Joe Peters (7 page)

She punched a light switch and I saw for the first time what I would later understand was a basement. This was nothing like the clean, orderly world of the rooms in the rest of the house. There was a smell of mustiness and damp rising up from the shadows thrown by the single light bulb. Thick cobwebs clung to the rough brick walls and bare wood. She hurled me down the stairs, kicking and punching as she followed me down. At the bottom there was another door, a big solid Victorian timber one, which she opened and threw me through with one last mighty slap, as if I was no more than a sack of straw. She turned on another light and I could see the full horror of where she was putting me.

Inside was a cellar containing nothing but a filthy old mattress propped up against the wall. Unable to stand the sight of me for a second longer she slammed the door shut behind me and switched off the light from the outside. I could hear her jamming something under the
door handle so I wouldn’t be able to get out. Then she stamped back up the stairs and there was silence as well as blackness.

For a moment it felt as though I was in total darkness, but as my eyes adjusted the few thin rays of light which filtered in through an airbrick high up in the wall once dawn broke gave me just enough vision to grope my way around. Even if she hadn’t jammed the door I knew better than to try to open it without her permission in order to reach the light switch. The cold began to creep into my bones and I just sat shivering in the dark, wearing only my underpants, waiting to see what would happen next. I listened to the trains rumbling past outside the airbrick, wishing I could climb into one of the warm, bright carriages I had seen passing so many times and travel as far as possible from that room.

I had entered a world I hadn’t even known existed a few minutes before; one that was to become my prison cell for the next three years.

I
don’t think that Mum had any long-term plan to turn that dark little underground room into my prison cell at the moment she first pushed me in there and wedged the door shut. There was no lock on the door at that stage; that came later, which suggests she hadn’t pre-planned my imprisonment. I think she had just had enough of me that morning – enough of what she saw as my spoiled, disruptive behaviour. She wanted to get me out of the way and teach me a lesson once and for all. It was only once I was in the cell that she realized it was the best place for me. She had accidentally found a way to keep me completely out of her sight, while keeping me available to vent her bitterness and anger on when it became too much to contain. She could keep me there for as long as she liked because there was no one she had to answer to.

When a child disappears it is usually their panicking and grief-stricken loved ones who raise the alarm, but in my case in was my loved ones who had caused me to vanish, so why would anyone else notice? The other people who might have cared what happened to me, like Marie and Aunt Melissa, had been chased away by Mum right from the beginning. They wouldn’t have expected to hear anything from me.

While other children played outside in the sun, went to school, made friends and learned new things, I sat in the dark on my own. As far as I know, during those three years no one from social services asked where I was or what was happening to me. Perhaps they did come knocking and Mum managed to convince them with some story or other. Maybe she told them I had moved from the area, but I think they would have asked to see at least some evidence of where I was now to back up any claims she made. My name must have been on the system because I had been to see the local doctor when I first went mute, so I must have had a national health number at the very least. I’m also fairly sure Mum would have been collecting benefits for looking after me from the welfare because she needed every penny she could scrounge together. So how could I just have slipped out of sight like that without anyone questioning it? Maybe they were confused because I had been living at two different addresses – both Mum’s and Marie’s. Maybe
their case load was just too great. I don’t know and I suppose I’ll never find out now.

After a while of sitting on the bare floor that first day, straining my ears as I listened out for her to come back down the stairs and give me another beating, I found the courage to stand up and pull the mattress flat onto the floor in order to give myself somewhere more comfortable to lie. I almost choked on the stale, damp stink that rose into the air on a cloud of dust as it dropped down, filling my lungs and making me wheeze. It was a relief to get my skinny limbs off the cold, hard concrete even though the mattress was full of lumps and sharp edges.

As I lay, staring up into the darkness, it wasn’t long before I felt the approaching urge to pee. I hadn’t emptied my bladder since the previous evening and I realized it was now painfully full. I had no idea how long I was going to be down there and I certainly didn’t have the nerve to bang on the door for help or to even try to push my way through it and find my way back up the stairs in the dark. Knowing how angry she always became when I peed myself by mistake, I tried to hold it in but the pain eventually became so intense I had to give up and I released it onto the floor, knowing, even as the feeling of release spread through me, that I would be in trouble if she spotted the puddle. I hoped she wouldn’t come back down before it evaporated, but in my heart I
knew that was unlikely. The urine left a new smell in the air and although it was a relief to have got rid of it I felt even dirtier as I lay back down on the mattress again to wait for something to happen, wondering if perhaps this was the end and I was just going to be left alone to die of hunger and thirst.

Hours later I heard footsteps on the stairs and the light came on in the cell, almost blinding me with its sudden brightness. When Mum opened the door and came in I saw immediately from her expression that she could smell what I’d done and I cringed, bracing myself for the blows.

‘You dirty little shit,’ she growled, her lips curling up in disgust. ‘You’re not even fucking house trained.’

Just as I expected she went completely mental at me for daring to soil her house, even this distant, dirty, forgotten corner of it. Armed with a new reason to be angry, she pulled me up off the mattress by the hair and beat me hard. Still gripping my hair tightly she pushed me onto my knees and smeared my face into the puddle of wee with all her strength, as if she was trying to teach a particularly stubborn puppy the error of its ways, forcing me down so hard I was afraid she would break my nose.

‘You dirty little bastard!’ she screamed as she rubbed, before shouting up to Wally.

‘Fetch a fucking mop and bucket!’

When Wally came hurrying down she hurled the mop at me with all her strength.

‘Clean it up now,’ she ordered.

She watched as I worked, shouting orders at me all the time: ‘Scrub harder! Use more water!’ Then she turned back to Wally.

