God's Callgirl (50 page)

For George—who says he can’t even remember this occasion—his rage came from the bitter realisation that he had finally lost his power over me. The new job would have presented so many opportunities for him to control and humiliate me. Now they’d been taken away and, on top of that, he’d have to work harder! It never occurred to him to thank me for being considerate and not undermining his prospects.

As it turned out, George stayed in that job for four years. He decorated the house till it resembled an Indian cave, and contributed to protecting the environment by shooting kookaburras (intruders in Western Australia and predators of native birds) and luring feral cats to their death. Eventually, his desire to rule soured the relationship with his boss. I thank grace for the good fortune and common sense that was granted me the day I said goodbye to George. But his larger-than-life character had inevitably left its mark on me, as I was to discover.

I RETURNED TO
Perth, where I met Persephone Arbour and joined her women’s group. For the first time in my life, I learned to open up to women. I had never confided in my mother, who was there physically but never available to me emotionally; she even competed with me. Unconsciously, I had related to all women as I had related to my mother: I had never confided in any of them.

Persephone led the group skilfully, encouraging us to tell our stories and learn from our experiences. She injected a marvellous spirit of humour into those memorable evenings held at her home. I told the group about George, and learned about the concepts of co-dependency and self-esteem. I also told the women about my exploits as God’s Callgirl. I was prepared for them to be appalled, but instead we all laughed a lot and together began the healing of the dreadful wounds of the recent past.

The laughter of my companions also helped me gain a new perspective on my previous sensual massage work. In this light, it seemed ordinarily OK again. What we did not touch on was the possibility that I had developed a certain disdain for men, based on the insidious belief that all they wanted was sex and that most were afraid of intimacy. This was a belief that had crept into my system without me even noticing it.

Although my contact with Persephone eventually grew more sporadic, she has stayed in my life and been an interested, compassionate witness to everything I was willing to share with her.

I HAD KEPT
fond memories of my friends Don and Ruth, and one of the first things I did when I settled down in Perth again, and was teaching, was to invite them over for
dinner. But they couldn’t make it, not then nor the next week. Finally Don said he would come over to talk to me.

I hugged him cordially when he stepped onto my patio, but wondered at the stiffness of his body and his smile. ‘A lemonade, Don?’ He refused with an instant no and wave of his hand, but agreed to sit down in the pleasant shade of that hot afternoon. He got straight to the point, apparently deciding there was no time to waste on pleasantries.

‘Carla,’ he began, with head held high, ‘Ruth and I will not be coming over for dinner,
ever.
’ There was a pause while he eyed me sideways, perhaps to let this poisoned arrow sink in before his next shot. ‘You are an evil person, Carla,’ he said in even tones, as if he were a bishop or a judge. ‘We pray for you, but we have decided to have nothing to do with you. You have an evil influence over people. This is the last time I will see you; neither of us will ever talk to you again.’

I was so shell-shocked that no thoughts would come, let alone the right words. I just couldn’t believe what he was saying. Don didn’t wait around for me to become coherent. ‘Wait!’ I yelled as he got to the gate, but still nothing had formulated in my brain that made any sense. One dreadful thought eventually became clear: Don had betrayed me—not only by telling his wife that we had had sex, but by blaming me instead of himself. I realised that judgment had been passed on me three whole years ago. They had said nothing to me then, and were not about to give me a chance to say anything in self-defence now. Even as I tried to speak, to convey my love to them, I felt the hopelessness of the situation. It had all happened so long ago. ‘Give my love to Ruth!’ I yelled, as Don let himself out and shut the gate.

I wrote a letter to them both, saying I loved them, that it was incredible that this misunderstanding had come between
us. I received no reply. I sent flowers, but it was no use. I was so hurt that I confided in a mutual friend, who was a psychologist. ‘What’s all this about praying for me?’ I asked, after she had listened carefully to my story. ‘They weren’t even religious.’

