Chapter 1:

Who I Am

I’ve always loved apocalypse movies, the kind where everything crumbles, and survivors scavenge for scraps of hope in a broken world. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I’ve been living in one my whole life! The difference is, in my apocalypse, there’s no epic fight for survival. Instead, it’s a quiet, relentless grind where the simplest places like shops, parks and barbers are real, but the ones that promise help or safety? Those are myths. They might as well not exist.

My name is Steven Condra. I was born on December 26, 1971, in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin. It was almost midnight. Muhammad Ali had just knocked out Germanys Jurgen Blin in Zurich, and Benny Hill was topping the UK charts with “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West).” Life back then might sound like a different world, but from the beginning, it was chaos.

I wasn’t permitted to live with my biological family, instead I was thrust into adoption, and as I grew, I came to understand that my biological parents weren’t allowed to marry, thanks to the Catholic Church’s grip on society. My adoptive family? Let’s just say they brought their own version of the apocalypse. My father drank himself into oblivion, his rage erupting nightly. He rarely used physical violence against me, it was screaming and shouting, night after night after night after night. He was only ever happy when he was in a pub, any pub, anywhere.

My mother’s answer to my bed-wetting, triggered by the terror of those nights, was slaps across my face and head. And as if that wasn’t enough, my adoptive grandfather brought horrors in the form of sexual abuse that I couldn’t escape, starting when I was too young to understand it at all.

Even then, I knew the places that might have helped, didn’t exist for people like me.

If I woke up in the night after wetting the bed, I would spend the rest of the night hanging with sheets out the window to try and dry them before my mother got up in the morning. She usually caught me out straight away, I still couldn't hide the urine stains so if I got them dry I got a reprieve day at most but then got into trouble for not telling her. Why in the name of God would I tell someone something that would cause them to slap me in the face.

I was seven years old, wearing my communion suit, when I first walked into a Garda station to ask for help, I was wandering the streets while “my family,” were drinking in the greyhound pub, Blanchardstown. I walked into the station, very nervously, terrified even, I remember my legs feeling very weak, like jelly. I can remember the Gardai laughing and smiling down at me as I tried to talk to them but they didn’t listen and I left with no help. I might as well have been invisible. The world had shops and parks, sure, but the ones meant for rescue? Those were always out of reach.

When it was decided I was old enough to do messages on my bike, I was sent regularly to the shops and my mother’s sister’s house in Clontarf, just to pick up whatever her sister was giving her. Could be clothes, could be food, could be anything. But I used to love going down because my Auntie E, who was also my godmother, would always look after me. I’d call down, and she’d always give me something to eat. And I’d hang out there with her for a little while. Then I’d get back on my bicycle and go from Clontarf to home. One springtime on the way back, I was going past St. Anne’s Park and saw all the daffodils. I went in and started picking them. The Garda came over and asked me what I was doing. I nearly shit myself! I told her I was picking a few daffodils for my mother. She smiled and told me I wasn’t supposed to pick those because they had been planted. At this poiunt I tried to hand her the flowers, but she wouldn’t take them. She said I could keep them and just said not to pick them again . Now I have to say,she was very nice about it. I was only a child. Still, it was pretty much my first contact with the Gardaí where I was in trouble. Haha

There were the fishing trips too. My father used to always drag me along, but fishing was never really about fishing. It was about the drink. He would drag me to some lake or river for a couple of hours before the main event, drink. That was the background of life. If he wasn’t drinking at home, he was drinking somewhere else. That was normal. That was what life looked like.

I leared to gamble, and liked it, even as a young lad. My father thought he was a great card player, but in reality, he was just the drunk acting the bully. I got involved very young because I wanted to do what my parents were doing. I'm pretty good at math, so learning how the hands worked wasn't too difficult, even quite young.

I remember a lot of cards, poker usually, in my mother’s uncle’s house in Donegal. From as young as I can remember, I started learning how to play. There were cards in a lot of other family houses also. McKee Barracks was where I spent a lot of Sundays. Sunday mornings, my father, his brother, their father, and their two sisters husbands would be in the mess drinking and playing cards. Not always all of them but the core almost every Sunday was my father, his father and lucky little me. Grandfather was some sort of a sergeant and my uncle T was a cook. I was too young to play cards at that stage, so I was running wild around the barracks.

Don’t get me wrong, I was too young to be acting crazy and too naïve anyway. I used to play this game where I’d try to sneak up on the guys at the main gate. Looking back now, it was really funny or it is from this perspective. If you walked into the main gate of McKee Barracks, the gatehouse was to your right or the guardhouse, and if you turned left immediately, walked straight down, somewhere in front of you, kind of to the right, was where the mess was, as far as I can remember.

So imagine this little guy, I could have been 5, or 6, I don’t remember, that’s a guess, but this is in some of my earliest memories, it’s so long ago. But I would actually worry if they would shoot me if they saw me trying to sneak up on them! A child’s mind… it can be a very scary place for silly reasons as well as real reasons.

This part you're reading right now is pretty much the last part I wrote and inserted to Chapter 1 because it's been the hardest to write down. I never want to write it down, but I have to because it's part of the story. So here it is. I remember when I was young, my sister got a dog. Well, the house got a dog, but it was my sister's dog, and I was told it was my sister's dog. I wasn't allowed near the dog. I was just told, it's not your dog, it's your sister's dog. But anyway she was probably only about three. I can't really remember, I was so young. But I remember my mother shouting at me, it was something to do with the dog, I can't remember exactly. I was told to leave the sitting room and I was standing on the stairs, heading upstairs, and my mother, the woman who adopted me, shouted from the sitting room, “the sooner you grow up and get out of here, the better it'll be for all of us.” Now, that, was a regular thing for her to say, but that's the earliest time I remember it being said. But she said that to me often.

A lot happened when I was a child, I don't remember much of it accept a lot of snippets of horror. My sister remembers a lot more, I remember talking with My sister on one particular occasion, she reminded me of the time our father had gone to court over a load of fines that he hadn't paid, I think they were parking tickets and stuff like that, but he went to court and was sent to prison. We were only delighted he would be gone for a while, but low and behold, he arrives back in a taxi full of drink, he was so proud of himself, he tells us that the warden showed him around the prison and then let him out the back door. Irish justice. Back to the usual.

And that’s how it’s always been: surviving, trying to make sense of a world that works in ways I don’t understand. I don’t write this so you’ll feel sorry for me—I don’t need pity. I need you to understand what it’s like to live in the spaces between: the shops and haircuts are there, sure, but ask about places for help, and you’re chasing myths. That’s what my world has been.