It was evening and the light was beginning to fade when I heard some kids’ voices in the woods close to the cabin. I dived back inside and watched through the corner of the window to see if they had any adults with them. When they came into sight I saw it was John and his sister, who I guessed had been the ones to grass on me. I should have kept quiet and waited for them to move on but I felt so angry with them for telling the grown-ups about me being in the railway hut after all the promises they had made that I couldn’t stop myself from going out to give them a piece of my mind. Maybe I needed someone to talk to as well, wanting to alleviate the boredom and loneliness a bit.
They nearly jumped out of their skins when I suddenly appeared on the path in front of them.
‘Why did you grass on me?’ I demanded. ‘You said you wanted to be my friend and to persuade your family to adopt me as your brother and then you go and fucking grass on me!’
‘I was worried about you,’ John said, obviously excited to have found me again but nervous about how I would react to them. He didn’t want to scare me away again. ‘But you got away. They’re looking everywhere for you. There’s been a big search party and everything.’
I couldn’t stay mad at them for long and once I had calmed down they promised that this time they really wouldn’t tell anyone about where I was – but I knew I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust anyone and every time I forgot that rule I ended up being let down again.
‘Can we get you any food or blankets?’ he asked.
‘Just leave me alone,’ I said, not wanting to push my luck.
I could see they weren’t going to do that, however much I pleaded. It was still all too much of an adventure for them, and they did seem to be genuinely concerned about me.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘go back and get me some food then.’
‘You stay here with Joe,’ John told his sister, ‘and I’ll go back.’ I guess he didn’t trust me either and was worried I would run away again the moment they were gone.
‘They’ll know if you come back without me and take food,’ his sister said. ‘They’ll expect us to be together.’
‘Okay,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Promise you won’t go anywhere, Joe?’
‘I promise,’ I lied.
The moment they were out of sight I grabbed my bag and ran off into the woods. There was no one in the world I was going to trust any more if it meant I might be taken back home. It wasn’t that I doubted their good intentions; I just thought there would be a strong chance the adults would be watching them and would immediately work out what was going on if they saw more food disappearing from the house. I was going to have to stay on my own if I wanted to be safe; there was no other option. This was how my life was going to have to be until I was old enough for the police not to be bothered about me any more.
Chapter Fourteen
Betrayal and Capture
The moment I was back out in the open I immediately missed the protective walls of the log cabin. The outdoor life can seem very alluring when you are trapped inside places that are making you miserable, but nature has an unkind way of reminding you why the human race has mostly chosen to live in houses throughout history. As the last of the daylight disappeared it started to rain hard. The water soaked through my clothes within minutes and kept on coming. A wind sprang up, driving the rain horizontally into my face as I walked, chilling every inch of me down to my bones. As I stumbled around in the dark, feeling cold, tired, wet and hungry, I kept thinking about John and the other kids going back to their warm houses and happy families and it all seemed so unfair.
I felt a surge of bitterness and anger at the way my life had gone; why couldn’t I have a normal life like everyone else? Why had God always had it in for me from the day I was conceived by mistake after that bloody anniversary party? Why had he taken my dad away and given him to the devil and never given me a single lucky break since? As I plodded through the wet with my head down against the elements I was raging and cursing Him out loud. It was as if I was making up for all the years when my anger and unhappiness had been trapped behind my silence. Anyone coming across me that night would have thought that they had found a deranged madman ranting in the woods – and in a way they would have been right.
I didn’t know where to go or which direction to head in. I wanted to find somewhere dry where I could lie down and sleep but I couldn’t think of anywhere to go that would be safe. There was nowhere people wouldn’t come searching for me, nowhere I would just blend in without people asking questions and telling others about me. It felt as though the whole world was joined together in an enormous conspiracy against me, a gigantic spider’s web with all of the strands trying to pull me back to Mum, while she sat in the centre waiting patiently for me to land in her lap again.
I thought about trying to find my way back to the railway hut and staying there to dry out before slipping away again first thing in the morning. But I decided it was likely the police would go back to look for me at some stage, particularly if John and the others told them they had spotted me again and they knew I was still in the area.
Although the rain started letting up a bit after an hour or two everything was still drenched in the woods, and the trees dripped on me as I passed underneath them. Every part of my body was aching with exhaustion and cold but there was nowhere to sit or lie or take shelter. It made any ideas I might ever have had of living rough in the woods seem like the ridiculous little boy’s fantasies that they were. Eventually I walked out from under the dripping trees onto a deserted road so that I could at least put one foot in front of the other without tripping over roots and fallen branches, banging my shins and twisting my ankles every few steps. I knew from my earlier explorations of the area that there was a little local supermarket about three miles up the road so I headed for that, thinking that perhaps there would be somewhere to shelter around it. I thought I could remember seeing a public phone box on the road outside it and another idea was beginning to ferment inside my head.
