Joe Peters Read online

  Mum actually seemed to enjoy violence, relishing watching it almost as much as she relished doling it out herself. She used to rig up a sort of boxing ring in the second lounge at the house and make my three oldest brothers fight each other, with her as their coach and cheerleader as well as their audience. The room was not as smart as the rest of her home since she displayed all her best furniture in the other lounge. It was a part of the house that no one from outside the family would ever be invited into. It contained just an old fire and a tatty settee and chair. It would have been a comfortable ‘family room’ if we had been the kind of happy family to have such a thing. It was certainly a place where Mum could relax and unwind and not worry if there was some blood spilled on the carpet. There were always curtains drawn across the windows, with nets pulled tight behind them for extra protection against prying eyes. Even if she opened the windows to let in some air she still wouldn’t part the curtains, not wanting anyone from the outside world to be able to glimpse into her private fiefdom and witness what she was getting up to. When she felt like some entertainment she would sit down in that room with a cup of tea, pushing the older boys on and on like gladiators in Ancient Rome, until one of them drew blood.

  ‘Go on,’ she’d jeer at them, ‘punch him! Fucking kill him!’

  If they tried to refuse they would get a beating from her, which would be far worse than anything they could do to each other. It didn’t matter if they were really hurt, she would insist they continued to fight until blood had been spilled, beating them with a garden cane if they tried to stop. She couldn’t allow any disobedience, couldn’t show a single moment of weakness or kindness in case it undermined the terror that she relied on in order to reign supreme over us all. Once one of them was bleeding she would allow him to come out of the ring and she would bring in another to take on the winner. She would tell them that she was just trying to teach them how to fight, toughening them up so they would be able to look after themselves in the outside world, but it seemed more like she did it to indulge her own blood¬ lust. The only person they really needed to protect themselves from was their own mother.

  Most of the violence in the house was inflicted directly by her. If any of us dared to disobey her, or even just looked at her in the wrong way, she would immediately lay into us in a blind rage. Sometimes she wouldn’t even need to have a reason; she would just become angry and take it out on whoever was nearest. She would grab Thomas and me by the hair and literally swing us round by it until our feet lifted off the ground, sending us hurtling into the walls. Her strength sometimes seemed superhuman. If she didn’t manage to get a satisfying liftoff first time she would repeat the manoeuvre until she got it right.

  As part of her hard-done-by widow act, Mum successfully sued the garage for several thousand pounds in compensation for Dad’s death, and Graeme closed the business down soon afterwards. Dad’s best friend Derek felt so guilty about not being able to save Dad when the flames were engulfing him that he wrote a suicide note and drove his car off the motorway, killing himself in the crash. It seemed as though the repercussions from that little gust of wind were going to go on forever, like ripples on a pond disturbed by a stone.

  Mum was determined to crush my spirit and put a stop to my disruptive behaviour once and for all and she beat me up so violently, so often, that I finally understood I must never question her or so much as look at her directly again. She was constantly warning me that next time I annoyed her she would kill me and as I lay on the floor in a battered heap I had no reason to doubt her. She made no effort to hold back the full force of her strength when she hit out; there was no self-control, no fear of causing damage, no worries about killing someone. It had become normal for me to be punched in the head or kicked over and over again for no reason at all. Even if I was behaving myself I still drove her mad, just because I was there and because I reminded her of the humiliation Dad and Marie had put her through.

  The fact that I was now virtually silent, making only little squeaking noises instead of speaking, seemed to fuel her annoyance even further. It was as if she believed I was mocking her with my whimpering, my pleading eyes and frantically shaking head as I tried to dissuade her from hitting me any more. As far she was concerned I was no longer a human being; I had degenerated into a hated animal to be kicked and punched and abused at every opportunity, like a beaten dog slinking around in the shadows with its head down and eyes to the floor.

  When I first lost my voice I found other ways to communicate. If I wanted something I would point at it and grunt and even that would drive her mad and so soon I stopped communicating at all. She made no secret of the fact that she detested me more and more every day; nothing I could have done would have made any difference by that stage.

  ‘Don’t fucking point,’ she would snarl, giving me such a hard slap I would be knocked off my feet.

  ‘Don’t fucking look at me!’

  ‘You smell fucking terrible!’

  Everything was an excuse to hit me. It went on and on and on. She channelled every ounce of anger and disappointment she felt towards the world in general and my father in particular, and took it out on me. She would encourage the others to do the same and Larry and Barry were happy to cooperate, delighted to have someone so much further down the family pecking order than themselves. They always wanted to do things to please her, and they soon learned that any humiliation they wanted to inflict on me would earn her approval as well as satisfying their own sadistic instincts.

