Joe Peters (15 page)

He was playing with himself again, apparently taking pleasure in watching me crying and seeing the fear in my eyes. As he dragged me by the hair into the bedroom I clung onto his wrists, trying to lessen the pain. He hurled me onto the bed, ordering me to lie on my stomach before tying my wrists and ankles to the bed frames and smacking me really violently with his hands. The more I struggled the more he enjoyed it, pleasuring himself over and over again and then eventually lying down on top of me, almost suffocating me in his layers of smelly, sweaty, flabby flesh, squeezing my neck hard, forcing my body to allow him to penetrate me.

‘What a good boy you are,’ he would tell me every time he finished, but then he would start on some new, violent humiliation.

When he eventually needed a rest he tied me to the radiator in the bathroom and went off, locking the doors behind him, telling me not to make a sound till he got back. I was left squatting naked on the cold tiles, feeling sick with disgust at everything that had been done to me, as well as terrified about what was still to come. My head was spinning and every part of me was in agony. I didn’t think I could survive any more pain.

When Uncle Douglas returned an hour or so later his breath smelled of drink so I imagine he must have been sitting in the hotel bar, gloating over his sexual adventures. He was carrying a glass of water and bent down to
lift my floppy head so that I could take some sips from it. He untied me and told me to take another shower but as I stood up I fainted. I was probably only unconscious for a few minutes and when I came round he had lifted me into the shower and was washing me again. He then dried me off and carried me through to the bedroom and dressed me as if nothing had happened. He carried me out to the car and chucked my lifeless body onto the back seat, leaving the key inside the hotel room for the staff to find.

When I got home I was carried back down to the basement and left on my mattress to recover. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, my grooming had begun in earnest.

I
nitially I was a bit of a novelty for the other kids at school – the first mute boy any of them had ever met – but it wasn’t long before that novelty had worn off and I was just another easy target for teasing and bullying. I was used to being a victim; it was a part I had been playing for years and nothing any of the other kids said or did to me came close to the horrors that I had already experienced at home or with Uncle Douglas, but it still made me sad to feel excluded from everyone around me yet again. I would have loved to make some friends but no one wanted to hang out with me because I was different and weird. A lot of them found it impossible to resist teasing me, knowing I couldn’t answer back. What was so wrong with me, I wondered, that everyone seemed to want to have a go at me all the time? Maybe I had inherited Dad’s genes and was just as horrible and wicked as
Mum had always told me I was. Maybe it was all Dad’s fault that my life was the way it was, as Wally had said – but deep down I knew that Dad was still the only person who had ever really loved me.

The girls at school were even worse than the boys when it came to picking on someone who couldn’t answer back. They danced round me all the time, taunting me, calling me ‘Dumbty Dumbty’.

‘Do you want a sweetie?’ they’d ask, all fake smiles and fluttering eyes. ‘Was that a “no”? Or a “yes”? Must have been a “no” I guess!’ And then they would run off laughing, leaving me still struggling to get the right word out. I could think of so many things I wanted to say but they had to remain bottled up inside me, simmering up to the boil.

The worst time was lunchtime because I couldn’t sneak off and find a quiet corner somewhere. I had to go into the canteen with everyone else if I wanted to eat, and I was always starving. The dinner ladies were kind and did their best to protect me at times when there weren’t any teachers around, going mad at my tormentors when they caught them and sending them off to the headmaster. But the bullies just got more sly, digging me painfully in the ribs when the grown-ups were looking away or pinching me under the table, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t make a sound. I was an outcast, just a dummy and a punch bag. Thomas used to stick up for
me whenever he was nearby, even though he was three years younger than me. He’d kick anyone he caught picking on me with all his growing strength, but he had friends of his own age and didn’t want to be standing guard over me every hour of the day.

‘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 started 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.’