Chapter 2:

Thin blurred lines

The world outside my window was ordinary: buses and cars groaned past, children in school uniforms dragged their bags. Ordinary for everyone else, maybe. For me, every sound pressed against the silence inside. I had a roof, four walls, and the illusion of safety, but no real anchor. The walls kept out the rain but not the loneliness.

Sometimes I wondered if anyone else noticed how thin the line was between living and just existing. Shops, parks, bus stops, those were real. But try knocking on the doors that promise help, safety, or justice, and you’ll find them bricked up with silence. That silence became my shadow, following me from one place to the next.

Growing up, I struggled to read people the way others seemed to do so naturally. I’d been told so many lies as a child that I couldn’t tell what was truth and what was deception. It left me in a position where I had to take people at face value. If someone said something, I’d believe them—it was just easier than trying to untangle the possible deceptions and lies.

This made me vulnerable at times. People lied to me, and I’d get into trouble for believing them. But there was another side to it, too. Because I trusted people so openly, they often trusted me in return. They could see that I was genuine, and that created connections I wouldn’t have otherwise had. In its own strange way, it worked to my advantage at times.

But that didn’t shield me from everything. I was bullied a lot when I was younger. One moment stands out vividly. I was walking home from Donaghmede shopping centre, and a lad a couple of years older than me followed me all the way to my front door. He and his friends regularly bullied me since I came into contact with them in secondary school. On this particular occasion he kept asking me what had I done to his bike, over and over. I kept repeating that I had done nothing to his bike. When we got to the front door, he started punching me, shoving me back against the door as I tried to get away.

I thought the door opening would save me. My father stood there, and for a split second, I thought he’d finally step in, help me, protect me. But instead, after I ran in behind him, he invited the lad into the house.

As if that weren’t enough, my father made me apologize to the bully afterward. I didn’t even understand what I was apologizing for. Earlier that day his friend had pushed his bicycle toward me, and I’d stepped out of the way. The bike bounced off a wall and got damaged somehow—not by me, but apparently that didn’t matter. The bully blamed me for it, punched me for it, and then my father made me say sorry to him for it.

Even now, I don’t understand it. Not the punch, not the apology, and certainly not why my father chose the bully over me in that moment. It wasn’t the punch that hurt the most—it was the betrayal of expecting help and being told instead that I was the one who should be sorry.

There was one time my father got involved in something I was part of, but even then, it wasn’t really for me. It was for him. We were doing a pub crawl to collect donations—four of us in the car, each with little boxes to shake and try to get a few bob from the drinkers. We needed someone to drive us, and my father was eager to volunteer for this one. Not because he wanted to help us, but because it gave him an excuse to stop at every pub along the way.

At each stop, we’d pile into the pub, trying to raise money while my father headed straight to the bar for a couple of pints. He’d sit there, loudly telling everyone how great he was for driving us around, soaking in the attention. Meanwhile, we’d finish up with our collections and then stand there, awkwardly waiting for him to finish drinking before we could move on to the next pub.

I felt embarrassed—no, ashamed. Here I was with my friends from St. John’s Ambulance, trying to do something decent, and my father was making it about himself. I could see it in their eyes, though they didn’t say much. It was humiliating, standing there while he made a show of himself in front of them. It wasn’t just the waiting; it was the whole spectacle of it. Even when he was there, he wasn’t really there for me. It’s the only time I can remember him being part of something I was doing, and yet, it still felt like it wasn’t about me at all.

It was Aga Khan Day at the RDS, one of the busiest and most chaotic days of the horse show. I was sitting outside the main first aid post, relaxing in an ambulance on what was shaping up to be a nice day. The Anglesea Stand was packed, as it always was on that day. If you were to draw a caricature of it, you’d have people hanging off the edges—it was that busy!

While I was sitting there, someone with a radio wearing a suit came running up to me and shouted, “There’s somebody fainting up there.” He was pointing in the direction of the Anglesea stand! I remember thinking, How in the name of God am I going to find a faint up there? Still, I got up and started running beside him towards the stand. Before we got far, someone else came running up, grabbed us, and said, “He’s in here, He’s in here!” They led us into the bar under the Anglesea stand.

