Joe Peters

by Cry Silent Tears

  ‘Yes I have,’ he corrected me patiently. ‘Because you’re a minor you need to be in protective custody.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything you say, you prick!’ I snarled, like a cornered dog fighting to the last, ready to bite any hand that was held out to me – literally, given my past history of attacking people.

  ‘There’s some officers coming from your local police station to pick you up,’ he told me. ‘They’re the ones who have been investigating your disappearance.’

  I felt a chill running through me. Would one of them be the man with the handcuffs? Or would they be friends of his? Would their report of whatever they had to say about me be read by him? Would he pass it on to Douglas, who would then report back to Amani and Mum? I stopped talking, hiding behind the mask of silence that had been my sanctuary for so many years, looking down at the floor as I had always been taught to. He left me in peace and an hour or two later the other officers turned up to collect me.

  ‘This is Joe,’ the first man told them. ‘He’s quite a handful, to say the least. Hang on to him tightly, he’s got a habit of bolting.’

  Not wanting to take any chances one of the new men pulled out a pair of handcuffs exactly like the ones I had worn so often when being raped by their colleague. He snapped them onto my wrist and attached me to himself, marching me out to the back of an unmarked car. Feeling the cold steel digging into my flesh brought back all my experiences with the policeman at Douglas’s house, making me shake uncontrollably. It was as though I was being delivered back to them on a plate, as though they had reached out all this way and pulled me back into their web. It felt as if there would be nowhere I would ever be able to run to where they wouldn’t be able to find me and bring me back. Now that I was in the police system, how long would it be before that policeman got to hear about my arrest and told Douglas and the rest where I was and what I had been saying? Anything I said now would be written down and recorded somewhere and they would know if I informed on them. God alone knew what they would do to me if that happened. All these panic-stricken thoughts were whirling round and round in my head as I sat in the back of the police car with one of my captors beside me and the other in the front, driving.

  One copper tried to make a bit of small talk as we drove along, but I wasn’t having any of it. I wasn’t even sure that I would be able to force any words out past the stranglehold fear now had on my throat. It seemed that whenever people were nice to me it always ended badly. I had to keep my guard up, had to be watchful. Despite being brought back in like this, my short time on the run had emboldened me a little. I no longer felt that I was completely helpless. I actually did have choices as long as I wasn’t trapped in a room with Mum or Amani or Douglas, and I could have some effect on what might happen to me if I stuck firmly enough to my guns and refused to make it easy for them to subdue me again.

  ‘I swear to God,’ I told him when I was finally calm enough to be able to stutter the words out, ‘if you take me home I’ll kill the fucking bitch.’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ he said. ‘Your mother is really concerned about you. She seems a very nice person.’

  ‘A nice fucking person? You don’t know fucking anything! She’ll fucking beat me to death if you take me to her house. I swear I’ll stick a knife in her if I have to go back.’

  ‘Why are you talking like this? Your mum is worried and she wants you back.’

  I could just imagine the performance she had been putting on for them, telling them what a difficult child I had been and what hell I had put her through, and how she had lost her beloved husband in a terrible accident and how I had done nothing but add to her troubles ever since. I’d heard her do it so many times before and the way I was behaving with the police now just confirmed to them everything she would have been saying about me being a problem child. Realizing that there was now a real danger I was going to be taken straight back home to the life I had walked out on a week or so before I went crazy again, like a wild animal trying to escape from a cage, determined to let them know just how desperate I was not to be returned to her.

  ‘I ain’t fucking going home!’ I shouted. ‘I ain’t fucking going. She’ll kill me!’

  ‘Calm down, calm down,’ the officer tried to restrain me in my seat as I thrashed wildly around. ‘We’re not taking you home, we’re taking you back to the police station.’

  ‘They’ll hurt me again.’

  ‘Who’s going to hurt you?’

  ‘My brother,’ I blurted, still too frightened to mention Douglas and his friends.

  ‘Why would your brother want to hurt you?’

  ‘He keeps sticking his fucking willy up my bum!’ I said, shocked to hear myself actually saying the words, embarrassed to admit to such a thing. No boy likes to confess to the fact that he has been raped, especially by his own brother – even if he knows it isn’t his fault.

  ‘You’re definitely not going back home,’ the copper assured me. ‘Please calm down. You’ve got to trust us.’

  ‘Why have you got me in these then,’ I asked, pointing to the handcuffs, ‘if you want me to trust you?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I’m going to take them off so you can see I mean it.’

  The doors were locked so there was no way I could get out anyway but it was a relief to feel them coming off, as if I was starting to win their trust. I tried to calm down and breathe a bit. I didn’t want to make any bad mistakes; I wanted to be ready to jump at any opportunity to escape that might present itself. Even if they were starting to sound more understanding I still didn’t trust them an inch and certainly didn’t want to stay in any police station for a moment longer than I had to. I was terrified that I would come face to face with Uncle Douglas’s friend and would then be totally at his mercy.

