McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (17 page)

I feel rather pathetic telling the woman serving me that I’ve come in because my name is McCarthy. Presumably I’m not the first lonely heritage-obsessed saddo to turn up from overseas claiming to be part of the diaspora and hoping to be made a fuss of. But I’m made as welcome as any local, and no traveller can ask for more. In fact, unlike the locals, I’m not allowed to pay for my drink. She introduces herself. It’s her pub. I blurt out something embarrassing about perhaps being cousins, like I’m some dewy-eyed policeman from Boston who’s never set foot in Ireland before.

‘Actually, it’s my birthday today and there’s a bit of a party later. Maybe you’d like to come?’

Trust me on this one. If you ever manage to turn up, by chance, in a strange town where there’s a pub with your name on it, on the night of the landlady’s birthday, and she invites you to the party, then this is God’s way of telling you to forget about going back to the B&B for sandwiches and an early night.

It must have been around four in the morning that I spilled the whiskey on the social worker. Earlier on things had been more sedate. For a while, at least.

I was introduced to neighbours and friends, a sister, and an eighty-two-year-old mother, who’d flown over from England for the birthday, but was planning to move back permanently, she told me, while buying me a pint to follow the one on the house, and the one the social worker, or was it the sister, had bought. Then someone turned up and said she’d just seen a woman put up her umbrella outside the church and a bread knife had fallen out.

I stood up about then and cracked my head on a shelf of sugar bags and jam, but by then someone had arrived with the menus and they were all ordering starters for the birthday dinner. So I said goodbye as they got up to leave and, ‘What are you talking about?’ said someone, and ‘Has he not ordered?’ asked another. So I ordered the garlic mussels and the sole and next thing I know we’re all outside and walking down the street carrying our drinks to the sister’s restaurant, where they sit me down at a specially laid table. I’d gatecrashed the private family party.

‘Ah no, this is just the meal, the party won’t be till later.’

I was handed a glass of white to go with my pint, its creamy head now mottled with rainspots. Someone else passed a glass of red. Suddenly I realised I was the only male on a table of high-spirited females, assorted ages forty-something to eighty-two. One of them raised a glass.

‘Well, Peter, blessed art thou amongst women,’ which really is an excellent joke if you know your Hail Mary.

I recall very fine ratatouille, potatoes
and
chips, so you didn’t have to make that difficult choice in advance, more wine, and seventy-two flash photos, unless they were only twenty-four-shot films, in which case there were just the forty-eight.

My credit card caused some hilarity, on account of there being no bill. Walking down the street some time after eleven, all the pub doors were shut and curtains drawn. True, the tremendous hubbub coming from behind the curtains suggested there might be the odd straggler still trapped inside, but of course they’d only be observing the statutory drinking-up time, licensing laws in the west of Ireland being painstakingly observed, as anyone will tell you. We went past MacCarthy’s, continued along the street, then through the door of a house, where we proceeded in a northerly direction along a darkened passageway, before emerging behind the bar of the most crowded pub I have ever been in in my life. Young women, gnarled old men, lads with Vinny Jones haircuts, animated old ladies, extended families were all yabbering and laughing and generally observing the statutory drinking-up time with impressive commitment.

Moving in any direction clearly wasn’t an option and the pub, as I’ve said, was shut. Unsure what to do, I instinctively ordered a round of drinks. You never know, perhaps there was an official extension, passed by the local courts for the benefit of the group of people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a glamorous, sporadically conscious young woman in the corner. Well, clearly my luck was in. An extra hour’s legal drinking must have been granted, because my round duly appeared.

‘That’ll be £18.47.’

This was the first money I’d been allowed to spend all night. I handed over a twenty, happy to be paying my way at last.

‘Ah wait, you’re with the MacCarthys. Sure, put that away, these’ll be on the house.’

We extricated ourselves from the crush just before midnight, when the legally extended closing time would certainly be enforced and everyone sent home, whether they liked it or not. Somehow you could feel it in the air.

Back at MacCarthy’s, however, no such restrictions applied, because this was a private party. I was in the dream Irish pub of the popular romantic imagination—dimly lit, past midnight, shelves piled with obscure groceries, a buzz of conversation and whoosh of energy coming off the crowd. On a bench by the wall two musicians were playing ‘Happy Birthday’ to announce the arrival of a giant strawberry gateau. For a moment I had a vision of Michael Flatley bursting from it in a shamrock posing pouch, his taut nipples glistening with baby oil.

But fortunately, this wasn’t a road we had to go down, and it was just cut into slices. The musicians played a raucous set of songs that nebulous half-Irish like me recognise, but can’t name. The guitarist’s massive voice cut effortlessly through the noise of the crowd and the bearded mandolin player, eyes closed in passionate supplication as he hit the high notes, was the very essence of the traditional Irish musician.

Turned out he was German. He just bowled up here five years ago wearing a sarong, and never left. The audience clearly didn’t resent his playing their music; if anything, I’d say they took the imitation as flattery.

I found myself envying this outsider who’s now an insider in a place where I desperately want to belong myself, despite the outrageous hours they keep. I was jolted out of my introspection by a seventy-two-year-old woman who stood on a chair and sang ‘The Fields of Athenry’. She was a bit wobbly on her pins, on account of having suffered a stroke the previous week, but it went down well anyway. Everyone followed with songs of their own, except me, because we just don’t carry on like that in England; and this, more than anything else, made me feel like an impostor.

