Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (2 page)

into them, and I have seen this many times in my lifetime. To give one example, I will have to move forward in time: a few years after I got out of prostitution and about a year or so after I'd returned to education, I was walking down Parnell Street when a homeless man approached me. He was filthy, dressed in rags and had a long dirty matted beard. He looked at least forty years old, possibly forty-five. He spoke to me and the words that came of his mouth hit me with the shock of a slap. He said, 'Rachel, do you not remember me? It's me, John!' He said all this with a huge delighted smile on his face. He was so happy to see me. Past the beard and the dirt and the roughened skin I saw his eyes, the same piercing blue, the same liveliness behind them, sparks of the same merry and mischievous light. It was indeed John. John and I had been in a psychiatric assessment centre for adolescents during the summer of 1990. We'd both been fourteen at the time. I'd been placed there because I'd been suspended from a hostel, thrown out of a foster home and expelled from school all in the space of a few weeks. There were a dozen or so other kids in the centre but John and I had a great connection. We were always laughing. There was a little one-roomed school on the grounds and there came a point where I had to force myself not to look at John in class any more because any time we made eye contact, the pair of us would end up laughing and getting into trouble with the teac.her. In the end I got sick of being psychiatrically assessed and walked out of there. I hadn't seen John since then and ten years had passed between that day and the day I met him on Parnell Street. Ten years, and he had aged thirty. He told me that he'd been homeless since he'd turned eighteen. When a boy in care turned l'ighteen, he was expected to be able to take care of himself. He could tither sink or swim. Many sank, as John did. We talked for a good few minutes and then he held his arms out for a hug. I hugged him, and was nauseated by the smell of him, and the guilt hit right after the smell. I cried as I walked away. I'm sure the day I walked away from John he went right back to whatever he'd been doing; and I'm sure he stole and scammed his way through life any way he could, just as I had done when I'd been similarly dt�erate. I have heard it said that economic deprivation and social exclusion have nothing whatever to do with the existence of criminality and that I ht�atter can be explained simply by the presence of evil. I met many young people like John in the early 1990s. I was a young person like John � the early 1990s. I know what happened to bring us to where we were iiiH.l I know that evil had nothing to do with it. Chapter 3 '"'-' IMY MOTHER'S ILLNESS She had secluded herselffrom a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding and solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order oftheir maker ... CHARLES DICKENS, GREAT EXPECTATIONS T he symptom of my mother's illness that was most obvious and most overt was a terrible fear of the world, and she was afraid both for herself and for her children. It was this fear that caused her to confine us to our home, so that the five of us were only allowed to go to school and to the local shops, very rarely anywhere else. We were not allowed to play with or interact with any of our neighbours' children. A 'hello' to any of our neighbours would have been taken as a sign of disrespect to our mother-by her, of course-so we were raised knowing to keep silent on our way in or out of the estate where we lived in north Dublin inner city. This was noted by the locals, along with our filthy ragged clothes, and naturally we were marked out as different. We were treated as such by the neighbours' children and (though I doubt they truly understood what they were doing) the cruelty of their daily taunts seriously compounded our sense of isolation. This in turn fuelled our mother's tendency to keep us isolated. But this was just one manifestation of an illness that became more marked as it displayed itself in increasingly disturbing ways. When I remember back over my childhood I see that it was like a living yardstick; an eerily accurate mode of measurement by which to gauge the progression of an unquiet mind. For example, I developed a fairly severe stutter in a short space of time as a child of about eight or nine. It didn't last long. That was a matter of luck I'd imagine, as my mother's technique of language correction was to hit me in the face with such force each time I stuttered that I would see blinding flashes of light like great bursts of electric lightning which, together with the pain, would leave me trembling in shock and fear. I have to give it to her though; it was effective. She literally frightened the stutter out of me, and I've never had a recurrence of it since. One of my most brutal memories of childhood is of opening our kitchen door and finding my mother lying unconscious in a monstrously huge puddle ofher own blood. I was about nine at the time. I remember, even though I wasn't a very small child, that the blood seemed like a small lake, extending three or four feet out from her body in all directions. I don't remember what happened after that, but I do remember her arriving home several days later in the same coat she'd been wearing, now covered in maroon-coloured dried blood and her muttering some nonsense about having had to receive a four-pint blood transfusion due to her chronic anaemia. There was no reference made by either of us to the truth, which was that she had tried to kill herself and had very nearly managed it. Where does the fragmentation of