Joe Peters (23 page)

When they dropped me off at the house, holding onto me so tightly as we approached the front door that I couldn’t possibly run, or even move, Mum was at her most charming, welcoming her prodigal son back home, making me look even more like a vile, ungrateful brat to the care home staff. The moment they had left the house and the front door had closed behind them the smile vanished from her face and the temper I had been expecting erupted from deep inside her.

‘Get in there,’ she commanded, grabbing my hair and dragging me into the second lounge, where all the curtains were tightly drawn as always, and I knew I was doomed. Amani appeared from nowhere the moment he heard the care workers drive off in their van and together they gave me the hiding of my life. For the first time ever I tried to fight back, refusing to lie down and accept it any more, but that only stoked up their fury to even more terrible heights. They were both far bigger and stronger than me and together they were invincible.
Amani used his belt and once I was down on the floor they were both kicking and punching and whipping with all their strength, throwing me round the room like a rag doll, smacking my head against the walls as hard as they could. It felt as though they were actually trying to kill me.

‘What did you tell those fucking coppers, you little bastard?’ Amani was yelling, obviously fearful he would lose his lucrative connections with Uncle Douglas and his friends, but I didn’t have enough breath in my body to be able to put his mind at rest and tell him that I had said nothing.

‘I told you I’d fucking kill you if you ever breathed a word about what went on in this family to anyone,’ Mum screamed as she landed kick after kick on my prone body.

The blows were so hard they made me retch and vomit. Once she and Amani had exhausted themselves and I was lying on the floor in a crumpled heap, Mum called Larry and Barry in and ordered them to watch me. They then ripped my clothes off and did what they wanted to me and I was too weak and defeated to put up any struggle.

‘I’ll fucking give you something to tell the police,’ Larry said through gritted teeth as he set to work.

By the time they had finished I was so bruised and battered there was no way I could get to school the
following day without somebody noticing the damage they’d inflicted, so they kept me off for a week, ringing in to say I was ill. As far as I am aware, no one from the social services came to check up that the handover had gone all right. No one from the school came to check that I really was ill. They obviously hadn’t believed a word I had said and had been completely convinced by Mum’s performance. Or maybe they had decided our whole family was a lost cause and too much trouble to deal with.

All through the following week one or other of them was with me every minute of the day to make sure I didn’t make another bid for freedom or get hold of any sort of implement I could use to defend myself. They beat me and raped me whenever the urge took them. But even Mum knew that they couldn’t keep me imprisoned in the house for ever now that the outside world was aware of my existence and after a week, when the most visible of my wounds had healed, they had to let me go back to school if they didn’t want to risk receiving another visit from the authorities. All through the Sunday before I went back she warned me and threatened me with what would happen if I breathed so much as another word about anything to anyone. She went on and on, shouting and yelling, making my head spin. In the end she pressed a knife against my neck.

‘I’m fucking telling you,’ she screamed, ‘next time I will kill you!’ And I believed her.

She escorted me all the way to the school gates on the Monday morning and I didn’t say a word, just staring straight ahead of me, waiting for my chance. The moment I knew she was off the school premises I walked out again into the lane that ran down the back of the building, not even bothering to change out of my uniform this time. Now I knew that it was possible to just walk away I wasn’t going to stay around for a moment longer than I had to. They were beating me anyway, so what did I have to lose by trying to get away?

I didn’t have any plan this time, in fact I was still in a bit of a daze, but I set off back in the same direction I had gone in before. This time I hadn’t walked for more than an hour before a police car drew up ahead of me and a policeman got out of the passenger door, pulling his cap on as he walked back towards me. I thought about making a run for it, but I was too tired and I thought he would almost certainly be able to catch me so I just stood there and waited for him to get to me.

‘What are you doing, sonny?’ he asked.

He held me firmly while his driver did a radio check, which told him that I had gone missing from the school.

‘Come on lad,’ he said. ‘Back to school.’

They took me in to see the headmaster when we got there and he asked me what was going on and why I was behaving the way I was.

‘I’m not going back home,’ I told him, not looking up from the floor.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Because they’re hurting me again,’ I said, unable to find any other way of explaining it.

‘What can I do to keep you in school, Joe?’ he asked.

He was a decent, old-fashioned sort of teacher and he knew that because of my learning difficulties it was even more important than normal that I had some sort of education for as long as possible. I appreciated his well-meaning concern but I knew he didn’t actually have a clue what my life was really like. How could anyone imagine it who hadn’t been through something similar? I just shrugged, not having any answer for him. He sighed and the usual procedures were set in motion. A social worker was called in to deal with me, yet another person taking me aside and trying to persuade me to explain what was going on in my head. Once again I told them that if they sent me home I would smash the place up, ‘and I’ll hurt her this time,’ I promised. ‘I’ll really hurt her.’

It was just boyish bravado because even though I was growing up – almost fourteen now – Mum was still ten times stronger than me when she was angry. If I had been able to get my hands on any sort of sharp implement I would have stabbed her at that stage, I’m sure of it. The social workers must have been starting to worry
about the risk I would do something really bad, given how aggressively I was behaving. They weren’t to know that I was watched every second that I was in the house and never allowed near the kitchen or anywhere else where I might be able to find a weapon to use in my own defence, or to launch an attack.

‘We’ve contacted your mother,’ the social worker continued, regardless.

‘If she shows up here I’ll fucking kill her,’ I shouted.

It was as though I was talking to myself. No one was taking any notice at all. I sometimes wondered what the point had been in teaching me how to speak if no one was willing to listen to anything I had to say. Mum arrived in the headmaster’s office to take me home as if the whole incident had just been another minor infringement of the school rules, and the moment she walked in I completely lost all control. I didn’t care any more if she heard what I had to say about her. She was going to kill me anyway if she got her hands on me. I was no longer willing to sit with my eyes on the floor, unable to speak up for myself.