‘Get two more buckets of cold water,’ she told him and he dutifully went back upstairs to dispose of the dirty water. I assumed she was going to use the fresh water to rinse down the floor, but once he had brought the buckets back down she sent him away and then threw the contents of both over me. The coldness of the water knocked the breath out of me.

‘You stink,’ she snarled. ‘You dirty little bastard!’

She left one of the empty buckets behind for me to use as a toilet from then on and wedged the door handle from the other side as she left me alone in the dark once more, shivering on the soaking wet mattress and feeling utterly alone. What was going to become of me? Would I die of cold or of hunger first?

To start with, one of them would bring me food once a day most days, but the longer I was down there the more angry Mum seemed to become towards me and the less willing she was to put herself out to feed me. She saw me as nothing more than an inconvenience and a blight on her life and preferred to put me out of her mind. Sometimes it would be her who would bring the scraps
down and sometimes she would send Larry and Barry, who were enjoying this new opportunity to humiliate me further. As far as they were concerned, the family dog was now being confined to a cage, which meant they didn’t have to have me stinking up their bedroom any more. Once they realized that the worse they treated me the happier Mum would be with them, they exploited every new opportunity to indulge their hatred of me and their own sadistic impulses. Just as before they would spit in my food and throw it on the floor, forcing me to lick it up like a dog, which was a hundred times worse when it was the filthy dirty bricks of the cellar floor that I was having to lick rather than Mum’s pristine kitchen floor. If I refused to do anything they ordered me to do they would call Mum.

‘Joe has had one of his tantrums, Mum,’ they’d say. ‘He’s thrown his food all over the floor. What should we do?’

She would then come clattering down the stairs and batter me and grind my face into it to teach me a lesson for being so disrespectful and ungrateful. When they brought down water in bottles it often tasted funny so I have no idea what they had put in it, and sometimes they would glue the tops onto the bottles so I would have to gnaw through the plastic just to get anything out of them. My baby teeth soon became so weak from malnutrition and lack of cleaning that they would chip and
break under any sort of strain. Toothache was added to the long list of different kinds of pain I suffered from. In the end I didn’t care how much it hurt or what the water tasted like because I was so thirsty I would have drunk anything.

Sometimes Mum even took away my underpants because she said I’d soiled them – ‘You dirty little bastard. You need to be taught a lesson!’ – then I was left naked for days. She fitted a bolt to the outside of the door so she didn’t have to keep on wedging it every time she went in or out, which meant there was no chance of me ever getting out on my own. Sometimes when no one had been down for a day or two I would wonder what would happen if they completely forgot about me. Would I just be a skeleton on the mattress when they finally remembered to come and check on me? I would still have preferred to keep quiet and die in peace rather than bang on the door to remind them I was there because of all the wrath and pain that would bring down on my head.

Often when Mum was punishing me for something she would talk about Dad, punctuating her blows and kicks with verbal tirades.

‘He was a rotten fucking man and a rotten fucking husband. And you are just as fucking bad as him.’

The pain he had caused her never seemed to fade; if anything it seemed to enrage her even more as time
passed. It was as though he was becoming more of an obsession with her now that he was dead than he had been when he was alive. Maybe it angered her to think that he had escaped from her by dying, that she couldn’t do anything to make his life a misery any more, so she turned her frustrations onto me instead.

‘Every time I look at you it reminds me of that sick bastard!’ she would say as she gave me another round of punches.

I still found myself thinking about him all the time as well, remembering our times together and wishing with all my heart that he was still alive. During the hours and hours that I sat alone in that cell I would chat to Dad in my head, just as I used to chat out loud when we were together in the car or the garage. I could picture him sitting on the mattress beside me, talking back to me. When my limbs got too stiff or cold, I would get up and pace around, trying to stretch them out, and pretending I was going for a walk with Dad. I went through a whole range of emotions in those days. Sometimes I was cross with him for being so careless with his own life and leaving me with Mum and the others when he knew that I needed his protection. Sometimes I just sank into black, total misery. What I wanted most was to die so that I could be with him all the time.

‘I’m a good boy, God,’ I would pray. ‘Please take me too. Please let me be with my dad.’

I would fantasize sometimes. I would imagine so hard that I had a nice mummy and daddy who were both alive and both loved me and we all lived together in a happy family that the pictures in my head would seem almost real. These fantasies passed the time for a while but I would then come back to reality out of my daydreams with a sick feeling in my stomach as I realized it had all been in my mind and that I was still lying on my own in the dark, freezing cold and hungry.

Sometimes Mum and the others would leave me alone for so long the bucket I was supposed to use as a toilet would fill right to the top. When it had reached the brim I would hold my wee in for as long as I could bear, for fear of making it overflow onto the floor and having my face rubbed in it, but eventually I would have no choice but to give in. The stench from the bucket grew so overpowering that anyone coming into the cell would gag and cover their mouths and noses, reinforcing the idea that I was a filthy, stinking creature, no better than a caged animal in need of regular mucking out and sluicing down. Once the bucket was completely full and standing in a growing puddle, I would try to find new places that I thought would disguise the wetness, but it never fooled her for a second and I always ended up with my face being rubbed in it again.

One day, after I had been under the house for a few months, Mum made a surprise announcement. ‘You
stink so bad,’ she told me, ‘it’s coming up through the floorboards. So you’re going to have a fucking bath. Come on, get a fucking move on.’

She escorted me roughly and impatiently upstairs to the bathroom, cuffing me round the head as we went, and scrubbed me down herself with all the violence she could muster. I thought I heard a man’s voice in the house while I was upstairs and when she escorted me back to the cellar again I found that someone had been in and fixed a proper lock to the door, one with a key that could be turned twice as if to finalize the locking in process once and for all. She must have got a locksmith in to do it. It was as though she was making my imprisonment official and my heart sank even further. Was I going to be kept there forever, until I died? It certainly looked that way.