All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed (9 page)

How he wasn’t down in the pub getting drunk at the weekends like the rest of them. He liked to tell me that he was one of the cleverest, most intelligent men I would ever meet.

Eventually, I’d go to bed, knowing he wouldn’t be long. He’d usually come up on to the landing when we were all tucked in, me in my room and the boys in theirs, and he’d read a book from the
Just William
collection or some funny poetry like those by Pam Ayres.

When he was finished, I’d lie in wait. He’d come in, close the door gently behind him and get into bed beside me, on the pretext of snuggling me. The sexual assault would then begin.

When he was done, when the bastard had satisfied himself, he’d leave as if all he had done to me was just give me a normal goodnight kiss.

*

I felt my sanity slipping further and further away. I had become a suicidal 13-year-old and I knew that if my father continued to abuse me I would breakdown. When a child is forced to confront danger, they tend to run to their parents for comfort and protection. I was not in a position to do this. I felt that if I had told anyone what my father was doing, I would have broken my family. So I turned to myself for help and discovered in me the strength to say no, to fight him off and confront the monster who was my father.

One night, moments after Da came into my bedroom, I decided to say no. I can remember that night as vividly as if it happened yesterday.

The door opened slightly and he stepped into the room and began to move towards my bed. He was naked underneath that horrible familiar dressing gown which was open.

As he closed the door, I sat up and pulled the duvet tightly around me.

He took a few steps towards me, bent down and attempted to pull the blankets back.

‘No!’

The word just came out of my mouth. He was stunned. Even in the darkness I could see that he was taken aback and did not know what to say or do.

He stood there naked. Then he just turned and left. That was it. It was over.

I was overcome by a mixture of emotions. The first was one of relief. Then fear. Then I was overwhelmed by a complete disgust and anger at myself for not having said ‘No’ sooner. Da had never threatened me with violence or coerced me into letting him abuse me.

I could have said ‘No’ before but I hadn’t. Instead I had chosen to let guilt and shame rest on my shoulders. I did, however, take solace from the fact that Da could no longer abuse me and would be too afraid to enter my room again. I soon learned that he had other ideas. If he couldn’t touch, he decided that he could look.

*

I hadn’t tried to stop my father or fend him off before this night because he was a man who I was conditioned to love. Everyone in the family loved Da. Ma loved him. My brothers loved him. He was a success story.

I was taught to respect, love and fear him in equal measures. I was never told not to trust him or to question his motives. He was after all my father.

Nor had I the confidence and experience to see him for what he was, or even to understand what he was doing to me.

I didn’t know what a paedophile was; I had never even heard the word.

No one had told me that some men, be they fathers, teachers or priests, were sexually attracted to young children. I was a child after all, and knew nothing of such matters.

All I knew was that my father made me feel dirty, repulsive and inhuman when he molested me but I believed that was my problem and not his.

So I continued to suffer from depression and low self-esteem even though he had stopped abusing me.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that the sense of relief that I experienced when I said no was just temporary.

You might say that I felt like a dog which had been kept on a tight leash, only to have the owner replace it with a 50-foot chain.

As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t been freed, and the problem hadn’t been solved, but my situation wasn’t as bad as it had been.

I could at least pretend to be free but whenever I walked past the 50-foot mark, the chain would yank me back to reality. To me, the threat posed by my father remained very real. The threat that he represented was always there, lurking in the shadows. In time, I would come to learn that the threat of a sexual attack was just as debilitating as the abuse itself.

In this regard, I remained a deeply disturbed child. I still suffered from phobias and lived a life which revolved around the rituals that my subconscious used to keep me sane.

I continued to search my immediate environment for loose strands of hair; I continued to pull my own hair out; I ate my breakfast in the exact same way each morning only to eject the contents of my stomach minutes later.

Because I made sure that I never went to school, I spent my afternoons sleeping.

Even though Da had stopped coming into my room at night, I still could not sleep. I feared that I would wake up in the room with him there. During this time, when I look back on those years between the ages of three and thirteen, I don’t see the memories clearly like I do with memories of other years. It’s like I remember everything from inside my head, looking out. I wasn’t there in person or in spirit, but I could see everything. I was hiding in my own head.

In physical terms, it would be like looking through a pair of binoculars: you have a distant, tunnel vision. That’s how I remember those years. I was literally inside looking out, through the holes in my eyes.

*

I wasn’t naturally a rebellious teenager but I became one by the time I reached 14 years. I don’t know whether I would have acted differently if my childhood had been a normal one though.

I am certain that I would have studied harder if my father hadn’t abused me.

As for the life I led for the remainder of my teenage years I can only guess, though I suspect the abuse did encourage me to start drinking and rebelling against authority while I was still at school.

The rebellion began in earnest when I started to drink. I never had difficulty buying beer when I was young. In fact, it was relatively easy to get someone to buy alcohol in an off-licence. All I had to do was to ask people walking in the door to buy me a flagon of cider and they generally obliged.

I never drank at home. Instead, I opted to drink in the fields and woodlands around west Dublin with a gang of locals that I’d become friends with. We’d sit around talking, laughing, drinking, getting off with boys and basically getting pissed out of our heads. It was best described as teenage hedonism. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. All I cared about was doing what I wanted.

I was to some extent a teenage delinquent and was out of control. I didn’t care about school, had suicidal tendencies and hated authority of any kind.

To this day, I still don’t know how I wasn’t caught drinking. There were nights when gardaí were called to move us from parklands where we were drinking and I was very nearly arrested.

Whenever the police would arrive, someone would scream ‘RAID’. We’d all run in different directions through the woods around the River Tolka, one place that we used to frequent, hoping that we wouldn’t be caught.

