Joe Peters (9 page)

Mum would leave those three hard chairs in the cell to remind me what was in store for me soon, as if I could ever forget. I just wished I could find my voice so that I could tell her how sorry I was that Daddy had let her down so badly. I wished there was something I could say or do to make her stop hating me so much but, if anything, her anger seemed to get fiercer as the days went by. Because I was so run down, and constantly breathing the damp, stale, fetid air of the cellar, I started to develop asthma. I was always fighting for breath, particularly when I was afraid, which was most of the time. The wheezing noises I made when I was trying to pull enough air into my lungs was another source of annoyance to Mum, another reason to give me a slap, which in turn made me struggle all the more for breath. There was nothing I could do. I was utterly and completely powerless.

I usually had no way of telling how long I had been down in the cellar but I knew the day that it was my seventh birthday because Larry and Barry came crashing down the stairs, flashing the light in the cell on and off from the outside and shouting, ‘Happy birthday,
bastard! Are you ready for a surprise, you little wanker?’ They burst through the door laughing uncontrollably and I knew what was coming next because they’d done it to me before. I wasn’t excited, just scared.

‘You don’t deserve any presents,’ Mum told me as she came into the cell behind them, ‘because you’re the child of a deceitful, cheating, dead bastard.’

Each birthday my brothers always gave me the hardest birthday bumps possible and this year was no exception. They threw me as high as they could and let me drop to the concrete floor while Mum watched approvingly. They grabbed me by the arms and legs as I frantically shook my head to let them know that I didn’t like it but they pretended not to understand.

‘Speak up if you want them to stop,’ Mum said, knowing, of course, that I couldn’t.

The shock of the falls to the floor left me completely winded.

Just as they finished, I saw Wally coming in carrying a present.

‘Happy birthday, Bro,’ he said, gently placing the present in my trembling hands.

I looked at it in horror. What on earth was he doing? Was it a joke? Why would he give me a present while Mum was watching? He must have known what the reaction would be.

Mum snatched it away and threw it against the wall with all her strength, smashing whatever was inside. I heard a breaking sound. Swinging round she slapped Wally hard in the face, screaming abuse at him for daring to be kind to me when he knew it wasn’t allowed, that I didn’t deserve it, that I needed to be punished and taught a lesson.

‘Calm down, Mum,’ he said, thinking quickly. ‘It was just a joke. I was just teasing him, to piss him off. I was hoping you would do the honours and smash it against the wall in front of the little bastard.’

It was the most unconvincing lie I had ever heard Wally utter. I couldn’t believe he was going to get away with it, but Mum immediately stopped shouting at him and started apologizing for smacking him instead.

‘Sorry, son,’ she said, smiling at him sweetly. ‘You know how I get sometimes. The little bastard don’t deserve fuck all! Let him rot.’ She lunged towards me, screaming into my ear. ‘Look what you’ve made me do to my Wally, you little bastard.’

I kept my eyes glued to the floor, terrified to look up so I didn’t see the kick coming until it connected with my head. She picked up the broken present, turned and stormed out of the cell, ordering Larry and Barry to go with her and telling Wally to lock the door after him.

Once I could hear they had gone, I glanced up at Wally and he winked at me, but I saw the tears welling
in his eyes, magnified by his thick glasses. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed before backing out the room and locking the door as he had been told.

I didn’t blame him for lying. I knew he was as frightened of her as I was. I was surprised that he had even taken the risk of bringing me a present at all and I doubted he would make that mistake again. It felt as though Mum had broken a few more of my teeth with her kick. I remembered my grandfather used to keep his teeth in a glass beside his bed and put them in when he got up in the morning and I wondered if I’d be able to get false teeth like his once mine were all gone. But the idea of putting those horrible plastic things in my mouth made me shiver.

I sat cuddling myself on the mattress for a few hours, trying to conserve my body heat, when I heard footsteps again and my heart started to race, making my breathing difficult. Was I in for another beating? The key turned and it was Larry.

