All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (11 page)

I used to tell my manager that Da lived in England. I don’t know why I lied—I guess it was the reality I secretly wanted. But one morning my manager called to the door for me when Da was home and he answered it. Afterwards, in the car on the way into work, my manager asked me about him. I felt terrible being caught out on this lie. I just muttered something about him being back for a while and he didn’t ask me any more questions. But that morning I realised that if I didn’t get this shit sorted in my head that I’d ruin the little life I’d built up for myself by telling silly lies. So, feeling like I was now safe from my da, I started blocking things out. One by one I pushed the bad memories to the back of my mind, well out of reach.

The Burgerland Christmas do the following year was a great night out. Temporary staff were brought in so that we could all go to the party. The function was held in a city-centre hotel and after we had gotten the meal out of the way the disco started and the real fun began.

I was in the middle of tearing up the dance floor when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cute guy walking in. He was obviously into mod music judging by his skin-tight haircut. I asked one of my co-workers who he was and she told me he was the brother of one of the supervisors in another Burgerland branch. Deadly.

I got on great with this supervisor and we were always buzzing off of one another. So, you know how you are at 16, you find out if he’s single, does he like the look of you and so on. After the usual intervention by a friend, who sidles up to the guy, giggles and whispers, ‘My mate fancies you’, he came over and asked me to dance. His name was
Billy
and we clicked straight away.

After the party, a gang of us went back to
Billy
’s house where myself and
Billy
cosied up together on the sofa, surrounded by all the other newly formed couples, who were kissing and whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears.

Billy
told me he was 17 years old. He had left school early like me but he had landed on his feet with a good job in a printers. He had a lovely sensitive side to him that came to light the more I talked to him.

I went into work the next day walking on air. I was dying to hear from him. A few days went by with no word and I was climbing the walls but then he turned up in Burgerland one day with a mate of his. I remember overhearing his friend saying, ‘She’s lovely man!’ I was especially pleased ’cause I was wearing the not-so-flattering Burgerland uniform, complete with a red cap and hair net.

Myself and
Billy
were practically inseparable from that day on. I was besotted. That Christmas, he bought me a silver Claddagh ring but I’d only had it a few days when I lost it somewhere in my bedroom. I’m not very religious but the ring meant so much to me that I got down on both knees and said a prayer to my namesake saint. My full name is Audrey Jude Delaney and Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases. I have to laugh sometimes at how apt my naming was. I prayed until I had carpet burns on my two knees from all the kneeling. But it worked. The ring turned up in the most unlikely of places and I found my faith in God being gradually restored.

Over the next few weeks,
Billy
and I ran up ferocious phone bills between us. We just couldn’t bear to be apart so the minute we separated and returned to our own homes, we’d be on the phone to one another. I would go down to the phone box across from the shop in my estate and he would ring it at a pre-arranged time.

I’d go down in the lashing rain or gale-force winds just to talk to him, even if we’d already spent the last few days living in each other’s pocket. There were no mobile phones back then. I lived two bus journeys away from Billy but whenever I visited him, either his brother or his da always insisted on giving me a lift home. He had a lovely family and they all treated me like I was one of their own.

*

Drugs were becoming a big problem for me around the time
Billy
and I got together. I never told him about it but I took whatever I could whenever I could. I was taking hash, acid and uppers and downers in the form of pills. I also took other tablets that I think were Valium but I never knew for sure. All these pills were cheap; kids as young as 14 sold them for pocket money. I took anything offered to me really; half of the pills could have just been antibiotics for all I knew. I just took whatever was going and hoped for a high.

One night though, I was in a right bitch of a mood because I had nothing to take. I had been spending so much time with
Billy
that I had lost contact with the people who usually hooked me up. So that night myself and
Billy
went to see a band in this club in Dublin. I felt all grown-up because the last time I’d been in the club had been seven years earlier for a roller-disco night. The band sang the song ‘My Girl’ that night and this became mine and
Billy
’s song from then on. After the band,
Billy
wanted to go to his friend’s 16
^th
birthday party. It was taking place in a shed at the back of the guy’s house where music could be blared as loud as they wanted. But a half an hour into the party I got all stroppy when I realised that no one had any alcohol.

