Sex Education
It was while we were at Newark that my mother gave birth to her fifth and last child – a little girl she named Minnie, after her favourite sister. Born as a complete surprise to all of us, including our mother, Minnie was black-haired and dark-eyed and we all doted on her, though I seldom got to see much of her, because my father kept me busy most waking hours.
He had a new job for me. Sick of driving his lorry down cul-de-sacs, then spending ages struggling to get back out of them again, he decided that it would look more professional to go knocking on doors using the transit van, with the lorry on standby around the corner. It was time I got my driving licence.
My mother picked up an application for a provisional licence from the post office and, that night, my father took it with him to the pub, where he got the landlord to help him fill it out correctly.
At that time a provisional licence could be requested without having to send off a birth certificate, so he added four years to my age, sent the form off and a couple of weeks later the licence arrived.
I began taking lessons right away – two a week at ten pounds a go, from an old guy called Jack. He was a regular at the Gypsies’ local, and made a lot of money by teaching
practically every teenage Gypsy in the camp while turning a blind eye to their real ages.
I failed my first test miserably, by taking the wing mirror off a passing car, failed my second without even getting into the lorry, having left my provisional licence at home, but third time around, I scraped a pass with an instructor who spent most of the test on the phone to his wife.
I was only thirteen, but we were all old before our time. That’s the way we lived.
A childhood for any Gypsy was very short indeed.
It was around the same time that it was decided that it was time for me to be introduced to sex. Just because Gypsy girls had to be chaste, it didn’t mean that the boys were going to be. Most of them tended to frequent prostitutes to relieve their sexual frustration, unless they won the jackpot of finding a Gorgia girl who would oblige for free.
There were a surprising number of willing girls around, and the Gypsy boys were quick to respond. Their pockets, their fists and their cocks were all that mattered. They hunted in groups; making it an outing for the lads.
‘Old, So-’n’-So’s boy’s still a virgin, let’s take him out, get him fucked, and we’ll all make a day of it.’
It was kind of like that.
My initiation into manhood was to take place down at the local Dyna Bowl, where a group of us teenagers tended to hang out in the evenings. One of the older boys in the camp, Colbert Runt, had found a couple of Gorgia girls who had agreed to meet us for drinks and some ‘no strings’ sex.
My choice, laughed Colbert, was known as ‘Gobbler’. It seemed her friends had given her the nickname because she was able to fit her whole fist inside her baby maker.
And word was she’d have sex with anything that moved.
My heart sank.
Once again I had to prove myself as a man. Only this time it was not in a ring, but in the back of an old van, with a girl who sounded like my idea of a nightmare. Either I slept with her, or went home with my reputation even more tattered than it already was.
Those rumours, fuelled by Frankie’s outburst when we first arrived in Newark, had never gone away. My mother said it was because I was too pretty to be a boy, which was of no comfort whatsoever, and my father quite openly referred to me in public as Nancy Anne.
Luckily for me, Adam and Levoy were coming along to be initiated that night too, by Gobbler’s Gypsy-loving friend Tracey. The three of us had frequently bragged about our sexual experiences, while watching
Star Wars
marathons in Levoy’s trailer. But now, with Colbert Runt demanding we come on his ‘free sex for all’ evening, we had to either face up to our lies and confess our lack of carnal knowledge, blag our way through it and hope for the best, or do what any sensible person would do and just say no to the whole stupid idea. Except that to say no would be taken to mean that we couldn’t be interested in women, and word would spread like lightning around the camp and beyond.
Adam, Levoy and I all went for the safest option: blag it and hope for the best.
That evening the three of us sat at a table in the Dyna Bowl bar. The ice in our Diet Cokes rattled as we held the glasses to our lips.
Then Colbert and the girls arrived. One looked like a
walrus in a miniskirt, the other like a transvestite in hysterectomy pants. With a ‘cooeee’ they plonked themselves down next to us. The walrus made a beeline for me.
‘Ooh, look at your eyes – hey Tracey, have a look at this one’s eyes, they’re like sequins, ain’t they?’
This had to be Gobbler. Her oversized face was thickly coated in a dark brown foundation, with orange lipstick smudged up onto her nose.
‘You’ve scored with that one, Mikey,’ chuckled Adam, but the laughter soon disappeared from his face as Tracey swooped in and squeezed herself between him and Levoy, placing a meaty hand firmly on his thigh.
After a few minutes of desultory chatter, Tracey grabbed Adam and Levoy and headed off. Gobbler followed suit, grabbing me by the hand and leading me outside and round to the back steps behind the Dyna Bowl. It wasn’t exactly a romantic setting. The air was like ice, and the steps were clearly more often used as a urinal than anything else. Gobbler sucked brutally on my tongue, tearing at my belt and raising her legs about my waist. I reciprocated reluctantly as she fumbled with her tights, ripping them down then pulling my hand into the crotch of her knickers.
I kept thinking of Adam and Levoy with Tracey and wondering if they’d managed to go through with it. I smacked her hand away as she made a swipe for my uninterested nether regions.
‘The condoms, get the condoms,’ she groaned.
Thank God! I thought; she had just handed me a golden excuse to get the hell out of there.
‘I forgot to bring one,’ I muttered, leaping off her. ‘I’ve got to get one off of Adam.’
‘Go then,’ she panted. ‘Don’t keep me waiting here with me legs open.’
I zipped up, running back round to the front of the Bowl as if my life depended on it. There was absolutely no way I was going back around that corner, and I pitied anyone who might have stumbled around there for a drunken piss in the next few minutes.
