Joe Peters (21 page)

I remembered Pete telling me that there were telephone numbers for kids to ring if they were being
treated badly by their families. I’d never thought of ringing one before because I had been told so often by Mum and Amani and Douglas that no one would ever believe anything I said that I had actually come to believe it was a fact. Mum had always been so convincing in her lies whenever the authorities had questioned or challenged her that I always assumed they would believe her and deliver me back to her if I tried to go for help. I was so terrified to think what she would do to me if she got her hands on me after I had tried to betray her that I never had the nerve to try it. But now that I had thought it through more thoroughly, and had been safe from her for more than a week, I was beginning to think about things a bit differently. Pete had believed everything I’d told him, and so had John and the kids who had wanted to look after me, so perhaps other people would too.

Now that I had time to reflect on everything that had happened to me over the previous eight or so years I began to realize that my case must be extreme. If Pete and John and the others were all so shocked by the little bits of my life that I had revealed to them, I couldn’t begin to imagine how they would react if they knew the whole truth. Maybe people on a phone line would believe me and help me too, just like Pete and the kids by the railway line. But which people would be the best to turn to? As far as I was concerned they were all strangers who
had the potential to do me harm if I was unlucky in my choice.

There was one telephone number that Pete had told me several times that I should ring and I could remember it because it was deliberately catchy to make it memorable. As it kept going round and round in my head I began to wonder if perhaps Pete was right. Maybe these were the people who would understand what I was going through if I told them, people with enough experience to know that I was telling the truth, people who would have the ability to protect me from Mum and Amani and Douglas. The idea was becoming more tempting as I squelched on down the dark, cold, empty road.

When I got to the little country supermarket, on the empty, isolated road, I climbed straight into the phone box just to get out of the rain and give myself a few moments to think what to do next. Being so cold and wet and hungry made me acutely aware that I wasn’t going to be able to cope on my own indefinitely. I was going to have to find someone I could trust who could help me and protect me from Mum and the rest of them. As I stood there, shivering, staring around me, water dripping down my neck from my soaked hair, I spotted a card pinned to the board above the phone, advertising the same helpline number that Pete had told me about. It was like a sign, as though God or someone was trying
to tell me what to do next. Even then it still took me a while to pluck up the courage to lift the receiver and my heart was thumping in my ears as I dialled clumsily with my frozen fingers.

The line rang for a long time but no one answered so after a few minutes I hung up, part of me grateful to have been given a way out of having to find the words to describe to a stranger what my life was like. My nerve was failing me again. What if the people at the other end of the phone rang the police and they sent me back to Mum? There was every possibility she would kill me for running away. But if I didn’t get help I was likely to die of cold and hunger anyway. I stood there for a long time, trying to calm myself down and then picked up the receiver and dialled again. Still no answer after the first few rings. I hung up and dialled several more times, my nerve going each time before anyone answered. How could I trust anyone when everyone had always betrayed me, abused me or left me? Dad had gone, Wally had gone, Pete had gone, my friends by the railway line had told on me. What made me think these people would be any different? But outside it was pitch black and the rain was growing heavy again. What other option did I have? I couldn’t spend the rest of my life hiding in a phone box. I dialled again and a woman answered the phone in a quiet, sweet voice before I had time to hang up.

I couldn’t find the words to speak, just standing there as mute as I’d been all those years before, my throat tightly closed and my brain unable to think what to do about it.

‘Are you still on the line?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m being hit by my mum,’ I mumbled eventually.

‘Okay,’ she said, as though that was the most reasonable thing in the world for me to tell her. ‘Where are you calling from now?’

‘Why?’ I asked, immediately suspicious and half wanting to run back out into the rain again.

‘I just need to know if you are in a safe place. Are you calling from someone’s house?’

‘No, a phone box.’

‘It’s quite late at night, so have you come out of your house?’

