The Girl Nobody Wants
By Lily O’Brien
The Girl Nobody Wants
Copyright 2011 by Lily O’Brien
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission of the author.
This book is based on true events but the names and locations of characters and events have been changed.
Smashwords Edition
CONTENTS
1. My Life with Bad People
2. Off to See Daddy in Ireland
3. All On Our Own
4. The Convent Home
5. The Holidays Without Fun
6. I Want To Die
7. Getting Older
8. Time To Leave
9. Getting Them Back
Reports
10. Going Home
11. New Friends
12. Memories of Ireland
13. Living Through It All Again
How Do I Feel Now?
Little Children
CHAPTER 1
My Life with Bad People
It’s my 40th birthday today and I’m trying to smile, but as I look in the mirror all I can see is an empty shell, someone waiting to die, and I have a feeling of butterflies in my belly that won’t go away and it’s making me feel sick. I want to sit down, but as I turn around and head for a chair, I get a nasty taste in my mouth and I have to run to the toilet before I vomit over the kitchen floor. I push the door open and I kneel down next to the toilet, but nothing happens and I wait for the feeling in my stomach to go away.
After a while I feel better, so I lift my head up off the toilet and I try to get up, but as I push my hands against the toilet bowl my stomach lightens and I have to grab hold of the toilet as I vomit into it. My head begins to spin, but my stomach’s empty, I haven’t eaten a thing in the last 24 hours, so all that comes out of my mouth is green water and I know I need to get up before I vomit again and make a mess of myself. But, it’s the same thing for me every day and I’ve been feeling this way for the last thirty-six years, and I have no idea how I’ve managed to last this long without cracking up or killing myself.
I get up and walk back into the kitchen and I stand in front of the mirror again. I straighten my clothes and look at myself again and I begin to brush my hair. My hair is long and blonde and I’m very slim, so my hair seems to suit me this way. But I’m only this slim because I keep being sick, and I need to be careful not to brush my hair too hard or I will end up pulling some of it out with the brush, then I will just get fed up with myself for being careless.
I’m still feeling a bit sick, so I sit by the kitchen window, but I don’t know what to do with myself, so I think about my partner Tony and then I think about what I’ve been telling him for the last six weeks and how stupid he must think I am. You see, I’ve been telling him that I will be dead before my 40th birthday; and each time I told him, all he ever did was to say ‘ok’ and that’s been driving me nuts. God knows, I could never tell anyone else how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking, as they would just think I’m nuts or stupid; but I can tell Tony anything, but all he ever does is say ‘ok’ and that makes me feel like I want to smash his face in.
And you could never tell that anything was wrong with me by just looking at me, as I dress clean and I keep myself tidy, and I have a smile on my face that hides my emotions and over the years I’ve become an expert at hiding behind it. My smile also hides my weaknesses from everybody, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep the charade up and keep what’s left of my life under control. God, I need help. It’s only 10 am Monday morning and already I’m picking up the phone to call Tony who’s at work. I need him to bring some painkillers home as soon as possible, as I can’t cope with the pain in my head and the tingling in my belly any longer. But it’s the same for me every day and he knows the drill because he’s been doing the same thing for the last twenty-two years.
I call him and he listens while I explain to him what I want, and he only has a chance to say ‘ok’ before I put the phone down on him. Then I walk into the living room and curl up on my bed waiting for him to come back, while the pain in my head takes control of my mind and I can do nothing to stop it. The pain’s awful and it makes me feel like I want to kill everyone; but within half an hour, Tony walks in and throws a packet of painkillers down onto the bed next to me. I quickly move my hand towards the packet and, as Tony turns and heads towards the toilet, I frantically grab the packet, jump off the bed and take four tablets out of the packet while I head into the kitchen for a drink of water.
One by one, I begin to swallow the tablets and then I hear Tony as he walks back along the hall and follows me into the kitchen; he looks over at me and he begins to shake his head from side to side, but then he stops; he knows what I’ve just done, but he says nothing. He just turns, gives me a kiss on the back of my head and says, ‘See you later, I’m off back to work.’ And as I drink a glass of water, I turn around and look him in the face, and I say nothing at all, not even thanks for the tablets. He looks at me again and then he walks off down the hall and towards the front door and I head back to my bed; but once I hear the sound of the front door closing and I know that he’s gone, I jump off the bed and head back into the kitchen and then I take another four painkillers.
I know he will be back around lunch time and it’s only a couple of hours away, so I get back into bed and I close my eyes while I wait for the tablets to work, but my flat’s a lonely place when I’m all alone and my mind won’t rest and I’m cold. My flat’s small and my bed is in the living room, so my two kids can have a bedroom each, and the kitchen door has fallen off its hinges, so I have a bed sheet hanging in its place; but the light and the noise from the street outside the kitchen window is filtering through and it’s bothering me.
