STRONGER
Nicola Hanney is a first-time author from Dublin. In 2023 she gave up her anonymity to participate in the RTÉ documentary
Taking Back Control to tell of the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of disgraced Garda Paul Moody while pregnant and fighting cancer. In sharing her story, Nicola hopes to empower victims and shed light on the early signs of abuse.
For My Son
Author’s Note
The story in this book has been condensed and most of the names, except for mine and Paul Moody’s, have been changed. Some people have been split or merged to protect their identity and in some situations details have been omitted for similar reasons.
It’s Valentine’s Day, I think, at this restaurant that everyone is talking about. We have to run in from the car ’cos it’s raining. I’m trying to remember. There is noise, music and everyone chatting. He gives me the silent treatment. Something I said … I was feeling sick that day, but he was sick of staying in. The food is good, but I can’t eat it. He notices that, that I can’t eat, and he puts his knife and fork down, his elbows are on the table. He has his hands over one another, you know, covering his mouth. He looks at me and my stomach flips ’cos I know. He keeps folding his napkin, and then … he … says to me, ‘You know what I would love to do to you, Nicola, right now?’ I say nothing, you know? ’Cos it’s so public, so I stay still.
‘I would absolutely love to get you into a lane and punch the fucking head off you,’ he says, ‘you filthy fucking prick.’
‘Do you want to take a break, Nicola?’ the garda asks me.
‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m okay, I will tell you everything.’
I was the one who called Niamh. But I know she would have called me before long.
‘Oh Nicola,’ she said, in that way she does that tells me she is sorry. I told her it was grand. But I was so disappointed.
I’d just been sent screenshots from a conversation she’d had with a guy called Paul Moody, a policeman I had matched with on Tinder the night before. He sent the screenshots, one after the other. In them Niamh had told him about me having cancer.
‘How do you even know Paul?’ she asked.
‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘I matched with him last night on Tinder.’
Niamh sucked her breath in and whispered a curse. The call was clicking in and out with the arrival of text messages on my side from Paul.
‘Nicola, look,’ Niamh said, ‘he played a really weird joke on me and so I told him you’d been sick … I’m so sorry.’
‘Ah Niamh,’ I said, because I was disappointed, ‘why did you tell him?’
I shouldn’t have said that. Because I knew why.
There is a photograph in my house of me. In it, I’m younger, around thirty, and I am surrounded by all the women I love. Some are my sisters, the Hanney girls, Sarah, Courtney, Laura, Isabel and Natalie. Some are my friends, girls I trained with, like Sonia O’Brien and
Niamh Roche. Some are my clients, women whose hair I have been doing for so long that they have become my friends, like Ann and Abbie, mother and daughter, and Alison, Joan and Frances. It’s a beautiful photograph, full of giddy, happy women, and you can tell we are boozing from the soft smiles and how our arms are draped around each other, all done up to the nines for whatever event it is. There were so many back then.
That photo was taken in my before time.
Before motherhood, before sickness, before Paul Moody.
When I was a sixteen-year-old kid I left school to become a hairdresser, like my older sister Laura, who lured me into the profession. She was always so glamorous and cool, and her life seemed fun. I wanted it.
‘Work is such good craic,’ she told me, practising highlighting all of our hair in the kitchen, ‘I have the best time with the girls every single day.’
I looked up to Laura, she was twenty-one and the coolest person I knew.
‘You’d love it, Nic,’ Laura said, ‘the clients are so funny, the stuff they do tell you as well!’ I wanted to be in that clique, the keepers of all the secrets of Dublin women.
My mam, Linda, took a bit of convincing, but we both still say it was the right decision for me. As soon as I started I absolutely loved it, earning twenty-eight pounds a week and feeling like I had won the lotto.
Don’t get me wrong, hairdresser training is hard work, but I have always been a glass-half-full kind of person, so for me it was brilliant and fun. I was thriving in this new environment, surrounded by feminine energy.
On Fridays, the hairdressers of our salon would meet in one place, Club M in Temple Bar, and dance the night away. That was me and the two other trainees, Niamh and Sonia, now old enough to be included in nights out, following after the stylists who’d left us to clean up, handbags heavy with the coin tips we’d got and our hearts full of life and love for our new job.