‘Come on, Joe,’ she said in her most reasonable voice, and I started to rage around the office, sweeping everything off the headmaster’s desk, smashing up the room like a madman.

‘This is what he’s always like,’ she said, standing back and allowing me to prove every bad thing she had ever
told anyone about me. They must all have felt so sorry for her, believing her to be a decent woman trying to do her best by her delinquent, ungrateful son.

‘Ah, fuck him,’ she said eventually, as if her saintly patience had finally snapped. ‘I’ve had enough. I don’t want him back.’

Once she said that there was nothing the social workers could do to dissuade her and they took me back into care, into a home that I actually quite liked, despite my destructive behaviour and resentful attitude. I felt safe there, the food was good and no one bothered me. I didn’t see Mum or the rest of the family again for six months. It seemed there was a chance I had managed to escape at last.

Over the next two years I would meet a lot of different care workers in a variety of homes. Now and again I would come across someone who truly seemed to want to help the kids in their care to live better lives, someone who would spend time talking to us, listening to us, organizing things for us to do. The vast majority, however, were obviously looking to do as little as possible in order to earn their wages. They would spend most of their time in the staff room, drinking tea, only coming out if there was trouble that needed sorting out. They would become impatient with any interruptions to their
privacy, telling us to go away if we ever dared to knock on their door for some reason they considered trivial. I know we were probably difficult to handle, me more than most, but the majority of them certainly didn’t do anything to improve the situations that we provoked.

They were always quite good about giving us our pocket money if we needed to buy clothes, or even just to go to the cinema, as long as they were within their weekly budgets. They were happy to see us get out from under their feet for a while and I guess it saved them the trouble of organizing anything for us themselves. At one home they had a sixteen-seater minibus but I don’t remember any of us ever going out in it, although it was occasionally used to take one or other of us to the doctor or the hospital. Of course we didn’t always spend the pocket money they gave us on whatever we said we were going to, and usually we would end up hanging around outside off-licences asking grown-ups to buy drink and cigarettes for us. It’s amazing how many of them would agree to it and I was often drunk when I got back to the homes, but the staff hardly ever noticed. When I was out and about I always wore shiny shell suits, trainers and a baseball cap, like it was some sort of uniform, the peak of the cap pulled down low over my eyes to hide them from the disapproving or wary looks of passers-by.

At one stage the authorities moved me to a smaller children’s home in a converted council house, which was
run more along the lines of a family home. I guess they were hoping to make me socialize a bit more normally. It was still run by social workers but there were some younger kids there as well as older ones. There was a lad in the house called Ben, who was ten, and we used to get up to a lot of mischief together. One night we went down to raid the pantry after everyone had gone to bed. I pushed against the glass door to open it and must have put too much force into it because my hand went straight through and was badly sliced. They had to rush me to hospital and stitch me up, leaving yet another scar that I still carry to this day.

There was a girl in the home called Jean who was a bit behind mentally, even more than I was. She was a year or so older than me and she let it be known that she fancied me. Although I was fed up with being made to have sex with men and boys I had always liked having sex with girls. I wanted to be normal and I didn’t want to think of myself as being gay, as I believed Larry and Barry were, so I wasn’t completely disinterested in her advances, even though I didn’t fancy her much.

I was in the bathroom in my underpants one day, running a bath, when Jean walked straight in and locked the door behind her. Even though she wasn’t exactly attractive, when she started touching me inappropriately my body responded as most adolescent boys’ bodies would under the circumstances, especially a boy who had
been forced into as much sexual activity as I had by that time. Realizing my luck was in I followed my instincts and we ended up having sex on the bathroom floor. Because it was a relatively small house everyone always knew what was going on and within minutes other kids were outside the door shouting encouragement. Ben was sex mad and he was the main one egging me on and asking for details of what was happening. With the benefit of hindsight I guess something must have happened to him to make him so fruity so young, but we never talked about those sorts of things. The noise soon brought the staff running upstairs and hammering on the door, demanding that we stop what we were doing and come out.

Although I was a bit embarrassed by the fuss I didn’t think I had done anything particularly wrong. Due to my past I saw nothing unusual in having sexual intercourse if it was mutually consensual but, not surprisingly, the social workers were horrified when they realized what had happened under their care and immediately held a conference about the problem. It’s hard to imagine how many hours must have been spent over the years by people discussing what they should do with me, even though they didn’t really know anything about what was going on in my life or in my head.

Because Jean was a good bit more backward than me they saw me as the culprit and accused me of taking
advantage of her, although it was her who had come on to me first and the whole thing had been mutual. I suppose, technically speaking, I had ‘taken advantage’, although I had not forced her to do anything. What I had done wasn’t right, but it was hardly surprising that I was confused about right and wrong at that time and Jean certainly never did anything she didn’t want to do.

With all the normal resentments of a teenager in care, I felt as though I was being picked on and I got so fed up with one particular social worker who was making out I was some sort of sex maniac that I eventually lost my temper. I stormed out to the car park and turned over his little 2CV car, rolling it right over onto its roof. It was as if my temper had given me superhuman strength, just as Mum’s always did.

If the social workers thought I was so sexually mixed-up and precocious, I wonder now why didn’t they try to find out how I had got to be that way? Looking back I can’t understand why it didn’t all click into place for them, but they continued to follow Mum’s line that I was disturbed and difficult because of Dad’s death and that was the end of the story. Rolling a social worker’s car over did nothing but illustrate exactly what she was telling them.