All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (10 page)

He was in many ways a strange man. He had a particular grudge against people who smoked for example. They were ignorant and brainless according to him, even though his own mother smoked. She even tried to keep it a secret from him. Having reared him and having worked hard all her life, she was too afraid to let him down by smoking a cigarette.

When she stayed over in our house, she’d have a puff or two and smoke out the window of my bedroom, like a teenager trying to hide her habit from her parents.

I remember one time when she was smoking in my room, she must have thought she was about to be caught because she sprayed a thick mist of deodorant all around the room to hide the smell of smoke.

I had two goldfish in a bowl on my dressing table at the time and I found them the next morning lying belly-up. There was a thick oily film on top of the bowl and when I dipped my finger in it I found it had a floral smell. I think the deodorant killed the poor things. But I felt more sorry for Nanny than the fish. I thought it was sad that she was afraid to embarrass her own son.

Everything revolved around status and money with my father. This attitude, which I despised, extended to everything and everyone.

Prospective boyfriends were scrutinised, not to see if they really liked me but to see if they were suitable to go out with me. He would ask where they lived, what their parents did, if they lived in a private or corporation house, and if it was a corporation house, had their parents bought it. The questions all revolved around what they had and where they came from. He didn’t ask if they treated me well or if I liked them.

A person’s class was more important to him than anything else. This really upset me, as it would have any teenager.

In fact, I used to find myself making up stories that people lived in private houses just to keep Da happy. I didn’t give a shit about people’s backgrounds, I just didn’t want Da to be condescending towards them.

*

After I was expelled from Mount Sackville, I spent second and third year attending a school on North Great George’s Street in central Dublin. I went on the hop and mitched so much there that the teachers hardly even knew my name.

I was now living a dysfunctional life and was out of control. If I didn’t like the look of the weather when I got up in the morning, I’d say I was sick and stay at home for the day.

My time in this school passed without incident. In one way it took the heat off me, but at the same time, that was the kernel of the problem. I had the ability to learn and obtain good grades in school; it was just that everyone seemed to give up on me.

To say I was a loner in school is an understatement. I shunned friends and discouraged anyone who wanted to become close to me.

I was a disturbed teenager. I used to make up stories about myself and I found myself conjuring up a whole fantasy family life whenever I discussed my family. I’d lie about how many brothers I had, what my parents worked at and what a wonderful life I had led. I basically gave myself a whole new life that bore no similarity to my real one.

I don’t know why I acted like this but it didn’t take long for people to find out the truth and stop talking to me. So, as you might imagine, I didn’t really socialise with the other girls.

Drawing attention to myself became an important focus in my life. I did everything and anything to get noticed.

One night, when I was feeling especially low, I took a pair of scissors to my hair and butchered it.

It was all patchy and in different lengths. I didn’t feel very attractive on the inside so I didn’t care what I looked like on the outside.

I can now see that I was trying to punish myself.

Da went mental when he saw me but I didn’t care. In fact I was delighted at having pissed him off.

I wanted to look really ugly so he wouldn’t want to look at me anymore. Of course, it made no difference. Da had his peep-holes at strategic locations around the house. If he wanted to look at me, I could do little to stop him.

*

By this time, Da had discovered that I was drinking, so he began to watch me closely and try to control me. I often wonder did Da know why I was going off the rails, or did he even care.

I personally believe he knew the abuse he inflicted on me had transformed me into a dysfunctional teenager but he didn’t care. Da was driven by self-gratification; that is what drove him to abuse children.

Whether or not his daughter was suicidal was almost an irrelevancy. My memory of this time is one of utter loneliness.

Though I had friends outside of school, they were mainly drinking buddies. Sometimes, when I just wanted to escape, I’d tell my parents I was sleeping over in a friend’s house. On those occasions, I’d go and buy some drink and spend the night sleeping rough, with only the alcohol to cushion me from the cold, hard ground. As far as I was concerned, it was better than being in a bed at home though and feeling Da’s eyes staring down at me from the ceiling.

