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

by Lily O'Brien

  But to my shock, she just smiled at me and she totally dismissed what I had said to her, as if I was telling her a joke, and Jim just laughed at me as mum took his side and told me to go away and to stop being stupid. I shouted at her and then I asked her how he got into my room as I had locked my bedroom door from the inside; but all she could do was smile and shrug her shoulders at me, while she ate a slice of toast. Shivers went down my spine and I felt like I wanted to cry. I was so upset that I just turned around and left the room, then I picked up my coat and I left the house without saying another word to them both.

  My belly was empty and I was hungry, but I didn’t want to stay in the house any longer. So I walked along the street and after a while I found myself walking towards my sister Tracy’s house, and all the time I was thinking about how bad things were and I was wondering if everybody in the world was as bad as Jim, Fred and my mum. Then as I walked along the pavement, I heard someone shout my name from a distance; and as I turned around, I could see that it was Simon and he was running as fast as he could to catch up with me. I had forgotten all about him, I thought he was still asleep at mum’s house; but as he caught up with me, he said that he had heard everything that I had said to mum and he said that he wanted to spend the day with me. ‘Ok,’ I said, ‘but first I need to find a local doctor’s surgery, as I have a bad pain in my head that won’t go away,’ and then we both went off looking for a doctor’s surgery.

  But it wasn’t long before we found ourselves playing around in Queens Park underground station. We had never been in an underground station on our own before, so we decided to have a bit of fun and we went down the escalator and then we got on an underground train. We never intended to go far and the train was very shaky; so after only four stops, we decided to get off and head back, but when we looked around we found ourselves back in Paddington train station and we knew where we were. So we decided to explore the station, and after a while, we found the biggest set of escalators that we had ever seen and we went up and down them for about two hours, but then we became bored with them. So we thought it would be fun to slide down the metal panels that went down the middle of the escalators, from the top all the way down to the bottom.

  I was so excited that I couldn’t wait to slide down them and we both scrambled and pushed at each other as we climbed on to the top of the escalator casings. And when we reached the top, we both laughed and we shouted at everyone to get out of the way, as we began sliding down the stainless steel panels. Simon went first and I grabbed hold of his jumper, and as we slid down I began to spin out of control, and it was great, I had never felt anything like it before.

  Then we began to go faster and faster and we realised that we couldn’t stop. I screamed with excitement as I loved every second of it; but as we hit the last panel, I flew up into the air and two workers just managed to catch me by my legs as I flew through the air, and they just managed to break my fall before I hit the floor. Then as they put me down, they asked me if I was ok, and I just laughed at them as I walked off. I could see Simon, he was lying on the floor and he was laughing to himself, and then he asked me if I wanted to do it again and I said yes. So we just turned around and ran up to the top of the escalator and we did it all over again; we spent the next few hours using the escalator panels as a slide, and by the time we left the underground station we were as black as coal from the dirt in the station.

  We headed back towards mum’s, but I said that I was not going in; and as I walked away, I told Simon that I would be back for him in the morning, and then I went off looking for a doctor again and I soon found one. I went inside and, after talking to the receptionist, I managed to get an appointment for the next morning to see the doctor, so I left the doctor’s and I walked off towards Tracy’s house. As I walked up towards the front door, I could see that someone was peaking through the living room curtains at me. I knocked on the door and, within a second, Fred opened the door and said ‘Hi’. I looked up at him, but I couldn’t smile at him and I didn’t even want to look him in the face, but I had to and I asked him if my sister was in and he said yes. I walked in past him, I went through into the kitchen, and she was standing next to the sink washing some vegetables. I didn’t want to tell her about what had happened earlier at mum’s house, so I just said hi, and we spent the rest of the day talking and cleaning around the house.

  But all I could really do was think about what had happened to me earlier at mum’s house and I knew I did not want to go back to mum’s ever again. When evening came, I made a couple of excuses so I could hang around and I kept making excuses until it got too late for me to head back to mum’s. And then Tracy asked me if I would like to stay for the night and I said yes, thanks, and we spent the rest of the evening watching TV; then Tracy said that I could sleep on the couch and then Fred and her went off to bed.

  But I couldn’t sleep and I felt uncomfortable on the couch, so I walked up the stairs and went to the toilet; but as I came out of the toilet, Fred was standing in the hall waiting for me. And within a second, he thrust both of his arms out and grabbed me by my breasts; and within an instant, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got nowhere to go, to get away from him,’ and then I thought to myself that everyone around me was a pervert. I had left my mother’s house because of one pervert and now I am here with another one standing in front of me.

  I pushed him away as hard as I could and then I ran down the stairs and out of the house and I headed back towards mum’s house, hoping that everyone would be asleep by the time I got back; and they were, so I went straight up to my bedroom and I locked my door. Then I checked the window, making sure that it opened just in case I had to use it to escape from Jim; then I put a chair up against the bedroom door, so I would hear Jim as he pushed the door against the chair as he tried to get in. But nothing happened that night and the next morning, as I walked downstairs and into the kitchen, my mum said that some social workers were coming around to visit us, and they were going to give her some money for three new beds and a TV for us kids.