‘Jesus, is this it? It’s like a kid’s disco,’ I said to
Billy
.

‘It’s just getting started. It’ll probably warm up in a few minutes.’

‘But sure no one has brought drink or anything. How can you get a buzz going? This is boring.’

I didn’t say what I was really thinking, ‘Where are the bleedin’ drugs?’

Looking back, I’m mortified by how I acted but I think I just panicked at the thought of having to meet all these new people completely sober. I’d have no choice but to be me. And the problem was that I didn’t like me.

‘
Billy
, can we leave? I don’t know anyone and the girls are looking me up and down and making me feel uncomfortable.’

‘C’mon, lets go so.’

So we left and headed to a nearby pub. I downed several vodkas one after another until the room was spinning but at least my thoughts weren’t going at 90 miles an hour anymore.

*

The following April, after
Billy
and I had been together for four months, the inevitable conversation about sex came up. I knew I definitely loved him by now. He was a massive part of my life and I was sure that he felt the same about me. I was always staying over in his house, sleeping in his sister’s room. But every so often we’d get the house all to ourselves and we’d climb into his bed and kiss and cuddle.

Billy
treated me like an angel. He was the only guy I’d ever been with who made me feel special. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for me and he always put me first. The only thing that confused me was how come he didn’t see the dirt in me.

Fear stopped us going all the way for the first couple of months. I was 16 and a half and I was mad about
Billy
but I found it all very confusing. My biggest fear was that he’d be able to tell that something had gone on before him. But lust won out in the end and we arranged to do it down by the Phoenix Park one day. It was all very mechanical. There was no such thing as foreplay;
Billy
kissed me for a few seconds before putting on a condom. We knew nothing about STDs but we were definitely scared of pregnancy. He came quickly. Afterwards, as we were getting dressed,
Billy
turned to me and said, ‘I thought you were supposed to bleed the first time.’

My face turned scarlet.
Billy
was a gentle soul and he wasn’t saying this in an accusing way, he just seemed confused.

I panicked and within days I’d finished with him. I just couldn’t handle the sexual side of the relationship. I hated lying to him and I was so bad at it that I was convinced he believed he wasn’t my first. The sex reminded me of my da too and I worried that now that we had done it once, I’d have to do it all the time. The only way to stop the bad memories coming flooding back was to finish with
Billy
. So I pulled the plug on my relationship with the loveliest bloke I had ever met. I was heartbroken but I desperately needed to feel in control again.

After we broke up, I started hanging around with my old friends on the north side of Dublin again. I got more and more heavily into drugs. I started dating unsavoury types, simply because they liked the same thing as me—drugs. We smoked hash, popped pills and drank and drank. I still had a bit of a head on my shoulders but being out of it meant you didn’t have to think, feel or answer awkward questions. I had become very adept at blocking out the abuse, even to the point where I was able to have sexual relationships without thinking of my da. When I was 17, I got engaged to a guy who Da didn’t approve of. This made it all the more interesting, but it wasn’t to last. It was just another way of rebelling as far as I was concerned.

I didn’t carry the emotions of the past with these sexual experiences, because at this stage I had almost forgotten my past. I didn’t remember anymore; I had pushed it out of my head. I still had the emptiness, the pain, and the mental torture that I couldn’t explain. But drinking and taking drugs solved that one for me. They allowed me to function for a while.

*

I decided to leave Burgerland when I was still 16. After listening to all the students there going on about their studies, I realised they had a future and I didn’t. I loved working there and part of me hated leaving but I knew I had to do something with my life.

