Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears

said. ‘I promise I won’t leave you here.’
    I felt a surge of hope. If I could just stay alive for a few more weeks, I told myself, Wally would be back to rescue me and would take me to live with him and his nice girlfriend, and we would be like a happy family.
    But the days passed and nothing happened. I waited and waited without any change in my circumstances, imagining that perhaps Wally was telling someone in the outside world about me. Surely they would soon come looking for me and would rescue me, battering down the doors and fighting off Mum and the other boys, like the cavalry galloping to the rescue? I imagined how shocked they would be when they found me and how they would feel sorry for me and want to help me, feeding me nice food and tucking me up in a clean, warm bed. A week went by and then another and it was a long time before my hope started to fade.
    But I guess Wally never did tell anyone; or if he did then they didn’t believe him. It would have sounded pretty far-fetched to have someone telling you that his mother was keeping his mute baby brother prisoner in acellar, starving him and torturing him just for fun. I imagine also that even once he was out of the house he was still too frightened of Mum to do anything against her in case she came after him or did something to his girlfriend.
    So Wally just disappeared out of my life and I never saw him again. I can imagine how relieved he was to escape from her, but how could he have left me to their mercy like that, knowing how they treated me? How could he have slept at night knowing that I was still down under the ground without a single ally in the house above?
    ‘I’ll look after you now,’ Amani promised me and despite all the bad things he had done to me that still kindled a tiny spark of hope in my heart. ‘I’ll do a better job than Wally ever did. If you’re a good boy you can have his bedroom.’
    He promised me the bedroom so often over the following weeks that I became really excited about it. I couldn’t stop smiling at the thought of sleeping in a comfortable bed and maybe even having some of Wally’s old childhood toys to play with.
    ‘If you do what I say we’ll get on okay,’ Amani assured me. I hoped that was true because he was my only chance now.
    But it wasn’t long before Mum decided who was going to have what room and put a stop to any dreams Imight have had for leaving the cellar. Ellie and Thomas were moved into Wally’s room and I stayed exactly where I was. Amani might have been a physically powerful man, but it was still Mum who was in charge. Not that he seemed to care because he was getting exactly what he wanted from our new family arrangement. He couldn’t have been happier.

 

    Chapter Eight

    Rescued from the Cellar
     
    I was kept imprisoned in the cellar for nearly three years, between the ages of five and eight, and no one from the outside world noticed that I had vanished off the face of the earth. Day after day I sat in the dark waiting for the next beating or the next rape, hunger and thirst constantly gnawing away at my insides, cold eating into my bones and asthma clogging my lungs. Once Wally had abandoned me no one showed me even a moment’s kindness and the easiest times were when it was just me on my own, talking in my head to Dad, with the cellar door double-locked and my tormentors safely on the other side.
    As far as I’m aware, no one from social services ever came to look for me. Maybe I’d slipped through the net in some kind of bureaucratic cock-up or maybe Mum spun them a line – I just don’t know. No one noticed thatI hadn’t been enrolled in any of the local schools either, until the day that Thomas mentioned to his teacher that he and Ellie had another older brother apart from Wally, Larry and Barry. Mum must have forgotten to make sure he understood he was never to mention me to anyone outside the house. Or maybe she had told him and Thomas was getting self-assured enough to