All My Fault: The True Story of a Sadistic Father and a Little Girl Left Destroyed

by Audrey Delaney

  After we broke up, I started hanging around with my old friends on the north side of Dublin again. I got more and more heavily into drugs. I started dating unsavoury types, simply because they liked the same thing as me—drugs. We smoked hash, popped pills and drank and drank. I still had a bit of a head on my shoulders but being out of it meant you didn’t have to think, feel or answer awkward questions. I had become very adept at blocking out the abuse, even to the point where I was able to have sexual relationships without thinking of my da. When I was 17, I got engaged to a guy who Da didn’t approve of. This made it all the more interesting, but it wasn’t to last. It was just another way of rebelling as far as I was concerned.

  I didn’t carry the emotions of the past with these sexual experiences, because at this stage I had almost forgotten my past. I didn’t remember anymore; I had pushed it out of my head. I still had the emptiness, the pain, and the mental torture that I couldn’t explain. But drinking and taking drugs solved that one for me. They allowed me to function for a while.

  *

  I decided to leave Burgerland when I was still 16. After listening to all the students there going on about their studies, I realised they had a future and I didn’t. I loved working there and part of me hated leaving but I knew I had to do something with my life.

  I enrolled in a full-time IT course with Anco on the Jamestown Road in Finglas. Computers were just getting popular around that time. I learned word processing, electronics and programming. It was all very new to me though and to be honest I hadn’t a clue about what I was doing. I sat in on the electronics class all right but most of it went over my head. I loved the word processing though.

  That course was one of the best things I ever did and it certainly stood to me in the future. You got a small training fee for attending too—it wasn’t a full wage but it was enough to get by on. I used the money to go on and do an evening typing class. I put a lot of effort into the typing and bought myself a heavy steel typewriter to practise on in the evenings. So during the week I focused on my studies and at the weekends I let my hair down and went mad.

  I was still trying to block out memories of the abuse but the more I did this the more emotional and angry I got. When I wasn’t practising for my course, I was out of my head on drugs.

  I thought that I had managed to put all the abuse behind me and I was now a normal, functioning young adult who had taken charge of her life. The demons were never too far away, though, and my mask would slip when I least expected it.

  One of my supervisors in the course asked me several times if I was all right, or if I needed to talk. I had no idea why he was asking me this. Was he referring to the way I sometimes cried in front of people in the class? Or did he notice how out of it I sometimes was? I always had a made-up story at hand to justify my tears. But then more questions were asked and cracks would begin to appear in my story. The supervisor was genuinely concerned. But I didn’t even know what was wrong with me myself, so how could I tell him.

  I was just trying to lose myself in my relationships so that I wouldn’t have to face up to my own problems.

  By now I had pushed everything that happened with Da so far to the back of my mind that it was like I no longer had a past. I had blanked it all out. I still had the empty feeling I could never explain but drink and drugs solved that one for me. So long as I had a constant supply of both, I could function.

  *

  I finished up my typing course and got a job as a receptionist in a gym on Eden Quay in Dublin. I was naturally well-mannered and polite so customer service came easy to me. I took the job very seriously and I found myself plunged into a completely different world to the one I had previously been living in. The gym attracted people from all walks of life. You had shop assistants, students, guards, builders, solicitors, doctors, professors—a whole cross-section of society. But when people got changed into their gym gear, they all looked the very same to me.

  I discovered that I was excellent at sales and it wasn’t long before I was earning good commission on top of a decent wage. Slowly but surely, my lifestyle was changing. I started socialising with people from work and I found that it was nice to have nights out that didn’t involve drugs. It made me realise that I’d had enough of them. Before I’d started working in the gym, I’d used drugs the whole time.

  Around the same time, my manager Joseph used to walk me to the bus stop every evening. Maybe it was the chivalry and the fact that I was feeling so vulnerable at the time but I found myself developing feelings for him. It was a very physical attraction. He would only have to walk by me in the corridor and sparks would fly. He made it clear that he felt the same way and we went on a few dates.

  *

  But I spent my early twenties feeling exposed and raw. I felt like the bubbly me that I’d once been able to present to the world was fading away and now my dark inner feelings were on show.

  Around this time, a friend of mine told me she was depressed and was going to see a psychiatrist. My overwhelming feeling was one of jealousy, which might sound strange. I was jealous that someone could go inside her head and fix it. I wished so badly that I could get someone to do that for me. I didn’t know how to go about it, though, and I was too embarrassed to ask my friend. I thought it would be so simple. A quack would show you a few blobs on the page, you would tell him what you thought of it, and he would ask you some more questions, maybe hypnotise you. Then he would make a diagnosis and you would be cured.

  But I was far from cured. In reality, I became agoraphobic. Without realising it, a desperation to hide away from the world crept up on me and I found myself withdrawing into a shell once more. I stopped seeing my friends and family. The black thoughts had taken over. The louder the thoughts became, the more I turned to drugs to quieten them. I had gotten to the stage where alcohol alone wasn’t enough to take the pain away. It was just the appetiser before the real tranquilliser. So I used my contacts to get my hands on whatever I could—hash, ecstasy, speed, coke. I smoked heroin too but I stopped short of doing it the dirty way, as I called it, which was using it intravenously. I used anything I could get my hands on to escape my thoughts.

