Joe Peters (24 page)

As a result of my relationship with Jean I was moved back to the bigger children’s home and another blot was added to my record. I must have been beginning to look
like a bit of a hopeless case to those who were still trying to find a way to help me. No one even came close to winning my trust and getting me to tell them what had made me the way I was.

A
fter six months of me living in the care homes, Mum came back into my life, being all nice again and asking me to go home. When they told me she wanted to see me I felt an immediate surge of fear, even though I knew she couldn’t actually attack me when there were other people around. Although I didn’t want to see her I was told I had no choice and there was a tiny part of me that looked forward to hearing how Thomas was getting on. However terrible my family life had been, it was still my family and there was an emotional tie that even she hadn’t been able to obliterate totally. When she arrived at the home I discovered she was pregnant with Amani’s baby, which would be her seventh in all. It made me feel sick to think that yet another kid was going to be brought into the world to be placed at her mercy.

‘I promise nothing will happen to you if you come back now,’ she assured me with all the sincerity she was capable of. ‘And I’ll keep the boys away from you.’

I didn’t believe her for a second and she must have been able to see that. It’s hard to imagine how she found the nerve to even think of asking, knowing how often she had betrayed me in the past, but my mother never lacked nerve. She seemed to be blaming it all on Larry and Barry now, when they were only ever doing what she told them or gave them permission to do.

‘Look,’ she said, her face a picture of reasonableness, ‘I know I’ve done wrong by you in the past and I’m really sorry for everything.’

I just stood with my arms folded, listening.

‘Amani’s gone now,’ she said, as if he had been the one who was the problem, not her. ‘I’ve got rid of him.’

That made me feel a bit better, because I knew I stood a better chance of being able to protect myself from one of her tempers if it was just her I was fighting against. I had never stood a chance against the two of them – no one did. I still couldn’t really work out why she wanted me back when she had spent so many years telling me how much she hated me and wanted to kill me. Maybe, I thought, it was because Amani wasn’t there and she liked having the house full of people who would do what she told them.

Despite all she had done to me, and even though I still didn’t trust her not to turn on me again, I decided to give her a chance. There must be something so instinctive inside us when we are thinking about our mothers, something that makes us want to believe they love us despite any evidence to the contrary. Why else would I even have considered going back to live with someone who had hated me so vehemently and had so deliberately set out to hurt me and exploit me for years on end? I wanted to believe I had a mummy who loved me, even if it had to be this woman. I wanted her to be the same with me as she was with Ellie, and with Larry and Barry. I tried to convince myself that she was finally telling the truth and that things would be different now that I was older and more able to look after myself, that I would be accepted as part of the family rather than looked on as the dirty little bastard who had to go under the table and be fed on scraps like a dog.

Perhaps one of the main reasons I went back was that I felt more confident from the months of being away and all the experiences I’d had in that time. I also felt safer because I knew that if things got bad again at least I could walk out and come back to the care home. I believed I had more control over my own life now that I was almost fifteen – nearly an adult – and I was fairly sure that no one would be able to do the things they had done to me in the past. I also wanted to see my little brother
Thomas again, who I had always liked and who had been through a lot of the same stuff I had, although neither of us had ever really talked about it frankly.

By this stage, the council had moved Mum to a smaller, more modern property. It was semi-detached again but was only on two floors and located in a different area of the city. It was a nice house with a big garden at the back. Mum was beginning to get arthritis in her legs and all the stairs and the cleaning at the old house had started to give her problems. It was hard to imagine that someone who had been such a terrifying force of nature might actually be growing older and more vulnerable. I noticed that she was beginning to look more like an old woman than I remembered, wearing old-fashioned clothes like bedroom slippers and baggy black trousers all day and every day around the house. When she went down the pub she would still dress up in bright floral dresses, but she had put on weight and they were starting to look alarming on a woman of her size. She would still always make an effort with her appearance when she went out, her hair and make-up immaculate, but she no longer looked young.

That didn’t stop men from picking her up in the pub once Amani had gone from the scene, although I dare say they had mostly had a few drinks by the time they actually decided to go home with her. She used to take them straight up to her bedroom and we could often
hear them going at it. We would all try to stay out of the way but occasionally we would see the men sneaking out in the morning and some of them were about as rough as it’s possible to imagine. I think she would get so drunk at night she lost all sense of judgement about those sorts of things. But then Amani hadn’t been any sort of oil painting, so maybe looks didn’t matter to her.

When I agreed to come back home she said that I could share a bedroom with Ellie and Thomas, separating me from Larry and Barry just as she had promised. That seemed a good start. It turned out to be true that Amani had gone, and so had all trace of Uncle Douglas and his other seedy friends. As far as I could tell Amani had gone back to my Aunt Melissa and his relationship with Mum had just dissolved. The others told me that she had tried to get some commitment from him when she found she was pregnant by him but he had felt like she was trying to trap him so he had walked away. I don’t think he even came around for the birth of the new baby. I certainly never saw him again.

Mum did seem to be trying really hard to overcome the nasty side of her personality and often apologized to us for the mistakes she had made in the past at moments when she was feeling sorry for herself – particularly when she’d had a few too many drinks. I tried to suppress all the memories that I carried, wanting to start again and not to be reminded about any of it, but it was
hard sometimes. The fact that we were living in a different house helped because it meant I didn’t have to be in the same rooms where I had been imprisoned and tortured, helping to avoid the stirring up of my blackest thoughts.

To begin with I allowed myself to believe that she actually meant what she was saying and that she was genuinely sorry for everything she had done, but then it dawned on me that the real reason she wanted me back was to have another potential breadwinner in the house. Over the years I worked as a ‘porn star’ she had been funding her drinking from the money that Amani was bringing in from Uncle Douglas and the rest, but now that had gone she was broke. She needed to get as many of her children working as she could, and persuade them to hand over their earnings to her, in order to keep enough cash coming in.