‘There you go, dick. I got some yummy scraps for you,’ he grinned, holding out the dog bowl. ‘Sorry we ate your birthday cake, weren’t enough left for you. If you beg nicely I might not gob in it.’

I was starving so I looked up at him in a sorrowful way, like a dog would. He burst out laughing and spat into the bowl anyway before tipping it all over me.

‘I’ve added some extra flavours,’ he shouted as he left the cell again.

The scraps were covered in salt and pepper, making them nearly inedible, making me heave on every mouthful, but I was so hungry I forced myself to keep eating. If I didn’t eat something the pains in my stomach would grow worse, so I didn’t have a choice.

The months went by and I kept myself going somehow. I’d pace round the cell when my muscles got too stiff, I’d daydream about Dad or about my ideal family, and, above all, I’d strain my ears for Wally’s footsteps on the stairs, hopefully bringing me some food and a little bit of human kindness.

One day he told me some news, that he’d got himself a girlfriend. My initial reaction was to think ‘A girlfriend! Yuk!’ I didn’t like the idea at all. I knew I would never get to meet her because no one in their right mind would ever bring a girlfriend into a place as terrible as my cell. Mum would never allow it anyway. I doubted if she even allowed the girl into the house, fearful of what she might see and who she might tell. Not that Wally would have been in a hurry to bring her. How could he show a girl what his family did to his little brother and expect her to just say nothing? He was probably frightened he would lose her if she found out too much. He can’t have been proud of the fact that his family kept a small boy prisoner in the cellar. I could
understand all that, but I would still have liked to meet her.

I didn’t realize the implications at the time, but over the next few months his visits to the cellar became less frequent. I guess he must have been out of the house more often, round at her place probably. Anywhere else would be a better place to be if you had a choice. But it meant that my existence became even more wretched without the comfort he brought.

Sometimes I’d just lie on the mattress and cry for hours on end. No sound came out except for a faint whimpering, but my whole body shook with grief, my chest ached and my throat closed up. It felt as though I was being crushed by a giant weight pressing down on me. In those moments, I lost all hope. I truly believed that this was what my miserable life would be like, day after agonizing day, until Mum finally did as she kept promising to do and killed me.

I
think it must have been about eighteen months after I was first banished to the cellar, not long after my seventh birthday, when things changed upstairs in the house. Mum was still waging a one-woman war against Dad and his family, determined to extract every ounce of revenge possible even though Dad was dead. She must have met Aunt Melissa’s husband Amani in the pub and spotted her opportunity to take one last kick at Dad’s memory by seducing him and trying to break up his marriage.

The first I knew about this new twist to our family relationships was one evening when I had my ear pressed to the cellar door, attempting to hear what was going on in the house. I did this sometimes in order to help pass some time. As I listened, I heard Mum telling someone to bring me upstairs to her and quickly rushed
back to my mattress in case they got angry with me for being nosey. The key was turned in the lock and Wally appeared, beckoning for me to follow him. It was such a rare occurrence that it was always exciting to be let out, even though as I pulled myself to my feet my heart was pounding with fear of what might be about to happen to me now. I hardly ever saw Mum without receiving at least one punch or kick, and usually she was unable to resist giving me a full-scale beating once she actually saw me and felt the familiar annoyance rising up inside her.

Wally rolled his eyes and murmured, ‘The piss artist wants you.’

I followed him up the steps and he stood me next to Thomas, who was already lined up in the passageway as if we were on parade. Wally then vanished out the front door, obviously not wanting to be around to watch if Mum started laying into us. I stood as still as I could possibly manage with my eyes on the floor, knowing that any movement I made or expression that crossed my face might trigger an explosion of anger. I was aware she was talking to us but I was having trouble focusing my brain on her words. I could see her lips moving and then suddenly she was screaming just a few inches from my ears, making them ring.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure I recognized. It was Amani, my uncle, married to Dad’s sister.

Mum was telling us not to call him ‘Uncle Amani’ any more, that now we had to call him ‘Daddy’.

