Free Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears

see me from the way they opened the top door and the speed and weight of their footsteps on the stairs. My worst fear was always that it would be Mum, because that invariably meant a beating, and the best times were when it was Wally being sent down with my food, or coming ofhis own accord to give me some company and comfort. He wasn’t like the others and even though Mum would specifically tell him not to go down to see me when she went out, he would disobey her whenever he was sure he could get away with it.
    Grown men might have gone insane when kept in solitary confinement as long as I was, particularly in such horrific conditions. I think the one thing that kept me from losing my mind was the visits from my oldest brother Wally. Even though Wally was eighteen years old by this stage, he was just as frightened of Mum’s violence as everyone else and he always did what she told him, but he didn’t enjoy being sadistic and bullying me the way the others did and whenever he thought she wouldn’t find out he would be kind to me. I guess he was a bit of a geek, with his big thick Buddy Holly-style glasses, short hair and freckles and I loved him for those little kindnesses. He was the only good thing in my life during those long years.
    When Mum was out at the pub and the others had been sent up to bed he would sometimes sneak down with a bit of stolen food for me and he would sit beside me on the stinking mattress and read stories from books about soldiers and young men, heroes and villains. Looking back, I think he made up some of those stories because they often seemed to be particularly relevant to my situation, fairy tales about evil mothers and little boyswho eventually escaped and lived happily ever after. I think it was his way of giving me hope that things would get better one day; that my nightmare wouldn’t go on forever. He used to treat me more like a grown-up than anyone else did. ‘You’re nearly seven now, Joe,’ he’d say, ‘it’s time for you to be brave and strong.’
    I knew he was right because that was what all the stories he read to me were about, young boys being heroes in the face of adversity and triumphing over evil, but I also thought it was easy for him to say when he had his freedom and a nice warm bedroom to go to when he wanted to escape the shouting and violence.
    When it was just the two of us he would laugh about Mum, calling her ‘the piss artist’. I didn’t know what a piss artist was, and I didn’t have the voice to ask him any questions, but I imagined it must be some sort of job she was doing. I reckoned she must be good at it and make a lot of money in order to be able to support so many of us.
    Spending so much time on my own in the dark meant that my understanding of things like language and the way the outside world worked got more and more behind for my age. Wally was the only person who talked to me properly; the rest of them just swore at me and taunted me, so he was the only one teaching me anything worthwhile at all. But I couldn’t ask him any questions, so even he could only teach me a limitedamount. Sometimes he would manage to make me laugh inside my head and even though I made no sound he would be able to tell I was laughing because I would make the same little frowning expression every time. This would set him off laughing too and for a few minutes I would be happy and able to forget all the pain and misery.
    ‘Mum’s a bit doolally in the head,’ he would tell me, but I didn’t know what that meant. I looked at him, confused. ‘You know, cuckoo,’ he searched for a better way to explain it. ‘Nuts in the head!’
    I tried to imagine how anyone could get a cuckoo and nuts inside their head. He’d often told me she was ill in the head, so maybe it was the cuckoo and the nuts that were causing the illness. Small children learn almost everything in life by asking questions of adults. When you aren’t able to do that, when you sometimes have no one