God's Callgirl (53 page)

It was time to admit there was no longer any fun in it for me. God’s Callgirl was dead. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to kill her off, but as my belief in myself dropped, so, uncannily, did the quality of my clients. But immediately I had the thought that it was time to leave my profession, along came the opposing voices telling me I couldn’t afford to give it up, that it was the only thing left to me now. The thought filled me with fear.

I threw myself into healing sessions once again, with increasing desperation. I attended weekend retreats, therapy courses, workshops, including Landmark Education’s Forum and two more of their courses—looking for the insights that would heal me. I spent all the money I’d ever saved, keeping almost nothing for the future. These courses were so useful in their own way, but they couldn’t do much for me—I was really only grasping at straws. I remained confused, suffering constantly from the effects of psychic dross transferred in sexual massage, especially when it included intercourse, although I allowed that rarely now. I no longer had the resilience I’d enjoyed when I was buoyed by a spiritual motive for my work and filled with a playful curiosity. Now my job was dragging me down. I had become tired and spent. A restless cauldron bubbled deep inside me, terrifying me with its potential to kill. A full two years had passed since I’d completed the Hoffman Process and uncovered my childhood pact with the devil. But this fear inside—terror of I didn’t know
what—
was intense, and no therapist was able to help me understand it.

Until I met Jessie.

JESSIE WAS A streetwise sex counsellor—she had literally been brought up on the streets of New York City. I told her everything about my story that seemed to be relevant: the choking in therapy, my hopelessness. I happened to mention that my early sex education had amounted to the wisdom: ‘kissing makes you pregnant’.

‘How so, kissing makes you pregnant?’ she asked me matter-of-factly.

Knowing that it wouldn’t look too good to a streetwise woman, I still confessed: ‘I believed that kissing excited the guy’s passion so his semen would travel down your throat.’

‘Did the nuns tell you that’s what happens? That the semen going down your throat would get you pregnant?’

‘No, they didn’t. I just thought that. It seemed natural.’

‘Why would you come to a conclusion like that if you’d never had the experience of it?’

Jessie’s question sent my mind reeling. I sat there, in a wicker chair on her verandah, and that instant I knew the truth. My father’s oral sexual abuse of me as a child was now suddenly so obvious! I was grateful to be sitting in a chair so I couldn’t fall down. My head was in a dreadful spin. I also had the queer realisation that I had
always
known this! I had always known it somewhere, but I hadn’t wanted to admit what my father had done. It had been crucial to protect the image of my father as a good man who loved me, his first, special daughter. I had hidden from myself that my father had not loved me enough to protect me; instead, he had been the one to violate me. He had been a devil to me. That knowledge had been far too painful.

Tears came to my eyes, but there was more to realise. A powerful reason for denying the truth was that I hadn’t wanted to admit having been in collusion with him, a
partner
in his vile crimes. Oh God—I had wanted to
protect
my
father. I loved him! It wasn’t just my shame, but my great
love
for my father that had kept me too afraid to see the truth.

Jessie arrived back on her patio. Time had passed and I hadn’t noticed it. I paid Jessie her hefty fee and left, wanting to put my head down somewhere, go to sleep, perhaps die.

I woke later that day with a certain clarity in my head. Pieces of the puzzle had clunked into place like great big keys fitting in their slots. My pact with the devil unravelled: ‘the devil’ I’d had to contend with was originally my
father.
As a child being abused in the night, when reality was mixed with dreams, I couldn’t distinguish that. The abuse had been so overwhelming, had felt so bad and made me choke so much, that every time it happened I believed I would die a bad girl and go to hell. So I had prayed to the devil of my childhood faith to be saved from death. From death by choking, first of all.
Please, daddy, please daddy-devil, don’t choke me to death.

The whole picture became clear to me. I now knew that my belief in myself as totally evil had been embedded in me since my father had tried to shut me up by throttling and kicking me. The resulting guilt and shame I lived with made me feel unworthy of succeeding in anything that was important to me as I grew older, which was why I believed that I owed it to the devil, or the evil in me, to fail.

