God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  I wrote a letter to them both, saying I loved them, that it was incredible that this misunderstanding had come between us. I received no reply. I sent flowers, but it was no use. I was so hurt that I confided in a mutual friend, who was a psychologist. ‘What’s all this about praying for me?’ I asked, after she had listened carefully to my story. ‘They weren’t even religious.’

  But Molly knew. She explained that Don and Ruth had become born-again Christians. She also made an astute observation. ‘They probably needed a scapegoat after you left,’ she said. ‘It would have been easier to blame you and save their marriage, than to cause a rift by accepting that one of them might be responsible.’

  I understood at last and it was easier to let them go. It was only after I’d lost my friends that I realised what they had meant to me: the only happy, normal couple in my life whom I had trusted. It would take me many years to find friends like that again.

  IT WAS HAL who first suspected that there was something in my past that seriously needed healing. Hal and I were in frequent contact, even when I did not live with him, because of our daughter. When a therapist couple came to town who specialised in championing people who had suffered at the hands of adults when they were children, Hal urged me to go along and offered to pay the expenses.

  Once signed up and present, it was a question of my speaking up, joining in. I watched participants fall in a heap on the floor, spontaneously screaming, and being embraced and comforted by John and Sue, who joined them there on the floor.

  I decided to go for it and sat down on the lounge-room carpet, surrounded by several pairs of feet from participants lounging in chairs.

  ‘Where are you?’ The question came from John. To my surprise, I replied without hesitation: ‘In the sandpit.’

  ‘How old are you?’ came John’s second question.

  ‘I’m two and a bit.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I’m sitting on sand…it’s coarse sand, wet…my bottom is bare…I like the grains of sand sticking on my hands and body.’

  ‘Who else is there?’ John continued.

  ‘My dad; he is looking at me.’

  ‘How does it feel when your dad looks at you?’

  ‘It feels…yucky.’

  ‘Your father is looking at you and it feels yucky?’ John’s voice was full of indignation, making me feel safe to clearly recall what I had experienced back then, as a two year old. My father wasn’t looking at my eyes, but staring at my bottom; his face was red and had a curiously stiff grimace. Yes, it felt yucky, very yucky.

  John roared, ‘How dare your father look at you like that?’, and I began to cry, feeling both forlornly betrayed by my father’s invasive staring and tenderly grateful for the supportive adults around me. Sue embraced me like a mother. It was so strange, to feel a mother’s protective arms.

  I felt a great deal lighter after that session, even though I felt bad that my father was a villain in everyone’s eyes. They had called a spade a spade: there was no doubt in their minds—or mine, now—that my father had been leering at me, not just looking, and that it wasn’t right of him to stare at my genitals like that.

  That night, I had a dream. There weren’t any pictures, but there were words that wanted to be remembered, urgently. I woke up early in the morning and wrote them down. I PROMISE TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING I DO, IF I AM ALLOWED TO LIVE, I wrote in capital letters. I wrote it several times, until it penetrated that this was literally a promise I had made at some time in my life. It was a very important clue, but what on earth was its context? How could I have made such a promise? When did I feel that my life was so threatened that I would make a deal like this? Who was the promise made to?

  As I pondered, I remembered that feeling of self-sabotage which had made sure that nothing I tried to take me away from my massage career would ever succeed. When it came to crunch time, it always became ‘clear’ to me that none of my ventures would work, even when I employed outside expertise and no matter how many business courses I attended. I remembered what Robert Kyosaki had said during one of his brilliant Money and You workshops. He had looked at me directly and spoken very distinctly:‘Of course, for some it is too late.’ I was in my early fifties then and desperately wanted to prove him wrong, yet I didn’t trust myself to. My capacity for failure was uncanny, but somehow expected.

  In one effort to get started in a new way of life, I enrolled for training in the so-called Efficiency Lessons, a graded series of sessions designed to empower people. I was so impressed when I experienced the Lessons for myself, that I invested a fair amount of money in becoming trained in administering them. I was doing really well; in fact, I seemed to have found a career for which I was superbly suited! Perhaps I was doing too well for some in the team. One, a woman psychologist, started asking questions about ‘the credibility of the trainee facilitators’. It seemed that just about anyone with a presentable face could apply, she said. What were our qualifications? And then: did any of us have a police record?

  We were required to detail our previous employment history. I decided to answer honestly: I had been a teacher, a bodyworker and also a prostitute; and yes, there was a time when my name and photograph were registered with the Vice Squad, so they would know my identity when they saw my advertisement. The record was scrapped when I left the prostitution business—I had called for confirmation and been told there was no record of me in their files—but that was not the point. An ex-prostitute was not the sort of person these people wanted on their staff, no matter how ‘efficient’ she was. The boss felt obliged to sack me. I left, fuming, blushing and feeling dreadfully ashamed.

  This wouldn’t have happened to just anybody. There was definitely a serious ‘bug’ in my system; a sabotage mechanism that matched the statement I remembered from my dream. The question was, what to do about it? A woman friend told me about regression therapy, which sounded as if it might help me to address the mystery.

