The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland (15 page)

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Sit down’, she said, and then she held up a hairbrush in front of me. ‘I want to brush your hair.’ I looked at her confused, she had never brushed my hair before, so I hesitated for a moment and then I sat down on the chair and I faced the wall. I tensed my shoulders as I waited for her to hit me with the brush, or for something else bad to happen to me; and sure enough, she dug the brush into my head and then she pulled down on the brush as hard as she could, pulling my head back as far as it would go. She hurt me, but I said nothing and she kept tugging at my hair until the brush came loose, then she did it again. ‘It hurts’, I told her. But she said, ‘Good, that means it’s working.’ Then she slapped me into the back of the head with the brush and she continued brushing my hair for what seemed ages. Then suddenly she stopped and she told me to go away. I got up and I walked out of the room and up the stairs to my bedroom; and as I walked in, I told Simon that he could stop hiding. Then I lay on my bed, crying to myself until I fell asleep, and all the time I was wishing I were dead, but in the morning I woke up and I knew my life would be the same as usual and I felt sad for myself.

One lunchtime, while on the way home from school, I stopped to play in the garden outside the house with Karen and another child; and while I played with them, a big brown car pulled into the drive of the house. It was Sister Ann’s man friend, the one who touched me in the back garden when I first arrived at Willows a long time ago. He got out of the car and he began to walk towards me. I stopped playing and I looked over at him; and as he walked up to me, he bent over and grabbed me by my arm and he began to pull me towards his car.

I struggled and I tried to get away from him, but he held onto me tight, he pushed me into the back of his car and then he slammed the car door shut, he went around to the driver’s door and he got into the car. His clothes smelt old and strange and he stunk of alcohol and cigarettes. I tried to get out of the car, but he had locked the door; then he turned around and pushed me back into the seat and he handed me a packet of sweets, while telling me to shut the fuck up and to stay in the car. I looked at him and he was so drunk that he had trouble putting the key into the ignition to start the car, but he eventually got the car started and he began to drive away, with me in the back.

But Karen had seen what he was doing to me and she began screaming at me to get out of the car, but I couldn’t. She ran in front of the car, ‘Lily’, she shouted and she banged her hands on the bonnet of the car, then she ran to the window and thumped the glass as hard as she could. I moved over to the window, I shouted back and I grabbed the door handle, but the door wouldn’t open Then one of the nuns came running out of the house shouting, ‘He’s taking Lily, he’s kidnapping her’ and she ran in front of the car and the man had to stop. She had managed to stop him before he drove out of the gates with me and she shouted at him to open the car door.

But she did not wait and she ran around and opened the car door herself, while the man continued to drive the car slowly forward and towards the gates. Still screaming at the man, the nun pulled me out of the car and then he stopped the car at the gates. He looked over at the both of us, and we could see that he was fed-up and angry with the nun for what she had just done, and because he didn’t get away with kidnapping me. He got out of the car and he shouted at both of us, and then he called the nun and me bastards as he got back in the car and then he drove off.

God knows what he was going to do with me; but for the next six weeks, he continued to harass me from his car, and every time I walked home from school, he would be parked by the side of the road with his car door open wide. And as I walked past the car, he would offer me sweets to get inside and to go with him, but I never stopped to talk to him and I would run past the car as quickly as possible, not giving him a chance to grab me.

Sometimes, he would turn up at our house and just walked straight in through the front door, he would be drunk and, as he staggered through the house, he would try to grab me or one of the younger girls, and he would try to drag us away with him and into his car. But the nuns would turn up just in time and tell him to go away and then they would push him out of the house and lock the door.

He eventually stopped harassing me for a while; but as I got older, he started again and he harassed me for years, by pulling up in his car and offering me things to get in it with him. I never did, and I never spoke to him, I just ran from him. But I watched him for years while he harassed and talked to the older girls and offered them money, fags and gifts, to get in the car with him for a few hours, and some of the older girls did.

