Joe Peters

by Cry Silent Tears

  I often used to guess in advance when Amani was likely to be coming to visit me because Wally would be sent down to empty the slops bucket and Mum would come in spraying air freshener around the place to try to make the air less chokingly disgusting. Not that any spray could make much difference when the stench was so ingrained into everything. I soon learned that there was never any point in trying to stop Amani doing what he wanted because he was a thousand times stronger than me. His hands were enormous and he would put them round my throat as he told me what to do, exerting just enough pressure to let me know he could squeeze the life out of me as easily as snapping a matchstick.

  ‘If you don’t do it right,’ he’d say each time, ‘I’ll kill you.’

  I was certain that he was capable of it. I already knew that they could do whatever they wanted to me and no one would ever come to save me, so why wouldn’t they kill me too? No one else in the house would ever have the nerve to tell on them, not even Wally. Once I was dead I would be forgotten completely within a few days, but at least I would be with Dad and I would be free of all the pain.

  ‘Mum and Amani are the masters,’ Wally told me one day. ‘They like to play mind games and you will have to stay strong to win against them.’ I liked the idea of being some sort of mind games warrior, but I couldn’t always be strong and usually my encounters with them left me feeling completely defeated.

  Sometimes Amani would take me upstairs to the bathroom and make me get into the bath in front of him. He would lock the door and pull his trousers down. I remember on one of those occasions I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was horrified at the sight of my bones protruding through my skin and the haunted look in my eyes.

  ‘Look at me,’ Amani snapped, and then he stood there playing with himself. At first I tried to look away but he slapped my face hard. ‘I said look at me! Don’t make me mad or I’ll fucking hurt you.’

  Then he made me stand up and wash myself in front of him. I felt ashamed and dirty. No one had ever told me these things were wrong, but I felt it instinctively. Dad would never have done anything like this, never mind all the other disgusting things Amani made me do. It seemed as though every day he came to see me he had some new, horrible sex act in mind, and it wasn’t long before he started raping me. It hurt so much at first that I passed out, and I’d be left bleeding afterwards and shaking in agony. I was frequently sick after his visits, and there was never time for me to heal between one rape and the next. It was a horrific new kind of torture that took me to new depths of despair.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t sink any lower, my last lifeline was taken away. One day Wally came down to see me and I could tell from his expression he had something important he wanted to tell me.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he said.

  He must have seen the expression of horror in my eyes because he looked away as though he felt guilty about what he was doing to me.

  ‘I’m going to live with my girlfriend and finally get away from the piss artist.’

  He had managed to find an escape route out of our family from hell and I envied him. I couldn’t wait to be able to follow him, if I managed to live that long.

  ‘I’ll be coming back to get you as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘I promise I won’t leave you here.’

  I felt a surge of hope. If I could just stay alive for a few more weeks, I told myself, Wally would be back to rescue me and would take me to live with him and his nice girlfriend, and we would be like a happy family.

  But the days passed and nothing happened. I waited and waited without any change in my circumstances, imagining that perhaps Wally was telling someone in the outside world about me. Surely they would soon come looking for me and would rescue me, battering down the doors and fighting off Mum and the other boys, like the cavalry galloping to the rescue? I imagined how shocked they would be when they found me and how they would feel sorry for me and want to help me, feeding me nice food and tucking me up in a clean, warm bed. A week went by and then another and it was a long time before my hope started to fade.

  But I guess Wally never did tell anyone; or if he did then they didn’t believe him. It would have sounded pretty far-fetched to have someone telling you that his mother was keeping his mute baby brother prisoner in a cellar, starving him and torturing him just for fun. I imagine also that even once he was out of the house he was still too frightened of Mum to do anything against her in case she came after him or did something to his girlfriend.

  So Wally just disappeared out of my life and I never saw him again. I can imagine how relieved he was to escape from her, but how could he have left me to their mercy like that, knowing how they treated me? How could he have slept at night knowing that I was still down under the ground without a single ally in the house above?

  ‘I’ll look after you now,’ Amani promised me and despite all the bad things he had done to me that still kindled a tiny spark of hope in my heart. ‘I’ll do a better job than Wally ever did. If you’re a good boy you can have his bedroom.’

  He promised me the bedroom so often over the following weeks that I became really excited about it. I couldn’t stop smiling at the thought of sleeping in a comfortable bed and maybe even having some of Wally’s old childhood toys to play with.

  ‘If you do what I say we’ll get on okay,’ Amani assured me. I hoped that was true because he was my only chance now.

  But it wasn’t long before Mum decided who was going to have what room and put a stop to any dreams I might have had for leaving the cellar. Ellie and Thomas were moved into Wally’s room and I stayed exactly where I was. Amani might have been a physically powerful man, but it was still Mum who was in charge. Not that he seemed to care because he was getting exactly what he wanted from our new family arrangement. He couldn’t have been happier.