Although I needed to be alone in order to feel at all safe, the trouble with having so much time to myself was that it had allowed memories that I would normally have suppressed to bob back to the surface. The more I remembered what had happened to me in my short life the angrier I became and the more certain that it could¬ n’t be right. For so many years I had assumed that most children had to put up with at least some of the things that I had been through, but now I was growing older and getting a better idea of what other people’s lives were like, I could see more and more clearly that that wasn’t true. I might have been angry with Pete for leaving the school, and I might have been angry with my new friend John for telling on me, but the small glimpses they had allowed me of their lives made me realize that my life wasn’t normal. I could see how shocked they had been by even the small amounts of information I had given them about my family, so there must be other people out there who would feel the same if they just knew what my situation was. Maybe, I thought, I didn’t have to struggle on alone. Maybe there were some good people out there somewhere who would help me if I went to them and explained everything that had been going on. I couldn’t trust the police because of the policeman who came to Uncle Douglas’s, but perhaps there were other organizations. My brain churned over and over as I walked on, my cold, wet clothes chafing my skin, making every step a misery.
I remembered Pete telling me that there were telephone numbers for kids to ring if they were being treated badly by their families. I’d never thought of ringing one before because I had been told so often by Mum and Amani and Douglas that no one would ever believe anything I said that I had actually come to believe it was a fact. Mum had always been so convincing in her lies whenever the authorities had questioned or challenged her that I always assumed they would believe her and deliver me back to her if I tried to go for help. I was so terrified to think what she would do to me if she got her hands on me after I had tried to betray her that I never had the nerve to
try it. But now that I had thought it through more thoroughly, and had been safe from her for more than a week, I was beginning to think about things a bit differently. Pete had believed everything I’d told him, and so had John and the kids who had wanted to look after me, so perhaps other people would too.
Now that I had time to reflect on everything that had happened to me over the previous eight or so years I began to realize that my case must be extreme. If Pete and John and the others were all so shocked by the little bits of my life that I had revealed to them, I couldn’t begin to imagine how they would react if they knew the whole truth. Maybe people on a phone line would believe me and help me too, just like Pete and the kids by the railway line. But which people would be the best to turn to? As far as I was concerned they were all strangers who had the potential to do me harm if I was unlucky in my choice.
There was one telephone number that Pete had told me several times that I should ring and I could remember it because it was deliberately catchy to make it memorable. As it kept going round and round in my head I began to wonder if perhaps Pete was right. Maybe these were the people who would understand what I was going through if I told them, people with enough experience to know that I was telling the truth, people who would have the ability to protect me from Mum and Amani and Douglas. The idea was becoming more tempting as I squelched on down the dark, cold, empty road.
When I got to the little country supermarket, on the empty, isolated road, I climbed straight into the phone box just to get out of the rain and give myself a few moments to think what to do next. Being so cold and wet and hungry made me acutely aware that I wasn’t going to be able to cope on my own indefinitely. I was going to have to find someone I could trust who could help me and protect me from Mum and the rest of them. As I stood there, shivering, staring around me, water dripping down my neck from my soaked hair, I spotted a card pinned to the board above the phone, advertising the same helpline number that Pete had told me about. It was like a sign, as though God or someone was trying to tell me what to do next. Even then it still took me a while to pluck up the courage to lift the receiver and my heart was thumping in my ears as I dialled clumsily with my frozen fingers.
The line rang for a long time but no one answered so after a few minutes I hung up, part of me grateful to have been given a way out of having to find the words to describe to a stranger what my life was like. My nerve was failing me again. What if the people at the other end of the phone rang the police and they sent me back to Mum? There was every possibility she would kill me for running away. But if I didn’t get help I was likely to die of cold and hunger anyway. I stood there for a long time, trying to calm myself down and then picked up the receiver and dialled again. Still no answer after the first few rings. I hung up and dialled several more times, my nerve going each time before anyone answered. How could I trust anyone when everyone had always betrayed me, abused me or left me? Dad had gone, Wally had gone, Pete had gone, my friends by the railway line had told on me. What made me think these people would be any different? But outside it was pitch black and the rain was growing heavy again. What other option did I have? I couldn’t spend the rest of my life hiding in a phone box. I dialled again and a woman answered the phone in a quiet, sweet voice before I had time to hang up.
I couldn’t find the words to speak, just standing there as mute as I’d been all those years before, my throat tightly closed and my brain unable to think what to do about it.
‘Are you still on the line?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m being hit by my mum,’ I mumbled eventually.
‘Okay,’ she said, as though that was the most reasonable thing in the world for me to tell her. ‘Where are you calling from now?’
‘Why?’ I asked, immediately suspicious and half wanting to run back out into the rain again.
‘I just need to know if you are in a safe place. Are you calling from someone’s house?’
‘No, a phone box.’
‘It’s quite late at night, so have you come out of your house?’
‘No, I’ve fucking run away!’ I was getting annoyed and knew I had to make a conscious effort to calm down if I was to expect her to help me.