a dysfunctional family begin? I believe it begins before the family does. I believe the wounds are already there, waiting to be cut into existence by the meeting of two unsuitable people and the birth of the children they go on to create with a love that is potent in its powers of destruction. What happened was that my parents both reached out for the comfort of love, as all humans do, and that unfortunately they just happened to reach for it within each other. Of course I regard myself fortunate that flawed and fractured love existed, otherwise I would not be here to record the outcome. As strenuous as lite has sometimes been, and as emotionally arduous as it was in the beginning, it is my life and I have always loved it. There were times when I loved it more in the having than in the living; still, it's been a rare day I considered letting it go. Some of the terms that are used around family dysfunction would not be accurate in reference to my family. Terms like disintegration, degeneration, deterioration seem to refer to the destruction ofsomething that was at one time healthy or whole. My family did not break down: my family was born broken. My father had his first nervous breakdown at eighteen, some fourteen years before he met my mother. My mother had begun acting strangely some time during her teens, the best part often years before she met my father. These two people, both afflicted by serious mental illness, met and paired together as adults, my mother being twenty-four, my father thirty-two at the time. My father's first breakdown had landed him in St Brendan's psychi.atric hospital and his manic depression was diagnosed there and then. His family were keenly aware that any woman he settled with would have to be a stabilising influence in his life, and my poor mother, with her untreated schizophrenia, was probably the one woman in all of Dublin who least fit the bill. But they did meet, they did marry, and the manifestations of my mother's illness continued unabated and roared through her marriage and the childhoods of her children like the ocean in all of our ears. Another expression ofher sickness would have been the evening, a day or two after our father's suicide, when she sent me and my older brother to our father's bed-sit to collect whatever was useful of his belongings. We were thirteen and fourteen at the time. It was in Rathmines, on the south side of the city. The main street was dominated by the neon lights of the Swan shopping centre. I had never seen them before that, and every time I've seen them since they've brought me back to the darkness of that November night. Itwas only about eight o'clock, but the sky was black and those lights shone bright against it so as to bring to mind the video games and pinball machines you'd see in an arcade. When we got to the bed-sit it was just that, another one-roomed hovel with a paltry attempt at a kitchenette in one corner and a single bed in the other. We'd seen many ofthese over the years, a new one each time my parents split up, which was often. That was just the last time our family was physically fractured, and as for the regular dissolution of our family; I remember the cruelty ofit, the way it was accepted without question that whenever the family broke down, my father was always the disposable member. I have always carried with me, heavily, like a weight, a deep compassion for separated fathers. It is easy to see why. So we stood there in his bed-sit, looking around. We'd never been in this one before. It was particularly small and ofcourse, being the last place he would ever occupy leant it a distinctive sort of melancholy; a feeling ofpitiful sadness with the shameful smell ofpoverty and degradation all bound up with that awful sense of finality that only death brings. There was, besides the elements that made it unique to the death of my father, a heavy sombre atmosphere, a sort of sensory arollla offatality I'd never experienced before. We'd been instructed to take anything that was of any use or value. There wasn't much. We hardly spoke while we were there and when we did it was very quietly, as though we knew what we were doing would have offended our father, and no doubt it would have, though I can see now, through my adult eyes, that he'd have been much more offended for our sakes than his own. But there was shame then, at that time, and I wonder could my mother, in her sickness, possibly have known that I'd feel like a vulture picking over my own father's bones? We scrunched closed packets of cornflakes and sugar and took them home to our mother, who inspected her meagre inheritance with glazed, emotionless eyes. Though I could see no ordinary mourning in them, I could see something very deep in her eyes that told me she held the whole universe behind them, and all the grief that was in it. There are too many painful memories, and I will not recount them all, because they are not all necessary. I will only recount what is necessary to show the reader how and why things came to be as they were, and I don't believe the excavation of every old bone is required in order to do that. But this image, this is important: two children walking back to a bus stop on a winter's night carrying light bags, each gram of which weighed as shameful. This is important to an understanding ofhow and why it could not have been hoped we'd grow up without encountering great adversity in our lives. Sometimes, when I am feeling very embittered, I feel assaulted by the assertions of others that my mother will 'always be my mother'. I regard them as the pious ramblings of people who haven't got a clue what it feels like to be raised by a paranoid schizophrenic. I contend then that you can sweeten stale cream