Inside, I found a man who’d collapsed. He was a doctor, I learned later, he’d been drinking despite being on heart medication—something he clearly shouldn’t have been doing. He’d suffered a heart attack. His heart was still beating, but he’d stopped breathing. It was clear what I had to do.

I went to work, resuscitating him. Those moments are vivid in my memory—not because of panic or adrenaline, but because I felt an overwhelming focus and determination. I wasn’t going to let this man die. Thankfully, I succeeded. After a few breaths, I don't remember how many, he started breathing again.

Not long after, the experts arrived, the higher-ups from the St. John’s Ambulance. One of them was a doctor or a surgeon, and he took over the situation.Suddenly our ambulance was outside and our patient was quickly moved into it and was taken away to hospital. That was the last I saw of him.

Now everybody around me was telling me “well done, congratulations.” These were all the other members of the St. John’s Ambulance who were on duty at the RDS, so I was a bit of a celebrity for a couple of days… hahaha. I loved it, I can’t deny that, but who wouldn’t?

I’m not going to say it’s not a big deal to save someone’s life. Of course it is. But in the bigger picture, traumatic things happened to me on a daily basis, so for me it was just another day. It just happened to be a traumatic experience with a positive outcome — that was my perspective.

I used to wonder how much trouble the doctor would be in with his family for drinking while on medication. Would he be in so much trouble that he wished he had died? These were the kinds of irrational thoughts I had back then. Looking back now, I can see that it was a big deal to save someone’s life, but at the time I didn’t see it that way. For me it was just another day, another moment that once it was over, was no longer a big deal. I don’t know if that makes sense to people, but the event was already long over for me by the next day.

So you can imagine my surprise when someone came up to me — I forget which first aid post I was at — and said the commissioner was looking for me. I looked back and asked, “Who?” and they said, “The commissioner. He wants to talk to you.”

I panicked for a minute, thinking I might be in some sort of trouble. I was brought to meet the commissioner, Mr. Derek L. Robinson, FRCSI, a consultant surgeon at the Meath Hospital. Now I was really nervous. I’d never met someone at that level of authority before, at least as I saw it.

I can’t remember exactly what he said to me. I just remember stumbling nervously over my words, trying to explain what had happened and how I’d handled the situation at the Anglesea bar. It felt like talking to my father — that same nervousness I always had with him, it had manifested itself into every aspect of my young life and made me afraid of authority figures. While I was telling him the story, I kept worrying that he’d pick out something I did wrong. Of course, the commissioner had no idea of this — it was just the world I lived in at the time. I actually couldn’t wait to get away from him, through no fault of his own. He was an absolute gentleman, but I couldn’t see that back then. All I could see or feel was fear.

It was alcohol that gave me my first real escape. It wasn’t hard to find—I’d grown up in pubs, after all. At 15, a few Smithwick’s shandies turned me into someone else entirely: funny, confident, the life of the party. For a little while, the apocalypse around me disappeared. But alcohol doesn’t fix a broken world, it just paints over the cracks.

I started to use it around this time. The first time my father gave me a drink not in private was that on my 15th birthday. I was home alone, St. Stephen’s Day. They were at another of my mother’s family Christmas parties, so anyway, depressed and lonely I rang my aunt’s house and spoke to my father. He came and collected me and brought me to the house. I remember him leaving me in a sitting room alone with a glass of beer.

The first time I bought a beer was a pint of Smithwick’s shandy at a dinner dance in the Grand Hotel, Malahide. It was in aid of the St. John Ambulance brigade and a few of us were allowed to join in after the food had been finished and the dancing started. I had only recently joined through a friend at school. I had three pints of shandy that night and it made me feel more than drunk, confident, less anxious, more talkative, all the things we know alcohol does. It was as if a “new, improved me” jumped out of the shadows, louder, braver, freer, a me I didn’t know existed. But the next day all that remained of him was a memory.