McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (41 page)

As if to illustrate the difference between the northern and southern hemisphere approaches to physical conditioning, a grey, poorly-looking man comes crawling up the slope towards us. He appears to be suffering simultaneously from a severe hangover, cold turkey and terminal TB. Perhaps fearing that Vicki may be about to challenge him to a game of one-a-side rugby, using a stone for a ball, he collapses at our feet in a gesture of abject surrender.

‘D’ya have a ciggie? I’m gasping.’

Gasping is seriously underestimating the situation. He sounds as if all his internal organs are about to rupture like badly perished rubber bands. As he wheezes and rattles like a consumptive beagle on a tobacco baron’s treadmill, his flickering, unfocused eyes suggest he may also be in the advanced stages of myxomatosis. It’s a mystery how he’s made it this far. Perhaps he had a coughing fit and fell out of a passing helicopter ambulance.

I don’t smoke, and now I remember why. But Vicki offers him a roll-up. In his elation, spittle bubbles up in the corner of his mouth, like pancake mix. He recoils in panic when she offers him the Old Holborn and the papers.

‘Christ, no. Could you find it in your heart to roll it for me?’

She smiles as she realises this is a fitness opportunity. She rolls the fag, rhythmically and deliberately, using the exercise to improve her upper body strength. TB says he’s come from Fermanagh. He’s left his smokes in the car because he’s on a fitness kick. Vicki passes him the roll-up, and he lights it.

‘Would you do me two? I’ve been asking all the way up and no one bloody smokes.’

She obliges, one-handed this time, to build up stamina levels in her right forearm. I offer him half a bar of chocolate. Pocketing the second cigarette and the Cadbury’s, he pulls himself to his feet, takes a long drag, and starts heading back down the slope into the path of the advancing pilgrims.

‘Hey, don’t give up, you’re nearly at the top,’ shouts Vicki.

‘Fuck that,’ replies TB, flicking the butt back over his shoulder on to the holy ground.

Croagh Patrick has been a place of Christian pilgrimage for over 1,500 years, but archaeological evidence shows that the summit was occupied by a ring fort, and at least thirty huts, long before St Patrick’s time. The mass pilgrimages that still attract huge numbers in July and August coincide with the ancient festival of Lughnasa (the Irish word for August), when tribute was paid to the pagan god Lugh, once worshipped by our friends the Tuatha de Danaan. Today at the peak there’s a small white church, built in 1905, and the ruins of an early Christian oratory, carbon-dated to 430–890 ad. As I hit the summit, forty or fifty people are milling round taking photos, eating picnics or praying in the bright sunshine and fierce wind. A worryingly batty man in his thirties is whacking pebbles a long way up in the air with a hurley stick. On high mountains, as on high buildings and underground railway platforms, it’s always best to keep an eye out for the loon who might want to nudge you off. I take refuge in the church.

An intense little man with a white goatee is leading a group of young people in some devotional chanting and singing in the Breton language. I’m reminded of a visit I made to Brittany a few years ago. The head teacher of a Breton language primary school—outlawed for years by the authorities in Paris, but now permitted, though with some reluctance—spoke with passion about the affinity he felt with the Cornish, the Welsh, and especially, he said, the Irish. It must be hard, I suggested, to know who to support when France play Ireland at rugby. He looked at me like I was mad.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It is very simple. Ireland, of course.’

There’s a little vestry on one side of the chapel, packed with bottles of mineral water, bags of fruit, muesli and chocolate, and some canvas and oil paints. It all belongs to Chris, the mountain’s artist-in-residence. No, honestly. Chris is nearly three-quarters of the way through a forty-day and forty-night stint on top. He says his presence is ‘a social sculpture in memory of mystics of the past’. Locals are betting on how long he’ll last. While we’re talking, someone comes to tell him that a curry is on the way up for him tonight. And yes, there will be poppadoms. Plain or spicy? Probably a selection.

He says he’s seen that all sorts of people come up here for very different reasons.

‘The travellers come in very big numbers. There were two or three hundred of them on Monday and Tuesday. They have an incredible devotion. They left little gifts and offerings in nooks and crannies everywhere—letters, medals, family photos. A CD of a Spanish rock star. On my first night up here, lying in my tent about a quarter to one, I thought it was the wind at first but it was voices, a traveller woman and her two kids. They’d climbed the Reek in the middle of the night, barefoot.’

He says that the tradition of barefoot pilgrimage isn’t penitential but reverential, so as not to despoil the ground with shoes.

‘And then, in the evening, the athletes come. There’s a whole crowd of them. Run up and down. Every day, some of them. Forty-six minutes is the record.’

I ask him about his paintings, but he’s dismissive of them. ‘Er, they just give me some exercise, keep me brain alive. It’s a social sculpture. The work of art is my presence here.’

I think I understand, but I decide not to pursue it, in case I don’t. Instead, I ask for his thoughts on my identity crisis.

‘Well, you’ll have a cultural inheritance learned from your family, and there’s nothing mystical about that. But in the mystical traditions and in early Christianity you have the notion of consciousness continuing from one embodiment to another. I think sometimes when people feel a connection with a place, it’s because strands of their consciousness have been there.’

