Joe Peters Read online

  When the police arrived they separated the two women off into different rooms and interviewed Marie first. I clung to her as she tried to explain how Dad had been allowed to have custody of me because of the way Mum had treated me in the past, and how his one wish was always that Mum shouldn’t be allowed to get her hands on me. But there was nothing she could say that could make any difference to the facts of the situation; I legally belonged to Mum and if she said I was to go back to her then I was going to have to go. The police probably couldn’t see what the problem was, knowing that Mum was already bringing up five other children. I listened without fully understanding what was being said, until a policewoman knelt down beside me.

  ‘You have to go with your mummy now,’ she said, and I started screaming ‘No! Don’t make me!’

  There was nothing Marie could do any more. We went out into the corridor where Mum was still gloating.

  ‘They’ve turned him off now. There’s nothing more to hang around for. Come on, Joe.’

  Marie burst into tears as Mum dragged me, sobbing, towards the exit. Just a few days earlier Marie had imagined she was going to spend the rest of her life with Dad, bringing me up as if I was her own son. Now she was a single mother and my baby half-brother, born just a couple of months before the accident, was all she had left to remember my father by.

  As we walked home, Mum made sure I knew what had happened. ‘Your dad’s dead now. He ain’t coming back. He’s fucking dead,’ she told me.

  ‘Has he gone to Heaven?’ I asked through my tears.

  ‘No, he’s gone to hell where all the nasty people go! God said he was no good and so now his body is going to be burned to ashes. It was God who threw that cigarette into the petrol but he didn’t do a good enough job, did he? So now his body is going to be taken to an oven and burned until it has crumbled to pieces.’

  As she talked I remembered watching the burning cigarette end bouncing back into the garage, carried by that fateful wind. Was that the hand of God I had witnessed at work there? Who else would have been able to control the wind like that? Her sneering words had a horrible kind of logic to them and I was left with a picture of my dad burning in hell for all eternity, just as I’d seen him do when he ran around the garage.

  I was crying so hard I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Don’t think you’re anything special,’ she told me, squeezing my hand viciously, ‘just because you were your dad’s favourite, and just because you saw him going up in fucking flames. You’re not special at all. You’re nothing, and I’m going to prove it to you. Just you fucking wait.’

  Chapter Five

  Smelly Woof

  From the moment we walked in the door of Mum’s big end-of-terrace Victorian council house, I was under no illusions at all about my place in the family pecking order. Far from being special, I was relegated to bottom of the heap. Larry and Barry appeared in the hall, and Larry’s first words were ‘I see the little bastard’s back,’ before he kicked me and Barry punched me on the arm.

  Mum called Wally downstairs and explained to the three of them that I had been spoiled rotten by my dad and needed to learn my place in the family as the lowest of the low. Having been Dad’s favourite I was seen as being part of his betrayal of her, and it wasn’t hard for her to persuade the others that I was a spoiled brat who thought he was better than them.

  Whereas Wally, my eldest brother, now aged seventeen, was inclined to be sympathetic to me because I was such a small child who had been through such a terrible trauma, Larry and Barry, aged fifteen and fourteen respectively, were more than happy to be given permission to indulge the vicious streaks that ran through their natures and to treat me as badly as possible. They were like bloodthirsty soldiers who had been given permission by their commanding officer to rape and pillage an enemy they had been brainwashed into believing was subhuman. Mum made it clear that showing me sympathy was not allowed. If Wally wasn’t going to join in my persecution he could expect to be on the receiving end of beatings himself. It all seemed very simple to her; if you weren’t on her team then you were obviously with the enemy.

  Ellie and Thomas (then aged four and three) were still too little to play any part in my humiliation. I guess to their wide, innocent eyes it all seemed like normal family life because they had never known any different. In fact I was the only one who had lived with anyone else, the only one who realized that life didn’t have to be this terrifying and this painful all the time.

