All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (6 page)

‘That’s absolutely beautiful. I am so delighted. Aren’t you very clever picking up something I’ve been wanting for ages,’ she said.

‘It was only cheap and it should have been in a pair. But I only had money for one,’ I explained.

‘Ah, but I have the other one at home and now I can put the two of them together. Thanks so much.’

She was a nice woman. She had that old-fashioned way about her that was sincere. I have nothing but fond memories of her. There were times that I wished she was part of our family. When you are a child you believe that some adults can solve your problems. I know now they can’t but when I was a child I still believed in the goodness of people.

The other person I bought a present for was Jonathan— the man who played my father on stage. He was just so nice to me and I guess, for a while, he filled this little hole I had in my heart. I bought him a fake-leather belt. It was only when he went to put the belt on that I realised I’d gotten him a kids’ belt.

‘Sure can’t I pierce a hole at the tip of the belt,’ he said laughing. ‘I am going to wear it every day from now on.’

As the hours ticked by that night I got more and more upset at the thought of it all coming to an end. Several years’ worth of sadness swelled up inside of me. It was one of the saddest nights of my life and I don’t think anyone understood how I felt. The cast had been my family for the last few months; Jonathan was my stage da, Maureen my stage aunt, and the rest of the cast were like brothers and sisters. When we were on stage nothing bad could happen. The singing and dancing was like a magical spell that transformed me into a good, clean person. Every night, hundreds of people watched me, with the spotlight shining down on me, and every night they applauded me—no one ever saw my dirty soul. The magic worked. All they saw was the singing, dancing, smiling me. Not the real me, the worthless, empty, no-good me whose Da did what he did because she let him.

At the end of the show, as the crowd were applauding us, Jonathan picked me up and spun me around. He was wearing the belt on stage and I was thrilled. I put my arms around his neck, not wanting to ever let go of him.

‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ I cried, clinging on to him tightly and soaking his shirt with my tears.

‘I’ll miss you too, don’t forget that. Sure didn’t I wear the belt and all for this special occasion?’

I was crying so hard my throat hurt but I welcomed the pain as some sort of relief. I just didn’t want the night to end.

*

I continued to dance for another year or so until shortly after we moved house again, this time to Castleknock. I was in the car with Da one Saturday when I decided never to go back to the classes again.

Da was giving another little girl and her mother a lift to a class and he made some comment about what a beautiful child the girl was and that he’d be free to take her to classes.

I froze when he said those words. I knew what he wanted and I wasn’t going to let him have it.

I was not going to let him break into that world. It was something I had for myself; something that he couldn’t pollute.

I never went back to the Billie Barry School after that. I wanted to keep it as something he hadn’t touched— something happy and pure. And so I stopped dancing.

Chapter Four

In 1979, my family moved from Fairview in north Dublin because Da said he wanted to live in a more upmarket community. We moved to Castleknock, which is an affluent part of Dublin and lies close to the Phoenix Park.

I remember the day when I first saw the house he bought and thinking it was a mansion. It had lots of bedrooms, a big kitchen and a games room, and was situated in the centre of Castleknock village. It oozed of money. You might say it had ‘I’m successful and rich’ stamped all over it.

The house move was a turning point in both his and my life for a number of reasons. I didn’t want to leave Fairview. I loved my friends there, and I loved the area. I hated moving to Castleknock but a part of me believed that the new house would bring with it a new hope, and that Da would stop coming into me. I wasn’t to know that Da had other ideas. At that point I associated my home in Fairview with the horrors of sexual abuse and bodily degradation. It was a place where my childhood had been stolen by a father who plundered my body. I hated the bedroom where my father visited me at night to abuse me. I hated the furniture, the carpets and the wallpaper in my bedroom. It was for this reason that I never bothered to keep my bedroom tidy. It was always in a state. I never cared about keeping it clean because it was always a sordid, dirty, horrible room to me anyway. I preferred to keep it dirty, because that was the way I felt about it.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to leave my friends and to leave behind everything I knew.

It was from this point onwards that I began to be consumed by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and low self-esteem. I also suffered from severe anxiety.

I never spoke to anyone about it until years later but the ongoing abuse affected every aspect of my life.

I wondered whether my family would be torn apart if Da was caught. These feelings consumed and haunted me. I was afraid that if I told anyone, my family and I would be separated. This was a very big fear of mine and it coloured my behaviour.

I kept my mouth shut throughout this time because I was too young to understand that it wasn’t my fault at all. I decided to just put up with it and do the best I could at not letting anyone find out. As far as I was concerned, it was my fault. There was something about me that made him do it; something dirty and he could see that filth in me. I didn’t want to hurt everyone just so I could feel better.

I loved my ma and brothers so much, and I pictured us all going into different homes and being taken away. I couldn’t face the prospect of not living with my brothers and Ma. She didn’t have a job, and I worried about how she would cope. She’d be crying all the time and I felt that it would all be my fault, so in my childish brain I concluded it was better for everyone if I said nothing.

*

Da used the move to Castleknock to further improve his credibility. In many respects, the move represented the completion of his transformation into a new man.

My father spent his life trying to forget his past, conceal his depravations and trying to act out the role of a self-made man. He was always too ashamed to tell anyone he’d been born on Gardiner Street; that he came from humble beginnings, which I think would have shown that he was even more talented.

The house in Castleknock was his new start in life and his castle. And he wanted to show his own family what a great man he was. I don’t believe he saw anything wrong with his sexual interest in children.

He was a man who constantly referred to his own achievements, boasted about his business acumen and spoke to others as if they were beneath him. He had an opinion on everything. I listened to him talk about subjects that he knew nothing of, and wondered how anyone could tolerate him.

