Joe Peters (2 page)

From what I’ve been told the marriage was pretty strong to start with, although the children were all brought up with the same ferocious strictness that Lesley had experienced herself, but the death of their fourth child at birth caused a rift between her and her first husband. The marriage quickly degenerated from that point and ended in divorce, leaving Lesley bringing up
three children on her own, feeling angry and resentful towards the whole world.

It was at that stage that she started to drink seriously in order to dull the pain of losing her baby, and the children’s father disappeared for good from all their lives. The trouble with drink is that although it does help to lessen any pain you might be suffering, it can stoke up any anger that might be simmering below the surface, and Lesley had a cauldron full of that waiting to come to the boil. It also soaks up any spare money there might be in the family, increasing the very hardships that she was trying to escape from.

If there was one thing Lesley was determined not to do, it was be a prisoner in her own home and she became an avid pub drinker and partygoer. She was, after all, still a young woman in her early twenties and she craved a bit of fun. Soon after the divorce had come through she went to a party that Marie – an old school friend of hers – was having to celebrate the anniversary of her marriage to a man called Frankie. Lesley was still a vivacious, attractive young woman and that night she was up for a good time. During the party she met my dad, William, a friend of Marie’s and Frankie’s, and he appeared to be unattached and interested in her. What she didn’t know at the time was that Marie and William were in love but couldn’t do anything about it because neither of them wanted to betray Frankie, who William looked on as his best friend.
Believing she was just enjoying a good night out, Lesley was actually stumbling blindly into a love triangle that was already on the brink of exploding.

William was by all accounts a bit of a charmer who could light up a room just by walking into it. He could have had his pick of the women there that night but it was Marie he was in love with and he was beginning to harbour thoughts of trying to coax her away from his mate, Frankie. The first thing he had to do, of course, was ensure that she was as keen to be with him as he was to be with her.

Feeling left out as he watched them together at their anniversary party, and hoping to make Marie jealous on the night, William decided to seduce Lesley, who had probably had enough drinks to make her look like a promising prospect. Ultimately I guess he was hoping that when Marie experienced a rush of jealousy at seeing him paying attention to her friend, she would realize how much she loved him and would leave Frankie for him. It was the sort of game that could only end in tears, but then a lot of people fail to weigh up the consequences of their actions when they’re young and they’ve had a few drinks at a party. Perhaps the flirtation between William and Lesley started out as a relatively innocent bit of fumbling around on the dance floor but one thing soon led to another and a month or two later she found herself pregnant with me.

I don’t think Dad was ever the least bit in love with Mum because his affections were always directed towards Marie, even on the night of my conception, but he was a decent man and once he discovered she was pregnant he decided that marrying her was the honourable thing to do. He was a bit daunted to discover that she already had three kids from her first marriage, something she hadn’t mentioned when they met at the party, but Mum came from a Catholic family and he realized it would look doubly bad if he didn’t put a ring on her finger. The fact that he was willing to marry Lesley, however, did not change the way William still felt about Marie and his plan to kindle her interest by making her jealous was working. Marie had finally decided to give in to his advances, despite the fact that he was now officially engaged to be married to her friend, and was still her husband’s best friend. I wasn’t even out of the womb and already my family life was a potential war zone. Whatever was going to happen next it was unlikely that anything was going to go smoothly for any of them.

After that night my dad and Marie allowed their passion for one another to overcome all caution and before long Frankie came home unexpectedly one day and caught his wife and his best friend in bed together. Unable to think of anything to say to the treacherous couple, he turned on his heel and walked out of the
bedroom without so much as a word. Dad, mortified at what he had done, hurriedly pulled on his trousers and ran after him, but it was too late to save the friendship. The two men started arguing and got into a fight in the street, and when Frankie did eventually come home he took the rest of his anger out on Marie. In that day of betrayal and violence their marriage was destroyed and Dad, furious that any man had dared to lay his fists on the woman he loved, went looking for Frankie again. Everyone now got to hear what was going on, including Lesley. There was no going back; she had a baby on the way and a husband who was having an affair with her best friend. She was publicly humiliated and very, very angry about it.

By the time I was born in 1973 Frankie had disappeared off the scene and Dad was skipping back and forth between Lesley, the mother of his adored first child, and Marie, the love of his life. It was as though I had been born into a powder keg and I was going to be the spark that would ignite the whole thing once and for all. If I had never been conceived I’m sure Dad would never have married Mum and he and Marie would have stayed together from then on and lived a very happy life together. But I was there, and that changed everything.

T
he garage where Dad worked was just a small back-street one, a couple of bays with ramps for the cars to be raised up on when the mechanics needed to get underneath, and some grubby offices and a customers’ waiting room to the side, with all the walls smudged in oily handprints. I loved the noise and smell of the place when they were all busy working. If cars didn’t need to go on the ramp Dad would sometimes work on them outside on the grass verge beside the road, where Graeme kept a few old bangers polished and lined up for sale at bargain prices. Dad liked being out in the fresh air as he worked and I preferred it too – just him and me and the cars, and the passing world for me to watch.

I always asked him if I could have an oily face like his and I’d squeal with delight when he would rub his fingers over a dirty car engine and then smudge my nose
and cheeks as though he was anointing me into some secret Masonic club for car mechanics. If he was working underneath a car he would put me inside his Capri, which would be parked across the forecourt, telling me to stay there and play till he had finished, but if he was working on top of an engine he would pull a high stool up for me beside him and let me fiddle around under the bonnet just like him. Often I was more of a hindrance than a help but he would never get cross when I messed things up, always joking and making me laugh.

I imagine that one of the reasons he liked going to work was because it took him away from the pressures of his private life. No man trying to please two women is likely to be having an easy time of it from either of them, however charming he might be. It was a situation totally of his own making, of course, but that wouldn’t have made it any easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The easygoing banter of his workmates must have seemed like a rest cure compared to what was going on in his personal life.

