Concrete and Flesh

Short story. A woman talks to a reporter about leaving a cult.

Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

What prompted you to join?" My interviewer has a tone and expression I would have considered warm and kind in the past, but now it sets my teeth on edge. I'd prefer if he was cold and clinical. Hell, I'd prefer if he was angry, or bored, or disgusted by me. I try to tolerate his kindness. It isn't his fault.

"A messy breakup, I guess." He nods as an invitation to go on. I’ve already practised what I want to say and what I want to avoid, and spent most of last night rephrasing things over and over in my head. "I lost my whole friendship group, just gone, like that. Then I came across a post online about The Retreat and I thought, yeah, I need a little holiday, digital detox and all that.”

“So it started out as a weekend retreat.”

“Yeah. Sort of. Four days.”

I dig my nail into the wooden kitchen table, running over the same groove I’ve already made. We’re sat in my parent’s kitchen, two years since that weekend. Now I’m just a thirty-five-year-old woman living back with her parents and struggling to do anything with myself. I used to think I was so fucking enlightened.

“How was it?”

“Magical. That’s how I felt about it at the time. I met all these new people, all so kind and thoughtful and…huggy. I met Eve on my first day, and she was encouraging, she made me feel valued. I look back on it now and I can see it was all textbook love bombing.” I talk to him with such certainty, parroting all the stock phrases that people lap up. When I look back on it, I see confused people trying their best. Plus Eve.

“Eve - you mean Kirsty Springall?”

I flinch, then try to turn it into a shrug. Kirsty Springall is such a mundane name. Even though it's been months since I last saw her, even though I’m working through all my feelings and “making good progress”, according to my therapist, using Eve’s real name feels like I’d be dishonouring her. I feel as if she might hear me and be repulsed by me and by what I’ve become: an outsider.

“Yeah. She went with a Biblical name. So tacky, now I think of it,” is all I say.

“That level of attention from strangers, I think that would feel seductive to many people. So how did things move on from there?” he asks.

“I got messages from the people I met there, saying they’d love to see me again, and that I’d be the perfect candidate to be a permanent resident there. All the messages were on Eve’s say so, but I didn’t know it at the time. Later, when I was a member, whenever she liked someone, she would get all of us to message them. Sometimes she’d tell us what to say, or else prompt us, like, ‘Oh, she mentioned she used to have an eating disorder, you should talk about your eating problems too’. It was all about tapping into vulnerabilities. I had shared stuff about my love life over the weekend, because… because other people were doing it, and it just felt like such a different environment. It felt open. So I got messages about that.”

Eve had made it seem all about connecting with people. I wasn’t being manipulative when I messaged a bulimic to say I had also been bulimic. I was helping the woman to open up, to heal her. I still can’t work out which is true.

“My housing situation was tricky after the breakup,” I continue. “I was left paying the full rent, which I couldn’t really afford, but I struggled to find somewhere new. It just felt like it made sense to move in there. Everyone seemed to genuinely appreciate my company, and the whole lifestyle appealed to me.”

“I get that. I used to live in a commune back in the noughties. I ended up moving on, but that kind of connection with nature and with other people isn’t something you get with standard living arrangements.”

“I had never grown stuff before!” I laugh. Those moments in the garden are still the ones I treasure the most - the sun warming my skin, nurturing the little green shoots that sprung from seeds I had planted, chatting about anything and everything with Piotr while fixing the fences. It’s a hobby that’s stuck. My parent’s garden looks a lot more colourful now.

“When did you start to grow uneasy about the place, or doubt the way Kirsty - Eve - was running it?”

“There was no set moment. I mean, even at the very beginning, I questioned some things. Eve would always find some way to touch me when we spoke - a hug, or just a little tap on the shoulder, or something. It was strange, but I didn’t want to say, like, ‘don’t touch me’. There was nothing sexual about it to clarify. I don’t think so, anyway. She always spoke about how we’ve moved so much into the digital world that our physical needs have been pushed to the side. So she was very encouraging of hugging, and of holding our hands when we were in the circle.”

“In the circle?”

“Meditation circle.” I say, then remember that it wasn’t what most people think of when they think of meditation. “She - she used that word, but it was more just a, a, um… Discussion circle. Just, whatever.”

“What did you discuss?”

“It was, I mean, that was one of the things that I was uneasy about. Not to begin with, I think. Sorry, do you want any more tea, coffee, water or anything? We’ve got biscuits too. Mum bought some digestives yesterday.”

He shakes his head. Silence stretches out between us, reminding me both of some of my therapy sessions and of the circle. Silence makes me scratch my arms, and if I’m not careful, I can do it for minutes at a time without realising. He wants me to go on talking, and I feel like I must have done something wrong. Silence doesn’t feel safe. I think he judges me, this reporter, for being so foolish as to join a cult, for thinking Eve was anything other than a narcissist. His readers will judge me too. I’ve asked him to use a pseudonym for me so I don’t get any unpleasant messages, but I don’t think I will manage to resist reading everyone’s opinions. I’m not coming across as a likeable person.

“It’s okay. If you want to go back to a different topic, then that’s fine.” His voice is gentle. It grates on me. “Let’s talk more about the friends you made there.”

“I’m just gonna…” I gesture to the corridor, then slip away from the table to the bathroom.

I’m crying now. My mum would say, let it all out. Eve would say that too. So many things Eve said meant something slightly different. It wouldn’t just mean to let myself cry and talk about why I’m crying, it meant to offer up all the things I’ve ever cried about - arguments with Dad about alcohol, stupid work mistakes, stupid sexual mistakes, grieving over my cat, the shame of grieving more over my cat than my grandmother. Eve has made me want to be the opposite of who I was when I was with her - I want to be repressed, I want to build up high walls, I want to never love again.