I think he mistakes my wincing into the wind for a smug smile, because then he reminds me of something I know, but sometimes forget, in my eagerness to have more of a claim on this country than Klaus, the Tweedles, and all the rest of them.

‘Just remember, it’s an easy place to be at home in, Ireland. I think the people are very skilled at relating. I notice, watching the different nationalities on the mountain, the fluidity of interaction the Irish people have with the visitors, and with each other. It’s a skill that’s less developed in other nationalities, and it’s so instinctive it doesn’t even look like a skill.’

On the way down this afternoon, I saw a kid crying because he couldn’t go any further; a bloke in a red shirt and black beard way up a hillside playing the harmonica; an Englishman shouting at his children that they’d all bloody well go back down in a minute if they didn’t bloody behave; a freckly ginger-haired baldy bloke in purple shell suit bottoms, flip-flops and nothing else; and a woman in a stars and stripes headscarf, sitting in the middle of the trail recounting the embarrassing details of her private life into a yellow cellphone. A breathless fat guy smiled and asked me, ‘Do they have a table for four up there?’

My hips and knees are aching from the impact of walking down, which always hurts more than walking up, but I’m feeling good for having done it. And it’s not just the physical buzz from working off the squid and black pudding. There’s a spiritual element too, and it comes not from any inherent power or magic the mountain possesses, but from what’s been bestowed on it by the people who have gone there every hour, every day, for millennia. And for once, my delight in a place has been enhanced by having lots of people around, knowing that they’re all still furthering that process.

So now I’m relaxed, well fed and luxuriating in the afterglow, while all around me people are waving stools over their heads. A tall, enormously fat man, in a custard-yellow shirt that would be a floor-length dress on anyone else, is throwing a pear-shaped woman round the room, and a table-load of eighteen-year-olds have moved the birthday cake off the table so they can dance on it. In a minute, they’ll dance on the table. Perhaps this is what they mean by craic. At the moment, the craicometer’s 98.6 and rising.

A quick hobble around Westport earlier confirmed my suspicion that a musical apartheid system is in operation. A dozen or more bars were playing host to mild-mannered, respectful, predominantly European visitors—many of them openly drinking coffee or fruit juice—listening to introspective diddly-di. But back here in P. McCarthy’s, downstairs from my polished pine suite, and just 100 yards but several worlds away from the town’s official music pubs, the shocking truth about Irish music lies waiting to be discovered.

I’ve come in for an eleven o’clock nightcap, and the place is going berserk. Everyone’s on their feet, apart from the young guy at the table over there, who’s having a haircut while a semicircle of raucous women roar in encouragement. In fact, everyone in the place is roaring, or howling, or whooping. On stage, a man with black nylon hair, matching chin-length sideboards, and Roy Orbison glasses is strumming a guitar in accompaniment to a drum machine that is going through the full repertoire of cymbal crashes, tom-tom rolls and big bass flourishes. It’s clear that the traditional music he’s playing is touching something genuinely heartfelt in his audience.

The stools, by the way, are above their heads so they can be waved in time as the whole room sways and sings along to ‘Daydream Believer’. In the middle of the room, a wee kind of village idiot man is cavorting on his own and playing the spoons badly—mind you, anyone would to ‘Daydream Believer’—and mimicking the dancers, but no one seems to mind. ‘Waterloo’, ‘Mama Mia’—half the lad’s hair is off, and now he’s snogging his hairdresser—and now it’s ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love With You’, and everyone’s dancing, smooching, embracing in groups of at least three or more, experience having taught them that more legs mean greater stability if balance becomes a problem.

Now, more than ever, I’m on my own. Suddenly I feel vulnerable. Away from the carefully manicured image presented in the town’s ‘traditional’ music pubs, I have stumbled on the reality. I know what’s going on. In Matt Malloy’s and the rest of them, when the last Italian has left, and the fiddle and bodhran have been put safely away for another night, they’ll draw the blinds, breathe a sigh of relief, and crank up Abba and Neil Diamond. Away from the Celtic correctness demanded by the Chieftains’ global concert audiences, old Matt himself will probably take the floor and lead the natives of Mayo in the music their fathers loved.

‘Sweet Caroline—nah nah nah…’

But what if someone spots there’s a stranger in the room? And what if they don’t want the unpalatable truth to seep out? I feel like the guy in the horror movie who has to hide behind a gravestone when Christopher Lee and all the extras in the long hooded robes file in and start chanting and tying up virgins. If they realise I’m in here, things might turn ugly. Uglier.

Slowly, I edge towards the door through the pulsing crowd. In the film, if there were a spare gown with a hood, I’d be wearing it now. Softly, softly, past the man-mountain in the yellow shirt—doing the hand jive to ‘Crocodile Rock’ now, while Village Idiot with the spoons tries to copy him—through the door and safely into the street. Outside, it’s still Ireland as we know it, or as we’ve been told it is, with no clues as to what’s going on behind closed doors. I edge a few yards along the street to the front door that leads to my pine-clad cell, and safety.