God's Callgirl (51 page)

A curious part of this process included a spontaneous memory of the circumstances of my birth, with details my mother had forgotten until I later reminded her of them. I also understood the feelings of both my parents at my birth. Through the Hoffman Process, my perceptions of my father and mother were transformed from seeing them only as the people who brought me up, to sensitive human beings who were struggling along, doing their best.

During several quiet days on my own in a Byron Bay hotel, integrating what I had gone through in the Hoffman Process, the realisation came to me that it was the devil of
my childhood religion with whom I had made my dreadful pact. I sat as if stunned while the implications became clearer. I had not wanted to die and risk going to hell—which meant I must have done something really bad to make me believe I
would
go to hell if I died. But what about confession—how was it that I did not believe God would forgive me for whatever it was I had done? Although I had been familiar with angels, always making room for them beside me when I was a child, I had turned to the devil and asked for
his
support. More than that: at some stage, I promised to fail at everything I really wanted to do in life, provided I was allowed to live! I was overwhelmed by these heinous thoughts, but relieved to have a clear strategy at last:
Exorcise this devil! Reverse this promise!

First I went to Melbourne and told each of my parents face to face that I loved them. We all shed tears of joy.

BACK ONCE MORE
in Perth, I parted with fabulous sums of money for all sorts of reprogramming techniques, including one very special and extremely expensive session in neurolinguistic programming, which purported to clear everything for all time. NLP works very well in many instances, but shouldn’t be overrated. If positive thinking works at all, it should have worked for me, but alas, it didn’t.

I had several sessions with hypnotists, to no avail. Oh, dear. But I wouldn’t give up; the urge to keep
fighting
this thing drove me on. Almost blindly.

I took on a full-time teaching job after my stay in Byron Bay, but became so tired of it, so thoroughly burnt out, that one day, when a semi-trailer came speeding through a red light, I didn’t care whether it ran over me or not. It missed me by the merest hair’s breadth.

I stopped teaching at the end of the semester but, rather than return to massage work, I moved back to Denmark for six months, living in a cabin on my friend Mark’s property, making a little money from giving the Efficiency Lessons there. The environment was great for my health and morale, but the money inevitably ran out—especially when I had to give up my inexpensively rented little cabin—and so I returned to Perth and to what was easier: relief massage.

My break in the country had refreshed me and I felt enthused again. So here I was, back again at my old job in spite of everything, working during Victoria’s school hours.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said a new client, turning to me as he was preparing to leave. ‘You look so innocent!’

‘I
am
innocent!’ was my swift reply. ‘There’s nothing wrong with what I do.’

I smiled at him, but his puzzled expression remained as he disappeared out the front door. I felt a key turning in my belly, telling me once again that all wasn’t perfectly well.

I came home one day and pressed the button on the answering machine to retrieve my messages. Ravel’s ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ filled my hallway. I let the measured, doleful music go on for a full half hour. There was no mystery to this: instead of putting a blank tape into my machine before I left, I had unwittingly inserted this haunting melody. Was it pure coincidence that I had chosen this particular tape, which I had forgotten to label when I recorded the music from the radio?

I thought of the princess in the stone coffin, waking to find herself buried alive, and my hair stood on end. Fuzzily, I saw myself as a woman of grace, dead to her real identity and living in an underworld. Wasn’t it like living in an underworld to feel inferior to friends who had ‘normal’ jobs?
I definitely did not want to tell them what I did for a living, and got in a real sweat that some people might guess.

I felt—and sometimes looked—a mess. I was waiting for a train at the city terminal one day, when I noticed a woman glance at me, then draw in a horrified breath and turn away, covering her eyes. Furtively I checked my appearance: my blouse was poking untidily out of my skirt, my sleeves and cuffs weren’t too clean and, worst of all, the colours I wore clashed. My hat was perched on my head at a silly angle. Suddenly I saw it all as an expression of my inner discord. Tall, thin women like me don’t get away with untidiness as easily as others; we stand out too much. The woman’s reaction probably had nothing to do with me, but at the time I was ready to believe that I had horrified her.