I WOULD NOT
immediately integrate all I had discovered at Jessie’s; in fact, it seemed ages before everything I now understood sat comfortably with me. The wheels turned incredibly slowly, as if through treacle. It was one thing to understand with my mind; quite another to heal the emotional patterns that had dug deep grooves in my subconscious. My emotions were like elastic bands tied to
my brain; I tried to change them and they would snap back, terrified of the unfamiliar, the unknown. To my horror, I found I was dogged by my shame as much as ever and by a terrible lack of self-confidence. I was a wreck. The only difference between understanding and not understanding was that now I saw myself confirmed as my father’s reject. I felt that my father had ruined my life and I was sitting in the rubble. Forlornly, I went for more counselling.

‘Will I ever be normal?’ I asked the sexual abuse therapist in her city office. She was a busy government employee and couldn’t offer me another session for three months. She looked shocked at my question: sitting before her was an elegantly dressed woman with no confidence that she could succeed in anything. My cheeks burned to read her reaction and to hear what she had to say.

‘You’ve been abused in every way,’ she said, leaning towards me across her desk. ‘Abused physically, sexually, emotionally and mentally. You will heal if you go through the process I’ve described for you.’ Then she added a remarkable thing. ‘Or you will have to take up a spiritual path.’

And so I left, and bought myself a teddy bear as instructed and ate lollies for my inner child till I was sick. I bought the recommended book,
The Courage To Heal,
and gave the little girl inside me a voice by writing her words with my left hand. I imagined holding her and comforting her with gentle words. It helped immensely. I felt the child rise up from the ground where she had been crawling around in the darkness of fear, cowering in the coal shed that she had never felt free to leave. How long would it be before she would feel really safe again?

I continued this wonderful healing intensively for several weeks, delighted to have regular conversations with me as a little girl. Whenever I forgot, I found her hurt by my neglect;
then I had to make it up to her. It was so important that she learned to trust my word.

Meanwhile, the therapist’s words about taking up a spiritual path intrigued me. I asked myself what she might have meant by that. Meditation, religion? If so, what religion? Or was it living under a spiritual mentor? Perhaps we don’t have choices, merely inspired thoughts leading us to actions which provide more lessons. In any case, Master Adi Da came to mind (known as Bubba Free John in Los Angeles in the early 1970s). I remembered how, when I first read a book about his life, the feeling in my heart was so radiant that I had looked down at my chest, even inside my T-shirt, to search for the light I felt so brightly. I hadn’t been able to put the book down, hooked on the feelings and sensations that came to me as I read. Now I started seriously to wonder about this master who could so affect people from afar.

I began to attend weekly Adi Da gatherings, held in Fremantle by a devotee who had spent some time with her guru. And so I set out upon the perilous journey of those mesmerised by their master—a spiritual path for the innocent, the sincere, the brave, the confused and the foolish. I bought books and tapes, went on retreats and started to meditate twice a day. I felt Divine Love once more, as I had experienced it in the convent, only this time much more tangibly and strongly. Master Da’s writings also inspired me: no one, it seemed, understood human nature and the ego better than he did. Master Da wrote many books, producing them at a prodigious rate, and we were supposed to buy them all.

MY WAY OF
life as a masseuse continued, haltingly. Only direct interference from ‘the hand of God’ would finally end
it. That hand manifested decisively and mercifully in the summer of 1994, although at the time I did not appreciate it. It turned my garden, and soon my life, completely upside down.

I looked out of the windows of my cosy house in Hilton, near Fremantle, and gazed at the ruins of my garden. I had chosen this place for its large garden and supposed long-term rental prospects. I lived there alone, my daughter Victoria having elected to live with her father when she turned fifteen. Now, barely eight months on, the large block had been divided into three lots and fences were going up on either side of me. The single, prized tree, a shady oak, soon found itself on the other side of a newly erected fence. New septic tanks were being installed in the back of each yard.

The man operating the digging machine was sympathetic, but he couldn’t help overturning the herbs, flowers and vegetable plots, the carefully rejuvenated hibiscus and veronica bushes. In the space of an afternoon, I found myself sitting in a house in a sandpit, angry and helpless to stop this destruction of all my plans for a peaceful life.

