I was brushing my teeth when he walked in. He had known I was alone. He shut the door and came and stood right behind me – too close – towering over me with his adult presence. He was naked bar a small towel around his waist. It barely covered his bulging stomach. I could smell his unwashed body.
‘Have you had a shower, Natacha?’ he asked in a creepy voice.
I spat out the toothpaste before I choked on it. ‘Yes, Uncle Clay,’ I answered politely as I tried to dart past him.
He grabbed me by the arm. ‘You need another one.’
He lifted my nightie over my head, folded it neatly and placed it on the towel rack. Then he led me to the shower, roughly pushed me in and turned it on. He removed his towel. As he turned to put it on the rack I shrank at the thick black hair that covered his shoulders. I dared not move. He got in with me. Then he took my hand and placed it on his penis. I froze. I had a sense this was wrong, very wrong. He put his hand over mine and slid it up and down over him. I screwed my eyes tightly shut as he began praising God over and over again. ‘Hallelujah, praise the Lord, hallelujah!’
When it was finished he washed himself thoroughly while I stood there numbly. Then he took the soap and lathered me with intrusive hands. I shifted and tried to wriggle away but he just laughed. His acne-pocked face broke into a toothy smile and I noticed his skin seemed to shine with grease. As he rubbed me with a flannel he told me I had been a very good girl. He didn’t need to ask me not to tell anyone.
He dried me methodically with the towel. He took a long time, almost deliberately as if to remind me how powerful and in control he was. Then he placed my nightie back over my head before patting me on the bottom and ordering me to get myself to bed. Without a word I did as he asked, climbing silently into my bunk. The other children were all asleep. I was too shocked to cry. Despite the wash I felt dirty and I could still smell him on my hands. I lay there staring at the dark wall for a long time.
It happened again about a week later. During nap time I felt a hand touch my stomach. I tensed, not sure what to expect. The hand slid into my pants. I felt like I needed to vomit but I held still, too scared to be spanked if I moved. His fingers moved, pawing at me. I kept my eyes firmly shut. I could smell his rotten breath as he moaned: ‘Thank you, Jesus, oh God, hallelujah,’ over and over. His fingers moved harder until the friction began to hurt. He continued to praise God but his breathing became heavier. A few minutes later I felt a shudder of movement as he gave one big groan. I heard him pick up the bottle of diluted Dettol that was on his bedside table. As he sprayed his hands with it the smell floated towards me. I desperately tried to hold back the waves of nausea that rose in my throat. I still didn’t open my eyes.
The following day I was able to snatch a few minutes alone with my mother. During break time she was sitting in the garden feeding one of the babies. She had been given a job, or ‘ministry’ as it was termed, in the nursery. I ran over to her and burst into tears. She hugged me and whispered: ‘Natacha, why do you cry? What’s wrong, ma chérie?’
I pressed my face against hers, comforted by the scent of her long blonde hair. I wanted so badly to communicate to her what had happened. But at four years old I couldn’t find the language or words to describe it. I so badly wanted her maternal instinct to understand, to look at me and somehow know.
Instead she wiped my tears and smiled: ‘Ah, chérie. Get the victory. Shall we pray together and ask Jesus to make it better for you?’
I hated that phrase. If we fell over and grazed a knee we were not comforted but urged to ‘get the victory’. If we struggled with memorising our Bibles we were told to ‘get the victory’. It never made anything better.
So on the day I woke up with a fever I didn’t expect much sympathy from the grown-ups. All night I had shivered and sweated, freezing cold one minute and boiling hot the next. I could barely touch my cereal at breakfast. Aunty Salome, who was supervising, put her hand to my forehead and frowned. ‘You are very hot, aren’t you?’
I looked at her expectantly, half hoping she’d tell me to go back to bed. But she didn’t and instead I was ordered to go straight to class. Sitting at my desk was agony. I was beginning to feel delirious, and when I was asked a question I could barely register the words I was hearing. I failed to answer correctly and was told to hold my hands out while they were rapped with a ruler for lack of concentration. My shirt was soaked with sweat, which made me feel cold and clammy.
No one considered taking me to a doctor because Grandpa said faith alone would heal illness. Going to a doctor showed a lack of trust in God and his power to heal. The only exceptions were when someone’s life was clearly at risk or for mothers-to-be, who were allowed to give birth in a hospital if they wished. I knew I had been born in a run-down local hospital because my dad had told me the story. He proudly told me he had insisted on it because he wanted to be sure his precious little girl was born safely, but he also said system people were so silly because they took pills when they had something as basic as a headache. They didn’t know the devil made the pills and used it to control their minds. He told me when he was younger and before he joined the group, he too had been controlled this way, so he knew from personal experience how evil medicine could be.
Personal computers, which were just beginning to enter the mainstream, were viewed with equal suspicion. In a Mo letter Grandpa had told us that using one would also result in the Antichrist putting a chip in your head to control you. In Word Time we read a storybook about a man this actually happened to. The devil made him do all sorts of bad things. In the end he had to have lots of sex with different women to get cured. One lady was able to take the chip out during a love-up session when he was distracted. Afterwards he was really grateful to her and fell in love with her.
Even the songs churned out by cult production teams added to the fear of outside control. There was one called ‘Cathy Don’t Go (to the Supermarket Today)’. The song was about a woman called Cathy who wanted to buy discounted bags of rice at the supermarket. The chorus, which had sinister vibrating guitar sounds, warned her not to go because a strange man would use the till’s scanning machine to put a chip into her hand so he could control and capture her.
By mid-afternoon I was seriously ill and unable to stand. Eventually I was carried to my room by an uncle and placed on the bed. I was left alone for several hours, crying for my mother and drifting in and out of sleep, when I became aware of Clay and two other adults standing over me. ‘She’s probably contagious. We need to be careful or they will all get it.’
Clay put his hand on my forehead and stroked my cheek. The next thing I was aware of was him lifting me up and carrying me out the back door of the house. Another uncle walked behind him carrying food supplies and bottles of water. Behind the house there was a wooden shed with a small double bed, which I knew was used by visiting Shepherds for sharing because my brothers had seen people having sex in there. The other uncle unlatched the door as Clay carried me inside and placed me on the bed. The room smelt like the bedrooms did during the grown-ups’ love-up times – a mixture of sweat and disinfectant. It was also so hot it was like being in a greenhouse. I could barely breathe.
The uncle turned to Clay. ‘She doesn’t look good. Should I go find Patience?’
I tried to move and nod my head yes. Clay saw me and told me to lie still. ‘No, she’ll be good,’ he replied. ‘The important thing is she doesn’t infect the other kids. I’ll stay with her until the fever breaks.’
‘You’re a good man, Clay,’ said the uncle, patting him on the back before leaving me to Clay’s mercy.
I was almost asleep when I became aware of Clay rubbing his hand up and down my leg. I tried to clamp my knees together. He forced