  I looked at her and I said that we have beds and a TV, but she said that we were going to take the old ones out of the house and hide them in the garden. That way, when the people arrive, they would see that we had none and then they would have to give her the money for new ones. Then she and Jim went about hiding everything out of sight and I just stood and watched them while they ran around. I shook my head from side to side in disbelief at what was going on and all they could do was laugh and talk about what they were going to do with the money when they would get it.

  Then as soon as they had finished hiding the beds and the TV, the social workers arrived and after walking around the house, they agreed that mum needed beds and they gave her £500 cash; and with that, she thanked them and she almost pushed them out of the door. Then once they had gone, she gave Jim £200 to keep him happy and he went out the door and off down to the pub to spend the money on drinks, and then mum spent the rest of the money on Christmas presents for the two children that she had with Jim, my step brothers.

  And the only reason she got the money in the first place was because of her lie that she needed to buy beds for us children who had just come over from Ireland. I could not take any more of it, she made me sick; so I went outside, looked around and found Simon sitting on the wall outside the house. After a couple of minutes, we both went off for a walk along the street and then I went off to my appointment at the doctor’s. As soon as I walked into the doctor’s office, I told the doctor that I had just come over from Ireland and that I needed some tablets for my head as I couldn’t cope with all the pressures around me, and to my amazement he said ok and he gave me a prescription for some pills. And that was it, it was that easy to get medication.

  And once I had taken some of the pills, my mind seemed to relax, things felt better and I felt more relaxed. Then I knew that I had to have the pills forever, or I wouldn’t be able to cope with my family and all their problems. I hated it at mum’s
house and I couldn’t take living there any longer, as I could no longer take Jim’s constant pestering and sexual advances towards me. It had now become so bad that whenever he walked past me he would push me up against a wall and whisper into my ear that he would leave me alone and stop bothering me if I had sex with him, just once. Just the look of his dirty old face was enough to make me feel sick; and each time he approached me, I would tell him to fuck off and then I would get out of his way before he tried to touch me.

  So I decided to try Tracy’s house again. But it wasn’t any better there either. I stayed at Tracy’s for a few nights, but every time Tracy wasn’t looking, Fred would try to grab or poke at me, trying his very best to touch me up. He would pull at my clothes or walk in on me while I was in the toilet. I just couldn’t get any peace from him. So I decided to go and live with one of my other sisters, Karen; she was only eighteen years old, but already she had a two-week-old baby girl, and she lived on the 12th floor of a tower block, not far from my mum’s house. And it was handy for me to stay close to my brother Simon and my sister Daisy.

  At first, everything was fine and Karen gave me the freedom of her flat; and for a while, I was happy. During the day, I used to give Karen a hand looking after her baby and it kept me occupied, but whenever anyone else came around to the flat, we would all end up arguing about who was going to look after the new baby. And it would always end up with Daisy, Simon and me, all sitting in a row and taking turns at looking after her. But then Jim began to come around to Karen’s flat looking for me, he would pound on the front door of her flat, demanding that I went back home with him. But Karen never let him in and I always hid from him until he gave up knocking and went away; and because he could not get at me, he began to turn his attention onto my brother Simon. But Simon was not having any of it. So, he also left mum’s house and he went to live with one of our older brothers, Kevin. Simon was only twelve and he needed a home, and Kevin was able to give him that home.

  After a while, things began to get a bit difficult for me at Karen’s, as she now had too many people coming and going every day; and because she had very little money to live on, looking after me was beginning to cause arguments between her and her partner. So I had no choice, I moved out and I went back to mum’s; but I hated being at mum’s, I never went to school and she never fed me. And I hated her for allowing Jim to touch me all the time. Even after me telling mum about him, she did nothing to stop him, and he never gave up; and almost every morning, when mum took my stepbrothers to school, Jim would come into my bedroom and try to touch me.

  Sometimes I would be awake and waiting for him to come up the stairs, and as he entered my bedroom, I would get up and call him a dirty pervert as I ran past him and out of the house. But on other days, I would still be asleep when he entered my room and I would be woken by him putting his dirty hands down the front of my knickers and from him shaking my bed because of him wanking beside it. I would sit up in my bed, I would call him all sorts of things and then I would get up and leave the house for a few hours until he went to work; then I would go back to the house, go back to bed and try to get some sleep.

  By now, I was sick of everything and I had had enough of Jim again. And I could not go to Tracy’s house because of Fred constantly touching me, so I decided to make myself a home in some bicycle sheds that were at the bottom of the building that Karen lived in. Karen had one of the sheds to keep some old junk in and she hardly ever used it, so she gave the keys to me and she said, ‘Do what you like with it’, and I did. The shed had a huge open space at the top of it that ran along the whole length of all the sheds and the space joined them all together. The space was for ventilation and it had chicken wire running across the front of it; and when I got up inside it, I was able to see through the wire and watch as people walked by the sheds. It looked a bit like a huge rabbit hutch that was ten feet above the ground and it was all mine.

