Friday reading

Deb's time at the Mission involves some strange experiences and encounters

Speaking of babies, this one inside me is doing somersaults. I’m twenty-eight weeks gone and I’m hoping she (I think she’s a she but maybe she’s a he) stays put for the next eight weeks, like a good girl. Because I’m thirty-two they call me an old first-time mother which is funny because it’s all so new and strange I feel as vulnerable as a child. Rose is a brick. She looks after me and the baby in every possible way. You need to know that she has always had my back. I suppose you resent her and that’s understandable. She did try to persuade me to contact you, at least to let you know I was ok. Except I wasn’t really ok. Not in my head, not in myself, not in any part of me. I was afraid and angry at the same time. And yes, a bit ashamed too. By then I was feeling like I would have to justify my departure and not go back with my tail between my legs. I needed to make myself all over again.

You’ll be surprised to know that I stuck it out with the holy joes for almost eighteen months. Looking back now I can only say I stayed because I had run out of juice. In truth I was half-glad that Heather had blocked my exit because I didn’t know where to go next. I felt alone and small or the world seemed too big. Plus, I believed her when she said they’d help me find my real dad. Fool that I was. Once they knew I was staying they upgraded me to a slightly better room in the main house. The place I had slept in for the first couple of nights was an annexe with a dozen ‘holding cells’ where they kept the women and girls they found on the streets most of whom didn’t stay even a second night. I saw Sal a few times again during the year and tried to talk her into sticking around at least until she could kick the drugs but she only laughed and told me I was mad. She might have had a point.

  They called themselves the Guiding Light Mission and I discovered later that they had a lot of money. After a few weeks of preparation – like preparing for First Holy Communion – they initiated me into their mission. I had to wear a little white kerchief on my head and go through a long ceremony with prayers and hymns and a priesty fellow laying his hands on my head and speaking in tongues. Afterwards, Heather and told me I would no longer have a name, but be known by ‘my’ number. They chose that by bibliomancy, opening the Bible at random in front of me and assigning the number of the first verse on the page to me. I was number fifty-three. I did wonder what happened if it fell open at the same page several times – would there be a bunch of fifty-threes? But I didn’t ask.  

  We prayed three times a day but every evening there was a big prayer meeting with people from outside. A big crowd crammed into the meeting hall, a lot of stockbroker and lawyer types in their suits, and carrying their brief cases, on the way home from the office. The women among them had to put on a white headscarf like mine for the meeting. The visitors, ‘brethren and sistern’, got the front seats.

  We, that is me and the other ‘handmaidens’ – skivvies – were squeezed into the back of the room. At any one time there were around twenty of us, some older women, sad and worn out by bad luck or bad choices. With nowhere else to go they paid lip service to the mission. Their faded faces frightened me a little, seeming to be mirrors of my possible future self. I vowed I wouldn’t let myself fall that far. Most of the others were genuine believers, their faces burnished with the conviction that they were on the straight road to heaven. And yes, I was one of them for a very short time. Now and again one of those true believers was ‘chosen’ to go away and help set up a new mission elsewhere.

  The priest (although I’m not sure he was a real priest like Soapy Sloane) called himself Jonah. Folks, I have been inside the putrid belly of that whale and let me tell you folks there ain’t nothing there but obscurity and noxious odours and I prayed to my Divine Father to save me and he delivered me into the light and he told me to go forth and spread light and that’s what I’m a doin right here right now and you good folks gotta make the most of the talents our Divine Father gave you and rise to the top of your professions become leaders in our hellscape society in order to bring more souls into the light yea even our meek sisters (that was us in the back row) are shining light in dark places . . . on and on he went all in one breath. The only light we were shining was Mr. Sheen and Flash and Harpic. And it turned out that what he wanted from the evening congregation was money. They paid tithes, so no wonder he told them to get ahead in their careers.  