I FINALLY CAME
across someone I thought could help me with exorcising my devil: Rimmie, a sympathetic, charismatic shaman. He had special powers, using drumming to move energy and help people break through their most stubborn problems. He had performed some exorcisms in his past—that made him a
must!

After familiarising himself with my story, he told me that what I had to do was call up my devil, visualise him and tell him to piss off. I sat down on a cushion on his floor, while he sat on a chair with his drum. I no longer believed in the devil as a Catholic reality; rather I saw it as an energy in my body with devilish characteristics: destructive, seductive, lying in every possible way. Even so, I knew I’d be able to visualise this energy as the devil I knew from my religious upbringing to fit the framework for this exorcism. I was apprehensive but wanted desperately to give it a go.

Rimmie started with a soft drum roll, taking it louder, then softer again, humming along like a honeybee and soon sending me into a dream-like state.

The devil appeared to me in a forest, where I was sitting against the smooth trunk of a large karri tree. As instructed, I described it to Rimmie. ‘Breathe in the strength of the tree,’ Rimmie coaxed me gently, drumming softly and persistently. ‘Now, stand up and look him in the face.’

The shaman’s drum grew a little louder. I breathed in the strength of the tree and, keeping my eye on the devil, used the tree’s trunk to support my back as I eased up to a standing position. The devil waited patiently, smoke pluming from his evil nostrils as he parted blackish curling lips in a vile smile. His eyes gleamed wickedly, as if enjoying this game of ‘Kill me if you can’; they reminded me uncannily of my father’s.

But he wasn’t my father, was he? He was the devil, and could be exorcised with the help of my therapist. My shaman friend was wetting his lips now, ready to utter the words which would surely liberate me from this beast.

‘Tell him to be gone now!’ he said authoritatively, interspersing his words with decisive beats on the drum. ‘Tell him that he has been with you long enough and now it’s time for him to go—he’s no longer needed in your life.’ Rattle, rattle, boom, boom!

A moment of hesitation on my part.

‘The pact that you made with him as a child is over! Tear it up!’ he yelled.

I gathered courage with the rhythm of the drum and words formed in my brain. I took deep breaths as I faced the monster. It was all malevolent grin, menacing me with piercing eyes that were sharp enough to cut through any Dutch courage. I faltered, but got through the performance with credible assertiveness. ‘Begone, evil thing!’ I shouted,
my lips held tight to stop them from trembling. ‘I renounce my pact with you! I am no longer afraid to die! I deserve to succeed at everything I do!’

I fell silent. The therapist slowed his drumming and waited for my breathing to slow down too. ‘What happened?’ he enquired, leaning towards me in eager anticipation.

‘The devil laughed,’ I said lamely. ‘He ran away through the forest, laughing loudly.’

Needless to say, this failed attempt only reinforced my belief that whatever it was that had me in its grip was invincible. If there was something stronger, I hadn’t found it yet.

But there
was
something stronger, and eventually
it
would find
me,
when I had given up looking desperately in all the wrong places.

THE VASE SHATTERS

IN
1993,
MY
father turned eighty. He was ill from cancer that was devouring his bowel at a ferocious rate. It was thought that he would not live very much longer, so I flew over to stay at my sister Liesbet’s house, to be at his side. My two other sisters also flew in, Berta from Fremantle and Teresa from Canberra. We didn’t want our father to die in a hospital.

Only six months before, he had hesitantly confided to me in his kitchen that he was suffering pain in his abdomen. He had groaned with the weight in his bowels and I should have suspected that something was really wrong at the time. My father rarely let on that he was in pain and his groan had been more than a complaint—it sounded like a ship sinking into the deep.

