Dying to Survive (4 page)

When I was in recovery that final time, I realised that I couldn’t blame my mother or my father or my past for my addiction, but I could understand how they affected me and how, slowly and inevitably, the feelings of rejection I experienced turned into a hatred for myself that I would do anything to conceal, taking more and more drugs to dampen down my true feelings.

It’s almost a cliché, but what is certainly true is that many of my problems had their roots in my childhood and in a broken family. It seems obvious to me now, but I only really realised the depth of my hurt for the first time when, back in the Dóchas Centre, a psychiatrist called Dr Sweeney came to see me. Head Psychiatrist at the Trinity Court methadone programme, I had met him many times before and I knew that he was my one and only ticket to freedom. So when he came to see me that morning in July 2006, I was prepared to be on my best behaviour. What I wasn’t prepared for was the journey on which our conversation would take me.

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‘Good morning, Ms Keogh. So you have managed to land yourself in here again. What has you in here this time?’ Dr Sweeney asked in his elegant accent. He was a short man with receding silver hair and his bones seemed to protrude through his classy black suit.

‘Ah, I was arrested for shop-lifting.’

The doctor sat coolly, with his legs crossed. ‘Take a seat,’ he said, as he signalled to the chair opposite him. ‘Now, Rachael, I have been asked to do an assessment with you, so if you don’t mind, I will need you to answer some questions. The questionnaire isn’t that intense. I’m sure you’ve done something like it before.’

‘Yeah, I was in the Rutland Centre,’ I replied. I had answered the standard questions about my home and family so many times before, I had lost count.

‘Oh, well then, this should be easy for you,’ he said with a smile. ‘When were you in the Rutland?’

‘I was there twice, first in nineteen ninety-six and again in two thousand and two.’

‘So what’s so different this time round?’

‘A lot,’ I replied. ‘First of all, I’m older. I think that if I don’t get clean now, I never will. I’ve been clean before, so I know what to expect and I know what I need to do. I haven’t used heroin since I came in here, so I really need to go into detox and get help with coming off the methadone.’

‘Ok, let’s get started,’ he said as he opened his black leather briefcase and took out a file. ‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Lynda Keogh.’

‘Your father’s?’

‘Con Geraghty.’

‘Tell me about them.’

‘Where do I start?’ I shifted uneasily in my chair.

‘From the beginning,’ the doctor replied, smiling.

Ah no, I thought to myself. He was asking me to tell him in detail about my life. My heart sank at the idea of an assessment this intense. Even though I knew my life depended on it, I felt that I couldn’t face the past just yet, not now. But I was eager for the doctor to know how serious I was, so I did as he said. Looking back on this split-second decision now, I think it probably saved my life. I had had many opportunities to talk about all this stuff before, but for some reason I couldn’t. I had been afraid of reliving my past: I thought that looking back would finish me off altogether. But of course my past never left me. It was with me every day, manifesting itself in different ways, refusing to be buried under a tonne of drugs, like some sort of living poison that was killing me anyway. I was afraid, but I was ready to tell my truth.

‘Well, I was born in the Rotunda hospital, on the fourteenth of October nineteen seventy-nine,’ I began. ‘My mother was only a kid herself when she had me—she was only fifteen. My da was nineteen, but he wasn’t there for the birth. My grandparents didn’t approve of him. Especially my grandfather and he made my mother’s life a hell on earth for getting pregnant so young.’

‘What are your grandparents’ names?’ the doctor interrupted, as he made a note of everything that I said.

‘John and Theresa Keogh. They practically raised me in Ballymun. They had five children: my auntie Marion, my uncle Jonathon, then my mother, my auntie Jacqueline and my other uncle, Laurence. They are all like my brothers and sisters. There’s two years between each of them, so they aren’t that much older than me. My mother hid her pregnancy up until the very end. She was terrified of my grandfather finding out.’

‘Why?’ asked the doctor.