‘Why?’ Thomas asked innocently and she slapped him hard round the face for daring to speak up.

His comment seemed funny to me and I wasn’t able to stop a smile breaking through, which earned me a slap as well.

‘Our daddy’s dead,’ Thomas went on defiantly. ‘I don’t want another dad.’

I glanced across at him, admiring his guts but wishing he had kept quiet. He was still only four and obviously hadn’t learned how to look after himself in that house. Mum punched the door angrily and then punched Thomas in the face and told him to go to his room. As he scuttled away, clutching at his cheek, she grabbed me by the throat.

‘Have you got anything to say to me?’ she asked. I could feel her spit on my face.

I shook my head as best I could and closed my eyes as she punched me hard in the ear. She opened the door at the top of the cellar stairs and threw me to the bottom, the slap still ringing in my ears as I bounced down, banging into the walls, pursued by her shouts.

‘Get back in your hole!’

I stumbled into the cell and pulled the door closed behind me then sank onto the mattress, the right-hand side of my body feeling bruised and broken where it had
clattered off the steps. I felt sorry for Thomas as he was still upstairs with her. At moments like that I was almost glad of the sanctuary of my hole in the ground.

Then I felt a twinge of hope. Maybe Amani would turn out to be the one who would save me? Even though Dad, who got on with virtually everyone except Mum, hadn’t liked him much, Amani had always been nice enough to me when I was at Aunt Melissa’s house. I thought that once he found out what Mum was doing to me he would tell my aunt what was happening and together they would help me to escape. I remembered how fiercely Aunt Melissa used to fight with Mum in the garage and how scared of her Mum had seemed. If she came to my rescue maybe I stood a chance.

But when Amani came down to the cellar to see me later, he didn’t look as though he was shocked by the state of me or feeling friendly towards me in any way. He was tall and ugly and scary-looking, with a large mole next to his thick, long nose. His skin was a dark black colour and his hair was thick and curly. As he walked in through the cell door he covered his nose with his gigantic hand because of the smell from me, from the mattress and from the bucket. I was used to that because everyone reacted the same way when they walked in; even Wally wasn’t able to stop himself from retching sometimes. It seemed to make Mum and Larry and Barry hate me even more, confirming in their eyes that I was just some
sort of filthy animal, making myself smell on purpose in some way just to annoy them.

Amani was puffing on a big cigar, which probably helped him to cope with the smell a bit better, and he looked at me as if I was a piece of dirt he’d found on the bottom of his shoe. I smiled cautiously, hoping that he was just pretending to hate me for Mum’s benefit, like Wally always did, but there was no response in his eyes; he just looked disgusted.

I was shocked when he walked back out without saying a word, slamming and locking the door behind him. I still tried to convince myself that he would tell Aunt Melissa what was happening once he was safely out of the house and she would get me help, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that rescuing me wasn’t part of his plan at all. In those few moments that he stood staring at me in the cell, Amani had sensed an opportunity and he intended to make full use of it.

What I didn’t realize was that he was the sort of guy who would have sex with anything or anyone he could. He was in our house to have sex with Mum and anyone else who was available and he wasn’t about to let on to Melissa about his new arrangements unless he had to. He didn’t care about my plight in the slightest; in fact seeing me in that cell had given him some different ideas of his own.

The next time he was able to get down to my cell, Wally told me a bit about our new ‘stepfather’. He must
have guessed I would be curious. It’s not every day you get told you’ve got a new dad.

‘Amani comes from Nigeria,’ Wally said, but I didn’t have any idea where Nigeria was. I thought it might be in Scotland, which was the only other country I’d ever really heard of. I raised my eyebrows to show I didn’t understand.

‘It’s a very hot country,’ he explained, ‘far away from here, in Africa.’ I wondered if it was the sun that had burnt his face in this hot country, making him such a different colour to me, a boy whose skin never got to see the light of day at all. ‘They have elephants there, and giraffes and lions.’ He also told me that Amani liked to smoke some kind of weed all day long and that I’d probably notice the funny smell sometimes.