A few months ago I attended Henry-Joe’s wedding. Layla had been with us at Newark. He had grown up with her and now, over ten years later, they were to be husband and wife.
I had to be there to see the happiest day of his life. My
father was there, so I stood discreetly amongst the crowd, but that was good enough for me. I watched Henry-Joe spinning around the dance floor with his beautiful new wife and my mother’s proud smiles and felt truly happy.
The day after Dillan said yes, I called Henry-Joe to ask him to be my best man. Only first, I had to come out to him. I asked how well he knew me, and he replied, pretty well.
I said I had something to tell him, and he said that he thought he already knew. I told him I was gay and he said, ‘I love you even more for it.’
The next question was ‘Will you be my best man?’
After several moments of shouting with surprise, he wept with joy. ‘More than anything, Mikey, I would love to be your best man.’
Henry-Joe would be there for me, but my mother would not. If my father knew I was marrying, he would forbid my mother to come, and she could not bring herself to betray him. But she wanted to do something for us as a gesture of her love, so she made our wedding cake. Despite having been the world’s worst cook throughout my childhood, she had since mastered the art of making a perfect fruitcake. And her passion for creative decor had evolved into an ability to make practically anything imaginable out of a roll of icing and a couple of well-placed toothpicks. So talented was she, that she had started her own cake-making business.
She made mine over a weekend when my father was away and I went to stay with her. We were up till all hours, designing, preparing, baking and sugar crafting. We moulded and nattered from dawn to dusk, and then from
dusk till morning, taking only short coffee breaks in which I would draw up a picture of the ‘bling’ wedding ring I had made for Dillan and make her laugh with stories of him parading around in it.
The cake was a work of art which even my mother, whose cake-making skills had become renowned, was amazed to have accomplished. Three tiers high, and like a ghostly ball gown, with folds of shimmering white-chocolate icing. She crafted bouquets of edible flowers that burst from each ruffle. And at the very top, a solid white chocolate skull, covered in exotic flowers and strings of edible pearls. The people in the bar where we were holding our reception were in total awe of such a cake, when Henry-Joe and I dropped it off.
Before I left that weekend, my mother pulled me to one side and passed me a small green box. Inside she had put her own wedding ring.
‘It’s for you, Mikey. I want you to have it.’
It will be the one I wear on my finger today. I check the box to see it’s still there.
The phone goes.
‘Whooooo! I’m here!’
‘Oh my God, Frankie?’
‘Yes. I’m coming with Henry-Joe. And I’m wearing the biggest and brightest yellow dress you’ve ever seen!’
Just a month ago, full of half-cut confidence, I came out to her over the phone.
Her reaction was very different to the one I had from Henry-Joe. She said that she was angry that I could have kept such a secret from her all these years, and that she was happy for me, but could not take part in my life.
I hadn’t expected to hear from her today, let alone see her.
She whoops into the phone, like a crazy ladette.
‘Mikey, I’ve dyed my hair like Pamela Anderson! I’m a big fuckin’ mermaid.’
I laugh out loud at the vision.
‘You’ll be the belle of the ball!’
‘I know that … don’t think I haven’t planned to find myself a rich husband there.’
After a few minutes of giving directions to the town hall, we hang up and I dance around the floor in bliss. How wonderful to have my brother as my best man, and Frankie there too.
Belle texts me that she has arrived and I go down to meet her. As I walk out of the door I see her standing on the open roof of her little 1950s convertible. She’s wearing a vintage gold Moschino dress that makes her look just like Audrey Hepburn, only with massive knockers.
When I am three feet away, she honks on the horn and waves as if I was the other end of the park. Brightly coloured balloons float up from her car and into the clear blue sky, like a school of tropical fish.
We sit in the car and Belle slaps her miracle concealer across my nose. She turns the rear-view mirror towards me, so that I can check out her handiwork.
‘Amazing,’ I grin.
She snaps her compact shut and winks. ‘Told you.’
We set off down the road, launching several more balloons as we roar along. With the wheel in one hand, and her satnav in the other, Belle leans over and grabs a cigarette from my carton with her teeth.
As I light her up and grab my own, Henry-Joe calls again. They are in the bar across from the town hall. I tell them I will only be a few minutes.
A text arrives from my mother.
‘Good luck, my son. I love you with all my heart.’
We stop briefly at the bar where the reception will be, so that I can take the foil off the cake. My lovely, and always reliable mate Rufus is there, the perfect master of ceremonies organising everything. The bar looks incredible; all wooden panels, fairy lights, exotic flowers and pastel-coloured birds.
Back in the car Belle looks at me.
‘This is it.’
As we drive, I plug my iPod into the stereo. The wind sweeps through Belle’s hair as we sail toward the town hall and I think of Caleb. I will always love him. I wonder about where he is now, what he is doing and whether he would be happy for me. I hope he is happy.
With five minutes to go before the ceremony, Belle pulls over in front of the pub opposite the town hall. She leans over and kisses me.
‘See you inside, my darling.’
She flies off in a mass of balloons, as a crowd of brightly coloured gowns, frock coats, top hats and layers of sparkles spill out of the pub, all cheering.
There are my friends from Liverpool, from the Guildhall, and the wonderful little bar where I first met Dillan; a decade of new and old friends. And beside them, smiling proudly, stand my brother, his wife Layla, and my sister.
Like an elegant circus they all parade across to the town
hall, hugging me, shaking my hand, and blowing kisses, wishing me luck as they pass.
Last of all comes Dillan, in his white Vivienne Westwood suit and silver trainers.
