Chapter 54 Lucy
Lucy
Growing up with two recovering addicts was not easy.
Mum was prone to moods and depression, though she’d never admit it.
Dad was not my real dad, but I don’t think I could have loved him more if he was.
He was always ready to talk about anything I was curious about.
But nearly all their friends were sober alcos too.
There was never booze in our house and I thought that was normal until I went for a sleepover at my pal Melanie’s house when I was about thirteen.
Her parents had some of their friends around, and they all got drunk; they were singing and hugging each other at the end of the night.
Mel said this often happened and used it to her advantage.
She knew that when they were ‘merry’ was the best time to ask for an Xbox, or a new iPhone, or for cold hard cash.
Cash was the best, because their friends would contribute too.
That night, Mel and I made a hundred euro each from her parents and their friends, and they were fun.
One lady kept running her fingers through my hair and saying, ‘A natural blonde, don’t ever dye your hair, it’s beautiful,’ and a man did some magic tricks and pulled a twenty-euro note from behind my ear.
When I came home and told Mum and Dad about it, they seemed embarrassed, and Dad said, ‘Don’t you think we’re fun?
’ and they were, but not in the same way that the drunk people were.
Mum bought a book about magic tricks and tried a few out on me but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
Dad bought me a new iPhone out of the blue about two weeks later.
They sat me down and explained what addiction meant and how recovery was a lifelong commitment.
I kind of knew all this stuff already. There were framed affirmations all over the house.
But then they told me the story of what their lives were like before they gave up drugs and alcohol.
They gave me a sanitized version of events until I was old enough to handle the truth when I was about fifteen.
They were both alcoholics and cocaine addicts.
When Mum was bad, she was bad, she couldn’t stop.
She stole money from Granny and almost died after a suicide attempt when she was just a little bit older than I am now.
She said she was deeply affected by having to leave Boston after Granny and Grandad broke up and being separated from her sister.
That sounded bad to me, but Dad’s story was a whole lot worse.
Dad was a child actor in a TV show called What’s Up for seven years, but he was also in a lot of feature films as a kid.
His mother was a pushy ‘stage mum’, and his schooling suffered because he missed so much.
He was on stage or screen from the age of seven to twenty-five.
His father was an alcoholic, and violent with it.
If Dad failed at an audition, his father would beat him.
His younger sister was a kid actor too and she got the same treatment.
One time, when he was fifteen, Dad was hospitalized after his father threw him down the stairs.
His mother lied to the doctors about how he tripped and fell, but the doctors noticed other bruises and marks on his body and started asking inconvenient questions.
The police were called, and Dad spent a week in a foster home with an ultra-religious family who told him that if he prayed hard enough, he would never be beaten again.
Dad had already tried that, and it didn’t work.
He soon landed back at home with his parents because he felt he needed to be there to protect his sister.
The rows between Dad and his father became more violent as Dad got older and began to fight back.
He put his own dad in the hospital one time, but his father called the police this time and social services got involved again.
It was all entirely dysfunctional. As soon as he was eighteen, he asked his mother for access to all the money he had earned, but his parents had spent it or squirrelled it away somehow.
They’d had fancy foreign holidays and lived a lavish lifestyle but had never had the sense to buy a house.
Both had given up work as soon as their children started earning a substantial living.
Dad moved out of the house and took his little sister, Barbra, with him.
His parents didn’t put up much of a fight.
He changed agent, hired a lawyer and went no contact with his parents.
His new agent gave them a place to stay, and various friends in show business helped them out.
He never got the money he had worked for from the age of seven, and the pressure of raising his young teen sister was a lot for such a young man.
She died in a car accident on an icy day when he was twenty-two. She was being driven home from school by a neighbour. It was one of those things where nobody was to blame. The road conditions were lethal. Everyone in the car died, including the neighbour and her daughter.
Poor Dad, it was incredibly sad. Sometimes when I was growing up, I thought that he was overprotective of me, but I know he was thinking of Barb.
There were photos of her all over the house, a beautiful, clear-skinned girl who never made it past fifteen years of age.
I admit I was jealous of her for a time, but when I told Dad how I felt, he was understanding.
Photos of me began to replace the photos of her. Dad has always been cool.
Mum has not. She had a few relapses when I was small, but I don’t remember them. She had far less reason to go off the rails, but she was always moody, prone to snarkiness. With Mum, I knew that she felt obliged to love me, but I never thought that she liked me much.