‘John wasn’t and still isn’t the easiest man to live with,’ I admitted. ‘He was a great lover of the drink. He was built like a tank, with hands like big shovels. He worked as a butcher and made a lot of money. My mother used to joke that they were the first kids in Ballymun to have Barbies with rabbit-fur coats. My grandmother had various jobs, but she was heavily reliant on John financially. He was the boss of the house and what he said, went. They constantly lived in fear of John. He was the type of man who was really unpredictable and chaotic, who would tell you exactly what he thought of you.’ I paused now to think of John and his unpredictable moods. My aunts and uncles lived in fear of him and, as a child growing up with them, so did I. But at the same time I loved him dearly, and when he was in a good mood we would talk about everything.

‘Every day, he would come home from work, after spending most of his wages on drink and he would wreck the place,’ I said, remembering how he might punch his fist through the wall or door. ‘For some reason, even before I was born, my mother would get the worst of it. He would call her terrible names, telling her that he would cut her from her neck down to her stomach and bury her in the mountains.’ I continued, ‘No matter what my family did, John would find something to give out about. If they tried to be quiet he would accuse them of sneaking around the house and of being up to no good. If they made noise he would accuse them of trying to annoy him. There was no winning with him.

‘My mother knew that there would be war when John found out about her pregnancy. She was right. After putting up with years of mental abuse, my mother finally found the courage to leave my grandparents’ house. Herself and my da got a one-bedroomed flat together in Coultry Road. But she went from one bad situation to another...’ I finished.

‘What are your memories of growing up?’ Dr Sweeney asked softly, already knowing that my memories couldn’t have been good.

‘My very first memory was when I was just two years old. I was in the kitchen of our flat. I could hear my ma and da arguing. I didn’t know why they were fighting or what they were even saying. All that I knew was that my mother was in trouble. The shouts became louder and louder and I remember having a sense of panic. Then I heard a bang and a shuffling noise coming up the hall and into the kitchen. Then I saw my father, his face distorted with anger. He was bent over my ma like a mad man. He had a firm hold on her long blonde hair. She twisted and turned, doing her best to escape his grip. But she couldn’t. My ma must have been cooking something on the grill, because when my da opened the cooker I could see that the bars on the inside were scorching red. Then my da dragged my ma over to the cooker and shoved her head into the grill. Her high-pitched screams paralysed me to the spot and that’s my first memory.’

I took a deep breath and looked at the doctor, who sat expressionless and unfazed. ‘Jesus, I don’t know where all that came from,’ I said, shaking my head, genuinely surprised by my own honesty.

‘You’re doing really well, Rachael. Let’s keep going,’ he replied. ‘Can you remember your next memory?’

‘It doesn’t get much better, Dr Sweeney.’

‘Keep going,’ he urged.

‘Well, it was around the same time, because we were still living in the flat. I remember being in my cot in the sitting-room. The flat seemed dark and empty, as if there was no furniture in it. Again, my ma and da were arguing. I could hear them shouting in the kitchen. Then I saw them. They were standing just feet away from me, in the hall. My da had my ma by the hair. He started to viciously bang her head off the wall. Then they were out of my sight, but I could still hear the bangs echoing all over the flat. I was later to learn that my da went mad because my mother had bought me a new pram without telling him. Seemingly he was furious because he needed the money for other things. He ended up throwing my new pram over our balcony, from the fifth floor. But I don’t remember this. I just remember the violence, because it really shook me up.’

The doctor nodded sympathetically.

‘That was the last time I saw my father. That night my mother left him and she went and stayed with a friend of hers. She didn’t want my grandparents to see her bruises, but when my mother’s friend saw her, she was so upset that she stormed over to my grandparents and she told my grandmother exactly what had happened.

‘My grandmother was at her wits’ end, so herself and her sister went over to our flat in Coultry and took all of our stuff back to her house. John wasn’t one bit impressed. The last thing he wanted was a seventeen-year-old girl with a two-year-old under the same roof as him. He made it impossible for my mother to stay in his house. My grandmother’s loyalties lay with my mother. She wasn’t prepared to leave her on her own again, so they took their bare essentials and walked from Ballymun to Finglas in the middle of the night. There they stayed for a few days, with my grandmother’s sister, in the hope that John would cool down and come around to the idea of us living there. He did, but he never made it easy. At one stage the mental torture became too much, the name-calling and the shouting, and my nanny, my mother and I had to leave the house for three months just to keep out of his way.’

