McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (30 page)

‘Er…nowhere, sir.’

‘Nowhere? Nowhere?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Take your hands out of your pockets in class.’

The rest of the class is cracking up now.

‘What’s your name?’

‘McCarthy, sir.’

‘McCarthy? A Cork man, is it? The rebel county, eh? We’ll see about that. Well, McCarthy, stand up straight. That’s better. Now, repeat after me…’

He enunciates some Irish words and I do my best to copy him. ‘Cá…bhfuil…an…pub.’

‘Not bad. Now, the whole class.’

Sixty voices join in this time.

‘Well done. Now, McCarthy, do you know what that means?’

All eyes are on me. They’re a hard audience to gauge. If I say ‘God save the Queen’ will it get a laugh? Possibly not. ‘Stuff the Pope’ could be risky too.

‘No, sir.’

‘
Cá bhfuil an pub
. It means ‘Where is the pub?’ Well, it’s just up there at the top of the street. You’ve been an excellent class. Good afternoon to you now, and God bless.’

I head for the door as quick as I can, as keen to avoid eye contact with my smirking classmates as I used to be after some ritual humiliation at the age of fourteen. I walk up to Mac’s pub. It’s actually a very welcoming traditional interior, but the stigma of drinking in a fake pub in a theme park is more than my soul can bear. Suddenly, reality intrudes and I look at my watch. Twenty-five to six. I’ve been having so much fun in theme-park hell that I’m too late to pick up my tyre. Damn. I’m going to have to find somewhere to stay. As I head for the car the school master is in the street, heckling passers-by.

‘You there, wake up! No holding hands! No eating sweets! Stop that smiling…’

I give an involuntary shudder. If a fake situation like this has the ability to chum up real emotions then what, precisely, is my objection to theme parks?

‘Organised fun, that’s what.’

I’m talking to myself in the shower. It’s not a problem, provided you keep things in perspective. When I was a student, I shared a house for a year with a guy who used to talk out loud late at night in his room so the rest of us would think he had a woman in there. He used to come in the kitchen and make two cups of coffee, then wink and go back upstairs to continue the monologue. He’s something big in personnel now, but they call it Human Resources.

Half a mile up the road from Bunratty are five enormous American-style houses, all clearly purpose-built as homes with a large B&B capacity. I pick the one that offers ‘TV and Radio!’ and, crucially, ‘Hairdryers!’. Everything—floors, walls, beds, wardrobes, ceilings, tables—is made from varnished pine, so that the sound of someone placing a book on a bedside locker seventeen rooms away echoes down the hallway like a truck delivering rubble.

When I arrived a couple from Ohio were in the hallway, about to head off to the medieval banquet. They clearly didn’t fancy the few hundred yards of pretty country lane that stood between them and the castle, so they were trying to get the owner, a farmer recently turned hotelier, to sort things out for them.

‘Say, could you call us a cab?’

‘A taxi? To go to the castle?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But it’s only along the road there. Sure, you’ll walk there in ten minutes.’

‘Yeah, well we’d like a cab.’

‘See, I don’t think they’ll come now for such a short journey.’

‘Hey, I’m paying them, aren’t I? Guess I can ask them to go wherever I like.’

‘I’m telling you, sir, they won’t come. Sure, it’s only a few hundred yards. Less than ten minutes I’d say.’

‘So you’re saying they don’t want the business?’

‘I’m saying it’s a very short distance, sir.’

‘I don’t believe this country.’

His wife intervened before things turned ugly. ‘Come on, hon, I guess we can walk. We can take a look at some nature.’

It wasn’t as if they were a pair of lard-arses, like the Tweedles in Killarney. They looked in reasonable shape; yet the blanket refusal of most Americans to walk anywhere that has a purpose, like a shop or a bar or a castle, remains one of life’s enduring mysteries. Put them in expensive jogging clothes, though, with headphones on and silly little weights in their hands, and they’re happy to strut up and down main roads in toxic fumes for hours without going anywhere, because it’s Exercise. But walk to the shop? ‘No way. Not me. Guess I’ll just sit here and silt up.’

I shower and change and head downstairs to see if they can arrange a chauffeur-driven stretch limo with opaque windows to take me to the pub. My footsteps echo off the woodwork like Harry Lime’s in the sewers of Vienna. The Reluctant Taximan is in the hall, polishing what appears to be a sacred barometer.

‘Will you be going to the banquet tonight, sir?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘They usually have a second sitting later.’

‘I’ll just be having a couple of quiet drinks, I think.’

‘Let me give you a tip. Don’t be going to Durty Nellie’s. It’s just a tourist trap these days. If you want to meet some locals, go to Mac’s pub instead. That’s where they all go.’

‘The pub in the theme park?’

‘In the Folk Park. That’s right. The park is closed but the pub stays open till late.’Tis very popular.’

I’m struggling to take this on board, and have to seek clarification.

‘So what you’re saying is the tourists go to the real pub, but the real people go to the fake pub in the theme park.’

‘That’s it.’

This is possibly the weirdest thing I’ve heard so far. I make a mental note to include it in the movie screenplay I’ve been working on at night after the pubs have shut. It’s set in an Irish fishing village that becomes rich from tourism when the local priest secretly dresses up as a dolphin and swims round the bay. There’s a sub-plot involving a nationwide noodles conspiracy, some humorous Germans and a bogus stone circle. I’m hoping Hollywood might be interested. They could cast Keanu Reeves as the priest, with Hugh Grant co-starring as a rough and ready Irish fisherman. I’ve got a good feeling about this. I think it could be a goer.