CHAPTER 6

I Want to Die

The smell of fresh air woke me early; it was summer and the air was warm, and as I lay on my bed I could hear the birds whistling, and I was daydreaming, pretending to be one of them. My window was open, so I whistled back at the birds, but it wasn’t the same and the birds just kept whistling; never once bothered by my attempts to copy or communicate with them. I looked up at the window and then I covered my eyes, wishing that I was one of them.

But all of a sudden, my concentration was broken by the sound of Sister Ann shouting at me to get up. I felt sad for myself and I wished I had been dead. I lifted my pillow and I placed it over my face and held my breath, but then Sister Ann came into the room and she pulled the pillow away from my face. ‘I want to die’, I shouted. ‘Good’, she said. ‘But you will go to hell if you do it that way.’ ‘Will I go to heaven?’ I asked. She looked at me and then she said, ‘No, you will be going to purgatory.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s not heaven and it’s not hell, only good people go to heaven.’ ‘Will you go to heaven?’ I asked. ‘Of course I will. I am a good person and I am married to god,’ she said, showing me a gold ring on one of her fingers. ‘You’re a bad girl, so you’re going to sit in a room all on your own forever, and you won’t go to heaven or hell, nobody wants you. You will have to sit in the room until you can prove that you’ve been good or bad, and then you will go to hell. If you want to go to heaven when you die, you will have to pray every day; in the morning and then again in the evening before you go to bed, and only then might you have a small chance to go to heaven.’

But I was sick of praying. The nuns at school had me praying all day and the nuns at our house had me praying every day after school and again on weekends, and the only thing that I would pray for was to die; so the last thing I needed was more unanswered prayers. I got up out of the bed, had breakfast and went to school. Then in the evening, Sister Ann told me that the following morning I would be going away for the summer holidays. I told her that I was sick of going away with bad people and I said that I wasn’t going and that she couldn’t do a thing about it, ‘I’m seven years old now and I don’t need to go away anymore.’ She looked at me and, saying nothing, she walked off and I went to my room. I knelt down at the end of my bed and I prayed for God to let me die, but nothing happened. So that night, when everyone was sleeping, I went down into the kitchen and I took a packet of Anadin painkillers out of the first aid box and I hid them down my knickers, and then I went back to my bed.

The next morning, I got up early while everyone was still sleeping and crept out of the house. I was going to kill myself before anyone got up. I ran off to the fields at the back of the house and I ran down to the stream that ran along the bottom of the fields. I knelt down by the stream and I opened the packet of tablets, then I put some of them into my mouth and I cupped my hands together to drink some water from the stream. But as I lifted the water to my mouth, some of the tablets fell out of my mouth and into my hands, and then they fell into the water. I quickly grabbed as many of them as I could and I pulled them out of the water; but as I lifted them up, they melted away and slipped through my fingers and then they were gone. I remembered that from my bedroom window I could see an old carven in the field next to our home, so I headed for it; I had decided that I was going to hide there from Sister Ann.

When I reached the caravan, the door was unlocked, so I stepped inside and I lay down on the floor, and it felt cold. I wanted to die. I shut my eyes and, within a couple of seconds, my head began to feel dizzy and strange, and I began to feel sick, so I lifted my head and vomited onto the floor next to me. My belly felt strange and I began to get pains inside my body that I hadn’t had before. I thought I was dying and I wanted Simon and Daisy with me. I wanted to get up, but whenever I moved, my belly got worse, so I stayed on the caravan floor and shut my eyes again. I don’t know how long I was in the caravan for, but it felt like hours and eventually I drifted off to sleep.

And the next thing I can remember fuzzily was being woken by someone lifting me up and talking to me. I don’t know who it was, but they must have brought me back to the house and put me into bed. When I woke up, my whole body felt stiff and weak and tingly and I had to stay in bed for the next two days. I was glad that I didn’t die, but at the same time I still wanted to, because my life had always been horrible and nothing was worth living for. While I was ill, the nuns tried to feed me, but I refused to eat and I tried to starve myself to death, so the nuns sent for a psychiatrist to find out what was wrong with me.

