Sins of the Mother (24 page)

But the best thing about being in England was that I was finally free of my mother. I didn’t have to see or speak to her and it didn’t matter what she said about me because she was
hundreds of miles away. In England, she had no hold over me. We kept in touch now and again – she came over when the baby was born to help out, though she was far more interested in
Cecily’s kids than mine. Matt was charming to her – she never saw how much he hated her underneath. As long as he only had to see her once in a blue moon, he didn’t mind putting
on a show. Besides, after our little girl was born, he was head-over-heels in love. Jennifer was a beautiful baby, but more than that, she represented our future. Matt was crazy about her and crazy
about being a father.

So when the police came to arrest him, we were both devastated. The fact was we just hadn’t moved away quick enough and a week after he had got out of prison he had been involved in a
robbery. I was really upset with him about this – I’d told him when I was visiting him in prison that I wasn’t planning to spend my whole life coming to see him locked up. But
there was nothing I could do about it now. He was extradited back to Dublin and locked away again.

I could have fallen apart but by now I felt strong. I packed up the family and followed him to Dublin, knowing full well that we would return to England after his release. I had no worries about
my mother any more – I knew that we had an escape plan once Matt had done his time. Besides, we told everyone we were married now so they couldn’t split us apart. The truth was we
couldn’t get married because Matt had been living under a false name but it didn’t matter, we were wedded in our hearts and that meant more than any little scrap of paper.

‘Manchester? Where’s Manchester?’ I asked alarmed when Irene first brought up the subject of moving. It might as well have been on the other side of the world!
Until that moment I’d never even considered leaving Ireland for good. On the ferry on the way over I was sick with worry. I didn’t know anything about this place and I’d never met
Irene’s sisters Cecily and Emily. Leaving all my family and everything I knew behind was hard – and yet, I felt ready for a new start. More than that, I wanted to give my unborn child a
stable home life, a secure childhood and the chance of an education – all the things I had missed out on as a child. I had no idea what was waiting for me in England but I knew one thing for
certain – it had to be better than what I was leaving behind . . .

There was a warrant out for my arrest by the time we left, so I went over on the ferry using a false name and we set ourselves up in a new home. I thought then about what I really wanted out of
life. When I first met Irene, I was sick of my life. I had no faith in myself, my family or anyone else. All I had was heroin. I’d been in prison fourteen times already and I was on the run
again, locked in a vicious circle.

Irene knew about the heroin, of course, she wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t know the extent of my habit. I’d always take it while I was in other people’s houses or under
the cover of shelter, in a derelict building or quiet doorway out of the rain. I never did it near her house. She made it clear from the start that she was against drugs but, back then, it was like
an epidemic. So many friends of mine were addicts. She told me I had to come off the smack but it wasn’t that simple. I couldn’t see a way out. Now, four months after our arrival in
England, I told Irene I was ready for the next step.

‘You can do this,’ Irene urged, as we lay side by side on the bed one night, holding hands. Her belly stuck straight up in the air and I kept my eye on the top of the mound for
telltale signs of a kick.

‘You don’t need the drugs,’ she went on. ‘You don’t need that life. You have so much more now. You can do this, I know it. I believe in you.’

It was the first time somebody had told me that I could change my life. I felt strengthened by her words and the next day we visited our GP, who referred me to a drugs counsellor. It
wasn’t long before I was on a methadone programme and, though it was hard at first to break the habit of smack, I was soon stable enough on the programme to come off it altogether. Best of
all, it freed me from the criminal life because I no longer needed to go out robbing and stealing to fund my habit. Finally, I could relax and just be myself.

It had been hard to leave my family, and especially my dad. He didn’t approve of Irene or the fact that she had three kids with another man but, worse, he didn’t want me to leave
Ireland and start my own life. The way he saw it, a family should stick together. There was no big argument between us, that wasn’t his way. My father was subtle; he let you know what he was
thinking in little ways, like his expressions and the way he acted. He said things to my brothers but he never said anything directly to me, so I only got to know what he was thinking by talking to
my siblings. By the time I was twenty-three the rest of my brothers had joined his army of thieves. We were nine young healthy lads – a force to be reckoned with – and my dad knew that
as long as he had his sons around him, he would always be well protected. If I left it could start an exodus – that was the way he saw it.

