I dusted myself off, picked up the cleaning things and went over to the van. I put a tape of fifties hits into the stereo, ‘Secret Love’ by Doris Day, blasted out at full volume, and right on chorus.
The men stuck their heads out of the trailer window, laughing. ‘Sing along then,’ shouted my father.
I smiled at my tormentors and turned it down. But I wasn’t going to turn it off.
I scoured the muddy footprints from the dashboard and pulled out the rubber mats from the floor, throwing them into a bucket of water, mixed with vinegar and washing-up liquid. Then I polished the dashboard, vacuumed the floor, cleaned the windows, emptied the glove box, swept out the back (where I sneaked a quick ciggie from the packet I’d found in the glove box), hosed the outside, dried it, polished it and, finally, put it all together again.
Five encores of Doris later, I was done. I stood, rags and bucket in hand, feeling proud. Not since the old bastard brought the thing home had it looked so sharp. No longer was it a filthy work van and pub taxi, but it was now a fabulous show vehicle. My refection shone off the side of the cab.
I emptied the bucket and rinsed it out at the tap.
Uncle Jaybus leaned out. ‘Good job.’
I beamed with pride. ‘Thank you.’
My hands were wrinkled, and white. I rolled my wet sleeves up and took the remainder of the cleaning stuff back into the trailer.
My father leaned over Uncle Jaybus’s shoulder. ‘Do it again.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve put that fucking car polish all over the cab. Wash it off, and do it again.’
‘You haven’t even looked properly.’
He leaped from the bunk and pushed me backward,
out of the door and down the steps onto the ground. He threw out the bucket and rags after me and shouted, ‘Don’t answer me back, poofy boy. If I say do it again, you fucking do it.’
I climbed to my feet and picked up the bucket and the scattered rags and polish cans and stood, rooted to the spot.
Frankie appeared in the door of our trailer. ‘Let the fat cunt do it himself, Mikey. Come in here now.’
My mother and Aunt Minnie leaned from the window. ‘Just bring the stuff in here and come and sit down – it looks lovely, don’t it, Min?’
‘Yeah, Mikey, it looks lovely, come in here and have some tea.’
Heart pounding, I put down the bucket, walked up to my father’s trailer and opened the door.
The group of men, who had been guffawing with laughter, fell silent.
My father’s eyes darkened. ‘What do you want?’
My mouth was dry. ‘I want you to go and check the van.’
He rose from the bunk. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yes.’
He seemed to swell in size, and all I could see was his luminous yellow glare. ‘You a big man now poofy boy?’
My body tensed. A swelling from the pit of my stomach rose and lodged in my neck.
‘Get out and clean that motor.’
My fists clenched so tight my nails dug into my palms.
Then he hit me. A punch, deep into my ribcage. I fell backward and clutched the steel frame of the doorway either side of me.
He laughed and stepped closer.
I thought of what he had done to me over the years and how I had suffered every hour of every day, trying to make him happy. I thought of the countless times he had relished humiliating me in front of his friends and family.
He kicked his foot out towards my stomach. But as he did, I launched myself forward, tightening my fist like a rock and bringing it down, heavy and hard on the bridge of his nose.
The cartilage squeaked beneath my bare knuckles, as he kicked me out through the door. The men in the trailer dived out of the way as he crashed into my mother’s Royal Dalton display. My mother, Frankie and Aunt Minnie screamed as I rolled onto the concrete for the third time that day. My father exploded from the trailer and charged at me like an enraged bull.
‘Leave him alone.’ My mother leaped from Frankie’s doorway and onto my father’s back, clawing, screaming and tearing at his face. But he grabbed her by the neck, punching her in the face before dropping her to the floor.
Frankie and Aunt Minnie, screaming and wailing, rushed over, picked her up and pulled her inside my parents’ trailer.
The group of men came quietly out of the big trailer and dispersed.
My father’s voice roared out. ‘
I’m going to kill you
!’
Laughing, crying and spitting out dirt, I climbed to my feet. ‘
Come on, then
!’