There was a long silence between myself and the doctor. ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ he asked kindly as he stood up from his seat and walked towards the door. ‘Please, yeah,’ I replied. And then he was gone. I sat silent and alone in the assessment room. The sun was shining through the window and every so often I would see the other inmates walk past in twos and threes, as they did their laps around the prison. I looked at my watch and realised that I had been telling the doctor my story for the past half hour. I also realised that in telling my story I felt absolutely no emotion. I was numb and was talking about myself as if I were somebody else.

The door opened and Dr Sweeney came back in. He handed me a glass of chilled water and resumed his position in his chair.

‘Ok, Rachael, these must have been really difficult experiences for you. How did they affect you growing up?’

I prepared to continue with my story. ‘They didn’t really, not in the beginning. I took everything in my stride. I loved living with my grandparents and I used to follow John everywhere. I grew to adore him and he grew to adore me. I quickly learned when to stay out of John’s way, though, and it wasn’t long before he began to see me as one of his own daughters.

‘When I was five years old my family sent me to the Holy Spirit Girls’ School in Ballymun. I’ll never forget my first day. As always, my mother dressed me in the best of clothes. She had me wearing this knitted powder-blue beret with a shoulder bag to match. On the front of the bag there was this little doll with curls in her hair. My own hair was baby blonde and had grown right down my back and my mother would always put rags in my hair, so it would have falling curls. That day I felt like the little doll on my bag and I was delighted to be starting school. That was until I got there. Every other girl in my new class was crying and didn’t want their mothers to leave them, so I started to cry as well, holding on to my grandmother’s hand for comfort.

‘Then I noticed this girl across the room. It was as if I was looking at myself in a mirror. She wore the exact same hat and bag, but hers was in pink. Her hair was like a golden sun, with big huge curls in it. It turned out that her mother and my grandmother knew each other and they only lived a few doors away from us. Her name was Mary and from that day onwards we were to become the best of friends. We were like two bubbly little angels who never caused any trouble. We both excelled in our school work. Then we would walk home together, get changed out of our uniforms and do our homework before we would even think about going out to play.’

‘When did things go wrong?’ asked the doctor.

‘A lot of things happened before I started to use drugs. I was very sick as a kid. I suffered with chronic asthma, and Temple Street hospital became like my second home. My doctor, Professor Gill, told me that I should have been in the Book of Records for the amount of time that I spent in hospital. I loved being in hospital, because I would be spoilt rotten and I got loads of attention from everybody. Nearly every night, depending on how well I was, the nurses would bring me down to their staff room. They knew how much I wanted to be a nurse as well, so they would dress me up in their uniforms. Then we would laugh and joke around as I pretended to be one of them. Every day someone from my family would come and visit me. When my aunties and my mother came they really pampered me. They would bring me up these amazing pyjamas, dressing-gowns and slippers, all in different styles and colours.

‘My auntie Marion, who was the eldest of my mother’s brothers and sisters, always brought along books for me to read. Then she would sit with me and do spelling tests, making sure that I pronounced every word perfectly, as my mother and auntie Jacqueline would do my hair in plaits or curls. Sometimes John would visit me in the hospital. He would try to show me how to play dominos, then he would test my general knowledge, asking me questions like, What’s the largest organ in the body? or, What bird lays the largest egg?

‘My grandmother would spoil me the most, bringing me up loads of toys, every type of Barbie that was going. When I was sick I really felt like a princess. This wasn’t the case when I was at home.

‘I think my realisation that, when I was “sick” in some way I would get the attention I craved, stems from this time. Even though I had everything that I needed materially, the people in my family weren’t around much when I was younger. My grandmother had started a job as a cleaning lady in Dublin Airport and she worked for the best part of the day. My mother, aunties and uncles were at the age of going out and socialising with their friends. I was left on my own with John who, although I loved him, could be unpredictable at the best of times. Every day when I came home from school I would say a little prayer that John would be either in a good mood or gone out.’