People in Glass Houses Read online

  If nothing happens, further prayer is required. And more intense prayer, often louder. Pushier. You tell that demon to leave.

  It doesn’t want to. You have to make it.

  The demon of homosexuality takes three to four hours to leave, give or take an hour. Tales are told of people changing voices, changing character and generally being weird while the demon wrestles with its host. The more entrenched the behaviour, the longer it might take to get rid of the demon. Not that this happened in the bible, it’s just the way things are now.

  This happened to Michael, whose Italian mother was bitterly disappointed that she would have no grandchildren. She twisted the pastor’s arm and, for three or four hours, they prayed and interceded over Michael and his tortured soul. Eventually, Michael concedes, he did hyperventilate a bit, and slip onto the floor. He’s also got epilepsy so that didn’t help.

  After it was over Michael felt better, and tried to keep on the straight and narrow. After some months, he found his mind wandering back to those thoughts again.

  Michael had three exorcisms. Eventually the pastor told him there was nothing more he could do. The demons were clearly gone. It was Michael who was allowing these thoughts to go on.

  I myself have never been exorcised, although several people have made some lazy attempts. I think they didn’t know what to name the beings inside me that made them so uncomfortable and nobody had the time to fight with these things. I remain unexorcised. Or spirited. Depends what side you’re sitting on.

  Chapter 7

  INTO TEMPTATION

  He said, ‘My name is Love.’

  Then straight the first did turn himself to me

  And cried, ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame,

  But I am Love, and I was wont to be

  Alone in this fair garden, till he came

  Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill

  The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’

  Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will,

  I am the love that dare not speak its name.’

  — Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Two Loves’ (1894)

  I’d like to say I eventually stopped going to church because I found a higher ground. I’d love to be self-righteous and say I left due to my principles, but the obvious erosion of so many of them would make that a joke too.

  I, like so many others, in the most uneventful and non-s pectacular way, left because the love of a human being outside the walls blew away the love I thought I’d had inside the walls.

  My parents were tired by the time I finished high school. Supportive and loving as they were, I had worn them down over the years. At least I managed to spare them the morbid idea that God was a joke being played on all of us, because that would have broken their hearts. Rather, I spent my time debating with them, arguing over the details of life, straining to exert intellectual independence, emotional freedom of choice and to get out of wherever it was we were living. I had moved every few years of my life, and I now live with an inbuilt travelling bug that causes me to want to wander shortly after I settle somewhere.

  The northwest districts of Sydney have gone gangbusters since those days, particularly since Hillsong and friends moved in. They are, in my experience, some of the most Siberian suburbs in Sydney. In the endless acres of housing developments, there are buses that seem to cruise by every few days. If you don’t drive, you don’t leave. There’s no beach and no bush. I have no idea why so many people want to live there. In my teenage years I thought I might simply cease to exist in the nothingness of Cherrybrook if I didn’t keep alert. It is a sound beyond that of silence; it is how snow-blindness feels.

  I had to get away. I had been such a good girl. I had done all the right things as best I could. And I deserved to go out and play.

  It was tradition in 1989 for a frightening majority of kids from New South Wales to go to Surfers Paradise in Queensland for a week of ‘partying’ after the HSC was finished. Some of the cool kids had started to tolerate my weird personality in a positive way, and there was room for me at late notice.

  I went in for the kill. I put my foot down. I told Fred and Elaine that I should go and that there was no evidence to suggest that I shouldn’t be able to go away for a week like everybody else and not come back dead or possessed, since I was actually old enough to vote.

  I don’t remember exactly how I did it, and some people may wonder why I didn’t just go regardless. Well, biblically, I had to honour and obey my parents. I couldn’t go to Surfers without their consent or I would be stepping outside of God’s will and I would be hit by a bus by lunchtime. The only way around this was to break their will, slowly, torturously, and without mercy. That way, once they said yes, there would be one less deliberate sin next to my name in the Lamb’s Book of Life on Judgement Day.

  It had been a long eighteen years living with me. Maybe they knew they weren’t getting out of this one easy and cut their losses. Finally, I was granted my technicality. They weren’t going to disown me if I went and, giving some indication of consent which I took as blessing, I ran off to pack.

  The minute the train left for Queensland, I became a different person. My mother believed for a long time that had she not relented, things could have turned out differently for me. I knew for a fact, one I couldn’t articulate, that I had to go away. I know for a fact now that if I hadn’t, something more violently explosive might have happened as I chewed away at my cocoon. It was just as well that it was some girls from high school and not a bikie gang. In short, my raw naïveté forced me to depend on the kindness of strangers, and while the majority of people could see me a mile coming, most of the strangers didn’t take me for too great a ride. Lucky for me. Sassy but green is a dangerous combination.

  Nineteen eighty-nine was still back in the good old days when there were smoking carriages. Nearly everyone we knew piled into that carriage and we met a whole bunch of people we didn’t. The difference between smoking and non-smoking carriages was night and day. The smokers were playing guitar and singing. The nonsmokers seemed to be spending all of their time restraining themselves from breaking into cross-stitch. The smokers had better-looking people having a better time, and smokers are still much more fun.