  Jan was a skilled therapist; she had a special gift for helping people to encounter memories of past lives and had given up a career as a successful businesswoman to do it. After I told her what I knew about my problem, she explained what we were aiming for: namely, to go into a past life which had a bearing on the dynamics that were still playing themselves out in this lifetime. Neither of us had any idea of what would transpire.

  Jan went through her gentle induction as I sat on a comfortable couch in her living room. I closed my eyes in perfect relaxation…relaxed…relaxed…

  The first thing I became aware of was empty pale sky. A feeling of intense coldness came over me. Jan piled on the blankets as I shivered, but I could not get warm. Gradually the vision in my mind revealed the tops of pine trees ridging nearby hills, standing in deep snow. I saw myself then as a young American Indian woman of about fifteen, collapsed into a kneeling position, held by the snow, with blood flowing from my legs.

  Then my eyes focused on two figures on horseback: one was a medicine man, the other my Sioux lover. The medicine man was the most powerful person in the tribe. No one contradicted him, especially the girls and women; they were not expected to have anything to do with tribal decisions. Yet this was exactly what I had done. I had the gift of being able to read minds and I could tell if someone was telling the truth or not. I had known that the medicine man was making up stories to build his influence and standing in the tribe. Rather than keep my own counsel, I had loudly accused him of lying, in the presence of the chief and all the elders.

  I had broken a tribal custom by speaking out and I had undermined the medicine man’s credibility. I should have known there would be retribution for this wild, impulsive action, but could never have envisaged my punishment: that I would be taken away from the camp and, once far away, that the hamstrings of my legs would be cut by my own lover, who was more bound to tribal loyalty than to his love for me. Unable to run away or return to the camp, I was left to die slowly in the snow, alone.

  Softly, Jan as
ked me to look into the eyes of my lover, who sat on horseback, about to return to the village with the medicine man. I met his hard, self-righteous eyes and…oh! I was shocked to the heart to discover in him the eyes of my own father! As the life-blood flowed from my legs, I returned his look with an intense gaze. There was no love left in me then, and no pleading, no questions; there was only the overwhelming desire to punish him. And with all the intention I could muster, I cursed him.

  How did the realisation come to me that this was how I had locked us both into lifetimes of conflict? I don’t know. The thought just came that I would both love and hate this man, and he would love and hate me, until the cycle was somehow broken. I did not know that my curse would give him the power to crush me again and again.

  It didn’t matter to me whether my experience with Jan revealed a true story or not, whether reincarnation was true or not; the important thing was that these feelings about my father were being acknowledged, and that I had gained some sense of responsibility for the kind of relationship that had developed between us. Over time, the information gained through my work with Jan would bear fruit.

  I continued my search for understanding by going to Byron Bay in New South Wales to do the Hoffman Process, which specifically dealt with father and mother issues. During all the angry pillow-bashing sessions, it puzzled me why I was driven to pulverise my father’s imagined penis again and again and again. The penis would always restore itself and I would bash it to pieces again, until I was utterly exhausted and believed it must be done for since I was done for. In hindsight, it is a wonder that none of the therapists there picked up on this.

  A curious part of this process included a spontaneous memory of the circumstances of my birth, with details my mother had forgotten until I later reminded her of them. I also understood the feelings of both my parents at my birth. Through the Hoffman Process, my perceptions of my father and mother were transformed from seeing them only as the people who brought me up, to sensitive human beings who were struggling along, doing their best.

  During several quiet days on my own in a Byron Bay hotel, integrating what I had gone through in the Hoffman Process, the realisation came to me that it was the devil of my childhood religion with whom I had made my dreadful pact. I sat as if stunned while the implications became clearer. I had not wanted to die and risk going to hell—which meant I must have done something really bad to make me believe I would go to hell if I died. But what about confession—how was it that I did not believe God would forgive me for whatever it was I had done? Although I had been familiar with angels, always making room for them beside me when I was a child, I had turned to the devil and asked for his support. More than that: at some stage, I promised to fail at everything I really wanted to do in life, provided I was allowed to live! I was overwhelmed by these heinous thoughts, but relieved to have a clear strategy at last: Exorcise this devil! Reverse this promise!

  First I went to Melbourne and told each of my parents face to face that I loved them. We all shed tears of joy.

  BACK ONCE MORE in Perth, I parted with fabulous sums of money for all sorts of reprogramming techniques, including one very special and extremely expensive session in neurolinguistic programming, which purported to clear everything for all time. NLP works very well in many instances, but shouldn’t be over-rated. If positive thinking works at all, it should have worked for me, but alas, it didn’t.

  I had several sessions with hypnotists, to no avail. Oh, dear. But I wouldn’t give up; the urge to keep fighting this thing drove me on. Almost blindly.

  I took on a full-time teaching job after my stay in Byron Bay, but became so tired of it, so thoroughly burnt out, that one day, when a semi-trailer came speeding through a red light, I didn’t care whether it ran over me or not. It missed me by the merest hair’s breadth.