  ‘He’ll sleep on the floor in your room,’ Mum told Larry and Barry. ‘He’s not good enough for a room of his own. Take him up there and get him out of my sight.’

  They were happy to oblige, kicking and punching me all the way up the stairs before pushing me into their bedroom.

  The house was four storeys high, as tall as a tower to a small, frightened boy. It had a railway line running directly beside it, the trains making the sturdy walls tremble every time they rattled past. I crouched by the window, shaking, and gradually my fear was turning to anger. The only thing I wanted was to see my dad again and the frustration at not being able to do that was building inside my head like a volcano waiting to erupt. When Larry and Barry came to fetch me for dinner, I lashed out at them, biting, kicking and punching, earning myself a clout round the ear and, I suppose, fulfilling Mum’s description of me as a spoiled brat.

  The family dining table was made of glass, with steel legs attached to the underneath by what looked like giant suckers. I went to sit down at it that first evening and Mum sneered, ‘No, you’re not good enough to sit with us. Get down on the floor, under the table, and we’ll feed you scraps, like a dog.’

  Larry and Barry wrestled me to the floor, and thus began a new pattern in which this was how all my meals were fed to me. As I crouched under the table, they would kick out at me and drop scraps on the floor, grinding them into the tiles with the heels of their shoes and then ordering me to lick them up with my tongue. They would actually make me jump up and down and beg for my food like a dog.

  I might have fought back if it was just my brothers but with Mum I already knew I had to be more careful how I behaved because of the fearsomeness of her violence and the willingness with which she would dispense it. After a few more beatings for looking at her the wrong way, or answering her back, the message got home to me once and for all and I realized I was not going to get any preferential treatment just because I had lost my father – quite the opposite in fact. I quickly learned not to do anything to antagonize her any more than I did simply by being there. My very existence was a constant reminder of Dad and his treachery, but even doing nothing wasn’t going to save me from what was to come. To the outside world she seemed like a tragic grieving widow coping with a traumatized child; to those of us who lived with her she was a vindictive, vengeful, violent force of nature.

  ‘You’re nothing special,’ she kept reminding me, over and over again. ‘Don’t you fucking forget it.’

  The day after Mum brought me back to her house, I overheard a conversation on the phone between her and Marie. My ears pricked up when I heard her name, hoping that she was going to come and fetch me back to hers, but it wasn’t to be.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Mum said to her, unable to resist another round of gloating. ‘You can fucking have him now. He’s no use to anyone any more, is he? I’ll let you take care of the funeral.’

  I didn’t understand what they were talking about but I found out later from Wally that Mum was refusing to pay for a funeral and insisting that Marie covered it. Marie had her own little market stall at the time selling perfumes and cosmetics so Mum knew she had a bit of money and she knew she wouldn’t want to refuse to do something for Dad. But even at that stage Mum still wasn’t going to let go of her powers as the legal wife that easily. Although Dad had always believed in having a burial, she insisted that his body be cremated.

  ‘She may be paying,’ she told the poor embarrassed funeral directors, ‘but I’m his wife so I get to say what h
appens, and I say he goes to the crematorium.’

  Marie put up a bit of a fight. ‘But William always believed in burial,’ she protested. ‘You know that.’

  ‘If you don’t agree to the cremation,’ Mum replied, ‘I’ll pay for the fucking funeral myself and I won’t be letting you through the fucking doors.’

  Even though she knew Mum didn’t have the money, Marie was aware that it wasn’t an idle threat. If she wanted to say her last goodbyes to Dad she had no choice but to do as Mum wanted.

  After Wally had explained to me what a funeral was, I begged Mum to let me come along to Dad’s, but there was no chance of that. She was playing the role of grieving widow and I suppose it would have spoiled the act if I had run over to cling to Marie during the ceremony rather than her.

  ‘You all right, Bro?’ Wally asked me now and then, giving me a comforting cuddle if no one else was watching, and I would nod gratefully, even though I wasn’t all right at all. I felt that he understood a bit of what I was going through and I wished it was just him and me living there with the little ones.

