Read Joe Peters for Free Online Page A

custody of me because of the way Mum had treated me in the past, and how his one wish was always that Mum shouldn’t be allowed to get her hands on me. But there was nothing she could say that could make any difference to the facts of the situation; I legally belonged to Mum and if she said I was to go back to her then I was going to have to go. The police probably couldn’t see what the problem was, knowing that Mum was already bringing up five other children. I listened without fully understanding what was being said, until a policewoman knelt down beside me.
    ‘You have to go with your mummy now,’ she said, and I started screaming ‘No! Don’t make me!’
    There was nothing Marie could do any more. We went out into the corridor where Mum was still gloating.
    ‘They’ve turned him off now. There’s nothing more to hang around for. Come on, Joe.’
    Marie burst into tears as Mum dragged me, sobbing, towards the exit. Just a few days earlier Marie had imagined she was going to spend the rest of her life with Dad, bringing me up as if I was her own son. Now she was a single mother and my baby half-brother, born just acouple of months before the accident, was all she had left to remember my father by.
    As we walked home, Mum made sure I knew what had happened. ‘Your dad’s dead now. He ain’t coming back. He’s fucking dead,’ she told me.
    ‘Has he gone to Heaven?’ I asked through my tears.
    ‘No, he’s gone to hell where all the nasty people go! God said he was no good and so now his body is going to be burned to ashes. It was God who threw that cigarette into the petrol but he didn’t do a good enough job, did he? So now his body is going to be taken to an oven and burned until it has crumbled to pieces.’
    As she talked I remembered watching the burning cigarette end bouncing back into the garage, carried by that fateful wind. Was that the hand of God I had witnessed at work there? Who else would have been able to control the wind like that? Her sneering words had a horrible kind of logic to them and I was left with a picture of my dad burning in hell for all eternity, just as I’d seen him do when he ran around the garage.
    I was crying so hard I could hardly breathe.
    ‘Don’t think you’re anything special,’ she told me, squeezing my hand viciously, ‘just because you were your dad’s favourite, and just because you saw him going up in fucking flames. You’re not special at all. You’re nothing, and I’m going to prove it to you. Just you fucking wait.’

 

    Chapter Five

    Smelly Woof
     
    F rom the moment we walked in the door of Mum’s big end-of-terrace Victorian council house, I was under no illusions at all about my place in the family pecking order. Far from being special, I was relegated to bottom of the heap. Larry and Barry appeared in the hall, and Larry’s first words were ‘I see the little bastard’s back,’ before he kicked me and Barry punched me on the arm.
    Mum called Wally downstairs and explained to the three of them that I had been spoiled rotten by my dad and needed to learn my place in the family as the lowest of the low. Having been Dad’s favourite I was seen as being part of his betrayal of her, and it wasn’t hard for her to persuade the others that I was a spoiled brat who thought he was better than them.
    Whereas Wally, my eldest brother, now aged seventeen, was inclined to be sympathetic to me because I wassuch a small child who had been through such a terrible trauma, Larry and Barry, aged fifteen and fourteen respectively, were more than happy to be given permission to indulge the vicious streaks that ran through their natures and to treat me as badly as possible. They were like bloodthirsty soldiers who had been given permission by their commanding officer to rape and pillage an enemy they had been brainwashed into believing was subhuman. Mum made it clear that showing me sympathy was not allowed. If Wally wasn’t going to join in my persecution