The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (2 page)

But I leave it at that for now and I start to cut the cake up into large pieces, but he’s hidden all of the kitchen knives from me apart from a small blunt one that we use for everything, and I struggle cutting into the cake and it ends up looking a mess. I ask him if I can have a sharper knife, but he says, ‘No, sorry’ and I shout at him, ‘Why not?’, but all he does is smile at me as he continues to drink his coffee. Then a feeling comes over me that makes me feel like I want to kill him, but instead I turn away and put some of the cake onto plates and I take it to the kids, who are in their bedrooms playing.

But they are playing computer games and they have forgotten all about my birthday; I hand them the cake and they say thanks and continue playing. ‘It’s only my birthday and it doesn’t matter anyway.’ But before I walk away, I stand by the bedroom door and I take a long look at them both playing and it makes me smile, and I am happy knowing that they are good boys and that I have managed to keep them safe and away from my family for so long. And I think that if it wasn’t for them, I would probably be dead already, as without them I have nothing to live for. Plus Tony keeps telling me that they need me and that it would be a selfish thing for me to kill myself and leave them without a mother, and even though it’s hard for me to say that he is right, I have to agree with him.

I head back into the kitchen and sit by the window again and have another fag, while Tony makes himself dinner, poached egg and beans on toast, quick and easy. Good, it saves me doing anything for him as it’s not my job anyway. The evening drags and I get bored as everyone has something to do apart from me and I begin to feel like everyone is ignoring me, so I take a verbal dig at Tony, but he doesn’t get the message and he keeps ignoring me. He’s writing something on the computer that he won’t tell me about and he doesn’t look up. So this time I shout at him and I start an argument on purpose, and now he’s talking to me and I feel better with myself, knowing that I have his attention, and I begin to smile.

So I quickly turn around and I walk away ignoring him, and I walk into the kitchen and light up another fag as he gets up and walks in behind me; then he asks me what the problem is, and I tell him to leave me alone and to go fuck off to bed. He says nothing, then he walks out of the kitchen and he gets ready for bed, and I can hear him as he shouts to the kids that he loves them and then he walks back in to me, ‘Good night’, he says. ‘I’m going to bed now.’ Then he walks away while I finish my fag by the kitchen window.

I know I won’t be able to sleep very well, so before I leave the kitchen I take a few sleeping pills to help me get through the night, then I walk into the living room and towards the bed. The room’s dark and I can’t see what I’m doing, so I turn the light on and make a big fuss about nothing before I get into bed, and I leave the light on just to wind Tony up. While telling him that if he wants the light off, he will have to get up and turn it off himself, or he can sleep with the light on all night if he wants as it won’t bother me. Then I smile to myself as I turn away from him and tuck myself in really tight with the quilt, leaving him very little to cover himself with, but he says nothing and he does his best to get comfortable.

God, I feel like I want to kill him, but he hasn’t done anything wrong, so instead of hitting him I get up and head to the toilet. I sit there for a while, resting my chin on the palm of my hand, and I think to myself that Tuesday will be the same as Monday and the rest of the week will be the same as every other week and I hate it, and I hate my life. Then I head back to bed and lie down for the night, knowing that I will have a horrible sleep ahead of me.

But while I lie there, I remember that tomorrow’s going to be different, as I have an appointment to see a mental health adviser at 10 am. It was made for me by my GP and he told me that if I don’t go to the appointment, he will stop all the medication that I’ve been on for the last twenty plus years and then strike me off his books for wasting his time. So I need to get up early, have a bath and wash my hair before I go and see the mental health adviser.

But what am I going to tell him and how will I begin, or will he even believe what I tell him? I have so much in my head and it’s all a mess; it’s like all of my memories are bad ones and they all have a pain connected to them that won’t leave me alone. I can’t rest, I look up at the ceiling and then I turn my head and look over at Tony. He’s still awake, but he’s facing the wall, and he’s having trouble sleeping too, but not because he has problems troubling him, but because I like to talk to him and I keep him awake. Then, when I do finally fall asleep, I still keep talking and that’s bad for both of us.

