‘Animal!’ he spat, when the little boy looked up. He dropped his trousers and urinated down the cellar steps, the sharp, overpowering stench filling the small space, worse than the collection of waste already in the corner of the room. Drops splashed at Charlie and onto the food, even as he jumped out of the way. He caught his grandfather’s satisfied glance before he dropped the door shut with a bang.

The young boy’s eyes filled with tears. He’d mistaken the scraps for a sign of kindness – a message that he hadn’t been forgotten.

As he ate food covered in piss, he knew he preferred the beatings to the torture he was being subjected to. He would rather the feeling of fists landing on his face because that was real and something he understood. This treatment, this captivity and … hate. His young mind couldn’t comprehend it.

It was sending him mad.

For four weeks, Charlie lived in the black cellar, surviving on the odd scrap of food and the tap water. He didn’t know how long he was there. Days faded into nights, nights faded into weeks. All he knew was that he’d been made to disappear. The little boy who shouldn’t have been born in the first place.

He was alone. Even his little brother was gone – and that had been her fault too. She’d taken drugs when the baby was in her tummy and he’d come out too small. There was something wrong with him. And still, Charlie had loved him.

His mother had been a slut. That’s what his grandfather roared over and over, the words cutting into Charlie’s skin, tattooing themselves in his thoughts. Her behaviour was his shame to carry. As time passed in the cellar, he began to believe it. He was only ten when she’d abandoned him that spring, days before Easter when the only worry he should have had was how many chocolate eggs he would get. She’d left him at the mercy of the evil man upstairs. So how come he still longed for her? For her gentleness and warmth. She could be silly at times, especially when she drank, but she never hit him. She used to cuddle him and tell him he was her little prince. Her Charlie.

Then, one day, after he’d been in the cellar for a long time, he heard yelling. Not his grandfather’s voice. It sounded like a stranger.

Charlie climbed up the stairs to the trapdoor. Survival instinct, something he didn’t even know he had left, kicked in. At the top, he summoned everything he could and screamed, bashing at the door with his little fists.