Joe Peters Read online

  ‘Joe has had one of his tantrums, Mum,’ they’d say. ‘He’s thrown his food all over the floor. What should we do?’

  She would then come clattering down the stairs and batter me and grind my face into it to teach me a lesson for being so disrespectful and ungrateful. When they brought down water in bottles it often tasted funny so I have no idea what they had put in it, and sometimes they would glue the tops onto the bottles so I would have to gnaw through the plastic just to get anything out of them. My baby teeth soon became so weak from malnutrition and lack of cleaning that they would chip and break under any sort of strain. Toothache was added to the long list of different kinds of pain I suffered from. In the end I didn’t care how much it hurt or what the water tasted like because I was so thirsty I would have drunk anything.

  Sometimes Mum even took away my underpants because she said I’d soiled them – ‘You dirty little bastard. You need to be taught a lesson!’ – then I was left naked for days. She fitted a bolt to the outside of the door so she didn’t have to keep on wedging it every time she went in or out, which meant there was no chance of me ever getting out on my own. Sometimes when no one had been down for a day or two I would wonder what would happen if they completely forgot about me. Would I just be a skeleton on the mattress when they finally remembered to come and check on me? I would still have preferred to keep quiet and die in peace rather than bang on the door to remind them I was there because of all the wrath and pain that would bring down on my head.

  Often when Mum was punishing me for something she would talk about Dad, punctuating her blows and kicks with verbal tirades.

  ‘He was a rotten fucking man and a rotten fucking husband. And you are just as fucking bad as him.’

  The pain he had caused her never seemed to fade; if anything it seemed to enrage her even more as time passed. It was as though he was becoming more of an obsession with her now that he was dead than he had been when he was alive. Maybe it angered her to think that he had escaped from her by dying, that she couldn’t do anything to make his life a misery any more, so she turned her frustrations onto me instead.

  ‘Every time I look at you it reminds me of that sick bastard!’ she would say as she gave me another round of punches.

  I still found myself thinking about him all the time as well, remembering our times together and wishing with all my heart that he was still alive. During the hours and hours that I sat alone in that cell I would chat to Dad in my head, just as I used to chat out loud when we were together in the car or the garage. I could picture him sitting on the mattress beside me, talking back to me. When my limbs got too stiff or cold, I would get up and pace around, trying to stretch them out, and pretending I was going for a walk with Dad. I went through a whole range of emotions in those days. Sometimes I was cross with him for being so careless with his own life and leaving me with Mum and the others when he knew that I needed his protection. Sometimes I just sank into black, total misery. What I wanted most was to die so that I could be with him all the time.

  ‘I’m a good boy, God,’ I would pray. ‘Please take me too. Please let me be with my dad.’

  I would fantasize sometimes. I would imagine so hard that I had a nice mummy and daddy who were both alive and both loved me and we all lived together in a happy family that the pictures in my head would seem almost real. These fantasies passed the time for a while but I would then come back to reality out of my daydreams with a sick feeling in my stomach as I realized it had all been in my mind and that I was still lying on my own in the dark, freezing cold and hungry.

  Sometimes Mum and the others would leave me alone for so long the bucket I was supposed to use as a toilet would fill right to the top. When it had reached the brim I would hold my wee in for as long as I could bear, for fear of making it overflow onto the floor and having my face rubbed in it, but eventually I would have no choice but to give in. The stench from the bucket grew so overpowering that anyone coming into the cell would gag and cover their mouths and noses, reinforcing the idea that I was a filthy, stinking creature, no better than a caged animal in need of regular mucking out and sluicing down. Once the bucket was completely full and standing in a growing puddle, I would try to find new places that I thought would disguise the wetness, but it never fooled her for a second and I always ended up with my face being rubbed in it again.

  One day, after I had been under the house for a few months, Mum made a surprise announcement. ‘You stink so bad,’ she told me, ‘it’s coming up through the floorboards. So you’re going to have a fucking bath. Come on, get a fucking move on.’

