All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (12 page)

I never felt like I was a junkie though. I was an addict all right but I still had my principles. I never slept with anyone to get money for drugs, never robbed to get them and never got behind the wheel of a car with drugs in my system. So to this day, I always say that I wasn’t a ‘junkie junkie’ – just a junkie. It’s my own personal thin line maybe—but it makes me feel better.

Chapter Nine

I fell for
Joseph
, my manager in the gym, in a big way. I’d only been seeing
Joseph
a short while when our relationship was tested by an emotional rollercoaster. I found out that my beloved ex-boyfriend
Billy
had been killed in a crash. He’d been riding his mod scooter with a friend when a van came crashing into them. His neck was broken and he died instantly.

Billy
’s sister rang me at work to tell me the bad news and when I hung up the phone my body was like jelly I was shaking so much.
Billy
had been my first love and I’d never stopped loving him—I just hadn’t been able for the sexual side of the relationship at the time. So I’d tucked my feelings for him away in a corner of my heart and broke it off thinking I was saving myself from future heartbreak.

Joseph
drove me to the funeral. He must have suspected that I still had feelings for my dear lost
Billy
but he never once asked me any questions. He just held my hand throughout and let me know I wasn’t alone.

Billy
’s family welcomed me with open arms. They even took me in the head funeral car and we all just held one another and bawled our eyes out.

The church was thronged. People were spilling out on to the streets. I cried and I cried throughout the funeral ceremony. I couldn’t imagine how terrible his parents must have been feeling if I felt this bad. They played ‘My Girl’ during the Mass—mine and
Billy’s
song—and that just made the waterworks ten times worse.

I lost days after the funeral. I couldn’t work; I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. I just wandered around in a confused daze, remembering all the good times I’d had with
Billy
and hating myself for screwing it all up in the end.

I blamed myself.

Da didn’t figure in the equation at all ’cause at this stage I was still blocking the abuse out. I didn’t have a past as far as I was concerned.

My life had been all over the place the last few months. Between changing jobs,
Billy
dying and meeting
Joseph
. The only constant in all of this was the empty feeling that just wouldn’t go away. There was something wrong with me. I knew that much for sure. I was different. I just didn’t know how. I started getting flashbacks of my childhood. Although I was fairly good at suppressing the memories, I’ve learnt that you can’t bury them forever.

After
Billy
’s funeral,
Joseph
became the glue holding me together. My feelings for him grew stronger the more I got to know him. He was 26 and had recently separated from his wife, with whom he had two little girls. When Da heard this he went mental and I had to listen to lectures on what a disgrace I was for dating a married man. He even got
Joseph
on his own one evening and tried to convince him to walk away from me. And it wasn’t just Da who disagreed with the relationship—some of my friends had their tuppence worth to give too. Eventually, me and
Joseph
became an official couple against the wishes of everyone. I even had to leave my job in the gym.

*

One day when I was working in an office, I had a severe attack of flashbacks. I felt my throat tighten. I couldn’t deal with it. At lunchtime when no one was around, I rang the Rape Crisis Centre, asking if I could speak to someone in confidence. The person who answered the phone put me on hold for a moment, and then asked if I could give them a number so they could ring me back. Like I was gonna! I didn’t even know what to say. I just hung up and pushed it out of my mind for years, blocking it out again.

I drifted from job to job after that, trying to find somewhere I could grow some roots. The one thing I knew I was good at though—no matter what the area—was sales. So myself and
Joseph
decided to combine our skills. He was a world-class power lifter and a fabricator by trade, with a sideline in making gym equipment for other businesses, I was great at sales and we both had experience in the gym industry, so why not try and open up our own gym? We had loads of clients between us who liked us and who we knew would follow us. All we needed was some business smarts and someone to help with the finances.
Joseph
thought that it would be a great idea to get Da involved in it. He thought it would help build some bridges between the two of them and also Da would obviously provide the missing business acumen. I didn’t like the idea but I had no good reason to give
Joseph
. I had no good reason to give myself. So it all went ahead. We took out loans and started up a toning table and beauty salon in Lucan in west Dublin. Around the same time we opened the business,
Joseph
and I bought a house in Celbridge in County Kildare. It was a good-size, red-brick bungalow with a large garden. But it was the two dogs we got rather than the house that had me excited. We got a Greyhound/Labrador cross-breed who I named Frisky, after a horse I’d once backed that had won big, and a small hairy Terrier cross who I named Peanut. He was the liveliest and funniest dog I ever saw. The dogs completed the house for me—it felt like we were one big happy family. All that was missing was the white-picket fence.