  Chapter Eight

  Rescued from the Cellar

  I was kept imprisoned in the cellar for nearly three years, between the ages of five and eight, and no one from the outside world noticed that I had vanished off the face of the earth. Day after day I sat in the dark waiting for the next beating or the next rape, hunger and thirst constantly gnawing away at my insides, cold eating into my bones and asthma clogging my lungs. Once Wally had abandoned me no one showed me even a moment’s kindness and the easiest times were when it was just me on my own, talking in my head to Dad, with the cellar door double-locked and my tormentors safely on the other side.

  As far as I’m aware, no one from social services ever came to look for me. Maybe I’d slipped through the net in some kind of bureaucratic cock-up or maybe Mum spun them a line – I just don’t know. No one noticed that I hadn’t been enrolled in any of the local schools either, until the day that Thomas mentioned to his teacher that he and Ellie had another older brother apart from Wally, Larry and Barry. Mum must have forgotten to make sure he understood he was never to mention me to anyone outside the house. Or maybe she had told him and Thomas was getting self-assured enough to disobey her a little from time to time.

  ‘Have you?’ the teacher was obviously surprised by the news. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Joe,’ Thomas told her innocently.

  ‘What school does he go to?’

  ‘He doesn’t go to school.’

  Puzzled, the teacher must have reported the conversation to the headmaster of the school, who then invited Mum in to talk about it.

  ‘Thomas tells us you have another lad called Joe,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, smart enough to know it would be pointless to deny it.

  ‘Why,’ he asked her, ‘doesn’t Joe go to school?’

  ‘He has problems,’ Mum told them, no doubt with a convincing look of pained martyrdom on her face. ‘He’s mute and he’s very disruptive. He’s got a tilted brain.’

  ‘But why haven’t you enrolled him in a school?’ the headmaster persevered.

  ‘He’s very destructive,’ she said, as if that answered everything. ‘I couldn’t inflict him o
n other people’s children. No one can control him.’

  I imagine Mum had to think quickly at this stage. She must have known that she could get into trouble for keeping me out of school for three years, but she probably thought that if she played up how difficult I was, it would make it look as though she had been shouldering the whole burden of looking after me, that she had been acting with noble intentions even if she had technically broken the law. Because I knew nothing about the world beyond what happened in my cell, my behaviour would bear out everything she said about me. They had been treating me like a caged wild animal for so long that I had become one and any school that took me on was going to have its work cut out introducing me into a class full of other children. Once the authorities had been alerted to my existence, however, they could not forget about me again.

  ‘We will need to come and meet Joe,’ the social services department told Mum when the surprising news was passed on to them, ‘to assess his needs so we can work out how best to help him, and you.’

  An appointment was duly made and the day that the welfare worker was due to come to the house to meet me I was brought up from the cellar and scrubbed down.

  ‘You’d better behave yourself,’ Mum warned as she got me ready, brushing my teeth for the first time in three years and dressing me roughly in some new clothes I had never seen before. ‘Or I’m going to give you a right battering once she’s gone.’

  It felt strange to have clean, soft material next to my skin after so many years of shivering naked or in nothing more than my soiled underpants. Everything smelled so fresh and exotic.

  Mum took me into her posh sitting room to wait. It was a room I had never even seen before and I was overawed with its immaculate decorations and furniture, having spent so long with nothing to look at but bare walls, floors and an old mattress. With Mum hovering around me like a bomb waiting to go off, I felt as though I had been brought into enemy territory and part of me would have liked to be back under the floorboards again, behind the safety of a double-locked door.

  She gave me a glass of something to drink and my hand was shaking so much I was frightened I was going to spill it on the swirly-patterned green carpet. Mum had told me so often that I was going to be killed that I began to wonder if this was to be the day of my execution; was someone coming to take me away and kill me because I had been so much trouble to my mother and because my father had been so bad to her? Every time Mum came down to the cellar to beat me or make me do something I would think that this time it was going to be my time to die. I was always surprised to find that I was still alive at the end of each ordeal.

  ‘Stop shaking!’ she ordered me and I tried my hardest by holding my wrist with my other hand.

  I was so confused. I couldn’t work out what her plan was or when I was going to be hit again. I got more and more scared of what was coming until my heart was racing. How would they kill me? Would it be agony? Would I go to hell when I died?

  When the doorbell rang Mum took the glass back from me and placed it carefully on the coffee table before going out to let the welfare worker in, welcoming her into the house as though she was delighted to see her.

  As I stood there, shaking, I could hear her talking outside in a sweet, reasonable voice she never used around the house when it was just family. ‘Hello, do come in … How nice to meet you … It’s so kind of you to come and see us … Come through and meet Joe.’

  When she came back into the room she was smiling all over her face and treating me as though I was her most precious child.

  ‘Sit down here, darling,’ she crooned at me, pointing to the corner of her settee, something I had never been allowed to do before. I was terrified of what might be going to happen next as the woman I suspected might be my executioner entered the room behind her, looking deceptively friendly. As she came towards me the welfare worker held out her hand for me to shake.

  ‘Hello, young man,’ she said in a warm, kind voice.