  I never felt like I was a junkie though. I was an addict all right but I still had my principles. I never slept with anyone to get money for drugs, never robbed to get them and never got behind the wheel of a car with drugs in my system. So to this day, I always say that I wasn’t a ‘junkie junkie’ – just a junkie. It’s my own personal thin line maybe—but it makes me feel better.

  Chapter Nine

  I fell for Joseph, my manager in the gym, in a big way. I’d only been seeing Joseph a short while when our relationship was tested by an emotional rollercoaster. I found out that my beloved ex-boyfriend Billy had been killed in a crash. He’d been riding his mod scooter with a friend when a van came crashing into them. His neck was broken and he died instantly.

  Billy’s sister rang me at work to tell me the bad news and when I hung up the phone my body was like jelly I was shaking so much. Billy had been my first love and I’d never stopped loving him—I just hadn’t been able for the sexual side of the relationship at the time. So I’d tucked my feelings for him away in a corner of my heart and broke it off thinking I was saving myself from future heartbreak.

  Joseph drove me to the funeral. He must have suspected that I still had feelings for my dear lost Billy but he never once asked me any questions. He just held my hand throughout and let me know I wasn’t alone.

  Billy’s family welcomed me with open arms. They even took me in the head funeral car and we all just held one another and bawled our eyes out.

  The church was thronged. People were spilling out on to the streets. I cried and I cried throughout the funeral ceremony. I couldn’t imagine how terrible his parents must have been feeling if I felt this bad. They played ‘My Girl’ during the Mass—mine and Billy’s song—and that just made the waterworks ten times worse.

  I lost days after the funeral. I could
n’t work; I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. I just wandered around in a confused daze, remembering all the good times I’d had with Billy and hating myself for screwing it all up in the end.

  I blamed myself.

  Da didn’t figure in the equation at all ’cause at this stage I was still blocking the abuse out. I didn’t have a past as far as I was concerned.

  My life had been all over the place the last few months. Between changing jobs, Billy dying and meeting Joseph. The only constant in all of this was the empty feeling that just wouldn’t go away. There was something wrong with me. I knew that much for sure. I was different. I just didn’t know how. I started getting flashbacks of my childhood. Although I was fairly good at suppressing the memories, I’ve learnt that you can’t bury them forever.

  After Billy’s funeral, Joseph became the glue holding me together. My feelings for him grew stronger the more I got to know him. He was 26 and had recently separated from his wife, with whom he had two little girls. When Da heard this he went mental and I had to listen to lectures on what a disgrace I was for dating a married man. He even got Joseph on his own one evening and tried to convince him to walk away from me. And it wasn’t just Da who disagreed with the relationship—some of my friends had their tuppence worth to give too. Eventually, me and Joseph became an official couple against the wishes of everyone. I even had to leave my job in the gym.

  *

  One day when I was working in an office, I had a severe attack of flashbacks. I felt my throat tighten. I couldn’t deal with it. At lunchtime when no one was around, I rang the Rape Crisis Centre, asking if I could speak to someone in confidence. The person who answered the phone put me on hold for a moment, and then asked if I could give them a number so they could ring me back. Like I was gonna! I didn’t even know what to say. I just hung up and pushed it out of my mind for years, blocking it out again.

  I drifted from job to job after that, trying to find somewhere I could grow some roots. The one thing I knew I was good at though—no matter what the area—was sales. So myself and Joseph decided to combine our skills. He was a world-class power lifter and a fabricator by trade, with a sideline in making gym equipment for other businesses, I was great at sales and we both had experience in the gym industry, so why not try and open up our own gym? We had loads of clients between us who liked us and who we knew would follow us. All we needed was some business smarts and someone to help with the finances. Joseph thought that it would be a great idea to get Da involved in it. He thought it would help build some bridges between the two of them and also Da would obviously provide the missing business acumen. I didn’t like the idea but I had no good reason to give Joseph. I had no good reason to give myself. So it all went ahead. We took out loans and started up a toning table and beauty salon in Lucan in west Dublin. Around the same time we opened the business, Joseph and I bought a house in Celbridge in County Kildare. It was a good-size, red-brick bungalow with a large garden. But it was the two dogs we got rather than the house that had me excited. We got a Greyhound/Labrador cross-breed who I named Frisky, after a horse I’d once backed that had won big, and a small hairy Terrier cross who I named Peanut. He was the liveliest and funniest dog I ever saw. The dogs completed the house for me—it felt like we were one big happy family. All that was missing was the white-picket fence.