As if symbolic of not knowing where to go next, I cracked the big toe of my right foot on my bedpost. There! I was forced to stop working. My kind neighbours, Elsie and Bert, brought me soup and buttered bread and cheerful chatter. Bert had been like a kind father to me since I moved in. I first met him when I answered an unexpected knock at the front door: toolbox in hand, he wondered if I had any odd jobs that wanted doing. He helped me break into my house when I had left the keys inside, by removing tiles from the roof above the laundry.

Next I developed a very sore back. I couldn’t walk straight and couldn’t even think of doing massage. For a full week, I’d dragged myself around on crutches because of my
toe; now I spent another week in agony because of my back.

During that second week, I was taken care of by one of my clients. He was a special angel who often came around to take me out for lunch or to the chiropractor, and he even did the shopping for me. I allowed Rob to help me out of bed one day, when I found it difficult to move. ‘Rather you than me,’ he quipped, grinning. It was a wonder to me that he would bother to come again after seeing me like this.

Rob was married, wealthy, and his business, whatever it was, had put him in touch with people in the justice system—police, detectives of all kinds, judges. He’d also had many experiences of massage parlours and brothels. I asked him questions while we sat having a beer with our restaurant lunch, but he was coy about satisfying my curiosity as to what was happening on the scene. He wanted to reassure me that it wasn’t worth knowing about. ‘Eat up, Carla. Take care of yourself.’

When I recovered from my sore back and broken toe, I told Rob I’d only do straight massage for him—I had really lost the energy for anything more. Rob took it in his stride. He could get the rest elsewhere, he told me.

My body had healed but I still had no idea where to go next.

The phone rang just as Elsie from next door arrived with some scones. To my utter surprise it was State Housing with an offer of a unit in Denmark for me. Three months earlier, a woman acquaintance had said to me, almost in passing, ‘Get your name down with State Housing, Carla.’ I’d laughed. ‘What would they be able to do for me? I’m not a single mum or an invalid.’ But she said it again, ‘Just get your name registered with them.’ So I’d gone down to their office.

Unbeknown to me, a group of units was being built in Denmark for the over fifties at that very time, and I was one of only two people who had applied for single accommodation. Bert suggested we go have a look—and he and Elsie absolutely approved of what they saw. A new unit! Space for developing a nice garden on all sides! It was a place I could retire to and securely stay for the rest of my life. This was an offer out of the blue that I could not refuse.

I moved in two weeks later. My whole world had taken a 180-degree turn while I was hardly looking. The hand of God had picked me up and dropped me down again decisively. It was none too soon.

IN THOSE LAST
days before I left the city, I had some loose ends to tie up. I phoned some of my clients who had entrusted me with their number to say goodbye.

I wanted to say a special goodbye to Guy, quite a handsome young man who had developed a crush on me. He was a travelling jewellery rep and sometimes I’d reduce my fee by taking a good-looking ring or a pendant. Guy was tall with a perfect body and good manners. He lacked confidence in himself as a sexual being, and that was his problem, for he had a healthy sexual appetite. In my dealings with him I always found him polite, amiable, appreciative and attentive—in short, what any girl might dream of—yet he didn’t have a girlfriend.

Guy and I had wondrous sex, once we got to know each other well. I enjoyed his young, muscular body, his smooth skin, clean breath and hair. Guy was always careful and brought his own condoms. The previous time I had seen him, I’d praised him for his good looks and charm and told him that if he wanted a girlfriend he wouldn’t have any
trouble finding one. He had listened to me with bated breath. Where on earth, I thought to myself, did a person like Guy get such a bad image of himself as a lover?

Guy had left me his mobile phone number, to contact him ‘in case you have a free spot for me’, so I rang him for the last time, saying I wanted a piece of jewellery as a present for a friend. When he came round, instead of leading him to my massage room with the soft pink light and seductive music, I took him to my brightly lit lounge room. He opened his display case and placed it on my lap, and it was then that he had the opportunity to see me in the ordinary light of day, without make-up, cheeks pale from present pain and past lack of sleep, hair lank for the same reasons. When I’m in pain, I can manage to look my age. From downcast eyes, I saw his startled reaction.