I feel like I’m going mad, I just can’t rest and I want to scream with anger, so I get back up, I search through my handbag, looking for more tablets, and I find a strip of sleeping pills that my doctor prescribed for me. I push the pills out of the strip and swallow half a dozen of them, while the rest fall out of my hand and onto the kitchen table, scattering amongst old fag packets and junk mail that’s been sitting on the table for weeks. I know the pills aren’t very strong and they will do little to help me, so I take a couple of nerve pills that my doctor prescribed for me. I know the nerve pills will do a better job than the painkillers and sleeping pills will ever do, and they will stop the tingling in my belly and calm the pain in my head for a couple of hours. I know it sounds like a lot of tablets, but I’ve been taking tablets for most of my teenage and adult life, and now it takes more and more of them to get a reaction from my body and to put some kind of normality back into my head that will last for a few hours.
So anyway, I head back to my bed, lie down and shut my eyes, but still nothing, I just can’t rest, so I get back up and I make a cup of coffee and smoke a fag out of the kitchen window. But the people outside in the street can look up and see me looking out of the window, so I quickly finish my fag, take a few more nerve tablets and go back to my bed and lie down again. I know it will be lunchtime shortly and Tony will be back from work soon, so I close my eyes and pull a blanket over my head to block out the light and sound from the street outside and I try to sleep. It’s difficult and I only manage to drift in and out of a dazed state of light sleep brought on by the medication, until suddenly I’m woken by the noise of the front door opening.
He’s back already; it must be lunchtime and I’m feeling normal at the moment, so I get out of bed and walk into the kitchen and I put the kettle on to make myself coffee. Then Tony walks in behind me and we both sit down and we talk about the weather, the news and our kids just to make some kind of conversation; but we seem to have little in common at the moment, so it’s hard work and we both know it. Plus, as the medication starts to take effect and it begins to relax my brain, I begin to feel like I don’t give a shit about anything he says to me and we both continue as if everything is fine.
He only has an hour for lunch, and because I have been waiting all morning just for his company and someone to talk to, the hour goes fast and already he has to go back to work. But as he leans over to give me a kiss good bye, I just keep my face blank and I show him no emotions at all; then after he kisses me, I wipe his kiss off my lips with the back of my hand, in an act of I don’t know what. It’s not that I hate him, it’s just that I hate him for having to go back to work and for leaving me all alone again. I know he has to go back to work and within a few seconds he’s gone and I can hear him locking the front door from the outside as he leaves.
It’s so that I will be safe and so that no one gets into the flat and kills me; ok, I don’t really think anyone is after me or that anyone’s going to kill me right now, and I asked Tony to lock the front door for me every time he leaves the flat as you never know who’s outside. It’s just that I feel so much safer when the front door to the flat is locked, and it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, the door has to be locked.
After he leaves, I walk back into the kitchen and I look over at the clock, it’s almost two-thirty in the afternoon and I have to go soon and get the kids from school; so I get changed and head for the front door, but as I get to the door I stop. I put my ear against the door and listen; it’s quiet outside, so I unlock the front door and walk outside. It’s still quiet and no one’s around, so I turn around lock the front door and run down the stairs and out of the building and towards my car. Still running, I press the car door release button on the remote so that I can open the car door and jump inside within a couple of seconds; then, once inside the car, I press the remote button again, locking the car doors shut so that no one can get to me inside.
I relax and take a deep breath, then I put the key into the ignition and I begin to turn the key, but the steering lock is on and I struggle with the steering wheel for a moment and then the key turns and the engine starts and I drive off towards the school. It only takes about fifteen minutes to get to the school by car, but within the first couple of minutes I’m already wound-up and I start calling the other drivers cunt’s and bastards. ‘God, I need a fag to calm myself down before I kill someone’, so I wind the car window down and light one up and it works.
I feel much better now and eventually I get to the school; the kids are waiting for me by the side of the road and they tell me that they have been waiting for ages. I’m late, but don’t ask me why; I’m late because I just don’t know. It must have been the fag or the other drivers going too slow or something like that. Anyway, the kids get into the car and we head back towards the flat and we just about make it back without me cracking up or shouting abusively at the other drivers.
Apart from the one old bitch who kept me waiting a couple of seconds longer than I needed to at the lights while she chatted on her mobile phone, but the kids told me to stop shouting at her, so I did, but I had to have a fag instead to calm myself down. I just can’t help it. I just get so wound-up and angry with everyone for the smallest of things and I tend to let off steam that way because the other drivers can’t normally hear me when I’m in the car, and I can scream and shout as loud as I want at them without any consequences.