till it's edible, but no amount of sugar stops it being sour cream. I resent them, I do; these people who maintain that my mother will always be my mother. I once worked with a woman who had two grown daughters, young women in their twenties. She spoke about them daily: what they'd been up to, what they'd gone through, what was going on in their lives. She recounted their experiences and the advice she'd administered to steer them through work problems and social problems and their heartbreak with men. Regardless of what trials they were going through, I couldn't help but think how lucky they were, those daughters. I have often wondered what a normal mother/daughter bond is, but because circumstances have placed me so removed from that concept, I do not wonder this with any overt sense of sadness; just simple curiosity, tinged with an abstract sort of regret. I wonder what that is like, and when I see grown women having a laugh or a hug or a conversation with their mothers, I find myself looking with concentration at what they are doing. I watch their facial expressions and make an effort to decode their body language. There is inquisitiveness there, paired with a sense of puzzlement. I am trying to understand what it is they are experiencing. I am trying to decipher dynamics I know nothing about. It interests me, but it leads to melancholy feelings. As far as fully rounded emotional maturity is concerned, in many ways my mother was a young girl while I was, and I've no doubt she still is to this day. We don't see anything of each other any more and, sad as it is, that is what works best for me right now and no doubt for her, too. For my part, to a very great degree, I have moved away from my feelings of blame-filled bitterness. It's been widely commented that there comes a time when a person stops thinking of their parents as parents and starts viewing them as people, and I believe it's when that happens, that the inclination towards pity shifts from you to them. When I think about my parents now, the overwhelming feeling I have for them is sorrow: just that; sorrow and compassion. I was surprised by the force of the compassion for my mother when it did hit. I almost hadn't been expecting it. I had always known some part of me felt sorry for her but I didn't look too deeply into that, the same way when you break a bone you make it your business not to flex the limb. '

Chapter 4 '"'-'

IA WEB OF DYSFUNCTION It is hard for children to withhold assent from their mother-to stand far enough apart to judge that what she is doing is not part ofnature. NUALA o'FAOLAIN, ARE YOU SOMEBODY? M y parents were not to blame for my becoming involved in prostitution. As I have said, they were sick people, not bad people. It is the background of dysfunction that acts as a gateway to that lifestyle and while sometimes such an environment can be attributed to the moral failings of parents, I truly believe that was not so in my case. Yes, they made choices that negatively influenced the direction of my life, but they didn't act alone. They were directed themselves by very powerful influences quite beyond their control. Mental illness, addiction and poverty existed as the trio of primary roots in our experience of dysfunction, and those were not threads of experience with which my parents or any parents would wish to be familiar, much less intentionally desire or invite. Whatever my parents got wrong, they must have gotten something right, because they reared five intelligent children who went on, after some adversity, to form decent and relatively emotionally healthy lives. I used to think I knew what it was to come from as horrible a back.ground as it was possible to know. I found out very quickly upon leaving home that I had no such knowledge. I met young teenage girls during my own early teens who had been horribly abused, physically and sexually, and bore obvious physical and emotional scars to prove it. I came to discover that sexual molestation was commonplace umon~ the girls I met and existed in a lot of cases as the primary reason they had fled their homes. I had, thankfully, no such experience; my father was a decent man. So if I hold a mirror up and look at where I've been and contrast and compare childhoods by that barometer, I have very little to gripe about. Still, though, conditions of consistent dysfunction act as a catalyst for future problems and if there is one thing I resent my mother for it is that she raised us in such a way as to be totally unskilled in dealing with the world, before turning us out, as fledgling humans, straight into the thick of it. These resentful feelings are there because I am only human and I can hardly be expected to be happy about it, but they are partnered with the knowledge that my mother did the best she could. And I wonder, if I were raising five children while struggling with an untreated mental illness along with a decade:..long addiction to prescription drugs, and all thisin the midst of extreme poverty, would /have done a better job? Could I even have found the strength to do an equal job? Somewhere inside myself, I doubt it. Looking at the three root causes of our family's experience of dys.function, now, when enough years have gone by to still my resentment to a degree that some level of contemplative analysis is possible, I can see how they worked together in a supportive triangular formation; and I can see how that formation nurtured itself and each of its separate components. Mental illness, addiction and poverty: active addiction is the surest route to extreme poverty and its function can only be accelerated when the people in its grip are poor to begin with. Mental illness, of course, reduces the capacity for rational