The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (25 page)

I looked at her and I said that we have beds and a TV, but she said that we were going to take the old ones out of the house and hide them in the garden. That way, when the people arrive, they would see that we had none and then they would have to give her the money for new ones. Then she and Jim went about hiding everything out of sight and I just stood and watched them while they ran around. I shook my head from side to side in disbelief at what was going on and all they could do was laugh and talk about what they were going to do with the money when they would get it.

Then as soon as they had finished hiding the beds and the TV, the social workers arrived and after walking around the house, they agreed that mum needed beds and they gave her £500 cash; and with that, she thanked them and she almost pushed them out of the door. Then once they had gone, she gave Jim £200 to keep him happy and he went out the door and off down to the pub to spend the money on drinks, and then mum spent the rest of the money on Christmas presents for the two children that she had with Jim, my step brothers.

And the only reason she got the money in the first place was because of her lie that she needed to buy beds for us children who had just come over from Ireland. I could not take any more of it, she made me sick; so I went outside, looked around and found Simon sitting on the wall outside the house. After a couple of minutes, we both went off for a walk along the street and then I went off to my appointment at the doctor’s. As soon as I walked into the doctor’s office, I told the doctor that I had just come over from Ireland and that I needed some tablets for my head as I couldn’t cope with all the pressures around me, and to my amazement he said ok and he gave me a prescription for some pills. And that was it, it was that easy to get medication.

And once I had taken some of the pills, my mind seemed to relax, things felt better and I felt more relaxed. Then I knew that I had to have the pills forever, or I wouldn’t be able to cope with my family and all their problems. I hated it at mum’s house and I couldn’t take living there any longer, as I could no longer take Jim’s constant pestering and sexual advances towards me. It had now become so bad that whenever he walked past me he would push me up against a wall and whisper into my ear that he would leave me alone and stop bothering me if I had sex with him, just once. Just the look of his dirty old face was enough to make me feel sick; and each time he approached me, I would tell him to fuck off and then I would get out of his way before he tried to touch me.

So I decided to try Tracy’s house again. But it wasn’t any better there either. I stayed at Tracy’s for a few nights, but every time Tracy wasn’t looking, Fred would try to grab or poke at me, trying his very best to touch me up. He would pull at my clothes or walk in on me while I was in the toilet. I just couldn’t get any peace from him. So I decided to go and live with one of my other sisters, Karen; she was only eighteen years old, but already she had a two-week-old baby girl, and she lived on the 12
^th
floor of a tower block, not far from my mum’s house. And it was handy for me to stay close to my brother Simon and my sister Daisy.

At first, everything was fine and Karen gave me the freedom of her flat; and for a while, I was happy. During the day, I used to give Karen a hand looking after her baby and it kept me occupied, but whenever anyone else came around to the flat, we would all end up arguing about who was going to look after the new baby. And it would always end up with Daisy, Simon and me, all sitting in a row and taking turns at looking after her. But then Jim began to come around to Karen’s flat looking for me, he would pound on the front door of her flat, demanding that I went back home with him. But Karen never let him in and I always hid from him until he gave up knocking and went away; and because he could not get at me, he began to turn his attention onto my brother Simon. But Simon was not having any of it. So, he also left mum’s house and he went to live with one of our older brothers, Kevin. Simon was only twelve and he needed a home, and Kevin was able to give him that home.

After a while, things began to get a bit difficult for me at Karen’s, as she now had too many people coming and going every day; and because she had very little money to live on, looking after me was beginning to cause arguments between her and her partner. So I had no choice, I moved out and I went back to mum’s; but I hated being at mum’s, I never went to school and she never fed me. And I hated her for allowing Jim to touch me all the time. Even after me telling mum about him, she did nothing to stop him, and he never gave up; and almost every morning, when mum took my stepbrothers to school, Jim would come into my bedroom and try to touch me.

Sometimes I would be awake and waiting for him to come up the stairs, and as he entered my bedroom, I would get up and call him a dirty pervert as I ran past him and out of the house. But on other days, I would still be asleep when he entered my room and I would be woken by him putting his dirty hands down the front of my knickers and from him shaking my bed because of him wanking beside it. I would sit up in my bed, I would call him all sorts of things and then I would get up and leave the house for a few hours until he went to work; then I would go back to the house, go back to bed and try to get some sleep.

By now, I was sick of everything and I had had enough of Jim again. And I could not go to Tracy’s house because of Fred constantly touching me, so I decided to make myself a home in some bicycle sheds that were at the bottom of the building that Karen lived in. Karen had one of the sheds to keep some old junk in and she hardly ever used it, so she gave the keys to me and she said, ‘Do what you like with it’, and I did. The shed had a huge open space at the top of it that ran along the whole length of all the sheds and the space joined them all together. The space was for ventilation and it had chicken wire running across the front of it; and when I got up inside it, I was able to see through the wire and watch as people walked by the sheds. It looked a bit like a huge rabbit hutch that was ten feet above the ground and it was all mine.

But I had nothing to put into my new home, so Karen and I went and stole a few scaffold boards from a builder’s yard and we laid the boards across the top of the shed’s walls, and I was able to cover the whole area with the boards and make a floor for myself. I even put some old carpet down on top of the boards, to stop stuff falling through the gaps between them and so that my knees wouldn’t hurt so much from crawling around on them.

