1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (13 page)

The audio backdrop to our conversations was provided by Dave, a drunk whose intoxication had led him to believe that he could still remember his entire repertoire of traditional Irish songs, and that this was the time and the place to present them before the public. Fortunately for him, the public were good-natured and long suffering. Obviously it was only a question of time before Dave’s musical 10,000 metres was over and he could be seen draped over a bar stool, but he wasn’t ready for the finishing tape yet, not whilst this final, interminable lap was still causing others a modicum of discomfort. He was selfless in that regard.

I didn’t want this evening to turn into an all-nighter, but Gary had other ideas, and at closing time declared as much.

‘Let’s all go down to Dodge’s and get really pissed.’

‘No, I really must go now,’ I said, sensing that Dodge’s wasn’t going to offer a sophisticated finale to the night’s proceedings. Naively, I looked to the others for support It wasn’t forthcoming, and I faced something of a barrage of viewpoints which weren’t wholly in favour of my calling it a night.

‘Tony, it’s completely at odds for a man who travels round Ireland with a fridge just to go home to bed.’

‘I know, I know, it’s just that I’m really tired and—’

‘Yeah, yawn, yawn, we know that, but we’ve got to do the ‘One for the Road’ thing.’

‘I’ve got to get some sleep, I really must.’

‘So it’s true that English people are wimps.’

‘I’m sorry but I am tonight, I really am.’

I stood up, hoping this might help matters but Gary was quick; ‘Sit the fuck down, cos you’re not going home.’

I sat down. This was ‘Houdini’s’, and my escapology skills fell some way short of what was required. In the end it was my own sozzled befud-dlement which brought about my liberation. I stood up again, turned to Gary, and tried to look determined.

‘I’m going to go now, I’ll see you in the morning, James.’

James. I called him
James
. Oh, it was a reasonable enough mistake to make, getting someone’s name wrong at the end of the evening, but of all the incorrect names available to me, I had to go for James. Gary’s expression seemed to change and I became momentarily anxious that he had taken my error as a Freudian slip, and that I saw him as ‘James’, my subservient Irish underling and chauffeur for the morning. I felt conspicuous, the old English landlord figure, benevolent maybe, but still a symbol of centuries of injustice.

Tiredness had made me paranoid. Everyone was laughing, and although there may have been a hint of the riled in Gary’s demeanour, his parting shot to me was delivered in a genial enough tone. It also bought me my freedom.

‘Tony, after calling me James, you should
definitely go
home.’

The walk home was exactly the one I had made when I had first arrived in Bunbeg three days ago. It ought to have been easier now, without a fridge and rucksack, but somehow it seemed further, no doubt the meandering gait of a man in the trough of physical condition doubling the distance to be covered. Back at the harbour, I sat on the quay and looked up at the stars, and then down at the gently shimmering water, the green and red lights of the harbour entrance providing a dash of technicolour to this, the tableau for a black-and-white movie about idyllic rural life. I decided I liked it here, and I felt a fellowship with all those who had left Ireland for London, New York or wherever, but had still maintained an unfaltering devotion to this, their pure and precious motherland. I let out a loud belch which rather brought my romantic reverie to a vulgar conclusion, and reminded me that thinking was best done in the morning, and sleeping was always the best option at night.

§

At 8.30 am I woke with an erection. There was no call for this—I wasn’t in the company of a beautiful woman, nor had my awakening interrupted an erotic dream, it was simply my body’s chosen way of saluting the new day. This phenomenon of an unwanted, unnecessary and more often than not unsightly erection, is undoubtedly a design fault by God. God did pretty well all round, creating oceans, clouds, wind, snow, whales, tigers and obstinate sheep. He had a heavy workload and no one could deny that the Almighty turned in a top-notch performance. But in one particular area—the design and implementation of the workings of the human penis, his work was sloppy. God, bless him, was accountable to no one, but if he had been, what would his school report have been like?

• GEOGRAPHY…. 10⁄10 Excellent. Especially well done with the Ox Bow lakes.
  
• HISTORY….10⁄10 Very well done. If you hadn’t created Time’, this would have been a free period.
  
