McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (43 page)

The old hardback guide still has its original green and gold paper cover, adorned with an illustration of the AA winged badge. They used to give you a metal one to stick on your radiator grille in the old days, but then the mods and rockers started fighting, the contraceptive pill came in, and England generally went to the dogs, so they decided to stop giving them out.

I found the book in a back-street shop about half an hour ago, just after I reached Sligo and decided to stay here for the night. Flicking through it now, in the beautiful dark-wood stone-flagged interior of Hargadon Brothers’ Bar on O’Connell Street, I’m wishing I’d found it earlier. Every place name in the country, alphabetically listed, has the Irish version as well as the English, and its meaning. Garvaghy—Garbhochadh—rough field. Dri-moleague—Drom Dha Liag—ridge of the two pillar stones. Sligo—Sligeach—the shelly place. And there’s a reminder that the north-south divide used to be more rigidly enforced. ‘A motorist crossing the border by roads other than those approved here, is liable to very severe penalties including confiscation of his car.’ And I love that description of Yeats—‘the famous poet’—in case you didn’t know who he was. Perhaps in the early 1960s drivers and readers were thought to be two distinct social groups.

Sligo is one of those towns where you can see the mountains from the centre, which I’ve always found an attractive quality. It offers the possibility of escape. Think what it would do for Birmingham. As I was driving in, I was at a red traffic light when a man in a blue suit and blue shirt got out of a blue car and went into an antique shop that was painted bright blue. The feeling that this might be a piece of avant-garde performance art was heightened by the fact that I was the only person in the audience.

I tried a couple of B&Bs advertising Vacancy, but the owners said they were full. In future, I decided, I would only try the ones that said No Vacancy, like that big detached house across the road there. Unfortunately, there was no reply. As I came out of the drive and waited to cross a road that was busier than I’d expected Sligo roads to be, a woman with mad hair, wearing slippers with pom-poms, came rushing out of a phone box and approached me at an urgent canter.

‘Did ya just knock on that door?’

Clearly, she was a crazy person. Perhaps she’d just done a runner from the ward, before Sister could come round with the evening medication. I decided to humour her.

‘I did, yeah.’

‘Is it a room you’re looking for? I have just the one left, but I’m afraid it’s not en-suite.’

No private bathroom? In the newly renovated Ireland, this is a shameful thing to admit, like it would have been twenty years ago to say you’d had a child out of wedlock. But where was this room she was referring to? The phone box? But then she produced a front door key, took me back to the house and showed me a comfortable ground floor room with double bed, TV, and a sink. Breakfast, rather alarmingly, would be at eight. I turned on the TV for an update on the latest Christian Brothers scandal but got the latest Charlie Haughey story instead—£16,000 on French shirts—then walked into town for a pint to celebrate the Tank not having exploded.

Here, in Hargadon Brothers, I’ve quickly realised that an alphabetically-ordered AA gazetteer is something to be dipped into; trying to read it from cover to cover is like pretending the IKEA catalogue is a novel. But I’ve nothing else to read. Thackeray and Wibberley are in my bag, but I’ve finished them. I’m only carrying them around because otherwise my bag would be empty, and then there’d be no reason to carry it around. My copy of
Father’s Music
is somewhere in the Tank, where there’s a risk of it being destroyed in the imminent inferno. So what am I to do? I can’t just drink and stare into space. People might think I’m a policeman. I search the bag again, but I’ve already read the back of the mineral water bottle. Still no fat. But lurking in its exterior document pocket, where the fluff lives, are the leaflets from Lough Derg. So far I’ve only flicked through them, in case they frighten me. But now it’s only about an hour and a half’s drive away, pigshit, heifers, and weeping statues permitting. I plan to be there tomorrow. Perhaps I should acquaint myself with what I’m letting myself in for. I remember reading this bit. ‘From midnight prior to arriving…’

Hang on. That’s tonight.

‘…the pilgrim observes A COMPLETE FAST FROM ALL FOOD AND DRINK, plain water excepted.’

There’ll be no bar on the island then.

‘The fast continues for three full days and ends at midnight on the third day. The Vigil is the chief penitential exercise of the Pilgrimage and means depriving oneself of sleep completely and continuously for twenty-four hours. It begins at 10 p.m. on the first day and ends at the same time on the second day.’

Yeah, but you’ll already have been up all day; so it’s more like thirty-six hours. Thirty-eight if I get up for tomorrow morning’s breakfast that I’m not allowed to eat.

‘Having arrived on the island the pilgrim goes to the hostel’—oh no—‘removes all footwear, and begins the first station.’ There are then three pages detailing the unimaginable quantity of praying, kneeling and sheer physical punishment involved. At the end, just in case anyone’s got the wrong end of the pointy stick about the kind of trip they’re signing up for, there’s a footnote.

‘Pilgrims may not bring to the Island cameras, radios, musical instruments or articles to sell, distribute or for games. Also no snogging, lap dancing or bum fun.’

I just added the last sentence myself in felt-tip.

The enormity of the task in hand is only now beginning to dawn. I really don’t know whether I can do this. There’s an underlying tone of sublimated violence that transports me right back to secondary school. I have a crystal-clear vision of the thick leather strap that the traditionalists preferred to the cissy, half-hearted cane favoured by some of the younger, more progressive teachers. During my first week in the sixth form the headmaster, Brother Cuthbert, gave me six of the strap for being in the sixth-form common room when I wasn’t a sixth-former. When I pointed out that, actually, I was, he said I’d probably deserved it anyway for something I hadn’t been caught for, so why didn’t I stop moaning?

