on his own, as we all were. Our parents relinquished their parental responsibilities and I knew that it would be up to me to take care of Vincent.

  I had been awake all night, tossing and turning. At 5 a.m. I got up and went for a walk in the park near our flat. It was probably stupidly dangerous for a woman to walk alone in a pitch-black London park, but I didn’t care. I took my CD Walkman and sat on a bench, playing the Kelly Clarkson song ‘Behind These Hazel Eyes’ over and over again, revelling in my misery.

  Everything I had tried so hard to become was beyond me. I couldn’t fix myself into the person I wanted to be. I couldn’t be normal.

  By 6 a.m. joggers and dog walkers started to fill the park. I didn’t care who saw me. I put on my sunglasses and just carried on crying. I felt like I wanted to scream out loud, to just walk up a mountain and fling myself off it.

  It was 7 a.m. when I walked back home. As I turned my key in the door I heard the sound of crying coming from the kitchen.

  Vincent was sitting at the table; he looked up at me with frightened eyes. Blood ran from his nose, and his cheeks were covered with scratches.

  ‘Natacha, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. They hurt me.’

  As I held him, he poured out the sordi
d tale. Two men he had met in a bar had tricked him into walking into a park where they attacked him, kicking him to the ground and assaulting him. He was badly hurt, but he refused to let me call the police.

  I cleaned his face up as best I could, made him a hot drink and put him to bed, wincing at the sight of his bloodied clothes. I picked them up and took them into the bathroom to wash them. As I scrubbed at them I started to shake. I couldn’t stop shaking. My whole body was convulsed. I gripped the sink for support and stared at my reflection with hatred. All I could see was how useless, ugly, stupid, poisoned, twisted and mad I was.

  A couple of weeks later I was on the Underground, coming back from an unsuccessful job interview, when I started to fantasise about throwing myself onto the track.

  I thought about how easy it could be and the relief I would feel. When the next stop came my legs carried me off the train as if sleepwalking.

  I stood on the platform swaying, gearing myself to jump, when I felt a hand on my arm. ‘Can I help you?’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Are you going to faint?’

  Her voice brought me back to reality. I ran away from her and up the escalators. Outside the station I leaned against a wall as violent shakes came over me again. I wanted to cry but nothing came out; I was numb with shock at my own actions.

  For the first time since leaving the cult I needed God, calling out to him: ‘Jesus, where are you? Please. Help me. Please tell me what to do.’

  Around a week later I had the house all to myself for the evening. Vincent was at a friend’s, and the housemates had gone to the cinema. I remember watching TV; there was a soap opera about a happy family who all loved each other. It made me depressed to watch it. I swigged from a bottle of wine, getting angrier and angrier, until I threw the remote at the screen.

  I tried to sleep, pulling the duvet over my head. I couldn’t relax so I sat up in bed drinking more wine from the bottle. When that ran out I stumbled into the kitchen, pulling open the food cupboards to find more booze. In the back of one I found some vodka. I took a large swig straight from the bottle.