Once home, I make the kids dinner and then I look at the clock, I know Tony should be home from work by now and he’s already told me that he’s got no money so he won’t be getting me anything for my birthday, but it doesn’t matter as long as he gets back soon. Because I don’t like being on my own all day, as it makes me feel fed up and angry having no one to talk to, but he’s late, it’s 6.15 pm and he’s only just coming through the front door. God, I want to take a dig at him, he should have been home almost an hour ago; but I can see that he’s got me some presents and a cake for my birthday, so it makes me feel better and I just can’t find any reason to take a dig at him. Plus I’m glad that he’s back from work and I have some adult company now.
I walk back into the kitchen and sit by the window, then I light up a fag and talk to Tony while he does the washing up, and once he’s finished he makes us both a cup of coffee while I open my presents. He looks over at me and I look back and smile and then I say thanks. It’s a couple of bottles of perfume, it’s nice but I already have over thirty different bottles of perfume, so now I’m starting to think that he’s trying to say something about me in a nice way, like I stink or something.
But I leave it at that for now and I start to cut the cake up into large pieces, but he’s hidden all of the kitchen knives from me apart from a small blunt one that we use for everything, and I struggle cutting into the cake and it ends up looking a mess. I ask him if I can have a sharper knife, but he says, ‘No, sorry’ and I shout at him, ‘Why not?’, but all he does is smile at me as he continues to drink his coffee. Then a feeling comes over me that makes me feel like I want to kill him, but instead I turn away and put some of the cake onto plates and I take it to the kids, who are in their bedrooms playing.
But they are playing computer games and they have forgotten all about my birthday; I hand them the cake and they say thanks and continue playing. ‘It’s only my birthday and it doesn’t matter anyway.’ But before I walk away, I stand by the bedroom door and I take a long look at them both playing and it makes me smile, and I am happy knowing that they are good boys and that I have managed to keep them safe and away from my family for so long. And I think that if it wasn’t for them, I would probably be dead already, as without them I have nothing to live for. Plus Tony keeps telling me that they need me and that it would be a selfish thing for me to kill myself and leave them without a mother, and even though it’s hard for me to say that he is right, I have to agree with him.
I head back into the kitchen and sit by the window again and have another fag, while Tony makes himself dinner, poached egg and beans on toast, quick and easy. Good, it saves me doing anything for him as it’s not my job anyway. The evening drags and I get bored as everyone has something to do apart from me and I begin to feel like everyone is ignoring me, so I take a verbal dig at Tony, but he doesn’t get the message and he keeps ignoring me. He’s writing something on the computer that he won’t tell me about and he doesn’t look up. So this time I shout at him and I start an argument on purpose, and now he’s talking to me and I feel better with myself, knowing that I have his attention, and I begin to smile.
So I quickly turn around and I walk away ignoring him, and I walk into the kitchen and light up another fag as he gets up and walks in behind me; then he asks me what the problem is, and I tell him to leave me alone and to go fuck off to bed. He says nothing, then he walks out of the kitchen and he gets ready for bed, and I can hear him as he shouts to the kids that he loves them and then he walks back in to me, ‘Good night’, he says. ‘I’m going to bed now.’ Then he walks away while I finish my fag by the kitchen window.
I know I won’t be able to sleep very well, so before I leave the kitchen I take a few sleeping pills to help me get through the night, then I walk into the living room and towards the bed. The room’s dark and I can’t see what I’m doing, so I turn the light on and make a big fuss about nothing before I get into bed, and I leave the light on just to wind Tony up. While telling him that if he wants the light off, he will have to get up and turn it off himself, or he can sleep with the light on all night if he wants as it won’t bother me. Then I smile to myself as I turn away from him and tuck myself in really tight with the quilt, leaving him very little to cover himself with, but he says nothing and he does his best to get comfortable.
God, I feel like I want to kill him, but he hasn’t done anything wrong, so instead of hitting him I get up and head to the toilet. I sit there for a while, resting my chin on the palm of my hand, and I think to myself that Tuesday will be the same as Monday and the rest of the week will be the same as every other week and I hate it, and I hate my life. Then I head back to bed and lie down for the night, knowing that I will have a horrible sleep ahead of me.
But while I lie there, I remember that tomorrow’s going to be different, as I have an appointment to see a mental health adviser at 10 am. It was made for me by my GP and he told me that if I don’t go to the appointment, he will stop all the medication that I’ve been on for the last twenty plus years and then strike me off his books for wasting his time. So I need to get up early, have a bath and wash my hair before I go and see the mental health adviser.
