Joe Peters (10 page)

Once Amani had found out that I was locked in the cellar and had no way of defending myself, and once he realized that Mum was happy for him to do whatever he wanted to me, and would sometimes even take pleasure herself from watching, he started to come downstairs quite regularly. I soon learned to dread the sound of his footsteps as much as I dreaded hers or Larry’s or Barry’s.

Sometimes he would come down on his own when the rest of the house was quiet. I guessed the others were all asleep while he was prowling around, but it was possible they all knew exactly what was happening even then, and didn’t care. I would hear the door at the top of the stairs
creaking open and I learned to distinguish his footfall just as I did with the others. As soon as I heard it I knew what to expect. I would keep my eyes tight shut, pretending to be asleep, but he wouldn’t bother to put the light on in the cell, so I was wasting my time putting on any sort of act. He didn’t care if I was awake or not. He would lie down beside me on the vile mattress, whispering into my ear that I was ‘a good boy’, sticking his hand down my pants if I was wearing any, and rubbing himself against me. The first time he did it I pushed him away and shook my head to tell him I didn’t like it, that I wanted him to stop. Wally had once told me that no one had the right to touch me in my private areas, and I believed him so I struggled and tried to get away. Even in the dark Amani must have sensed that I was resisting him.

‘Don’t say no to me, boy,’ he snarled, grabbing my private parts and twisting them painfully. I didn’t dare say no again because I could tell he was just like Mum, not someone who was willing to be disobeyed, unconcerned by how much pain he had to inflict on others in order to get his own way. I longed to scream out loud but the sounds wouldn’t come, so I just lay still and hoped he wouldn’t hurt me too much.

‘If you tell anyone about this I’ll stab your eyes out and chop off your willy,’ he would warn me after he’d finished. But he was wasting his threats because I couldn’t speak so how was I going to tell anyone anything?

Since his arrival I’d been given a dirty fitted sheet to cover the mattress, and Amani would wipe himself on that, leaving a cold wet patch behind him. Then he would walk out of the room as if nothing had happened, locking the door again behind him.

I soon realized that he thought I was just there for his convenience and Mum was happy to encourage that idea. He and Mum enjoyed coming down to the cellar together and they both liked to make fun of me and tell me I was a waste of time and a waste of space. Amani quickly moved on from rubbing himself against me to getting me to perform sex acts on him. I didn’t always understand what it was he wanted me to do and if I didn’t do everything he told me to do properly when Mum was there they would both batter me together, seeming to enjoy the violence almost as much as the sexual relief. After the beating I would then have to do the act again properly and Mum would stay to watch. Once Amani had finished with me he would just throw me back down onto the mattress, call me a ‘dirty little bastard’, and they would go off upstairs together laughing happily.

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.

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 on 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?