So before I nod off, I ask him what he thinks about the appointment I have in the morning and if I should go to it. He turns around and smiles, then he looks straight into my eyes and he says, ‘Yes, please go’, and good night and God bless. Ok, I get the message and I roll back over to my side of the bed and I stare at the ceiling again, while I think of things to tell the person in the morning. I know it’s got to be from the beginning, when it all started as that’s the only way I’m going to be able to tell him everything about myself and feel that it might help me in some way, so I close my eyes and I look deep into the darkness that I’ve created for myself. I know I won’t see anything like people or places because I’ve been doing the same thing for years, but if I keep my eyes closed tight for a while, I start to see little flashes of bright white light bursting through the darkness as it passes before my eyes. It only lasts for a split second at a time, but it helps me to drift away from reality and then off to sleep.

But once I’m asleep, my dreams disturb me and after a couple of hours I’m awake again, and I feel cold and confused and I have to get up before my head explodes from the madness crashing around in my head. So I get up and I look at Tony, he’s still sleeping, so I walk into the kitchen and I look out of the window; it’s still dark outside, great. I sit on a chair by the window and I have a fag and think to myself that I wish my life was all over. I wish I were dead, I mean how can I keep going on day after day when I feel the way I do?

I must have been a very bad person in a past life for me to be tormented like this now. It’s a fucking shit hole of a world that we live in and I hate it and what am I waiting for. All my life, people have used me as if I was nothing, and very few people have ever helped me or shown kindness towards me unless they wanted something from me. The only person who has been honest with me is Tony, even my own family have treated me like shit and they have never shown me any kindness or love. I feel so sad.

I can even remember as far back as when I was four years old, when I lived in London with my mum, step dad and some of my brothers and sisters. You would think that it all sounds nice and fine, but even back then, when I was only four years old, one of my older brothers, Paul, was messing around with me and abusing me for his own pleasure and satisfaction. It all started when mum wanted someone to baby-sit for her; my brother Paul would come around to the house and tell mum that he would do the babysitting for her, while she and my step dad, Jim, went out to the pub for a drink. At first, they paid Paul to do the babysitting; but after a couple of weeks, they stopped paying Paul and they kept the money so they could buy even more drinks down at the pub for themselves.

But that didn’t stop my brother Paul from coming around to baby-sit for them, and while they were out, he would come into my bedroom and sit and talk to me until they got back. Then after a few weeks of them going out to the pub and leaving Paul alone with me, he began to act more like a child around me and he began to play games with me and he would pull at my nightdress while he tickled me all over my body. And while he was alone with me, he would tell me that I was a very pretty little girl and that my nightdress was beautiful.

Then one night, while mum and my step dad had gone out to the pub for a drink, Paul got up, locked the front door and turned off all the lights in the house and then he came into my bedroom. It was late, but I was still awake and I could see him standing just inside the doorway of my room; and as he entered the room, he told me to be very quiet. Then he walked over towards me and picked me up out of my bed and he took me out of my bedroom and into the living room. I looked up at his face and I smiled at him while he laid me down onto the living room floor.

At first, I thought it was a game, ‘fun’, and that he wanted to play games with me in the living room; but as I spoke to him, he told me to be quiet and to stay still, then as he moved back away from me he began to lift up my nightdress. And as he did so, I put my hands out to stop him and to push my nightdress back down, but he got angry with me and he pushed my hands out of the away and he started pulling at my knickers, trying to take them off me. I asked him what he was doing, but he said, ‘Be quiet, shush’ and then he pulled my knickers down and off me and with both hands he lifted my legs up and wide open, moving me into odd positions like a rag doll.

Then he put my legs back down onto the floor and spread them wide apart, hurting me, and I began to cry. I told him to stop and I tried to get up, but he told me to shut up and he pushed me back down onto the floor and I stayed there while he undid his trousers and took them off. I looked up at him and I tried to get up again, but before I could move away from him, he got on top of me, positioning his body against mine, and he used his whole body to trap me into a position that stopped me from moving away from him. And all of a sudden, he put his dick up against my body and he pushed himself between my legs.