  When we got to the police station nearest home I was escorted quickly into an interview room, allowing me no chance to do a runner. They sat me down with another cup of tea and a senior officer came in to join the one who had been in the back of the car with me. Their attitude certainly seemed to have changed, as they started to question me more gently about what had happened between my brother and me at home. It seemed that by talking about what he did to me I had set off some sort of procedural alarm bells and they were going to have to take the accusation seriously. Maybe it was occurring to them that there might be more reasons for my behaviour than they had been led to believe. For the first time ever, grown-up men in positions of authority actually seemed to be listening to me. I dare say they were feeling sorry for Mum too, imagining how devastated she would be to find out what her other son had been up to under her own roof, but I still didn’t feel ready to try explaining her part in my nightmare of a life.

  I didn’t want to tell the officers any more details than I had to, but I wanted to say enough so that they would realize they couldn’t let me go home, not even temporarily, while they undertook their enquiries. My brain was racing as I tried to work out the best way to protect myself. Larry had always been the ringleader of any abuse that he and Barry had inflicted on me, so I didn’t bother to include Barry as well in my accusations. It was bad enough to admit that one brother had been raping me; another would have been even more humiliating and might even have started to make my story sound less credible. I don’t know why I didn’t tell them more about Mum and Amani and Uncle Douglas. I guess I still felt embarrassed to have to admit the extent of the abuse I had been subjected to, feeling dirty, humiliated, guilty and implicated myself in everything I had ever been forced to do over the years.

  Although I was glad that they were finally paying attention and not just dismissing me as a hopeless troublemaker, I was now feeling nervous about having said too much. There is a certain amount of safety in being someone that no one takes any notice of. To suddenly find myself in the spotlight and the centre of attention was scary. I knew that when Mum got to hear about this she was definitely going to want to kill me and Larry woul
d be in the queue right behind her. Now that I had made this accusation it was even more important that I made sure the police didn’t send me back to the house.

  ‘Can you give us more details?’ they kept asking.

  ‘No,’ I said, my eyes constantly fixed on the floor. ‘He just keeps interfering with me.’

  Once they had heard me out they decided there was enough merit in the accusations for them to need to call in social services. I was pleased they were taking me seriously but nervous about having to deal with people who already knew all about my past record for being damaged. From the moment I had bitten the first welfare worker who came to the house to the moment I walked out of the school, they had a catalogue of evidence to show that I was an aggressive, disturbed boy. Would they think I was making up this whole story about Larry just to cause more problems for my family?

  When the social worker arrived and they explained the situation to her I could see that she didn’t believe a word I was saying but had to go through the motions.

  ‘We’ve been to see your mum,’ she told me and I could imagine just how convincing Mum would have been at that interview.

  ‘She’s told us that you have always been a disruptive influence in the family,’ the social worker went on. ‘She told me you’ve been causing trouble all your life.’

  I stared at the floor and said nothing, knowing that if I said out loud some of the things that were going through my head I would simply be confirming her prejudices. When they went back through the files they found all the reports of me being traumatized by Dad’s death, and now the police had heard me ranting and raving and swearing about how I was going to kill Mum if they sent me home, so it was looking to them as if Mum was right and I was the problem. Perhaps they would have looked further into the causes of all my disruptive behaviour if they hadn’t been able to see a perfect explanation in Dad’s death. What they all saw when they looked at me was an aggressive troublemaker who distracted other children in school and gave his poor family endless heartache. My only hope was that they would believe what I said about Larry, or at least decide that it was enough of a possibility for them not to be able to take the risk of sending me back.

  ‘Because of the seriousness of your allegation against your brother,’ they eventually told me, ‘you need to go to a care home while we do some investigating.’

  To my relief they sent me to a holding and assessment unit where they kept children until they worked out what best to do with us regarding homes, fostering, adoption, education and all the other options. It was a mansion of a place, very clinical, cold and daunting, and felt more like a prison than a children’s home. One side of the building was used for social services offices and there were a lot of cameras tracking our movements, so there wasn’t exactly a trusting atmosphere. The system was strict, although fair. They genuinely did seem to want to find a way of saving me from myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to trust them and was proving to be a challenge to their patience.

  Although I continued to be difficult, I did feel that at least the policeman had kept his word about not sending me home and I thought maybe there was some hope that once they had completed their investigations they would believe me and let me stay away from Mum and the rest of them until I was old enough to live on my own.

  The day after I arrived at the home the same policeman who had brought me back in the car came to see me.

  ‘We’ve arrested your brother,’ he said, and I felt my heart lift. If Larry had confessed then I was willing to tell them everything, even about Uncle Douglas and his friends, including the policeman with the handcuffs. ‘And he’s denied everything. Your mum says you’re a liar. We’ve spoken to your school and they’ve confirmed you’re disruptive too.’

  My hopes plummeted as quickly as they had soared. It was just as I should have expected – I wasn’t going to be believed. I didn’t say anything, just stared at the floor and waited to learn what my fate was going to be.

