Joe Peters (20 page)

I had no idea of any of this as I settled down to sleep for another night in my hut. The first I knew that something was wrong was when I was woken later that night by the sound of footsteps outside, crunching through the shingle on the track. Immediately alert I threw off the stolen bedclothes and knelt by the door, peering out through a crack, my heart pounding as I tried to assess the danger. I could see the beam of a torch coming towards me. The figure holding it looked too tall to be one of the kids, and the footfall was too heavy, more like the scrunch of an adult man’s boots. Not sure what to do next, I leaned my whole weight against the door, wedging it with my foot, buying myself a few seconds to think. I assumed it must be a railway maintenance man doing some night work and I began to plan how I would get out the door and past him before he had a chance to grab me and before any of his mates turned up.

The footsteps stopped directly outside the door and a thin slither of torchlight came in through the crack making me instinctively dodge back out of its path.

‘Who’s in there?’ a man’s voice enquired. ‘Joe, is that you?’

Now I was confused; how did the stranger in the dark know my name?

‘I’m a police officer.’

‘Fuck off!’ I shouted, unable to think of anything intelligent to say in the circumstances. I was thinking about the policeman who used to come to my cellar and to Douglas’s house and shivering at the prospect of being arrested and falling back into their hands.

‘There’s a few people worried about you,’ he persisted. His voice sounded kind and concerned but I’d been fooled like that before and I wasn’t falling for it again – not now I’d had a taste of freedom.

‘Like fuck they are!’ I shouted.

‘Come on; open the door, Joe, please. I need to see if you’re okay.’

‘I am, so fuck off.’

‘But I need to see for myself that you’re all right. Please open the door. I don’t want to have to kick it in and hurt you because that wouldn’t be nice, would it? I really am a policeman and if you open the door a little you’ll be able to see my uniform. These people up here are your friends and they’re worried about you.’

‘Fucking grasses!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t want to go back. Please, can’t you just leave me alone? Forget you even heard about me. Please.’

‘I can’t lad, no, sorry. My duty is to make sure you are protected.’

I could tell he wasn’t going to change his mind and just go away. If I stayed where I was, I was trapped. If he came in, I would be cornered and it would be harder
to get away than if I was outside. I made a decision and opened the door, letting him think he had won me over with his reasonableness and his promise of protection. I stepped out with my bag over my shoulder and he took a firm hold of my wrist to make sure I didn’t do a runner. I didn’t like the feeling after being free for a few days; it reminded me of all the other times I had been gripped by adult hands and pulled in one direction or another, but I didn’t struggle. It wouldn’t have been worth it and he would only have tightened his hold on me. He was too strong for me to be able to wriggle free; I just had to hope that an opportunity would arise for me to get away before he had me under lock and key. As we made our way up towards the road we had to get over a steep bank. I could tell he was having difficulties, his feet sliding out from under him and only one hand free to support himself when he was in danger of falling.

‘You don’t have to hold me that hard,’ I protested, realizing it was going to be difficult for him to negotiate this obstacle with me attached to him. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You’re not going to run now, are you?’ he asked, sounding a bit doubtful at the prospect of loosening his grip. ‘You promise me?’

‘No, of course not. I promise you.’ Everyone else made promises that they didn’t intend to keep, I thought,
so why should I be any different? I was willing to do anything I could to stay out of Mum’s clutches.

The moment I felt his fingers slacken I tore free and was off into the night. I could hear him shouting after me. ‘Joe, come back here.’ But I didn’t turn round and in my fear and desperation I must have put on a real burst of speed, despite tripping several times on the many unseen obstacles in my path, because I had soon pulled away into the darkness. I left him trailing along behind until eventually even the beam of his torch had disappeared from sight. It’s surprising how much energy fear will give you when you need it. I found out later that the police searched for me for the next couple of days, and I did see the odd police car circling around as I watched from my next hiding place, but they didn’t seem to be putting their whole hearts into it. I guess they thought I would turn up sooner or later, that I wouldn’t have the necessary skills to survive for long in the wild on my own.