I was frightened and I shouted at him to stop and I thumped him as hard as I could into his belly, and I shouted at him to stop hurting me and to get off me. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t move; he was squashing me with his body and he was pushing his whole body between my legs. My belly was beginning to hurt me and he was squashing me so much that I could hardly breathe; again, I shouted at him to stop. ‘Please stop, my belly hurts’, I said, but he kept on pushing and squashing me, while all the time telling me to shut up.

And he only stopped when I began to bleed from between my legs and his clothes got wet from the blood. The blood dripped from between my legs and onto the floor and then the blood smudged over his clothes, so he stood up and he used my knickers to wipe the blood from his clothes. My belly was still hurting me, but at least I could breathe again and, as he moved away from me, I began to cry; he looked down at me and then he stood me up and he put my knickers back on me.

God, when I think of it, it makes me feel so sick. The dirty bastard, how could he do that to me and think that it was ok and as if it was nothing at all? I mean I was only four years old and he was fifteen, and when he had finished with me and he was carrying me back to my bedroom, he tripped on the hallway carpet, but he was able to stop himself from falling over and he said sorry to me for tripping and almost dropping me onto the floor. I was in a lot of pain and it was as if my belly was on fire and my legs hurt from him bending me into odd positions and from him trying to have sex with me. I was still crying when he put me back into my bed, but he didn’t care, he just turned around, walked away and closed my bedroom door as he left the room. God, what he had done to me was so sick.

And when I got up the next morning and I tried to tell mum what had happened to me the night before, she never said a word, not a thing, nothing about the blood on my clothes or on the carpet. She just took my bloodstained knickers off me and hand-washed them in the kitchen sink with washing-up liquid and then she handed them back to me and that was it. ‘All done.’

I blame my mum for what went on. She could have stopped a lot of the abuse by kicking my step dad Jim out of the house in the first place and by sticking up for us kids, but she never did and, as far as she was concerned, her man came first before her kids. Yet Jim treated her like shit and he would push her around all of the time and have sex with her in front of us whenever he felt like it, and she seemed to like it as she always had a smile on her face.

And when they both got drunk, it was even worse. He would brutally hit and rape her and she would never try to stop him, and he would have sex with her whenever and wherever he felt like it; so to the older kids in the family, sex was nothing at all and abusing each other was the normal thing to do. Just like the adults had done to each other.

The only thing is that it wasn’t just my brother Paul who was mentally and physically abusing me back then, it was almost all of the adults around me that were abusing me in some way or another. There were just three of us little kids living with mum back then and we had nobody to protect us, not even our own mother, so all the adults around us had plenty of time and opportunities to abuse us and they did. There was just my big sister Daisy who was only five years old and my little brother Simon who was two and myself, all looking after each other, and we had no one else to help us.

The rest of the kids, the bigger ones, mostly boys, lived in squats and used to walk around the streets all day doing nothing. They would only come around to mum’s for food or money; otherwise, you wouldn’t see them unless they had caused trouble and needed somewhere to hide from the police. It’s terrible to think that mum had eleven kids in total, all doing whatever they wanted, and no one ever did a thing to help us. We never went to school and even at the age of four I was allowed to walk around the streets every day with only Simon, my baby brother, and Daisy, my sister, for company and protection.

We would play outside in the streets for the whole day with nothing to eat or drink, and we were always dressed in the flimsiest of clothes and we never had shoes on our feet, only socks. We would run around outside the flats of the council estate that we lived on and we would look through the rubbish bags left outside the bin rooms for something to play with or eat. We never knew what it was that we were playing with or eating from the bags; we just grabbed the things that we found interesting and then we ran off with them, as anything was better than having nothing at all. If it was wet, sticky or colourful, then it was good; and if we could suck, chew or play with it, even better.