  ‘Your mum is so fed up with you she says she doesn’t want you back. She’s at the end of her tether.’

  Suddenly there was hope again, even though they had returned to preferring to believe that I was the problem, not Mum and Larry. It might have been for the wrong reasons, but at least I had managed to get out of the house and free of Mum’s iron grip. Everyone might have decided I was a liar and a bad boy, but at least I would¬ n’t be getting any more beatings or abuse for a while. I guess Mum must have been panicking after the visits from the police. As long as I was mute or too terrified to speak to anyone she had felt safe, but I had finally found the courage to use my voice and even though I hadn’t been believed this time, there was still a possibility she was in danger of being uncovered. Now that I had dared to speak to a policeman she would never be able to rely on keeping me quiet in the future. That, I assume, was why she had announced she didn’t want me back in her house.

  We slept in dormitories at the children’s home, with screens between the beds, and the staff were constantly checking on us through the night. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be, but I still felt safer than I had ever felt at home. At least no one was going to attack me there, or make me do anything I didn’t want to do. The worst part of it was the boredom as we sat around watching television or playing pool – but then I was used to that from the many hours I had been left on my own at home either in my darkened cell or in a bedroom where I was forbidden to move or do anything.

  Most of the staff’s time at the home was spent assessing and interviewing us all individually, so there was nothing for the rest of us to do whenever it was someone else’s turn to go into the office. None of the staff had any time for joking with us or even for getting to know us better; they just had to get on with their duties of care. In that respect they were more like prison officers than social workers. I think if there had been anyone available to sit down with me and win my trust at that stage I would have been ready to start talking about the things that had happened to me, but I was suspicious of everyone, having been betrayed so many times, and none of them had the time to help me overcome those suspicions.

  Most of the other children in the home came and went quite quickly, but I was one of the more difficult and challenging cases and it seemed to be giving them a problem working out what to do with me. I was constantly anxious about what their ultimate decision would be, terrified that Mum would change her mind and say she’d have me back and they would decide to send me home just because they couldn’t think what else to do with me.

  Once the assessment process had been completed, they told me, they would either send me home or on to another care home for a longer stay, or to foster parents. Who, I wondered, would want to foster a foulmouthed teenage boy who saw the whole world as being against him and had a reputation for being disruptive and for running away? And, if someone did foster me, who was to say they wouldn’t abuse me in just the same way everyone else had? Staying in the care system seemed like my best bet. All I could do was wait and hope and see what was decided by people I didn’t even know. It is a scary feeling to have virtually no power to influence anything that happens in your own life.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In and out of Care

  Once I had been accepted into the care system I was moved back and forth between a number of homes for a few weeks as they tried to work out the best thing to do with me. I know that I was a right handful to any staff who tried to help me. I was so angry at the world and so suspicious of all the people in it that I wasn’t willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who had shown me any kindness in the past had ended up letting me down: Dad by dying, Wally and Pete by leaving, Douglas by tricking me into liking him with handfuls of sweets, John and possibly even the helpline lady for turning me over to the police. I didn’t trust any of the key workers who professed to have my best interests at heart. I decided it was better to keep them all at arm’s length if I wanted to avoid being hurt all over again. So I did whatever I liked and tre
ated everyone like shit, fulfilling Mum’s description of me perfectly. I was a nightmare and it wasn’t long before they were all looking for a way to pass the problem on to someone else. I was too much trouble for anyone to want to cope with me.

  About a month after I was picked up from the phone box, the worst thing possible happened and someone managed to persuade Mum to take me back home. Maybe they thought they were doing me a favour by talking my mother into trying again with me. I don’t know what changed her mind. Perhaps she had thought about it and decided it would be safer to keep me close so she would know what I was saying to people. Or maybe she was missing the money that I brought in to her from Uncle Douglas. When they told me what had been decided I went just as crazy as I had in the back of the police car a month earlier. There was no way I was going to go back peacefully, but this time they weren’t taking any notice. As far as they were concerned I was a pain in the neck and they believed I had even made up false allegations about my brother in order to try to get my own way. They wanted rid of me as soon as possible, so three staff at the care home restrained me, bundled me into the back of a white van and drove me to Mum’s house, fighting and screaming all the way. I felt there was nothing in the world I could do or say to convince them that they were making a mistake, that they were delivering me back to the devil herself, transporting me to my execution. It was just like being in one of my nightmares as I dreamed I was struggling to get out of the front door but was being dragged backwards. It didn’t matter how much I struggled in that van, it still kept on driving towards Mum’s house. I might just as well have been mute again for all the notice the key workers were taking of my pleading and shouting.

  When they dropped me off at the house, holding onto me so tightly as we approached the front door that I couldn’t possibly run, or even move, Mum was at her most charming, welcoming her prodigal son back home, making me look even more like a vile, ungrateful brat to the care home staff. The moment they had left the house and the front door had closed behind them the smile vanished from her face and the temper I had been expecting erupted from deep inside her.