When the centre first opened,
Joseph
got me an old mustard-coloured Allegro car. He had it sprayed pink and gave it to me as a present. I had never had a driving lesson in my life. The only driving I had ever done was sitting behind the wheel of cars robbed by my mates or else ‘borrowed’ from someone’s Ma or Da. But I loved driving. Doing handbrake turns and donuts in quiet open areas was the best buzz ever. I’m not proud of these things now but at the time I didn’t understand what other people got so worked up about. To me, it was an adrenalin rush and a bit of fun. I was the only girl brave enough to get involved in the driving side of things; the other girls just sat in the back and came along for the spin.

A couple of weeks after
Joseph
presented me with the car, we had one of our first big rows. I can’t remember what it was about now, I just remember the great escape the car allowed me. I had just gotten my provisional license and paid the insurance and I couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. I jumped into my pink Allegro and off I went. I could speed away from all my troubles just like that. It was a great feeling. Like the costume I wore in the pantomime or the Burgerland fries costume, the car allowed me to hide from people. I had a windscreen to shield me. I could just whiz by people and get to where I wanted to go without having to stop and talk and risk them catching a glimpse of my dirty soul.

*

Even though me and
Joseph
were playing happy families, I hadn’t abandoned my peculiar morning rituals. I still got up every morning and fetched my bowl and spoon, poured the cereal, and stirred and ate it in the exact same manner as I’d been doing since I was a child. I couldn’t leave the house if this ritual hadn’t been followed to perfection. Joseph found it a little strange and he used to joke about it with his mates but I think in a way he found it a little endearing.

My health was also as up and down as always and the crazy hours I was working in the gym weren’t helping matters. I worked 12-hour days. I was admitted to hospital at one stage with a painful, icy feeling in my left arm. The doctors told me that the stress of my job was tiring out my heart. They took me off the pill and told me to cut back on work but things were just starting to take off so there was no chance of that. I didn’t pay too much attention anyway. Aches and pains, doctors and nurses—they had all become like wallpaper in my life to the point that I no longer took much notice of them. I was already hooked on medicines at this stage, both prescribed and illegal. I needed Valium on a regular basis and also continued to take sleeping pills. It was the only way I could hope to get any sleep at night. Taking tablets and medication had also become part of my daily routine, and it would take many years before I even tried to address this problem.

I also started getting major migraines around this time that seemed to coincide with Da being present. The minute he walked into the same room as me, I tensed up. The pressure inside my head was terrible. I hated him being around. I found the way he acted around women humiliating; the way he leered at them and used any excuse to be all touchy-feely.

I remember one day Da and
Joseph
were in the office discussing something. I just nipped in for a second to grab something from one of the cupboards when this overwhelming wave of emotions washed over me. It was like all the feelings I’d been trying to quash got swept into a tornado and it was now bulldozing through me at break-neck speed. I don’t know how else to describe it. Black thoughts had come dislodged in my head. I tried to push them to the back of my mind but next thing I knew everything went black. I had fainted. I had fallen flat on my face in front of Da and
Joseph
. When I came to, I told them I’d been feeling a little dizzy but it was nothing to worry about.

*

It didn’t take long for cracks to appear in mine and
Joseph’s
relationship. I still loved him and knew he loved me, but we started rowing a lot.

In the beginning, we had the sweetest relationship ever, but in time things started to go wrong between us. It was no one’s fault; it was just something that happened.

