McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (39 page)

He’s almost at my table. He’s very enthusiastic. The fat Mancs are all watching. I stand up to meet him, smiling in feigned recognition. Then his face drops.

‘Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

I’m left standing there like a lemon, my hand stretched out. He picks his embarrassed way back across the room. The blimp kids are fighting over the rice that’s fallen on to the tablecloth, because that’s all that’s left now that they’ve finished their banana fritters. The three guys leave with their takeaway. He tries to look straight ahead, but he can’t resist a sideways glance as he goes through the door.

I know it’s possible with guilt, but can you be racked by curiosity? If you can, I am. Who did he think I was? He was Irish himself, local I expect. What if…what if I really do look like the bloke who used to own the pub over the road?
What if he’s mistaken me for Pete McCarthy?
The metaphysical implications are mind-boggling. Perhaps I should follow him out of the door and ask him, but then two things happen. Three, really.

The waitress comes across with my meal and begins to unload the tray on to my table, effectively blocking me in. I can see the three men crossing the street and approaching a parked car. I half stand, undecided; the Mancs get up to leave, milling around by the till and filling the doorway. So I sit back down, resigned to the fact that I’ll never know.

And then Frank McCourt walks past the window. I’m sure he sees me, but he just walks past, and then he’s gone. First the guy in the suede jacket, and now McCourt; two crucial questions, and neither of them answered. Mind you, McCourt’s probably just being polite. He must know how members of the public hate being pestered by celebrities when they’re out just trying to have a quiet meal.

The noodles are very good. Very spicy. The salt and pepper squid’s good too, though fiercely hot. It comes with intriguing garnish: lettuce, cucumber, tomato and a glacé cherry. The bill for everything is only £12, which makes these the cheapest noodles in the country by a long way. The Chinese lady is beaming as I go up to pay.

‘I watch you eat with chopsticks, very very good, where you learn? You been in China?

I tell her I’ve been to Hong Kong and to Guangzhou and she goes ballistic.

‘Guangzhou! Guangzhou! I don blieve it. You been in Guangzhou?’

She looks at my credit card as she hands it back. ‘Mr McCarthy! Like pub across road! I don blieve it. And you been in Guangzhou! Very good with chopsticks!’

I can still hear her as I walk out into the darkening, McCourt-less street.

‘Mr McCarthy! In Guangzhou! I don blieve it.’

‘That conical mountain to the left,’ wrote Thackeray, ‘is Croagh Patrick.’

The Reek dominates the whole of this corner of Mayo. Its near-symmetrical pyramid form is like the blueprint for an archetypal mountain, the resonant shape of a fairytale peak from a children’s story book. It is here that St Patrick is said to have issued the exclusion order banishing all snakes from Ireland when, in 441, he spent forty days and forty nights fasting at the summit. The mountain towers over the islands of Clew Bay, the small but perfectly formed town of Westport, and P. McCarthy’s pub, which is where I’m staying.

Just seven or eight miles from its namesake in Castlebar, this is the place where they once laid on the seventeen toasted sandwiches, as noted in Budapest a year last St Patrick’s Day. Since then, it’s changed hands. The new people aren’t called McCarthy, but they’ve kept the name outside in big red letters.

The landlady shows me to a room clad entirely in varnished pine that appears to have been finished the day before yesterday. I ask about the previous owner.

‘He was called Pete McCarthy. He went and opened a place in Castlebar.’

I feel like a particularly incompetent private detective, trying to track down my namesake and continually getting further away. Maybe he’s emigrated to England to see if he feels he belongs there.

They say that an hour after eating Chinese food you’re hungry; but an hour after eating Singapore noodles you’re thirsty, so I wander out into town for a nightcap. Matt Malloy, who plays flute in the Chieftains, has a pub that’s famous for traditional music; but it’s so full of affluent natives of various Mediterranean countries in posh waterproofs and Aran handknits that I can’t get in. Across the street in a room behind a small grocer’s shop I find a cunningly concealed one-room bar. It’s narrow and cramped, with benches and wooden booths, and is full of locals chattering away over the sound of Man United on the TV. I buy a pint, some razor blades and a Biro and install myself in a corner. Immediately, the man on my left turns to say hello. The Irish are so hospitable, aren’t they?

‘’Ello.’

Hold on, he’s got a south of England accent.

’Ere. Don’t I recognise you from Brighton?’

Great.

‘You’ve picked the right place. I love it in’ere, just locals. You only meet tourists in all the others. Three times a year I come over, for the birds; you know, the feathered variety, heh, heh.’

Oh God, no. A birdwatcher.

‘On your own? Yeah, me too.’

A birdwatcher with no mates.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen you around town. And in those TV travel programmes. That must be a cushy job, getting paid to have holidays. I work for Connex South Central meself, on the admin side.’

Connex? The bastards who took over the railways in the south-east when British Rail were taken outside and shot. First thing they did was abolish the buffet car, the bacon sandwiches and the cheese on toast that once made Brighton commuters the happiest in the world. There’s a kid in a cap now, with a trolley-load of confectionary and tea-flavoured drinks. I try to pin this disgraceful act of vandalism on my new friend, but he denies all responsibility.

He tells me something about his job that I don’t understand and can’t remember. Then he drinks up.

‘Well, must dash. Can’t linger. Up early in the morning. Places to go, birds to see, heh, heh, heh.’

I’m forced to consider the awful possibility that all those blokes you see with binoculars and flasks and ornithological reference books spend their days making dreadful bird-woman puns to each other.