But I had to make my own life. I didn’t belong to him and I knew, the moment I held my daughter for the first time, that I wanted to do things differently. As a father, I wanted to be
there for her, for her to feel secure. I didn’t want to leave her alone in the world the way my father had left me. So when I was extradited back to Ireland to serve my sentence for the pub
job, it nearly killed me. I sank into a terrible depression in prison, prompting a return to smack. It was easy enough to get my hands on – usually there was a group who bribed or blackmailed
an officer to get him to smuggle in the drugs. Of course, I felt eaten up by guilt for going back. All that effort to get clean had been wasted! My guilt made me want to get high even more, to
escape the self-loathing that plagued me. It was a vicious circle.

Then, one day in March 1992, I found another way to escape. There was a fella four cells down from me who liked to paint. I used to wander into his cell in the daytime and watch him for hours
– carefully selecting his colours, mixing them, sweeping his brush across the canvas, building up the layers and the shapes until there was an actual picture in front of him. The whole
process was fascinating.

‘Here, Matt, why don’t you try to do a bit yourself?’ he suggested during one of these extended visits.

‘What? No! I wouldn’t be able to do that,’ I scoffed. ‘I can’t draw a straight line!’

Well, I had no idea if that was true or not – in fact, I had never tried painting before.

‘Here.’ He went over to his box of art tools and dug out some materials. ‘Here’s two brushes and three tubes of paint. And, okay, yes, here’s a small canvas. Why
don’t you do something?’

I took the stuff he handed me and went back to my cell.
Why not? I might as well give it a go
. So I sat down and painted a picture from my head – it was a corner of a room with a
table and a piece of fruit on it. The next day I showed it to my new friend.

‘That’s not bad for your first go.’ He sounded impressed. ‘Give it to us and I’ll take it up to the art teacher.’

It wasn’t long before word came back from the art teacher – I was to put my name down for his class right away! So I joined the art class and started painting with the teacher,
learning different techniques from his art books and magazines. I was astonished to find that I could pretty much copy any style that I tried. I loved the post-impressionist style of Paul Gauguin
and accurately reproduced some of the work he did of the native women of Tahiti. I tried my hand at some Van Gogh works and then moved on to Goya, Renoir and even the surrealist works of Salvador
Dalí.

For the first time in my life I was learning something. I was acquiring knowledge and I was using my hands in a creative way. It was as if my body had an innate understanding of painting, I
could sense what I had to do and I did it naturally. This was a form of escapism I had never known before, one that actually used my brain creatively. It was astonishing that I’d never so
much as sketched before now – it felt like I was born to paint.

The reaction I got from others when they saw my work was amazing. I had real talent, they said appreciatively. As the months passed, I started to develop my own style and express myself on the
canvas. I gave way to my deepest, darkest emotions and created a few self-portraits with very dark, thick oils. I poured all my blackness and bitter self-loathing onto the canvas, even using my
hands to paint at one point, instead of a brush. I painted the darkness inside me and the result was a very thin skull with penetrating, bloodshot eyes. Looking at that portrait, you would know
there was something wrong with the artist. You could see my soul was tortured and disturbed. They were powerful images.

Irene organized an exhibition of my work, which was a huge boost, not just to my confidence, but also to my case for parole. The parole board could see I had changed and built a new life in
England. ‘Go back there,’ they told me. ‘Take your family and return to England and keep away from your old life.’ So I was allowed out shortly afterwards, having served two
years of a seven-year sentence. And for the first time it felt like I had a family to return to and somewhere to go.

