Chapter 24 #2
‘I do know what it’s like to have to start again with nothing.
I was raised in a community calling themselves the Pioneers of Perfect Peace.
I call them a controlling, soul-crushing cult.
We lived in a huge farmhouse in Lincolnshire.
I only learned to read through our daily “moral studies”, and knew nothing whatsoever about the world beyond our chain-link fence.
My work, from six years old, was washing dishes and keeping the floors clean.
If I missed a crumb, or left a smear on a greasy pan, I had to complete my Penitence.
Usually a night in the coal bunker, or maybe sitting through a day of communal meals but not being allowed anything to eat or drink.
You can imagine.’ She sighed. ‘Well, I hope you can’t, but there we go.
Anyway, I’d resigned myself to being married off to one of the Grand Pioneers like the other girls, but when my father announced that Herman had selected me, something inside me died.
They thought I’d be happy, because he had no other wife, unlike the others, but I was petrified of him.
He hardly ever spoke, and slunk from room to room, so I would often turn around and he’d be standing there, watching me.
His first wife, Catherine, had died a few years earlier.
They’d told us she had an incurable sickness. I think the sickness was Herman.
‘Anyway, I decided to run away. I was sixteen, and had never been more than a mile from the farm.
I had no idea that if I went to a police station or a hospital, someone would help me.
My indoctrination included everyone outside our community, especially authority, being out to destroy us.
I had no clue how to survive or protect myself, and when my father found me a few weeks later, living in an abandoned warehouse with a group of crack addicts, I was relieved.
‘I still have the scars from the Penitence that followed. The only good thing to come out of those hellish weeks was that Herman did not want a “wilful wife”. I was nineteen before anyone else chose me, and so beaten down I felt grateful a man in his sixties with three other women and nine children wanted to make me his next unofficial slave. For three years I played by the moral rules, took the abuse and the punishments and had every micrometre of my life controlled by a despicable human being.’
‘How did you get out?’ I asked, understanding why Sofia had suggested this wasn’t an ideal topic of conversation for a spa day, but needing to hear the ending so I could stop feeling so sick to my stomach.
‘Wife number three almost died giving birth. Afterwards she told me that if it wasn’t for her children, she’d have let herself die.
I knew it was a miracle I hadn’t got pregnant yet, and surely only a matter of time, even with an older husband.
This time, I stole a shotgun from the stores and walked straight out of there, my head held high.
I did for my future children what I was too cowardly to do for myself.
‘I went straight to a police station that time, thinking they must be better than the commune or a crack house. Someone found me a place in a homeless shelter, and the police raided the Pioneers of Perfect Peace, so there were no more child brides. Eons of therapy, adult education classes and cramming in every TV show I could find to figure out how stuff in the real world worked, and here I am.’
‘Here you are, with a genetics degree, a job as a research scientist, one of the world’s best husbands and a gorgeous baby,’ Rina added. ‘Not to mention organising a killer spa day.’
‘This could make a great business,’ Rosie said, with a much-needed change of subject so we could all recover from Li’s story. ‘At-home spa days.’
‘Ha!’ Sofia laughed. ‘Can you imagine a spa day at my house? Crammed into my bath, using Mimi’s bubble machine to make it seem like a Jacuzzi. The dog nicking our scones. Mess everywhere, kids bursting in demanding I find their football boots. Not many women have a house like this one.’
‘Is anyone else going to share, or are you leaving me hanging?’ Li asked as we moved on to cake.
‘Mary’s heard enough about my divorce from hell,’ Rina said. ‘Rosie?’
Rosie shoved in a large chunk of brownie.
‘Ugh. You know I don’t want to be that poor young woman who had cancer.
Wasn’t she brave? Isn’t she inspirational?
She fought so valiantly and was determined not to let it beat her!
As if my nan and my cousin, and anyone else whose cancer is terminal, haven’t tried hard enough.
