Joe Peters (16 page)

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 be 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.

If we behaved well and did it right we would be rewarded with rests, allowed to go to our cell-like little bedrooms where they would lock us in and bring us cups of milky tea and plates of biscuits or bars of chocolate. When you had spent as many years as I had making bottles of stale water last for days on end, you appreciated tiny gestures like that. It was like rewarding the animals in the circus when they got their tricks right. Sometimes they would bring us sandwiches, although there was often mould on the bread. I used to pick the mould off and eat what was left, grateful to be given anything and always aware that I didn’t know how long it would be before we were offered anything else.

They would allow us to bath and clean ourselves as long as we did whatever was required of us, but it was hard to feel clean after being in Douglas’s disgusting bathrooms. We didn’t get peace in there because they always wanted to come in with us, washing us, playing with us, filming us, photographing us. They never missed an opportunity; even if you were just going for a pee they would want to take a photograph, stage- managing the pictures like professional photographers: ‘Go on, pull your pants right down.’ The only time a bathroom would be cleaned up was if Douglas was going to be doing some filming in there, and then it would suddenly become spotless.

At night we would all be locked into our separate little rooms to sleep and I would be able to hear the men’s voices downstairs in the kitchen as they continued talking and laughing into the small hours. Every so often during the night I would be woken by the sounds of footsteps on the stairs. The bolt would slide back on the bedroom door and someone would come in to help themselves in private. Sometimes there would be groups of them, particularly after pub closing times, and they would stumble in together but be too drunk to get erections, which would make them angry and violent, as if it was our fault for not arousing them properly. Sometimes, if we had been good during the day and performed well, Douglas would protect us from too many night-time callers.

‘Leave him alone now,’ I’d hear him say outside the door. ‘Let him get his rest.’

I guess he was just protecting his investments, wanting us to be ready to perform effectively again the next day.

All the men in the house seemed completely confident that they would never be caught. Maybe they even kidded themselves that they weren’t really doing anything wrong. One time some of us were actually filmed outside in the garden, which was securely fenced in to make sure we couldn’t escape. It’s strange to think that normal families must have been living in the houses

all around, completely unaware of what was going on just a few yards away from where their children played or slept safely in their bedrooms.

If we didn’t do exactly what they wanted us to do during filming we were kept awake, not fed and made to do it again and again until we got it right. Even though the things they made us do were horrible, I knew that by the end of each weekend I would at least be cleaned up and would have had enough to eat and drink, which wouldn’t have been the case if I had been at home. It’s hard to believe, looking back now, that any child could have a home life so terrible that he would be better treated in a place like Douglas’s house, but it was true. By that age I had learned to do whatever I could to survive. I knew what it felt like to be left in the dark without food or clean water for days on end, and I knew that was worse than anything these men could do to me. I had been taught how to survive like any captive animal.

I cherished the times that I was rewarded for good behaviour with a break in a private bedroom. I could lie there and listen to the laughter of the customers coming and going and exchanging views on the videos, although I could still hear the screams of pain from the children in the punishment room whose spirits needed to be broken.

None of the customers ever called us by our names because they needed to think of us as objects not people.
They would never treat us with any courtesy or speak to us about anything; not so much as a ‘hello’ or a ‘how are you’. If we had been animals they probably would have talked to us more than they did. Maybe if they had been forced to think of us as individuals with feelings they wouldn’t have been able to inflict so much pain on us and wouldn’t have been able to make their fantasies about us into reality.

Because I never dared to look too closely at what was going on between them, it was hard to work out quite how the business side of the operation worked. The men who came for the weekends certainly paid for our services, and I guess they paid again to take away video recordings of their performances, which they could then watch and enjoy all over again at their leisure. I think there were other clients who didn’t take part but came and bought the videos for their own purposes. There were always people coming and going, talking about this child or that act, comparing notes, recommending different films, asking for more of the same, as if they were normal movie fans hanging out at their local Blockbusters.