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Authors: Mikey Walsh

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BOOK: Gypsy Boy
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I leaped up and started to shut the taps on the gas bottles, struggling because two of the fingers on my right hand, where Kenny had stamped on them, were immoveable.
I grabbed each gas bottle one by one, dragging them to the trailer door, and rolling them to the ground. Once they were out, I pushed the windows wide open to rid the trailer of the overbearing stench of the gas.
Kenny didn’t look at me. He pulled himself up onto his bunk and buried his face in his hands, weeping and swearing and shaking his head.
I heard my father’s truck rumble into the yard. The men had returned from the hunt for Kenny and had come to check if he was here. As Uncle Matthew unlocked the gates, I rushed through the trailer, closing the windows with my left hand.
Kenny looked up. ‘Mikey?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t tell Matt, will you?’
The moment had passed. He was not going to say any of the things I longed to hear. I sighed.
‘Of course I won’t.’
The voices and the crunch of gravel approached the trailer. Uncle Matthew stepped in, with tears in his eyes.
‘Kenny, I’m so sorry mate, you know what I’m like when I …’
‘It’s all right, come here.’
Kenny rose from his bunk and gripped Matthew in a masculine hug.
My father appeared in the doorway. ‘I thought I told you to get the fuck to bed?’
‘He’s all right, Frank,’ said Kenny. ‘He just helped me get back to the trailer, that’s all.’
My father looked me up and down, narrowing his eyes. ‘What’s up with your hand?’
‘I trapped it between two of the tar barrels earlier on. Think I’ve broken my fingers.’
He shook his head. ‘Got no more sense than a cat’s got cunt, you ain’t. Get out of the trailer, big man, and go up to bed.’
As I made my way through the yard, I could hear laughter and through the broken door of Kenny’s caravan I could see the group emptying his beer fridge and settling down for part two of their drunken night. It was as if nothing had happened at all.
I walked home, my fingers throbbing, and my heart cracked. It wasn’t my love that had stopped Kenny from killing us both, it was the realisation that there was someone even more pitiful and wretched than he was.
And now, after the ordeal, we were both left with a secret to bear.
When I got back I went into my parents’ trailer and pulled a bottle of vodka and a box of painkilling pills from the chest, and then crept with them to my bed.
 
The next day I woke up with a swollen hand, a throbbing headache and a half-full bottle of vodka lying next to me.
Frankie’s bunk was made and the curtains were open. I pulled back the sheets to find a blanket of vomit. I brushed the crust from my mouth, my chest, my legs and my arms, removed all my clothes, pulled on some tracksuit bottoms, then bundled up the sheets and took them out to the shed. As I waited for the washing machine to begin I glanced through the open shed door. My father’s truck was gone.
I walked over into my parents’ trailer. It was clean, polished, vacuumed and empty. I grabbed a bacon sandwich that had been left under a plastic cover, and took a bite. The bread was wet with cold fat, mixed with a lashing of tomato ketchup. It tasted good. Then I remembered. The family had all gone down to Tory Manor for the day. I had said I would rather stay at home.
I thought of Kenny. He hadn’t said anything to my father, otherwise I would have known by now. But he didn’t love me. I was just another Gypsy kid. I wasn’t going anywhere, not with Kenny anyway. And I couldn’t go alone – I wouldn’t be able to survive in a world I didn’t know.
I searched through the boys’ video collection and pushed
The Wizard of Oz
into the video player. I took another bite of the sandwich, poured myself a glass of cherryade and lit up one of my father’s cigarettes.
Regret
A few days later we were on the move again. By the time we left I still hadn’t faced Kenny, so I didn’t know whether he would want me to ride with him, as usual. As the convoy prepared to leave, I edged closer to his car. I watched as he double-checked the tow-bar between his car and caravan, climbing on top of it and bouncing up and down.