  There’s something I forgot to mention: my holiday was only to last for ten days. I was simply taking a holiday from my life, not changing it. It was the first of December and we were booked for six nights at the backpackers in Surfers, then I was going with a couple of girls to Great Keppel Island for a few more days. And then straight back home to normal life.

  I left without any doubt that it would be good to get away from all the stress of the previous two years, get away from my parents and hang out with my friends, stay up late, have my mother not know where I was and smoke as many cigarettes as I wanted. Then, I would come home, open my exam results three weeks later and find out when (not if, when, please God, when?) I started law school. The rest of my life would be history.

  So it wouldn’t matter to smoke. It was only for a week. I loved smoking. My grandmother’s sitting room had been littered with chain-smoking aunties who were a hundred years old in the shade, and cared nothing for talk of tumours. They sipped their sherries and demanded someone find them an ashtray. The room stank and no one noticed.

  I got myself a full pack for Surfers Paradise. I was amazed after we arrived that I needed another one after a day. Cigarettes were $2.80. I bought more of them. For everyone.

  For five nights and days, I wandered around the Gold Coast with the seasoned smokers from school. I slept almost not at all. I had never been anywhere by myself and I was not going to miss a moment. I didn’t want to drink with them. Alcohol has only ever made me sleepy. During the night we went clubbing, and during the day we went shopping and to the beach. It was mild, really mild. We kissed boys, we went swimming at night, they drank and smoked, I smoked. And I didn’t have to go home.

  You’re supposed to go to church when you’re somewhere else,
but there was no chance of that happening. I told myself that even though I was deliberately sinning by not paying attention to my Christian imperatives, it was likely I would survive and be able to do a collective repentance when I got back to Sydney. It would make for a change. Instead of the same old boring daily chitchat God and I had been involved in, where I asked the same questions and he gave the same responses, maybe it would be novel to take a whole bunch of sins back and work on an entire episode rather than the singular, often fleeting moments I repented of every day. I asked God what he thought of this over a cigarette but knew that my very insubordination was enough to have me struck down. So I got on with my adventure.

  By the sixth night, I was ready for something new. The girls had found a little more fun in drinking than I did, and clearly it made them somewhat sleepy as well. I found this tedious. They planned to go on that Friday night to a nuts and bolts party where people pair up according to whatever tag they get.

  I decided to go it alone. Six days away from home, and I was feeling like a bit of a natural. The big bad terrible world had turned out to be not as menacing as I had been warned. Rather than treacherous animals, the boys had turned out to be dopey, and the girls were friendly. Strangers were as much fun as I had secretly imagined. Everyone was actually way too interested in themselves to set upon and lure me into their evil ways. You get guaranteed all your life that the minute you step outside the Kingdom, evil men and wicked women will corrupt you and defile you before the light changes to green. Promises, promises.

  I was feeling a lot less contaminated than expected and a lot less guilty. Intellectually, though, I knew it wasn’t going to be long before I had to face God and explain what exactly I had been thinking and doing. That, however, was still a week away.

  I wandered around on my own by the beach that afternoon and then hung out with some guys back at the hostel who were playing cards. I had made up my mind to stay out on my own that night, and meet up with the girls after their party was over at about midnight. So when the sun started going down and the boys wanted to buy alcohol, I tagged along.

  I don’t remember much more of that night. I know I drank a bottle of champagne. I know that somewhere in the night one of those boys, Roger, and I made out. I found out the next day that after their party, the girls had had an intervention with one of our gang who was outed as an anorexic. She had walked out on all of them, explaining what they could do with their interventions. There was drama everywhere. I was due to leave for Great Keppel. And I really liked the boy.

  He walked with me down the street that afternoon and held my hand, like he was proud of me. Like I was a regular girl. I knew I liked him in the sunshine as well as the night, but I didn’t think much of giving him my phone number. He was, after all, an atheist, and something that happened on holiday.

  I was exhausted by the time we got to Great Keppel Island. It was exquisite and magical but I hadn’t slept in days. We met a bunch of new people and they were great, but I was tired. And I was starting to wonder whether Roger would call me. I missed him. That was silly, of course. He was due to self-destruct like a Mission Impossible tape in five days. Still, I was sort of yearning.

  I got home from the top of Australia and slept for a day. When I woke up, everything looked the same and felt the same. It was good to be back. My parents were relieved I hadn’t been shot with any of the devil’s poison arrows and I’d even picked up a little colour, so I looked healthy enough.

  A few days later, Roger called. He was working behind the counter in a bottle shop and liked having a full-time job. He wanted to go out with me. I wanted to go out with him. We were together for two years.

  A couple of weeks after that, my HSC exam results arrived. I scored higher than I had thought I needed to do my course. It was a week later that the real shock came. Both of my applications for law school had been rejected. I had missed out by five points.

  I sat like Moses outside the Promised Land. I knew it was my fault. I had chosen flesh over spirit. I had not fought. I had sinned and sinned some more. I had reaped what I had sown. All of that work and I had blown it on schoolies week, right when God was guiding the HSC markers’ hands and minds. Like Moses, I had wandered around and around in the stinking hot desert. And just as everyone else was hearing how it was full of milk and honey, one act of pride and I die on the mountain outside the city walls. It seemed it couldn’t end any other way. I got what I deserved.

