Free Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears Page A

with you at all for days on end and no mental stimulation, it must do something to a young, developing brain. It certainly slowed down my development in those years, stunting my ability to make sense of the world around me and to understand things that other children my age would have taken for granted. I was living in a vacuum, cut off from all normal life with no mental stimulation beyond Wally’s fleeting visits.
    He would try to encourage me to speak, patiently attempting to extract even the simplest sounds from myapparently paralysed voice box, constantly trying to restore the confidence that the others had battered out of me.
    ‘One day you’re going to grow up to be very intelligent,’ he would tell me. ‘That means clever.’
    I actually doubted if I would grow up at all because Mummy was always telling me I would be dead before my next birthday, but I still liked to be flattered and to think that someone believed in me and believed that there would eventually be an end to my suffering and an escape from my cell.
    Sometimes Wally would play tricks on me, though. On the first of April one year he came downstairs and told me that Mum had fallen downstairs and died. I felt as though a weight was lifting off my heart. I was free and God had answered all my prayers. When Wally told me that it was April Fools’ Day and he was only joking it was as though the whole world had landed back on my shoulders again.
    ‘You aren’t that lucky, Bro,’ he said before leaving the cell again. ‘But maybe one day your time will come.’
    One evening when he visited, I couldn’t stop shaking and he explained to me that it was my body recovering from the shock of the beating Mum had given me an hour or two before. Every part of me used to hurt after those beatings. Once my heart was racing so fast Wally said he was worried I was going to explode. I must havelooked panicked when he said that because he laughed at the expression on my face.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t let that happen.’
    He was always terrified of being caught down there without permission and so he would sneak off again after what seemed to me like just a few minutes. If he heard Mum’s footsteps going past on the path outside the airbrick he would know he just had enough time to get back upstairs before she managed to get round the house and open the front door with her key. She would nearly always be rolling drunk by then, back from the pub and shouting obscenities at the top of her voice at anyone who was in the house. That would help to slow down her progress and Wally could tell exactly where she was from the noise. I would be desperate not to be left alone in the dark again and would cling to Wally’s leg like a frightened toddler, staring up at him with imploring eyes, whimpering like a puppy.
    ‘You don’t want your brother getting in trouble, do you?’ he would say as he struggled to get away from me. ‘You’ve got to let me go now, Joe.’
    In the end he would have to peel me off and force me back so he could get out the door, hurriedly pushing me in so he could lock it behind him before turning out the lights and rushing up the stairs.
    It was usually him who would take my toilet bucket up to empty, but he was only allowed to do that if Mum hadtold him to. If she caught him doing anything for me out of kindness he would be in trouble himself. Wally had explained to me that he would sometimes have to pretend to be nasty to me if Mummy or the other boys were around. He explained that it was in my interests to keep the charade up, as well as his. ‘If she thinks I’m being nice to you,’ he explained, ‘she won’t let me down here to see you any more and I won’t be able to help you at all.’
    One night he felt so bad for me he tried to sneak down at two in the morning with a load of cakes when he thought Mum had gone to bed – but she caught him before he could get through the top door. I could hear her shouting from where