The account of Revelation that Robin had sent Strike had been brief and to the point, partly because she’d had neither time nor energy to go into details while exhausted, crouching among nettles in the dark and pausing regularly to listen out for footsteps, but it had shaken her more than she’d liked to admit in her letter. Mazu had encouraged those in the circle to use the filthiest and most abusive words they could find when berating those confessing, and Robin thought she was unlikely ever to forget the sight of Kyle doubled over in his chair, sobbing, while others screamed ‘pervert’ and ‘faggot’ in response to his admission that he continued to feel shame about being gay.
When Kyle’s time in the hot seat had concluded, Mazu had told him calmly he’d be more resilient for having undergone Revelation, that he’d faced ‘externalisation of his inner shame’, and congratulated the group for doing what she knew had been difficult for them, too. Yet the facial expressions of those shouting abuse at Kyle were still seared on Robin’s memory: they’d been given permission to be as vile as they liked, irrespective of their true feelings about Kyle or homosexuality, and she was disturbed by the gusto with which they’d participated, even knowing that their own turn in the middle of the circle would come.
Robin was rapidly learning that at Chapman Farm, practices that in the outside world would be considered abusive or coercive were excused, justified and disguised by a huge amount of jargon. The use of slurs and offensive language during Revelation was justified as part of PRT, or Primal Response Therapy. Whenever a question was posed about contradictions or inconsistencies in church doctrine, the answer was almost always that they would be explained by an HLT (Higher-Level Truth), which would be revealed when they had progressed further along the path to pure spirit. A person putting their own needs above those of the group was deemed to be in the grip of EM (egomotivity), one who continued to prize worldly goods or status was a BP, or bubble person, and leaving the church was ‘going DV’, meaning, becoming a Deviate. Terms such as false self, flesh object and materialist possession were now employed casually among the new members, who’d begun to reframe all past and present experience in the church’s language. There was also much talk of the Adversary, who was not only Satan, but also all temporal power structures, which were populated by the Adversary’s agents.
The intensity of indoctrination crept up even further during Robin’s third week at the farm. New members were regularly bombarded with dreadful images and statistics about the outside world, sometimes for hours at a time. Even though Robin knew this was being done to create a sense of urgency with regard to the war the UHC was supposedly waging on the Adversary, and to bind recruits more closely to the church as the world’s only hope, she doubted anyone of normal empathy could fail to feel distressed and anxious after being forced to look at hundreds upon hundreds of images of starving and wounded children, or learning the statistics on people trafficking and world poverty, or hearing how the rainforest would be entirely destroyed within another two decades. It was difficult not to agree that the planet was on the brink of collapse, that humanity had taken terrible wrong turns and that it would face an awful reckoning unless it changed its ways. The anxiety induced by this constant bombardment of dreadful news was such that Robin welcomed the times recruits were led to the temple to chant on the hard floor, where she experienced the blessed relief of not thinking, of losing herself in the collective voice of the group. Once or twice, she found herself muttering
Her only real bulwark against the onslaught of indoctrination was to remind herself, constantly, what she was at the farm to do. Unfortunately, her third week inside the church yielded very little in the way of useful information. Emily Pirbright and Will Edensor remained impossible to engage in conversation due to the unacknowledged system of segregation in place at the farm. In spite of Will’s wealth and Emily’s almost lifelong membership of the church, both were currently acting as farmhands and domestic servants, whereas Robin continued to spend most of her time in the temple or the lecture room. Nevertheless, she tried to keep a covert eye on both of them, and her observation led her to a couple of deductions.