When I close my eyes and send myself back there, to those times, to remember us three crossing the Liffey to go dancing, in my memories it is always summertime and the city is always busy. The lights of Dublin reflect in the dark river as we cross over and when we get to the club we bypass the queue, on instructions from my older sister Courtney, who always knew the score, and blag our way into the VIP area, where all our friends were.
All those disco lights, the beats and clapping hands, the way women catch eyes and point to one another. We intertwined our fingers and our hearts, and sang the lyrics because we always knew them. Those lyrics were about us, we felt every word. Hands in the air, eyes closed, spinning around. We spent more time inside the loo than outside it in those days, passing tissue under the loo door, sharing make-up and broken heart stories. The fellas at the bar flashed smiles and credit cards at us, and we took the drinks and smiled back, but then we disappeared into the crowd because all we wanted was to dance.
The next morning we would wake up in Sonia’s house, to her da Joe coming around the door whistling with a full Irish and lifts home.
‘Would you not get some fellas to collect yiz?’ Joe would say, pretending to be put out as he started his car.
‘The best ones are taken,’ I’d always say back, poking him in the arm, ‘are’int yous Joe?’
You couldn’t walk through the doors of an occasion without catching Joe O’Brien’s eye. In his purple shirt and slacks, he always
made a fuss, one hand up to the barman, the other to you, ‘Now what’ll you have?’
When I was young, out for the night with my best friends, I felt like I would live forever. I was happy. Happy was me. As our careers progressed and our wages rose, we crossed oceans instead of rivers, to Ibiza, Tenerife and even Las Vegas, where we lost Niamh’s passport and I blagged my way through security to retrieve it before the plane turned around. There was no way I was letting my friend spend her trip queuing at the embassy, so I chanced my arm and argued until border control printed me a fake boarding pass and let me race back through arrivals to the gate where the plane was being cleaned. The passport was still there in the seat pocket where she had left it, thank God.
When I finally came back through waving it, Niamh laughed so much that I’d have done it ten times over, because stories like that, they bond women and we spend hours repeating them again and again, each time laughing even harder than we did when it happened. My gang have been telling the same stories for years, and we never get sick of them and we always have new ones too. This fun we have had, it stitches all the pain together and makes it easier to carry. It’s like we are always trying to get each other back to how it felt when we were young, when life was safe and happy.
I knew why Niamh had told Paul I had cancer. Because I would have told on her too, if the roles had been reversed. It didn’t make it any less frustrating, that it wasn’t her fault, that I’d have done the same. Maybe I was pretending, for that moment, that I was the old me – that immortal girl with her hands in the air. I had enjoyed chatting with a man who didn’t know anything about me. But when Niamh got the text asking about me from a policeman she knew through her
boss, Karl, and he told her I was being investigated for not declaring my income, her urge to keep me safe kicked in and she defended me the only way she knew how, with the truth.
I read the texts between them that he had sent me.
Paul, she had breast cancer, Niamh had written. She had been sitting in the maternity hospital at the time, waiting for a scan for her first baby. Paul had frightened the life out of her.
Revenue are investigating her for unpaid taxes, he wrote back, the proof is here, you’ll have to give me more than she had cancer. If you tell me everything, I’ll have a word with the lads investigating.
Niamh texted back, Please Paul, she was really ill, her family had to pay her mortgage. This can’t be true, Nicola is a really honest person.
Ah, he admitted then, I’m only messing with you, I met her on Tinder and just wanted to suss her out.
‘He didn’t give me time to think,’ Niamh said on the phone, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you.’
‘Ah, I’d have done the same,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I’ll meet him now.’ I was disappointed, I didn’t want to go on a date dragging all of my baggage with me.
‘Obviously it wasn’t fair that he did that,’ Niamh said, ‘but he wasn’t to know your history. I’ve met him a few times, he is really funny, don’t let this spoil it, just go on the date.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘anyway I don’t have much time before we go to Ibiza.’
‘Meet him for a coffee,’ Niamh pressed, ‘see what happens.’
Cancer can be quiet, rumbling away as a mild ache in the background for a while. At least that’s how it was for me, coming as an ache in my neck and hip that I presumed was punishment for twenty years on my feet as a hairdresser. People told me to see the doctor.
‘It’s the way I’m standing,’ I told them.
‘You do slouch,’ said Joan, covered in a black cape. ‘Pull over one of those stools,’ she said pointing.
