Dying to Survive (3 page)

‘I don’t want to be using drugs,’ I continued as I began to sob. ‘I have to go off later on and do whatever I have to do to get drugs. It’s like all my morals go out the window. My family instilled a lot of goodness in me. I mean, I’m not a scumbag. I’m a good person.’

‘What’s out there to help you get through this really bad situation that you’re in?’ Alison prompted.

‘I need to be hospitalised. I rang a few places and I’ve been told that I will have to go on a waiting list, but if I go on a waiting list, I’ll have no arms, or I’ll be dead by the time I get in there.’

‘Do you really think you could die?’

‘I know for a fact that I will be dead. Your body can only take so much and the doctors told me if I continue to use, they will have to amputate both my arms’.

‘But you just can’t stop yourself?’ she asked.

‘I just can’t stop myself. I’m gone so far and I feel so sick, I don’t have the strength to do it on my own. I need help. I know I have the potential to do a lot more with my life.’

The interview ended there and I was relieved. It was as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The rest of the day became a blur. I lay on my chair and felt as if I was floating and there I stayed until the next day.

_____

Or so I thought. My mother’s screams nearly gave me a heart attack. ‘Jesus Christ, Jacqueline, look at this!’ I woke up and saw my mother standing at the end of my chair, staring at me as though I had ten heads. ‘Rachael, what on earth did you do to yourself?’

I was completely baffled; I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘You’re like a bloody ad for Cadbury chocolate.’ Suddenly memories of the night before came flooding back to me. Memories in the form of fancy walnut whips, orange delights and chocolate strawberry hearts raced through my mind. I had got up in the middle of the night, craving something sweet. I devoured half of my posh chocolates and fell asleep on top of the rest. Any delusions of being Ireland’s next top model quickly went out the window. Especially when I looked down at my feet, which had blown up like two big purple balloons.

‘Were you injecting into your feet?’ my mother asked, as the blood drained from her face.

‘I had to,’ I replied, avoiding eye contact with her.

‘That’s it. You’re coming to the hospital with me now. C’mon, get up and get dressed.’ My mother attempted to lift me up off the chair.

Neil lifted his head up from where he had been sleeping on the floor beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said in a husky voice, still half asleep. He looked at me with one eye still closed. Then it dawned on him...‘What are ye like, the bleedin’ state of ye,’ he said as he fell back into his sleeping position. By this stage, my mother was no longer in the room, so I took the opportunity to ask, ‘Neil, where’s the gear?’

‘It’s in your arm, love,’ he replied.

‘It’s not. I still had a bit left. D’ye know what I done with it?’

‘Check under the chair,’ he suggested. I put my hand under the chair and pulled out a one-ml barrel. The heroin was still in the needle, but it had turned to crystal overnight. ‘Shit, I’m gonna have to cook this up again.’ I could hear my mother coming back into the sitting-room, so I quickly hid my ‘works’ under my blanket.

‘I’ve just been talking to Garda John White on the phone. I told him that I was bringing you to the hospital,’ she told me. ‘And as soon as you were a feeling bit better, you would ring him to try and get your warrants sorted out.’

‘What did he say to that?’ I asked her doubtfully.

‘He was actually very nice to me; he said that your health was the most important thing and you’re not to worry. When you’re ready, you have to hand yourself in.’

I looked at my mother, not believing a word she had said. It just sounded too good to be true. My health ‘is the most important thing’—they weren’t saying that when they had me in custody, were they? ‘They’ve changed their tune quick enough,’ I said to my mother, knowing that something wasn’t right.

My mother just smiled and we chatted for fifteen minutes or so. Then suddenly I heard a loud knock on the door. It was a knock of authority and I immediately knew it was the gardaí. I looked at my mother, eyes wide with fear. ‘Neil, it’s the guards,’ I blurted out, as he jumped up, still fully clothed and grabbing his man-bag that was almost like his second skin.

‘I’ll answer the door. Wait here,’ my mother told me and Neil.

‘I can’t, Lynda. I never went to court the other day. I have a warrant as well,’ Neil said to my mother as he ran into the bedroom and hid down the side of the bed. I sat frozen to the spot and held my breath as my mother opened the door to the gardaí.

‘I’ve just been speaking to John White and he told me he would give me some grace to get Rachael better before she handed herself in,’ I heard my mother say loudly. ‘That’s not possible, Mrs Keogh. I’m John White and I didn’t speak to you at all. We have a warrant to come into your flat. We’re taking Rachael down to the station.’

‘Don’t you dare try and take my daughter down to the station. She needs to go to the hospital!’ My mother sounded hysterical now.

‘Lynda, step out of the way or we’ll be taking you down as well.’

My mother shouted back, ‘You can do what you want with me, but you’re not getting into this flat.’

I had no choice but to face the music. I shoved my works, filled with heroin, up my sleeve and walked out, still covered in chocolate. ‘Ma, just let them in,’ I said to my mother who was beginning to get very upset. She stepped aside and in strolled five gardaí, looking very satisfied with themselves. One of them was a woman, who looked three times the size of me and I knew by her face that she wasn’t to be messed with.

‘There ye are, Rachael,’ the female garda said to me. ‘You’ve been a hard girl to get hold of. You know why we’re here. Come on, you’re coming with us.’

‘You could at least let her wash her face and put some clothes on,’ my mother said protectively.

‘No, you’re coming the way you are,’ the garda said, not wanting to let me out of her sight

‘She can’t go in her nightdress. Just give her a few minutes, it’s not as if she’s gonna jump out the window,’ my mother protested.