  She escorted me roughly and impatiently upstairs to the bathroom, cuffing me round the head as we went, and scrubbed me down herself with all the violence she could muster. I thought I heard a man’s voice in the house while I was upstairs and when she escorted me back to the cellar again I found that someone had been in and fixed a proper lock to the door, one with a key that could be turned twice as if to finalize the locking in process once and for all. She must have got a locksmith in to do it. It was as though she was making my imprisonment official and my heart sank even further. Was I going to be kept there forever, until I died? It certainly looked that way.

  As the months dragged on I grew accustomed to listening to the sounds outside the airbrick and in the house above. Sitting in the dark I had to rely on my ears for every bit of information and my hearing seemed to become more acute without any visual distractions. I would be able to tell who it was coming down to see me from the way they opened the top door and the speed and weight of their footsteps on the stairs. My worst fear was always that it would be Mum, because that invariably meant a beating, and the best times were when it was Wally being sent down with my food, or coming of his own accord to give me some company and comfort. He wasn’t like the others and even though Mum would specifically tell him not to go down to see me when she went out, he would disobey her whenever he was sure he could get away with it.

  Grown men might have gone insane when kept in solitary confinement as long as I was, particularly in such horrific conditions. I think the one thing that kept me from losing my mind was the visits from my oldest brother Wally. Even though Wally was eighteen years old by this stage, he was just as frightened of Mum’s violence as everyone else and he always did what she told him, but he didn’t enjoy being sadistic and bullying me the way the others did and whenever he thought she wouldn’t find out he would be kind to me. I guess he was a bit of a geek, with his big thick Buddy Holly-style glasses, short hair and freckles and I loved him for those little kindnesses. He was the only good thing in my life during those long years.

  When Mum was out at the pub and the others had been sent up to bed he would sometimes sneak down with a bit of stolen food for me and he would sit beside me on the stinking mattress and read stories from books about soldiers and young men, heroes and villains. Looking back, I think he made up some of those stories because they often seemed to be particularly relevant to my situation, fairy tales about evil mothers and little boys who eventually escaped and lived happily ever after. I think it was his way of giving me hope that things would get better one day; that my nightmare wouldn’t go on forever. He used to treat me more like a grown-up than anyone else did. ‘You’re nearly seven now, Joe,’ he’d say, ‘it’s time for you to be brave and strong.’

  I knew he was right because that was what all the stories he read to me were about, young boys being heroes in the face of adversity and triumphing over evil, but I also thought it was easy for him to say when he had his freedom and a nice warm bedroom to go to when he wanted to escape the shouting and violence.

  When it was just the two of us he would laugh about Mum, calling her ‘the piss artist’. I didn’t know what a piss artist was, and I didn’t have the voice to ask him any questions, but I imagined it must be some sort of job she was doing. I reckoned she must be good at it and make a lot of money in order to be able to support so many of us.

  Spending
so much time on my own in the dark meant that my understanding of things like language and the way the outside world worked got more and more behind for my age. Wally was the only person who talked to me properly; the rest of them just swore at me and taunted me, so he was the only one teaching me anything worthwhile at all. But I couldn’t ask him any questions, so even he could only teach me a limited amount. Sometimes he would manage to make me laugh inside my head and even though I made no sound he would be able to tell I was laughing because I would make the same little frowning expression every time. This would set him off laughing too and for a few minutes I would be happy and able to forget all the pain and misery.

  ‘Mum’s a bit doolally in the head,’ he would tell me, but I didn’t know what that meant. I looked at him, confused. ‘You know, cuckoo,’ he searched for a better way to explain it. ‘Nuts in the head!’

  I tried to imagine how anyone could get a cuckoo and nuts inside their head. He’d often told me she was ill in the head, so maybe it was the cuckoo and the nuts that were causing the illness. Small children learn almost everything in life by asking questions of adults. When you aren’t able to do that, when you sometimes have no one with you at all for days on end and no mental stimulation, it must do something to a young, developing brain. It certainly slowed down my development in those years, stunting my ability to make sense of the world around me and to understand things that other children my age would have taken for granted. I was living in a vacuum, cut off from all normal life with no mental stimulation beyond Wally’s fleeting visits.

