Joe Peters (17 page)

There was another man, with an accent which I now think must have been American, who often came to the house while we were filming but never participated in the scenes himself. Douglas was always very respectful towards him, doing exactly what the man told him, and
he would go away again with a bunch of videos. I guess he was some sort of businessman who knew how to sell the material to a wider audience. He always knew exactly what he wanted, like a film producer instructing a director what to film. I presume that when you read in the papers about material being downloaded from the Internet it must come from people like him; maybe he was part of some sort of organized pornography distribution ring.

None of us children knew or cared about things like that; we just cared about how much they were hurting us and how little they were bothered about us as human beings. We were broken creatures, keeping our heads down and getting by as best we could. Occasionally I glanced at one or other of them and made brief eye contact, wondering what their lives were like, but we never dared to flout the rules by talking to each other.

When I was dropped back home from my weekends at Douglas’s house, feeling sore and distraught, Mum and Amani would never do anything to make me comfortable or to reward me for earning them so much money. If there were any dirty jobs to be done around the house, like unblocking the toilet, they would have saved them for me, and they’d force my hand down the bowl if I hesitated for even a second. As far as they were concerned I was just a slave, an object to be used
whenever needed. They didn’t want me getting the idea that I had any rights to special treatment just because I was now ‘a porn star’. I was still their property before anything else.

S
ometimes when I went to school on a Monday morning it was only a matter of hours since I had been delivered back from Douglas’s house. I would be buried so far inside my own head, trying to protect myself from thinking about everything that had happened to me, trying not to make anyone angry with me, trying to hide from the world, that I would hardly dare to raise my eyes to the blackboard once I was sitting in the classroom. Silent, angry and withdrawn, I must have seemed an impossible challenge for the adults who were trying to help me. They could never have imagined what was churning round inside my head or how much my body hurt after a weekend of abuse by several grown men.

As the teachers laboured to broaden my mind and encourage my creativity, my brain was still numb from the humiliations and terrors I had so recently endured,
and which I had every reason to believe I would have to go through again the following weekend, maybe even that evening when I got home.

The authorities were doing their best to help me, believing that they were just dealing with a boy who had been deeply traumatized by the horrific death of his father. My one-to-one teacher in the classroom, Miss Meredith, was a warm, kind, gentle woman in her late twenties whose main task was to help me with my reading and writing. She sat beside me all day through every class and even today I can remember how lovely she smelled when she came close to me, so fresh and clean and scented like flowers. If she tried to hug me I had no idea how to respond, going rigid with fear and embarrassment, which must have made it awkward for her. It had been so long since anyone had touched me with anything other than violence and greed, so long since I had seen anyone treat anyone else with affection.

Her efforts to help me come out of my shell were mostly falling on stony ground. It was as though I was stuck in a mental rut, frightened to poke my head out and risk feeling any new emotions. All I did whenever I was given a pencil and paper was draw pictures of my dad on fire, a little stick figure running frantically around with flames pouring out like angels’ wings behind him, because that was all I ever saw when I looked inside my box of memories. Nothing that had
happened to me in my life since that day had given me anything happy that I might have been able to replace that hellish image with. All my happy memories had ended at the second the car exploded in the garage, literally going up in flames. Miss Meredith would try to coax me to think of something else I might like to draw a picture of. She would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to do; she just encouraged me all the time, which was an experience I had never had with a grown-up before.

‘Why don’t you draw a house and some trees?’ she would ask. ‘What about a picture of a cat or a dog? Shall we draw an aeroplane? What about drawing a picture of your mummy that you could take home and give to her?’

My speech therapist, Jill, was another extremely kind woman wanting to do her best to help me to break out of my silent mental prison. I was almost nine when we started working together and with her patient encouragement I was soon forcing out more individual one-syllable words but I still couldn’t string them into any sort of understandable sentence. She and I knew what the various grunts and gurgles were meant to represent, but if I had tried them on any of my classmates they would just have laughed at me and called me new names. She would show me pictures and try to get me to draw and talk about what I could see, hoping to reopen the pathways between what I saw and heard and what I
said. When she realized how serious the blockage was between my brain and my mouth, Jill showed me some exercises I could do with my tongue and my lips in order to form the right sounds. I had to make different noises while she held my tongue down uncomfortably with a spatula. At times I wanted to give up and run away. If she hadn’t been so patient and understanding I would never have got through those early sessions.

The first proper word that I coughed out was ‘fuck’, which made her jump and her eyebrows rise. In those days it was still a rarely used swear word in polite circles, but it was a word I had heard repeated around me more often than any other, and it also expressed very succinctly how I was feeling. And it was an easy one to get my tongue round.

‘Oh,’ she said, recovering herself quickly. ‘Well, you know that word then.’

It was almost as if I had cleared a blockage that day and other words started to come tumbling out, initially indistinct and falling over one another but growing clearer over the following months as the muscles in my tongue, throat and lips began to regain their strength.

‘Me,’ I would say proudly, ‘Joe.’

For a long time I had trouble with the first letters of words. ‘Dog’ would come out as ‘og’ and Jill would have to show me physically how to make the ‘d’ sound in order to complete the word. I must have been using all
the wrong muscles because my neck swelled up with the effort of speaking and my throat became sore from the strain of getting those few words out distinctly. Talking is a function that most of us take for granted every day of our lives, but when you are trying to relearn the knack of it from scratch it’s an incredibly complex and difficult task.

From single words we moved on to stories. Jill would show me pictures of scenes and ask me what was happening.

‘Mum home?’ I would suggest.