Once I was confident I had got away from him I slowed down, stumbling round in circles through the woods until I came into a deserted summer campsite. There I found an empty log cabin that had been locked up for the winter. The lock on the door was flimsy and I managed to force my way in with one hefty kick. It was more comfortable than the previous hut had been; there was even a bed, which I threw myself down onto,
my heart pounding from the exertions of the night. The cabin was dry and clean, but it was still cold once I had cooled down again after the running. All my bedclothes had been left behind in the hut and I didn’t think it would be wise to go back for anything the next day in case the police were still watching it. I imagined that the kids’ families would probably have reclaimed their property by then anyway. I didn’t know how long it would be before someone came to open the cabin up for the summer, but I thought it would do as a hideout until the police had stopped bothering to look for me at least.

I stayed in the cabin for several days, living off the remains of the food supplies that I had been keeping in my bag, rationing them out carefully to make them last, seeing no one. The following Sunday I was wandering around the empty campsite for yet another day, keeping myself entertained as best I could. The site had given me a lot of space and quiet to be alone with my own thoughts. I was used to being on my own, so that wasn’t a problem. I was content to mooch around looking for things to salvage and things to eat with nobody else to interfere with me or boss me about. I wasn’t giving the future too much serious thought, but I suppose I imagined I would just keep moving from place to place over the coming years, scrounging enough food to survive as I went, maybe getting the odd job here and there for
pocket money. Being alone in the woods was so much better than being at home, or spending the weekend at Douglas’s house, that I didn’t give much thought to anything else. If I let myself think about it, I missed Pete and I sometimes wondered what was happening to my brother Thomas. We were never bosom buddies the way I was with Pete, but I knew he had a bad time at home and I worried about him.

It was evening and the light was beginning to fade when I heard some kids’ voices in the woods close to the cabin. I dived back inside and watched through the corner of the window to see if they had any adults with them. When they came into sight I saw it was John and his sister, who I guessed had been the ones to grass on me. I should have kept quiet and waited for them to move on but I felt so angry with them for telling the grown-ups about me being in the railway hut after all the promises they had made that I couldn’t stop myself from going out to give them a piece of my mind. Maybe I needed someone to talk to as well, wanting to alleviate the boredom and loneliness a bit.

They nearly jumped out of their skins when I suddenly appeared on the path in front of them.

‘Why did you grass on me?’ I demanded. ‘You said you wanted to be my friend and to persuade your family to adopt me as your brother and then you go and fucking grass on me!’

‘I was worried about you,’ John said, obviously excited to have found me again but nervous about how I would react to them. He didn’t want to scare me away again. ‘But you got away. They’re looking everywhere for you. There’s been a big search party and everything.’

I couldn’t stay mad at them for long and once I had calmed down they promised that this time they really wouldn’t tell anyone about where I was – but I knew I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust anyone and every time I forgot that rule I ended up being let down again.

‘Can we get you any food or blankets?’ he asked.

‘Just leave me alone,’ I said, not wanting to push my luck.

I could see they weren’t going to do that, however much I pleaded. It was still all too much of an adventure for them, and they did seem to be genuinely concerned about me.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘go back and get me some food then.’

‘You stay here with Joe,’ John told his sister, ‘and I’ll go back.’ I guess he didn’t trust me either and was worried I would run away again the moment they were gone.

‘They’ll know if you come back without me and take food,’ his sister said. ‘They’ll expect us to be together.’

‘Okay,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Promise you won’t go anywhere, Joe?’

‘I promise,’ I lied.

