Chapter Eight: lo I am with you always

Daniel's story.

When Daniel had told Dorothea the story of his childhood, in a rare moment of intimacy, after they’d read the bible and prayed at the side of the bed one night, Dorothea at last understood his jealousy.

That night, after something in the bible reading had allowed Daniel to finally express the loneliness of his youth and his anguish at the unfairness of life, she listened to his words and a tenderness, that she thought had drowned, suddenly emerged and threatened to choke her.

“When I was twelve I saw my mother having sex with my uncle. I was sent home early from school because I’d been caught bullying a younger boy and when I came into the house I heard strange noises coming from my parent’s room. It sounded as though someone was attacking her, that she was in distress. The bedroom door was open and I saw them clearly. Uncle Carl and my mother, as naked as the day they were born. I couldn’t believe what he was doing to her or that she seemed to be enjoying it. She was crying out, ‘Yes Carl, like that, yes I like it like that, don’t stop, don’t stop.’

I was terrified but somehow I knew that if they saw me I would be in trouble. I felt guilty. I was the innocent child and I was the one who felt guilty, and dirty. I left the house quietly and spent hours walking through the neighbourhood. What was I going to do with this knowledge? It wasn’t only the thought of the disgusting things that adults did to each other, and that they could actually enjoy doing it, that tortured me. It was the knowledge that my mother was doing it with my uncle and not my father.

When I eventually went back home my mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. My father’s favourite; steak, eggs and chips. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek and smoothed my hair and asked me how my day had been. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t process the metamorphosis that she’d undergone from the rutting, sweating b***h of a few hours before to this demure, chaste woman with her hair swept back into a pony tail and dressed in a sleeved blouse and knee length skirt. I hated her because of what she’d done to my father and to me. I hated her for the guilt that her dirty secret made me feel; eating away inside me, crawling into my bowels and my brain when my father came home and she kissed him on the mouth with those lips that I’d seen brushing Uncle Carl’s sweating, naked, hairy chest.”

Daniel had kept his secret to himself for a week. It burned inside him. It lived in his consciousness through every waking moment and rose up to torment him in his dreams.

On the seventh day his mother was out shopping and his father was drinking beer in the lounge, listening to the races on the radio, his newspaper and betting cards scattered untidily about his favourite chair. Daniel approached him and allowed the words to stream out of his mouth like an avalanche of bile that he could no longer keep inside.


Suddenly it had all made sense to Dorothea. Why he didn’t want her to work, why he wouldn’t allow her out of his sight; his jealousy of any man that she had contact with. But this is as far as Daniel’s confession to Dorothea went. He stopped speaking and turned away from her and when she touched his shoulder, wanting to comfort him, he shrugged her off. He never spoke of these things again and Dorothea never pried.


Daniel turned away from Dorothea, allowing the tears to pool in his eyes and trickle over the bridge of his nose and wet the pillow beneath his head. He pushed her hand away from his shoulder. He didn’t want her pity. He didn’t want her love. What he wanted was his childhood back, but that was never going to happen. He dried his tears with a balled up fist, the way he used to when he was small, and thought about that day again.

After his words had dried up, and his father had finally managed to tear his attention away from the race commentary, there was a long silence and then all that his father said was, “Go to your room Daniel, now, and stay there.” He sat on his bed but left the door open so that, when his mother arrived home, he heard his father’s shouted accusations and his mother’s pleading denials. It went on for a long time and then suddenly the tone of his mother’s voice changed and his father grew silent.

He went to his door but he couldn’t hear what his mother was saying so he crept down the passageway and peered into the lounge. He could see his father from behind, still sitting in his favourite chair, and his mother standing in front of him.

She had her blouse off and was reaching behind her back to undo her bra. Her breasts sprang from their restraints. “You see these, Daniel; these are for you and no one else. There’s never been anyone else and there never will be.” She unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath, “And this, this is all yours Daniel. The boy is lying, he’s jealous of me, he always has been and he wants me out of the way so that he can have you all to himself.”

She knelt in front of his father’s chair, between his knees, but all Daniel could see was her head bobbing up and down and all he could hear was his father’s groan; a sound that gathered in the depths of him and rose through his throat and emerged from his mouth; a low guttural noise that Daniel had heard dogs make when their possession of a bone was threatened.

He suspected, when he heard that sound, that he’d lost a battle to this woman who he’d loved as his mother and this knowledge became a certainty when later, back in his room, he heard her cry out, “Yes Daniel, like that, like that, harder, harder, please don’t stop.”


They’d come for Daniel in the night. Taking him from his bed as his father stood by and did nothing, ignoring his son’s pleas for help; his promises that he’d be good; his begging for forgiveness. Forgiveness! What had he done?
He could still see the blank look on his father’s face, his arms folded resolutely over his beer belly, his feet set firmly apart. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

In the back of the car, watching the night rush past, he’d cried. In the strange cold dormitory with its rows of narrow single beds and unfriendly children, he cried into the dark. For weeks he cried and cried until his tears dried up and he was unable to cry again. He had tried to cry over the years, making the sounds, feeling the pain, but the tears would never come; until that night and his confession to Dorothea.