So our home life was missing a lot more than the white-picket fence by now. But I kept telling myself it was nothing I couldn’t handle. And if things ever did get to be too much, sure I could always just call up a mate and get them to hook me up with something to get me out of my head.

After our first year in business, we were doing well so we decided to extend the gym using equipment
Joseph
had been working on. We added a sauna and showers to the works, so now we had the toning tables, a beauty salon and a mixed gym.

In our third year, the interest rates on mortgages and loans doubled and we got hit badly. Money was tight everywhere and the clients had to put their own priorities first; their gym membership was way down their list of concerns. So we started losing customers fast. Our loans were outstanding and our own mortgage on the house in Celbridge went through the roof.

It was all coming tumbling down.

We were in the middle of a financial crisis and we were all financially exposed. It got to the stage where we had no choice but to liquidate the gym. We were completely broke. We just about had a roof over our heads but the electricity in the house had been cut off and we didn’t even have any heating.

The pressure on us was overwhelming. I tried everything to escape from reality. When
Joseph
went out with friends, I usually took the dogs with me for company and escaped to my car. I’d put the radio on full blast just so I wouldn’t be able to hear my own thoughts; whispering voices that spread like smoke in my mind and threatened to blot out everything if I turned off the music and listened to what they had to say.

For most of my life, everyone had thought of me as smiley, bubbly, happy-go-lucky Audrey. Nobody knew the real me. On the outside, I had a great sense of humour and I loved a laugh. But the sadness was always lurking on the inside, threatening to brim over and spoil everything. I used to think that the happy me the rest of the world saw was just a lie and not the real me. But I now know that it was the sad, confused and empty me that should never have existed. During my late teens and early adulthood, any real happiness I felt had to be drug induced. I couldn’t fall asleep without taking pills and when I did finally nod off, I would be hopping all over the bed with nightmares. I’d never remember the details of the dreams the next morning but I’d be left with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It was after yet another row with
Joseph
that I was sitting in my little pink haven one day with the radio blaring. The music faded and the news came on. The newsreader was going through all the top stories and I remember her saying the words ‘child abuse’. I froze. Every bone in my body tensed up and I felt my fists clenching involuntarily. The words had struck a cord with me. I tried to push them out of my mind and pretend I hadn’t heard them. But it was too late. A door had been reopened somewhere in my mind— one that I had sealed shut a very long time ago.

Once this door opened, it seemed I lost control of my memories. Whereas I was once able to block them out, now they assaulted me on a daily basis. Everywhere I turned the word ‘child abuse’ kept popping up. I heard about priests, fathers, uncles. It seemed to be everywhere. I’m not sure if this was a new thing or if it was just registering with me for the first time—I honestly don’t know. But I slowly acknowledged what this phrase ‘child abuse’ meant. Then I absorbed the words ‘child sexual abuse.’ This was overpowering. I couldn’t deal with it and I went into a state of denial.

*

After we lost the gym, I was in and out of jobs for a long time, unable to hold anything down for very long. I felt like, to add to all my other problems, I now had no sense of purpose. Nightmares, migraines, flashbacks, money troubles. It was like a twisted funfair ride that just went round and round in circles and I couldn’t make it stop. My problems were like a disease that had invaded my body and there was no cure for it. I was convinced it was terminal so what was the point in living? It was time to take action.

So not for the first time in my life, I made a pathetic attempt to end it all. I bought some alcohol and drank until my senses were nicely numbed. I took a knife that I used as a potato peeler and I began cutting into my skin. It didn’t do much damage so I replaced it with a serrated bread knife. I couldn’t press it down hard enough though. Both arms were left with mere skin abrasions. This wasn’t the first time I had tried to slit my wrists. I had made a feeble attempt before. But it was the same scenario. I was left with a few scratches—silly looking slices on my wrists mocking me for being too chicken to go deeper. Then I heard the dogs barking and it dawned on me; if I died who would feed the dogs? It was a silly thing to focus on but it brought me back to my senses. Here I was again, several years later and the only thing that had changed was that things had gotten worse.