• MATHS…. 10⁄10 Everything seems to add up.
  
• ENGLISH….9⁄10 Good, but you could have made them better at ‘making a scene’.
  
• RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION….8⁄10 You could have been a bit clearer about which is the right way, but most humans seem to worship you anyway, so you’ve got away with it.
  
• BIOLOGY…. 2⁄10 Design of the human penis, poor. See me.
  

After breakfast,
The Gerry Ryan Show
called and asked if I could give them a quick update on how I was getting on; presumably his listeners had been on tenterhooks as to whether I’d made it to Tory or not I relayed all the news and told Gerry I was heading for County Sligo today, conveniently forgetting to mention the extraordinary route I was going to take to get there.

‘Will you be watching the FA Cup final tomorrow?’ he asked.

I’d forgotten about that.

‘Well, yes I’d like to. Is it on TV over here?’

‘It is. I’m sure you and your fridge will find a suitable pub to watch it in. Have a good weekend now, won’t you?’

‘Yes, and you, Gerry.’

I was pleasantly surprised when Gary turned up only half an hour late, proudly announcing that he had gone to bed at 6.30 am. My appearance on
Live At Three
had depended totally on Gary being ‘Live at Ten Thirty’, which at 6 am must have been an evens bet, at best. I looked at him, frail and gaunt, his blood vessels coursing with alcohol, and began to wish that I
did
have a driver called James, with boiled sweets by the dashboard, a flask of tea and a rug in the back seat. Instead I had a wild man who was about to turn me into a road accident statistic.

‘Get hitching then!’ he croaked, in a voice about an octave lower than I recalled.

The previous night we had agreed that it would be wrong for me to accept a lift from Gary without having ‘worked’ for it, in the form of hitching. So, as Andy assembled his family for a formal seeing-off ceremony, Gary drove off to turn the car around and I dumped myself by the side of the road and stuck the old thumb out.

Seconds later a car pulled up. The window was wound down, and a frail, gaunt man with alcohol coursing through his veins called out to me, ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m headed for Northern Ireland, just south of Armagh.’

‘That’s lucky, so am I. Jump in.’

My goodness, what a lucky break.

§

I was sad to leave Andy, Jean and family, Bunbeg House having been home for an eventful three days and three nights. Andy had refused to let me pay for my accommodation, and only after a long struggle had he finally accepted some money towards a phone bill which I expected to have been doubled by the whole ‘helicopter incident’. As Gary drove me away up the narrow lane with which I was now so familiar, we passed a van coming the other way with ‘Donegal Plumbing Repairs’ written on its side, and I felt proud that if nothing else, my legacy at Bunbeg House would be a better quality shower for those in Room Six.

Gary entrusted me with the map reading but was unforthcoming when I asked for our exact destination.

‘Just get us to Armagh, and we’ll worry about the rest after. I’ve got a fax somewhere with all the details on it.’

I proposed a route which Gary approved with a worrying insouciance.

He was only concerned with specialising on his half of the bargain—driving. I hoped he was up to it.

‘Are you not knackered?’ I asked.

‘Ah no, I’m grand. I only need three and a half hours’ sleep.’

Gary was a vigorous driver. He should have had a sign on his wind: screen saying ‘No Concessions’, because he was uncompromising in pursuit of the shortest route between two points, and paid little heed to the discipline of driving on any particular side of the road, or to the well being of his passenger. What made things worse was that this was a hire car and Gary cared little about the future state of its suspension, and so I was bounced along Donegal’s roads at excessive speed to meet my TV crew, or if it pre-empted it, my maker.

Even though the scenery was passing quicker than I would have liked, I was still able to observe its wild beauty. Be it the impressive Errigal Mountain, its quartzite cone almost making it appear snow-covered, or the dramatic cliffs and marshy valley of the darkly named ‘Poisoned Glen’. As we hurtled past, Gary told me something about a vengeful British landlord who had deliberately poisoned the waters of the glen, but I failed to take in the finer details, finding it difficult to concentrate when each bend in the road threatened my very existence. We overtook on another blind comer and I felt my appearance on
Live At Three
was about to be usurped by a slot on
Dead At Noon
.