  He would try to encourage me to speak, patiently attempting to extract even the simplest sounds from my apparently paralysed voice box, constantly trying to restore the confidence that the others had battered out of me.

  ‘One day you’re going to grow up to be very intelligent,’ he would tell me. ‘That means clever.’

  I actually doubted if I would grow up at all because Mummy was always telling me I would be dead before my next birthday, but I still liked to be flattered and to think that someone believed in me and believed that there would eventually be an end to my suffering and an escape from my cell.

  Sometimes Wally would play tricks on me, though. On the first of April one year he came downstairs and told me that Mum had fallen downstairs and died. I felt as though a weight was lifting off my heart. I was free and God had answered all my prayers. When Wally told me that it was April Fools’ Day and he was only joking it was as though the whole world had landed back on my shoulders again.

  ‘You aren’t that lucky, Bro,’ he said before leaving the cell again. ‘But maybe one day your time will come.’

  One evening when he visited, I couldn’t stop shaking and he explained to me that it was my body recovering from the shock of the beating Mum had given me an hour or two before. Every part of me used to hurt after those beatings. Once my heart was racing so fast Wally said he was worried I was going to explode. I must have looked panicked when he said that because he laughed at the expression on my face.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t let that happen.’

  He was always terrified of being caught down there without permission and so he would sneak off again after what seemed to me like just a few minutes. If he heard Mum’s footsteps going past on the path outside the airbrick he would know he just had enough time to get back upstairs before she managed to get round the house and open the front door with her key. She would nearly always be rolling drunk by then, back from the pub and shouting obscenities at the top of her voice at anyone who was in the house. That would help to slow down her progress and Wally could tell exactly where she was from the noise. I would be desperate not to be left alone in the dark again and would cling to Wally’s leg like a frightened toddler, staring up at him with imploring eyes, whimpering like a puppy.

  ‘You don’t want your brother getting in trouble, do you?’ he would say as he struggled to get away from me. ‘You’ve got to let me go now, Joe.’

  In the end he would have to peel me off and force me back so he could get out the door, hurriedly pushing me in so he could lock it behind him before turning out the lights and rushing up the stairs.

  It was usually him who would take my toilet bucket up to empty, but he was only allowed to do that if Mum had told him to. If she caught him doing anything for me out of kindness he would be in trouble himself. Wally had explained to me that he would sometimes have to pretend to be nasty to me if Mummy or the other boys were around. He explained that it was in my interests to keep the charade up, as well as his. ‘If she thinks I’m being nice to you,’ he explained, ‘she won’t let me down here to see you any more and I won’t be able to help you at all.’

  One night he felt so bad for me he tried to sneak down at two in the morning with a load of cakes when he thought Mum had gone to bed – but she caught him before he could get through the top door. I could hear her shouting from where I was lying.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing at this time of night? Where are you going with all those?’

  ‘It’s nothing. I was just going to tease him a bit,’ he lied, ‘and eat them in front of him.’

  She can’t have believed him because I could hear him being beaten for that and I convinced myself that it was all my fault for making him feel sorry for me.

  If it hadn’t been for Wally’s secret visits I think I would have died of starvation or just gone completely insane in those months and years. They were the only thing I had to look forward to, the only relief from the loneliness and agony of my existence. I’m convinced that without his kindness I wouldn’t have survived.

  * * *

  I never knew when another beating from Mum was coming. Sometimes she’d forget about me for days on end, and at other times my punishments would be more regular. There were evenings when she tried to get at me after she came back from the pub, in the mood for giving me a beating, but she would be too drunk to get the key into the cellar door. I would be huddled on the mattress, shaking with fear as I listened to her on the other side, banging around, swearing and shouting about how she was going to kill me, telling me what a little bastard I was and how I would be sorry once she got her hands on me. It was always a relief to hear her finally giving up and stumbling back up the stairs, because then I would know I was safe from her for at least a few hours while she slept off the effects of the drink.