  Being only five years old I’d had no concept of death until I was told that Dad had gone. Marie had talked about heaven, but Mum said he’d gone to hell. I’d never even had to think about it before. So my way of finding out about it was by discovering that the one person in the world I loved above all others had gone for good; that I was never going to see him again, or talk to him, or ask him any questions or take shelter behind his long legs. It felt as though I had been hit with a sledgehammer, the weight of my misery crushing me into the ground.

  Occasionally Wally would try to put things right for me in a hushed whisper when he was sure Mum was out of the house. ‘Don’t listen to Mummy,’ he would say under his breath, ‘she’s wrong. Your dad has gone to heaven, not hell.’ I wanted to believe him, but I was afraid he was just being kind and that it was Mum who was telling the truth. She was the grown up after all, I reasoned, and she was my mother; why would she lie to me about something so important? Nothing made any sense any more.

  Mum kept the house in immaculate condition, obsessively cleaning and tidying all day long. It was a show home although hardly anyone other than her and her children was ever allowed to set foot through the door. None of us dared to make a mess because it could result in her exploding with fury. Apart from drinking and beating her children about, housework was all Mum ever did. It was as though she was trying to control every object and every speck of dirt in her little kingdom. Each morning she would be up at half past five sweeping round the paths outside the house and vacuuming every dustless room. The towels in the bathroom were lined up in perfect sequence and even the bar of soap by the bath would be positioned at exactly the correct angle. No one was allowed to sit on a chair or settee in case they dented the cushions; we all had to sit on the floor. Before she went to bed at night she would lay out all the breakfast bowls for the morning, every setting lined up and every portion of cereal measured out and ready. The immaculate state of the house added to the image of her as the admirable mother in the eyes of any visiting authorities. If she was looking after her home this well, they must have reasoned, she must be caring for her children with equal passion and dedication.

  As my overwhelming grief and anger began to erupt as tantrums, in which I threw cups and plates across the room, and lashed out, kicking and biting my brothers, Mum stepped in quickly. Having a disturbed five-year-old smashing the place up in temper was far more than she was ever going to be willing to tolerate. I had to be brought under control instantly and completely, so that I would obey her as readily and blindly as the others did. She didn’t intend to teach me how to behave better with love and encouragement, which is how most mothers would have approached the problem; she intended to break my spirit in every way possible. She couldn’t be bothered to try to find out what was troubling me and work towards helping me come to terms with the shock that had traumatized every atom of my body.

  To achieve instant results she needed first to isolate me from the rest of the world, from anyone who might disagree with her methods and might show some sympathy for me rather than for her. In the early days some of Dad’s family came round hoping to visit me and see how I was getting on, but Mum wouldn’t allow any of them through the door or anywhere near me. She wanted to keep prying eyes away from what was really happening inside her home, inside the kingdom that she ruled with a rod of iron. If they came knocking she would order them off her property with a stream of threats and obscenities.

  ‘Fuck off out of it,’ she screamed into their faces, ‘or I’m calling the police. Go on, fuck off out of it!’

  She’d always hated them all, particularly Aunt Melissa, and now Dad was gone she felt she didn’t have to put up with any of them sticking their noses into her business any more, telling her how to bring up her children. I was her son and as far as she was concerned it was nothing to do with them how I was getting on. I was more than just her son; I was her sole property now that Dad had gone, to do with as she pleased.

  Within a few days of me arriving, I was told that I was only ever allowed to wear my underpants because I didn’t ‘deserve’ to have any clothes. If I refused to obey any of her orders I would be violently punished, so I quickly learned always to do as she told me.

  I was only allowed to use the bathroom when she said I could so I soon became unkempt and dirty, in contrast to the immaculate cleanliness of the rest of the house. Then because I was so dirty I wasn’t allowed to use any of Mum’s crockery in case I spread my germs and diseases to the others.