thinking, which lessens the likelihood of those suffering from it engaging in any sort of successful struggle against either it or the grip of addiction. Poverty itself is an aggravating factor in mental illness, and it was especially so in the 1970s and 8os, when the only in-patient treatment available was substandard and wholly inadequate. Also, in a household with five young children, poverty creates the perfect breeding ground for depression, a central element of mental illness, which the depressive addict will then attempt to alleviate with their substance of choice, the use of which will further aggravate their mental condition. Poverty provokes a desire for escapism, which encourages addiction; and mental illness incapacitates, making employment less likely, therefore copper.fastening poverty. Really, I could go round in loops all day, uncovering further and deeper reasons how and why those three elements nurtured each other, but there is no need: my parent's problems were dearly relentless; besides, it is an upsetting thing to examine the impossible maze that ensnared those two people who loved me. 'What hope had they got?' The question is a cry that is angry and impassioned, but the answer comes back low.spoken in a tone that is factual and cold: 'They had none: I know that I was mentally and emotionally abused on a daily basis until I was fourteen years old. That abuse came about not by way ofdeliberate intent on the part of my parents, but rather as a consequence of the conditions their illnesses conspired to create. That truth, unfortunately, wasn't enough to alleviate the damage the abuse was responsible for, and why should it have been? If somebody has spent their first fourteen years of life in a state of almost constant tension, physically and mentally stiff, as if continually braced against some oncoming storm, how much smaller is the leap into a situation which will place them in circumstances to which they will respond and react as they have always done? In this way and for this reason, prostitution was much more feasible for me than for the child of a non-dysfunctional home. For all the tensions and stressors of my childhood, I do not claim, among the children my parents reared, to have drawn the short straw; not by a long way. For a large portion of my childhood, almost as much as she needed to have somebody on whom to vent her frustrations, my mother was in need of somebody to hold in high regard. That position was mine for a long time and retaining my 'post' involved the execution of particular types of patience and cunning merged together to form an unsavoury skill. Dealing with a mentally ill woman in such a way as to benefit yourself and your position within a dysfunctional household is a skill indeed and every day for me presented both the necessity and the opportunity to practise it. The negative side ofmy mother's nature, her all-consuming animosity, was in many respects something akin to a flame. It had to consume; it couldn't survive otherwise, and just like fire, you could blow it away and it would live elsewhere, as long as it had somewhere else to go and something else to feed upon. I could see what aggravated her, she made that very clear, and I deduced that the best way to play the game was not only to behave so as to deflect negative attention from myself, but also to actively direct her aggression onto the other children, so as to make doubly sure that I would remain unscathed. I deflected attention from flaws she might perceive in me by way of regular selfless acts, such as cleaning the house from top to bottom while she was in bed asleep, and also by exploiting through encouragement seeds of derision that existed in her mind, directed at my brothers and sisters. All of this had to be executed in a very subtle manner because schizophrenics are hyper-perceptive and if she had ever discovered the ruse, that would have spelled disaster for me; so I had to learn to gently encourage these ideas that my siblings were bad, misbehaved and unruly. Because she had made a confidant of me, and treated me as an adult and an equal, it was often only a matter of responding agreeably to her never-ending diatribe about my siblings' characters and behaviours. These perceived flaws existed only in her imagination, but whenever she would express them, I would deliberately encourage them. It was a constant exercise in manipulation on my part, and by dint of simple practice, I eventually became very good at it. It was, in essence, a struggle for a position of relative ease within the household. There were so many stressors in our lives at that time, from within and without, that a position of some favour with our mother was very enviable and I was prepared to resort to ruthlessness in order to attain it. It was a survival tool that I honed as a child in response to an appalling daily reality; but still, to this day, I am deeply ashamed of it. One example ofan outside stressor was the fact that we were known by the other children in the estate simply as 'The Knackers'. They'd dubbed us with that title in response to our permanently dirty hair and tattered clothes, which were passed from one child to the next, regardless of what sort of state they were in. They called us this to our faces on a daily basis for the ten years I lived in that house. A couple of days after my youngest brother was born in June 1989, I went to the local shop to buy a packet of nappies for him. My older brother had had his first ride home in a _police car that day. He'd been caught shoplifting in the local supermarket and my mother was at her wits' end about what the neighbours would say. I personally couldn't understand why she'd give a damn about the neighbours or