But what am I going to tell him and how will I begin, or will he even believe what I tell him? I have so much in my head and it’s all a mess; it’s like all of my memories are bad ones and they all have a pain connected to them that won’t leave me alone. I can’t rest, I look up at the ceiling and then I turn my head and look over at Tony. He’s still awake, but he’s facing the wall, and he’s having trouble sleeping too, but not because he has problems troubling him, but because I like to talk to him and I keep him awake. Then, when I do finally fall asleep, I still keep talking and that’s bad for both of us.
So before I nod off, I ask him what he thinks about the appointment I have in the morning and if I should go to it. He turns around and smiles, then he looks straight into my eyes and he says, ‘Yes, please go’, and good night and God bless. Ok, I get the message and I roll back over to my side of the bed and I stare at the ceiling again, while I think of things to tell the person in the morning. I know it’s got to be from the beginning, when it all started as that’s the only way I’m going to be able to tell him everything about myself and feel that it might help me in some way, so I close my eyes and I look deep into the darkness that I’ve created for myself. I know I won’t see anything like people or places because I’ve been doing the same thing for years, but if I keep my eyes closed tight for a while, I start to see little flashes of bright white light bursting through the darkness as it passes before my eyes. It only lasts for a split second at a time, but it helps me to drift away from reality and then off to sleep.
But once I’m asleep, my dreams disturb me and after a couple of hours I’m awake again, and I feel cold and confused and I have to get up before my head explodes from the madness crashing around in my head. So I get up and I look at Tony, he’s still sleeping, so I walk into the kitchen and I look out of the window; it’s still dark outside, great. I sit on a chair by the window and I have a fag and think to myself that I wish my life was all over. I wish I were dead, I mean how can I keep going on day after day when I feel the way I do?
I must have been a very bad person in a past life for me to be tormented like this now. It’s a fucking shit hole of a world that we live in and I hate it and what am I waiting for. All my life, people have used me as if I was nothing, and very few people have ever helped me or shown kindness towards me unless they wanted something from me. The only person who has been honest with me is Tony, even my own family have treated me like shit and they have never shown me any kindness or love. I feel so sad.
I can even remember as far back as when I was four years old, when I lived in London with my mum, step dad and some of my brothers and sisters. You would think that it all sounds nice and fine, but even back then, when I was only four years old, one of my older brothers, Paul, was messing around with me and abusing me for his own pleasure and satisfaction. It all started when mum wanted someone to baby-sit for her; my brother Paul would come around to the house and tell mum that he would do the babysitting for her, while she and my step dad, Jim, went out to the pub for a drink. At first, they paid Paul to do the babysitting; but after a couple of weeks, they stopped paying Paul and they kept the money so they could buy even more drinks down at the pub for themselves.
But that didn’t stop my brother Paul from coming around to baby-sit for them, and while they were out, he would come into my bedroom and sit and talk to me until they got back. Then after a few weeks of them going out to the pub and leaving Paul alone with me, he began to act more like a child around me and he began to play games with me and he would pull at my nightdress while he tickled me all over my body. And while he was alone with me, he would tell me that I was a very pretty little girl and that my nightdress was beautiful.
Then one night, while mum and my step dad had gone out to the pub for a drink, Paul got up, locked the front door and turned off all the lights in the house and then he came into my bedroom. It was late, but I was still awake and I could see him standing just inside the doorway of my room; and as he entered the room, he told me to be very quiet. Then he walked over towards me and picked me up out of my bed and he took me out of my bedroom and into the living room. I looked up at his face and I smiled at him while he laid me down onto the living room floor.
At first, I thought it was a game, ‘fun’, and that he wanted to play games with me in the living room; but as I spoke to him, he told me to be quiet and to stay still, then as he moved back away from me he began to lift up my nightdress. And as he did so, I put my hands out to stop him and to push my nightdress back down, but he got angry with me and he pushed my hands out of the away and he started pulling at my knickers, trying to take them off me. I asked him what he was doing, but he said, ‘Be quiet, shush’ and then he pulled my knickers down and off me and with both hands he lifted my legs up and wide open, moving me into odd positions like a rag doll.
Then he put my legs back down onto the floor and spread them wide apart, hurting me, and I began to cry. I told him to stop and I tried to get up, but he told me to shut up and he pushed me back down onto the floor and I stayed there while he undid his trousers and took them off. I looked up at him and I tried to get up again, but before I could move away from him, he got on top of me, positioning his body against mine, and he used his whole body to trap me into a position that stopped me from moving away from him. And all of a sudden, he put his dick up against my body and he pushed himself between my legs.
