The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (3 page)

God, I feel sick now thinking about it, but it was the same thing every day and the normal thing for us to do because our mum hardly ever did a thing for us. So whenever we went out, we went looking for something to eat first and then we would go and play around the rubbish shoots of the big council blocks, slamming the fire doors on each floor of the building and trying to make as much noise as we possibly could. The sound from the doors slamming was so loud that it would echo throughout the building and shake the panes of glass in the doors and windows of the hallways, and then people would come out of their flats and shout at us while they chased us out of the building. God, it was so good back then and it was about the only fun we ever had together, but we didn’t know any better and it wasn’t our fault as no one was looking after us or teaching us the difference between right and wrong.

Then one day, when Daisy, Simon and I went into one of the buildings to play games, a tall black man was standing by one of the rubbish shoot rooms that we used to play in and he looked angry. We looked over at him and we could see that he had one of his hands down the front of his trousers and he was moving his hand around inside his underpants and he was doing something to himself, and in his other hand he was waving a packet of biscuits at us. He looked like he was waiting for someone, so we stopped playing and we turned around to go back outside, but as we walked away he shouted for us to stop and he told us that he had food in the shoot room and the food was all for us.

He said that he wanted us to go into the shoot room with him to get the food, so we walked towards him and as we got to the shoot room door he smiled and we walked in, and then we all stood still and looked up at him, waiting for the food. But there was no food, nothing but rubbish, and then the man leaned over our heads and he pushed the door closed behind us and held the door shut with one arm. He then looked down at us and he began to say something to us, but my sister Daisy grabbed Simon and me, and she shouted, ‘Quick, run.’ So I screamed as loud as I could and I began pulling at the door and as the man let the door go I pulled the door open and we all ran out of the shoot room as fast as we could, and Daisy and I screamed at each other to run. We knew what he wanted; it was the same thing that my older brother Paul had done to me many times before, back at mum’s flat when she was out, and it wasn’t nice.

Still holding each other’s hands, the three of us ran out of the building and we ran straight out into the road, all falling over and all getting cuts on our knees and faces at the same time. We got up off the road and we headed back to mum’s. Our clothes were dirty and I was shaking when we got back to the flat, but nobody gave a damn. Mum and Jim never once asked us what we had been doing all day or if we were ok, so we just walked straight past them and into our bedroom and we all sat on the bed.

Our bed was big and all three of us had to share it, but we loved it, as it was big enough for all of us to sleep on together. Simon, Daisy and I were exhausted, so we cuddled up together and you couldn’t tell whose arms or legs were whose; we felt very safe and happy on the bed together and we stayed in a big pile on the bed until we got our breath back. And once relaxed, we began to laugh and giggle to each other because we had got away from the bad black man and then we fell asleep on the bed, dirty but happy.

The next day would be the same as all the others, with mum’s first words of the morning to us indicating that she wanted us to get out of the flat, and then she would leave us on our own for the whole day, to fend for ourselves as usual. It didn’t matter to her if it was winter or summer, raining or baking hot, it just didn’t matter to her at all, so long as we all got out of her way for the whole day. But we never went back to the shoot room again. Sometimes while out playing, we would bump into our older brothers and sisters, as they walked along the streets of the council estate we lived on, and we would try to tag along with them, but they would tell us to fuck off and to go pester someone else. And our brief encounter with them would end with them calling us little shit heads and stuff like that, until we left them alone. You never forget something like that and I think it will stay with me for the rest of my life, because when someone hurts you, you never forget it.

Some days, people in the streets would stop us and ask us if we ever went to school or if we had a mummy or a daddy, and then they would give us money and sweets, but we never knew anything about school so we just ran off laughing at them. To us, it was all just fun and games, and running from people whom we didn’t know was what we did best and we would run as fast as we could to get away from them.

Then one day, while walking home, an old woman stopped us. ‘Hello, children’, she said. ‘Can you help me? I have locked myself out of my flat and I cannot get back in, but perhaps one of you children could put your little arms through the letterbox and open the door for me from the inside.’ I looked at Daisy and she looked back at me, I couldn’t wait to do it and I shouted, ‘I will do it’, and quickly, without another word, I put my arm through the letterbox and pulled on the handle inside and the door swung inwards, with me still hanging on to it with my arm sticking through the letterbox. ‘Thank you’, she said, then she told us to wait while she went inside to get something, so we waited by the open door and I tried to have a look inside her flat; but before I had a chance to see inside, the old woman came out of the flat and handed us a packet of chocolate buttons each. ‘Thank you’, she said, and then she went back inside and closed the door.

We felt so happy to have chocolate buttons and I can still remember the feeling I had to this day. From that day on, each time we walked past the old woman’s flat, she would be standing at her door waiting for us to come along. It was as if she knew we were coming and she would say the same thing to us about locking herself out, and each time I would put my arm through the letterbox and open the door for her and she would then give us some sweets to say thank you.

Now when I think back to it, I know that she had planned it that way and it was her way of helping us without us knowing what she was doing. We couldn’t always run away from the bad things around us and sometimes we just had to take whatever came our way, like having a bath. It might sound simple enough and it can even be a fun time for kids, but taking your clothes off in our house was like throwing meat to the lions.

I could never take a bath on my own or with my sister Daisy or brother Simon, as Jim’s rule was that we all had to have a bath one at a time. And I always wanted mum to bathe me, but Jim wouldn’t allow it and he always insisted that he bathed me on my own and always with the bathroom door shut. And mum would never try to stop him or come into the bathroom, because she knew precisely what he was doing and she would just let him bathe me just to keep him happy.