what they'd have to say; it wasn't as if we could number any friends among them. So anyway, I walked into the shop; I was thirteen at the time. There were three or four of the neighbours' children, all around my age, standing huddled together in a group in the middle of the shop floor and I heard the boy with his back to me say, very distinctly: 'You know the young fella out of the knackers' house? He just got brought home in a police car.' At that moment, one of the children he was speaking to spotted me and elbowed him in the ribs. They all glanced at me quickly, looked away, and fell silent. I passed them without a word or a look and made my way to the counter. It was a shock of revelation; a very undesirable kind. I paid for the nappies in a sort of daze and walked out of the shop and all the way home still reeling from the realisation that they hadn't only called us 'Knackers' to our faces with the intent to insult; it was also simply a term of reference, a means of identification. 'Knackers' was what we actually were to them. It is not a term I could ever use in reference to the Travelling people. Years later, in prostitution, on hearing prostitutes casually referred to as 'whores', I was imbued again with the understanding that an insult cuts much deeper when it is not intended to insult, when it is presented as a simple term of reference with no intention to affront. The prostitute knows that she lives in a society which, however saturated with sexual imagery, is still steeped in the veneration of virginity, and has the wit to know that since she is placed on the opposite end of that spectrum she will not find herself venerated any time soon. When someone castigates women like me for their histories, I just think quietly to myself: you could have been me, I could have been you, and isn't the whole world made up of junkies who just never got strung out? But anyway, this is an example ofthe sort ofbanishment and shunning we lived with as children; this was an enormous part ofour daily reality, this experience of being ostracised by our neighbours' children on the one hand and being refused permission to mix with them on the other. In this way, we really only had one reality to which we could identify and belong, and that was within the home. Inevitably we would develop all the psychological problems that living in such an environment entails, constant and ensnared witnesses as we were to the sickness that raged within its walls. �Of course, sheer poverty set us further apart and compounded our sense ofotherness in ways that operated beyond the physical realities and practicalities ofeconomic lack. I remember Brother Luke's ofBow Street well. Our mother used to send us down there when we were children to ask for food and to explain that our family couldn't afford any. As young as we were, we understood the nature of begging. It humiliated us, yes, hut we were inured to it so that what might have been a sharp sting to other children was just a dull thud in us. I remember so well that old medieval-looking street off Smithfield. The brother there (I'm not sure if he was Brother Luke himself) would move around the kitchen swathed in his huge brown cassock that skimmed the tloor as he wrapped meat and packed tins and cut great lumps of butter from an enormous block. I used to wonder what all that food was for; he never kept anything in small amounts. Years later I found out it was a food centre for the homeless. I can't remember him ever saying a word. He may have taken an oath of silence, I don't know, but I always got the impression that the sight of us depressed him, and probably it did, but it more likely just saddened him. His silence frightened me then, but I can see now that he was a very kind man. I remember one Christmas week he gave me and my sister so much�ood we could scarcely carry it and had to keep stopping for rest breaks all the way home. The load we carried made a forty-minute journey out of a ten-minute walk. It was so much the more awkward because he'd given me an enormous cake and I had to carry it so that it wouldn't get mashed in the box while managing half a dozen bags strung along either arm. There was no top on the cake box and I remember the neighbours' children gawking at us as we walked in and the keen sense of prestige involved in being seen carrying an enormous cake, coupled with the relief that they didn't know where it came from. I'd often be sent around to the St Vincent de Paul who would hold a clinic in a building adjoining our local church one day a week; I think it was a Friday. There was a dim waiting room with a scruffy terracotta.tiled floor and I remember clearly the humiliation of sitting alongside the other people on the benches that lined the walls. I was not humiliated, for the most part, because of waiting there for charity, as we were all waiting for the same reason; but the sting was in being the only child in that room, because I could decode from the adults' sidelong glances that my unaccompanied presence there spoke volumes about what was going on at home. My mother's propensity to treat me as though I were ten years my senior began at a very early age and I'm sure it had a great deal to do with my feeling older than I was all throughout my childhood and adolescence. From the age of about eight, she would send me alone to visit my father during his stays in the psychiatric hospital. That was always a dismal experience, as he would be medicated and was always deeply depressed, often to the point of immobility. I also had negative associations with St Brendan's on account of earlier memories I had of my mother sitting crying on the white benches of its grounds. One particular day though, it went well beyond the depressing. My father was usually located in the day wards, which was the term for the downstairs dormitories that housed