I was frightened and I shouted at him to stop and I thumped him as hard as I could into his belly, and I shouted at him to stop hurting me and to get off me. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t move; he was squashing me with his body and he was pushing his whole body between my legs. My belly was beginning to hurt me and he was squashing me so much that I could hardly breathe; again, I shouted at him to stop. ‘Please stop, my belly hurts’, I said, but he kept on pushing and squashing me, while all the time telling me to shut up.
And he only stopped when I began to bleed from between my legs and his clothes got wet from the blood. The blood dripped from between my legs and onto the floor and then the blood smudged over his clothes, so he stood up and he used my knickers to wipe the blood from his clothes. My belly was still hurting me, but at least I could breathe again and, as he moved away from me, I began to cry; he looked down at me and then he stood me up and he put my knickers back on me.
God, when I think of it, it makes me feel so sick. The dirty bastard, how could he do that to me and think that it was ok and as if it was nothing at all? I mean I was only four years old and he was fifteen, and when he had finished with me and he was carrying me back to my bedroom, he tripped on the hallway carpet, but he was able to stop himself from falling over and he said sorry to me for tripping and almost dropping me onto the floor. I was in a lot of pain and it was as if my belly was on fire and my legs hurt from him bending me into odd positions and from him trying to have sex with me. I was still crying when he put me back into my bed, but he didn’t care, he just turned around, walked away and closed my bedroom door as he left the room. God, what he had done to me was so sick.
And when I got up the next morning and I tried to tell mum what had happened to me the night before, she never said a word, not a thing, nothing about the blood on my clothes or on the carpet. She just took my bloodstained knickers off me and hand-washed them in the kitchen sink with washing-up liquid and then she handed them back to me and that was it. ‘All done.’
I blame my mum for what went on. She could have stopped a lot of the abuse by kicking my step dad Jim out of the house in the first place and by sticking up for us kids, but she never did and, as far as she was concerned, her man came first before her kids. Yet Jim treated her like shit and he would push her around all of the time and have sex with her in front of us whenever he felt like it, and she seemed to like it as she always had a smile on her face.
And when they both got drunk, it was even worse. He would brutally hit and rape her and she would never try to stop him, and he would have sex with her whenever and wherever he felt like it; so to the older kids in the family, sex was nothing at all and abusing each other was the normal thing to do. Just like the adults had done to each other.
The only thing is that it wasn’t just my brother Paul who was mentally and physically abusing me back then, it was almost all of the adults around me that were abusing me in some way or another. There were just three of us little kids living with mum back then and we had nobody to protect us, not even our own mother, so all the adults around us had plenty of time and opportunities to abuse us and they did. There was just my big sister Daisy who was only five years old and my little brother Simon who was two and myself, all looking after each other, and we had no one else to help us.
The rest of the kids, the bigger ones, mostly boys, lived in squats and used to walk around the streets all day doing nothing. They would only come around to mum’s for food or money; otherwise, you wouldn’t see them unless they had caused trouble and needed somewhere to hide from the police. It’s terrible to think that mum had eleven kids in total, all doing whatever they wanted, and no one ever did a thing to help us. We never went to school and even at the age of four I was allowed to walk around the streets every day with only Simon, my baby brother, and Daisy, my sister, for company and protection.
We would play outside in the streets for the whole day with nothing to eat or drink, and we were always dressed in the flimsiest of clothes and we never had shoes on our feet, only socks. We would run around outside the flats of the council estate that we lived on and we would look through the rubbish bags left outside the bin rooms for something to play with or eat. We never knew what it was that we were playing with or eating from the bags; we just grabbed the things that we found interesting and then we ran off with them, as anything was better than having nothing at all. If it was wet, sticky or colourful, then it was good; and if we could suck, chew or play with it, even better.
God, I feel sick now thinking about it, but it was the same thing every day and the normal thing for us to do because our mum hardly ever did a thing for us. So whenever we went out, we went looking for something to eat first and then we would go and play around the rubbish shoots of the big council blocks, slamming the fire doors on each floor of the building and trying to make as much noise as we possibly could. The sound from the doors slamming was so loud that it would echo throughout the building and shake the panes of glass in the doors and windows of the hallways, and then people would come out of their flats and shout at us while they chased us out of the building. God, it was so good back then and it was about the only fun we ever had together, but we didn’t know any better and it wasn’t our fault as no one was looking after us or teaching us the difference between right and wrong.
