The first time *Susan injected "one of the girls done it" for her.
The friend just stuck the full syringe into her arm, she didn’t look for a vein.
"I’d seen needles but I’d never seen anyone ‘skin popping’ it. I was fucked like, fucked as I was taking tablets on top of it. One time I gave her a few digs over it, as the two of us ended up later down in a house getting another girl on to it. The three of us used to be sitting down in that girl’s house, sticking needles into each other, doing it all with each other. It was mental."
It was mental for about a month afterwards as the girls couldn’t get enough of the stuff. "It was injecting, injecting, needles, needles, everywhere. We were in one of the girl’s house and she was housesharing with people and they knew nothing. She got thrown out in the end when one of them in the house stuck their hand in the bin, throwing something away and Jesus Christ, there was a needle".
Susan says she never shared needles but came close to it with those two girls. "They were older than me, they were 23 and 25. The two of them were with each other but they knew each other through me. We used to be the best of pals, every bag we got we shared, everything. We shared all the same drugs, money.
"If we were hungry, we wouldn’t waste money on food, we’d go somewhere like Cork Simon for a dinner. We’d love it. It was like ‘oh man, I can’t believe it, I don’t know the last time I had a dinner’."
Susan is just 19 and possibly one of the loneliest people I have met in my life. She first smoked heroin when she was 15 and wasted from alcohol and prescription drugs, she only started injecting it at the start of this year. The guy who first gave her heroin has since died from an overdose — as has his girlfriend.
"My first smoke was in a rollie. I didn’t smoke it off the foil as I didn’t want people knowing what I was doing. I had taken handfuls of D10s and D5s on top of it so I just blanked out, passed out on the chair and woke the following morning and I was thinking to myself, ‘I can’t believe I done that’."
She’d fallen in love with drugs years beforehand, because it allowed her to "block everything out".
She’d also been drinking heavily since she was 13, drinking "on the streets, lighting fires, at house parties", drinking with people 15, 16, and 17 years older than her.
"I was having a mad time taking any drug I could get my hands on: speed, yokes, everything. The first drug I took was ecstasy, yokes. I got a handful of them for nothing, I didn’t know what they were. Then I ended up lying in bed for three days awake, a jaw wrapped around me, one of those days was Christmas day, yeah Christmas day on a come-down," she smiles.
When she was six, Susan’s mum, a chronic alcoholic, walked out on her and her brothers, heading off to the UK and leaving the children with their dad. "It was just me and my other two brothers in the house and I was left do all the girly stuff and if it wasn’t done, I’d get a beating like". One day, she was hit so hard she went flying from one end of the room to another and broke her nose. That was it, she couldn’t take anymore and walked.
"I was bouncing all over the place then, moving back and forth to a friend’s house, to my brother’s house. I just wouldn’t go home again to my dad. My friend’s family were very, very good to me. I was drinking 24/7 already then, there was so much I wanted to blank out.
Source: Claire O’Sullivan, Irish Examiner, 18/11/13
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