‘No, I’ve fucking run away!’ I was getting annoyed and knew I had to make a conscious effort to calm down if I was to expect her to help me.

‘Oh, all right.’ She didn’t seem perturbed by my attitude or my swearing. Maybe my call wasn’t so unusual and she was used to dealing with fear and aggression in the kids that rang up. ‘How long have you run away for?’

‘What’s with all the questions?’ I wanted to know. ‘What are you going to do to help me?’

‘First of all we need to know your name.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to know what to call you. My name is Susan, what’s yours?’

I didn’t answer immediately. I was beginning to worry that I was making a mistake, but at the same time it was nice to be in the shelter and talking to a friendly voice.

‘Joe,’ I said eventually.

She chatted on for a while, not asking too many questions. ‘If you’ve run away,’ she said eventually, ‘then there must be people who are concerned about you. And there are some nasty people out there at night who might hurt you.’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly vehement. ‘I’m safe here. There’s people already hurting me and doing fucking things to me.’

She didn’t have to tell me about how many nasty people there were in the world, I’d met some of them personally, and I knew all too well it wasn’t strangers hiding in the bushes at night who I had to be wary of; it was my own family and the people they introduced me to. I felt sure I knew more about the way the world worked than she did, for all her professional training and good intentions.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked, changing her tack, but I didn’t tell her. Although she seemed very nice the
conversation didn’t seem to be going the way I had assumed and hoped it would. I don’t know what I had expected to happen, but I hadn’t been prepared to be bombarded with so many questions.

Then she told me she was having a problem with her phone.

‘I’m just going to switch to another one,’ she said. ‘Hold on a second, Joe. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.’

There was something about her voice that made me trust her so I hung on as she told me to. I thought about hanging up but then I would have had to go through the whole process again if I’d decided to ring back, so I stayed there, staring out into the blackness and the rain outside. She was gone for what seemed like ages but was probably only about half a minute. When she came back on the line she kept me talking for a bit longer about myself and what I should do, and then suddenly I was bathed in the unexpected glare of headlights, pinned down in the phone box like a cornered rabbit. Swinging round I saw the distinctive bonnet of a police car drawing up at the kerb outside. As the policeman climbed out of his car, pulling on his waterproofs, I realized it was the same man I had escaped from a few nights earlier down by the railway line. I knew I had to act fast because he wouldn’t be taking any risks now he knew how desperate I was to get away. Dropping the phone I threw open the door and made a dash for it. This time, however, he
was ready for me and grabbed my backpack as I went past, jerking me to a halt. I tried to wriggle free of the straps and extricate myself, but he got hold of my arm.

‘Wo, calm down. Joe, calm down!’ His voice wasn’t as angry as I would have expected considering how I had messed him about the last time he’d caught me. He actually sounded quite friendly.

‘Fuck off!’ I shouted, struggling in vain to get free. ‘I ain’t going back! Fuck off! I ain’t fucking going back to the bastards!’

At the time, I was convinced it had been the woman on the end of the helpline who had betrayed me. It’s possible that the police car turned up by coincidence at that precise moment, but it seemed unlikely. What were the chances of him appearing out there in the middle of nowhere at that time of night at exactly the moment when I was on the line to her? Yet again I felt I had reached out to someone for help and been let down. I was so angry I exploded, thrashing and punching and kicking and shouting as he struggled to keep a grip on me.

‘Stop fighting, Joe,’ he said, trying to hold me at arm’s length to protect himself. ‘Please. I ain’t gonna let you go this time so there’s no point trying.’

Eventually I wore myself out. He was a lot stronger than me and I could tell he wasn’t going to release me however hard I hit him. I resentfully allowed him to
fold me into the back of his car, thinking I would let him think he had beaten me and wait for a better opportunity to get away. Once I was safely locked in the back he drove me to a tiny local police station nearby, which I think was probably just an office tacked onto the side of his house. At least it was warm and dry as we came in and he turned on the light. He locked the doors behind him and settled me down, making us both a cup of tea.