In Ireland I was afraid to be myself for fear of people laughing at me. And showing weakness was dangerous in that world. It was the burden of being my father’s son
– I couldn’t do anything that people would interpret as ‘going soft’. But in England I’d been free to explore a different way of life. By my nature, I wasn’t a
tough guy and that was why I had spent so long escaping reality through drugs. I had been living a lie. Now I could have the quiet life I wanted.

But before I returned to England, I had to do one last thing. My parents had split up – my mother finally got sick of my father’s many affairs – and my mother lived on her own
in the family flat; she had seen Jennifer a lot while I was in prison, which was comforting. My mum was a proud and devoted grandmother to all her grandchildren and it made me feel better to know
that at least while I was locked up, my daughter was getting attention from her extended family. The one person Jennifer had never met was her granddad, my father. It was an emotional moment for
me, introducing my dad to his granddaughter, but he took one look, grunted and walked out of the room without saying a word. At the time I was so angry, but a year later he died suddenly in an
accident and I was comforted by the fact he had seen her at all.

Losing my father made me think a lot about what it meant to be a dad. I pored over my memories of him and tried to separate my feelings as an adult from the ones I’d had as a child. As a
child I had loved and admired him without question but, the older I got, the more I saw his faults and the more I resented him for what he took from me. I loved him but I also hated him for not
being there for me, for forcing me into a life of crime and for making choices in his life which hurt all of his family.

It made me think hard about the kind of father I wanted to be. By now I was back on the methadone programme and I was determined to make it work, no matter what. Far from starting an exodus as
my dad had feared, I was the only sibling in my family to leave Dublin and reject a life of crime. I didn’t want my daughter following in my footsteps, the way my father had groomed me to
follow him into the family business. I wanted her to have the freedom to choose her own life, I wanted her to be her own person.
Imagine what you could have been with the right
opportunities
, I told myself.
Imagine the kind of life you could have had! You can give that to your child. You can right all the wrongs from the past
.

‘This is the last time I ever go to prison,’ he told me during one visit. ‘I won’t be able to leave Jennifer again. I don’t care what I have to do
to survive, I can’t leave my little girl without a daddy.’

Jennifer was one year old when her daddy was sent to prison and, like all of us, she missed him horribly. I tried to keep us all together. Meanwhile, to help pass the time in prison, Matt took
up painting and I was astonished to find he was an incredibly talented artist.

Sadly, by the time Matt was out of prison and we were preparing our return to Manchester, the boys had other ideas. Now fifteen and sixteen, they were headstrong and they had got used to being
back in Ireland where they had grown up. They didn’t understand my determination to leave all my family and friends, and it was hard to explain. In the end, they persuaded me to let them stay
in Ireland with their father. So we crossed back on the ferry now just four of us – me and Matt, three-year-old Jennifer and Anna, who was twelve. It broke my heart to leave the boys behind
but they wanted the chance to live in Ireland, the country they had grown up in. I hoped they would be happy but I couldn’t stay with them. I knew I couldn’t survive if I stayed
behind.

Back in Manchester we picked up where we left off. I worked full time in a factory and Matt got painting and decorating jobs. Anna missed her older brothers a lot but she was
happy to go back to England. She adored Matt and was so thrilled he was living at home again. Every now and again I had my dark days, but they were manageable – Jennifer gave us both hope.
She was a shining light in our lives. Smart and beautiful, she astounded her nursery teachers by reading and writing at three years old. The others had done okay in school but Jennifer was bright,
really bright, and I knew I wanted to give her all the chances I had been denied in my life. I wanted to give her the best education possible. Matt and I didn’t talk much about the past.
Neither of us wanted to look back, only forwards. So we didn’t hang photos on the walls, we didn’t visit our family in Ireland and we didn’t tell Jennifer about our troubled
pasts. She didn’t need to know – she was a child. And over here, she was free from the pressures of a society throttled by religion and poverty. We threw a protective ring around her
and we prayed it would shield her from the pain and misery we had left on Ireland’s shoreline.