He swooped down on me and his fists crashed into my face, my ribs, my arms, my stomach.
Shaking with a rage I had never felt before, I screamed, spat, snarled and lashed out at him, numb to his punches,
and laughing in his face. Then he lifted me over his shoulder and into Frankie’s trailer.
Kettles, perfume bottles, empty chicken buckets and ashtrays were sent crashing as he threw me across the bunk and began to punch me in the head, face and eyes.
‘
I hate you!
’ I screamed. ‘
For as long as I’ve lived I’ve hated you
!’
He shouted at me to shut up, slamming me with more punches as I screamed and laughed and spat clumps of bloody snot into his face. As his energy drained, so did mine. Our chests and stomachs heaved as we stared at one another, panting and sweating. As blood began to blur my vision, without the strength left to speak, I mouthed the words, ‘I hate you, Dad.’
He walked out of the trailer and I fell into blackness.
Our move was postponed because he disappeared. He didn’t come back to the camp again for four days.
During those days the rain fell steadily and my body ached constantly. My wounds were healing badly and I lay, curled in my bunk, waiting for my father to return.
I knew it was not my fighting back that had made him go, but the words I had screamed at him.
‘I hate you, Dad.’
Whatever hope there might have been for us, whatever tenuous bond we had hung onto, was gone. I hated him, and now he knew it. The huge love I’d felt for him as a small boy had been battered and taunted out of me, and we were both the losers. No doubt he was in some pub, hunched over a beer, bemoaning the fates that sent him me for a son.
As for me, I knew I needed to escape. It was my only
hope. Otherwise he would kill me, or I would die anyway, of the pain and shame and hurt of being everything he didn’t want me to be, and nothing he did.
Eventually he returned, without a word to anyone about where he’d been. And in the days after that he only ever spoke to me to issue orders or threats.
Before we left for Newark Uncle Matthew and Aunt Nancy announced that they had decided to leave the convoy and head back south, taking Kenny with them. I was desolate.
Kenny and I hadn’t spoken since ‘that night’. Whenever he saw me coming towards his trailer he literally leaped out of it and ran away. But in my heart I had hoped that, in time, we could be friends again. I missed him so much – there had been no one else, ever, that I could laugh and talk and feel easy with in the way I did with him.
They left ahead of us, and everyone was upset. Losing some of our group after all those months together was hard. My mother and Aunt Minnie spent the morning hugging and crying with Aunt Nancy as the men helped Uncle Matthew and Kenny pack everything away.
With their trailers hooked on, the family sounded their car horns to signal goodbye. As the vehicles started to move, there were calls of goodbye and tears. Kenny’s car was at the back, and I waved my arms and shouted ‘Goodbye, Kenny,’ hoping he might wave or smile, to signal peace between us.
He didn’t even turn around. My aunt Minnie did though, raising a curious eyebrow at my enthusiasm, before looking back at the departing vehicles.
I didn’t care. I turned and ran, through the gap in the
hedge and across the field to get to the fence at the end of the road for one last glimpse. Water sprayed up from the field, soaking me, and the long grass tangled around my feet, winding its tentacles around my shins. I ripped myself free of the grass and leaped to the fence, just in time to catch Kenny’s car as it rattled by.
I waved again and saw him notice me. He turned to unwind his window and I felt wildly happy. He was going to say something, after all.
He drove by, without even looking at me. My only friend.
My world tumbled and crashed and burned.
The following night I sat in the back of the transit van as we set off for Newark. Through the tin wall separating us I could hear my mother’s favourite tape begin. Barbra Streisand, singing ‘Memories’.
The floor beneath me rumbled and I wrapped myself up in a quilt to lock in what I could of my body heat. The van stank of tar. I leaned close to the rumbling tin wall, now warming from the heaters in the front and I felt, as I used to in the stable, in the company of a friend. I had asked to ride in the back, preferring to be alone among the luggage, where I felt safe from my father’s tongue and fist.