As he leaped to the ground, he gave me a quick look and smiled. I was so happy – perhaps we were going to be friends again, our secrets – his suicide attempt, my declaration of love – forgotten. But the next moment he slipped into his car and was gone, following the rest of the convoy out of the campsite gate.
As I stood staring after him, Aunt Minnie pulled up next to me in Old Bessie, as she liked to call her worse-for-wear Ford Sierra. After a failed attempt to get the window to wind down, she shouted, ‘Get your skinny arse in here.’
Romaine was in the front seat. Aunt Minnie prodded her hard in the neck.
‘Get in the back with old Minge.’
Romaine climbed over to join Frankie and baby Jimmy in the back. I slipped around the front of the bonnet and yanked open the door, to be enveloped in a cloud of smoke and cheap perfume.
‘Welcome to the cool car,’ Frankie hooted, swigging on
a gallon bottle of cola, before lighting up a fag. I climbed in and heaved the door shut.
The next three hours was a marathon of Aunt Minnie’s Whitney, Abba and Barry White tape, mixed with bickering from the back, boy talk and terrible sing-alongs.
In the middle of a raucous version of Abba’s ‘Voulez-Vous’, Aunt Minnie shocked me by stopping to say, ‘It ain’t right, Uncle Matthew’s dossa wanting to spend so much time with you.’
My face flushed.
Aunt Minnie squinted over at me and carried on. ‘I think he fancies you, but don’t mention that, will you? Just be aware of it and stay away from him.’
I nodded.
We stopped at the motorway services where Aunt Minnie, still a hardened kleptomaniac, nipped into the shop and reappeared with wine gums and pasties.
‘They were the closest things to the door,’ she explained.
Our next campsite was in a dirty little town, through a dirty little road and up behind a dirty old petrol station, where we were surrounded by several overgrown fields filled with rubbish.
As we gasped with horror, Romaine giggled, ‘Somebody could do with a goat.’
The battered gates to the camp hung behind an old shop. The owner, grateful to have anyone use his site, let us in without a single question. He showed us round the site, clutching an iron rake with one hand and clamping a beekeeper’s hat to his head with the other, only removing it to grab the convoy’s first rent payment.
The camp had only one electric box with six sockets,
and the toilet cubicle consisted of four walls and no toilet; just a large cesspool to dump toilet buckets in.
It was, without doubt, the worst camp we had ever visited. We all imagined we would move on as fast as possible. But on the first day the men found there was plenty of work, so they decided we should stay for a while.
 
The trailer Frankie and I lived in was parked next to the far grander one occupied by our parents and the boys. Ours had been bought third- or fourth-hand and was intended to be run into the ground, and within a month of it being left in Frankie’s hands, it was well on its way.
The outer shell had a ‘once white’ scaly, lumpy surface, with a thick belt of oak brown that ran through the middle of it. The windows were blacked out, which was a godsend, given the disgusting orange and brown decor inside.
In the tiny kitchen area we had a non-working oven, used as storage, a non-working fridge stacked with nonperishable goodies and a microwave. Frankie’s bed was made up from two broken, brown bunks, surrounded by shelf upon shelf of fancy perfume bottles she had collected. Among the fancy scents were several used moisturiser tubs, filled with old fag ends.
The other end of the trailer, next to a shower cubicle also used as storage, was my room which consisted of two narrow cupboards, a pull-out bed, and a sliding door made of petrified paper with a wood pattern stained onto it.
Frankie was not a traditional Gypsy girl. She never cleaned, never cooked and despite the Gypsy belief that girls shouldn’t wash their hair while menstruating, she
would never refrain from scrubbing the lacquer build-up out of her Chaka Khan do, whatever the time of the month.
She would remain asleep for most of the day, rolling over and growling ‘fuck off’ whenever our mother tapped on the window. But as Frankie was never willing to do any kind of housewifely chore at all, my mother was a teacher without a pupil. Around three o’clock Frankie would get up, and after an hour or so of trowelling on her make-up, she would be ready to face the world.