I open up a breathing app and sit on the toilet seat for two minutes, watching the bubble on my phone expand and contract with every breath. Then I return to the reporter, still sniffling, but calm enough, or repressed enough, to continue.

“We had the circle every morning and night, and we would hold hands and talk about whatever came to mind.” I say this before I’ve sat down, and before he has a chance to ask if I’m okay. I speak fast to get it out of the way. “Eve guided it, and she’d break down every emotion we had until it was about something else entirely. We weren’t upset that someone hadn’t followed the cleaning rota, we were ashamed that our parents didn’t keep a clean house and thus didn’t care about our wellbeing and didn’t really love us. If we disagreed, then we were in denial. Sometimes it would end up with all of us turning on one person and repeating what Eve was saying. We’d tell them, with love and affection, that they were wrong about their own feelings. I did it as much as anyone else.”

The reporter looks taken aback by my bitter tone. 

“Do you mind if I do these while we talk?” I gesture to the dirty pans in the sink. I can’t keep still any more.

He agrees, and our conversation becomes lighter. I answer his questions about the friends I’ve made. Piotr and Ciara have both left, and I still talk to them sometimes. My closest friend, Marie, is still at The Retreat. I avoid talking about her. 

When the washing up is done, and my fingers have turned pruney, I sit back down. I know he wants to move to more difficult topics.

“What compelled you to leave?” He asks.

“She introduced a new practice, about a year after I joined. The others probably told you about it.” I know he’s interviewed Ciara at least, and I suspect he’s been in contact with others.

“I could guess, but I want you to tell your story in your own words. I don’t want to take that away from you.”

“She called it Oneness. Or going to the Oneness room. I only went there - was forced there - twice. It took me another two months after the first time until I left, but that was essentially the reason I left.” 

I feel an unpleasant ripple of shame. I can imagine Eve reading the article, and seeing me say I was forced. She would be disgusted by me. Maybe she’d say I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own choices. I still struggle to use that word, force. It brings to mind the image that she frogmarched to the room. Sometimes I dance around the word when I think about the horrific things I was cajoled into saying in the circle. I did have a choice. I could have risked the consequences and refused to say or do what she wanted. I could have left The Retreat earlier. The fact that I quit at all proves that I had a choice, but I just kept making the wrong one, over and over.

“It was a tiny basement. You could only get there by… I guess you’d call it a trapdoor. You’d get down via a little rope ladder, and once you went down, she would pull it up and close the door. There was no light, and nothing else in the room. There wasn't quite enough space to stretch out both your arms." I stretch my arms to the side as I say this, mimicking what I had done when I was trapped in there. When I look up, I see he’s nodding with an expression of vague concern. I realise I have only told him about the dimensions and he's looking for something more emotional. I open my mouth to offer up some vulnerability, but I can't find the words. It’s easier to explain why I joined than why I left, even though to the rest of the world leaving is the choice that makes sense.

He breaks the silence.

"What were you feeling when you were in that room?"

“Scared. Lonely. Betrayed, to be honest. Both times, everyone encouraged me to go there. They said it would be healing, over and over they said it, making it sound like I would be a permanent mess if I didn’t do it. I had said the same thing to other people, before and after. The first time wasn’t so bad, it was just a couple of hours. The second time… I had questioned something Eve had said in the circle. Someone else backed me up. She didn’t like that.”

“So she made you go there again?”

I give an empty laugh and bite the dry skin off my lips.

“I chose. Or she made me, sure. I don’t know. It was just twenty-four hours, and people think, oh, twenty-four hours, I’ve spent that long in bed when I’m ill. No problem, it's just a day. But there's, there's nothing there." I try to steady my breathing. I sound pathetic, complaining about being in the dark for a day. Ciara was there for two days once, no food or water. The world seems small now. My parent’s kitchen doesn’t feel real. “There’s no, there’s no anchor there. I can’t see, I can’t hear. She makes us go there naked because clothes are a barrier to our true selves, so I don’t even get to feel the texture of what I’m wearing. There’s just the concrete walls, concrete floor, and my own flesh. And the smell. And there’s no way to tell the time. I can’t sleep naked on concrete. I’m just timeless, out of time, forever there with nothing. I should be meditating. I feel guilty I’m not being at one with myself or whatever the fuck it is I’m supposed to be doing. It should be an opportunity but I’m just scared and trying to work out how long there is left and -”

My interviewer reaches his hand out across the table and I jolt. Only then do I realise I've been digging my nails into my arm. Curved red welts blossom. 

I chuckle and wave my hand, as if I can wave away his concern.

"Concrete and flesh. That's all I could feel."

It's more than I meant to say. It’s more than Eve would want me to say. I start to feel like the interviewer is no better than her. He’s just trying to extract information out of me to use as a cautionary tale for some bullshit article. I am lost in the extraction. I feel like a sequence of salacious events instead of a person. 

Our conversation peters out after that. I don’t want to tell him to leave, but I no longer want him there. He asks about the mechanics of leaving, about the people still there, but after a few one word answers he gives up and offers to finish up any further questions over email.

“Yeah. Sounds good.” I say, but I’m no longer sure I’ll reply. 

I wonder how much of my outburst will make it into the article. I wonder if Eve will see through the pseudonym the reporter uses and know I spoke to him. Every single day since I left, I wonder what Eve thinks of me.

---

My original intention was to focus on the way familiar words are redefined within a cult, but I didn’t end up going down that route much.

The ending feels rushed to me - I always struggle with endings, especially when I’m writing late. There’s also more dialogue than I intended. I can’t decide if it bothers me that the reporter has no personality of his own.

What are your thoughts on Concrete and Flesh? I’d love to hear what you think works and what doesn’t, or how it could be improved.