Sitting right next to the castle on what must be one of the prime pieces of retail real estate in the country, Durty Nellie’s is a simple thatch and sawdust pub that must turn over millions each year. There’s only a handful of people in when I arrive, all of them eating. I get a pint, and sit on a bench by the window. I’ve brought Father’s Music, the Dermot Bolger novel, with me, but I quickly realise that the first page is far too raunchy to read in a public place, so I order some smoked salmon and soda bread instead, and try and calm down. I’m in a small bar between the two main rooms, and for the moment I have it to myself. I’ve just started eating when the door opens and two short but substantial women walk in. They’re in their thirties, wearing nylon windcheaters and baseball caps, and one of them is chewing gum. I know it’s wrong to deal in stereotypes, and everyone deserves to be treated as an individual, but I can’t banish a nagging suspicion that they might be from the United States.

‘Oh, wow,’ says one of them. Perhaps she’s never seen anyone eating smoked fish before. She goes to the door and shouts outside.

‘Hey, Clyde, check this out!’

Clyde comes bounding in like an enthusiastic wolfhound. Boy, is he tall. If one of the women stood on the other woman’s shoulders, and then they dressed up in a long coat and went out on a date with Clyde, people would still point at them in the street and chortle at the remarkable height disparity.

‘Wow,’ says Clyde. ‘Okay.’

You can see he’s impressed. He whips out a top-of-the-range digital stills camera, and the women instinctively fall into one of those good-time-on-holiday poses you see on photos pinned to bar walls all round the world. Click, and they’re outta here. I have the place to myself again. What will they say when they’re showing their holiday photos to the folks back home?

‘And here’s one of us in some place we don’t know what it’s called where we didn’t have a drink.’

‘You look like you’re having a good time.’

‘Oh, we were, we were. There was a guy like, eating fish?’

‘Excellent.’

At bang on seven o’clock I’ve just finished eating and I’m standing at the bar, when the door opens again and two men in their sixties stride purposefully into the room. One of them walks straight to the upright piano against the wall, the other straps on the piano accordion he’s been carrying and, without any further ceremony, they launch straight into a rather down-beat lament. People immediately appear in both doorways and gaze in admiration. People behind them push through and take seats in the room, like extras drifting on from the wings to fill the stage in a big musical. It’s extraordinary. The tune that had begun to an empty room finishes to tumultuous applause. My pint’s still only half poured.

A flurry of skilled professional banter from the accordionist quickly establishes that everyone, and I mean every single person in the room, bar me, is American; yet this afternoon at the castle everyone seemed to be French. Perhaps there’s some vampire-type thing going on, where the French all turn American at nightfall. Back at the bench there’s only a discarded paperback novel to mark where my seat used to be. I squeeze back in between Kirsty and her cousin Raymond from Philadelphia. Their mothers are sisters and the four of them have spent the last ten days touring Ireland in a tiny car, sleeping four to a room, which I suppose is a kind of fun. Their mothers are on the other side of the room, clapping and singing along to ‘The Black Velvet Band,’ which is quickly followed by ‘Wild Rover’. Everybody seems to know the words, and somehow the American accents don’t seem incongruous. I just pretend that I’m in an Irish theme bar in New York, and immediately start to get powerful feelings of nostalgia for Ireland, which seems a perfectly valid way of getting something positive out of the situation.

It’s not long before everyone is singing along to old Celtic favourites like ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. By the time we hit ‘My Way’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’, it’s mayhem, and still only half past seven.

Suddenly, amid the popping flashbulbs, a middle-aged woman takes the floor. She is holding a camcorder to her eye, delivering a faltering commentary as she goes panning round the room, lurching forward for big close-ups of her family, who are cheering her on. Clearly, she’s not used to doing this, but the crowd are playing along, waving and grinning for the camera in an amiable game-show kind of way. Then her son steps forward, puts his hand on her shoulder and stops her.

‘Mom, Mom.’

He is embarrassed as you can only be when you’re embarrassed for your mother.

‘Mom, it’s the wrong way round. You’re looking through the wrong end.’

Mom removes the lens from her eye and stares at it in puzzlement.

‘So that’s why I can’t see anything.’

She turns the camera round so that it’s pointing towards the crowd, and then she’s off again.

‘Mom, Mom.’

‘What now?’

‘You have to press like, the little red button?’

‘Oh. Okay.’

And that’s how they make TV holiday programmes these days.

At the end of the song, the musicians take a short break to regroup and discuss whether they know all the chords to other old Irish favourites, like ‘Uptown Girl’, and ‘Copacabana’. Kirsty and Raymond take me across the room to introduce me to their mothers. We chat while Kirsty gets the drinks.

‘Say, Peedurh, can you tell us something? We’ve been driving all week and we still don’t know if the signs are in miles or kilometres.’

‘They’re in both. Either. It varies.’

‘Isn’t that kind of confusing?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, how do you know which is which?’

I explain that you have to try and guess the age of the signpost and the graphics, but they’re struggling to keep up. Suddenly the room darkens as an enormous man enters. He’s in his fifties, wearing a striped businessman’s shirt open at the collar, and pants you could camp in, even if there were a few of you. He places a large cup on top of the piano, and starts to click his fingers. Everything goes quiet. A deep, soulful R and B voice rumbles up from some hidden place inside him.