  On a multitude of levels I was baffled. It still didn’t make sense that the formula hadn’t worked. I had combined the ingredients, followed the instructions, and my soufflé had risen and then collapsed.

  These triple-tested, can’t-fail recipes needed to be quadruply tested, it appeared. The bible works for everyone else but me. Their soufflés rise the first time.

  I had been over it thoroughly. Commit to the Lord whatever you do and your plans will succeed. I had placed emphasis on each word, and examined all possible meanings. I had scrupulously, obsessively scrubbed every nook and cranny of my not-so-dusty heart and I had made every choice, up until Surfers, with the utmost of care.

  Had I missed out on law school and my future as the attorney-general because of a few packets of cigarettes and kissing a boy who didn’t love Jesus? Had God let go of me after all we’d been through because of schoolies? Why not? He’d dumped Moses for less.

  I am an original test case for the ‘name it and claim it’ movement. We had heard so many stories of people who pinned photos of cars on their fridges, or made a list of the perfect spouse, and God had delivered to them their details. All I wanted was a lousy law degree. I wanted to fight for justice. Why didn’t my plans succeed? I now had no idea what to do with my life. So I did what every directionless reject does and signed up for an Arts degree.

  By that time it was mid-January and I was deeply, heavily in love.

  Roger was an Irish atheist from Sydney’s inner city. His parents divorced when he was twelve and he lived with his mother, who managed a supermarket. They were proudly working class, and Roger had no academic aspirations at all. He boasted of how he and his friends had gone out all night before exams. None of these things meant anything to me. He was lovely. And he was lovely to me.

  The boys at Hills were looking for a wife, and found me immediately wanting. I had had so little to do with them because of that, although social occasions sometimes let me get near enough to have a closer view of the men of our future. I couldn’t see anything. I thought I did have a lot to offer someone if they weren’t looking for a housemaid. As a Jewish South African princess, I can’t cook or clean properly. And, as Joan Rivers says, I don’t exercise— if God had wanted me to bend over he would have put diamonds on the floor. But this boy didn’t want a helper or a companion. He wanted to be with me, exactly the way I was. He didn’t see my sin. He saw me. I couldn’t see me, and wondered what he was looking at.

  I fell in love with him in the purest and simplest way. I have always been a cynic, but I had brought with me a heart that was a blank slate when it came to romance. I had harboured serious crushes on boys I could never have, and suddenly here in front of me was a live one. School was over. This was a real boyfriend.

  We were never supposed to be serious, of course. He was supposed to be a trial boyfriend, before I got the one that God had waiting around the corner. I also knew that by not trusting God and waiting I was wrecking my chances of meeting him.

  He was such a nice guy, though, and we got on so well. We were like playmates. We had a lot of fun together, we laughed a lot, and we went to places I’d never been before. Was it wrong to love him? He was obviously a test of my faith. He didn’t seem sent by Satan, but there was no way he’d been sent by God. Only the fool has said in his heart there is no God. But he was so good to me and so easy to be around.

  Roger, as it turned out, had no issues with my religion despite my self-destruction over his lack thereof. He was impressed and intrigued that I had unusually high standards
for an eighteen-year-old and had no intention of compromising them.

  I announced clearly that there was going to be no sex and Roger had no problem with that, which only severely confused matters. We had been taught that men were sex-hungry creatures and that women had to laughingly accept it. Young girls weren’t sexual; they were merely responsible for whether or not their relationships turned sexual, young men being the way nature made them. Why then was this atheist bound for hell treating me so much better than the Christian boys had been treating my Christian girlfriends?

  I gave up. I loved it in his arms. I loved the touch of his skin, his kiss, and the way it felt when he held me. For a long time it was enough for both of us. My heart opened up to him in a way I didn’t understand, nor did I care to. For the few hours I spent with him every weekend, there was peace inside me. Something finally felt right, natural, and I was no longer all by myself.

  We spent hours on the phone every night. We talked and talked about our worlds. We got very close, but I faced a no-win dilemma. My conscience gnawed at me constantly. I hadn’t returned to the normal life I’d told myself I would; I was now in deeper trouble. Within a month, only an act of God would have pried me away from him. How was this going to be resolved? It had to go one way or another. So I ended it.

  When you’re going to be a virgin until you get married, you automatically block out anything to do with sexuality because it’s useless information. Suddenly, here I was having feelings that I had expected to wait a very long time for. Only months before meeting Roger, I had known I would have to wait for some compatible Christian to arrive, fall in love with me, me fall in love with him, date, recognise each other as the one, go through the planning of a wedding, get dressed up, go to Port Macquarie on honeymoon and then get feelings like these. It was years away. Now I had myself a man.

  It seemed after a while, four months to be exact, that it was ridiculous not to have sex. I loved him. Nothing about him made me feel bad. His love made me feel good. And since I had already made my booking for hell, I may as well check in.