  ‘You’ve inherited the “dirty disease” from your filthy fucking father,’ Mum told me. ‘I don’t want you infecting the rest of us.’

  When you’re little you believe whatever your mother tells you, so I assumed it must all be true, that I must be inferior to the others in some way. The fact that I was the family dog became a standing joke and later they bought me a metal dog’s bowl for my Christmas present, laughing happily at their own wit as they gave it to me. It was as though I was there to entertain them. They were constantly thinking up new ways to amuse themselves, like offering me my meal in the bowl and then throwing the food at me anyway, or spitting on it before making me eat it up, saliva and all. They called me ‘Smelly Woof’ when they were pretending I was their pet, and I knew I did smell, mostly of my own wee, which would escape me involuntarily when fear overcame me and I lost control of my bladder. If I had been allowed a bath occasionally maybe I wouldn’t have stunk the house up and made them all so disgusted with me.

  As the days went past a mixture of shock, fear and grief was taking control of my head and sometimes it wouldn’t let the words come out of my mouth. There were so many things I wanted to say but when I tried to talk the muscles in my throat would seem to freeze, refusing to obey me, making me stammer and stutter as I attempted to force the words out. It felt as though someone was trying to strangle me into silence. All I could think about was my dad. I was constantly seeing the pictures of him burning and Mum’s words going round and round in my head. I tried to say, ‘I want to see my dad’, even though I knew the words would earn me another beating, but as I struggled to find them my tongue would stumble. Wally was the first to notice that I was stuttering.

  ‘I’m worried about Joe,’ he said to Mum.

  ‘What’s fucking wrong with him now?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘He’s not talking.’

  ‘It’s probably a throat infection,’ she said. ‘He’s fine.’

  Over the following week the stutter became worse and worse. By the end of it my brain had completely lost control of my voice and I fell totally silent, unable to form even single words like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘help’. Mum thought at first that it was just me messing about and being difficult but eventually she had to admit that Wally might have a point and agreed to take me to see the doctor. Sitting in the surgery she related my story to him, giving it all the necessary drama and pathos to make it
clear that she was really the one who was suffering the most, having lost her husband and been left with six children to bring up.

  ‘The poor boy was there to witness it,’ she told him, her voice catching on the tears she was pretending to swallow back. ‘He saw his lovely father going up in flames in front of his eyes, just a few weeks ago. The two of them were so close, it’s hit him hard.’

  The doctor examined me and listened to everything she had to say and then explained what he thought had happened.

  ‘I believe Joe has been struck mute from the shock of what he’s witnessed,’ he said gently.

  He was obviously as concerned about upsetting her as he was about whatever was wrong with me.

  ‘William was such a good husband and father,’ she started up again. ‘This is a tragedy for the whole family, but especially for Joe. And now my little boy has been struck dumb as well. How long will it be before he can talk again and get back to his normal self?’

  ‘It could just be a short-term condition,’ the doctor said doubtfully, obviously not having a clue. ‘Or it could be a long-term problem. We’ll just have to see how things develop.’

  By the time we left the surgery the penny had dropped in Mum’s head that I actually had become mute, and it wasn’t just an act. She was partly annoyed with me for causing her yet more inconvenience and for trying to draw more attention to myself, but I suspect there was a part of her brain that was already beginning to see the possibilities, even at that stage. If I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t tell any tales.

  It would be four and a half years before I was able to speak properly again and by striking me mute my brain had finally delivered me completely into Mum’s power. I was totally helpless. Now that I couldn’t speak, my frustration grew even greater, exploding out into uncontrollable physical tantrums and I started hitting furniture, throwing things and kicking doors in my silent rages. I didn’t realize it, but the worse I behaved the more I was playing into Mum’s hands, proving just what a difficult child I was and what a wonderful woman she was to be bringing me up on her own, especially when she had so many other children to care for at the same time.