Luckily for me I had held out for longer than Adam and Levoy had. They were sitting back at the table with Colbert, gulping on a fresh drink when I went back inside. They all looked at me.
‘So,’ said Colbert. ‘Did you fuck her, or what?’
I’d already planned this part. ‘No way, she’s dirty.’
‘Yeah, ours was too, wasn’t she Levoy?’ said Adam.
‘Er, yeah,’ muttered Levoy finally catching on.
It wasn’t much of an excuse, but Colbert wasn’t the brightest spark and didn’t ask questions.
‘Oh well, he smirked. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’
I prayed not.
We downed our drinks and left the Bowl before Gobbler and Tracey reappeared. Back at the camp, Adam, Levoy and I headed for Levoy’s trailer. We spent the rest of the evening making up stories about how great the girls had been at giving head.
Levoy and Adam passed their driving tests within a month of each other and as a reward Adam was given a new BMW and Levoy a brand-new Toyota van. Every night, just as my father would go from trailer to trailer to call for the men, Levoy would call for us teenagers. One by one we
would stack ourselves into the back of his van, but only after a good twenty-minute argument between the girls about who would get to sit in the front. Kayla-Jane and Frankie always won, so Romaine and Charlene were always in the back with me and Adam.
We still went to the Dyna-Bowl, because it was one of the few places in town that we could hang out. As soon as we arrived in the car park we would head straight to the bar where all of us, including Levoy, would get wasted on diamond white cider and jelly shots. My father had stopped paying me while I was learning to drive the lorry, and afterwards reinstated my wages at just twenty pounds a week. But my mother would give me extra without my father knowing. Like the other boys, I would blow the lot on drinks and cigarettes at the Dyna Bowl bar.
With our group – Frankie, Kayla-Jane, Adam, Levoy, Romaine and Charlene – I felt at my most comfortable. We would play drinking games, and torment Adam and Romaine who had started going out with each other. There were still rules – we boys had to pay for the girls, no mention of sex words and so on, but it was the nearest I ever got to really relaxing.
Sometimes, to change the pace, we’d go to the cinema. One night the others in the group voted to see
The Lion King
for the third time. I decided to give it a miss. With the cinema being next to the Dyna Bowl, I bought a packet of cigarettes, told the others I’d see them later, and headed over to the bar on my own.
‘What can I get you, mate?’
I had noticed this particular barman several times before. He had a warm smile, bright blue eyes and tattooed arms.
‘We’ve got a two-for-one offer on Fosters if you fancy it?’
‘All right then, I’ll have two of them.’
I sat at a high stool at the bar as he poured. I took a sip. I’d never tasted lager before. It was so rancid I nearly spat it out, but I had to keep some kind of composure in front of the barman.
‘You’re one of the travelling lot aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ I answered suspiciously.
‘The travellers have always lived around here. I live just up the road from the campsite. Always thought you lot were all right.’
I took another swig of the lager. ‘Do you wanna help me finish the other one?’
He smiled again. ‘Thanks. I’m finished now, I’ll just get my coat.’
While he was gone the danger of what I was doing hit me. I was about to share a beer and conversation with a Gorgia man. My father – not to mention the rest of the men back at the camp – would probably kill me if they found out.
Kayla-Jayne and Charlene’s older sister Esther, a pretty girl of twenty, once told me that she used to hang around this same bar with two other Gypsy girls. One of them had started seeing a Gorgia man, and when their fathers found out, all three were not only banned from ever going there again, but were labelled whores, which meant not one of them would ever marry. It was a terrible punishment, and now here I was, risking even worse. But I felt excited by the idea of talking to someone new, someone outside our small, closed world.
He appeared a minute later and sat on the stool next to
me. His name was Caleb, he was twenty-five years old and he’d been working in the bar since dropping out of the Navy two years before.
‘I’m Mikey,’ I told him, ‘and I’m nineteen.’
You weren’t even supposed to be in the bar until you were eighteen. I’d added one for luck.
We talked for a while, then he looked at his watch. ‘I have to shoot off, do you want to come for a drink with me and some friends?
‘I can’t, I’ve got to get back.’
Our chat had lasted all of twenty minutes. I waited for him to leave the building before I left for the cinema. I felt guilty for breaking the rules. But I wished I could have gone with him.
In the weeks that followed I saw Caleb whenever I went into the bar with the others. He was always friendly when I went over to order drinks, and several times he repeated his invitation to go out with him and his friends. But I didn’t dare accept.
Then everything changed. A new group of Gypsy boys, from a campsite a few miles away, heard about the Dyna Bowl hangout and arrived one night to see for themselves.
I was drunk and doing impressions of Aunt Minnie, when three stocky, greased-up Gypsy boys entered the bar. Without any introduction, they bought their drinks, came right over to our table and took a seat. They closed in, blatantly chatting up the girls while giving Adam, Levoy and me the cold shoulder.
We went out into the lobby to play the fruit machines and discuss the situation.
‘It’s all gonna change now,’ said Levoy in a morbid tone.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because now this lot know we all come here we won’t get rid of them,’ said Adam.
‘Who are they?’
Adam and Levoy knew of them and gave me the low down on the newcomers. They said that the group had been banned from the main Gypsy haunt a few miles away, after countless violent attacks on Gorgias and other Gypsies.
Romaine came out to join us. ‘I think your sister’s found a man in there, Mikey.’
‘What!’
‘Yep, he’s already buying them drinks and flirting.’
I went over to the door to see. Sure enough, Kayla-Jayne, Frankie and even sour-faced Charlene were melting and giggling at every word that came out of the boys’ mouths.