McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (25 page)

The presenter’s doing his best to sound concerned, but clearly this isn’t what he went into showbiz for. His polished mid-Atlantic brogue can’t conceal the fact that he’d like Donal’s cottage to collapse on him, his phone, and his kidney machine. He obviously hasn’t considered the possibility that Donal may not exist.

Someone told me a while back that a lot of the crankier-sounding phone-ins, and the most deranged letters received by producers of TV and radio programmes, come from students on media studies courses, who are encouraged by their feckless, embittered, promiscuous, drunken tutors to see how programme-makers react under extreme provocation. So it could be that Donal isn’t on dialysis in a turf-fired hovel in Monaghan, as he claims, but on vodka and Nightnurse in a centrally heated flat in Dublin, killing time until
Countdown
comes on.

So I just sit patiently in the traffic and listen. There’s just time to shave, grow more stubble and shave again, when suddenly we’re moving and I’m out of the town centre and on to a ring road full of petrol stations, B&Bs and recently erected Ikea flat-pack hotels. As I’m turning off a roundabout on to the Tralee road, I spot a hitch-hiker who is giving a demonstration of how not to hitch-hike. Is he standing up, smiling, with his thumb out? No. He is sitting, slumped forward, with a sign round his neck, like a police mugshot of someone called ‘Galway’. He’s nodding his head as he listens to a Walkman, and he has a scarier beard than Gerry Adams. Because it takes so long to type books out and sew all the pages inside the cover, you are reading this quite a while after I left Killarney; but, believe me, if you go there tomorrow, he will still be by the roundabout.

Halfway to Tralee, I stop to buy a small bottle of still mineral water. It’s fresh Irish spring water, just like the water we used to get from my uncle’s well when I was a kid, except that it works out at £2.40 a litre now. Mind you, you couldn’t read a list of ingredients on the side of the bottle in those days, so that’s value for money. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how we coped before we could read the contents of a bottle of water. Calcium, magnesium, potassium, nitrate and fluorides, but not a trace of fat. That’s one of the best things about water, I reckon. No fat. I drink deep, and drive on.

Tralee has depressing outskirts, but a delightful town centre. While Ireland’s new prosperity has brought new building and transformed the look of the countryside, lots of small country towns have remained unchanged apart from a lick of paint and the odd rogue plastic window. You can see why they didn’t use Tralee as the location for
Bladerunner
. It’s a town from a children’s story book, free of glass and steel modernising, and bearing no resemblance to the increasingly homogenous British high street with its depressingly familiar procession of brand names. A place like Tralee puts you in touch with a remembered but recently disappeared past, and makes you realise how long it is since you walked through a British town and thought, ‘Oh good. There’s a branch of the Gap.’

There are a couple of traditional-looking but un-ponced-up hotels with Georgian doors and sash windows. I go into one and find a homely restaurant, where local shoppers and business people are nattering vigorously over the comfort-food set lunch. I order from the schoolgirl waitress, then take out a set of brochures and information sheets about the Lough Derg pilgrimage.

From midnight, prior to arrival at Lough Derg, the pilgrim observes A COMPLETE FAST FROM ALL FOOD AND DRINK [their emphasis], plain water excepted, and prescribed medication. The fast continues for three full days…

I actually have butterflies in my stomach reading this stuff. As I’m starting to question the wisdom of making this journey north, I’m distracted by the conversation at the next table, where two big, rugged men in suits—rough diamonds who look like they’ve made a few bob—are beginning to reap the benefits of the couple of drinks they had before lunch.

‘Hey, did ya hear about the Corkman who went on
Mastermind
?’

His friend is shaking his head, and already laughing at the central conceit. Kerrymen like them have always made jokes about Corkmen, and vice versa; the rest of Ireland makes jokes about Cork and Kerry; and the English make jokes about the whole of Ireland, in the belief that there’s nothing funny about Surrey.

‘So Pat goes on
Mastermind
. He goes and sits in the chair in the spotlight, like, and they announce his special subject: “Ireland, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, 1916 to 1921.”

‘ “Start the clock,” says yer man. “First question, name one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916.”

‘ “Pass.”

“Name the IRA leader who led the fight against the British before agreeing to partition.”

‘ “Pass.”

“Name the first president of the Irish Free State.”

‘ “Pass.”

‘And a voice shouts out from the audience, “Good man, Pat. Tell the bastards fuck all.” ’

There are places in the world where it’s dangerous to react to other people’s conversation, but I’m sure Tralee isn’t one of them. They’re laughing out loud, and so am I. The joke-teller catches my eye, gives a big grin, and says, ‘How are ya?’ and I find I’m congratulating myself on my choice of lunch venue. Once you’ve been around a bit, I reckon, you get an eye for these things. After all, the locals eat here. It’ll be simple ingredients, simply cooked. Add on the top-notch humour, and this is shaping up to be the perfect lunch.

And then it arrives.

Cremated lamb, gravy with skin, thrice-microwaved carrots, two ice-cream scoops of mashed potato riddled with hard bits, all singed crisp for ten minutes under one of those incendiary lamps, then served on a plate the temperature of molten copper.

I try my best to eat it, honest I do. I think of how hungry I’ll be at Lough Derg. I imagine I’m in prison. I slice off a forkful of gravy and pretend it’s squid, but it’s too rubbery to be realistic. So I’m on the horns of a painful dilemma here, the eternal and exquisite agony of the Englishman abroad, or at home for that matter: to complain, or not to complain? Of course, we’re known for not complaining, because we’re embarrassed by it. But if I do complain and send it back—as clearly I should, because eating it isn’t an option—they’ll think, Ah, supercilious English bastard, it’s good enough for everybody else, but not for him. But if I don’t, then the waitress will go back in the kitchen and they’ll all go, ‘Did ya give the English guy the joke meal? And did he eat it? Christ almighty!’