It was the Bible verse that had opened the floodgate of tears he’d forced down into the well of sorrow, that he’d thought had dried up, but now was full again and threatening to overflow. He’d chosen to read from Matthew chapter twenty eight and when he got to verse ten he knew what was coming but he couldn’t stop himself from going on.


“Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Why had he read those words to Dorothea? Over the years he’d avoided them; never used them in his sermons, always skipped over them when he was preparing for his Sunday night meetings.


In the days, months, years that followed his incarceration in the Havenside Home for Wayward Boys he’d learned to defend himself. First from his own empty pain and loneliness, then from the other boys and finally from Mr. Shayne; the Irish dorm master who seemed to have hated him at first sight.
At least once a week Mr. Shayne would call Daniel to his room. He’d explain patiently, as though he was speaking to a congenital idiot, what Daniel had done wrong during the week; a never ending list of petty complaints. He never laid a hand on Daniel over the six years that the boy was in his care. Instead he would make him remove his clothes and kneel on a carpet of rough salt crystals.

The sting came slowly, creeping into Daniel’s skin and his knee bones; rising up into his eyes, trying to force out the tears that, at first, threatened to spring from the well that had not yet run dry. But he would force them back and refuse to show his pain to this man who was like his father in so many ways; sitting in his armchair watching Daniel, swilling back beer and stroking his fat gut through the stringy vest that he always wore; smiling that, almost friendly, smile. Waiting for Daniel to break, but he never did.

A priest would come to the Home on Sundays and the boys would sit in the Chapel and listen to him preach about what God had in store for them if they sinned, or disobeyed their masters. Father Brian would have a one on one with all the new boys and put the fear of hellfire into them with his words. He gave each of them a Gideon’s Bible, advising them to read it every day.

At first Daniel hid the Holy Book in his tiny cupboard, under his meagre belongings but one day some impulse, that he was never able to explain, made him take it out. He opened it at random and read those words; “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”, and tears came unbidden to his eyes. Could it be true that there was someone who loved him; some all-powerful, all-knowing, omniscient being who knew everything about him and loved him anyway?

He read the Bible every day after that, starting at the first page, working his way through the ‘begats’ and not stopping until he reached the benediction in the final verse of Revelations. He was overcome with adoration for the all-powerful God who could do anything, see everything and create stars with a flick of His wrist; a magician, an avenger, a saviour who cared about him and his petty, insignificant life. Who sent His son to die on the cross of Calvary for his sins and who waited in glory for Daniel to be delivered to him in the rapture.

While he knelt on his torture rack of salt, listening to Mr. Shayne’s words, “C’mon boy, I know it hurts, cry and I’ll let you stop, C’mon boy…”, feeling the ache in his knees that seeped into his legs and feet and rose into the small of his back, waiting for the hours to tick by and his final release from pain, he repeated those words over and over in his mind; ‘Lo, I am with you always, I am with you always, I am with you…’


When he turned eighteen the world was at war and Daniel was allowed to join the South African Navy. He’d finally escaped his imprisonment in the Havenside Home and the torture that Mr. Shayne was still inflicting on him.

For the next few years he saw the world from the deck of his ship and explored the seedy seaports that they anchored in. He saw the worst that the world had to offer but still he read his tattered, well-thumbed Gideon’s Bible and prayed that he could believe that there was a tiny seed of goodness in everyone; a seed that God could water and raise up into a mighty tree of faith. He felt that God had done that to him; had taken the acorn of faith that was born in him with His words and grown a solid, sturdy, unbreakable tree of faith that would bow in the storm of life but never break. He thought this until an Officer ordered him to his cabin and with threats of false accusations and a court marshal, forced him to do the things that shook his belief in his God and in himself.

When Daniel thinks back to the compromising position that he’d seen his mother and Uncle Carl in, he feels his guilt once more. He knows now that the guilt he felt then came, not from his accidental discovery of his elders committing adultery but from the feelings that he’d had while he stared at Uncle Carl’s body for minutes longer than he’d needed to.

Daniel was disgusted by his mother’s naked body; those breasts jiggling while his uncle thrust in and out of her; her whiteness and hairlessness, except for the dark, wet shaggy bush sprouting from between her legs. He was also disgusted by his uncle’s body but he allows himself to recognize now, that mixed in with that disgust was an element of fascination and excitement.

‘Why did I read that verse to Dorothea’, he thinks. ‘Why did I expose myself, allow myself to be vulnerable and weak in her eyes? She will take advantage of this knowledge and torture me with it. Why did I do that? Never again!’