At Strabane the roadsigns changed and the distances were marked in miles instead of kilometres, marking my return into British Sovereign Territory. This was the province of Tyrone, and we were soon whizzing through its county town, Omagh, where the playwright Brian Friel was born. His play
Philadelphia Here I Come
was no doubt inspired by these surroundings, and might just as easily have been called
Anywhere Other Than Omagh, Here I Come
.

It was another sunny day, with a few clouds around, but threatening to turn into something of a scorcher. But I still couldn’t understand why I was feeling so hot Then I discovered the reason.

‘Gary, do you know that the heater is on full?’

‘Yeah, I can’t work out how to turn the thing off.’

I gave it five minutes of my time and achieved very little other than the establishment of the fact that I too was unable to turn the thing off. I made use of the only piece of equipment in the car which I understood, and wound down the window.

At Aughnacloy we were back on the border again and Gary made a short detour to show me the staunchly loyalist estate where the citizens had seen fit to paint Union Jacks on the paving stones. It was almost as if they had felt the need to be literal about the word ‘flagstones’. Not to be outdone, on their estate the nationalists had the Tricolour adorning their pavements. A battle for souls, under the soles. Would that the conflict had been fought entirely with the paintbrush.

I consulted the map and alerted Gary to the fact that Armagh wasn’t that far off now and he instructed me to rummage in the back for the fax with the details of our rendezvous.

‘Of course, the area south of Armagh is one of the few identifiable danger spots of the Troubles,’ he said, the beginnings of a grin suggesting that he was going to relish what was to come. ‘It’s bandit country. We should see a lot of army activity round there, and there’ll be choppers in the air and all that. Do you know about the sign they’ve put up near Crossmaglen?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a picture of a gunman with the words ‘Sniper At Work’ written underneath. When the nationalists first put it up, the British Army took it down. But then they made another one and put that up, and when that was taken down they made another, and so it went on until the British gave up and they just leave it there now.’

All rather sinister. I tried to lighten the mood by suggesting that the British Army should put their own sign up with a picture of a sniper crossed out Who knows, it might do the trick; for the most part it works for’No Right Turn’.

It must have looked odd, my arse being presented to oncoming traffic, but that was an unavoidable bi-product of my back-seat rummaging. I couldn’t find the fax anywhere.

‘It must be in the boot,’ said Gary with confidence, and so we stopped the car just outside Armagh and did a joint boot rummage.

No fax.

‘Have you looked under the fridge?’ asked Gary.

‘No, I haven’t but-Well, look under the fridge. I bet the bloody fax is under the bloody fridge.’

We looked, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t anywhere, because the man who only needed three and a half hours’ sleep had failed to put it in the bloody car. He pretended to be unconcerned.

‘It’s all right, because I remember that Antoinette said that the meeting point was somewhere on the Armagh to Dundalk Road.’

I consulted the map.

‘But Gary, as far as I can see, there are two roads to Dundalk, a big main one, and the B31, which is much smaller.’

‘The B31? I’m pretty sure the B31 was mentioned.’

Everything about Gary’s countenance suggested that he was anything but ‘pretty sure’ of the BSI’s involvement in the day’s plans. However that was the route we took until I realised what was going on here. I was being driven to an approximate area in Northern Ireland in the faint hope that we would casually run into a mobile TV unit, and the only reasons for suspecting that we might possibly be in the correct ‘approximate area’, were the vague recollections of an overtired man with a hangover. It made little sense and I insisted that we stop at a call box and phone the
Live At Three
office in Dublin.

From a British Telecom phonebox, I made an international call to the Republic of Ireland, and a flustered secretary at RTE gave me the address of our rendezvous and I took down the directions. I looked at my watch. It was 1.30 pm. At least we had time on our side, the crew couldn’t be far away and we had an hour before everyone at RTE would start to panic.

‘What we’re looking for, Gary,’ I explained, ‘is the Silverbridge Harp GAA Club. Apparently we take the R177 five miles south of Armagh.’

Gary was now the chief map reader, his cavalier driving skills temporarily rendered surplus to requirements since we had ceased having anywhere to head for. He studied the map and shook his head in frustration.