But Molly knew. She explained that Don and Ruth had become born-again Christians. She also made an astute observation. ‘They probably needed a scapegoat after you left,’ she said. ‘It would have been easier to blame you and save their marriage, than to cause a rift by accepting that one of them might be responsible.’

I understood at last and it was easier to let them go. It was only after I’d lost my friends that I realised what they had meant to me: the only happy, normal couple in my life whom I had trusted. It would take me many years to find friends like that again.

IT WAS HAL
who first suspected that there was something in my past that seriously needed healing. Hal and I were in frequent contact, even when I did not live with him, because of our daughter. When a therapist couple came to town who specialised in championing people who had suffered at the hands of adults when they were children, Hal urged me to go along and offered to pay the expenses.

Once signed up and present, it was a question of my speaking up, joining in. I watched participants fall in a heap on the floor, spontaneously screaming, and being embraced and comforted by John and Sue, who joined them there on the floor.

I decided to go for it and sat down on the lounge-room carpet, surrounded by several pairs of feet from participants lounging in chairs.

‘Where are you?’ The question came from John. To my surprise, I replied without hesitation: ‘In the sandpit.’

‘How old are you?’ came John’s second question.

‘I’m two and a bit.’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘I’m sitting on sand…it’s coarse sand, wet…my bottom is bare…I like the grains of sand sticking on my hands and body.’

‘Who else is there?’ John continued.

‘My dad; he is looking at me.’

‘How does it feel when your dad looks at you?’

‘It feels…yucky.’

‘Your father is looking at you and it feels yucky?’ John’s voice was full of indignation, making me feel safe to clearly recall what I had experienced back then, as a two year old. My father wasn’t looking at my eyes, but staring at my bottom; his face was red and had a curiously stiff grimace. Yes, it felt yucky, very yucky.

John roared, ‘How dare your father look at you like that?’, and I began to cry, feeling both forlornly betrayed by my father’s invasive staring and tenderly grateful for the supportive adults around me. Sue embraced me like a mother. It was so strange, to feel a mother’s protective arms.

I felt a great deal lighter after that session, even though I felt bad that my father was a villain in everyone’s eyes. They had called a spade a spade: there was no doubt in their minds—or mine, now—that my father had been leering at me, not just looking, and that it wasn’t
right
of him to stare at my genitals like that.

That night, I had a dream. There weren’t any pictures, but there were words that wanted to be remembered, urgently. I woke up early in the morning and wrote them down. I PROMISE TO FAIL AT EVERYTHING I DO, IF I AM
ALLOWED TO LIVE, I wrote in capital letters. I wrote it several times, until it penetrated that this was literally a promise I had made at some time in my life. It was a very important clue, but what on earth was its context?
How
could I have made such a promise?
When
did I feel that my life was so threatened that I would make a deal like this?
Who
was the promise made to?

As I pondered, I remembered that feeling of self-sabotage which had made sure that nothing I tried to take me away from my massage career would ever succeed. When it came to crunch time, it always became ‘clear’ to me that none of my ventures would work, even when I employed outside expertise and no matter how many business courses I attended. I remembered what Robert Kyosaki had said during one of his brilliant Money and You workshops. He had looked at me directly and spoken very distinctly:‘Of course, for some it is too late.’ I was in my early fifties then and desperately wanted to prove him wrong, yet I didn’t trust myself to. My capacity for failure was uncanny, but somehow expected.

In one effort to get started in a new way of life, I enrolled for training in the so-called Efficiency Lessons, a graded series of sessions designed to empower people. I was so impressed when I experienced the Lessons for myself, that I invested a fair amount of money in becoming trained in administering them. I was doing really well; in fact, I seemed to have found a career for which I was superbly suited! Perhaps I was doing too well for some in the team. One, a woman psychologist, started asking questions about ‘the credibility of the trainee facilitators’. It seemed that just about anyone with a presentable face could apply, she said. What were our qualifications? And then: did any of us have a police record?

