Read Online Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears - Free Book Online Page B

even more as timepassed. It was as though he was becoming more of an obsession with her now that he was dead than he had been when he was alive. Maybe it angered her to think that he had escaped from her by dying, that she couldn’t do anything to make his life a misery any more, so she turned her frustrations onto me instead.
    ‘Every time I look at you it reminds me of that sick bastard!’ she would say as she gave me another round of punches.
    I still found myself thinking about him all the time as well, remembering our times together and wishing with all my heart that he was still alive. During the hours and hours that I sat alone in that cell I would chat to Dad in my head, just as I used to chat out loud when we were together in the car or the garage. I could picture him sitting on the mattress beside me, talking back to me. When my limbs got too stiff or cold, I would get up and pace around, trying to stretch them out, and pretending I was going for a walk with Dad. I went through a whole range of emotions in those days. Sometimes I was cross with him for being so careless with his own life and leaving me with Mum and the others when he knew that I needed his protection. Sometimes I just sank into black, total misery. What I wanted most was to die so that I could be with him all the time.
    ‘I’m a good boy, God,’ I would pray. ‘Please take me too. Please let me be with my dad.’
    I would fantasize sometimes. I would imagine so hard that I had a nice mummy and daddy who were both alive and both loved me and we all lived together in a happy family that the pictures in my head would seem almost real. These fantasies passed the time for a while but I would then come back to reality out of my daydreams with a sick feeling in my stomach as I realized it had all been in my mind and that I was still lying on my own in the dark, freezing cold and hungry.
    Sometimes Mum and the others would leave me alone for so long the bucket I was supposed to use as a toilet would fill right to the top. When it had reached the brim I would hold my wee in for as long as I could bear, for fear of making it overflow onto the floor and having my face rubbed in it, but eventually I would have no choice but to give in. The stench from the bucket grew so overpowering that anyone coming into the cell would gag and cover their mouths and noses, reinforcing the idea that I was a filthy, stinking creature, no better than a caged animal in need of regular mucking out and sluicing down. Once the bucket was completely full and standing in a growing puddle, I would try to find new places that I thought would disguise the wetness, but it never fooled her for a second and I always ended up with my face being rubbed in it again.
    One day, after I had been under the house for a few months, Mum made a surprise announcement. ‘Youstink so bad,’ she told me, ‘it’s coming up through the floorboards. So you’re going to have a fucking bath. Come on, get a fucking move on.’
    She escorted me roughly and impatiently upstairs to the bathroom, cuffing me round the head as we went, and scrubbed me down herself with all the violence she could muster. I thought I heard a man’s voice in the house while I was upstairs and when she escorted me back to the cellar again I found that someone had been in and fixed a proper lock to the door, one with a key that could be turned twice as if to finalize the locking in process once and for all. She must have got a locksmith in to do it. It was as though she was making my imprisonment official and my heart sank even further. Was I going to be kept there forever, until I died? It certainly looked that way.
    As the months dragged on I grew accustomed to listening to the sounds outside the airbrick and in the house above. Sitting in the dark I had to rely on my ears for every bit of information and my hearing seemed to become more acute without any visual distractions. I would be able to tell who it was coming down to