If I didn’t have money for alcohol and I couldn’t find any to steal from home, then I’d just go to my parents’ drinks cabinet with an empty plastic bottle and fill it up.

Alcohol became my sedative. I didn’t care what it tasted like. I would mix loads of different spirits together. More often than not, it would taste awful but it got me completely drunk, or out of my head.

I don’t even remember getting hangovers. I never minded being out in the dark either. I was afraid of no one. I wasn’t an aggressive person but if someone started a fight, small and all as I was, I could fight back and box their ears. But I never fought out of spite or anger. I just defended myself.

I remember the worst dig I ever got was from a girl from Blanchardstown in west Dublin. I had gone for a walk with some fella she fancied one Friday night, but all we’d done was sit in a field chatting while we drank a flagon of cider between us. But later on that night she marched over to me with her hands on her hips, her face scarlet with anger.

‘You keep your hands off him unless I say you can have him. Right?’ she said as she gave me the most unmerciful kick.

It took a few seconds for the pain to die down but when it did I jumped up and boxed the little bitch black and blue. I couldn’t let her win. If she got the better of me once, there’d be no stopping her and she’d never leave me alone. From then on, nobody in that gang ever dared pick on me as that girl had been a toughie. If you could kick her ass in a fight then people knew not to mess with you. I developed a reputation for being tough, which was great because it meant people were too scared of me to ever try it on so I was rarely in any fights after that.

*

When I was 15, I started using acid when I began hanging around with a girl from Cabra. She was deadly craic. There was this lad she fancied from Phibsboro, on the north side of Dublin, so she introduced me to him and his mates. They were a few years older than us and were small-time drug dealers so I was a little intimidated by them when I first met them.

‘How yis? Ye wanna hang out in town?’ asked the taller one.

‘I haven’t got a bean. I’ve no odds at all,’ I said.

‘Sure don’t worry. We have a few bob to collect and we won’t leave ye stuck,’ said the smaller one.

I knew he liked me straight away. I thought he was all right. He looked a little like Mick Jagger but he wasn’t really my type. But I thought he was funny and I found it hard to resist people who could put a smile on my face.

Up to this point, I had drunk a lot of alcohol and smoked a lot of hash, and when I couldn’t manage to roll a joint, I would eat it. I’d go into the toilet, burn the hash with a lighter to soften it and crumple it into some tin foil before eating it. Smoking was better though, it gave you more of a buzz but I was crap at rolling a joint so sometimes it was easier just to eat it. People used to tease me that my catchphrase was, ‘Here, I’ll buy a spot off you if you roll them for me first.’ I even bought a little machine to do the rolling but it was even more useless than me.

So we followed these guys up to a pool hall and watched as they collected money from different people and handed over small packages in return. We thought these guys were real bad asses so when we called up to one of their houses later we got the shock of our lives.

‘Come on in girls and take a seat,’ said a nice lady who turned out to be the mother of one of the guys.

‘Will you have a cup of tea?’

‘No thanks. I don’t drink tea,’ I replied.

‘Are you one of those healthy-living people? You certainly look fit and what a lovely shine off your hair. Can I get you anything else love?’

She seemed like the nicest woman in the world. She clearly hadn’t a clue what her son got up to when he was out of her sight.

‘Bye bye love,’ she said to her son as we were leaving, ‘Have a nice time playing video games.’

We all headed into town to a games hall. It had video games in the front and snooker tables in the back. I used to be in there every second day back then when I was on the hop from school.

The lads pulled out what looked like sheets of cardboard with lots of tiny pictures of strawberries dotted all over them. They tore off two small squares and handed one to me and one to my mate. They told us to put them on our tongues and wait for the strawberry surprise. The surprise was the best fucking high I’ve ever had. My senses were heightened to the point where I thought I was going to become airborne. I felt like I could do absolutely anything.

