Free God's Callgirl by Carla Van Raay

mama, who had a much greater investment in how the family looked in photographs than my father did.
    Mother was busy with the littlies and couldn’t be everywhere at once, which gave me the perfect opportunityto repeatedly pinch my seven-year-old brother until he cried. With venom that would do a spider justice, copying the way a teacher had treated me , I nipped his pretty cheeks, sinking my fingernails in again and again, until finally the red marks didn’t go away. My idea was to mar his good looks and make him cry so much that it would show on the photos.
    The strategy worked, but didn’t go unnoticed by my mother who was furious. She was helpless to undo the situation, but for the rest of that day she slapped my face and cursed me whenever we came within reach of one another. I did not attempt to get out of her way, somehow realising that every slap proved I had won. In the end it was my father who uncharacteristically took command and ordered her to stop, for God’s sake, because the whole house was feeling unbearable.
    She now often had to contend with the cold stubbornness of her eldest daughter, who pitted her will against her own when she had the courage. ‘Bullheaded’, she called me. ‘I’m not a bull,’ I would say quasi-innocently, and she fell for the bait to argue the point, saying that I knew what she meant. It was only my constant fear of dying and going to hell that made me repress the worst bouts of rebelliousness that boiled up inside me as if in a fast-heating cauldron, making my heart race and contorting my face as sweat broke out everywhere.
    I was hotly tempted to kill both of my parents. I dreamed up elaborate murder schemes, and once almost convinced myself that I’d be able to do it and get away with it. Then I hesitated, and couldn’t believe how bad I was. The ‘real me’ was this hideous person, who would be discovered when the outer layer of niceness was removed. The core of my being, I was convinced, was rotten. Everything in myreligion confirmed it. I couldn’t think any better of myself when I bought a box of chocolates for my mother’s birthday with my scant pocket money, ate one to try them out, and then ate the lot, because it wouldn’t do to give her a box that had been tampered with.
    Nevertheless, in spite of everything I still was in love with God. This was not the God of fear and punishment, but a natural feeling in my heart that would assert itself when it got the chance. It might have been God the loving parent, the father in heaven whom a child could imagine to be kind and loving. Some adults in my life were kind and loving—my Uncle Kees, and Pater Janus, and even my own parents and teachers sometimes. When I felt God in my heart, I thrilled with joy to receive holy communion.
    As the memory of the coal shed receded, I felt the lightness and cleanliness of confession once more. At my confirmation, I was proud to be a soldier of Christ. I felt able to please God in a way I had been unable to please my father. I imagined myself armed with light and swords made of fire, ready to cut the devil and evil to pieces, marching with fists on flailing arms through the alleyway behind our house, singing, ‘ Soldiers of Christ, we march to vindicate Thee ’. The German blood in me delighted in the marching rhythm of the confirmation hymns.
    By then, I was no longer consciously aware of my alliance with the devil, but it lay there in my subconscious. Two strong opposing beliefs swayed me like a birch tree in a storm, first one way and then the other. I was good, brave and lovable; and it was just as clear at other times that I was the worst girl alive. By the end of my childhood I couldn’t make sense of my own identity: the idea of my goodness was constantly invaded by shameful feelings, proving to me that this was my real self. I had no control over the terriblethoughts of harming and murdering others. It was exhausting, like trying to outrun a bad dream.
    Being stupid was