‘Oh, all right.’ She didn’t seem perturbed by my attitude or my swearing. Maybe my call wasn’t so unusual and she was used to dealing with fear and aggression in the kids that rang up. ‘How long have you run away for?’
‘What’s with all the questions?’ I wanted to know. ‘What are you going to do to help me?’
‘First of all we need to know your name.’
‘Why?’
‘I need to know what to call you. My name is Susan, what’s yours?’
I didn’t answer immediately. I was beginning to worry that I was making a mistake, but at the same time it was nice to be in the shelter and talking to a friendly voice.
‘Joe,’ I said eventually.
She chatted on for a while, not asking too many questions. ‘If you’ve run away,’ she said eventually, ‘then there must be people who are concerned about you. And there are some nasty people out there at night who might hurt you.’
‘No,’ I said, suddenly vehement. ‘I’m safe here. There’s people already hurting me and doing fucking things to me.’
She didn’t have to tell me about how many nasty people there were in the world, I’d met some of them personally, and I knew all too well it wasn’t strangers hiding in the bushes at night who I had to be wary of; it was my own family and the people they introduced me to. I felt sure I knew more about the way the world worked than she did, for all her professional training and good intentions.
‘Where are you from?’ she asked, changing her tack, but I didn’t tell her. Although she seemed very nice the conversation didn’t seem to be going the way I had assumed and hoped it would. I don’t know what I had expected to happen, but I hadn’t been prepared to be bombarded with so many questions.
Then she told me she was having a problem with her phone.
‘I’m just going to switch to another one,’ she said. ‘Hold on a second, Joe. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.’
There was something about her voice that made me trust her so I hung on as she told me to. I thought about hanging up but then I would have had to go through the whole process again if I’d decided to ring back, so I stayed there, staring out into the blackness and the rain outside. She was gone for what seemed like ages but was probably only about half a minute. When she came back on the line she kept me talking for a bit longer about myself and what I should do, and then suddenly I was bathed in the unexpected glare of headlights, pinned down in the phone box like a cornered rabbit. Swinging round I saw the distinctive bonnet of a police car drawing up at the kerb outside. As the policeman climbed out of his car, pulling on his waterproofs, I realized it was the same man I had escaped from a few nights earlier down by the railway line. I knew I had to act fast because he wouldn’t be taking any risks now he knew how desperate I was to get away. Dropping the phone I threw open the door and made a dash for it. This time, however, he was ready for me and grabbed my backpack as I went past, jerking me to a halt. I tried to wriggle free of the straps and extricate myself, but he got hold of my arm.
‘Wo, calm down. Joe, calm down!’ His voice wasn’t as angry as I would have expected considering how I had messed him about the last time he’d caught me. He actually sounded quite friendly.
‘Fuck off!’ I shouted, struggling in vain to get free. ‘I ain’t going back! Fuck off! I ain’t fucking going back to the bastards!’
At the time, I was convinced it had been the woman on the end of the helpline who had betrayed me. It’s possible that the police car turned up by coincidence at that precise moment, but it seemed unlikely. What were the chances of him appearing out there in the middle of nowhere at that time of night at exactly the moment when I was on the line to her? Yet again I felt I had reached out to someone for help and been let down. I was so
angry I exploded, thrashing and punching and kicking and shouting as he struggled to keep a grip on me.
‘Stop fighting, Joe,’ he said, trying to hold me at arm’s length to protect himself. ‘Please. I ain’t gonna let you go this time so there’s no point trying.’
Eventually I wore myself out. He was a lot stronger than me and I could tell he wasn’t going to release me however hard I hit him. I resentfully allowed him to fold me into the back of his car, thinking I would let him think he had beaten me and wait for a better opportunity to get away. Once I was safely locked in the back he drove me to a tiny local police station nearby, which I think was probably just an office tacked onto the side of his house. At least it was warm and dry as we came in and he turned on the light. He locked the doors behind him and settled me down, making us both a cup of tea.
‘Right,’ he said, once I had calmed down and he felt he could talk to me rationally. ‘We know who you are. You fit the description of a missing boy who’s been reported as running away from home.’
‘You can’t fucking send me back there!’ I started shouting again. ‘And how did you fucking find me there in that fucking phone box anyway?’
‘We knew you were there,’ was all he said. ‘We’ve been told that you claim you’re being beaten by your mum. Is that true?’
I said nothing. I knew now that anything I did say would find its way back to her and she would kill me the moment she had the chance. I didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were by accusing her of things that no one would ever believe were true anyway. It was beginning to look as though I had made a mistake by talking about it at all, so I decided to revert to not telling anyone anything.
‘I’m not fucking going back there,’ I muttered, desperately mustering all the bravado I could to hide the terror that was now overcoming my anger. ‘You can’t make me. I don’t have to talk to you. You’ve got no right to keep me here.’
Joe Peters Page 16