‘Mummy came through the door,’ Jill corrected, coaxing me to try to construct whole sentences, ‘then went through to the kitchen and made tea.’

‘Mum come home. Tea.’

Years of silence meant that finding single words was hard enough without worrying about how to make them flow together. It was like learning a foreign language, putting together single chunks of vocabulary, hoping they would make sense to the listener, but forgetting how to make the links that give subtleties and nuances to anything we have to say to one another.

Jill was endlessly patient, building my voice back one brick at a time. But it wasn’t just talking that was a problem for me when it came to fitting in with normal society. Because I was so unpractised in all the social skills other children would take for granted, as well as
having muscles that hadn’t been exercised in years, my eating habits were messy and my physical co-ordination was terrible. Having grown used to licking scraps of food off the floor, or picking at them with my fingers, I had only a sketchy idea of how to use a knife and fork or a spoon. Miss Meredith had to teach me those sorts of basic life skills as well as the mental skills I needed like reading, writing and maths. I kept remembering Wally telling me I was a bright kid and I would do well one day, but it didn’t feel that way as I struggled to master even the simplest skills, the sorts of things other kids would have mastered in their first couple of years at school.

I wanted to learn as much new stuff as I could, but sometimes the effort of just keeping up with the others was almost unbearable and the humiliation of constantly failing to reach even my own modest goals was agonizing. Most children don’t remember when they mastered the basic skills of life, and almost assume that they have had them forever. What normal person can remember the first time they successfully tied a tie or brushed their own teeth or managed to eat some peas off a plate using only a knife and fork? Well, I do.

Mum convinced the teachers that all my problems stemmed from my development being delayed by the shock of seeing Dad on fire, my ‘tilted brain’ as she put it so bizarrely. It was an impression that I reinforced by
continually drawing pictures of the accident, colouring the flames in with bright oranges, yellows and reds, pressing down so hard I wore the crayons away. I was obviously obsessed by that one terrible moment in my life and had never been able to go through the normal grieving and recovery processes. Most children subjected to such a trauma would have had counselling and therapy and would have been treated with gentleness and respect while they tried to find their balance in the world once more. Quite the opposite had happened to me; nothing good had happened since and no caring adult had even tried to replace those terrible images of my father running around the garage on fire.

Mum had lengthy and charming answers for any questions the authorities might put to her, and she was so practised at delivering these explanations they always sounded completely plausible. When they asked why I ate my food like an animal, she told them she had tried to teach me table manners but that I had refused to use implements to eat, just grabbing aggressively at any food that was put in front of me and throwing the cutlery around the room. She didn’t tell them that she had often not given me any food at all for days on end, or that she had made me eat off the floor or out of a dog’s bowl. Sometimes when I listened to her explaining everything away I found it difficult to believe my own memory of events, but then as soon as she got me home again it
would all come rushing back when she once again turned into the monster I had always known.

But despite all the disappointments and set-backs, the hard work that Miss Meredith and the teachers were putting in was starting to have an effect. Free of my cell and allowed at least a few hours of mental stimulation each day in an atmosphere where I could feel safe and relatively sure no one was going to attack me beyond a bit of childish teasing, things which had seemed like a meaningless blur to me when I first walked into the classroom began to come into focus and make a sort of hazy sense. Very slowly, as the months went by, I started to catch up with the other children – although they were always able to move ahead more quickly when we were given new things to learn, because their knowledge was based on more solid foundations than mine.

Jill’s efforts were also paying off and by the time I was due to move on to secondary school at the age of eleven, I was starting to be able to string full sentences together. But still the words I needed would desert me unexpectedly if I was under any sort of pressure and I would be left stuttering around in search of them.

It was a huge relief when the first sentences came out and I could see that other people had heard me and understood what I was saying. Being able to communicate almost freely with the world around me was like being unlocked from a prison inside my head. For the
first time in years the outside world could actually hear what I had to say, could know what I was thinking and feeling. I was no longer just a silent object, an embarrassment in social situations, a problem to teachers and social workers. I could respond to things people said to me, try out ideas on people and attempt to make them laugh. That was the best feeling, because if people were laughing they weren’t hitting me and there was always a chance they would like having me around, wanting me to entertain them some more. At last I could answer people’s questions if I wanted to, although most of the things that were stored in my head I didn’t want to share with anyone.

The fact that I was starting to talk and going to school like a normal child didn’t make any difference to my situation once I got home in the afternoons. If anything, Mum became even stricter in order to ensure she kept me in my place now that there was a possibility I could talk to other people or write or draw descriptions of my life during the years in the cellar. She could no longer rely on my muteness to protect her from discovery. She had to ensure that I was never in any doubt what would happen to me if I didn’t obey her every word or if I ever tried to get her into trouble. She didn’t have to worry; I still believed she was capable of killing me if she felt she had to, or if I provoked her temper far enough. I was still more frightened of her than of anyone or anything else.

As soon as I walked in through the door after school she would order me to strip down to my underpants and I would be sent up to the bedroom to sit and do nothing until she or one of the others told me to do otherwise. It was hard to know what was worse – the hours of boredom when I just stared at the hands on the clock, or the things they would make me do, whether dirty jobs around the house, or disgusting sexual acts with Amani or my brothers.

Even though the other kids at school could now understand some of the things I was saying, I was still considered a bit of a freak – but at least now I was just ‘the boy with the speech impediment’ rather than the boy who ‘didn’t talk’. In the mid 1980s, school authorities were starting to hire more teachers to help children who had special needs and I was given more support than I would have been even a few years before.