Joe Peters (19 page)

‘Where are you from?’ a boy who introduced himself as John asked.

‘I’m just visiting the area,’ I said vaguely.

‘Why have you got a bag?’ he asked, gesturing at my school backpack, which now held all my worldly possessions.

‘None of your business,’ I replied.

‘Do you want to play football?’ he said, changing the subject without seeming in the least put out by my surliness.

‘Okay.’

I accepted the invitation readily, hungry for any company and friendship I could find. It felt nice to be with a group of kids who accepted me without knowing anything about my background. They didn’t know me as the smelly, mute boy who couldn’t read or write very well for his age. To them I was just an interesting stranger who had wandered into their comfortable, secluded little world. They actually seemed to like me for myself. They tried asking me more questions and I
managed to make my answers vague enough to sound convincing and friendly without giving anything away.

‘Are you going to be here tomorrow?’ John asked when it was finally too dark to see the football and it came time for them to go home for the night.

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking this would be as good a place as any to stop for a while, especially if it meant I had a ready-made group of friends.

‘We’ll see you then.’

Once they’d gone, shouting their goodbyes, waving cheerily as they ran off into the darkness, the night suddenly seemed very quiet and the air uncomfortably cold. Being out under the immense night sky was a daunting feeling since I had spent so much of my life trapped in confined spaces, but the feeling of liberation was exciting at the same time. The illuminated windows of the big, solid-looking homes that my new friends had disappeared into seemed very tempting as I turned and walked away into the deepening gloom to look for somewhere to spend the night. I could see I wasn’t going to have time to build myself a shelter as I’d sort of imagined I would, but I would still need to find some protection from the cold. Winter hadn’t long passed, and the air was already losing its daytime heat.

My way was lit only just enough by the stars and moon for me to be able to see the world in silhouette around me, but I found a railway line and decided to
follow the tracks to make sure I didn’t get too lost in the dark shadows of the surrounding trees. I had brought a torch with me, which I had found in someone’s bag in the school cloakroom, but I didn’t want to use up the batteries unnecessarily, since I didn’t know how long it would be before I got a chance to replace them. I was also nervous about drawing attention to my presence there.

I had only gone a couple of hundred yards from the houses when I came across a workman’s hut by the side of the track. The door wasn’t locked so I pushed my way in, shining the torch around the dusty interior. The beam picked up some old bits of equipment, most of which looked as if it had been long forgotten, and some stored railway sleepers, giant blocks of solid wood which looked as though they had been left there since the lines were first laid. I doubted if anyone used the hut any more, especially at night. It smelled strongly of tar and oil but I had slept amongst far worse smells than that in my time. Perfect, I thought. My own little home in the wild. I pushed the door shut behind me, pulled away some of the cobwebs and managed to find myself a dry corner where I could lie down. I’d been walking for seven hours and then played football so it wasn’t long before I fell into a deep sleep, only occasionally woken by the cold.

When the daylight finally returned and I poked my nose out round the door, the countryside was just as deserted as it had been when I went to bed. The only
sounds came from the wind and birds in the trees. I decided to explore and went to hide my backpack in some nearby woods, not wanting to carry it around but fearing that some workmen might come to the hut during the day and find it if I left it there. It contained all the possessions I had in the world so I couldn’t afford to lose it.

My newfound friends were in school during the day so I passed the long hours playing on my own in the woods. I enjoyed my newfound freedom but I’d finished all the food I’d brought with me from the school dinner room and hunger pains were growling ominously in my stomach like an approaching thunderstorm. All day I was looking forward to seeing John and the other kids when they came out again after school and I was waiting outside their houses for ages before they finally appeared. When John and his sister emerged through their gates I could see that they were looking for me, hoping I would be there, eager to talk, which was a nice feeling.

‘What house are you staying at?’ John asked as we sat waiting for the others to join us. ‘Because we know everyone in the area.’