  But I had nothing to put into my new home, so Karen and I went and stole a few scaffold boards from a builder’s yard and we laid the boards across the top of the shed’s walls, and I was able to cover the whole area with the boards and make a floor for myself. I even put some old carpet down on top of the boards, to stop stuff falling through the gaps between them and so that my knees wouldn’t hurt so much from crawling around on them.

  At first, it felt like fun, a bit like making a camp; but after a couple of weeks, the cold evenings began to creep in and Karen went back upstairs to her warm flat and she left me all alone. I began to feel nervous and I wanted to go with her. But I knew I had to stick it out, as nobody wanted me around; so in the evenings, I would climb up onto the carpet, curl up into a ball and try to sleep. But it was the middle of winter now and it was freezing cold, and I started to shake as I was freezing; so I got up and I swallowed a few pills that the doctor had given me. Hoping they would help me to sleep, as my only other option was to sleep in with the rubbish bins in the shoot room. And after a while, the pills did nothing for me, so I tried sleeping in the bin room; but rats were running around the floor, the room smelt, and every time someone threw rubbish down the shoot from the floors above, I could hear the rubbish get louder as it came flying toward me and it was horrible. Then when the rubbish crashed into the bins, it would send dust up into the air and I would have to hold my breath for a while, until all the dirt settled again.

  It was dirty, and I just couldn’t cope with it, so I left the bin room and I spent the rest of the night sleeping in the corner of one of the lifts, as it went up and down the building all night. In the morning, the lift got busy as people went to work, so I got out on Karen’s floor and I went and had some breakfast with her; then we both went out for the day and, as we walked around the streets, we hunted around for things to put into my shed-home. We found a mattress in a skip, and an old chest of drawers that someone had put outside the rubbish room; and later that day, Karen gave me some blankets and that was it. I had everything that I needed, and I was happy again.

  As I sat looking at all the things I had, Simon came around and we spent the rest of the day playing chase in the lifts. Simon would be in one lift and I would be in the other, and we spent the whole time going up and down the building, trying to catch each other as we stopped the lifts on different floors. We had never seen lifts until we came to London and they fascinated us; at first, we couldn’t understand how each time the lifts stopped and the doors opened we were on a different floor. And the people who lived in the building could not help but find us amusing, but we got used to all the people looking at us and we just carried on as if it was a fairground ride.

  I spent the next twelve months living above the sheds on my own; and during that time, I was my own boss, I did my very best to stay away from my mother’s house, so that Jim couldn’t touch me, and I also stayed away from Tracy’s, so that Fred couldn’t put his dirty hands on me too. However, I began to get a bit out of control and I started smoking cigarettes and then came the drugs. At first, I smoked weed, but then some older people got me to take cocaine. I tried to keep a distance from most of the drugs and I stopped using cocaine soon after I first took some. But after a while, I found myself addicted to sniffing glue and I was always getting as high as I could, by swallowing handfuls of painkillers that my doctor had prescribed for me. They were very strong painkillers that he had given me, and my addictions got so bad that most days I would openly walk around the streets out of my head.

  I also got addicted to the glue sniffing that I did and, during the day, I would walk around with a bag of glue literally stuck to my face; and most days, I would end up at Saint Mary’s hospital, Paddington, choking and unable to breathe because of the glue. At the time, I thought it was funny and I used to walk into the hospital with all my clothes stuck together and my face covered in glue, and I would tell the doctors that I was suffering from an asthma attack. But I would still have the tube of glue I used, stuck to my pocket and I would be laughing as they took care of me and used chemicals t
o un-stick my clothes.

  I was only fifteen and I was out of control, but eventually the hospital staff got so fed up with me doing the same thing day after day that they eventually called the police to me. And after a bit of help from all of them, I was able to stop what I was doing and I eventually sorted myself out. After the hospital got the police involved, the police realised that I had no one to look after me, and they found out about me living all on my own above the sheds under my sister’s block. But instead of them moving me on and pushing me onto the streets, or forcing me to go back home to my mum’s to be abused again, they decided that the best thing for me was for them to allow me to keep sleeping above the sheds, and to keep an eye on me. And every evening, the police would walk past the sheds to make sure I was ok and, as they walked past, they would just smile up at me as I looked down at them through the chicken wire; and then they would walk away, leaving me alone again.

  After a few months, Simon said that he wanted to stay above the sheds with me; he said that he no longer wanted to stay with our older brother Kevin at his house, as it was no fun anymore. I could tell that something was up with him, as lately he had become a little withdrawn and he was beginning to look unhappy. He was only thirteen years old and he was my baby brother and I loved him, so I said yes and we both went off to Kevin’s, to get his clothes. When we got there, Kevin wasn’t in and, within a couple of minutes, Simon ran in, grabbed his stuff and we left the house and headed back to my place.

  When we got back, we settled down for the night; but after a couple of hours, Kevin turned up and he was looking for Simon. Kevin looked up at us and he told Simon that he had to go back with him and that he wasn’t allowed to stay above the sheds with me. I looked at Simon and I told him that he didn’t have to go back with him, so he said, ‘No, I’m not going.’ Kevin went mad, he began shouting at both of us, calling us ungrateful little bastards, and then he walked away. Now I knew that something was definitely up with the both of them, but I left it at that and we both fell asleep.