Most evenings, it would start with Jim coming home from the pub drunk; he would grab me by the arm and tell me to get into the bathroom and to wait for him. Then he would follow me into the bathroom, strip me naked and make me stand in front of him while he filled the bathtub up with cold water. I would be standing there naked and shivering from the cold of the room, but I would not move an inch for fear of him hitting me, and once the bath was full of cold water he would pick me up. But he would always grab me from between my legs with one hand while he held me steady around my neck with the other hand. Then he would push and poke his fingers in-between my legs, fondling me at the same time as he tightened his grip around my neck and I felt like he could have strangled me within a second; I would stay as stiff as a board and I would never move an inch just in case he hurt me.

Then he would slowly lower me into the bath, making sure that he had plenty of time to touch me between my legs with his fingers as he did so. I didn’t like what he was doing and he always hurt me with his fingers, but I said nothing and once I was in the bath he would let me go. He would then get down on his knees next to the bath and once he was in position next to me, he would undo his trousers and put one of his hands down between his legs and then he would position his other hand on top of my head.

And when he was ready, he would grab me by my hair and then he would push and pull my head up and down, in and out of the water whilst he played with himself while next to the bath. And somehow I knew he was wanking himself off at the same time as he forced my head under the water, and it was as if both his hands were moving at the same time and speed, getting faster and faster all of the time until he would finish. And during the whole time, he had a look on his face that would have wiped the grin off almost any adult’s face, apart from my mum’s. She knew exactly what he was up to and I think that if playing around with me kept him happy, then she was happy too. No matter what the emotional cost was to me, it just did not matter to her and she would never try to stop him from abusing me.

Then after a while, things began to get worse for Daisy, Simon and me, as mum became pregnant again, but this time she was pregnant from him, Jim; and as her belly began to grow, I could tell that Jim hated her for being pregnant. Because he started to kick and push her around even more than he usually did, and she even told me that he was trying to get rid of the baby out of her belly by hurting her, because he didn’t want the baby, as it wasn’t his. For the next few weeks, Jim made everyone’s life hell, and during that time mum’s belly grew even bigger and Jim told mum that if she wanted to keep the baby, then she would have to get rid of us little kids because his baby came first. He said that he didn’t have the money to keep all of us, so we had to go; and having us around was now causing them both problems. No matter what we did, we couldn’t do anything right; and even when we were good kids and never caused any trouble, Jim would still find some way of treating us nasty and upsetting us.

Like when he would come into our bedroom in the middle of the night and wake us all up just so that he could put a spoonful of mustard into our mouths. Mum would be standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at us with her arms crossed, and she would be smiling as if it was a good thing that he was doing to us. Sometimes we would try to keep our mouths shut, but he was too strong and he would force our mouths open and make us swallow the mustard without us making a fuss. Because if we did complain and make a big fuss, he would just make it worse for us, and he would beat and hit us into swallowing the mustard. Then he would add an extra spoonful for the trouble we had caused him, so most nights we would just swallow the mustard the first time so that he would go away and leave us alone and allow us to go back to sleep.

The same thing would happen to us almost every night until one night, after drinking too much alcohol, Jim kicked mum so hard that she started to bleed from between her legs and she had to be rushed into hospital, so that the doctors could take the baby out of her belly before she lost it. However, when she got to the hospital everything was ok, she was fine and she gave birth naturally to a baby boy. Once mum returned home with the new baby, she didn’t have much time for us kids anymore, so she arranged for one of our older sisters, Tracy, to occasionally come around to the house and take us kids out for the day. Tracy would pick us up early and then she would let us play around in the streets all day, near the flat that she was living in with her boyfriend, Fred.

Tracy was only seventeen and Fred, her boyfriend, was twenty-three, and they had come over to London from Ireland about a year earlier, just after she and Fred met. At first, I thought that Fred was a nice man, as he would never say or do anything wrong while my sister Tracy was around, and some days, while Tracy was looking after us, they would take us out to the park for the day and Fred would play games with us. He would push us on the swings and he would run around playing chase with us, acting just as a child would. Then, after leaving the park, he would buy us sweets and give us rides on his back while we walked back to the flat and we would always have a lot of fun playing with him, as he acted just like us, and we were getting more attention from him than we ever got back at mum’s.

Then one day, Tracy told me that she was going to leave Fred to baby-sit me on his own while she took Daisy and Simon off to the park with her. I thought it was a bit strange and unfair that I was not going with them, so I asked Tracy if I could go, but she said no and she said that I had to stay with Fred until she came back. Then she smiled at Fred and me as she left, leaving me all alone in the flat with Fred.

It felt like hours sitting and waiting for them all to come back and, for most of the time, Fred left me all alone in the living room just sitting and waiting, but then Fred must have got bored because he came and sat down next to me and he began playing games with me. Then, after a while, he put me on his back and he gave me a ride around the living room, bouncing me up and down and shaking me from side to side until I fell off onto the floor and then he tickled me until I begged him to stop. But after a while, he said that we had to stop as it was getting late and he made a bed up in the living room for me to sleep on. He said that it was late and he told me to go over to the bed, to lie down on it and to stay there, so I did; and as I lay down, I gave him a kiss goodnight on the side of his face and he went off into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. I looked around and then I curled up into a ball on my little bed and wished for Simon and Daisy to come back.

But after a couple of minutes, Fred’s bedroom door opened and he came back out of the bedroom. I looked over at him and I could see that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He walked straight over towards me and then he looked down at me and, within a second, he bent over and picked me up out of the little bed that he had made for me on the living room floor. Then he carried me in his arms towards his bedroom, I wriggled around and I tried to get up out of his arms, but he held me tight around my legs and my back until he got into the bedroom with me.