The first week that I was home went quite well as she tried to lull me into a sense of security, then in the second week she started talking about how she wanted me, Thomas and Ellie to start earning our keep. I was immediately on my guard, fearful of what she might have planned for us and ready to make a run for it the moment anyone like Douglas showed up at the door. Larry and Barry were too bone idle to do anything and she didn’t seem to think she could force them any more now they were in their mid twenties, so she kept up the
pressure on us, suggesting things we could do. I was shocked by how normal, honest and sensible the suggestions seemed to begin with.

She started by sending us out to wash people’s cars, knocking on doors and charging a pound a car. We got really keen and were doing twenty or thirty cars a day quite quickly, excited by the amount of money we managed to fill our pockets with by the end of a hard day’s work. The moment we got home, of course, she would take the money straight off us and head down the pub with it. We were really working hard and I began to resent losing the money so quickly, particularly when she wasn’t using it to buy anything for any of us.

‘Why am I giving you everything I earn?’ I asked one day, having been lulled into a false sense of security by her apparent change of character. ‘I don’t mind giving you a bit, but we should be allowed to keep some of what we earn.’

The moment the words were out of my mouth I realized my mistake because her fist punched hard into my face, sending me spinning across the room. All the memories came erupting back to the surface as I tried to pull myself together and clear my head. They threatened to overwhelm me and for a second I was going to retaliate with any weapon I could find. But something stopped me. I don’t know if it was because I feared I would make her even angrier, or if I was actually able to
rationalize the situation and realized I would only make my own situation worse. Instead of hitting her back, I walked straight out of the house and returned to the care home, telling them that Mum had assaulted me again. They could see the bruise deepening on my face, making my eye swell until it was almost closed, but when they went round to see her she made up a long story about how I had been being disruptive and smashing up the house and that she had had to restrain me. To my horror they believed her yet again.

I admit that my behaviour over the previous months in the homes had not done anything to help my reputation so it was probably easier than it should have been for the authorities to accept that I was just up to my old tricks again. As far as they were concerned, my mother had done her best to put me on the straight and narrow, only to be met by ingratitude and violence. I stayed at the care home anyway because I refused to go back and I was getting a bit too big to be easily forced to do anything I didn’t want to do.

A month later Mum came round again trying to persuade me to return home for another attempt at reconciliation. For the whole year that I was fifteen, I kept going back and forth, each time hoping that it would be different and each time being disappointed. Her mood swings were even more unpredictable than they had been before. Whereas when I was small she was
always angry and always aggressive towards me, she now had moments when she was all sweetness and light, but it was impossible to predict when those moments would disappear and she would be back to screaming and punching and dragging me or Thomas around by our hair. Despite her arthritis she was still a formidable force when she was angry and something stopped me from fighting back with all my strength. Despite all the threats I had issued over the years, I always held back from actually hitting my own mother, which meant she still had the power to rule over me as long as I was in her house.

As soon as her mood blackened Larry and Barry would appear at her side to assist her in whatever beating she was administering, just as they always had, like two evil henchmen, never wanting to miss out on any possible blood-letting. Still I kept hoping that she would eventually stop picking on me and would start treating me the same way she treated them. I kept on giving her one more chance, despite the endless disappointments. Larry and Barry were both very hard men by that time and even she wouldn’t have tried taking them on beyond the occasional passing clip round the ear to remind them who was the ultimate boss.

At least I had the freedom to come and go from the house as and when I wanted, and to make friends wherever I chose. At one stage I got to know an old boy called
McDermott, who used to run a little garage down the road, a bit like the one Dad had worked in. He must have felt sorry for me or something because he spent a lot of time chatting to me and letting me help him with odd jobs, giving me the occasional pound here and there or buying me a McDonalds for my lunch. Once I felt completely comfortable with him I would accept invitations to go back to his house for lunch, which was always really nice and companionable. I felt he was treating me as a fellow adult. In reality he was probably trying to keep me occupied and out of trouble, but if so then that was kind of him too. He would be happy to let me talk about Dad all the time, something I still wanted to do, just like when I was younger and kept obsessively drawing pictures of him on fire. There weren’t many people who I could do that with because I would never have dared to mention Dad’s name at home for fear of the repercussions.

One day McDermott and I dropped in to visit a mate of his on the way back from our lunch and I needed to use the toilet so I popped up to the bathroom. While I was in there I spotted a gold sovereign ring lying on the side of the basin and slipped it into my pocket. It was such a stupid thing to do, more of a habit than anything else because Mum was always encouraging us to nick anything we could. I would never have taken anything from McDermott himself because he was my friend, but
this seemed like fair game because it was a stranger’s house. The plan in our house was always to try to turn everything into money so a couple of days later I went down to a jeweller’s in town and asked them to buy the ring. The jeweller took it from me and examined it carefully.

‘This is stolen,’ he said without giving it back. ‘I’m not buying this.’

‘No it’s not,’ I lied. ‘It’s my dad’s and he’s passed it on to me.’

‘It’s not your dad’s.’ He was obviously completely confident and wasn’t taking any notice of anything I was saying. ‘It’s stolen.’

He wouldn’t give it back to me and I realized then that McDermott must have been into the local shops to tip them off and ask them to keep an eye out for the ring, assuming I would be in with it sooner or later. Looking up, I saw that the shop was fitted with a CCTV camera so I knew there was no way I would be able to deny that it was me who had brought the ring in. McDermott would know for sure that I had stolen his mate’s property. I felt so ashamed and angry with myself.