patients who had signed themselves in for treatment. I wasn't aware of the existence of any other wards at that time. When I approached the desk that day and asked to see my father there was a delay I hadn't experienced before. Normally, on giving his name, I would be directed to his bed. The nurse behind the desk went off and came back with a man who was tall, dressed in white, and of a heavy build, with a big belly that protruded far over his belt. A male nurse, though I hadn't any idea who or what he was, ignorant as I was that there was any such thing at the time. He guided me towards a lift I'd never been in and through what seemed to me then to be huge steel doors. The lift seemed extraordinarily large and was sheeted with steel and standing inside its metal walls as the lift moved slowly upwards, I just knew that something was wrong. The lift doors opened and the man walked me out into a hallway. The walls were cream and a dead-looking green. Straight away there was the sense that this was a place so different from downstairs, it was scarcely imaginable that anyone could make the transition simply by way of a lift. Just as the nurse was about to walk towards my father's bed, which I couldn't see, as it was behind a cubicle wall, the most intimidating person I had ever seen lumbered by. He was enormous in stature, seemed about six-and-a-half feet tall, with huge arms and shoulders. But it was his walk, not his stature, which exuded a sense of menace. He put one foot in front of the other in the manner of zombies walking in the movies and his eyes just stared straight ahead; he seemed to have neither time nor trouble for looking in any other direction. He opened his mouth and emitted a sort of deep guttural moaning sound that resonated more horribly than anything I'd ever heard as it bounced back off the walls, and the last I remember of him was looking as the back of his head as he moved onwards up the hall and I started to walk again, beside the nurse who'd temporarily stopped to clear his path. That in itself had struck fear into me; that the nurse, whom I'd regarded as an authority figure just seconds before, had deferred power to this man. We walked on and I saw that bodies lay in beds all around the ward, or sat up in bed, just staring with a spaced-out resignation that rendered them little more than statues that somehow managed to breathe, and a great air of misery and utter hopelessness permeated the air and made it heavy, so that I felt physically pressed against by it. When we got to my father's bed the nurse walked away and left me there. Everywhere I looked I saw dead colours; shadows of grey, dirty shades of cream, and that horrible decomposing green. I remember thinking how unwell my father looked while he made the gargantuan effort of lifting his head off the pillow. I kept saying, 'Dad, Dad', and pulling at his shoulder, and eventually he slowly raised his head and looked at me. I saw that he was heavily medicated. His eyes were glassy and unfocused and as he recognised me I thought I saw them cloud with shame. He managed the briefest of conversations before he sank back beneath the fog. I cannot remember what was said, but I know that if I could, recounting it would not take up more than a couple of lines. I'm sure he must have asked after my mother, because that was always his first question when he hadn't seen her in a while. I didn't know what to do. I sat on the edge of the bed in the end and stared at the cubicle wall till enough time had passed that seemed reasonable for a visit. I stood up and said goodbye to him and then I went looking for the nurse. When I got home I told my mother about the man who'd frightened me in the hospital and she said to me: 'Your father is afraid of that man because he beats him.' That was a typical example of her thoughtless wounding tongue, and all I could think about after that was my father being beaten by that man, and thinking about it, for a long time, I couldn't stop wishing I had hugged my sleeping father. Memories of childhood are connected to us by a door, the existence of which we rarely consider. We travel back to those places, summoned, whether or not we are desirous of making the journey. The key to this portal morphs and changes from moment to moment. To that time, for me, the key might be that particular shade ofloathsome green in a public toilet; tomorrow it might be a pretty white-painted bench in a public park. But whatever is responsible for bringing me back there in my mind serves the same purpose, to forcibly cause me again to experience that sense of stepping out ofa lift and into a nightmare. I have never liked lifts, but I've never shared that common fear of a sense of forced enclosure. I would imagine that fear engulfs the moment the doors begin to close. I feel the stab of anxiety at the opposite moment, when the doors begin to open. To this day I don't understand why I was allowed, alone, at that age, into the secure ward of a mental hospital. But then Ireland was a different place in the mid-198os, and I'd imagine people scarcely knew what to do when confronted with a young child presenting herself at a mental institution, obviously deeply assured that she had every business to be there. Had they not allowed me in, I'd just have a different dismal memory; I'd be remembering the day I wasn't allowed in to visit my father. I'd be remembering wanting to go in and comfort him and not being allowed to do that; and that is the thing about severe family dysfunction: when the problems come from within, there is almost nothing that can be done to make things