The unemployed were one of his favourite targets. He would often say that people who claimed the dole were living off the state and should be made work. He would offer his opinions on everything, regardless of whether anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I think he felt compelled to exaggerate his own importance in order to conceal his weakness.

It was only in later years that I really came to understand that my father was an illusionist and a manipulator. Every breath he took was a strategy.

Everything he did had the potential to turn into something sinister.

When I’d go to bed at night, he was always the one to settle me to sleep. He would climb into bed beside me and offer to read a story but with one hand burrowing its way underneath the duvet, while the other held the book upright.

He’d stay for a half an hour or so, until any chance of me falling asleep had been destroyed, and then he would gratify himself. I was his to abuse.

I was about ten years old when we moved. By this time, I was mentally unwell. Many mornings through my childhood and teenage years, I used to wake up and I could not recognise my own speaking voice. It never sounded like me. It was a different person; a nicer person. When this voice would appear, I would talk or sing just to hear it. I had no idea why it happened, but it was strange, a bit scary, but also a novelty.

It was like I had another person inside me, but I was in control of this other person. This voice was more like another version of me. A nice me. One I liked. I controlled her and made the words that I wanted to hear, but she had a nicer voice, a kinder voice, a sweeter voice. But it wasn’t my voice. My voice was horrible. I was a crow, and common when I spoke. This was a completely different one, not even like me when I spoke—it was a posh voice. It only ever came out when I was alone in my bedroom, either talking to myself, playing a game or singing. Then I would hear the nice voice come out and I would keep talking or singing, just to hear it. I liked this new voice and it stayed with me until I was about 13. I didn’t notice when it went away. It just never came back.

I think it’s likely that this was the voice of my ‘inner child’, the person I might have been if my father hadn’t stolen my childhood. This was literally the child inside me trying to come out. It was the child I repressed because an abused child is one who has lost their innocence. My spirit kept fighting to break out, until I finally learned to silence her. She was not to awaken for many years to come.

*

My self-esteem continued to plummet after we moved house. I felt that I didn’t fit in with the other kids in Castleknock. They all talked with posh accents. Da reinforced this notion that I was an inferior girl because I spoke with a Dublin accent. He really never stopped telling me that people and strangers wouldn’t respect me and that I wouldn’t get a job if people thought I was common.

I had long stopped caring about my education by this time and didn’t really think anything of the school I had been sent to.

I made a couple of friends when I entered the school but I didn’t let anyone get close to me. The girls were nice kids but they lived in a different world to me. Although I was someone who picked up accents easily, I tried my hardest not to pick up theirs. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they had nice ones, I just wanted to rebel against everything.

I had come to hate and detest everything my father approved of. As far as he was concerned, people were not good enough unless they pronounced their words properly and measured up to an invisible yardstick he used.

In time, this sense of rebelliousness intensified. I’m still not sure whether this was a cry for help, or that I simply did not want to conform, but I refused to do anything that was asked of me.

I was ten years old and in sixth class but I discovered that
I
was the only thing that I could control.

My education was the first thing to suffer as a consequence of my new found liberty. I fell behind in my schoolwork for the first time because my mind was filled with such bad feelings that I no longer cared.

I also grew to hate Castleknock because Da loved it. From my point of view, his fuck-off house represented everything that was bad in this world. I hated it and him. I hated the fucking ground that he walked on.

But it was at this stage that my life also began to fall apart. You might say that I became dysfunctional though I would counter that I became functional in order to survive.

No one realised what was happening to me, so no one offered to help. My teachers found themselves having to deal with an unruly student who looked for trouble.

I also distanced myself from other girls at the school. I was terrified that if I got close to them, Da would too, and then I’d lose them all eventually.

I was always on guard, waiting for someone to blow my cover by pointing a finger at me and yelling, ‘Look! There it is—the dirt! See how dirty she is.’

This became an obsession of mine. I used to wonder if anyone knew what he did to me. The truth was that nobody knew. I remember seeing Da laughing with some people one day and my mind had become so distorted that I was convinced he was telling them exactly what I let him do to me. Of course he wasn’t, and they hadn’t a clue what was going on, but I thought they were laughing at me, the dirty little bitch. My stomach churned and I felt hot and humiliated.

At other times, I would wonder when Da would be arrested for being a pervert. I remember one day the gardaí came to the school about some suspicious man who’d been seen in the area. All I could think was, ‘Here we go again! Me fucking Da is at it again.’

I didn’t want to hear the details of the car or anything that might confirm it was him. It wasn’t Da but I assumed it was. My abiding memory of that event is of not being afraid of meeting the strange man the other girls feared. I wasn’t afraid because I believed I knew him already.

I gave up on life in my last year of primary school. I stopped going to school by pretending to be sick. When I did attend class, I never paid any attention to my teacher or did my homework so it made no difference whether I was there or not.

Ma would ask me about homework, but I would either answer that I had none or that I’d done it already.

The abuse altered my life in every conceivable way. I never slept at night. If Da abused me, I would inevitably stay awake all night thinking about what he’d done. If he didn’t happen to enter my room on a particular night, I would stay awake for fear that he was about to arrive. I lived in a state of perpetual fear.

The lack of sleep had an adverse effect on my intellectual development.

It also caused me to develop serious psychological problems.

The effect of sleep deprivation was obvious. I would waken each morning barely able to concentrate or focus on anything. Instead I would struggle to wake up, make my way downstairs and spoon Rice Krispies into my mouth while Da sat across from me, acting normal, like the previous night’s events had never happened.