We travelled at dead of night, so there was nothing to see. I lay, curled on the floor, and wondered what the future held for me. My father was a pureblood, a great man, a champion bare-knuckle fighter, a Black Knight of raging firepower.
And me? I was no knight. My growing fear and mistrust of people was trapping me in a lonely inner world. I lived in fear of angering my father with my ‘effeminate’ traits.
I frequently locked myself into confined spaces to find sanctuary and be myself without a disapproving world ripping me to shreds. Despite my efforts, I had become everything Gypsies despise. I was gay. I had caught a disease that could only be found in the world outside, and everyone could see it. They knew. And that’s why I was a slave to my father.
I lit a stolen cigarette and sat in the darkness. My whole body chanted the same thing over and over; run, run, run. Go far away and never come back.
But I was still not quite thirteen years old and couldn’t imagine ever being away from my culture and my people. So I clung, with quiet desperation, to the alternative. Newark could be my chance for a new start. No one there would know about me. Our new home could mark my new life, where I would finally pummel the feelings that made me this way. I would work harder, and make my father proud of his heir. I had to. Despite the crushing rules, I was proud of being a Gypsy. It was who I was.
Somehow, this time, I would make it work.
A New Start
As the van’s brakes slammed on and we lurched over a ramp in the road, I woke and scrambled towards the back window. The sky was red with the breaking dawn, and outside I could see a field full of black and white cows, a chain-link fence and rows of neat, gleaming trailers lined up along a stretch of glistening, black tarmac. Next to each trailer was a brand-new four-by-four heavy-duty car.
Our convoy must have looked monstrous in comparison.
Aunt Minnie and the girls waved at me from the car behind, their cigarettes glowing like sparklers. Frankie’s old brown and cream fright was looking more like a rotten tooth than a passable caravan amongst that lot.
I laughed and waved back. At least we were colourful.
We passed by the owner’s redbrick house and came into a large clearing filled with trailers, cars, outhouses and children’s toys.
We stopped, and I waved for Romaine to come and release me. She slid open the door and clapped her hands. ‘Oh, my god, this is so cushti, come and have a look.’
I walked round to the front of the van. Henry-Joe and Jimmy scrambled over our mother’s lap, sprinting off toward the grassy island at the camp’s centre. Leaping around it were several other children, all dressed like little
china dolls, with perfect ringlets, bell-shaped dresses and little-old-man suits. The boys, scruffy and unconcerned, dived over to join them.
A grit lane circled the grassy island, and beyond it stood a ring of concrete plots, each with its own tap, electric box and space for two good-sized trailers. Towards the entrance to the clearing was a large redbrick toilet block with two saloon-door entrances marked male and female. Beyond them we could hear the reassuring sound of a working flush.
Frankie and Aunt Minnie emerged, and lit up fresh cigarettes.
‘I’ve warmed a seat up for you, Bettie,’ Aunt Minnie shouted, nudging Frankie and laughing.
My mother rolled her eyes and laughed.
‘Just look at these two tramps will you. The owner’s gonna take one look at those two fools and chuck us straight off.’
To the side of the camp stood a twenty-foot steel net and barbed-wire wall, and on the other side there was an army barrack. We could see, inside a giant shed, heavy machinery and camouflaged vehicles, with soldiers moving around them.
The men of the convoy went over to the house to meet the owner. Most places were filled, but thanks to Rayleen’s family, we were expected and there were four good-sized plots waiting for us.
As crowds of people started to pour from the other trailers, I headed in the direction of the wood at the back end of the camp, hoping to avoid the meet-and-greet gathering. I planned to have a sly smoke there. I didn’t
want to give my father any reason to start on me again, so, unlike Frankie, I kept my smoking a secret.
As I walked away, Aunt Rayleen called me. ‘Hey, Mikey, come and meet the boys.’
Shit.
I accelerated into a trot, and dived into the first entrance into the wood that I could see, then waited in silence like a hunted hare as Rayleen called again. After several moments of tensed-up fear, I relaxed, safe for the moment.
I pulled out my cigarette box and lighter.