Actually, nothing would ever have made Mum an easy person to deal with by then. If she had been angry with life after the loss of her fourth baby and the collapse of her first marriage, she was even angrier when she discovered she now had a husband who was blatantly sleeping with her best friend and making it obvious that he preferred her company. I don’t think Dad was
making any secret of how he felt about Marie, which must have been hard for Mum to handle, but at the same time I doubt if Mum was making much of an effort to win him back with charm, knowing what her temper was like. It’s always hard to know exactly what goes on in other people’s relationships and I was certainly too young to understand anything of the emotional whirlwind swirling around me in those first five years of my life. All I knew was that Dad was my protector, whereas Mum was quite likely to give me a beating for no apparent reason if he wasn’t looking after me. Maybe my older brothers had undergone exactly the same levels of discipline when they were small, but Dad hadn’t been around to protect them. They weren’t really his problem. His main concern became keeping me safe from her anger and he did that by having me with him at every possible moment.

Because we were always together and because he made no secret of how much he loved me, Mum began to view me as an extension of him. She saw me as part of the conspiracy against her, part of a team with Dad and Marie, part of her humiliation. Knowing that I was the most precious thing in the world to Dad, she would use me against him whenever she had an opportunity. On one occasion, when I was still a small baby, I’m told she dangled me by the leg from an upstairs window. My father had just stormed out of the house after a row and
she shouted at him down in the street below: ‘Do you want the little bastard then?’

My father panicked at the sight of me dangling fifteen feet above the hard pavement and ran back. Kicking the front door in he raced upstairs to rescue me, probably aware that she was more than capable of actually dropping me on my head at a moment like that. By the time he burst into the room she had pulled me back to safety, having achieved exactly the reaction she’d wanted. Apparently there was a big fight, in which she ended up with a thick lip and he got two black eyes. He says he’d never raised his hand to a woman before that day but she pushed him too far after risking my life like that. Dad left the house clutching me tightly and vowing to himself that he would never trust her alone with me again.

Mum then called the police to tell them that Dad had abducted me and that she needed their help to get me back. She could be very plausible when talking to people in authority and with her bruised face she wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing them that she was the injured party, that she was a good and dutiful mother who had her child’s best interests at heart, while Dad was a violent philanderer who should never be trusted to look after a baby. By hitting her and grabbing me he had inadvertently played into her hands, making her look like the innocent victim of a brutal man. The police got involved and instructed him to give me back, which
meant he had to come back too if he wasn’t going to risk leaving me alone with her. It must have been an agonizing choice for him and it must have made him resent Mum all the more for forcing him into a corner.

As far as Mum was concerned, of course, her plan of using me to blackmail Dad into giving up Marie and staying with her had temporarily paid off. Not wanting to lose his son, knowing that I would need him there to protect me from her anger, he was forced to come home. She had gambled on him being more frightened of losing me than of losing Marie and the gamble had paid off, although not for long. He must have felt as though he was being torn in half, unable to give either of us up but constantly frightened of what Mum might do next. Even though he was back living in the house he was always nervous about leaving me alone in a room with her and he would take me everywhere with him, especially to work and also to Marie’s house when he could no longer resist the temptation to be with her.

It wasn’t long before Mum realized that her plan wasn’t working and that his feelings for Marie were too strong for him to be able to stay away from her, as long as he felt that I was safe. It must have been galling for Mum to know that he preferred to be with Marie and she saw me as an accomplice in his behaviour, another enemy, even though I was far too young to understand what was going on between the grown-ups in my life.

Despite the explosive nature of their relationship, or maybe because of it, Mum and Dad still managed to get it together enough during their periods of reconciliation for her to fall pregnant by him twice more, giving birth to a girl called Ellie, born eighteen months after me, and then a boy called Thomas, who was almost three years younger than me. I suppose there must have been some positive passion in their relationship as well as all that anger for them to continue creating a family in the midst of their battles.

From the moment she was born, my sister Ellie was Mum’s favourite, her little angel, and she never seemed to want to hurt her in the way she did me. Thomas was treated badly, but she didn’t hate him with the same depth of loathing that she harboured for me. With a strange kind of warped logic, she blamed me for Dad’s misdemeanours but not the other two. Maybe it was because I was so clearly his favourite. Maybe it was because I looked so much like him.

People who knew our family at that time tell me that Dad never became as obsessed about the other two as he was with me. Maybe he didn’t think they were in the same danger from Mum as I was. Maybe he could sense that my mother harboured a dislike for me that went far beyond anything rational. Perhaps he deliberately kept his other two children at arm’s length in the hope that she would bond with them better if she didn’t associate
them with him and Marie. Or maybe he just liked having me around because I was that little bit older and adored him so completely. Once he had a boy to be his constant companion, perhaps he didn’t feel that he needed any more. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking or feeling during those early years of my life. I just know he was my hero, my pal and my protector.

Soon after Thomas was born, Mum and Dad decided to try to patch everything up once and for all. Dad reluctantly parted from Marie and went back home to attempt to be a father to all six of us (including three step-kids), but he still made sure I was always under his watchful eye. Terrified of being hit I would cling tighter to him and the closer I stuck to him the more annoyed Mum became with me. Her hatred of me seemed to grow deeper every day. The attempt at reconciliation soon floundered and by the time I was four Dad and I were more or less living full time with Marie. Mum’s desperate attempts to hold onto her second marriage had failed and she was finally losing him. He was setting a divorce in motion and all she could do was rage against us to anyone who would listen. I dare say she got a fair bit of sympathy as she was the deserted party, but anyone who knew what she was like in the privacy of her own home would never have been surprised that Dad had chosen Marie over her.