  I stopped teaching at the end of the semester but, rather than return to massage work, I moved back to Denmark for six months, living in a cabin on my friend Mark’s property, making a little money from giving the Efficiency Lessons there. The environment was great for my health and morale, but the money inevitably ran out—especially when I had to give up my inexpensively rented little cabin—and so I returned to Perth and to what was easier: relief massage.

  My break in the country had refreshed me and I felt enthused again. So here I was, back again at my old job in spite of everything, working during Victoria’s school hours.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said a new client, turning to me as he was preparing to leave. ‘You look so innocent!’

  ‘I am innocent!’ was my swift reply. ‘There’s nothing wrong with what I do.’

  I smiled at him, but his puzzled expression remained as he disappeared out the front door. I felt a key turning in my belly, telling me once again that all wasn’t perfectly well.

  I came home one day and pressed the button on the answering machine to retrieve my messages. Ravel’s ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ filled my hallway. I let the measured, doleful music go on for a full half hour. There was no mystery to this: instead of putting a blank tape into my machine before I left, I had unwittingly inserted this haunting melody. Was it pure coincidence that I had chosen this particular tape, which I had forgotten to label when I recorded the music from the radio?

  I thought of the princess in the stone coffin, waking to find herself buried alive, and my hair stood on end. Fuzzily, I saw myself as a woman of grace, dead to her real identity and living in an underworld. Wasn’t it like living in an underworld to feel inferior to friends who had ‘normal’ jobs? I definitely did not want to tell them what I did for a living, and got in a real sweat that some people might guess.

  I felt—and sometimes looked—a mess. I was waiting for a train at the city terminal one day, when I noticed a woman glance at me, then draw in a horrified breath and turn away, covering her eyes. Furtively I checked my appearance: my blouse was poking untidily out of my skirt, my sleeves and cuffs weren’t too clean and, worst of all, the colours I wore clashed. My hat was perched on my head at a silly angle. Suddenly I saw it all as an expression of my inner discord. Tall, thin women like me don’t get away with untidiness as easily as others; we stand out too much. The woman’s reaction probably had nothing to do with me, but at the time I was ready to believe that I had horrified her.

  I FINALLY CAME across someone I thought could help me with exorcising my devil: Rimmie, a sympathetic, charismatic shaman. He had special powers, using drumming to move energy and help people break through their most stubborn problems. He had performed some exorcisms in his past—that made him a must!

  After familiarising himself with my story, he told me that what I had to do was call up my devil, visualise him and tell him to piss off. I sat down on a cushion on his floor, while he sat on a chair with his drum. I no longer believed in the devil as a Catholic reality; rather I saw it as an energy in my body with devilish characteristics: destructive, seductive, lying in every possible way. Even so, I knew I’d be able to visualise this energy as the devil I knew from my religious upbringing to fit the framework for this exorcism. I was apprehensive but wanted desperately to give it a go.

  Rimmie started with a soft drum roll, taking it louder, then softer again, humming along like a honeybee and soon sending me into a dream-like state.

  The devil appeared to me in a forest, where I was sitting against the smooth trunk of a large karri tree. As instructed, I described it to Rimmie. ‘Breathe in the strength of the tree,’ Rimmie coaxed me gently, drumming softly and persistently. ‘Now, stand up and look him in the face.’

  The shaman’s drum grew a little louder. I breathed in the strength of the tree and, keeping my eye on the devil, used the tree’s trunk to support my back as I eased up to a standing position. The devil waited patiently, smoke pluming from his evil nostrils as he parted blackish curling lips in a vile smile. His eyes gleamed wickedly, as if enjoying this game of ‘Kill me if you can’; they reminded me uncannily of my father’s.

/>   But he wasn’t my father, was he? He was the devil, and could be exorcised with the help of my therapist. My shaman friend was wetting his lips now, ready to utter the words which would surely liberate me from this beast.

  ‘Tell him to be gone now!’ he said authoritatively, interspersing his words with decisive beats on the drum. ‘Tell him that he has been with you long enough and now it’s time for him to go—he’s no longer needed in your life.’ Rattle, rattle, boom, boom!

  A moment of hesitation on my part.

  ‘The pact that you made with him as a child is over! Tear it up!’ he yelled.

  I gathered courage with the rhythm of the drum and words formed in my brain. I took deep breaths as I faced the monster. It was all malevolent grin, menacing me with piercing eyes that were sharp enough to cut through any Dutch courage. I faltered, but got through the performance with credible assertiveness. ‘Begone, evil thing!’ I shouted, my lips held tight to stop them from trembling. ‘I renounce my pact with you! I am no longer afraid to die! I deserve to succeed at everything I do!’

  I fell silent. The therapist slowed his drumming and waited for my breathing to slow down too. ‘What happened?’ he enquired, leaning towards me in eager anticipation.

  ‘The devil laughed,’ I said lamely. ‘He ran away through the forest, laughing loudly.’

  Needless to say, this failed attempt only reinforced my belief that whatever it was that had me in its grip was invincible. If there was something stronger, I hadn’t found it yet.

  But there was something stronger, and eventually it would find me, when I had given up looking desperately in all the wrong places.