  I was still sleeping on the floor in Larry and Barry’s room. Wally had his own room at the top of the house and Thomas and Ellie shared another room. I would have much preferred to have been in with them but I knew better than to argue with any decision Mum made. I had to stay in the bedroom all day long, except at mealtimes, but I wasn’t allowed to play with anything in there that belonged to my brothers. If I so much as touched one of their belongings I would be given a beating and I had nothing of my own to play with. The boredom of just sitting there all day long increased the feelings of isolation and frustration that were building up inside me, until I was just itching to break out into mischief or destruction but never daring to.

  At night I had no mattress or pillow, only a single blanket. Larry and Barry shared a double bed and resented having me in the house as much as Mum did. They bullied me at every opportunity and whenever they made a noise that disturbed Mum they would make sure I took the blame. She used to put us all to bed by six or seven in the evening so that she could have some solitary drinking time for herself. We would usually be awake again at four or four thirty, itching to get up and move about. Larry and Barry would start messing around together, fighting in bed and farting on each other, and if they woke Mum up she would shout through the wall.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘It’s Joe,’ they would yell back. I would open my mouth to protest my innocence, terrified of the punishment I would inevitably receive, but no sound would come out and Larry and Barry would giggle triumphantly as they waited for the entertainment that would follow.

  Furious at being woken and at the thought that I would dare to play up after all she had done to tame me, she would come storming in and give me another beating. The fact that I had no voice with which to plead my innocence was probably irrelevant as I doubt she would have believed me anyway.

  Larry and Barry were thick as thieves and they used to order me to do things that they knew would get me into trouble. Being five, brimming with repressed energy and boredom, and eager to please my big brothers to avoid getting a beating from them, I was easily influenced and always ended up being the one who got caught. Whenever there was any trouble Mum would blame me anyway, even if it was obvious it couldn’t have been anything to do with me.

  ‘None of this ever happened till you came on the scene,’ she’d say about some minor infringement of her rules, and then she’d give me another battering, dragging me around by the hair with my mouth stretched open but the screams
refusing to form in my throat.

  One dark morning, just a few months after Dad died, Mum had finally had enough of me disturbing her sleep. She pulled me all the way down the stairs by my hair, shouting at the top of her voice.

  ‘This time you have gone too fucking far, you little bastard. You’ve pushed me too far. I’m finished with being patient with you. I’ve fucking had enough!’

  I really believed that she was finally going to kill me. She’d told me often enough that she would do it one day.

  There was a door under the stairs, which I had assumed led to a broom cupboard; I had never seen anyone opening it and no one had ever mentioned what lay behind it but I would be finding out soon enough. Dragging me behind her along the hall floor, Mum threw open the under-stairs door. I saw another staircase stretching down into the darkness below and I felt a terrible foreboding of what might be in store. Was this where she took people she was going to kill?

  She punched a light switch and I saw for the first time what I would later understand was a basement. This was nothing like the clean, orderly world of the rooms in the rest of the house. There was a smell of mustiness and damp rising up from the shadows thrown by the single light bulb. Thick cobwebs clung to the rough brick walls and bare wood. She hurled me down the stairs, kicking and punching as she followed me down. At the bottom there was another door, a big solid Victorian timber one, which she opened and threw me through with one last mighty slap, as if I was no more than a sack of straw. She turned on another light and I could see the full horror of where she was putting me.

  Inside was a cellar containing nothing but a filthy old mattress propped up against the wall. Unable to stand the sight of me for a second longer she slammed the door shut behind me and switched off the light from the outside. I could hear her jamming something under the door handle so I wouldn’t be able to get out. Then she stamped back up the stairs and there was silence as well as blackness.

  For a moment it felt as though I was in total darkness, but as my eyes adjusted the few thin rays of light which filtered in through an airbrick high up in the wall once dawn broke gave me just enough vision to grope my way around. Even if she hadn’t jammed the door I knew better than to try to open it without her permission in order to reach the light switch. The cold began to creep into my bones and I just sat shivering in the dark, wearing only my underpants, waiting to see what would happen next. I listened to the trains rumbling past outside the airbrick, wishing I could climb into one of the warm, bright carriages I had seen passing so many times and travel as far as possible from that room.

  I had entered a world I hadn’t even known existed a few minutes before; one that was to become my prison cell for the next three years.

  Chapter Six

  Incarceration

  I don’t think that Mum had any long-term plan to turn that dark little underground room into my prison cell at the moment she first pushed me in there and wedged the door shut. There was no lock on the door at that stage; that came later, which suggests she hadn’t pre-planned my imprisonment. I think she had just had enough of me that morning – enough of what she saw as my spoiled, disruptive behaviour. She wanted to get me out of the way and teach me a lesson once and for all. It was only once I was in the cell that she realized it was the best place for me. She had accidentally found a way to keep me completely out of her sight, while keeping me available to vent her bitterness and anger on when it became too much to contain. She could keep me there for as long as she liked because there was no one she had to answer to.

  When a child disappears it is usually their panicking and grief-stricken loved ones who raise the alarm, but in my case in was my loved ones who had caused me to vanish, so why would anyone else notice? The other people who might have cared what happened to me, like Marie and Aunt Melissa, had been chased away by Mum right from the beginning. They wouldn’t have expected to hear anything from me.

