The Girl Nobody Wants: A Shocking True Story of Child Abuse in Ireland

by Lily O'Brien

  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 a
nd 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.