We stand and grin at one another.
Frankie spins round, her dress cracking like a dragon’s tail in the middle of the road.
‘Hurry up, then!’ she laughs.
We race to catch up with our merry band, crossing the road and winding its way up the marble steps toward the great oak doors.
Two years after my father learned the truth about Joseph, he turned up at Joseph’s door with Jimmy and let him know that he knew the truth. Joseph lashed out at my father, but Jimmy, by then in his mid teens and as large as a truck, punched him in the mouth, exploding four of his front teeth.
Four more boys came forward to say that Joseph had also abused them. Unwilling to pass him over to the police, the accusing boys’ fathers, their friends and relatives made his last years a living hell. He was hunted, tortured, and beaten up by men who once looked up to our family. He went to work for a scrap company in another town, and five years ago he died, alone in his home, from a heart attack.
My father no longer has anything to do with his remaining brother, Tory. After Old Noah died, Tory refused to speak to them again, and in the following years, he lost most of his money.
My father has throat cancer – a legacy of his years of heavy smoking. He is near blind, and spends most of his time asleep in front of the TV. His last attempt at bullying the family ended when Henry-Joe stood up to him and hit him back, yelling ‘You might be able to scare everyone else, old man, but I am not a little boy any more. I’m a better
man than you will ever be, so don’t ever raise your hand to me again.’
My father did not. He knew that he had been beaten.
Jimmy, now barely twenty, turned out to be the wolf my father had hoped for. But my father’s violent training backfired. No one, not even my father, can stop Jimmy’s violence now. My father came to believe he was possessed, and took him to a church in the hope of an exorcism. It made no difference: Jimmy still spends his life looking for trouble. He has been charged several times with grievous bodily harm – on one occasion, towards thirteen people at one time. It began as a spat in the local pub when a Gorgia man tried to chat up Frankie. She tried to get rid of him before Jimmy arrived back from the bar. She pushed him away and he punched her in the eye in front of Jimmy, sealing his doom. The night ended with several people with broken bones and the guy who started it all with his index finger bitten off by Jimmy and spat across the carpet.
The days of knocking on doors are history – it is now against the law to call, the way Gypsies used to. The younger generation, while determined to carry on with their traditions for as long as possible, are having to find new ways of surviving.
I hope that they can. Left to themselves the Romanies live peacefully and quietly, away from the spotlight. But the Irish Travellers have damaged the image of travelling people everywhere – parking trailers wherever they choose, and scattering litter. There is also a lot more violence, not just with fists, but with knives.
A couple of years ago my brothers were accosted by a gang of fifteen Irish Travellers, aware of the reputation of
our family as fighters. Henry-Joe and Jimmy were prepared to fight, but knives appeared, and today Henry-Joe has vicious scars across his back, and Jimmy, after surgery for wounds to his face, was left with paralysed muscles down one side.
As for our old friends, many of them have encountered hard times.
Kayla-Jayne’s boyfriend Tyrone left her after she slept with him. Weeks later she realised she was pregnant. She kept it hidden until the eighth month, when her family found out. Tyrone was forced to marry her, but of course it didn’t last, and, like Frankie, she and her child live with her parents.
Levoy turned to crack not long after my departure, and was sent to stay with a family in San Diego to dry out. I saw him a few years ago, and although he was free of drugs, they had affected him deeply, both physically and mentally. He now lives with his parents and works in a local store in Newark. Bitter about what our upbringing has made him, he doesn’t see any of the people he used to know.
Adam came back to the Newark camp, and is now married, with three children.
Romaine didn’t marry. Now in her mid-twenties, she is regarded as a spinster. Aunt Minnie still wears her fur coat.
Jamie-Leigh married a violent man, who, while high on Ecstasy, was hit by a train and killed. In the years after I left Newark, when both she and Frankie had lost their husbands and were excluded socially, they found one another again and became very close. Jamie-Leigh would come round every day, always joking with my brothers that she was waiting for me to return and marry her. When my
family came to meet me at the airport she had sent with them a paper napkin, with a large heart drawn on it to give to me. Underneath she had written, with perfect spelling, ‘I love you’.
Soon after that, Jamie-Leigh got involved with the underworld and began smuggling drugs. She was caught with cocaine strapped to her thighs, and is now serving a long sentence in a South American prison. I don’t know if we will ever meet again, but I will always feel she is a part of me.
My cousin Tory got married and lives with his wife and children in a house across the way from Granny Bettie. Noah is divorced and works as a bodyguard now.
Aunt Maudie had a stroke while she cleaned the kitchen, and Uncle Tory came home that night to find her dead on the kitchen floor. He was devastated.
It breaks my heart to know how many of our people are struggling, and turning to drugs or crime. A once proud race has been brought to its knees.
And what of the mythical King of the Gypsies?
The real truth is that there never has been a Romany king. Only the odd self-proclaimed fool, who ends up getting himself and his whole bloodline beaten to a pulp.
I wouldn’t change my life. If I hadn’t done all that I have done, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I am proud of my race, and what I am.
You can take the boy away from the Gypsies, but you can’t take the Gypsy out of the boy.
To my ball and chain. I love you Always.
To all those other Kids of the 80’s … Never Say Die.
And last of all, to you who read this book. I wrote this just for you.
Mikey
Five years ago MIKEY WALSH finally succumbed to staying put. London called him and it is the longest time he has ever lived in one place. He taught himself to read and write and now works at a nearby primary school, where he teaches art and drama, and also picks up the formal education he missed out on as a child. He proposed to his partner on the number 38 bus two years ago and they married last summer.