But I’ve come this far. I have to go through with it. If I can’t cope, I’ll just have to leave the island early. Kill a priest and steal a boat, perhaps. Dig a tunnel under the lake. Something like that.

What’s the time? Ten to ten. My fast begins at midnight, and I have every intention of taking it seriously.

I go up to the bar and order another pint, and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. You can usually count on being able to taste them three days later.

On the way back to my last bed for a couple of days, I pass a seething mass of people queuing to get into a nightclub. Round the corner and up the street I walk past a Chinese takeaway, but only about ten yards past. Here’s a chance to take the eating right up to the wire. Sligo Chinese turns out to be an intriguing dialect, and service is impressively quick. For a shade under £5 I can go back to my room and gorge myself on a pre-midnight feast of Singapore noodles.

On the way up the drive I start thinking of those depressing, paranoid restaurants that display signs saying that you may only eat food bought on the premises. What if my landlady objects to my bringing food to my room? She might be lurking in the hallway with a plate of sandwiches as I come in. They usually are. But my room’s at the front of the building. Maybe I can get the noodles in through the window, so I’ll be empty-handed if she catches me. Thinking about school while taking strong drink is a lethal combination that has dredged up rich deposits of guilt from the depths.

The window’s closed tight, but the top vent is cracked open. Even if I climb on to the window ledge, though, I don’t think my arm will reach as far as the catch to open the lower window. I suppose I could get up and try and throw the noodles into the room through the vent, but it’s a long drop, and anyway I must be drunk to be carrying on like this. Realising this helps me think more clearly. I place the white plastic bag, and its precious cargo of rice vermicelli with mix meats and seasonal veg in curry flavour, carefully into my bag, cover it with Thackeray, and open the front door.

There’s no one in the hall, so I duck straight into my room. The digital clock radio by my bed says twenty-three twenty-six. I turn on the TV. They’re showing an old episode of
The Sweeney
. Perfect. I remove the insulated lid from the tin-foil carton to reveal a grey, brainlike mass of compacted noodles, dotted with fluorescent pink char sui pork. No chopsticks though. I should have asked. Too late now. Tentatively I look around my bedroom, on the off-chance that some have been provided, but there isn’t even a teaspoon. The noodles gaze up at me invitingly. The clock says twenty-three thirty-five. Just twenty-five minutes to go. I’ll have to eat the noodles with my bare hands, like a savage, or a student.

It’s a messy business, but I stick with it. On the TV an impossibly young-looking Dennis Waterman is doing his best to convey youthful sex interest. I remember I once saw
Minder
dubbed into German. ‘
Ach, Terry,
’ said George Cole to Waterman, ‘
jetzt gehen wir nach Craven Cottage.
’ And
Bonanza
dubbed into Serbo-Croat, but I can’t quote any lines.

I’ve finished eating by ten to, but the programme carries on for a few more minutes. Then the TV station clock comes on screen.

It’s half past twelve.

The bedside clock was wrong. Of course it was. They always are. So I’ve broken my fast half an hour into day one. This is terrible. They’ll know! They’ll be able to tell! There’ll be some sort of special branch priest eyeing the new arrivals as we step off the boat. He’ll look at me and nod, and they’ll take me off for a urine sample and an internal examination. I’ll be banged up for having a twenty-minute noodle advantage over the other contestants.

My room smells like Chinatown on a Sunday lunchtime. I open the window, then clear up the debris as best I can. Even if you’ve had cutlery to eat it with, the aftermath of a Chinese takeaway is a dreadful business. I gather up the little yellow tubes and fragments of bright pink meat from the MSG-encrusted melamine bedside table, like a forensic scientist at a Triad murder scene, and put them in the box, which goes in the plastic bag, which I wrap in the rubbish bag from my waste basket, which I zip in my own bag for disposal in the morning. God may know what I’ve done, but there’s no reason why the landlady should.

Next morning I have to go into the breakfast room and watch people eating while I pay, so it’s a good job I’m still full. A couple who use too much hair gel come in while I’m waiting for a receipt. She’s got a love bite on her collarbone, and he is the most hungover man anywhere in the world at this moment. He refuses cereal with a grunt of disgust, and begs for water. Then he sighs, yawns, groans, and bangs his forehead on the table. Outside the rain is coming down in sheets from a very low sky. I can’t eat until the day after the day after tomorrow. I’ve had better starts to the day.

I can usually rely on the car radio to cheer me up. This morning there’s a phone-in on Limerick Hospital’s no smoking policy.

‘My mother was eighty-six years old and suffering from cancer. I had to take her home so she could have her cigarette and die happy.’

‘My father was ninety. They refused him the cigarette that would have allowed him to face eternity in a relaxed fashion.’

Just north of Sligo, I stop at Drumcliff church and visit the grave of W. B. Yeats, the famous poet from the
AA Road Book of Ireland 1963
. There’s steady drizzle, and swirling mist, and a plume of smoke rising from a beautiful sugar-loaf-shaped mountain to the north. In the car park, there’s a log cabin with Irish knitwear for sale, just as Yeats would have wanted.

The rain eases off for a while in the pretty little village of Belleek, so I stop at the supermarket and pick up an assortment of bandages, foot medication and industrial-strength painkillers. Thick wooded lanes begin to open out on beautiful views east across Lough Erne. There’s no new development to be seen. A few old-established houses are dotted across the empty countryside. It feels tranquil, remote, more brooding the further north I get. Pettigoe, according to the brochures, is the last stop before embarkation at Lough Derg. There’s a woman on the radio, talking about her work signing the Irish language for deaf people.