  When the centre first opened, Joseph got me an old mustard-coloured Allegro car. He had it sprayed pink and gave it to me as a present. I had never had a driving lesson in my life. The only driving I had ever done was sitting behind the wheel of cars robbed by my mates or else ‘borrowed’ from someone’s Ma or Da. But I loved driving. Doing handbrake turns and donuts in quiet open areas was the best buzz ever. I’m not proud of these things now but at the time I didn’t understand what other people got so worked up about. To me, it was an adrenalin rush and a bit of fun. I was the only girl brave enough to get involved in the driving side of things; the other girls just sat in the back and came along for the spin.

  A couple of weeks after Joseph presented me with the car, we had one of our first big rows. I can’t remember what it was about now, I just remember the great escape the car allowed me. I had just gotten my provisional license and paid the insurance and I couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. I jumped into my pink Allegro and off I went. I could speed away from all my troubles just like that. It was a great feeling. Like the costume I wore in the pantomime or the Burgerland fries costume, the car allowed me to hide from people. I had a windscreen to shield me. I could just whiz by people and get to where I wanted to go without having to stop and talk and risk them catching a glimpse of my dirty soul.

  *

  Even though me and Joseph were playing happy families, I hadn’t abandoned my peculiar morning rituals. I still got up every morning and fetched my bowl and spoon, poured the cereal, and stirred and ate it in the exact same manner as I’d been doing since I was a child. I couldn’t leave the house if this ritual hadn’t been followed to perfection. Joseph found it a little strange and he used to joke about it with his mates but I think in a way he found it a little endearing.

  My health was also as up and down as always and the crazy hours I was working in the gym weren’t helping matters. I worked 12-hour days. I was admitted to hospital at one stage with a painful, icy feeling in my left arm. The doctors told me that the stress of my job was tiring out my heart. They took me off the pill and told me to cut back on work but things were just starting to take off so there was no chance of that. I didn’t pay too much attention anyway. Aches and pains, doctors and nurses—they had all become like wallpaper in my life to the point that I no longer took much notice of them. I was already hooked on medicines at this stage, both prescribed and illegal. I needed Valium on a regular basis and also continued to take sleeping pills. It was the only way I could hope to get any sleep at night. Taking tablets and medication had also become part of my daily routine, and it would take many years before I even tried to address this problem.

  I also started getting major migraines around this time that seemed to coincide with Da being present. The minute he walked into the same room as me, I tensed up. The pressure inside my head was terrible. I hated him being around. I found the way he acted around women humiliating; the way he leered at them and used any excuse to be all touchy-feely.

  I remember one day Da and Joseph were in the office discussing something. I just nipped in for a second to grab something from one of the cupboards when this overwhelming wave of emotions washed over me. It was like all the feelings I’d been trying to quash got swept into a tornado and it was now bulldozing through me at break-neck speed. I don’t know how else to describe it. Black thoughts had come dislodged in my head. I tried to push them to the back of my mind but next thing I knew everything went black. I had fainted. I had fallen flat on my face in front of Da and Joseph. When I came to, I told them I’d been feeling a little dizzy but it was nothing to worry about.

  *

  It didn’t take long for cracks to appear in mine and Joseph’s relationship. I still loved him and knew he loved me, but we started rowing a lot.

  In the beginning, we had the sweetest relationship ever, but in time things started to go wrong between us. It was no one’s fault; it was just something that happened.

  So our home life was missing a lot more than the white-picket fence by now. But I kept telling myself it was nothing I couldn’t handle. And if things ever did get to be too much, sure I could always just call up a mate and get them to hook me up with something to get me out of my head.

  After our first year in business, we were doing well so we decided to extend the gym using equipment Joseph had been working on. We added a sauna and showers to the works, so now we had the toning tables, a beauty salon and a mixed gym.

  In our third year, the interest rates on mortgages and loans doubled and we got hit badly. Money was tight everywhere and the clients had to put their own priorities first; their gym membership was way down their l
ist of concerns. So we started losing customers fast. Our loans were outstanding and our own mortgage on the house in Celbridge went through the roof.

  It was all coming tumbling down.

  We were in the middle of a financial crisis and we were all financially exposed. It got to the stage where we had no choice but to liquidate the gym. We were completely broke. We just about had a roof over our heads but the electricity in the house had been cut off and we didn’t even have any heating.

  The pressure on us was overwhelming. I tried everything to escape from reality. When Joseph went out with friends, I usually took the dogs with me for company and escaped to my car. I’d put the radio on full blast just so I wouldn’t be able to hear my own thoughts; whispering voices that spread like smoke in my mind and threatened to blot out everything if I turned off the music and listened to what they had to say.

  For most of my life, everyone had thought of me as smiley, bubbly, happy-go-lucky Audrey. Nobody knew the real me. On the outside, I had a great sense of humour and I loved a laugh. But the sadness was always lurking on the inside, threatening to brim over and spoil everything. I used to think that the happy me the rest of the world saw was just a lie and not the real me. But I now know that it was the sad, confused and empty me that should never have existed. During my late teens and early adulthood, any real happiness I felt had to be drug induced. I couldn’t fall asleep without taking pills and when I did finally nod off, I would be hopping all over the bed with nightmares. I’d never remember the details of the dreams the next morning but I’d be left with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.