Call Me Evil, Let Me Go. Sarah Jones

her heart out to her about Roy. But most of all she was mesmerized by Black’s powerful presence. She found him charismatic and his sermons overwhelmingly authoritative. He told us all that we needed to be where God is and that He had chosen her to be in his church. She believed him and it made her feel special to be there.

      I liked the sense of community and the fact that everyone seemed very happy. But I was very scared of Black, particularly when he implied that a local woman, who was an important figure in the Church, had contracted lung cancer because she had criticized Black and that God had given her the illness as a punishment. I was also scared of Black’s aloofness and the way he stared at me.

      Kerry, who stayed with another couple, was less enthusiastic. She thought Black was distant and cold, and disliked the belittling and intimidating way he talked to her. She also disliked the way the prayer meetings dragged on and on. She wondered whether part of the reason for this was to exhaust the congregation and make them more emotional as a way of putting the fear of God in them and inducing them to become members of the Church. Mum didn’t want to hear her criticisms, and came home feeling stronger and more able to cope with her difficult life.

      That summer, Roy decided to leave the squat and return to live at home. Initially, we all tried to make him feel welcome and hoped we would be a united and close family again. Tragically his behaviour was even worse than before. He behaved so peculiarly that we were all scared stiff of him. None of us could relax for a second and the tension in the household quickly became unbearable. My parents feared the long-term damage the strange atmosphere would have on us all, and how it would affect our lives as adults. Dad, who had always looked out for us, began to suffer from the same symptoms of stress and panic that had marked the start of his nervous breakdown.

      He felt on the verge of collapse and told Mum that if Roy stayed permanently he feared he would become ill again. Mum was beside herself with worry. On impulse she rang one of her friends from Bethesda Charismatic Church, who immediately invited us to come and stay with her family. We accepted her offer and Mum, Dad and I all trooped over and slept in the spare room. It was a crush but at least we felt more sane. After a week Roy was fed up with being on his own and returned to the squat, so we moved back home. The house was in chaos and it took days to get it clean and tidy again.

      Unfortunately Roy kept coming back and on one occasion in the middle of the night he went downstairs and turned all of the gas stoves on. Dad, who was an insomniac, smelled the gas and rushed downstairs before anything serious happened. Mum got me out of the house to some other good people from the Church. She and Dad bravely stayed with Roy, and when he calmed down he told them he wanted to move to a larger squat in a bigger town, ‘away from small-town life’. In desperation she rang Pastor Collins. Edmund didn’t seem to mind how late it was and offered to ask a couple of people from the congregation to drive Roy to wherever he wanted to go. Mum said she would be very grateful, so he rang them immediately. They didn’t hesitate to take him on the two-hour car journey. Dad was amazed at their generosity and it ignited something deep inside him.

      Roy settled in his new squat and shortly afterwards Dad told Mum he wanted to come to church with her. It was a real turnaround for him, because although he had always considered himself to be a Christian in the way he went about his life, he had been very sceptical about the Church as an institution. He thought it was full of hypocrites who went there when it was good for business. But the way so many of the Bethesda Church members selflessly helped with Roy was a true eye-opener and he was overwhelmed by their kindness. He decided to find out more about this Church, particularly as it was having such a positive effect on Mum.

      Dad attended a few services and it wasn’t long before he told Mum he could feel that there was someone else in charge and that all situations could be overcome through Him, and that he too wanted to become a Christian. Mum was thrilled and the next time Black came to preach Dad went along to listen. He expected to be very impressed, but was not and instead found him overbearing and insincere. He didn’t want to upset Mum as she was going through so much with Roy, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

      Mum was meanwhile keeping a much bigger secret from him. At a recent community charity event Black had whispered a few words into Edmund Collins’s ear implying that Dad had sexually interfered with me. Pastor Collins quietly passed this information on to Mum, adding that he was sure it wasn’t true. Mum knew it was a total lie and although she didn’t mention anything to me, she was absolutely right. My wonderful father had never been anything other than appropriately loving towards me.

      It was instead an example of Black’s trouble-making and his sly way of setting one member of a family against another. Mum kept this dark secret from Dad for twenty years, partly because she knew it was nonsense and partly because she didn’t want him to stop being a Christian. Luckily Dad’s new-found joy in religion wasn’t dimmed by his low opinion of Black, so much so that once he started going to church regularly he found the answers to his prayers. About a year after Roy left to go to his new squat, we were phoned by the police to say he had created such a scene in the street that he had been arrested and sectioned. It had happened before and each time he was taken into hospital he was merely given a dose of some sort of tranquillizer and discharged again.

      This time he was again taken to hospital, and Mum and Dad rushed there to see him. When they arrived his first words to them were, ‘I am so sorry.’ He had never shown any awareness of his effect on the family before and sounded like a totally different Roy. He continued to be so apologetic for all the trouble he had caused that both Mum and Dad burst into tears. Once they calmed down they went to speak to his consultant, who told them that Roy was suffering from bipolar illness. He had been ill for ten years with all the classic symptoms and it was only now that anyone had offered a proper medical diagnosis. They both believed that it was something God had facilitated.

      Roy remained in hospital for about a month and was found supported accommodation, where he has lived ever since. He takes mood-stabilizing medication to control his condition and manages his simple life. Support staff help him with daily tasks and activities, and check he is OK. He phones me once a day and my parents about six times, which is sometimes quite stressful for them, but he needs reassurance that we are still there for him.

      Once Dad became a committed Christian he stopped both drinking and smoking, and family life dramatically changed as a result of their new religious beliefs. We stopped going to the more riotous parties, gave up playing cards and barely watched TV. Instead my parents’ social life revolved around Bible-study groups, going to church and the occasional weekend conference arranged by the Society of Christ’s Compassion.

      I was still only in my early teens, but the dramatic changes went down like a lead balloon with me. When Mum went to church before Dad became a Christian she was very discreet about religion and made sure it didn’t dominate the house. But suddenly Bibles were everywhere and my parents now played only religious music or recordings of sermons. It was so different from our previous home life and I found it suffocating.

      I also felt resentful that they made new rules for me that hadn’t applied to my sister Kerry. She had had lots of freedom and fun, but just as I was old enough to join in, everything disappeared. Mum and Dad were trying to get me to go to church all the time, which I certainly didn’t want to do. I was so cross that it didn’t take long for my rebellious spirit to emerge. In most other households I would have been seen as a fairly typical teenager, but because of what my parents had gone through with Roy, which for years one doctor after another had attributed to youthful rebellion, my general stroppiness seemed far worse than it was.

      I had always loved my parents and was basically a decent child, but having endured a pressure-cooker atmosphere at home for so long, I needed to let off steam. Also the change of regime at home, which suddenly switched from being easy-going to strict, occurred at just the wrong time for a lively adolescent girl.

      My first teenage rebellion was to become a hippie and I began wearing paisley kaftans, tie-dyed T-shirts and a long Afghan coat that was impregnated with patchouli oil. I also started smoking, like most of my friends. At that time I was a pupil at the local comprehensive school and smoked behind the shed during school hours with a group of friends and, later on, in some derelict woodland once classes were over.

      There