  While other children played outside in the sun, went to school, made friends and learned new things, I sat in the dark on my own. As far as I know, during those three years no one from social services asked where I was or what was happening to me. Perhaps they did come knocking and Mum managed to convince them with some story or other. Maybe she told them I had moved from the area, but I think they would have asked to see at least some evidence of where I was now to back up any claims she made. My name must have been on the system because I had been to see the local doctor when I first went mute, so I must have had a national health number at the very least. I’m also fairly sure Mum would have been collecting benefits for looking after me from the welfare because she needed every penny she could scrounge together. So how could I just have slipped out of sight like that without anyone questioning it? Maybe they were confused because I had been living at two different addresses – both Mum’s and Marie’s. Maybe their case load was just too great. I don’t know and I suppose I’ll never find out now.

  After a while of sitting on the bare floor that first day, straining my ears as I listened out for her to come back down the stairs and give me another beating, I found the courage to stand up and pull the mattress flat onto the floor in order to give myself somewhere more comfortable to lie. I almost choked on the stale, damp stink that rose into the air on a cloud of dust as it dropped down, filling my lungs and making me wheeze. It was a relief to get my skinny limbs off the cold, hard concrete even though the mattress was full of lumps and sharp edges.

  As I lay, staring up into the darkness, it wasn’t long before I felt the approaching urge to pee. I hadn’t emptied my bladder since the previous evening and I realized it was now painfully full. I had no idea how long I was going to be down there and I certainly didn’t have the nerve to bang on the door for help or to even try to push my way through it and find my way back up the stairs in the dark. Knowing how angry she always became when I peed myself by mistake, I tried to hold it in but the pain eventually became so intense I had to give up and I released it onto the floor, knowing, even as the feeling of release spread through me, that I would be in trouble if she spotted the puddle. I hoped she wouldn’t come back down before it evaporated, but in my heart I knew that was unlikely. The urine left a new smell in the air and although it was a relief to have got rid of it I felt even dirtier as I lay back down on the mattress again to wait for something to happen, wondering if perhaps this was the end and I was just going to be left alone to die of hunger and thirst.

  Hours later I heard footsteps on the stairs and the light came on in the cell, almost blinding me with its sudden brightness. When Mum opened the door and came in I saw immediately from her expression that she could smell what I’d done and I cringed, bracing myself for the blows.

  ‘You dirty little shit,’ she growled, her lips curling up in disgust. ‘You’re not even fucking house trained.’

  Just as I expected she went completely mental at me for daring to soil her house, even this distant, dirty, forgotten corner of it. Armed with a new reason to be angry, she pulled me up off the mattress by the hair and beat me hard. Still gripping my hair tightly she pushed me onto my knees and smeared my face into the puddle of wee with all her strength, as if she was trying to teach a particularly stubborn puppy the error of its ways, forcing me down so hard I was afraid she would break my nose.

  ‘You dirty little bastard!’ she screamed as she rubbed, before shouting up to Wally.

  ‘Fetch a fucking mop and bucket!’

  When Wally came hurrying down she hurled the mop at me with all her strength.

  ‘Clean it up now,’ she ordered.

  She watched as I worked, shouting orders at me all the time: ‘Scrub harder! Use more water!’ Then she turned back to Wally.

  ‘Get two more buckets of cold water,’ she told him and he dutifully went back upstairs to dispose of the dirty water. I assumed she was going to use the fresh water to rinse down the floor, but once he had brought the buckets back down she sent him away and then threw the contents of both over me. The c
oldness of the water knocked the breath out of me.

  ‘You stink,’ she snarled. ‘You dirty little bastard!’

  She left one of the empty buckets behind for me to use as a toilet from then on and wedged the door handle from the other side as she left me alone in the dark once more, shivering on the soaking wet mattress and feeling utterly alone. What was going to become of me? Would I die of cold or of hunger first?

  To start with, one of them would bring me food once a day most days, but the longer I was down there the more angry Mum seemed to become towards me and the less willing she was to put herself out to feed me. She saw me as nothing more than an inconvenience and a blight on her life and preferred to put me out of her mind. Sometimes it would be her who would bring the scraps down and sometimes she would send Larry and Barry, who were enjoying this new opportunity to humiliate me further. As far as they were concerned, the family dog was now being confined to a cage, which meant they didn’t have to have me stinking up their bedroom any more. Once they realized that the worse they treated me the happier Mum would be with them, they exploited every new opportunity to indulge their hatred of me and their own sadistic impulses. Just as before they would spit in my food and throw it on the floor, forcing me to lick it up like a dog, which was a hundred times worse when it was the filthy dirty bricks of the cellar floor that I was having to lick rather than Mum’s pristine kitchen floor. If I refused to do anything they ordered me to do they would call Mum.