Then one day, when Daisy, Simon and I went into one of the buildings to play games, a tall black man was standing by one of the rubbish shoot rooms that we used to play in and he looked angry. We looked over at him and we could see that he had one of his hands down the front of his trousers and he was moving his hand around inside his underpants and he was doing something to himself, and in his other hand he was waving a packet of biscuits at us. He looked like he was waiting for someone, so we stopped playing and we turned around to go back outside, but as we walked away he shouted for us to stop and he told us that he had food in the shoot room and the food was all for us.
He said that he wanted us to go into the shoot room with him to get the food, so we walked towards him and as we got to the shoot room door he smiled and we walked in, and then we all stood still and looked up at him, waiting for the food. But there was no food, nothing but rubbish, and then the man leaned over our heads and he pushed the door closed behind us and held the door shut with one arm. He then looked down at us and he began to say something to us, but my sister Daisy grabbed Simon and me, and she shouted, ‘Quick, run.’ So I screamed as loud as I could and I began pulling at the door and as the man let the door go I pulled the door open and we all ran out of the shoot room as fast as we could, and Daisy and I screamed at each other to run. We knew what he wanted; it was the same thing that my older brother Paul had done to me many times before, back at mum’s flat when she was out, and it wasn’t nice.
Still holding each other’s hands, the three of us ran out of the building and we ran straight out into the road, all falling over and all getting cuts on our knees and faces at the same time. We got up off the road and we headed back to mum’s. Our clothes were dirty and I was shaking when we got back to the flat, but nobody gave a damn. Mum and Jim never once asked us what we had been doing all day or if we were ok, so we just walked straight past them and into our bedroom and we all sat on the bed.
Our bed was big and all three of us had to share it, but we loved it, as it was big enough for all of us to sleep on together. Simon, Daisy and I were exhausted, so we cuddled up together and you couldn’t tell whose arms or legs were whose; we felt very safe and happy on the bed together and we stayed in a big pile on the bed until we got our breath back. And once relaxed, we began to laugh and giggle to each other because we had got away from the bad black man and then we fell asleep on the bed, dirty but happy.
The next day would be the same as all the others, with mum’s first words of the morning to us indicating that she wanted us to get out of the flat, and then she would leave us on our own for the whole day, to fend for ourselves as usual. It didn’t matter to her if it was winter or summer, raining or baking hot, it just didn’t matter to her at all, so long as we all got out of her way for the whole day. But we never went back to the shoot room again. Sometimes while out playing, we would bump into our older brothers and sisters, as they walked along the streets of the council estate we lived on, and we would try to tag along with them, but they would tell us to fuck off and to go pester someone else. And our brief encounter with them would end with them calling us little shit heads and stuff like that, until we left them alone. You never forget something like that and I think it will stay with me for the rest of my life, because when someone hurts you, you never forget it.
Some days, people in the streets would stop us and ask us if we ever went to school or if we had a mummy or a daddy, and then they would give us money and sweets, but we never knew anything about school so we just ran off laughing at them. To us, it was all just fun and games, and running from people whom we didn’t know was what we did best and we would run as fast as we could to get away from them.
Then one day, while walking home, an old woman stopped us. ‘Hello, children’, she said. ‘Can you help me? I have locked myself out of my flat and I cannot get back in, but perhaps one of you children could put your little arms through the letterbox and open the door for me from the inside.’ I looked at Daisy and she looked back at me, I couldn’t wait to do it and I shouted, ‘I will do it’, and quickly, without another word, I put my arm through the letterbox and pulled on the handle inside and the door swung inwards, with me still hanging on to it with my arm sticking through the letterbox. ‘Thank you’, she said, then she told us to wait while she went inside to get something, so we waited by the open door and I tried to have a look inside her flat; but before I had a chance to see inside, the old woman came out of the flat and handed us a packet of chocolate buttons each. ‘Thank you’, she said, and then she went back inside and closed the door.
We felt so happy to have chocolate buttons and I can still remember the feeling I had to this day. From that day on, each time we walked past the old woman’s flat, she would be standing at her door waiting for us to come along. It was as if she knew we were coming and she would say the same thing to us about locking herself out, and each time I would put my arm through the letterbox and open the door for her and she would then give us some sweets to say thank you.
Now when I think back to it, I know that she had planned it that way and it was her way of helping us without us knowing what she was doing. We couldn’t always run away from the bad things around us and sometimes we just had to take whatever came our way, like having a bath. It might sound simple enough and it can even be a fun time for kids, but taking your clothes off in our house was like throwing meat to the lions.