  After I had been in the cellar for a few months, not content with giving me arbitrary beatings, Mum decided she should make my punishments more formalized, more like rituals. She got Larry and Barry to bring three solid old wooden chairs down to the cell, and the three of them would strip me naked and stretch me across them. My brothers held my wrists and ankles while Mum beat me viciously with bamboo canes that they had stolen from the nearby allotments, or with a broomstick.

  ‘You no-good little bastard,’ she would shout as she hit me over and over again. ‘I fucking hate you! If I had a gun I would shoot you dead.’

  Larry and Barry would be laughing all the time and egging her on. ‘Give it to him, the little twat!’

  I wanted to scream but no sound would come out; all the pain stayed locked in my brain instead. In the end I would pass out during those beatings. I’d wake up a while later to find I had been chucked back onto the mattress, every part of me aching, fighting for breath and hardly able to move.

  One time when I woke up I found that I wasn’t lying down as usual. While I had been unconscious my wrists had been tied above my head to a piece of iron piping that ran from the floor to the ceiling. I was still naked and the whole surface of my back was in agonizing pain from the beating I had just received. A bucket of cold water suddenly hit me, bringing me fully back to consciousness. I gasped, trying desperately to pull enough air into my lungs to breathe, wheezing and rasping. Mum was laughing at me, still holding the empty bucket.

  ‘Nothing to say for yourself, you little bastard?’ she asked. ‘Where’s your rotten fucking father now when you need him?�
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  I managed to lift my head and looked into her eyes. I immediately realized it was a mistake to make eye contact and averted them again but it was too late to stop her lunging at me, grabbing hold of my hair and smashing the back of my head into the pipe behind me.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, you little shit!’

  I bit my tongue and tasted the blood in my mouth. I remember thinking that if I had a gun I would shoot myself between the eyes rather than have to take any more of this. Mum then stormed out of the cell and I heard her banging her way angrily up the stairs. My whole body was trembling uncontrollably and I must have passed out again from the pain.

  The next thing I knew I was jerked awake by the sound of someone coming back down the stairs. Oh no, I thought, not again. There was too much noise in my head and ringing in my ears to be able to work out who it might be. Surely this time she would actually kill me as she was always promising and finally put me out of my misery. I must have tipped her too far over the edge by daring to look at her, making her think I was being insolent. I was fighting for breath and I could feel tears trickling down my cheeks as the key turned twice in the lock.

  ‘It’s okay, Joe,’ Wally said. ‘It’s only me.’ He looked at me with such sad eyes. ‘Why do you wind her up?’ he asked kindly. ‘What have I told you about not looking at her, you silly boy? Always look at the floor when she’s talking to you.’

  She must have given him permission to come down and release me because he untied my wrists from the pipe and I know he would never have dared to do it of his own accord. My arms slumped down and I fell onto the hard, cold floor as if I was dead. He gently massaged my wrists to try to get the blood flowing through them again, then lifted me under the arms and eased me across the floor onto the mattress, lying me down on my front as carefully as he could.

  ‘This is all your Dad’s fault, you know,’ he said as he gently bathed my wounds with salt water, but I couldn’t be bothered to listen any more. I was hurting too much and I was bored with hearing the same things over and over again, even from Wally. ‘This is going to hurt a bit,’ he warned me and I scrunched my face up as the salt went into the cuts. It felt good to have him tending to me so gently, even if the salt did sting. After a while he stood up to go, telling me to lie quietly until he was able to get back. I heard the door being locked again and the light went out. Then his footsteps disappeared up the stairs. I had to drag myself to the poo bucket to be sick and in the dim light of the airbrick I thought I could see streaks of blood in the vomit. I didn’t have the strength to crawl back to the mattress so I just laid my head down on the concrete and slipped back into a merciful unconsciousness.