To get round the problem of cleaning, she would kidnap Henry-Joe and Jimmy nightly, dragging them over to our trailer so that she could ‘play’ with them. Once inside our trailer she would dress them in her clothes and make-up for the nightly ‘game’ of ‘Queen Ant’. Frankie was, of course, the queen ant in question, and the boys were her willing worker ants. They would drag the queen, crippled from over-eating and unable to move (which wasn’t far from the truth in Frankie’s case), from one end of the trailer to the other, cleaning and tidying as they went. Frankie would lay comatose as they passed by the fridge, picking up packets of biscuits and crisps to feed her. Once they had half-killed themselves getting her onto the bed, they would leave her stuffing her face in front of a video, while they finished cleaning the trailer.
Frankie, through sheer boredom, had doubled in size since we started travelling, and was not remotely interested in shedding weight. The more my father brought up her being fat, the more she would take sick pleasure in corrupting our brothers. Especially his champion, Jimmy, who was five years old, and already running a self-made
training circuit and weightlifting daily with bean cans in pillowslips. Our father had no idea that during pub hours, little Jimmy was kitted out in miniskirts, high heels and fake Chanel clip-on earrings, spoon-feeding his ‘queen’ a microwave toad in the hole.
Henry-Joe, now age seven, was a mass of ginger hair, with a pinched, white face. He spent most of his time teaching Jimmy ridiculous words that made no sense whatsoever. He did it so often that the words became part of his own vocabulary, and all too often both boys were considered simpletons, running around in circles, screaming gobbledygook words at the top of their lungs.
I laughed long and hard at Frankie’s Queen Ant routine. My own games with the boys were more likely to be Sega ones – I spent hours with them, helping them work out the moves. I loved them dearly and enjoyed being around them, as long as my father was out of the way.
Eventually, to everyone’s relief, it was decided that we should move on, to a camp in Newark. It was, apparently, a great place to be, with plenty of work and a good camp. Aunt Rayleen, wife of my mother’s little brother Jimmy, told us her family had been there for weeks and had no plans to move.
‘It’s paradise,’ she told us excitedly. ‘Acres of land, hot and cold water, a nice shower block and plenty of electricity.’ We liked the sound of it – hot food, clean clothes, TV and, best of all, no need for a weekly trip to the local sports centre for a decent wash.
Rayleen’s three brothers were already there, and she talked about them constantly to Frankie.
‘Honest to God, Frankie, you’ve never seen three
better-looking boys in all your life!’ she repeated over and over again like a rather manic parrot.
By the time we hit the road we all knew that the oldest, Danny, was a flame-haired, muscular twenty-five-year-old stud that was divorced (his wife’s fault, of course). Then there was Jay, who, according to Rayleen, looked like a young Marlon Brando, and every travelling girl in the country wanted a piece of him. And finally there was Alex, only sixteen, and already a renowned ladies’ man, due to his silver tongue and fancy pick-up lines.
I could see that Uncle Jimmy’s squeeze was intent on setting my sister up with one of her brothers. But what Frankie thought about it, I didn’t know. She was now fourteen, which was the courting age, and meant that she was officially ripe to start dating and find a husband.
All Gypsy girls are expected to marry between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with a limit of no more than four boyfriends to sample beforehand. More and a girl is at risk of being called a slut. And boyfriends mustn’t be allowed to do more than show an interest. Gypsy men, while happy to pick up Gorgia women for sex away from the camp, want to marry a girl who has never even been kissed by another man.
The girls get the raw end of the stick. They spend their days training to become the perfect housewife, and in the meantime there is absolutely no sex before marriage, and they must not even speak of it.