‘Well, we wouldn‘t be surprised,’ the garda said sarcastically as she walked into the bedroom to have a look around. Myself and my mother quickly followed her, well aware of Neil in his hiding place behind the bed. My mother stood at the end of the bed, barely blocking Neil’s feet. The female garda continued to snoop around, then she slowly walked up to my mother and stared her right in the eyes. ‘I’m giving her two minutes. That’s it.’

‘Rachael, hurry up, just throw your jeans on,’ my mother said, closing the door behind her and leaving me in the bedroom. Needless to say, the first thing I did was make a dash for my bag of tricks, which included spoons, citric, a tourniquet and everything I needed to have a ‘turn-on’.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Neil asked quietly.

‘I have to get something into me, Neil. I’m not sitting in that station dying sick again.’ My hands were shaking as I put the heroin onto the spoon and tried to burn the crystals down into liquid. Then I wrapped the blood-stained tourniquet around my arm and began to search for a vein.

It was as if my mother knew what I was doing, because she kept talking to the gardaí, clearly in an attempt to buy me time. They were having none of it, though, and before I knew it, my two minutes were up. Bang, bang, bang on the door.

‘Rachael, are you ready?’

‘Yeah, I’m coming now.’ I still couldn’t get the heroin into me.

‘C’mon, open the door.’ I knew that unless they kicked the door in, they wouldn’t be able to open it—the handle was missing from the outside, so they would just have to wait. ‘I’m just ready, will you give me a chance!’

‘Lynda, open this door right now, or we’ll arrest you as well,’ the female garda said, getting more and more frustrated by the minute.

‘Ye’d easily know you had no kids,’ my mother retorted. ‘Anyway, I can’t open the door; she can only open it from the inside,’ she continued calmly. Then I could hear the woman trying to pull the door from the top. I realised that I was definitely making things harder for myself with the gardaí. It was bad enough having eight warrants for my arrest and an escape from garda custody hanging over my head, never mind resisting arrest as well. I threw the needle on the bed, resigned to going through some withdrawals. I got dressed quicker than ever before and handed myself over to the gardaí.

Down at the station, the gardaí were delighted to see me. They kept cracking jokes about Sky News and my escape from custody. ‘Don’t worry, Rachael, we’re not keeping you here. You’re being brought straight to court, then you can go to the hospital if you feel you need to. Is that ok?’ one of them asked me. They were making sure to treat me with respect and giving me no reason to bad-mouth them.

They kept their word and within minutes I was being escorted to the Bridewell district court, sandwiched between two plainclothes gardaí in a Toyota Corolla. ‘Jesus, word travels quick in this city,’ one of them said as he stared out the window. I followed his gaze and saw a gang of journalists and reporters, many of whom I recognised, standing outside the Bridewell.

I was swiftly ushered through the back door into what is known as the most unpleasant garda station in Dublin and brought to the women’s holding cell. I hadn’t been in this cell for six years, but nothing seemed to have changed. It still smelt of musk and concealed dirt. The walls were still free of graffiti. Some people said that was because once you wrote your name on the wall, you were signing your life away and you were bound to end up in prison at some stage or another. But the real reason for the clean walls was because of the constant watchful eyes of the gardaí who would patiently sit in line on the opposite side of the iron-barred gates, pretending to read their daily newspaper while they waited for their prisoner to be called.

It was no surprise to me to see the same old faces, facing the same old charges and with the same old stories. For most junkies, including myself, prison and drugs are a package deal. One comes hand in hand with the other, a vicious cycle from which it is nearly impossible to break free. But a lifestyle that is very easy to get comfortable in. Sometimes prison for me was a refuge from the cold streets of Dublin. A warm place to lay your head, eat well, get your methadone and physically recuperate, only to go back out into the real world to use drugs and destroy yourself all over again.

As I sat in the underground cell I felt a sense of impending doom. Even though I had been in and out of prison since I was fifteen, I really didn’t think that I could cope with going back in. I no longer had the energy to wear the hard-woman mask just to survive, to pretend to be something that I’m not. I waited in anticipation until I heard my name being called from the courtroom upstairs, my stomach churning.

_____

I stood face to face with the judge on his high bench, who glared down at me over the top of his glasses. He was surrounded by solicitors, gardaí and an army of journalists. ‘You may sit down, Ms Keogh.’

Every movement I made was carefully observed and noted by the journalists. I could feel myself rapidly regressing into a childlike state and I just wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I kept my head down as the garda gave the judge a detailed account of my charges. Then my own solicitor, who knew my background really well, proceeded to inform the court of my addiction and the urgency of my need to go in to treatment. ‘I am applying for bail on behalf of my client, your honour,’ my solicitor stated.

‘Well, your honour, given the fact that the defendant escaped garda custody, I am objecting to bail,’ the prosecuting barrister insisted.

‘Miss Brennan,’ the judge addressed my solicitor, ‘I am not one bit impressed that your client tried to make a laughing stock of the gardaí by escaping from custody. But I am taking into consideration that she needs medical attention and she will receive that immediately. I am hoping that a bed will become available for her within the next week in the Cuan Dara detox centre, but until then, I am placing her into the Dóchas Women’s Centre...’

My heart sank. Going to the Dóchas Women’s Centre—the new Mountjoy Women’s Prison—was like doing a crash course in criminality: The Dummies’ Guide to Being a Successful Criminal. Almost everything I had learned about the streets, drugs and crime, I had learned in prison. I would usually finish my sentence being less rehabilitated and more streetwise than ever before. That was it, I thought. I had no hope of getting clean now.

Chapter
2

    THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

W
hen people ask me how I got into drugs, I can’t pinpoint the exact moment. There was no one single incident which set me along that path. I didn’t turn overnight from a bright, well-behaved little girl, who always did her homework and loved clothes and her friends, to the damaged young woman I became, full of hurt and self-loathing, unable to see how anyone could get through life without drugs.