So I did, sitting to do the rest of her hair, but there was no relief. I wore different shoes, got a better bra, nothing worked. I developed a cough.
‘I feel like I can’t shake this,’ I said to my sister Isabel. She handed me a cup of tea.
‘Maybe go the doctor,’ she said.
‘I went,’ I said, ‘he said I was fine but did blood tests anyway, all normal.’
‘Jaysus,’ she shook her head in disbelief, ‘I’ve never seen you complain, it must be bad.’
It was.
‘The doctor told me to drink more water and get exercise,’ I said. Isabel looked incredulous. ‘You do be down that gym all the time,’ she said.
‘And I drink two litres every day,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I feel awful.’
‘Did you take painkillers?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said and quickly added, ‘I will, I will,’ when I saw her despair.
Isabel and me are numbers six and seven of ten children born to JP and Linda Hanney, both from Dublin city. Along with my sisters, I have four brothers – John, Liam, Ross and Justin – and we all grew up together in a tiny house just off North Circular Road in Dublin 1. Me and Isabel were born within a year and a half of one another.
‘Stay with your sister,’ was what my mother told me every time we went anywhere, and I always did. We ran together as girls, swinging off the ropes tied to lamp posts by the Dublin kids that came before us, the same ones kids swing off now I’d imagine. My dad is a taxi man now, but for a while when we were kids he owned a sweet shop in Summerhill, starting it when me and Isabel were at the right age to think that was a dream. We lost the run of ourselves just before opening day, gorging on the stock of marshmallow flogs.
‘Hide the wrappers,’ my mother ordered the older ones, while Isabel and me threw up the flogs. I don’t think either of us ever ate marshmallows again, but Isabel left school to train as a confectioner and the irony of that was not lost on us. Our girlhood ended around then, as I began to focus on my career and so did she. And she met Tony, the man she married. We didn’t run together as much after that, but we kept our bond telepathically. Isabel always knows what I am thinking.
Our house was small and with ten of us rows would break out, so my mother often packed us up and brought us out. If it wasn’t raining she would bring us on the train to the seaside, to Killiney or Sandycove, where the boys had the guts to jump in. When Mam had no money, she would walk us to Dollymount Strand, two hours each
way with our towels under our arms. I loved the feeling of the seaside, and still do, the endless horizon and that feeling of space that you can’t find elsewhere.
As a little girl I would find a spot away from the crowd and sit with my arms wrapped around my knees imagining what could be out there. The horizon gave me dreams, and hope. At the shore the water was busy and moving, but past that it was still and calm and I felt like Heaven was somewhere the sky met the sea, where God was. The power of infinity gave my mind peace, like a reset. I would leave each time feeling recharged with hope.
I needed hope as a child, because Dublin was a tough city. Our house was a hard place, but the streets were far worse because there was a bully on them, a lanky kid with his hair shaved named Trevor, who spat at and pushed me, and pulled my bag off my shoulder and threw it onto the ground.
‘You’re an ugly little bastard, aren’t yeh?’ he always said.
I didn’t think so. I liked the girl in my mirror a lot. I liked her because she was me, made up of scraps of all the people I loved, my sister’s eyes, my mother’s chin. I knew that boy was just saying what he wanted, and it wasn’t true. But that didn’t make it easier, because he tormented me anyway, whether I believed him or not.
‘Maybe he likes you,’ my mam said when she noticed spit in my hair and I told her about it. I never told anyone about that bully except her. I only ever saw trouble worsen whenever you told on people, especially if I told my brothers, so I never did. The pressure of that was too much. It made me hate my own place. I daydreamed that one day someone would stop him, but they never did, he was always there. He stopped stepping into my path eventually, after a word to him from my mam, but I still felt his presence on the other side of the road.
When you’re from ten kids you’re either quiet or you are a chatterbox. Isabel is quiet and I’m the talker. So I made a good hairdresser, since chatting is part of the job. I did well as a trainee and qualified into my first full-time job as a stylist not long after that. Inspired by a pep talk from my mam, I bought a small apartment in Dublin 9, about fifteen minutes from everyone in each direction, and fifteen minutes from the sea.
‘You’ve too much wood,’ my mam said when she saw it. ‘It’s like a coffin.’ Mam is superstitious.
