Living With Evil by Cynthia Owen (ap literature book list txt) 📗

each other so much. Then that bastard would be shouting, “Get in here, now!”

‘I can see him now, pissing in the bucket then pulling me into his bed and pinning me against the wall. I can still smell the shit and drink all over him.

‘After he raped me, I’d scream and literally climb the walls, shouting out for help. He punched and kicked me, telling me to shut up, and if I escaped downstairs then Mammy, that wicked witch, would tell me, “Get back up those stairs. He’ll beat me or rape me if you don’t. Go on, if you don’t want your Mammy to die!” She was never a mammy to me. You were my real mammy, not her. I love you so much.’

I rocked Theresa gently in my arms and told her I was sure we would get justice one day. I had a top legal team behind me now, she would see.

I spoke the words bravely, but inside I was shattered.

Once again, I had left Simon struggling to juggle his work with running the home and, with a heavy heart, I returned to England.

How I wish I could turn the clock back and never have let go of Theresa. Within days of my leaving, she ended her life.

Just as Martin had done ten years earlier, Theresa banged a nail into a doorframe and hanged herself. She was just thirty-three-years-old.

The grief and feeling of loss was indescribable. Theresa left a thirty-five-page suicide note addressed to me.

It contained unbearably graphic accounts of how she and Michael were sexually abused by my father, with my mother’s blessing.

The heartbreaking note also held her last request. Theresa didn’t want my parents to see her dead. She was terrified of them being near her, even as she lay in her coffin, and she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the Irish sea at the pier at Dun Laoghaire, to make sure they never went near her again.

Martin had been buried in a family plot, and Theresa couldn’t bear the thought that one day my parents’ dead bodies would lay on top of hers. That’s how much they scared her.

I lay awake most nights, watching poor Simon fall slowly to sleep. How many more times did I have to burden him with my sorrows? We had three inquests to face now: Theresa’s, Michael’s and Noleen’s.

My mother and father stayed away from Theresa’s, thank God, but I was there to hear the coroner record that she had been sexually abused in childhood. It was a bittersweet victory.

Both of my parents attended Michael’s inquest in 2006. I hadn’t seen them in years, since I confronted them in the police station. They looked like frightening strangers to me. I was forty-four-years-old, but they made me feel nervous and insecure, like a scared little girl again.

My mother glared menacingly at me, spitting out a stream of lies and insults.

When I found the guts to glare back, she actually shouted: ‘I’ll fuckin’ stab her in a minute.’ The woman’s audacity was breathtaking.

Every fibre in my body tensed when my father took the stand. He was an old man by then, well into his seventies, and when he took off his jacket he had three dirty stains on the back of his blue sweater.

I gasped audibly. I felt so ashamed of him, and it plunged me straight back to the dreadful shame I experienced throughout my childhood, when I was scruffy and dirty and smelly like him.

I listened in horror as my parents tried to destroy Michael’s character, falsely accusing him of all sorts.

When I had my turn in the stand, I made sure the coroner heard the truth: Michael had been abused as a child. He was not on drugs, and he did not have a criminal record. We never found out exactly how he died.

I walked away holding my head high and feeling empowered to face my parents again at Noleen’s inquest - if they weren’t in jail first.

With Gerry’s help, I had called for a public inquiry into my case. It was thirty-three years since Noleen had died, and it was my last hope of having my parents convicted.

My phone rang out just before midnight on 31 August 2006.

Simon watched my jaw drop as I answered the call.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s my mother,’ I said flatly. ‘She died three hours ago.’

Josie Murphy had died peacefully in hospital, without pain. She was seventy-three-years-old.

I broke down sobbing, not for my mother, but for the innocent lives she had destroyed.

I had waited so many years for her face her crimes in court, and I felt robbed and cheated of that right.

As the news sank in, I realized I felt great relief too. One of my abusers was dead. Her reign of terror was finally over.

Noleen’s inquest took place at the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght. Tears soaked my cheeks as I listened to the post mortem. I was reminded that, amongst Noleen’s forty stab wounds, she had eighteen on her chest and fifteen on her neck. A number were inflicted after death.

Hearing those cold facts bounce off the wallpaper in the hotel conference hall made my daughter’s killing sound more callous than ever.

I thought of my evil, frenzied mother. How could any human be so cruel? And how could my father sit in that court as brazenly as he did, still scowling at me like I was a piece of dirt as he clung on to his wicked secrets, a frail pensioner?

When the verdict was finally returned I was flooded with relief. I couldn’t have lived if the verdict had gone against me, and having Noleen formally named as my daughter was an incredible victory.

It was the recognition I had craved for decades, and I was vindicated, to a degree.

But I’d be a liar if I said I felt justice had been done and I could live happily ever after.

All that had been proven was what I and my abusers already knew: I had