  Heather was a slave driver. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Cleaning the meeting hall, scrubbing the floors, the bathrooms, the ‘holding cells’, peeling mountains of potatoes and carrots, doing the laundry, it was never ending. We got an hour off in the middle of the day for prayer and reflection, they said but weren’t allowed to leave the premises. The new recruits had to be accompanied by one of the other bright and shiny ones and then only to do essential personal shopping, once a month.

Photo by Kelly Mora on Unsplash

 There was a small yard in the back where we could sit in fine weather. At its centre stood a forlorn pine tree, shaggy as an old bear on a chain. I took to stroking one of its drooping branches as I passed. But behind it, in a corner a creeper tumbled over the wall from the next yard. And oh, the scent of its blossoms drew me into its embrace. I would break off one or two of its tiny flowers, with apologies, studied them in my palm, grateful for their beauty, crushed them and pressed their scent to my nose, displacing for a moment the odour of disinfectant and brown stew that coloured the air in the house.

  I wanted to believe, and tried to believe, and prayed like billy-o. It wasn’t unusual at the evening prayer meeting for someone in the congregation to suddenly break out in tongues. At first that sounded like gibberish to me but after a while it began to make a kind of sense or I imagined I understood what was being conveyed in the strange words. Then one evening it happened to me. At least something happened but I’m not sure what except that after the meeting I felt dizzy and disorientated as if I had fainted. But all the other girls crowded around me, congratulating me and saying I had spoken in tongues. I caught their celebratory mood and laughed with pleasure at myself. Twisting my head around my eyes met those of one of the older women, and read her look of pity and jaded cynicism. She had seen it all before and knew it for the hysteria it likely was.    

  What exactly is the mission? I asked Heather one day.

  She looked at me in silence for a few moments, uncertain whether I was taking the piss. If you are asking sincerely, she said, you will need to make an appointment with Brother Jonah and he will explain how we dedicate our lives to the mission.  

  I nodded, knowing I would never ask for a meeting with Jonah.

 We have great hopes of you, Heather added, with a small smile. You could be an asset to our work if you keep on as you are doing.

  Those words provoked a steely defiance in me. No expectations please. I had had enough of those.

  I befriended a girl, who had joined shortly before me. Her name was Shirley but she refused to answer to it saying, Shirley is gone, she was a bad person, and I have nothing to do with her now. That frightened me a little because I couldn’t think of my Deb self in the third person. When I tried to do that I felt a weird crack inside, that other orphan self I had glimpsed when I first left home, reasserting herself and trying to shake off the falsehood of fifty-three.

My head went back and forth like this for almost a year until the day Shirley, number eighty-four, had a meltdown. We were at the prayer meeting when she went from the blather of tongues into a raging fit, cursing and swearing and yelling at some unseen person about having broken her into pieces, her hands flailing as if to ward off an attack. The rest of us clung to one another, hearts pounding with terror, some of the girls started to cry. I felt a chill of terror on my skin and sickness in my stomach. A couple of the men there managed to restrain her, not before being bitten and kicked, and take her out of the room. Next day, we were told she wouldn’t be coming back. That’s when I decided I had to get out. The question was how. We were allowed to write letters but we knew that Heather read them. I couldn’t trust Sal to post one for me, besides I didn’t know when she’d be back. I was closely supervised on my monthly outing. My only hope was to ask one of the delivery men who brought the fresh food every day and hope that he wouldn’t shop me to Heather or Jonah.

  I wrote to Rose telling her I needed to get away from the place but I had no money and wasn’t even too sure where I was. Next morning while on kitchen duty I hovered near the back door until the vegetable man came. He said nothing only nodded when I asked him to take the letter. I gave it to him with a few bob to buy the stamp. He took the envelope and resting it on his clipboard turned it over and wrote an address on the back.

 I’m assuming you’ll be wanting a reply, he winked at me.

 Yes, Yes, I said. Thank you. I beamed at him, happiness spilling out of me at the thought of rescue. Thank you.

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