Joe Peters by Cry Silent Tears Page B

until my heart was racing. How would they kill me? Would it be agony? Would I go to hell when I died?
    When the doorbell rang Mum took the glass back from me and placed it carefully on the coffee table before going out to let the welfare worker in, welcoming her into the house as though she was delighted to see her.
    As I stood there, shaking, I could hear her talking outside in a sweet, reasonable voice she never used around the house when it was just family. ‘Hello, do come in … How nice to meet you … It’s so kind of you to come and see us … Come through and meet Joe.’
    When she came back into the room she was smiling all over her face and treating me as though I was her most precious child.
    ‘Sit down here, darling,’ she crooned at me, pointing to the corner of her settee, something I had never been allowed to do before. I was terrified of what might be going to happen next as the woman I suspected might be my executioner entered the room behind her, lookingdeceptively friendly. As she came towards me the welfare worker held out her hand for me to shake.
    ‘Hello, young man,’ she said in a warm, kind voice.
    Assuming I was about to be hit, because that was all I had known for the previous three years or more, I reacted instinctively to defend myself and bit her hand, instantly proving that everything Mum had told them about me being aggressive and disruptive was true. The woman screamed and my teeth stayed tightly clamped into her flesh. I didn’t want to let go because as long as her hand was between my teeth she couldn’t use it to hit me.
    ‘I am so sorry,’ Mum said, taking my face between her fingers. ‘Come along Joe, let go now.’
    I expected her to punch me in the ear like she normally would have done in such a situation and braced myself for the blow, but instead her touch was gentle and caring.
    ‘Come on, darling,’ she coaxed sweetly. ‘Let go of the nice lady.’
    When they finally prised my teeth open I started kicking and screaming, determined not to be taken to my execution without putting up a fight. I figured I had nothing left to lose now if they were going to kill me anyway. Mum restrained me, kindly but firmly. I dare say the welfare worker was impressed with her saintly maternal patience in the face of such provocation.
    ‘I can see why you haven’t enrolled him,’ the woman said as she sat down on one of the chairs, nursing her wounded hand and eyeing me nervously in case I flew at her again.
    ‘I can’t let him mix with other children,’ Mum said. ‘Not when he’s liable to behave like that.’
    ‘I do see what you mean,’ the woman assured her sympathetically, ‘but I’m afraid he must go to school. It’s the law. There’s a lot we can do to help him, and to help you.’
    Unable to speak up in order to defend myself in any way I had to listen while Mum did all my talking for me. Before he went away Wally had been trying to help me to talk but at that stage I had only just started to be able to form single sounds like ‘aah’ or ‘the’. It was impossible to communicate anything with such limited words. To the welfare worker I must indeed have looked like a deeply traumatized, virtually feral creature. Although the authorities told Mum that I would have to be enrolled at school, because that was the law, no one could really blame her for trying to keep me away from the rest of the world, taking all the burden of looking after me upon her own shoulders. When they looked at my notes they saw that it was true that I had witnessed my father’s death and had been struck dumb as a result, and the picture must have seemed as if it was all clicking neatly into place. The family doctor backed up everythingMum said, confirming that she had taken me to see him soon after Dad’s death and that I had already lost the ability to speak by then.
    ‘He’s a very aggressive and disturbed child,’ he had written, remembering what Mum had told him at the time, and