‘Don’t talk to my brother like that!’ he’d shout whenever he caught them in the act, and they would all take notice of him, however old they were.
Thomas was turning into a hard little nut, happy to give anyone a kicking if they tried it on with him. I didn’t fight back myself because I’d learned how much worse things got for me at home when I did that. Teachers were still using canes and slippers to beat children in school back then and I didn’t want to risk that. In fact, I did end up getting beaten once or twice for being disruptive in class and it wasn’t as dreadful as I had feared. I was so hardened to punishment I didn’t even react when they swiped me across the knuckles with a cane. Pain didn’t have much effect on me by then; I used to inflict it on myself anyway. Sometimes I would scrape pen nibs along my arm, digging them into the flesh from the sheer frustration of being me and having to live the life I had been given and being so helpless to do anything about making it better. There were times when I felt as though I hated me as much as Mum and the others did, and I thought I could understand why they always wanted to hit me.
There was one boy in my year called Pete who never joined in any of the attacks on me and started coming to my rescue whenever he saw I was being bullied. He came from a more educated family than most of us; his father was a doctor and his mother was a university lecturer. He knew that what they were doing was out of order and he started sticking up for me, apparently not afraid of anyone. He and Thomas were the only ones who had ever done that. Wally had been kind to me, but he had tried to avoid taking a beating himself on my behalf, and had never confronted the others and told them that what they were doing to me was wrong. Pete knew what was right and what was wrong and he wasn’t willing to keep quiet about it. You don’t meet many people who are brave enough to be like that, particularly not children, and I felt proud when I realized that such a good and brave person wanted to be my friend.
Pete was pretty tough physically so he doled out the odd clip round the ear on my behalf when my attackers wouldn’t back down and he started to get into trouble for it with the staff. His parents were called into the school to talk about his behaviour, which the staff all thought was out of character. All his mum and dad knew was that their previously bright and well-behaved son had only started to get into trouble since befriending me, the strange, grubby, skinny little mute boy, so they obviously jumped to the conclusion that I was a bad influence on him. In fact all Pete was doing was watching my back and being protective. He was my Good Samaritan and I wished I could find the words to tell them that they should be proud of his behaviour, not worried about it.
I used to get my head shoved down the toilets a lot by the bigger boys, so Pete would make sure he accompanied me every time I needed to go. The bullies wouldn’t do anything if he was there to challenge them and make them feel like cowards. He’d been quite popular before but the other children tried to isolate him because I was always with him and they didn’t want me, ‘the freak’, hanging around with them. But Pete never let me down. If he had to choose between me and his former friends then he always chose me, and they were forced to respect that once they realized they couldn’t turn him against me. Watching the way he dealt with them was a lesson to me and I wished I could stand up to everyone in my life the way he stood up to those kids.
I’d started speech therapy lessons with a woman called Jill, but progress was very slow in the beginning. Pete never got impatient with me when I couldn’t communicate with him verbally. I would point to something, or draw a picture, or make an expression and he would always understand what I was on about. He worked hard at it but never made it seem like a chore. He was an only child, which was maybe why he was less willing to hunt with the pack and was not frightened of standing up for what he thought was right, even if it meant being ostracized himself.
‘I’d love you to be my brother,’ he told me several times. ‘I’d look after you all the time then.’
Can you imagine what it felt like to have someone say things like that to me when I had spent the last three years being told what a filthy, smelly, evil little bastard I was?
Despite the misgivings Pete’s parents had about their son’s unusual choice of friend, they invited me back to their home after school one day. They lived in a big smart house and I felt incredibly nervous, imagining what sort of reception I would get. I was shaking as we crunched across the gravel towards the imposing- looking front door, knowing exactly how Mum always reacted to any children who made unwelcome visits to our house. Pete was hoping that if his parents actually met me and got to know me they wouldn’t be so worried about me hanging out with him because they would see that I was a nice guy. Personally, I was very doubtful that I was going to be able to impress them when I didn’t even have the power of speech, but I was anxious to try – and curious also to see what life was like in a family so different from mine.
I had never been to anyone else’s home apart from other family members when Dad was alive, and I had certainly never been inside such a lovely house with posh cars parked on the drive and expensive furniture in every room. There was a real feeling of warmth and love and security the moment you walked through the door, a million miles from the cheap, neat, show-home look that Mum struggled to maintain in her best lounge. Pete’s father was a tall man with a deep, commanding voice. He and his mother were incredibly welcoming and tried to make polite conversation with me as we had tea sitting at their huge oak kitchen table. Pete did the talking for me, translating my noises and gestures and expressions. It seemed to me that they were way above me in every sense, that I didn’t deserve to be sitting with them and should probably be under the table as I would have been at home. To be treated with such kindness and respect was an overwhelming experience but at the same time it gave me hope because it made me realize that there was a world where people were gentle and polite and protective towards one another. Maybe one day, I thought, I would be able to escape from my background and live a life more like this.
Not having the slightest understanding of what life might be like in a home like mine, Pete innocently came knocking at Mum’s front door one day to ask if I could come out to play.