‘Right,’ he said, once I had calmed down and he felt he could talk to me rationally. ‘We know who you are. You fit the description of a missing boy who’s been reported as running away from home.’

‘You can’t fucking send me back there!’ I started shouting again. ‘And how did you fucking find me there in that fucking phone box anyway?’

‘We knew you were there,’ was all he said. ‘We’ve been told that you claim you’re being beaten by your mum. Is that true?’

I said nothing. I knew now that anything I did say would find its way back to her and she would kill me the moment she had the chance. I didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were by accusing her of things that no one would ever believe were true anyway. It was beginning to look as though I had made a mistake by talking about it at all, so I decided to revert to not telling anyone anything.

‘I’m not fucking going back there,’ I muttered, desperately mustering all the bravado I could to hide the terror that was now overcoming my anger. ‘You can’t make me. I don’t have to talk to you. You’ve got no right to keep me here.’

‘Yes I have,’ he corrected me patiently. ‘Because you’re a minor you need to be in protective custody.’

‘I don’t have to do anything you say, you prick!’ I snarled, like a cornered dog fighting to the last, ready to bite any hand that was held out to me – literally, given my past history of attacking people.

‘There’s some officers coming from your local police station to pick you up,’ he told me. ‘They’re the ones who have been investigating your disappearance.’

I felt a chill running through me. Would one of them be the man with the handcuffs? Or would they be friends of his? Would their report of whatever they had to say about me be read by him? Would he pass it on to Douglas, who would then report back to Amani and Mum? I stopped talking, hiding behind the mask of silence that had been my sanctuary for so many years, looking down at the floor as I had always been taught to. He left me in peace and an hour or two later the other officers turned up to collect me.

‘This is Joe,’ the first man told them. ‘He’s quite a handful, to say the least. Hang on to him tightly, he’s got a habit of bolting.’

Not wanting to take any chances one of the new men pulled out a pair of handcuffs exactly like the ones I had worn so often when being raped by their colleague. He snapped them onto my wrist and attached me to himself, marching me out to the back of an unmarked car. Feeling the cold steel digging into my flesh brought back all my experiences with the policeman at Douglas’s house, making me shake uncontrollably. It was as though I was being delivered back to them on a plate, as though they had reached out all this way and pulled me back into their web. It felt as if there would be nowhere I would ever be able to run to where they wouldn’t be able to find me and bring me back. Now that I was in the police system, how long would it be before that policeman got to hear about my arrest and told Douglas and the rest where I was and what I had been saying? Anything I said now would be written down and recorded somewhere and they would know if I informed on them. God alone knew what they would do to me if that happened. All these panic-stricken thoughts were whirling round and round in my head as I sat in the back of the police car with one of my captors beside me and the other in the front, driving.

One copper tried to make a bit of small talk as we drove along, but I wasn’t having any of it. I wasn’t even sure that I would be able to force any words out past the stranglehold fear now had on my throat. It seemed
that whenever people were nice to me it always ended badly. I had to keep my guard up, had to be watchful. Despite being brought back in like this, my short time on the run had emboldened me a little. I no longer felt that I was completely helpless. I actually did have choices as long as I wasn’t trapped in a room with Mum or Amani or Douglas, and I could have some effect on what might happen to me if I stuck firmly enough to my guns and refused to make it easy for them to subdue me again.

‘I swear to God,’ I told him when I was finally calm enough to be able to stutter the words out, ‘if you take me home I’ll kill the fucking bitch.’

‘That’s not a very nice thing to say,’ he said. ‘Your mother is really concerned about you. She seems a very nice person.’

‘A nice fucking person? You don’t know fucking anything! She’ll fucking beat me to death if you take me to her house. I swear I’ll stick a knife in her if I have to go back.’

‘Why are you talking like this? Your mum is worried and she wants you back.’