‘Over there,’ I said, waving in a vague direction, eager to change the subject.

‘But last night you said it was over there,’ he protested, obviously puzzled and intrigued at the same time.

‘It’s a farm over the bridge,’ I said, because I had passed several in my journey.

‘Which one?’ his sister was intrigued now too. ‘Our mum and dad know all the farmers.’

Obviously they had been talking about me at home and their parents had shown an interest. I began to feel a little panicked but forced myself to stay calm.

‘Okay,’ I said, unable to think of any way out. ‘I’ll be straight with you. Promise me you won’t say anything to anyone?’

They nodded solemnly, their eyes wide in anticipation of hearing something amazing. Everyone loves to be told a secret.

‘I’m a runaway.’

It was the first time I had actually said the word out loud and the dramatic sound of it quite surprised me.

They both gasped and there was a moment’s silence as they took in this astounding fact, followed by a torrent of questions.

‘Why?’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Who have you run away from?’

‘Where are you sleeping?’

‘What are you going to do now?’

I explained that my mum hurt me and was threatening to kill me.

‘If they find me,’ I said, ‘the police will take me back home and she will really hurt me.’

I made them swear over and over again not to tell anyone, not even the other members of their gang – but not surprisingly it was too juicy a piece of news for them to be able to keep it to themselves and within five minutes of turning up all the other kids in the group knew about it. I guess every child must dream about running away from home at one time or another, and now they had met someone who had actually done it and they wanted to be part of the adventure themselves. Football was forgotten – they just wanted to sit around and talk and plan my future with me. Everyone was talking at once.

‘Okay,’ John said after a while, ‘we’ll make a pact. We won’t tell anyone, and we’ll look after you.’

We moved further away from the houses to be sure we wouldn’t be overheard and they got me to sit down and tell them more about the things Mum did to me. They listened with their jaws hanging open. I didn’t tell them about anything sexual, just the beatings and about being locked in a room with no light or food for days on end. It was obvious none of them had ever even realized there was such a thing as child abuse; none of them could even imagine having a mother like mine. She must have sounded like a character from a horror movie, which pretty much sums up what she was like. I could see they were deeply shocked and that they truly did want to do something to help.

‘So where did you stay last night?’ John’s sister wanted to know

I pointed down the track to the hut.

‘But wasn’t it really cold in there?’

I shrugged and nodded. ‘It was a bit.’

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do.’ She was taking charge of the situation now. ‘We’ll go home and steal you some blankets.’

‘No, I’ve got a better idea,’ John overrode her in his enthusiasm. ‘We’ll sneak you into our house and you can hide out under my bed. We can bring you downstairs and feed you whenever my mum and dad go out.’

I was really beginning to panic now. If we started doing all these things it wouldn’t be long before a grown-up suspected what was going on and asked some serious questions. These kids didn’t look like the sorts that would stand up well under interrogation. They were treating the whole thing as a glorified game, like any child from a normal background would, but to me it was deadly serious, a matter of life and death. If I was caught and taken home now I was pretty sure Mum would lose the plot completely and might very well kill me in her next explosion of temper.

‘I don’t think that would work,’ I said, not wanting to sound ungrateful. ‘But I am quite hungry.’

‘Okay,’ John said, jumping up, ‘we’ll get you a feast.’

‘Don’t go mad,’ I said. ‘Don’t take anything anyone will miss. We don’t want to arouse their suspicions.’

Despite me pleading with them to show some restraint they had decided what they wanted to do and were too excited to be reasoned with. They all dashed off back to their homes, telling me to wait for them in my hut.

Once inside their houses they went mad, emptying their parents’ cupboards, bringing me down armfuls of bedclothes and carrier bags full of food, turning the hut into a little home from home, like a cross between a children’s camp and Santa’s grotto. Not all of it had been completely thought through – such as the tins of baked beans that came without a tin opener – but there was still enough for me to eat my fill as they babbled on about their plans for my future and how they were going to care for me and hide me. It felt a bit as though I was a pet dog again, but at least now I was a cherished family pet, not a despised one.