Looking around I realised that it wasn’t actually a real wood. The trees were just a screen to the field behind, which was overgrown and full of battered lorries and scrap.
Just behind the trees was a row of dog kennels, each one housing the favourite dog of the Gypsies – a Lurcher. As I stood, smoking and looking out over the field, I could hear the laughter and chatter from the growing crowd around the convoy. Suddenly I felt like a fool for running away. This was supposed to be my new start and here I was, cowering behind the trees. One of the dogs began to bark at me and, with my cover blown, I headed back into the clearing.
My mother and Rayleen waved as I walked slowly back to join them.
They were standing with three rather odd-looking boys, each with a dramatically different hair colour and build. I guessed that I was about to come face to face with Rayleen’s infamous brothers. My first thought was that she had oversold them in the looks department by a long shot. Despite their different colouring and build, they all looked exactly
like her, and she was no oil painting. All four of them had extremely close-set eyes and noses like closed fists. ‘Hello there, mate, good to meet you,’ they chorused, each shaking my hand.
My father beckoned me over to help, as he pulled Frankie’s trailer free from Aunt Minnie’s car. Two of the brothers disappeared, but the youngest, Alex, offered to help. My father, purple in the face, heaved at the front of the trailer as we pushed from behind. Once it was settled onto the plot my mother had chosen for us, my father moved on to help Uncle Jaybus and the others before returning to work on the bigger trailer. Alex and I were left winding down the legs of the trailer, and he chatted cheerfully away about the site and the people there.
‘I’ve heard loads about you,’ he panted, spinning the trailer jack.
Obviously not, was all I could think, otherwise he wouldn’t even be talking to me. I struggled to overcome my shyness.
‘Yeah, me too you.’
For the rest of the evening we didn’t part company, He even offered to take me for a drive around Newark in his car. It seemed I might make a real friend after all.
As he went off to fetch it, I leaned into the big trailer, where my mother was shooing Henry-Joe and Jimmy out of the toy cupboard.
‘I’m going with Alex to the shop, is that all right?’
My mother’s face lit up. ‘He’s a nice boy, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, he is.’
She smiled and reached for her handbag. She pulled out
a twenty-pound note and, after looking both ways and whispering ‘Shhhhh’, she put it in my hand. ‘Don’t tell your dad, otherwise he’ll keep you here to help him set up.’
As we ploughed through the back lanes in Alex’s bright red pick-up, we talked about the feud between him and his brothers and the Walsh boys.
Apparently it all stemmed from a row over a girl the year before at the Cambridge Fair; a huge Gypsy convention held every July, where Gypsies from all over the country came together to eat, drink, show off their well-earned motorcars and, of course, fight.
I made it clear to Alex that the feud is nothing to do with me.
‘Me neither,’ he said, slapping his hand down on the steering wheel.
During the drive around Newark, I learned that Alex was three years older than me, had two different girlfriends who knew nothing of one another, and regularly enjoyed going out on the town to score with Gorgia women.
‘Have you had any sorts yet, Mikey?’
I cringed, twitched and muttered a story about a girl in Doncaster.
‘What was she like, then?’
I spent the next ten minutes describing what I thought would be a typical sexy yet believable girl, and the ten after that trying to make her sound slightly less of a dog. The look on Alex’s face told me that he had guessed I was a virgin. But he politely went along with the story I struggled so hard to come up with.
As we pulled back into the camp, we saw Frankie and
Romaine propped up against the wooden gate with a group of other teenagers. As we got closer, I saw Alex eyeing a girl with long blonde hair and legs about as long as my dumpy sister was tall.
‘Now that is a
sort
,’ he said.
As we pulled up to the grass verge, the girl turned and stared at us. Alex wound down the window.
‘Hello,’ she chirped.
Frankie and Romaine squeezed in either side.
‘You all right, shit-heads? I’m his sister Frankie by the way.’
The giant girl giggled. ‘I’m Kayla-Jayne.’
Two other boys and a girl appeared at the window on my side.