It was so strange that he was to die before our mother. She had been in a nursing home for a whole year already, and he had been dreaming of the time he would be free, when he was no longer required to pick her up and wheel her around on her twice-weekly outings. It had been a painful decision to admit our mother to a nursing home. She had begged us with tears not to leave her in that place with the awful smells, the crowded conditions that meant she had to eat her meals on her lap for want of a dining
room, and where corpses were carried out the back door so nobody would notice anyone had died in there, where there was nothing else to do. It was no wonder that her response to this environment was to become introspective, then senile—a deterioration increased by the medications she took for pain. And yet she was still physically robust, while her husband had only weeks to live.

The four of us made a roster and tended our father day and night. His strength left him measurably every day; he watched this with incredulity. He had undergone an operation, but it had been too late: the cancer had spread upwards and into his lungs. Knowing that his time was limited, he had travelled to his beloved Germany for the last time, to say goodbye to family members there. He had to cut the visit short because of pain; he wryly remarked that he had flown back first class without being able to touch the free whisky.

He would test out his still-strong legs and arms, shaking his head with disbelief, but soon he had to rely on a walking stick, then a walking frame, to get his trembling body around. It was awesome to watch the man who had once terrorised us, now become dependent on us, like a baby.

It was so difficult for him. It was a while before he had the courage to ask us to clean his dentures, and let us see his shrunken face without them. The time came when he couldn’t wipe himself after letting go his evil-smelling faeces. His skin had become softer than a baby’s, so paperthin that he begged for gentleness as he stood there. Yet he would eat lots of food, as if this would somehow return his strength. In the end, we told him gently that the doctor had said he should only eat when really hungry. ‘What goes in has to come out again, so there’s no point,’ the doctor had said. My father silently considered this and acted on it
immediately. From then on, only the ration provided passed his lips; he asked for nothing more. His acquiescence moved me deeply. It was a sign that he had accepted he was dying.

It was one of my father’s last remaining pleasures to leave his bed at two every afternoon and install himself in front of the television to watch ‘Days of Our Lives’. For countless years, he and my mother had been spellbound by these beautiful, greedy men and women who reliably betrayed each other, year in, year out. I had the miserable bad luck, once, to arrive from the airport on one of my visits from Western Australia while my parents were watching their favourite show. The front door wasn’t locked, so I went in, announcing my arrival in a loud and cheery voice. No one came to greet me. I found them in the living room, their faces riveted to the demon screen. Without speaking, my father beckoned me imperiously to come in and sit down on the couch. My mother acknowledged my presence with a half glance as I crossed the path of her vision, without actually moving her head or meeting my eyes, her face contorted into an apologetic smile. I had arrived at crunch time for one of the characters. At last, they sighed deeply and I knew that it would soon be over and we’d have a cup of tea.

My father continued his addiction to the lives of those dreadful sham males and bitchy women. We sat with him to keep him company, taking a risk that the sticky soap opera might rub off on us. About ten days before he died, he suddenly shook his head, uttered a loud, ‘Tch! Tch!’ through loosening false teeth, and wondered out loud how anyone could watch such awful stuff. ‘It’s disgusting what those people do to each other,’ he said, as if he had been asked for his opinion and this was his first ever review of the show. ‘How can they put on terrible shows like that!’ He got up to hobble back to his bed. We looked at each other open
mouthed at this sudden sign of sane disillusionment. Was our father becoming enlightened?

We four sisters shared a cup of tea in the kitchen while our father slept and discussed whether his frequent anger might have contributed to his physical condition. We could not accept that cancer can strike people for no reason. His outdoor lifestyle had been very healthy. Perhaps the destruction of his lifelong efforts in the convent gardens had eaten away at him? Maybe our mother’s constant belittling of him had finally taken its toll? He had endured it so long and so bitterly. And his diet hadn’t been too good. He had been a closet chocaholic ever since he gave up smoking ten years previously.

No one can really know what causes an illness, but I felt, rightly or wrongly, that the unresolved secrets and conflicts of the past had played the most important part. Our father had never finished any relationship business: he lived in unresolved conflict with every member of his large family, and with several other people in his life, such as Mother Albion. There were many skeletons in my father’s past, which might have taken up residence in his gut, to wreak their terrible havoc there.