‘Fuck off!’ Mum told him the moment he opened his mouth to speak. ‘Don’t come knocking my door again.’
She slammed the door in his startled face and I suspect in that moment he suddenly understood a great deal more about me and why I was the way I was, even without knowing the gruesome details. Her reaction wasn’t personal to him; she talked the same way to any kids who came round for us, so they only ever tried once. She didn’t want to have other kids hanging around the house, asking questions, seeing things that they shouldn’t and telling tales back at their own homes. She didn’t make any attempt to turn on the false charm for them; it was only the adults in positions of authority who she was polite to, putting on her big act when she thought she was about to get into trouble or when she wanted to scrounge some more benefit money.
I was over the moon at having a real friend of my own and looked forward to getting to school each day just to see him. Another advantage of school for me was that I knew I would get at least one meal a day, five days a week, and I made the most of it. I would eat twice as fast as everyone else and keep on going back up for third, fourth and sometimes even fifth helpings, pointing at the food and looking at the dinner ladies with imploring eyes. I ate like a pig, clearing my plate and anyone else’s that was within reach. It became a standing joke amongst the dinner ladies and they loved it. It was a compliment to their cooking I guess.
‘You need fattening up,’ they would laugh as they heaped more and more food onto my plate. ‘You can have as much as you want, love.’
My favourite was the apple crumble with loads of custard. It filled my stomach with a satisfying weight that I could feel lying inside me for several hours afterwards, a completely different feeling to the endless hours of hunger pains that I had grown used to in Mum’s house. It wasn’t long before I st
arted to put on weight and regain some of the strength and health that had ebbed away over the previous years of starvation and imprisonment. It’s amazing how a young body can recover from so much abuse and actually catch up on the growing that it’s missed once you start to nourish it a bit.
There were several more weekend trips to the hotel in the country with Uncle Douglas, and the routine was always the same. Mum would be paid in advance and warned that if I didn’t do it right she wouldn’t be paid again next time, so she made it clear to me each time what she would do to me if I didn’t please her best customer. He would then go through pretty much the same rituals every time, torturing and raping and humiliating me for hours on end, making sure that he could rely on my absolute co-operation and obedience with threats and beatings. Although he was pleasing himself and living out his own fantasies, Douglas was also preparing me for something else, breaking me in so that he could be sure he could sell my services to others and be confident that I would never let him down or cause any trouble. I was being trained just like an animal in the circus.
‘You’re going to be making big films,’ Mum said one day when she was yet again getting me ready to be picked up from the house by Uncle Douglas. ‘You’ll be becoming an actor.’
Her words puzzled me. How could that be possible, I wondered, when I couldn’t speak or even make a sound?
‘You’ve got to prove you’re worthwhile otherwise I won’t be paid,’ she reminded me. ‘You’re going to be the youngest porn star ever.’
I wasn’t sure what a porn star was. Porn was a type of fish wasn’t it? Perhaps I was going to have to dress up as a fish, but I couldn’t swim so I hoped they wouldn’t be asking me to do that. It was all very confusing.
‘Uncle Douglas is a famous film producer,’ she went on. ‘He’s going to be taking you away for filming for a few days. You’ll meet other children.’
She made it sound as though it was a great opportunity for me but I knew from bitter experience that anything involving Uncle Douglas was not going to be good fun. I could be quite sure of that. When he picked me up he didn’t take me to the hotel as usual – instead he drove me to his house. It was just the sort of place you would expect such a disgusting man to live in. Tucked away out of sight down at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was separated off from any neighbouring houses by tall dark trees and high fences. It looked big and dark and forbidding before you even walked through the door.
Inside the gloomy interior the stench of stale food and sweat and dirt was overpowering, making you want to gag. Everything was filthy and the windows were all sealed so that there was no chance of anyone escaping or of any fresh air getting in. The house contained a maze of nasty little rooms. First of all I was led into a sort of sitting room where several other kids were sitting staring at the ground. It was like a sort of holding area and Uncle Douglas explained to me that the rules in there were strict. We weren’t allowed to speak to anyone else, not even one another, or to make eye contact. We had to keep our eyes on the floor at all times. I imagine that they were the same rules the slave traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used in order to ensure their charges didn’t mutiny or become bold or defiant.
We were mostly boys, although there were a few girls. The girls were sniffling and sobbing, while the boys were dry-eyed and silent, like the walking dead. I was told that if anyone broke a rule and looked up, or spoke, or refused to do what they were told, or simply got an instruction wrong, they would be taken to the ‘punishment room’ and beaten savagely until they had learned their lesson.