We were required to detail our previous employment history. I decided to answer honestly: I had been a teacher,
a bodyworker and also a prostitute; and yes, there was a time when my name and photograph were registered with the Vice Squad, so they would know my identity when they saw my advertisement. The record was scrapped when I left the prostitution business—I had called for confirmation and been told there was no record of me in their files—but that was not the point. An ex-prostitute was not the sort of person these people wanted on their staff, no matter how ‘efficient’ she was. The boss felt obliged to sack me. I left, fuming, blushing and feeling dreadfully ashamed.

This wouldn’t have happened to just anybody. There was definitely a serious ‘bug’ in my system; a sabotage mechanism that matched the statement I remembered from my dream. The question was, what to do about it? A woman friend told me about regression therapy, which sounded as if it might help me to address the mystery.

Jan was a skilled therapist; she had a special gift for helping people to encounter memories of past lives and had given up a career as a successful businesswoman to do it. After I told her what I knew about my problem, she explained what we were aiming for: namely, to go into a past life which had a bearing on the dynamics that were still playing themselves out in this lifetime. Neither of us had any idea of what would transpire.

Jan went through her gentle induction as I sat on a comfortable couch in her living room. I closed my eyes in perfect relaxation…relaxed…relaxed…

The first thing I became aware of was empty pale sky. A feeling of intense coldness came over me. Jan piled on the blankets as I shivered, but I could not get warm. Gradually the vision in my mind revealed the tops of pine trees ridging nearby hills, standing in deep snow. I saw myself then as a young American Indian woman of about fifteen,
collapsed into a kneeling position, held by the snow, with blood flowing from my legs.

Then my eyes focused on two figures on horseback: one was a medicine man, the other my Sioux lover. The medicine man was the most powerful person in the tribe. No one contradicted him, especially the girls and women; they were not expected to have anything to do with tribal decisions. Yet this was exactly what I had done. I had the gift of being able to read minds and I could tell if someone was telling the truth or not. I had known that the medicine man was making up stories to build his influence and standing in the tribe. Rather than keep my own counsel, I had loudly accused him of lying, in the presence of the chief and all the elders.

I had broken a tribal custom by speaking out and I had undermined the medicine man’s credibility. I should have known there would be retribution for this wild, impulsive action, but could never have envisaged my punishment: that I would be taken away from the camp and, once far away, that the hamstrings of my legs would be cut by my own lover, who was more bound to tribal loyalty than to his love for me. Unable to run away or return to the camp, I was left to die slowly in the snow, alone.

Softly, Jan asked me to look into the eyes of my lover, who sat on horseback, about to return to the village with the medicine man. I met his hard, self-righteous eyes and…oh! I was shocked to the heart to discover in him the eyes of my own father! As the life-blood flowed from my legs, I returned his look with an intense gaze. There was no love left in me then, and no pleading, no questions; there was only the overwhelming desire to punish him. And with all the intention I could muster, I cursed him.

How did the realisation come to me that this was how I had locked us both into lifetimes of conflict? I don’t know.
The thought just came that I would both love and hate this man, and he would love and hate me, until the cycle was somehow broken. I did not know that my curse would give him the power to crush me again and again.

It didn’t matter to me whether my experience with Jan revealed a true story or not, whether reincarnation was true or not; the important thing was that these feelings about my father were being acknowledged, and that I had gained some sense of responsibility for the kind of relationship that had developed between us. Over time, the information gained through my work with Jan would bear fruit.

I continued my search for understanding by going to Byron Bay in New South Wales to do the Hoffman Process, which specifically dealt with father and mother issues. During all the angry pillow-bashing sessions, it puzzled me why I was driven to pulverise my father’s imagined penis again and again and again. The penis would always restore itself and I would bash it to pieces again, until I was utterly exhausted and believed it must be done for since I was done for. In hindsight, it is a wonder that none of the therapists there picked up on this.