‘Merci beaucoup.’
He waved us through. My heart was pounding and I felt light headed.
A childish tittering roused me from my daze. My brothers were helping Dad collect our luggage. Our battered suitcases looked ready to spew their contents over the luggage carousel.
I turned my head towards the giggling. A girl of about my age was whispering into her mother’s ear and pointing.
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘Mommy, why is everyone staring at us?’ I asked.
‘Oh, Natacha, darling. Everyone is not staring at us.’ She looked around. ‘And if they were, it is because they are system people and they can see we are God’s people. It is God’s image shining in you that makes them stare so.’
‘Do they want to hurt us?’
‘No, my darling,’ she continued, beginning to hit her stride. ‘It is just that they have never seen the beauty of God’s love made manifest in people such as us. And that is why we are here, remember – to share God’s love with these lost souls before it is too late.’
I suddenly became very aware of my surroundings. Everything was shiny, clean, properly built and maintained. The people were neatly groomed in expensive-looking clothes. Several of them were fat. Many of them smoked. Others looked bored, as if waiting for luggage at a gleaming airport in the Antichrist’s stronghold was perfectly safe. Didn’t they even know what danger they were in?
By contrast, we looked like refugees from a different planet. We were underweight, underdressed and under the impression that we were the normal ones – the ones, amidst all this material system wealth, who really knew what was going on.
Dad told us an uncle named Samuel was coming to pick us up. I was relieved to know we weren’t expected to take a system bus. Samuel was waiting for us in the main concourse. He was tall and strongly built, with dark curly hair and deep blue eyes. He greeted us with a warm smile and hugged my parents vigorously. ‘Bonjour, bonjour, welcome to Paris.’
He and my father walked ahead, jabbering at one another in a language I didn’t understand. Since moving to Thailand, American English had become my parents’ chosen spoken language because that was the official language spoken in The Family. Mom had taught us a smattering of French vocabulary when we were alone with her, but English was my native tongue.
Samuel held open a huge metal-framed glass door and gestured us through it. I held back for a moment, not trusting him and wondering if it was a trap.
‘Come on, ma chérie, hurry up,’ Mom urged me on with a smile.
It was absolutely freezing. The first thing to hit me was the wind. An icy blast bit into my face, causing my eyes to screw up and water.
I think I fully expected outside to resemble a scene of nuclear devastation – flattened buildings, the stench of death, the hum of marching boots, voices of women screaming and children crying. Instead, when I managed to open my eyes I saw rows and rows of cars. Not like the battered cars in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but gleaming, shiny cars in so many different shapes I couldn’t count. My father and Samuel were already pushing our trolley across some striped lines in the road, towards a field of hundreds more cars. I quickened my pace, desperate to get out of the wind.
Samuel walked in the direction of a large silver car with square lamps at the front. I heard Matt mumble, ‘Oh wow, please let it be that one.’
Instead Samuel opened the door of the battered black Renault estate next to it. Matt looked crestfallen. Even I felt a bit cheated too, wondering how we’d all fit in. My father rode up front. Me, Mom – who carried baby Andy in her arms – and Aimée were in the back seat with Matt and Marc. Vincent and Guy squeezed into the boot space with our luggage. Driving through Paris was horrible. I was still tense and frightened, wondering if we might get stopped at a checkpoint or if a bomb might fall, but from what I could see it didn’t look like any bombs had fallen. Everything was still standing, people walked along the pathways, the roads were wide and well kept. It didn’t look there was a war going on at all.
To me Paris looked unnaturally clean. At the very least I had expected to see people being murdered in the streets, babies thrown from prams, drunken violence and drug use – all the depravities of the ‘system’ I had heard so much about but experienced so little of.
I was really confused but I thought it best not to admit it. I didn’t trust this Uncle Samuel and thought he might be a spy.
After an hour or so we left the city streets behind, the lush French countryside beckoning us on. I began to relax as my mother sang a hymn to pass the journey.
‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.’
We travelled east, to what Samuel told us was the Champagne region. The landscape in Champagne was like green corduroy, stitched from the grapes that Samuel explained made the region world famous. I don’t think an adult had ever taken the time to explain a journey to us before. Usually when we went witnessing no one even bothered to tell us the name of the city, but Samuel pointed out landmarks and buildings. I was beginning to think he might be OK after all.
My brothers and I made a game of staring down the rows of grapes as we flashed by. Each row offered a different view from the next. It was as if each one was a single frame of film and we were watching some strange movie. It made me dizzy and giggly and happy.
‘Here we are, everyone!’ Samuel declared as we drove into a little town up a steep winding hill. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was like a fairytale, with little timber-framed cottages clinging to the side of the hills. When we pulled up outside our new home my eyes nearly popped out of my head.
The house was the most romantic thing I had ever seen, with rustic beams and low ceilings. It even had a log fire, which Samuel lit for us. We all immediately huddled around it, shivering. Our clothes were completely inadequate for the French climate.
Samuel took my mom and me into the kitchen to give us a tour. He opened the cupboards, which to her delight were full of pans, plates and bowls. He’d even been thoughtful enough to buy a box of groceries – bread, milk, biscuits, pasta and vegetables – ahead of our arrival. I could have kissed him.
Before we left Indonesia the senior Shepherd had come to see us and given my father enough money to last three months, telling my father that was the maximum he’d been authorised to give us. Very quickly we realised it wasn’t going to buy much at all. Even if we were careful it would probably only stretch to a few weeks. My father decided the best way to make some money fast was either by ‘parking’ – which meant standing in supermarket car parks and trying to sell literature – or by performing music. I found parking excruciatingly embarrassing; playing music made much more sense to me because performing was what we did best.
We walked to the edge of town, where Samuel had told my father there was a large supermarket. It had a huge red neon sign saying Carrefour, a word I had never seen before. We took a spot by the exit, my dad started to strum the guitar and we sang our hearts out.
A man pushed his trolley outside, packed high with crates of beer. He walked past us, sneering: ‘Crazies.’
He was the first of many.
One elderly woman stopped and stared at my mother, barely able or willing to hide her distaste. ‘Bloody gypsies,’ she hissed at us, before spinning on her heel and striding across the car park.
A few people took pity on us – mostly the poorer agricultural workers. Perhaps knowing poverty makes one look more kindly upon those who suffer from it.
The cold was making the little ones ill. Vincent developed a horrible rasping cough and baby Andy couldn’t stop crying. My father promised my mother he would fix it somehow. Later he and I walked through the