  Assuming I was about to be hit, because that was all I had known for the previous three years or more, I reacted instinctively to defend myself and bit her hand, instantly proving that everything Mum had told them about me being aggressive and disruptive was true. The woman screamed and my teeth stayed tightly clamped into her flesh. I didn’t want to let go because as long as her hand was between my teeth she couldn’t use it to hit me.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Mum said, taking my face between her fingers. ‘Come along Joe, let go now.’

  I expected her to punch me in the ear like she normally would have done in such a situation and braced myself for the blow, but instead her touch was gentle and caring.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ she coaxed sweetly. ‘Let go of the nice lady.’

  When they finally prised my teeth open I started kicking and screaming, determined not to be taken to my execution without putting up a fight. I figured I had nothing left to lose now if they were going to kill me anyway. Mum restrained me, kindly but firmly. I dare say the welfare worker was impressed with her saintly maternal patience in the face of such provocation.

  ‘I can see why you haven’t enrolled him,’ the woman said as she sat down on one of the chairs, nursing her wounded hand and eyeing me nervously in case I flew at her again.

  ‘I can’t let him mix with other children,’ Mum said. ‘Not when he’s liable to behave like that.’

  ‘I do see what you mean,’ the woman assured her sympathetically, ‘but I’m afraid he must go to school. It’s the law. There’s a lot we can do to help him, and to help you.’

  Unable to speak up in order to defend myself in any way I had to listen while Mum did all my talking for me. Before he went away Wally had been trying to help me to talk but at that stage I had only just started to be able to form single sounds like ‘aah’ or ‘the’. It was impossible to communicate anything with such limited words. To the welfare worker I must indeed have looked like a deeply traumatized, virtually feral creature. Although the authorities told Mum that I would have to be enrolled at school, because that was the law, no one could really blame her for trying to keep me away from the rest of the world, taking all the burden of looking after me upon her own shoulders. When they looked at my notes they saw that it was true that I had witnessed my father’s death and had been struck dumb as a result, and the picture must have seemed as if it was all clicking neatly into place. The family doctor backed up everything Mum said, confirming that she had taken me to see him soon after Dad’s death and that I had already lost the ability to speak by then.

  ‘He’s a very aggressive and disturbed child,’ he had written, remembering what Mum had told him at the time, and probably remembering our visit all too vividly.

  Mum had an explanation for everything.

  ‘Seeing his dad bursting into flames in front of him has tilted his brain,’ she explained, using a phrase she had invented herself and would repeat over and over to anyone who’d listen. ‘That’s why he’s so disturbed. He’s a terribly fussy eater too. That’s why he is as thin as a stick and poorly looking. He’s a terrible worry to all of us. It’s because he won’t eat properly that he has become malnourished and his teeth have all rotted.’ She babbled on and on as if the emotional strain of it was more than she could bear, that she had to unburden herself of all her worries now that she had found someone kind enough to listen.

  ‘We know you’re a good mother,’ the welfare worker gently reassured her, falling completely for the act. ‘But you have done wrong by keeping Joe at home and trying to deal with him on your own. We can help you. That’s what we’re here for. You must trust us to do the best thing for him and for you and the rest of your family.’

  Mum seemed to be loving the attention she was getting. Her initial nervousness about how things would go when they found out about me had vanished; she had discovered a way of getting away with everything she and the others had done to me over the previous three years and of coming out looking like a heroine.

  Once the welfare w
orker had gone, having reassured us that everything was going to be fine, Mum stripped me of my new clothes and bundled me straight back downstairs to the cellar. I was quite keen to go before I did something wrong and made her lose her temper. Once I was locked back in the dark I sat on the mattress and thought deeply about everything that had just happened, trying to work out what it all meant.

  From my point of view, once I had realized that this woman was actually there to help me rather than kill me, it occurred to me that things could be about to improve dramatically for me. Now the outside world knew that I existed, surely it would become obvious to Mum that she couldn’t keep me in the cellar for much longer. If I went to school I would be able to make friends and I wouldn’t have to be alone all the time.

  Sure enough, a few days later I was taken back upstairs and Mum informed me that things were going to change from now on.

  ‘If you promise me you’re going to behave now,’ she told me, ‘you can move back into Larry and Barry’s room.’

  Remembering how my older brothers had treated me in the past, I would much rather have gone in with Thomas and Ellie but I knew that option wasn’t on offer so I made no sign or sound of protest. I didn’t want to risk upsetting her again by seeming ungrateful for anything she was offering, not when things were just starting to go my way.

  ‘It suits us for you to come out of the cellar now,’ Mum told me, ‘because Amani wants to use the room for other things.’

  I guess she didn’t want me to get the idea that she had been made to do anything she didn’t want to do just because the welfare worker had been round. She wanted to make it seem as though it was her decision to bring me out of the dark, as if she had decided I had been punished enough now for my past crimes and that I should be allowed to have another chance at living amongst the family to see if I had learned my lesson and mended my ways.