The moment they were out of sight I grabbed my bag and ran off into the woods. There was no one in the world I was going to trust any more if it meant I might be taken back home. It wasn’t that I doubted their good intentions; I just thought there would be a strong chance the adults would be watching them and would immediately work out what was going on if they saw more food disappearing from the house. I was going to have to stay on my own if I wanted to be safe; there was no other option. This was how my life was going to have to be until I was old enough for the police not to be bothered about me any more.

T
he moment I was back out in the open I immediately missed the protective walls of the log cabin. The outdoor life can seem very alluring when you are trapped inside places that are making you miserable, but nature has an unkind way of reminding you why the human race has mostly chosen to live in houses throughout history. As the last of the daylight disappeared it started to rain hard. The water soaked through my clothes within minutes and kept on coming. A wind sprang up, driving the rain horizontally into my face as I walked, chilling every inch of me down to my bones. As I stumbled around in the dark, feeling cold, tired, wet and hungry, I kept thinking about John and the other kids going back to their warm houses and happy families and it all seemed so unfair.

I felt a surge of bitterness and anger at the way my life had gone; why couldn’t I have a normal life like everyone else? Why had God always had it in for me from the day I was conceived by mistake after that bloody anniversary party? Why had he taken my dad away and given him to the devil and never given me a single lucky break since? As I plodded through the wet with my head down against the elements I was raging and cursing Him out loud. It was as if I was making up for all the years when my anger and unhappiness had been trapped behind my silence. Anyone coming across me that night would have thought that they had found a deranged madman ranting in the woods – and in a way they would have been right.

I didn’t know where to go or which direction to head in. I wanted to find somewhere dry where I could lie down and sleep but I couldn’t think of anywhere to go that would be safe. There was nowhere people wouldn’t come searching for me, nowhere I would just blend in without people asking questions and telling others about me. It felt as though the whole world was joined together in an enormous conspiracy against me, a gigantic spider’s web with all of the strands trying to pull me back to Mum, while she sat in the centre waiting patiently for me to land in her lap again.

I thought about trying to find my way back to the railway hut and staying there to dry out before slipping
away again first thing in the morning. But I decided it was likely the police would go back to look for me at some stage, particularly if John and the others told them they had spotted me again and they knew I was still in the area.

Although the rain started letting up a bit after an hour or two everything was still drenched in the woods, and the trees dripped on me as I passed underneath them. Every part of my body was aching with exhaustion and cold but there was nowhere to sit or lie or take shelter. It made any ideas I might ever have had of living rough in the woods seem like the ridiculous little boy’s fantasies that they were. Eventually I walked out from under the dripping trees onto a deserted road so that I could at least put one foot in front of the other without tripping over roots and fallen branches, banging my shins and twisting my ankles every few steps. I knew from my earlier explorations of the area that there was a little local supermarket about three miles up the road so I headed for that, thinking that perhaps there would be somewhere to shelter around it. I thought I could remember seeing a public phone box on the road outside it and another idea was beginning to ferment inside my head.

Although I needed to be alone in order to feel at all safe, the trouble with having so much time to myself was that it had allowed memories that I would normally have
suppressed to bob back to the surface. The more I remembered what had happened to me in my short life the angrier I became and the more certain that it could¬ n’t be right. For so many years I had assumed that most children had to put up with at least some of the things that I had been through, but now I was growing older and getting a better idea of what other people’s lives were like, I could see more and more clearly that that wasn’t true. I might have been angry with Pete for leaving the school, and I might have been angry with my new friend John for telling on me, but the small glimpses they had allowed me of their lives made me realize that my life wasn’t normal. I could see how shocked they had been by even the small amounts of information I had given them about my family, so there must be other people out there who would feel the same if they just knew what my situation was. Maybe, I thought, I didn’t have to struggle on alone. Maybe there were some good people out there somewhere who would help me if I went to them and explained everything that had been going on. I couldn’t trust the police because of the policeman who came to Uncle Douglas’s, but perhaps there were other organizations. My brain churned over and over as I walked on, my cold, wet clothes chafing my skin, making every step a misery.