Free Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears Page B

I was lying.
    ‘What the fuck are you doing at this time of night? Where are you going with all those?’
    ‘It’s nothing. I was just going to tease him a bit,’ he lied, ‘and eat them in front of him.’
    She can’t have believed him because I could hear him being beaten for that and I convinced myself that it was all my fault for making him feel sorry for me.
    If it hadn’t been for Wally’s secret visits I think I would have died of starvation or just gone completely insane in those months and years. They were the only thing I had to look forward to, the only relief from the loneliness and agony of my existence. I’m convinced that without his kindness I wouldn’t have survived.

    * * *
     
    I never knew when another beating from Mum was coming. Sometimes she’d forget about me for days on end, and at other times my punishments would be more regular. There were evenings when she tried to get at me after she came back from the pub, in the mood for giving me a beating, but she would be too drunk to get the key into the cellar door. I would be huddled on the mattress, shaking with fear as I listened to her on the other side, banging around, swearing and shouting about how she was going to kill me, telling me what a little bastard I was and how I would be sorry once she got her hands on me. It was always a relief to hear her finally giving up and stumbling back up the stairs, because then I would know I was safe from her for at least a few hours while she slept off the effects of the drink.
    After I had been in the cellar for a few months, not content with giving me arbitrary beatings, Mum decided she should make my punishments more formalized, more like rituals. She got Larry and Barry to bring three solid old wooden chairs down to the cell, and the three of them would strip me naked and stretch me across them. My brothers held my wrists and ankles while Mum beat me viciously with bamboo canes that they had stolen from the nearby allotments, or with a broomstick.
    ‘You no-good little bastard,’ she would shout as she hit me over and over again. ‘I fucking hate you! If I had a gun I would shoot you dead.’
    Larry and Barry would be laughing all the time and egging her on. ‘Give it to him, the little twat!’
    I wanted to scream but no sound would come out; all the pain stayed locked in my brain instead. In the end I would pass out during those beatings. I’d wake up a while later to find I had been chucked back onto the mattress, every part of me aching, fighting for breath and hardly able to move.
    One time when I woke up I found that I wasn’t lying down as usual. While I had been unconscious my wrists had been tied above my head to a piece of iron piping that ran from the floor to the ceiling. I was still naked and the whole surface of my back was in agonizing pain from the beating I had just received. A bucket of cold water suddenly hit me, bringing me fully back to consciousness. I gasped, trying desperately to pull enough air into my lungs to breathe, wheezing and rasping. Mum was laughing at me, still holding the empty bucket.
    ‘Nothing to say for yourself, you little bastard?’ she asked. ‘Where’s your rotten fucking father now when you need him?’
    I managed to lift my head and looked into her eyes. I immediately realized it was a mistake to make eye contact and averted them again but it was too late to stop her lunging at me, grabbing hold of my hair and smashing the back of my head into the pipe behind me.
    ‘Don’t look at me like that, you little shit!’
    I bit my tongue and tasted the blood in my mouth. I remember thinking that if I had a gun I would shoot myself between the eyes rather than have to take any more of this. Mum then stormed out of the cell and I heard her banging her way angrily up the stairs. My whole body was trembling uncontrollably and I must have passed out again from the pain.
    The next thing I knew I was jerked awake by the sound of someone coming back down