At first, it felt like fun, a bit like making a camp; but after a couple of weeks, the cold evenings began to creep in and Karen went back upstairs to her warm flat and she left me all alone. I began to feel nervous and I wanted to go with her. But I knew I had to stick it out, as nobody wanted me around; so in the evenings, I would climb up onto the carpet, curl up into a ball and try to sleep. But it was the middle of winter now and it was freezing cold, and I started to shake as I was freezing; so I got up and I swallowed a few pills that the doctor had given me. Hoping they would help me to sleep, as my only other option was to sleep in with the rubbish bins in the shoot room. And after a while, the pills did nothing for me, so I tried sleeping in the bin room; but rats were running around the floor, the room smelt, and every time someone threw rubbish down the shoot from the floors above, I could hear the rubbish get louder as it came flying toward me and it was horrible. Then when the rubbish crashed into the bins, it would send dust up into the air and I would have to hold my breath for a while, until all the dirt settled again.

It was dirty, and I just couldn’t cope with it, so I left the bin room and I spent the rest of the night sleeping in the corner of one of the lifts, as it went up and down the building all night. In the morning, the lift got busy as people went to work, so I got out on Karen’s floor and I went and had some breakfast with her; then we both went out for the day and, as we walked around the streets, we hunted around for things to put into my shed-home. We found a mattress in a skip, and an old chest of drawers that someone had put outside the rubbish room; and later that day, Karen gave me some blankets and that was it. I had everything that I needed, and I was happy again.

As I sat looking at all the things I had, Simon came around and we spent the rest of the day playing chase in the lifts. Simon would be in one lift and I would be in the other, and we spent the whole time going up and down the building, trying to catch each other as we stopped the lifts on different floors. We had never seen lifts until we came to London and they fascinated us; at first, we couldn’t understand how each time the lifts stopped and the doors opened we were on a different floor. And the people who lived in the building could not help but find us amusing, but we got used to all the people looking at us and we just carried on as if it was a fairground ride.

I spent the next twelve months living above the sheds on my own; and during that time, I was my own boss, I did my very best to stay away from my mother’s house, so that Jim couldn’t touch me, and I also stayed away from Tracy’s, so that Fred couldn’t put his dirty hands on me too. However, I began to get a bit out of control and I started smoking cigarettes and then came the drugs. At first, I smoked weed, but then some older people got me to take cocaine. I tried to keep a distance from most of the drugs and I stopped using cocaine soon after I first took some. But after a while, I found myself addicted to sniffing glue and I was always getting as high as I could, by swallowing handfuls of painkillers that my doctor had prescribed for me. They were very strong painkillers that he had given me, and my addictions got so bad that most days I would openly walk around the streets out of my head.

I also got addicted to the glue sniffing that I did and, during the day, I would walk around with a bag of glue literally stuck to my face; and most days, I would end up at Saint Mary’s hospital, Paddington, choking and unable to breathe because of the glue. At the time, I thought it was funny and I used to walk into the hospital with all my clothes stuck together and my face covered in glue, and I would tell the doctors that I was suffering from an asthma attack. But I would still have the tube of glue I used, stuck to my pocket and I would be laughing as they took care of me and used chemicals to un-stick my clothes.

I was only fifteen and I was out of control, but eventually the hospital staff got so fed up with me doing the same thing day after day that they eventually called the police to me. And after a bit of help from all of them, I was able to stop what I was doing and I eventually sorted myself out. After the hospital got the police involved, the police realised that I had no one to look after me, and they found out about me living all on my own above the sheds under my sister’s block. But instead of them moving me on and pushing me onto the streets, or forcing me to go back home to my mum’s to be abused again, they decided that the best thing for me was for them to allow me to keep sleeping above the sheds, and to keep an eye on me. And every evening, the police would walk past the sheds to make sure I was ok and, as they walked past, they would just smile up at me as I looked down at them through the chicken wire; and then they would walk away, leaving me alone again.

After a few months, Simon said that he wanted to stay above the sheds with me; he said that he no longer wanted to stay with our older brother Kevin at his house, as it was no fun anymore. I could tell that something was up with him, as lately he had become a little withdrawn and he was beginning to look unhappy. He was only thirteen years old and he was my baby brother and I loved him, so I said yes and we both went off to Kevin’s, to get his clothes. When we got there, Kevin wasn’t in and, within a couple of minutes, Simon ran in, grabbed his stuff and we left the house and headed back to my place.

When we got back, we settled down for the night; but after a couple of hours, Kevin turned up and he was looking for Simon. Kevin looked up at us and he told Simon that he had to go back with him and that he wasn’t allowed to stay above the sheds with me. I looked at Simon and I told him that he didn’t have to go back with him, so he said, ‘No, I’m not going.’ Kevin went mad, he began shouting at both of us, calling us ungrateful little bastards, and then he walked away. Now I knew that something was definitely up with the both of them, but I left it at that and we both fell asleep.

The next morning, Simon became very aggressive towards me and I knew that something had changed him. For the first few months, since we came to London, he had been happy; he thought it was great having bigger brothers to hang around with, he liked to play fight with them, and being around everyone made him feel wanted. But now something had changed him again and he had become his old unhappy self again; he was acting just as he did after he was abused back in Ireland. I said nothing, but I watched him as he became angry towards everyone again, and I noticed that Kevin was always trying to hang around with him. He would play with him, acting like a child, and every day he would give him handfuls of sweets and lots of attention; but as time went on, Simon only got worse.

Then one day, as Simon, Kevin and I were playing in the rain, Simon slipped and I slipped too and we both fell to the ground; then as Simon got up, he stood over me and he hit me as hard as he could into my back. I was shocked at what he had just done to me and I looked up at him, then Kevin grabbed Simon around this neck, threw him to the ground and then he began to beat Simon. I looked at them both, but I could not understand what was going on; then they broke into a huge fight, so I got up and rushed over towards them, and I screamed at them both to stop. Kevin was beating up his own little brother and Simon was begging him to stop; he was shouting, ‘Please, Kevin. Please don’t hit me’, and I could see the fear on Simon’s face. I could see that Simon was very afraid of Kevin and, at that moment, I knew something very bad was wrong between the two of them.