I enrolled in a full-time IT course with Anco on the Jamestown Road in Finglas. Computers were just getting popular around that time. I learned word processing, electronics and programming. It was all very new to me though and to be honest I hadn’t a clue about what I was doing. I sat in on the electronics class all right but most of it went over my head. I loved the word processing though.

That course was one of the best things I ever did and it certainly stood to me in the future. You got a small training fee for attending too—it wasn’t a full wage but it was enough to get by on. I used the money to go on and do an evening typing class. I put a lot of effort into the typing and bought myself a heavy steel typewriter to practise on in the evenings. So during the week I focused on my studies and at the weekends I let my hair down and went mad.

I was still trying to block out memories of the abuse but the more I did this the more emotional and angry I got. When I wasn’t practising for my course, I was out of my head on drugs.

I thought that I had managed to put all the abuse behind me and I was now a normal, functioning young adult who had taken charge of her life. The demons were never too far away, though, and my mask would slip when I least expected it.

One of my supervisors in the course asked me several times if I was all right, or if I needed to talk. I had no idea why he was asking me this. Was he referring to the way I sometimes cried in front of people in the class? Or did he notice how out of it I sometimes was? I always had a made-up story at hand to justify my tears. But then more questions were asked and cracks would begin to appear in my story. The supervisor was genuinely concerned. But I didn’t even know what was wrong with me myself, so how could I tell him.

I was just trying to lose myself in my relationships so that I wouldn’t have to face up to my own problems.

By now I had pushed everything that happened with Da so far to the back of my mind that it was like I no longer had a past. I had blanked it all out. I still had the empty feeling I could never explain but drink and drugs solved that one for me. So long as I had a constant supply of both, I could function.

*

I finished up my typing course and got a job as a receptionist in a gym on Eden Quay in Dublin. I was naturally well-mannered and polite so customer service came easy to me. I took the job very seriously and I found myself plunged into a completely different world to the one I had previously been living in. The gym attracted people from all walks of life. You had shop assistants, students, guards, builders, solicitors, doctors, professors—a whole cross-section of society. But when people got changed into their gym gear, they all looked the very same to me.

I discovered that I was excellent at sales and it wasn’t long before I was earning good commission on top of a decent wage. Slowly but surely, my lifestyle was changing. I started socialising with people from work and I found that it was nice to have nights out that didn’t involve drugs. It made me realise that I’d had enough of them. Before I’d started working in the gym, I’d used drugs the whole time.

Around the same time, my manager
Joseph
used to walk me to the bus stop every evening. Maybe it was the chivalry and the fact that I was feeling so vulnerable at the time but I found myself developing feelings for him. It was a very physical attraction. He would only have to walk by me in the corridor and sparks would fly. He made it clear that he felt the same way and we went on a few dates.

*

But I spent my early twenties feeling exposed and raw. I felt like the bubbly me that I’d once been able to present to the world was fading away and now my dark inner feelings were on show.

Around this time, a friend of mine told me she was depressed and was going to see a psychiatrist. My overwhelming feeling was one of jealousy, which might sound strange. I was jealous that someone could go inside her head and fix it. I wished so badly that I could get someone to do that for me. I didn’t know how to go about it, though, and I was too embarrassed to ask my friend. I thought it would be so simple. A quack would show you a few blobs on the page, you would tell him what you thought of it, and he would ask you some more questions, maybe hypnotise you. Then he would make a diagnosis and you would be cured.

But I was far from cured. In reality, I became agoraphobic. Without realising it, a desperation to hide away from the world crept up on me and I found myself withdrawing into a shell once more. I stopped seeing my friends and family. The black thoughts had taken over. The louder the thoughts became, the more I turned to drugs to quieten them. I had gotten to the stage where alcohol alone wasn’t enough to take the pain away. It was just the appetiser before the real tranquilliser. So I used my contacts to get my hands on whatever I could—hash, ecstasy, speed, coke. I smoked heroin too but I stopped short of doing it the dirty way, as I called it, which was using it intravenously. I used anything I could get my hands on to escape my thoughts.