I’d just find a good hiding spot and lie low till the danger had passed.

Ironically, drinking cider in fields and woods gave some purpose to my life. I started to look forward to the weekends and it helped numb that pain in my heart that threatened to overwhelm me.

Getting completely pissed out of my head became an anaesthetic of sorts. It enabled me to cope with the bullshit that I had to deal with. I also started to smoke around this time. This wasn’t just normal teenage rebellion—I knew how much Da despised people who smoked, so it made each puff more enjoyable.

*

In many ways my life was in a state of freefall. But the worst aspect to my life continued to be Da, whom I had to face every day. I found living under the same roof as him to be an ordeal in itself.

I had come to despise and hate him. Living in close proximity to him made me feel insecure and uneasy. He made my skin crawl.

The worst thing was the pretence that each of us adopted. I acted as if everything was okay and he acted as if he was a loving father. He smiled at me and I smiled back. We both acted out the roles of father and daughter as if our relationship was a normal one.

We were all one big happy family. Only Da and I knew the truth. And if we kept silent, then everything else would be okay. There were even times when I tried to convince myself that I could erase the past for the sake of my family.

Then I saw him looking at me through the glass window over my door. My bedroom had a small glass panel above the door to allow light into the hallway, but you wouldn’t be able to see in to my room without standing on something.

I cannot explain why my attention was drawn to the window, but as I was getting undressed in my room one night, I felt that someone was watching me.

I looked up and saw Da standing on his large stepladder. I scrambled for my clothes the second I saw him and dived under the bed covers. He didn’t seem bothered that I’d discovered him and it was only when he was sure that the show was definitely over that he climbed down. As soon as he was gone, I tore down posters of Phil Lynott and Leif Garrett from the wall and used them to cover the window. I made sure that there wasn’t even the tiniest gap between them.

The next day, Da came storming in and ripped them all down with the excuse that the landing was too dark and needed the light coming from my bedroom. I went to Ma in floods of tears and pretended that the light bulb on the landing was shining into my room at night and keeping me awake. She sided with me and the posters went back up.

The installation of peep-holes was Da’s response. He made the peep-holes after he disappeared up into the attic one night. Our attic was just a normal one though it was much larger than that of your average house. It was filled with old Christmas decorations, camping gear and other half-forgotten rubbish that we didn’t want to throw away.

It didn’t even have a proper floor—it just had beams that you had to try and balance on, otherwise your foot might go through the ceiling of a bedroom.

I can only assume that Da had watched me undress on numerous occasions before I noticed him as he only began venturing into the attic after I blocked out the bedroom window.

Like everything my father did, it appeared innocuous at first.

Every evening, he would get up on his old painting ladder, which had now become a permanent fixture on the landing, and climb up into the attic. I thought nothing of it when I heard the sound of him drilling; that was until I saw tiny holes in the bathroom ceiling which he used to watch me going to the toilet or taking a shower.

Having my privacy robbed was a whole new type of violation that I couldn’t comprehend.

Even after all these years, it is hard to describe how humiliated I felt each time I had to undress. I would stare at these tiny holes wondering if he was looking at me. Not knowing was just as bad as knowing that he was there. If I went to the toilet, I would stare at a hole trying to see if he was there, watching in silence.

It was at this point I decided to try to stop him. I refused to let him look at me. I undressed under the dressing table from then on, knowing that he was in the attic. I started bringing an umbrella into the toilet, especially when I had my period. I never accepted that he could just watch me, I just didn’t always know where the holes were.

This new invasion of privacy started messing with my head. Eventually I became certain that he could see everything I did, from scratching my head to undressing. I even felt like he could read my thoughts so I tried to keep my mind as blank as possible. I felt transparent. It was like Da owned every single part of me—mind, body and soul—and there was nothing left for me.

Then I would ask myself if I was being paranoid. When I felt really low I’d even ask if it was wrong for him to watch me? He wasn’t hurting me physically; he wasn’t touching me; so why did I feel so degraded and humiliated?

The only respite I got at this stage was at the weekends when he and Ma would spend their free time on their boat on the Shannon. This was Da’s latest show of materialistic bullshit. He couldn’t wait to show off his new purchase, and he used to show photographs of it to all his friends. He embraced this lifestyle by wearing a captain’s hat, as well as buying a whole new wardrobe full of clothes, complete with boaty shoes. I grew to hate navy, white and red as they reminded me of him. He even developed a new ‘boaty’ language where everything was nautical.

I had to go down to Shannon the first few weekends, but I hated it. Everyone slept in the one room, and Da wouldn’t give me any privacy to get changed, so I just stayed in my pyjamas all day. He was embarrassed by this as he spent a lot of time socialising down there, and he didn’t want people to see his teenage daughter hanging around in her pj’s. So he agreed that I didn’t have to go with them on their weekend jaunts.

I spent those weekends having parties and generally going wild drinking and smoking hash, unbeknownst to my parents. Every Sunday evening I would clean the house in a panic, going so far as to burn toast, so that it would hide the smell of cigarette smoke.

The familiar knot of tension would reappear on a Sunday evening as Da walked back through the door. I always made sure I was already changed into my pyjamas when he came in, so his trip to the attic that night would be a wasted one.

Chapter Seven

Da’s career continued to go from strength to strength. Around this time, he was made president of some professional body.

This was the icing on the cake for him; this was the moment he had waited for all his life. Jesus, like I hadn’t heard enough about how amazing and hard working he was and how the two sets of relations from either side of the family weren’t a patch on him.

Da may have been a paedophile, but he was also a snob. He criticised everything and everyone. He reminded me of one of the gossipy characters from a soap opera, someone who judged everyone.