Free God's Callgirl by Carla Van Raay Page B

Dutifully, I went to all the streets and letterboxes that were strange to me—which, I discovered later, were almost all in the wrong zone. I had inadvertently wreaked vengeance on a power-mongering priest who was all too happy to use a naive child. At the same time I had ruined his opinion of me, and disgraced myself further in my father’s eyes. The terror of ‘doing it wrong’ became synonymous with the terror of never managing to be good enough to deserve respect.

GETTING OLDER AND A LITTLE WISER
    QUESTIONS ABOUT RELIGION and the soul plagued me. I had to know what my chances were of making it to heaven. I asked the priest in the confessional about the punishments for various sins, but he would sigh, or get impatient and tell me to ask someone else. I would go to confession again and ask why God put a tree in the garden of Eden if he didn’t want it touched? Couldn’t he have put it somewhere else? And what was so bad about learning the difference between good and evil from the forbidden apple? And what was limbo again? What did the souls do there? And purgatory—was it really the same as hell, except that one day you got out of there?
    I asked my parents similar questions. Why did God punish people if he loved them and forgave them? Why did good people suffer? How many days would you get in purgatory for being rude? They tried to give me answers carefully, looking at each other to see if the other agreed or had a better idea. I would check up on them a few days later by asking the same question, watching them closely for signs of slipping up.
    Alas, though it was my intention to finally get things straight in my head, I had inadvertently set a trap for myparents’ uncertainties, and I gave up on adults at the tender age of eight. I decided that adults didn’t have answers, so there was no point in asking them any questions. I started on the dangerous path of figuring things out by myself, reasoning with the information that I had gleaned and intuited. Given that most of this was superstition at best and a bastardisation of the truth at worst, I was bound to arrive at some bizarre conclusions. I am a water sign, a Scorpio, and given to arriving at immutable conclusions, a tendency aided and abetted by the Germanic blood in me.
    MY PAPA HAD wanted a son as his first-born. He must have said this to someone in my presence, because I caught on pretty early and tried hard to be a boy for him. I carried things that were far too heavy for me, to show him how strong I was. My heart was soft, but I couldn’t show it. Instead, I would have to be stronger than any boy around my own age and prove it by fighting him! An innocent newcomer to the street would be brought to my house by the neighbourhood kids, eager to see a contest. It always ended with me triumphantly standing with my foot on the poor fellow’s quivering back, while the kids cheered in awe and reminded themselves not to mess with this crazy girl.
    I had three brothers before we left Holland to come to Australia. Adrian was the eldest; he was strong but not assertive. He came running up to me one day with terror in his eyes because Henk, who was fourteen and the biggest kid around, a fellow with a meaner and more calculating streak than any of us, was chasing him. Adrian ran up and buried his head in my chest. I promptly put my arm around him and waited for the tall bully to round the corner. When he did he ran into my fist. It hurt, but it did the trick: Henkwent sprawling and ran away with a bleeding nose. That evening his parents came around to abuse my parents.
    The only problem with this sort of superiority was that I had no real friends. I wasn’t exactly feared—I never went out of my way to pick a fight—but inside I felt like a cripple, believing that no one would bother to make me their friend if they really knew me. All I had was a doubtful prestige.
    I regularly won the annual running races organised by parents for the local kids. We ran around