I had enough of feeding the tragedy gossip at the time. ’
‘Yes, but the point is we’re showing Mary our catastrophe scars, so she’s in the coffee-mum loop. Otherwise, next time you make a callous joke about chemo she’ll just think you’re a bit nasty,’ Li said.
‘I am quite nasty.’ Rosie sighed. ‘But I can summarise, as long as you promise not to feel sorry for me, Mary, or think that me still being here is anything to do with how strong I am, rather than an early diagnosis, brilliant doctors and the cruel unpredictability of cancer.’
‘Of course.’
‘Okay, I had bone cancer. Diagnosed at twenty-one, a month after I met Jay. Surgery, chemo, radiotherapy, became a bald, withered-up skeleton that smelled of vomit for a while. Gradually, inch by inch, got better. Got married. Got over it. Sort of. The end. Sofia’s turn.’
Sofia got up, gave Rosie a kiss on the head, offered her a tissue, wiped her own eyes and braced herself.
‘We spent four years trying to get pregnant, including failed IVF that broke us financially and emotionally. Adopting all the kids was the best gift, and the biggest challenge. We deal with the after-effects of their trauma, every single day. From a teen who’s discovered that vodka temporarily numbs the pain, to a toddler who deliberately hurts herself.
It’s hard, some days, not to feel sad or angry or hopeless.
It’s impossible not to worry. I mostly have no clue what I’m doing, and if I didn’t have Jesus I’d have run for the hills by now.
But I have five precious kids, so I’m only whinging a tiny bit. ’
Whew.
‘There’s a reason we formed the coffee mums,’ Rina said. ‘Everyone goes through crap. Parenting is always a roller-coaster ride.’
‘More like the ghost train,’ Rosie muttered.
‘Well, the ghost train is also a roller coaster, but thank you for that helpful interruption. Anyway, my point is we all bonded because we couldn’t be doing with the droning on about ups and downs like potty training or whether we’ve got a place at the top nursery.
On the flip side, we’re all way past pretending things are fine when they’re secretly falling apart. ’
‘Honestly, sometimes it’s more like the big wheel,’ Li mused. ‘Round and round, dragging on unbearably slowly, every day the same, so boring but at the same time stressful because that creaky cable could snap at any moment.’
‘I wish all I did was go round and round,’ Sofia groaned. ‘I feel more like we’re on the bumper cars, getting knocked sideways every minute, my teeth rattling inside my skull.’
‘Um.’ I dared to pipe up, because this conversation was starting to undo all the lovely effects of the massage. ‘Isn’t one of the rules no wallowing?’
‘Spoken like a true coffee mum!’ Rosie exclaimed.
‘Phew. The enforced sob-story sharing was supposed to make you feel better, not worse. I think Rina was trying to explain that none of us have much patience left for fakery or faffing about things that don’t really matter.
We’ve all learned the hard way that we need to be there for each other, but to do that we need to really be there , if you get what I mean. ’
I did. I’d experienced how bad it could get when people tried to hide their problems.
We properly changed the topic after that, heading back to the hot tub via a stroll around the garden to admire the view from all angles.
We talked about Christmas films, global politics and how Sofia handled her thirteen-year-old, Adina, wanting a phone for Christmas, potentially introducing her anxiety issues to the rampaging monster of social media.
I left feeling relaxed and invigorated in equal measure. When each of those women hugged me goodbye, I felt enveloped by authentic friendship.
I smiled all the way home. Even Bob crying for a solid twenty minutes for no discernible reason didn’t knock me.
Then my phone pinged, notifying me of a Facebook message.
It was Shay.
My heart dropped through my pelvis and hit the ground with a jarring thud.
I’d blocked Shay and Kieran’s phone numbers, binned my rarely used Instagram and, as Mum had discovered, my old email had been deactivated. It had been so long since I’d used my Facebook account, I’d not bothered to delete it.
I couldn’t resist opening it.
Shay
Can we talk? We miss you.
My finger hovered over the phone for a few seconds, a thousand thoughts and regrets zipping through my brain.
Deleted. Blocked. Done.