When he arrived, the nuns told him that I had gone mad, that I had run away and I had tried to kill myself, and now I wouldn’t eat anything. But after the psychiatrist had a chat with me without the nuns in the room, he knew that I was fine. And he told the nuns that there was nothing wrong with me, and then he left. The nuns were disappointed, and once he had gone, they told me that if I did not start eating, they would send me away to a mental hospital and I would never see my sisters or Simon again. I didn’t want them to send me away, so I began to eat again and the nuns left me alone for a few days until I got better. They still had plans to send me away for the summer holidays and they were only waiting for me to get strong enough before they did so; and a few days later, two nuns walked into my bedroom and grabbed me by my arms. I didn’t stand a chance, they grabbed hold of me and they dragged me down the stairs, slapping me into my back on the way.

And once downstairs, they dressed me and then marched me out of the house and into the back of a waiting car. I shouted at them to let me go, but they slammed the car door shut and the car drove off; they had locked the car door, so I lay across the seat and I kicked at the windows as hard as I could, but my plimsolls just made a thudding noise as they thumped against the glass. I tried again, but nothing; it was no use, so I shouted at the driver to stop and then I screamed as loud as I could, but the driver took no notice of me and she continued driving.

Then a couple of seconds later, she turned around and I could see that it was Sister Ann and she was smiling at me with excitement. ‘You wait’, she said, ‘you just wait.’ I leaned forward and I tried to hit her in the face, but as I moved to the edge of the seat, she swung her arm around and she knocked me back against the car window. My head hit the glass and the pain I got was so bad that I had to hold my head with both hands, as my head felt like it was going to explode. She continued driving and, as the hours passed, I still felt sick; and when she finally stopped the car at our destination, I was still holding my head. ‘Get out. Get out now before I hit you again’, shouted Sister Ann, as she opened the car door.

I got out of the car and I looked around. I could see an old house sitting in the middle of a farm. ‘This is where you’re going to be staying’, she said as she slammed the car door. I felt sad, I was missing Simon and Daisy terribly. Suddenly, a group of children ran past me and up towards the car and they were shouting; and as they got to the car, they climbed all over it. Then a scruffily clothed woman, with a fag hanging out of her mouth, walked up to us and she shook hands with Sister Ann. I could tell that they had known each other for some time; and after shaking hands, they both walked off, leaving me on my own and the children to play with the car.

I looked over at the children and I counted them; there were five children, all acting as if they were mad animals. The oldest, a boy, opened the car door and he sat in the driver’s seat. He then began pulling at the steering wheel and moving it from side to side as if he was driving the car, then he got out and he slammed the car door shut as hard as he could. Then he walked over to the car aerial and snapped it clean off and, as he looked around, he began to walk towards me. And then he asked me, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Because I’m going to hit you with this.’ I looked at the piece of car Ariel in his hand and then I ran off after Sister Ann and I ran in front of her. ‘He’s going to hit me’, I shouted. ‘Go away before I hit you’, she replied. The boy soon forgot about me and he ran off after one of the other children.

I walked back to the car and I got inside, but Sister Ann came back and she told me to get out. ‘You’re going to be staying with this woman for the next two weeks and you had better be good for her,’ she said. Then she got into the car and drove off, leaving me standing next to the woman. ‘Don’t worry’, she said, ‘come with me and we can make the dinner together.’ And we walked into the kitchen together and I sat and watched her as she boiled cabbage and potatoes for dinner. While I sat with her, she told me that I was going to be sleeping with all her girls in the big bedroom; then she told me to go and play, so I got up and went outside to look for her children, but they had all gone off out of sight. So I wandered off and I began to look around the farm. Everything lying around the farm was very old and most of the things I looked at were broken, and in a barn was an old tractor. The wheels were all rusty and the seat was lying on the ground, broken.