Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears Page A

disobey her a little from time to time.
    ‘Have you?’ the teacher was obviously surprised by the news. ‘What’s his name?’
    ‘Joe,’ Thomas told her innocently.
    ‘What school does he go to?’
    ‘He doesn’t go to school.’
    Puzzled, the teacher must have reported the conversation to the headmaster of the school, who then invited Mum in to talk about it.
    ‘Thomas tells us you have another lad called Joe,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, smart enough to know it would be pointless to deny it.
    ‘Why,’ he asked her, ‘doesn’t Joe go to school?’
    ‘He has problems,’ Mum told them, no doubt with a convincing look of pained martyrdom on her face. ‘He’s mute and he’s very disruptive. He’s got a tilted brain.’
    ‘But why haven’t you enrolled him in a school?’ the headmaster persevered.
    ‘He’s very destructive,’ she said, as if that answered everything. ‘I couldn’t inflict him on other people’s children. No one can control him.’
    I imagine Mum had to think quickly at this stage. She must have known that she could get into trouble for keeping me out of school for three years, but she probably thought that if she played up how difficult I was, it would make it look as though she had been shouldering the whole burden of looking after me, that she had been acting with noble intentions even if she had technically broken the law. Because I knew nothing about the world beyond what happened in my cell, my behaviour would bear out everything she said about me. They had been treating me like a caged wild animal for so long that I had become one and any school that took me on was going to have its work cut out introducing me into a class full of other children. Once the authorities had been alerted to my existence, however, they could not forget about me again.
    ‘We will need to come and meet Joe,’ the social services department told Mum when the surprising news was passed on to them, ‘to assess his needs so we can work out how best to help him, and you.’
    An appointment was duly made and the day that the welfare worker was due to come to the house to meet me I was brought up from the cellar and scrubbed down.
    ‘You’d better behave yourself,’ Mum warned as she got me ready, brushing my teeth for the first time in three years and dressing me roughly in some new clothes I had never seen before. ‘Or I’m going to give you a right battering once she’s gone.’
    It felt strange to have clean, soft material next to my skin after so many years of shivering naked or in nothing more than my soiled underpants. Everything smelled so fresh and exotic.
    Mum took me into her posh sitting room to wait. It was a room I had never even seen before and I was overawed with its immaculate decorations and furniture, having spent so long with nothing to look at but bare walls, floors and an old mattress. With Mum hovering around me like a bomb waiting to go off, I felt as though I had been brought into enemy territory and part of me would have liked to be back under the floorboards again, behind the safety of a double-locked door.
    She gave me a glass of something to drink and my hand was shaking so much I was frightened I was going to spill it on the swirly-patterned green carpet. Mum had told me so often that I was going to be killed that I began to wonder if this was to be the day of my execution; was someone coming to take me away and kill me because I had been so much trouble to my mother and because my father had been so bad to her? Every time Mum came down to the cellar to beat me or make me do somethingI would think that this time it was going to be my time to die. I was always surprised to find that I was still alive at the end of each ordeal.
    ‘Stop shaking!’ she ordered me and I tried my hardest by holding my wrist with my other hand.
    I was so confused. I couldn’t work out what her plan was or when I was going to be hit again. I got more and more scared of what was coming