The girl ignored me, and began talking over my shoulder, focusing on the more important, driving teen. She asked Alex about his relationship status and car.
‘I’m single, but looking to settle down,’ he said, smiling sweetly.
I nearly choked on my can of Coke.
As the girl chatted on I looked at the two boys. They seemed friendly; unlike the usual aggressive boys I had met before. I realised that this was the longest I had ever been in the company of other young people without being challenged to fight. And it felt good.
A little later Alex dropped me back at our trailer and said he would call by later. The big trailer was now settled, with its legs wound down and, just for good measure, my mother was giving it another good scrub to get rid of the dirt from the journey.
All that was left to do was to attach the awning to the
front of it and I had come back just in time to help. Many of the trailers had awnings attached to the sides, but my mother, who couldn’t help but bring her Elton John decor taste into everything, had had an awning made especially to fit the whole front of the trailer, like a passion-pink circus tent; frills and all. Even though the night air had already begun to draw in, my father was determined to get the job over and done with. The great pink lump, along with its one hundred-plus attachment poles had been pulled from its sack and spread across the concrete to let the creases fall out. This monstrosity of a contraption was my least favourite part of the set up, mainly because it always caused my father to blow his fuse. Not once had it been attached without me or one of my brothers being whacked with the one pole that never fitted.
For several of our moves we had made do without it, since it was such a nightmare to assemble, but now we were planning to stay a while, and my mother wanted it up.
A group of teenagers had assembled in Frankie’s trailer, and they watched as my father wrestled with the awning, shouted, sulked and swore for the next couple of hours. What seemed like an eternity later, it was done. My father managed to crack me a smile as we stood back to admire our handiwork.
‘Come and have a look, Bettie.’
My mother descended from the trailer and out through the zip door of her creation to join us.
‘You happy?’ my father said proudly, pulling her to him with a kiss.
She leaned into his chest and looked over at the finished
object, tilting her head. She gave a half-pleased hum, and that was good enough for me. I made a dash for it and joined Frankie and the others in her trailer.
For the first time, I began to feel confident around others my age. Alex soon joined us, and we all sat around, talking and smoking.
The two teenage boys who’d hung around the car earlier were there, and Alex began to taunt them. ‘What are your names then, Little and Large?’
It was cruel, but accurate. They got up and made polite excuses to leave.
‘Wanna come and play pool, Mikey?’ asked the thinner boy.
‘Not with you he don’t,’ laughed Alex.
As the boys left I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. They reminded me of myself.
I went outside to say goodbye to them. The three of us stood awkwardly, listening to Alex and Frankie back in the trailer, firing off insults about them and screaming with laughter.
‘I’ll see you later, thanks for coming up.’ I spoke loudly, trying to drown out the noise behind me.
The two boys looked up to the window, as Alex waved like the Queen.
‘Ignore him.’
The large boy walked off, rubbing his face in a temper.
The smaller one shook my hand. ‘I’m Adam. Your cousin.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, my dad and your dad are first cousins. That makes us second.’
‘I never knew that.’
He smiled, then set off after the other boy.
‘See you later, cousin,’ I called.
‘See you later!’
‘That wasn’t very nice, Alex,’ I said, when I was back inside the trailer.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Romaine. ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing, Frankie.’
‘Oh, they were arseholes,’ Frankie retorted, laughing her head off.
It was clear that Alex was my stubby little sister’s type. I knew she would never act that way if she didn’t fancy him.
‘Why are you laughing like that?’ I said. ‘We’ve been here two minutes and you’re acting like a bitch.’
She paused. ‘Oh shut up, Joseph, who are you to tell me off like a child?’
‘What did you call me?’
She snickered, wiping the mascara that had run down her cheeks and pulling herself up from Alex’s shoulder.
‘Joseph … Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph,
Joseph
!’
I put my outstretched arm behind her music system.
She screamed. ‘Don’t you dare!’
I launched the thing off the table, sending it exploding into a wall before it crashed to the carpet and splattered across the floor. Then I got up and walked out.