I did well in my career, becoming a Senior Stylist, and I worked really hard, loving the independence money gave me. I bought what I wanted, drove my dream car – a white convertible Audi with a black roof. I went where I wanted. I dated and had some long-term boyfriends, but I didn’t take anything too seriously. I felt I was too young to settle. I wanted to focus on my career. But there was a downside to working so much and to the glam life of a hairdresser who spent all day in heels at odd angles cutting and styling hair.
‘You look absolutely terrible,’ my sister Courtney said to me when she saw me. She was home from England for a visit, having moved to Blackpool for love years before. Courtney is my godmother, a thoughtful move by my mam, who found that letting the older ones stand for the younger ones was a way to give each child a special someone in a large family like ours. Courtney plays her part well; even now she has a photo of me as her screen saver. She always wants me to shine.
‘I’m thirty-six, but I feel eighty,’ I said, ‘my neck is still killing me, and my hips.’
‘Maybe you need a break from work,’ Courtney said, and I thought maybe I did too.
‘Niamh said I would love Thailand,’ I said. My friend had been travelling the year before.
‘I think, go,’ Courtney said. ‘What good is all this hard work if you don’t get out there and enjoy yourself? Take the break, Nic, do.’
I knew I agreed already, I wanted to go.
‘I need time off,’ I told my boss. ‘I’m burnt out.’
He rolled his eyes and sucked his teeth, flipping through the appointment book with a scowl, but I knew that was just his way of giving himself a minute before letting me have what I wanted – a month off to go to Thailand.
I had no idea what Thailand would come to mean in my life, in the long run, but back then it was a culture shock to say the least. I was totally in love with the speed of life there, the bustling way Thai people have of living, the sing-song language and the food – I ate every curry there was, soups and stews with fresh lemongrass and chilli and coriander, and I wrote home about it, in text messages with photos of the meals I was having and the things I was seeing. I felt brave and capable, reading maps and counting foreign money out into the hands of street merchants, chancing my arm with buses to other places and learning all sorts about myself I hadn’t known before.
Its amazing, I told Niamh on WhatsApp.
I knew you’d love it, she replied.
I saw temples and Buddhas painted with gold, and buildings with tiered turrets that had balls on the top so that they looked like Christmas trees. I saw strange birds and stray dogs and beautiful people, who greeted me every time calling with a soft ‘Sawasdee’ and a wave. There were all sorts of markets and shops, where things were so cheap I couldn’t resist. I slept well and I lay in the sun for hours every day.
But I didn’t feel better. My cough got worse.
‘Pneumonia,’ the doctor in Bangkok told me when I went to see
him. He had listened to my lungs and looked in my eyes and at my tongue. I wasn’t sleeping at all because of the pain in my neck.
‘Is that serious?’ I asked him, and he shook his head and scribbled in Thai on a piece of paper, lines of swirls and curls that I couldn’t read. He handed it to me, folded it into my hand with a hard pat.
‘Take all pill, every day, feel better,’ he said.
But I didn’t get any better.
I took a boat to Koh Lanta, an island with white sand and turquoise water. I remember sitting on the deck of the boat just staring at the sea and wishing I could feel better. My mind drifted and reorganised as it always did when I stared at the horizon. Why was I feeling so bad? Out of nowhere one single thought struck me and my hand flew straight to my breast. I felt it, a hard lump just under the skin and my mind screeched to a halt.
‘I don’t understand where it’s come from.’ I had rung Courtney as soon as I got to shore. ‘I’ve been rubbing suncream on all week.’
My mouth was dry with fear, my heart was thumping. I was too afraid to check again, I didn’t want to feel it. I didn’t want to even brush against the lump, I kept my free hand balled into a fist.
Courtney was straight on Google, assuring me it was nothing.
‘It says here, listen,’ she said. ‘Pneumonia can cause lumps on the chest, okay? So that’s what it is.’
‘I’m coming home,’ I said, frantic.
‘Listen to me,’ Courtney said, calmly. ‘Just enjoy your holiday, it’ll be nothing.’
I knew she would never lie. She had read this information online. It made me a bit calmer, but I went home anyway.
The first thing I did was meet Niamh in the Hole in the Wall pub and tell her.
‘I’ve the doctor tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Let me feel it,’ she said.
So I let her.
‘I’d say that’s what Courtney said, or it’s a cyst,’ Niamh said, but she looked at me for a little bit too long after that.
In the hospital they said the cancer was in my breast and it had spread to my liver, spine and hips. It was causing my cough.