As we nodded she raised her eyebrows. ‘So you are aware of this? I know some of you gave godly answers. But how was it one wicked child gave an answer formed by the devil himself?’
At that she flew across the room and grabbed a terrified girl called Samantha. She was older than me, about 13. It seems Samantha had told the Shepherds that Uncle Ezekiel had made her do things to him.
I knew I had made the right choice about staying quiet when Salome forced a bar of soap into Samantha’s mouth, barking at her to eat it to wash away her lies and sinful nature. All of us, from toddlers to teens, stood watching, motionless and powerless.
After it was over Samantha was allowed a glass of water and was shoved back into her chair. She was ordered to remain silent for the next week. Any child caught talking to her would get the same punishment. Then we were sent back to class. No one dared even look at poor Samantha. When she came back into class later she had a handwritten cardboard sign tied around her neck with string, which read: I am on silence restriction for telling lies. Please do not speak to me. Her eyes were red and puffy as she shuffled shamefacedly into her seat.
My father had missed this whole debacle. As usual he was in Bangkok when the Shepherds had visited. But he knew that similar investigations were happening in all communes in response to allegations of abuse within The Family, the story making it into the international media. In a bid to protect the group’s reputation and make it look like they were doing something, David Berg had ordered all communes to talk to the children and find out their stories.
I badly wanted to tell an adult about my experiences with Clay but I was also very confused. No one had ever explained to me that things like that were wrong. It was only the sick feeling in my stomach that made me think there was something bad about it.
I had been brought up to fear and respect adults, and to never question their decisions. That made me think that what Clay did was probably normal or something that every other adult did to children.
Ezekiel soon disappeared, and not long after that Clay vanished too. No one told me why. Not knowing if he was coming back or not made me worry even more.
My trauma was showing in other ways, had anyone bothered to look hard enough. I was becoming severely anxious at any slight change to routine. At night I still couldn’t sleep, often waking up crying.
One night as I climbed into my bed I felt someone looking at me. Startled, I turned, fearing Clay had returned. Instead I saw a little girl in a long white dress staring straight at me. She didn’t smile but something about her presence calmed me.
Over the next few days I saw her everywhere, walking in front of me to class and standing next to me as I ate.
I like to believe she was my guardian angel.
Chapter 7
The Children of God might have renamed themselves The Family in a bid to make some kind of point about communal values, but when I was seven we came to learn just how little families like ours really meant to them.
It was early morning, when the tropical heat was at its most bearable. Birds sang their wake-up calls, swooping onto the flame of the forest tree with twigs in their mouths ready for nest building. A red-and-yellow butterfly fluttered down and paused on my hand before flying away. I watched it go before turning back to the confusing scene on the driveway.
An uncle was loading Leah and Thérèse’s scarce possessions into the minivan. My mother and Leah were standing next to it, hugging each other. I didn’t really understand what was going on but I had a sense it was very bad, and because Mom and Leah cried it was only natural I did too.
My brothers hung near them, trying to cling to Leah’s legs. With a determined look on his face Marc climbed into the van, picked up the bags and started to carry them back towards the house. The uncle grabbed them and put them back into the van.
‘No, no, no.’ Marc flung himself at Leah from behind, gripping onto her as if his life depended on it. My mother walked behind, gently trying to prise him away, but he screamed and clung even tighter.
My parents had been ordered to a new commune in Bangkok; Leah and Thérèse had been ordered to a different city. Leah was highly valued as a flirty fisher and she was still technically single because, although in a committed relationship with my father, she wasn’t married to him. In short, her assets were too useful for her to be allowed to stay in the threesome any longer.
The senior Shepherds who made the decision had sprung the news on us while my father was away on a mission, denying him the chance to say goodbye to his long-term lover and their daughter. As the minivan prepared to drive away with my beloved baby sister in it, I pressed my face against the window and blew a kiss to Thérèse, who had tears rolling down her tiny cheeks. She was just six. I was seven. As I waved goodbye I could never have imagined that it would be a decade before I saw her again.
We weren’t the only family to be broken up in such a brutal way. Siblings were sent away, married people separated, older children ripped from their parents – all on the whims of the leadership. I had heard my older brothers talking about how the mother of a friend of theirs had left The Family by running away in the middle of the night. She came back with some men a few weeks later to try to kidnap her son, but the Shepherds had been expecting her to try it and had already sent him to another country so she couldn’t find him.
My dad was still a Regional Shepherd but was beginning to see his authority wane. David Berg was paranoid about anyone becoming too powerful or challenging his dominance. As such he created a management ethos based on game playing, backstabbing and blame. Even at local leadership level it was impossible to get too comfortable in your role because it seemed that however hard you worked or how competent you were it was never quite enough. Dad had been a Shepherd for over ten years now, and some may have felt that was too long.
The night after Leah and Thérèse left was horrible. My mom looked pale and in pain, the boys wouldn’t stop crying and I was completely confused, still half expecting them to come back in through the door. Then we had the added turmoil of knowing that we were also on the move at the crack of dawn. Mom tried to be positive about it, saying that as Dad was in Bangkok so often anyway it was a very good thing because we could see much more of him.
I was sad to leave some of my friends but I was pleased to see the back of that place.
By 7 a.m. we were on the road, a ragtag family in a battered minibus, a few bundles of clothes our only possessions. The roads were winding and rough, which made me feel so ill we had to stop the car twice for me to vomit by the side of the road.
As we reached the outskirts of Bangkok I thought we had driven into hell itself. It was a terrifyingly teeming, bustling, overwhelming city that made Phuket look like a tiny village. I had never seen so much traffic or heard so much awful noise. At the traffic lights a man in uniform banged on the window. I saw his uniform and screamed: ‘Antichrist!’
‘It’s OK, ma chérie. He’s just a system policeman. He was only helping us through the traffic,’ explained my mother.
Her words did nothing to help me understand. I’d always been told the systemites in uniform were the Antichrist’s followers and were the most dangerous of all. When the End Time came they were the very people who would want to kill us. So why was it that whenever we went outside my parents spoke to them?
Once we’d traversed the city centre we reached a suburb on the far side. We turned off down a dusty unmade road, surrounded by boggy fields mostly, with a few half-constructed villas along the side. After a kilometre or so we arrived in front of a house with a large red metal gate and a high concrete wall with broken splinters of glass sticking out the top. We beeped the horn and the gate swung open to reveal our new home, a two-storey concrete building with a cluster of smaller one-storey buildings