The courting rules dictate that a girl also has to be officially asked out before even sharing a kiss with the boy she desires. On top of this, it is considered desperate and bad form to say yes to a date right away. The boy is expected
to return with the same question at least a couple of times before getting the answer he longs for. Sadly, things often go wrong and the boys move on after a first rejection, leaving the girl heartbroken. And she can do nothing to resolve the situation. Having done the right thing and said no, for the sake of her reputation, she can only silently hope that he will come back and ask her one more time, at which point she will be allowed to say yes.
Many Gypsy girls go on to regret losing the one boy they really wanted, all because tradition dictates that they must say no when they long to say yes. And if they haven’t found a husband by the age of eighteen, they risk growing old alone, condemned to be unwed spinsters by a crazy set of customs.
Girls are also not supposed to talk to men when they have their periods. We boys, hearing about this via underground means (any talk of periods was another taboo), would watch the girls like hawks, waiting to see how far a ‘traditional’ girl would go in avoiding us, to keep to the custom.
Frankie ignored it, just as she ignored the no hair-washing-during-your-period rule. But she was still a Gypsy girl and, like her friends, wanted to find a husband. So it was with a little more effort over her clothes and hair than usual that she prepared for the move to Newark.
I was interested in meeting Rayleen’s brothers too, mainly because it was rumoured that they didn’t like Uncle Tory and his sons. When I heard that, my heart soared. Finally, a group of people who weren’t desperate to live in the Walsh shadow. I hoped to make friends with these boys, if only to annoy my father.
 
 
A couple of days before the move, a flurry of cleaning began. All the women, except Frankie, began scrubbing their caravans in order to make a good impression when we arrived. I was sitting in our caravan with Frankie, my mother, Aunt Rayleen and Aunt Minnie, who had come in for a coffee break, when my father arrived outside.
‘Stop sitting with the women and clean the fucking van!’ he bellowed.
My mother rolled her eyes. ‘He’s at it again is he? There’s some cleaning stuff under the sink in the big trailer, Mikey.’
Five men were sitting in my parents’ trailer, talking about fighting, money and the move to Newark. Most of them I knew, but one was new. His front teeth looked as if they had been filed into jagged points.
‘He your oldest, Frank?’ he asked.
Uncle Matthew looked up from his can of cider. ‘He’s the oldest boy … looks like him don’t he?’
I kneeled down to the cupboard to find the cleaning stuff.
The snaggletooth man hissed with laughter. ‘Naah, he’s like his mother he is.’
I buried my head deeper into the cupboard to hide my blushing and smiled in quiet relief. I was happy to look like my mother, and grateful for someone who didn’t compare me to Uncle Joseph.
‘He hasn’t got his mother’s hair though,’ laughed Uncle Jaybus. He opened the window and leaned out. ‘She’s the Ginger Ninja she is!’
The men laughed. I stood and looked out toward Frankie’s trailer. Aunt Minnie leaned out, sticking up her two fingers. ‘Shut your mouth, swell head!’
Uncle Jaybus sniggered in his goofy way, then bellowed back to his wife. ‘I loves you, my ugly!’
Aunt Minnie cackled like a witch before collapsing in a coughing fit.
I ducked back down to the cupboard and picked up several dust rags, a can of polish and a dustpan and brush. I laughed, listening to the wails from the women in the other trailer.
My father walked over, pulling me up from the floor. ‘How long does it take to get a few cleaning things.’ He grabbed me by the shirt collar and kicked me out of the door, sending me hurtling from the top step and scattering the cleaning things.
The men laughed.
‘Gotta train ’em up, see?’
The laughter erupted again.
‘And don’t dare walk away from it till it’s spotless,’ my father called after me.
My father had swapped our car for an old blue transit van, which was better able to pull the second trailer. It was caked in a light grey and brown crust from a rabbit-hunting trip the night before. A couple of the local men had greyhounds and often went out rabbit hunting with them in the small hours, taking anyone who fancied tagging along with them. My father was not a fan of rabbit hunting, or of greyhound dogs, but it was a social sport and he went for the company.
BOOK: Gypsy Boy
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ads

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