So perhaps this is where my Irish side can come into play. I won’t be sneery, or snotty; and I won’t be hypocritically silent either. I’ll just smile like an old pal, and make a pleasant social encounter of it. I’ll say, ‘Hey I’m not being awkward but…’

‘Is everything all right, sir?’

‘Mm? What?’

She’s appeared from nowhere.

‘Is your meal all right, sir?’

We’re both looking at it. As it’s set, it’s started to bulk up alarmingly, and has taken on the texture of one of those elephant-dung sculptures that get shortlisted for the Turner Prize. But somehow, I can’t do the English thing, and I can’t do the Irish thing. I can’t complain, I can’t not complain. I can’t turn it into an amusing social encounter, and I sure as shit can’t eat it. So I pretend my mouth is full, nod slowly, and give a wincing half-smile, as if I’ve been kicked in the testicles and I’m trying to pretend it doesn’t hurt. This does the trick. She moves on to the Kerrymen, and serves each of them an enormous tureen of unidentified solids obscured by custard.

I wait till she’s gone back into the kitchen, then leave the price of the meal, plus a tip, on the table next to the untouched food and dash for the door. When you’re a student you run out without paying; but when you’re a grown-up you pay, then run out without eating. It’s one of the perks of being emotionally immature.

Out in the street, my instinct is to hide, in case someone runs out after me and tries to give me back my money, or my meal. There’s a tourist board sign pointing up the street to the Kerry Experience, the thing the clandestine snoggers were pretending to read about last night. So I decide to go there, even though I don’t know what it is.

It turns out to be an award-winning museum and Visitor Attraction, with a modern computerised box-office and ticketing operation. This gets up my nose for a start, as I still cling to the naive and discredited Marxist dogma that museums should be free. Two French students, barely visible beneath backpacks the size of American fridges, are negotiating a discount as I shell out the full whack, but I try not to let it bother me.

‘And may we leave our luggages ’ere?’

‘I’m sorry. We have no room.’

I follow them as they lurch precariously up the stairs, aware that at any moment they might topple over on to their backs and die like sheep before the emergency services can get to them.

Why do people carry these vast objects around on their backs? In my experience, most backpackers you see round the world are only interested in beach parties, nightclubs, and pizza, and have no intention of climbing a mountain or hiking a hill in their lives, unless they have to go up one to score some Es, and even then they probably get a cab. The pack is only used for carrying dirty washing around the world; so why don’t they throw some of it away and get a nice little holdall instead?

The Experience affects me as these things usually do. I find myself wishing that instead of being in an audio-visual display about Kerry, or an interactive recreation of life in Kerry, I was outside, in Kerry. Mind you, there’s a family from Dublin who are good value. At various points in the exhibition, life-sized figures are arranged in tableaux to illustrate life in ancient Ireland: lighting a fire, making Celtic jewellery, hunting, serving after hours, and so on. But instead of reading the information boards, the Dubliners are climbing into each display—three boys, a girl, and Ma and Pa—and taking flash photos of themselves gurning, shrieking and flashing V-signs among their Celtic ancestors. As I leave, I see one of the French backpackers wedged in a narrow gap between the Dark Ages and the arrival of Christianity.

At the end of a corridor lined with impressive photographs of ruined castles and stone monuments is a big-boned youth in a white shirt and black trousers. There’s no one else around. He gives me a big smile.

‘Do ya want the ride?’

It’s hard to know really, isn’t it? Do you, or don’t you? What is ‘the ride’ anyway? In contemporary low-life Irish fiction it usually refers to sexual activity devoid of tenderness and longterm commitment, doesn’t it? So what’s this kid’s game?

‘This way.’

He leads me through a doorway. As I don’t know what to expect, anything would be a surprise, but I have to say I hadn’t anticipated little fairground carts on tracks. He sits me in one, presses a button, and off I glide into a reconstruction of medieval Tralee before it burned down in 1691. A tape plays, on which birds sing, sheep baa, and people greet you in Irish as you cruise past the market, the shops and the inn. ‘Sláinte’ shouts a man. Or was it ‘Wanker!’? It’s hard to tell with all the birds and sheep.

Ahead of me on the track I see three empty carts moving along; behind me, two more. I’m the only person in here. I have no kids with me, no foreign students to supervise, no minibus load from an old people’s home to care for. I am in here, on my own, on a sunny day, at full price, because I have chosen to be. I am indeed the saddest of the sad, and if I hadn’t realised already, I’d have seen it on Big Lad’s face as he stops my little ghost train car and lets me out.

Feckin’ tragic, he’s thinking. That’s worse than going on the dodgem cars on yer own.

I need a Kerry experience.

Back at the Tank, I look at the map. The latest version of my plan is to follow the road north, via Limerick, Galway and Sligo, to Donegal. Limerick isn’t far, a couple of hours at most. I could stay there tonight, or even go further. But this page of the map stops at Limerick. I look down the side of the page to see which number to turn to next and something catches my eye.

The Dingle Peninsula.

I want to be going north and east, and Dingle is south and west. Whichever way you look at it, that’s the wrong way; and the more diversions I make, the longer it will be before I get to the barefoot fasting and inflicting of holy bruises.