But then singing turned to dancing and I no longer felt English, just awkward, as I was swept up in a distant relative of the waltz. By now, there were just a dozen of us, the hardcore survivors of the seething mob who’d been here four hours ago. Christ, was that really the time? As I swivelled my wrist to look at my watch I tipped the glass of Jameson’s I was holding over the social worker, but of course it wasn’t a problem, it was only whiskey, she said, and didn’t I look at home here? And would I ever think of coming to live here, because it’s clear that I belong? I hadn’t even told her what was going through my head or the reasons for my trip.

As Stroke Lady was loaded into a taxi of which she would have no recollection next day, but that’s the medication for you, I noticed the birds were singing, and decided to try and fit in a short nap before breakfast. Saying goodbye to my new-found family and friends, I realised with a shock that I now knew more about some of them than about people at home I’d known for twenty years. As I can’t now remember what these things were, I can’t say whether or not this was a profound and truthful insight, or just gibberish.

I walked back along the high street, past pubs that were either long closed, or full of people who’d calmed down quite a lot since last night. It was half past five as I walked up the gravel drive to the front door of the B&B. After several frustrating minutes trying to open it with my bedroom key, I tried the front door one instead. As I lurched inside, Mrs O’Sullivan appeared, just in time to see me pause to admire the luminous Virgin again, and knock it off the wall. Politely declining the six rounds of ham sandwiches on the tray she was holding, I edged gingerly along the hallway to the wrong bedroom door, and opened it.

If it weren’t for the fact that the pubs had been closed for six and a half hours, she’d probably have thought I was drunk.

I wake the next morning around eleven. Two Italian motor-cyclists in blue and yellow suits are staring at me, and grinning.

I’ve woken once already when, two and three-quarter hours after she’d offered me the plate of sandwiches, Mrs O’Sullivan knocked on my door and announced it was breakfast time. To my distress, the fry-up featured puddings, both black and white, and an unforgivable kidney. I palmed the offending items into a napkin, and slipped the obscene bundle into my trouser pocket for disposal later. Out in the polished parquet hallway, Mr O’Sullivan was bolting the Blessed Virgin back on the wall with a Black and Decker, while his son played Robopriest on the computer. I paid Mrs O’Sullivan and thanked her.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you’re looking grand, considering. Isn’t it true that Mrs Thatcher only used to sleep three hours a night when she was in charge of you?’

Perhaps so. If she went round all day feeling like this, it would explain an awful lot.

I went outside into a biblical deluge with no plan beyond having a big snooze in the car. Negotiating the steep driveway in the Tank was like white-water rafting, only without a big Kiwi to rely on if the going got tough. Making sure not to knock the eagles off the gateposts and really spoil Mr O’Sullivan’s day, I turned right down the lane, with the tide. My eyes felt as if I’d slept with someone else’s contact lenses in. Perhaps I had. I gave them a good rub and crouched forward over the steering wheel like Mr Magoo.

The road ahead was all but invisible in the apocalyptic gloom, and the exhaust rattle had upgraded itself overnight to a bassy blowy sound not unlike a tuba. All things considered, it would be a good idea to stop soon. Suddenly a dog ran out of a driveway and started to ran along beside the car, snapping and yelping at the wheels.

I waited until the barking had stopped, indicating either that I had outrun the high-spirited little dog, or squashed the bastard, and pulled into the gateway of a mist-shrouded field. I remembered the heated seat, an impressive feature in a ₤290 car; so I turned it on, closed my eyes and was asleep in seconds, only quicker.

I think the bikers have come to view a stone circle in the field and found me parked in their way. I don’t know how long they’ve been knocking on the windscreen; long enough to find it amusing, at any rate. There’s a considerable amount of drool on my chin, but they look sensational. Doesn’t it make you sick, how Italians always look so good? In Verona, I’ve seen pensioners wearing Gucci shades and canary-yellow mohair suits. Where I live they have on-the-spot fines for that sort of carry-on.

There’s nothing like a couple of Italians staring at you to make you feel ashamed to be part of a nation that thinks polyester is a good fabric. They wait patiently for me to reverse out of the steaming quagmire.

‘Iz no problem,’ says the guy, who looks like a particularly handsome Serie A footballer, while his presumably cello-playing supermodel novelist girlfriend hugs his arm. The sun’s out now, and I fancy a look at the stone circle myself, which is now clearly visible in the field, but I can’t bear the thought of them seeing that I’m wearing brown shoes with black trousers; so I drive off back towards town, exhaust trumpeting stylishly. There’s an enormous single standing stone about fourteen feet high in the garden of a bungalow. These things must be ten a penny round here, I think, swerving to avoid an object in the road, which may or may not have been a dead dog.

There are no Singapore noodles in the Beara Peninsula; however, they do a decent bit of cod in the Old Bakery Café, which is where I find out about the Buddhists. Half an hour later, I’m looking down from my window on the cliff edge, past the fluttering prayer flags, on to one of the most spectacular stretches of coastline I’ve ever seen. Five craggy headlands stand in a line between me and Castletownbere. Blue sky is followed by yellow mist, then by an enormous broad rainbow, as the weather goes into convulsions on hitting land for the first time since leaving America.