Douglas was undoubtedly the man in charge of this little kingdom, but he had a sidekick called Joe, who was just as vicious and vile as him. Joe was his assistant, responsible for herding us down corridors when we were needed, or taking us to the punishment room. He must have looked to the outside world like a total misfit, with his grubby black trackie bottoms, white socks and lumpy shoes. If he wore a jumper it always seemed to be too small for him, the sleeves ending inches above his bony wrists. The buttons of his floral shirts would always be undone, showing a disgustingly hairy chest, contrasting with a spookily hairless chin on his drawn, pale face. He was tall and thin, the opposite to fat Douglas. Together they were like a pair of cartoon baddies from a Disney film. They might have been a couple of losers in the world outside the house, but inside it they possessed total power.
To begin with I was relieved to see other people around, especially other kids, thinking perhaps Uncle Douglas would leave me alone if he didn’t have the privacy he needed to indulge his appetites. I soon realized that everyone in the house was there for the same reason and he wasn’t going to have to keep anything hidden or private. Out in the hallway I heard some adult voices and it wasn’t long before I became aware that these were the clients who would be paying for our services.
The men who came to the house always looked a little disconcerted when they first walked in and breathed the foul air, and most of them refused Douglas’s eager offers of tea from the cracked and stained mugs that festered on every surface, but they always stayed because they knew that he was offering them things that they would have trouble getting anywhere else. He was offering them a walk on the dark side of life, an opportunity to go to places that didn’t exist in their normal, respectable, everyday worlds. Sometimes they would discreetly try to open one of the windows to let some air into one or other of the stinking rooms, but none of the hinges moved; they had all been painted over years before.
Uncle Douglas was able to satisfy his customers’ most evil fantasies because he had a string of terrified slaves like me, people who had been sold to him by their families or carers and who were too frightened to protest or put up any sort of fight because they knew what would happen to them if they tried. Our spirits had been broken and we had been trained to obey; we knew what was expected of us and we knew we would be brutally punished if we didn’t provide it.
Douglas must have felt that he had groomed me well enough and that now I was ready to be used for his business, to become ‘a porn star’, as Mum put it. I didn’t realize it when I first walked into that house, but this was where nearly all my weekends and school holidays would be spent for the next three or four years. I was still only nine years old. There were always several of us kids there at the same time and we would be kept there for entire weekends, often longer during the school holidays. It became the new routine of my life; Uncle Douglas would pick me up after school on a Friday and I would be taken back home again on a Sunday evening so I would be ready to get back to school on the Monday morning.
The punters who came and went during those weekends arrived at the door with their twisted fantasies and paid Douglas to set the scenes up and film them while they did whatever they wanted to us. Sometimes they just wanted to watch us doing things to one another; other times they wanted to be inflicting the pain and suffering themselves. Some of them would want to dress up in all sorts of ridiculous costumes that would have had us laughing if we hadn’t been so fearful for our lives. Most of the clients were very different to Douglas and Joe, quite respectable-seeming men, mostly wearing wedding rings. Some of them I knew already from visits to our house, like the policeman with his handcuffs. A lot of them were regulars, coming back week after week. It was as if Douglas had managed to get them hooked on his own particular brand of drug and they just couldn’t get enough.
They always knew exactly what they wanted, right down to the expressions they wanted us to have on our faces while we performed the acts and the lighting they preferred on the scenes they constructed. Some of the men instructed kids to call them names like ‘Mummy’ or ‘Daddy’, but of course I couldn’t do that since I still couldn’t talk. Sometimes they would want us boys to perform with older girls and we had to pray that we would get the necessary erections or else we would be punished again for disobeying their orders. Generally we would be expected to follow their directions as exactly as professional actors on a film set, or we would b
e taken out of the room and beaten until we got it right.
Once or twice at the beginning I didn’t understand what they were telling me to do and got it wrong and I soon realized they were willing to be as vicious in their punishments as Mum had ever been. Their favourite trick was to grab our testicles and twist them as hard as they could until we were screaming for mercy. Sometimes I would be slow to understand what it was they wanted me to do for the camera. I don’t know if it was to do with my learning difficulties or what it was, but they weren’t about to make any allowances for anyone and I would be beaten until I got it right just like the others.
I don’t know if the clients always knew how badly we had been beaten in order to make us do what they wanted, or whether they actually managed to convince themselves that we were up for it, believing we came from a dirty sub-human world where such things were normal. It seemed to me that if they had children of their own they wouldn’t have associated us with them; it was as though we were from a lower species as far as they were concerned.
By listening to what was going on around me, I worked out that some of the children seemed to be related to one or other of the abusers, and all of them were there with the knowledge and co-operation of at least some members of their family. I never came across a single child who had been abducted or kidnapped; they had always been sold into this slavery by someone who should have been looking after them and protecting them from the world. Some of them were even younger than me, no more than eight years old.
There was one boy who was in his late teens and seemed to be the son of one of the other men who was always there. This boy would do whatever they told him, just like us, but he appeared to enjoy it as much as they did. It was as though he had started out a terrified child, just like me, and had become one of ‘them’ over the years. I knew that would never happen to me; I would never become like these people. Sometimes the clients would get this lad to coach the rest of us in how to do things right. He reminded me of Larry and Barry and the way they acted at home, relishing the whole thing as if it was the greatest fun in the world.
Joe Peters Page 12