better from without. That is not to say that kind-natured strangers did not sometimes try: they did, and the memory of their actions stays with me to this day. I remember when my youngest sister spent several weeks in Cherry Orchard hospital in 1985. She was suffering from some sort of virus and was five at the time. I made the two-legged journey there to visit her alone, as my mother never had any time for that sort of thing and my parents were separated at the time. When the day came for me to collect her and bring her home, I found, to my horror, at the bus stop on Westmoreland Street, that I had lost the pound note my mother had given me for our bus fare. It was about seven or eight o'clock in the evening but it was wintertime and already very dark. There was no turning back and I got the bus to Cherry Orchard and decided to worry about how to get us both home when I got there. (I cannot remember if I had change enough to get that bus or if I had to make my case to the bus driver. I'd say it was probably the latter, because I do remember talking to him, which wouldn't have been necessary otherwise.) I got off the bus and walked up the long dark road lined with poplar trees that seemed, against the night sky, to be menacingly tall and resolved that there was nothing for it but to appeal to someone's sense of charity. I made my way into the hospital and when my sister and I were getting ready to leave, I explained to the nurse that I had lost our bus fare, told her how far we had to go, and asked if she'd be able to give me the money for the bus home. The look on her face was one I'd seen on many faces and it was something that made me deeply uncomfortable, that I had that effect on people; that my presence so often worked the features of strangers into that same sense of affronted appal. They were little stabs, those expressions. She called a taxi for us and paid the driver in advance. I remember on the taxi ride home feeling warm, grateful and ashamed. Ofcourse there were good times: I remember (and strangely this memory induces the greatest sadness ofall) my mother sitting on my father's knee as they kissed and cuddled and hugged to the tune ofKris Kristofferson's 'Loving her was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever do Again)', which played loudly on the old vinyl record player. I saw this scene more than once and I came to identify that song very clearly as an expression of their love. To this day I cannot listen to it without battling a tidal wave of emotion, the origins of which I'm certain, but the transition of a happy thought into tears confuses me still. I did love Christmas-time as a child, poverty or not. I adored the smell of the pine trees. I still do. When we lived in the city centre my mother would take me into O'Connell Street and Henry Street shopping and I would be mesmerised at the sight of all the lights. I remember one Christmas, after we'd moved out of town, my father bringing home a tree so tall he had to practically saw it in half in order to make it fit into the kitchen, which was like walking into a forest by the time he'd completed the operation. I felt as if I was in Narnia and I know that my enduring insistence on buying a huge genuine tree every December has its origins in that day. Sometimes my father would play silly games with us where he'd fashion a ridiculous looking hat out of some old cloth and stylt.� himself as a wizard and he'd stand there asking us questions. If we guessed the right answer we'd win a chocolate bar out of a bag he'd be holding. If ever, in the morning time, there'd be hot porridge or gas in the heater, you could be sure my father was responsible for it. He'd line us up on the wooden benches and place the heater opposite us so we could warm our legs. If there was any jam in the house, he'd put a dollop of it in the porridge, which my mother derided as a common low-class habit he'd picked up back in the days when he'd been running around Cabra West with the arse hanging out of his trousers. This view of his upbringing was, like so many other things, a fiction of her mind. Sometimes I used to sit on the stairs outside the sitting room listening to my father playing guitar. I have never heard anyone play like that. My father was a great jazz guitarist and had been a member of several Irish showbands, including the Dublin City Showband. If, during my parent's frequent fights, my father couldn't afford to move out, he would retreat to the sitting room and live there, like it was his own little flat. It was filled with his records, guitars, amps and other musical equipment. He had everything you could need in there for a litde self-contained flat, including the sofa he slept on. He even bought his own ketde, and I used to sit outside listening to him play. He never found out about that. On and off for a couple of years my mother was in the habit of allowing me to stay up a bit later than the other children. Sometimes we'd pot plants together. I felt very close to her during those times and regardless of the absence of a mother-daughter bond, I did, and do, love my mother. It is difficult, both in the practical and the emotional sense, searching for the good times among the memories of a dysfunctional childhood. It is rather akin to hunting for pretty pebbles among the mass of shingle and shale of an enormously large beach. When you find them, they are lovely and precious because they're rare; but their very rarity reminds you how much crap surrounded them and kept them hidden. Their purity though, is so much the more beautiful for the contrast with all that surrounds them. And just now it hits me; maybe in this last line I have solved the riddle of those Kris Kristofferson tears. Chapters~