Sins of the Mother (21 page)

So I put on a front, I pretended that I didn’t care what anyone thought and I made sure there was always music and laughter in our house. At night and alone, I fought the demon as best I
could. Ever since my admission to the mental hospital I had been on and off antidepressants, but these days they didn’t work so well. The only thing that seemed to keep the misery at bay was
a drink or a joint. The dope calmed me down, made me less aggressive, and even the psychiatrist I’d started to see after Paul left agreed that if it worked for me, I should just carry on.
Sometimes of an evening my friend Ellie, who lived up the street, would come round and we’d drink tea, listen to music and smoke dope. That was my one way of relaxing and forgetting all my
troubles.

One night, Ellie called to ask if her cousin could join us for a smoke – she confided he was on the run from the Garda and laying low at her daddy’s house for a while. I didn’t
mind that he was a criminal – my brother Peter had been into crime for as long as I could remember. I knew it didn’t make you a bad person. Peter had stolen his whole life and mainly to
stop us all from starving to death. As a man he had married a woman used to the finer things in life and, to give her what she wanted, he carried out armed robberies. It was what he knew –
stealing to make his loved ones happy – but of course he got caught. Most people who lived on the fringes broke the law one way or another, even if it was just buying a little hooky from the
market. When you didn’t have much, you had to make do.

Ellie knocked at around 8.30 p.m. that evening and behind her came a small, lithe young man with big blue eyes, long mousy brown hair and a watchful face.

‘Hi, I’m Matt,’ he said. His movements were graceful and smooth, like a dancer’s.

‘Come in,’ I said. ‘I’m Irene.’

We sat down for a while and had a little smoke then Matt jumped up and started pacing. He seemed edgy and uncomfortable.

‘Will you not sit down a while and have a cup of tea?’ I offered.

‘Ah no, I’m going off,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got to go to London.’

London? Really?
I thought.
How rude! You come into my home and don’t accept my hospitality? Cocky little upstart!

‘Alright, well go on then,’ I replied tartly. ‘There’s the door – off you go.’

When I met Irene, I was twenty-two and she was twenty-nine. She was a striking-looking woman with long dark hair, a sexy laugh and a confident smile. She was outspoken but I
liked that – she stood up for her kids and didn’t let other people bully her. There were some folk who were scared of her but I liked Irene from the start and, when I sat and talked to
her, I realized she was a good and honourable person. On our own, she dropped the attitude and she was soft and sweet. I think that’s what drew us together – I saw that we were both
acting these tough roles in our lives that neither of us had chosen. I’d been doing it from the day I was born, and by the time I met Irene I was sick of my life. I was sick of robbing,
running and doing time. I wanted more and I knew she did too – I just didn’t know how to make the change. It was Irene who saved me.

I was five years old when I first went out shoplifting. Back then, I was the second eldest son out of four kids but this changed annually until there were ten of us in total: nine boys and one
girl. My mother Lilian was small and thin, with long black hair – she was easy-going and calm most of the time, except when she had a few drinks in her and then she would say exactly what she
thought.

Mum kept a tidy house but it wasn’t easy for her, not with my father Kieran going away all the time. As a well-known bank robber and gangster, that was just part of life for him. So when
Dad was inside and there was no money coming in, I skipped school and went down the city centre to shoplift. At first I only took food – I was blatant, filling up a trolley of food in the
supermarket and just walking out with it. Later on, I went into clothes shops and came out pushing whole rails of clothes which I knew I could sell for cash.

We lived in a three-storey tenement block in the middle of the city – it was a poor area but everyone knew each other and we all helped each other out. Your door was always open and there
was always somebody around who would buy whatever you were selling. In my world, you did what you had to do and you never complained. That was just the way it was. Dad was always clear about
that.

‘You can have the criminal life or you can have the nine-to-five,’ he told us kids. ‘But you can’t have both. And if you’re going to have the criminal life then you
must respect the code. You keep your mouth shut, you don’t talk about stuff you do and you don’t take anyone down with you.’

Dad was head of his firm – as a child I could see that he was the man in charge and I respected him for it. There were always hardened criminals in our small flat, planning their next job,
as well as large bags of cash and guns lying around. When Dad was at home he provided well for the family – we had plenty of food, clothing and toys – but when he was away we just had
to make do on our own. Nobody taught me how to steal, I just went out and did it. And nobody told me I had to do it – I wanted to because I knew it was my duty. As the second eldest it was my
role to help my mum and to get whatever she needed. We always looked out for each other.

Getting sent down – well, that was just part of life. I got my first charge when I was eight years old, which wasn’t bad considering I’d been out stealing for three years
already. I was caught with a £1.90 set of Christmas lights and sent to reform school for four weeks. At the time, I felt myself swell a little with pride. It seemed very grown up to get
charged, just like my daddy. I did as I was told – I kept my mouth shut and my head down. I was one of the lucky ones – as my father’s son I had respect from the other boys and
they left me alone, but the kids who didn’t have visitors, who didn’t come from known families, were bullied, beaten up and robbed every day. There were fights all the time but I tried
not to get involved. I didn’t enjoy Christmas much that year, away from home in a dormitory full of other boys, eating horrible food instead of my mother’s home cooking.

It wasn’t until I was ten years old that I began to get a sense of the limitations of my life. At first it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t at school but when the other kids much
younger than me could read and write and I couldn’t even spell my name, it was embarrassing. I stopped going to school altogether because I was too far behind to catch up. I wasn’t
stupid but that’s how the teachers treated me and I was frustrated at times that I couldn’t read letters, notices or newspapers. It was worse when I was locked up. There wasn’t
much to do besides read and you couldn’t communicate with the outside world unless you could write, so being illiterate made me feel even more isolated and alone.