I could never take a bath on my own or with my sister Daisy or brother Simon, as Jim’s rule was that we all had to have a bath one at a time. And I always wanted mum to bathe me, but Jim wouldn’t allow it and he always insisted that he bathed me on my own and always with the bathroom door shut. And mum would never try to stop him or come into the bathroom, because she knew precisely what he was doing and she would just let him bathe me just to keep him happy.
Most evenings, it would start with Jim coming home from the pub drunk; he would grab me by the arm and tell me to get into the bathroom and to wait for him. Then he would follow me into the bathroom, strip me naked and make me stand in front of him while he filled the bathtub up with cold water. I would be standing there naked and shivering from the cold of the room, but I would not move an inch for fear of him hitting me, and once the bath was full of cold water he would pick me up. But he would always grab me from between my legs with one hand while he held me steady around my neck with the other hand. Then he would push and poke his fingers in-between my legs, fondling me at the same time as he tightened his grip around my neck and I felt like he could have strangled me within a second; I would stay as stiff as a board and I would never move an inch just in case he hurt me.
Then he would slowly lower me into the bath, making sure that he had plenty of time to touch me between my legs with his fingers as he did so. I didn’t like what he was doing and he always hurt me with his fingers, but I said nothing and once I was in the bath he would let me go. He would then get down on his knees next to the bath and once he was in position next to me, he would undo his trousers and put one of his hands down between his legs and then he would position his other hand on top of my head.
And when he was ready, he would grab me by my hair and then he would push and pull my head up and down, in and out of the water whilst he played with himself while next to the bath. And somehow I knew he was wanking himself off at the same time as he forced my head under the water, and it was as if both his hands were moving at the same time and speed, getting faster and faster all of the time until he would finish. And during the whole time, he had a look on his face that would have wiped the grin off almost any adult’s face, apart from my mum’s. She knew exactly what he was up to and I think that if playing around with me kept him happy, then she was happy too. No matter what the emotional cost was to me, it just did not matter to her and she would never try to stop him from abusing me.
Then after a while, things began to get worse for Daisy, Simon and me, as mum became pregnant again, but this time she was pregnant from him, Jim; and as her belly began to grow, I could tell that Jim hated her for being pregnant. Because he started to kick and push her around even more than he usually did, and she even told me that he was trying to get rid of the baby out of her belly by hurting her, because he didn’t want the baby, as it wasn’t his. For the next few weeks, Jim made everyone’s life hell, and during that time mum’s belly grew even bigger and Jim told mum that if she wanted to keep the baby, then she would have to get rid of us little kids because his baby came first. He said that he didn’t have the money to keep all of us, so we had to go; and having us around was now causing them both problems. No matter what we did, we couldn’t do anything right; and even when we were good kids and never caused any trouble, Jim would still find some way of treating us nasty and upsetting us.
Like when he would come into our bedroom in the middle of the night and wake us all up just so that he could put a spoonful of mustard into our mouths. Mum would be standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at us with her arms crossed, and she would be smiling as if it was a good thing that he was doing to us. Sometimes we would try to keep our mouths shut, but he was too strong and he would force our mouths open and make us swallow the mustard without us making a fuss. Because if we did complain and make a big fuss, he would just make it worse for us, and he would beat and hit us into swallowing the mustard. Then he would add an extra spoonful for the trouble we had caused him, so most nights we would just swallow the mustard the first time so that he would go away and leave us alone and allow us to go back to sleep.
The same thing would happen to us almost every night until one night, after drinking too much alcohol, Jim kicked mum so hard that she started to bleed from between her legs and she had to be rushed into hospital, so that the doctors could take the baby out of her belly before she lost it. However, when she got to the hospital everything was ok, she was fine and she gave birth naturally to a baby boy. Once mum returned home with the new baby, she didn’t have much time for us kids anymore, so she arranged for one of our older sisters, Tracy, to occasionally come around to the house and take us kids out for the day. Tracy would pick us up early and then she would let us play around in the streets all day, near the flat that she was living in with her boyfriend, Fred.
Tracy was only seventeen and Fred, her boyfriend, was twenty-three, and they had come over to London from Ireland about a year earlier, just after she and Fred met. At first, I thought that Fred was a nice man, as he would never say or do anything wrong while my sister Tracy was around, and some days, while Tracy was looking after us, they would take us out to the park for the day and Fred would play games with us. He would push us on the swings and he would run around playing chase with us, acting just as a child would. Then, after leaving the park, he would buy us sweets and give us rides on his back while we walked back to the flat and we would always have a lot of fun playing with him, as he acted just like us, and we were getting more attention from him than we ever got back at mum’s.