‘You’ll be our best runaway friend,’ they said as they proudly showed me everything they had stolen for me, ‘and we’ll never tell anyone that you’re here.’

On their record so far I didn’t have too much faith in them being able to keep such an exciting secret from their families for long, but it still felt nice to be the centre of so much friendly attention and I was grateful for the bedclothes and the food. The contrast between the way
they were looking after me in that hut, and the way Mum and Amani and the rest of them had looked after me in the past, when I was just a small child, touched me and made me feel sad at the same time. Why didn’t my own family want to look after me like this? I decided to stop worrying about things I could do nothing about and just enjoy my good fortune for a few days before moving on. All the bad stuff was behind me now, I reminded myself. I didn’t need to think about it any more.

My new friends were obviously nervous about leaving me on my own that night and didn’t want to tear themselves away and go back to their houses. I expect they half wanted to camp out with me and share the adventure for a bit longer, but as it grew later I was getting increasingly nervous that their parents would wonder where they were and would come looking for them. I begged them to go back home before that happened.

‘What if some strange man comes past and hurts you?’ John’s sister asked and the others all agreed.

‘They won’t,’ I assured them, desperately wanting them to go now. ‘It’s dark enough, no one will see me.’

‘Wild animals might eat you,’ someone else suggested.

‘No, really,’ I insisted. ‘I’ll be all right.’

I kept on trying to convince them it was safe to leave me, stressing again how important it was that they didn’t tell another soul about me. They promised and I know
they did intend to do their best. Eventually they reluctantly agreed to leave me and I settled down under the blankets for a warmer night’s sleep than the night before, my stomach feeling comfortably full.

For the next few days my friends came to see me after school each evening, bringing more and more supplies, far more than I needed or could actually eat. On the fifth night John took me to one side and put forward a new proposition.

‘Why don’t you come and live with us?’ he suggested, and I could tell he’d been thinking about it a lot, probably talking it through with his sister. ‘You could be my older brother. If I tell my mum and dad that your mum is nasty to you they could adopt you and you could stay with us permanently.’

I couldn’t deny that it sounded like a tempting option, but I was old enough and experienced enough to know that the chances of something like that happening were less than slight. I knew Mum would never give me up unless someone paid her enough money to compensate her for her financial losses. I was worth too much to her in potential earnings and she wouldn’t want to give me the chance of being happy anyway. I also couldn’t imagine that these kids’ parents would be too thrilled about taking in a stray child with learning difficulties and a history of behavioural problems just because their own children asked them to.

‘No,’ I said, more vehemently than I had intended. ‘I’m happy here. Honestly.’

That night John decided he needed to get me some hot food for a change. While sitting at the family dinner table he started secretly putting roast potatoes into a bag and then announced he needed to go to the toilet. He dashed down to the hut to give them to me before they went cold but when he returned to the dinner table ten minutes later his mum wanted to know where he’d been.

‘I’ve been in the toilet,’ he lied.

‘No, you haven’t,’ she said, ‘because I looked. I saw you outside.’

‘There was a stray dog out there,’ he said, his brain racing to find a convincing cover story. ‘I felt sorry for him.’

Despite his quick cover-up, his mother’s suspicions had been raised. She had already noticed how many items had been disappearing from the kitchen cupboards over the previous few evenings and obviously felt that she was onto something. She certainly didn’t believe that her son was feeding a stray dog with tins of beans, loaves of bread, bottles of milk and packets of cereal. The questions went on and on until eventually my friend’s inability to tell bare-faced lies to his own mother got the better of him and he confessed the whole story. I suspect he was relieved to get it off his conscience; he wasn’t the sort of boy who would have been comfortable lying to his
parents, even if it was in what he thought was a good cause.