‘Nice meeting you. Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you look a bit lonely. Mind how you go.’

That was half an hour ago. No one else has talked to me. Beckham’s just scored. I think I’ll go to bed now.

I was only going to stay the one night, but the skies are clear next morning and Croagh Patrick looks hard work, but inviting. It was a sacred place long before St Patrick showed up, and it seems a pity to be so close and not give it a go. I’ve just missed the big annual pilgrimage, when thousands of pilgrims go up together. It used to be the thing to do it barefoot, but the first-aid bills were colossal, so the Church said, ‘Get some shoes on!’ Perhaps I’ll go up on my own this afternoon, or, better still, tomorrow morning. Lough Derg will wait one more day.

Westport is a delightful little planned Georgian town, with what appears to be a little planned Georgian river right in the centre, where people can fish. There’s a comforting main street, with shops selling things you actually need, and plenty of wooden window frames and Georgian doors that have somehow survived the renovation boom. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of place to cash in on some spurious connection—‘Welcome to wonderful Westport, home of St Patrick and one of the blokes out of the Chieftains’—so it’s a bit perturbing to see a bar and restaurant called Thackerays, even if it is in the hotel where he stayed:

Nature has done much for this pretty town of Westport; and after nature, the traveller ought to be thankful to Lord Sligo who has done a great deal too. In the first place he has established one of the prettiest, comfortableist inns in Ireland in the best part of his little town, stocking the cellars with good wine. Secondly, Lord Sligo has given up for the use of the townspeople a beautiful little pleasure ground about his house.

Sligo was quite a lad. A friend of George IV and De Quincey, a patron of the arts and the turf, he was also a governor of Jamaica who helped free the slaves. He rode mules across Greece with Byron, and won a 1,000 guinea bet by driving his own coach from London to Holyhead in thirty-five hours. He also stole the 3,000-year-old columns from the entrance to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, and bribed the crew of a British warship to help take them home, for which he got four months in Newgate Prison.

It must have been some court case. On the day Sligo was released from jail—in a plot development that would have been rejected by the soaps as too far—fetched—his mother married the judge who sentenced him.

Sligo’s home, Westport House, is a splendid Georgian affair in a beautiful setting on the edge of town, facing Clew Bay, its islands, and the Atlantic. As I’m climbing the imposing stone steps to the front door, a family of six are queuing at the admissions desk in front of me. The two girls are very excited.

‘Mammie, Mammie, when will we see the rabbit?’

‘You’ll see him soon enough, now.’

‘We want to see Pinky!’

The skull and antlers of a 12,000-year-old elk, preserved through the millennia in an ancient peat bog, hang on the wall of the vaulted entrance hall. A fine collection of paintings of the house, the bay, and Croagh Patrick, by the celebrated Irish landscape artist James O’Connor, flank the splendid staircase that sweeps down into the hall. And descending the stairs, with a jaunty gait and a barmy wave, is a six-foot nylon fur-fabric pink rabbit that’s looking a bit frayed round the edges. The kids go potty. Ignoring the obvious risk of electrocution by nylon-generated static, they mob the great big bunny.

‘Pinky! Pinky! Pinky!’

The poor sod inside buckles under the onslaught of good-natured blows to the head and kidneys.

‘Da! Da! Da! Take a picture! Take a picture!’

I suppose it might be useful as evidence when the case comes up.

The costume is so thick you just know it’s still damp with yesterday’s sweat. The two boys, rather ominously, are rehearsing some computer game kick-boxing techniques which they are about to apply to Pinky’s ribcage. Their father, a nervous and troubled man, who presumably has to spend large parts of his life in a confined space with these tiny hyperactive ninjas, is clearly aware of the urgent need to create a diversion so that the severely fustigated rabbit can retreat to the blood bin. But has Da got what it takes?

‘Okay, kids, what’s it to be first? The eighteenth-century art collection—or the giant log flume?’

Howling in anticipation, the kids charge outside and down the stone steps, like looters who’ve forgotten they were meant to steal something.

The house, though grand, has a rough, lived-in feel. The oil-painted faces in the family portraits are vivid and eccentric. The Lord Sligo of Byron’s acquaintance hangs next to his mother who married the judge. Given the colourful burlesque of his life, it’s perhaps appropriate that he’s the dead spit of the comedian Mel Smith; unlike the current owner, his great-great-great-great-grandson, who looks more like Steve Martin.

Within an hour of my arrival, I find myself chugging through lush Irish jungle on a mini-railway, discussing Irish history with Jeremy Ulick Browne, Lord Altamont, and the eleventh Marquess of Sligo, who are all the same person. I’ve never been on a children’s ride with an Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocrat before, so I try and make the most of the opportunity. He is armed with a wealth of historical anecdote about various reprobate ancestors. Ireland, I remark, is a country with so many stories to tell.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And some of them are true.’

The grounds in which Thackeray once strolled now house a campsite, holiday cottages, a bar and, of course, a giant log flume. Jeremy looks on in delight as a constant stream of high-spirited children, soaked to the skin, and shouting so their swearwords can be heard above the Verdi opera that’s playing on the Tannoy, drift past in plastic logs. I’m trying my best to disapprove of all this vulgar, populist stuff, but I can’t. Everyone’s clearly having a good time, and the wild and crazy lord’s naïve, almost boyish enthusiasm for his toys is rather infectious. Westport House almost proves that fine art and giant pink rabbits can happily coexist.