Then one day, Tracy told me that she was going to leave Fred to baby-sit me on his own while she took Daisy and Simon off to the park with her. I thought it was a bit strange and unfair that I was not going with them, so I asked Tracy if I could go, but she said no and she said that I had to stay with Fred until she came back. Then she smiled at Fred and me as she left, leaving me all alone in the flat with Fred.
It felt like hours sitting and waiting for them all to come back and, for most of the time, Fred left me all alone in the living room just sitting and waiting, but then Fred must have got bored because he came and sat down next to me and he began playing games with me. Then, after a while, he put me on his back and he gave me a ride around the living room, bouncing me up and down and shaking me from side to side until I fell off onto the floor and then he tickled me until I begged him to stop. But after a while, he said that we had to stop as it was getting late and he made a bed up in the living room for me to sleep on. He said that it was late and he told me to go over to the bed, to lie down on it and to stay there, so I did; and as I lay down, I gave him a kiss goodnight on the side of his face and he went off into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. I looked around and then I curled up into a ball on my little bed and wished for Simon and Daisy to come back.
But after a couple of minutes, Fred’s bedroom door opened and he came back out of the bedroom. I looked over at him and I could see that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He walked straight over towards me and then he looked down at me and, within a second, he bent over and picked me up out of the little bed that he had made for me on the living room floor. Then he carried me in his arms towards his bedroom, I wriggled around and I tried to get up out of his arms, but he held me tight around my legs and my back until he got into the bedroom with me.
Then he laid me down on his bed and climbed over me; I looked up at him and I watched him as he moved around the bed, and then he lay down on the bed next to me and he positioned himself as close to me as he possibly could. I knew something was wrong and I started to shake with fright and I told Fred that I wanted to get up, but as I turned and moved away from him, he grabbed me and pushed me back onto the bed and then he smiled at me.
Then he put one of his hands down between his legs and he began to touch himself while he continued looking over at me. I asked him what he was doing and he told me that it was good for him and that it felt nice, and then he said that his dick was a lollypop and that I should put it in my mouth and suck it for him because it was nice for both of us. I said no, I said that it was not a lollypop and I told him that I wanted to go back into the other room. But as I tried to get up and off the bed, he grabbed me again and pulled me closer to him and he forced my head over his dick and he told me to open my mouth and to suck it for him. I said no and I tried to wriggle away from him, but he held me tight around my head and, with all his strength, he pushed my face next to his dick and he kept pushing me closer until his dick touched my mouth. I struggled and twisted my head to one side to get away from him, but he grabbed me even tighter around my head and then he pushed my head down hard and his dick went into my mouth.
I didn’t want to do it and I tried to move my head away from him, but he grabbed me even tighter around my head and neck with both hands, while he told me to suck his dick for him. I said no, but he was holding my head so tight that I could feel the pressure in my head build up as he squashed my skull with both hands and, as I tried to move my head away from him, he just kept moving my head up and down, faster and faster. I had no control over what he was doing to me, I coughed and choked a lot, but it didn’t seem to bother him and he just carried on, moving my head up and down on his dick for a few more seconds until he had finished with me.
Then he pushed me over to the other side of the bed and he told me that it was enough and then he handed me a proper lollypop that he grabbed from a glass bowl that was sitting on a cupboard next to the bed. And it looked like he had it all set up in advance and had planed the whole thing, then he told me not to tell anyone about our little secret and that if I was a good little girl for him, he would buy me lots of sweets and toys to play with. I began to cry and I felt sick, but he didn’t care and he just put his clothes back on, and then he told me to go back into the living room and to get back into my bed and to be a good girl for him and to be quiet.
I did what he said, but I was upset by what he had just done to me, I was shaking, my belly felt sick and I had a bad pain in my head that wouldn’t go away and I wanted to go home. Then Tracy came back with Daisy and Simon and, as she walked into the living room, she walked over towards me and looked down at me and she patted me on the head. She then smiled as she put Simon and Daisy in the bed next to me and then she walked over to the bedroom that Fred was in; and as she walked into the bedroom, she smiled and closed the door behind her. I soon fell asleep, cuddling into Simon, and when I woke up the next morning, Daisy looked over at me and we said nothing. I couldn’t wait to go back home to mum’s house.
CHAPTER 2
Off to See Daddy in Ireland
After about six months of us going around to Tracy’s flat and Fred constantly molesting me, mum told me that I couldn’t go there anymore because Tracy was pregnant and she was going to have a baby. Mum said that Tracy had no more time for me and she could not look after me anymore. God, I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it; I was finally getting away from Fred. However, it wasn’t long before mum decided that she too could not look after me, so she said that she had decided to send all three of us little kids back to our real dad, who lived in Ireland.