As I got older, I noticed my father fell far short of my expectations. He talked to us boys about ethics and being a good family man, but behind my mother’s back he played around with
other women. I knew this because I saw him in the pubs at night. I saw it with my own eyes. He even fathered a love child with another woman. This hurt because I loved my mother and she already had
it hard without my dad cheating on her. But more than that, I was disappointed in my father. He was my role model, the man I’d admired and copied all my life. Yet here he was – a
hypocrite and a cheat. He said one thing and did another, and I didn’t like people like that. I knew early on I didn’t want to grow up and be like him.

But then at twelve years old I made a terrible mistake that kept me locked in a life of crime for far too long. I got hooked on heroin. It happened so easily and so casually,
almost like an accident. Today I know that becoming an addict was probably inevitable for me, considering the world I lived in. This was the early eighties – before HIV and before we even
knew about the dangers of addiction. Addiction wasn’t a word back then, it wasn’t a
thing
the way it is today. Nowadays you can be addicted to everything from prescription
pills to pornography, but in those days we didn’t talk about getting addicted, we only talked about chasing the high. Heroin was cheap and readily available and most people I knew had tried
it at least once. The problem was that if you did it more than a couple of times, you were hooked. It happened to me, like it happened to all my siblings and many of my friends too. We all had our
own stories of how we accidentally fell into addiction.

I had been hanging around the bottom of the stairs of our tenement building when I was approached by a couple of lads I knew, both around seventeen.

‘Matt! Matt!’ they called me over. They looked nervous and edgy. The bigger one spoke: ‘Matt, stand there and watch out for the police. We’re going up the stairs here to
have a turn on.’

At the time, I didn’t really know what they meant by a ‘turn on’ but I guessed it had something to do with drugs – the way they were acting, it couldn’t have been
anything else. I just did what they asked me and a few minutes later the big guy came down the stairs and told me I could join them. Curious, I followed him up to the first-floor corridor where his
friend sat on the floor, leaning against the stone wall, eyes closed and a serene look on his face.

‘Matt, do you want some of this?’ The first guy waved a syringe filled with a light brown liquid in my direction. The lads in our area always treated me like I was one of them, even
though I was much younger. It was because I had been out grafting for so many years already – I don’t think they even thought about my age.

‘Er, no, you’re alright,’ I said. I really wasn’t bothered about drugs. I had never even smoked a joint before, which were as common as fags in my area.

‘Ah, go on,’ he said, edging towards me. ‘I’ll give you a skin pop.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ll lift your skin up and just do it in there instead of your vein so it’s slower. It’ll sort of creep up on you.’

I shrugged – I didn’t see any harm in it and I was curious to find out what it felt like so I agreed. ‘Alright then, do me a skin pop.’

So he lifted up the skin on my arm and pushed in a very small amount of the liquid from his syringe. Then he made himself a tourniquet with his belt and gave himself the rest into the vein on
his inner arm. One after the other, just like that. Afterwards, he let out a really long sigh and leaned back against the stone wall with his eyes closed. I just got up and walked out of the
block.

For a while I didn’t feel any different. But about ten minutes later, I was suddenly hit by a wave of nausea.
Oh Christ!
Saliva pooled in the bottom of my jaw, my stomach churned
unpleasantly. I had to stop walking for a while to lean against a wall and then I felt a dragging sensation in my guts and I retched violently onto the pavement. The sour taste of bile filled my
mouth and I spat, disgusted, into the gutter.
What is this stupid drug? Why would anyone choose to make themselves sick like this?
For a while, I stayed on that spot, leaning against the
wall, breathing shakily. If I moved, I knew I was going to throw up again. I don’t know how long I was stood like that before it struck me that I didn’t feel so lousy any more. In fact,
I felt really calm and relaxed. It was like a very nice floating feeling. And at that moment, I didn’t have any cares or anxiety.
Oh, so this is why they do it!

A few weeks later, just after I turned thirteen, I went back to the bloke who gave me the skin pop and scored a £10 bag of heroin from him. I fancied getting high again.
He showed me how to cook it up and inject it into my arm and after that I took it every day. For a while it was just £10 a time but it wasn’t long before it became £20, then
£30 and £40 a day. Even in prison I took it daily, which meant I needed to keep robbing to fund my habit, locking me into the criminal world. By fourteen I was smoking and taking
cannabis too, and was as much a hardened criminal as my father. He liked it that way – he wanted all his boys to become his little army of robbers and for a while I went along with that. I
was one of his boys and, even at that young age, gangsters would approach me in pubs to ask them if I could get them guns.

At the age of sixteen I’d just got together with my first proper girlfriend when I was sent to borstal for a year. It was the hardest time I’d ever done. Normally, I was fine with
being sent away because I was a ‘stand-up guy’. That’s what we called blokes like me who came from criminal families. I was a stand-up guy so I was okay – I got left alone.
But this time I was in hell. She was free but I wasn’t, and it killed me worrying about what she was up to every night. Two months in, I heard she had started seeing another bloke and it
wasn’t long before we split up.

After that, I tried not to get too attached – it had been torturous worrying about what my ex was up to while I was inside. So I decided it was better not to have a girlfriend at all. I
didn’t mind – I had heroin instead and she was a demanding mistress, sucking up all my time, money and energy.

16

IRENE AND MATT