I looked over at the weeping, wailing grown-ups. Rebecca had tears streaming down her red face. She shook her head in sorrow. ‘The King is gone. Oh Lord. Jesus has taken him for an angel. Our King is gone. What will we do now?’ She had the photo in her hand and held it up for us to see. ‘Look, children, look at him. Here he is in all his God-given glory.’
I stared at the black and white image of an old man with a long grey beard. In all these years the only photocopied photos we’d seen had his face obscured by the cartoon lion’s head. It had to be that way because the devil’s soldiers would surely have murdered him if they had known what he looked like.
‘See his beautiful face. Our beautiful King David,’ my mother cried out. ‘I knew he would be beautiful.’
But to me Grandpa had always been the drawn cartoon figure from my children’s books – carrying his staff, a halo over his mane of long hair and a flowing robe. He was the all-powerful conquering hero of my childhood. The photo Rebecca held up was of an ordinary old man.
I wasn’t really sad but it was impossible not to be swept up in such a public outpouring of grief. I threw myself onto the floor, wailing: ‘Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa. Why did you leave us?’
Chapter 11
Hypnotic incantations floated across the garden, hanging in the thick, hot air. Marching side by side, my parents circled the building as they chanted in joint prayer.
I sat cross-legged next to a rose bush, watching. I had baby Aimée in my arms. Guy and Vincent sat at my side. Guy, who had been so badly affected by my mother’s forced long absence when he was two, was still particularly clingy with me, getting panicky and agitated if I disappeared from his sight for more than a few minutes.
He turned to me with puzzled look: ‘What are Mommy and Daddy doing?’
‘They are making our new house nice, sweetheart. It’s called a Jericho march. Do you know the story in the Bible when Joshua and his army marched around the city of Jericho before they went into battle? Well, Daddy is doing that, but for our new home. Just stay quiet and watch him.’
Matt and Marc stood in a far corner of the garden, heads down in the type of private conversation the two of them seemed to have more and more these days.
Slowly, with a perfectly matched rhythm, Mom and Dad repeated their marches round and round the colonial-style green-roofed three-bedroom villa that was to be our new home. Mom suddenly drew a sharp intake of breath, as if she’d been hit with a large object. She fell writhing to the floor and started speaking in shrill tongues, but in two different voices, as though two people were having an argument.
Marc threw her a look of disdain.
She stood up, waving her arms in the air: ‘Go, leave this place. Leave us. I cast you out.’
Dad followed her lead, also urging something to go.
After a few more laps and then going inside to repeat the process in each room, Dad came bounding out, grinning over to us. ‘Welcome to your new home, everyone.’
I was 11. We had just moved country again, this time to Indonesia. We’d landed a few weeks earlier, having been told we were to be based in a large commune in Jakarta. I was not looking forward to being in a big group house again because memories of Bangkok were still all too raw.
But we arrived to the middle of chaos. Grandpa’s death had led all sorts of people to start asking questions about The Family. Dad told us there had been lots of really mean articles in the newspapers saying bad things about him, calling him a madman and a drunk who liked to hurt children. I was upset on Grandpa’s behalf. These people didn’t even know him, so how could they say such things? My father said it was because the ones who were saying it were the crazy ones. The newspapers that wrote those things were in the western countries. The Antichrist controlled those countries and all the institutions in them, including newspapers.
But these stories had created such a problem for The Family that large communes were now deemed a security risk, attracting too much attention. All big houses were ordered to be broken up and their inhabitants dispersed into smaller groups, so they could blend in to the system more easily. Any material stored in communes that the outside world might think was bad – such as the Davidito book, Heaven’s Girl books, Mene letters, Mo letters – were ordered to be burned in a project that the adults called ‘the purge’.
Almost the moment we arrived, a Shepherd asked my dad to start helping him carry boxes of papers to a big bonfire they were building in the garden.
My parents were secretly furious. We’d just been moved out of a perfectly safe, small house in Malaysia. They’d dragged their kids to yet another new country, only to find there was nowhere for them to stay. On top of that my mom was pregnant again, with her eighth child.
Dad managed to secure a meeting with a senior Shepherd to plead our case. The man gave him some funds and told him to find himself a house for us all, but to make sure there was enough space in it to take another family or a few singles if needed. My father was nothing if not resourceful and after asking around the local area found us a villa that had stood empty for years. It had a certain charm but it definitely wasn’t a palace.
We didn’t have any furniture, beds or even mattresses. Mom asked if we could bring some spare things over from the commune but she was told that everything had already been allocated to others. When she questioned this she was told everything had been fairly divided according to need. It was clear that this was not the case. The senior inhabitants took the best furniture and anything valuable for themselves. That upset my mom. She was a pregnant woman with a large family. Surely that should have put us higher up the priority list?
She harked back to the early days of the group when a generous and giving hippy spirit filled the group, the days when someone would rather sleep on a cold floor than see a friend go without a sleeping bag. That ethos had long passed. In the end we managed to salvage a few battered pots and pans and some mattresses.
Despite Dad putting on a brave face we moved into our empty house with heavy hearts. The funds my father had been given covered the rent on the house but not any living costs. He was instructed to ‘live by faith’ and was given several boxes of pamphlets to sell on the streets. The normal rules applied – a percentage of what he made daily we could live on, and the rest was supposed to go back into the group coffers.
Every day he got up at dawn and pounded the streets, in the same way he’d done as a 17-year-old recruit back in Paris. But there was one big difference. Indonesia is a Muslim country. No one wanted to buy his leaflets, not even out of curiosity. People ignored him, pushed past him; others spat at him, calling him an infidel. If he was lucky a couple of old ladies might take pity on him, dropping him a few coins. He came back from witnessing exhausted, tired and depressed, and feeling like a terrible father for failing to bring enough money home to feed his hungry children.
An American uncle moved in with us. He was so creepy, and balding on top with a long ponytail at the back. He had sharp little teeth like a weasel. I hated the way he looked at me. Fortunately my mom noticed it too and did all she could to keep me out of his way, ensuring I was never left alone with him.
Life was definitely hard, in many ways harder than we’d ever known it. But for me there was a silver lining. For the first time in our lives we were a family unit. I shared a room with my siblings, and when we did have enough food for a meal we ate it together. No more Isaiah hitting me with a scrubbing brush, no more Aunty Rebecca force-feeding me eggs, no more twisted perverts like Clay and no more brutes like Ezekiel.
Or so we thought.
On a visit to the senior Shepherd’s house to beg for more funds