The boys gave us each some money to play video games and I headed straight for Space Invaders. I got the highest score on the machine. I felt unbeatable. Like I had the Midas touch and everything I touched turned to gold. It was a big change to the usual feeling of everything I touched becoming dirty and contaminated.

We spent the night walking around town, swinging around lampposts and giggling at nothing. Everything looked different with acid—it was like we’d found a portal into a parallel new-and-improved version of the world, where things were almost the exact same just a shinier and happier version.

That was the start of acid for me. I fell in love with the drug and couldn’t get enough of it. It was fairly cheap and the lads from Phibsboro gave us plenty of freebies too. After a while, one tab a night turned into two, which turned into five, and before I knew it I was popping them like Tic Tacs and losing count.

It wasn’t all fun and games though. The comedown could be horrible. You could go into the horrors altogether and get very paranoid. And the more highs you had, the worse the paranoia got. Everyone was looking at me and everyone was talking about me. At least that’s what I thought. But acid numbed the pain in my head for a little while at least and the paranoia was worth that short bit of relief.

*

I dropped out of school altogether during the Inter Cert year. I did the exam all right and I scraped a pass but after that I just wanted out. I made up some excuse about wanting to train as a hairdresser and how I’d managed to line up a job. Of course, this was complete fabrication on my part. I was the girl who ran a mile in the opposite direction if I saw a loose strand of hair. But I left anyway and that marked the end of my school days.

It was around this time that I stopped vomiting in the mornings too. I’m not sure why this was. Maybe it had to do with me being old enough to be able to get out of the house more. I also now had drink and drugs to take away the pain and sickness. All my other routines stayed the same though. I still had my Rice Krispies, my bowl and spoon, the orange juice and the pill. And by the afternoon, I’d be passed out on the couch as usual from tiredness. Even though Da wasn’t calling to my room at night anymore, I’d still feel anxiety taking over my body every evening as the sun went down. I couldn’t control it. And then there were the nightmares. Sleep was a double-edged sword—although I badly needed the rest, it meant making myself vulnerable to nightmares.

Da continued to spy on me but I did what I could to hide from him. I’d turn the light off before getting undressed or get undressed under my dressing gown. I even tried using my Ma and Da’s en suite, but Da wised up and bored holes under the sink that allowed him to spy on the whole bathroom. All he had to do was open the door of the hot-press, get down on his knees and peer through. I often stuffed newspapers into the holes just so he knew that I knew. But it didn’t bother him at all. He just pulled them out and carried on watching. He didn’t care that I knew.

Chapter Eight

The first job I ever had was in Burgerland on O’Connell Street. I pretended to my ma that the hairdressing job had fallen through. I was glad to be out of the house.

I loved the job in Burgerland. The staff came from all different walks of life: there were college students, college dropouts, kids like me who had dropped out of school and others who were in it for the long haul and wanted to become a manager one day. I didn’t care what anyone had been doing before they ended up in Burgerland ’cause once they put on the uniform we were all on the same level and we all followed the same rules. In between the hard work, we had the best of craic and many of the people became friends first and co-workers second.

Every Sunday at Burgerland, I was given the role of dressing up as a packet of fries in a big foam costume. I had to go out on to the street and shake hands with passing kids, who either ran away from me in fear or fell at my feet in adoration. Most of the other staff refused to do this job, mainly because they’d have felt like a prat. The foam costume reminded me a little of the Fozzy Bear one I had worn in the Gaiety. No one could see me. I could hide behind a screen and be someone else for a while. So I volunteered for the role as the hideous sponge packet of fries and I’d dare anyone else to show as much enthusiasm for it as I did.

When I was working the early shifts in Burgerland I used to get a lift into town with one of the managers who lived near me in Castleknock. Things at home were a bit better by then ’cause Da, who was forever changing jobs, was working in England. He was away from Monday to Friday and then I’d be gone out all weekend between work and partying so I hardly saw him at all.