Now looking alarmed, Penny scurried away into a shower cubicle and closed the door behind her.
When she estimated that twenty minutes had passed, Robin stripped off her tracksuit, showered the product out of her hair, dried herself, checked in the mirror that all traces of blue dye were gone, then returned to the dark dormitory in her pyjamas.
Penny remained hidden in her shower cubicle throughout.
The routine of the higher-level recruits changed with the arrival of the Season of the Stolen Prophet. They were no longer spending entire mornings watching footage of war atrocities and famine in the farmhouse basement but were given more lectures on the nine steps to pure spirit: admission, service, divestment, union, renunciation, acceptance, purification, mortification and sacrifice. They were given practical advice on how to achieve steps one to six, which could be worked on concurrently, but the rest were shrouded in mystery, and only those who were judged to have successfully mastered the first half dozen were deemed worthy to learn how to achieve the last three.
Robin also had to endure a second Revelation session. For the second time, she escaped sitting in the hot seat in the middle of the circle, although Vivienne and the elderly Walter were less fortunate. Vivienne was attacked for her habit of changing her accent to disguise her moneyed background and accused of arrogance, self-centredness and hypocrisy until she was reduced to heaving sobs, while Walter, who’d admitted to a long-running feud with an ex-colleague at his old university, was berated for egomotivity and materialist judgement. Alone of those who’d so far been subjected to Primal Response Therapy, Walter didn’t cry. He turned white, but nodded rhythmically, almost eagerly, as the circle threw insults and accusations at him.
‘Yes,’ he muttered, blinking furiously behind his glasses, ‘yes… that’s true… it’s all true… very bad… yes, indeed… false self…’
Meanwhile the bottoms of the medium-sized tracksuits Robin was given once a week kept sliding down from her waist, because she’d lost so much weight. Other than the irritation of having to constantly pull them up again, this didn’t trouble her nearly as much as the awareness that she was slowly becoming institutionalised.
When she’d first arrived at Chapman Farm, she’d registered her own tiredness and hunger as abnormal, and noticed the effects of claustrophobia and group pressure during lectures in the basement. Gradually, though, she’d stopped noticing her exhaustion, and had adapted to making do with less food. She was alarmed to find the unconscious habit of chanting under her breath becoming more frequent and she’d even caught herself thinking in the church’s language. Pondering the question of why the unknown Jacob, who was clearly too ill to be useful to the church, was being kept at Chapman Farm, she found herself framing the possibility of his departure as a ‘return to the materialist world’.
Unnerved by what she was still objective enough to recognise as partial indoctrination, Robin tried a new strategy to maintain her objectivity: trying to analyse the methods the church was using to force acceptance of its world view.
She noted the way duress and leniency were applied to church members. Recruits were so grateful for any let-up in the constant pressure to listen, learn, work or chant that they showed disproportionate gratitude for the smallest rewards. When older children were permitted to run into the woods at the perimeter for unsupervised leisure time, they took off with the kind of glee Robin imagined children in the outside world might have displayed on being told they were going to Disneyland. A kind word from Mazu, Taio or Becca, five minutes of unsupervised time, an extra scoop of noodles at dinner: these triggered feelings of warmth and delight that showed just how normalised enforced obedience and deprivation had already become. Robin was aware that she, too, was beginning to crave the approval of church elders, and that this craving was rooted in an animalistic urge for self-protection. The regular re-sorting of the groups and the ever-present threat of ostracism prevented any feeling of real solidarity developing between members. Those giving lectures had impressed upon all of them that the pure spirit saw no human being as better or more loveable than any other. Loyalty was supposed to flow upwards, towards the divine and the heads of the church, but never sideways.
