McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (45 page)

‘Okay, O’Neill,’ said the Brother, ‘get changed for a four-mile cross-country hop.’

So there I was, standing in light, refreshing drizzle in a queue of a few dozen people, waiting to get on to St Brigid’s Bed, when suddenly the woman in front of me collapsed. Bang, just like that, down she went. Everyone crowded round, while I looked up and checked the buildings for snipers. No one knew what to do. She looked very poorly and yellow, the colour of ancient pub piano keys. Four priests were standing not far away, comparing shoes. Two were ginger, one a skinhead, and one had a goatee. The girl at the ticket desk had told me they’d do first-aid, hadn’t she?

‘Father! Father! Over here!’

Skinhead strolled across and took command, just as three or four people were trying to sit her up.

‘No. Stop! Just lie her flat. Leave her to me.’

His authoritative tone was convincing. The crowd backed off as he put an arm behind her back, and a hand behind her head, and began to lower her. Then, when she was just nine inches or so from the ground, he pulled his hands away, and the back of her head hit a stone flag with a sickening crack. Ooh, winced the crowd, and recoiled. Another woman, her friend, or perhaps her lover, pushed through the crowd and stood by the priest.

‘Will she be all right, Father?’

‘Ah, I’d say she will.’

But she was just lying there, looking like she was about to die, and no one seemed to know the next move. Then Skinhead called over one of the Ginges, who strolled, at a fairly leisurely pace it has to be said, across to a door in the stone wall, marked ‘First-Aid’. Obviously this kind of thing must happen all the time, with all the fasting and deprivation involved. There’ll be trained paramedics on hand. It’s probably a legal requirement.

After a couple of minutes, a prim, middle-aged lady in a navy-blue two-piece, peach sweater, and black shoes with heels and gold buckles, emerged with half a polystyrene cup of water, and tried to feed it to the still-unconscious woman.

‘Are ye feeling better?’

Course she isn’t. She’s yellow and grey.

‘Do ye want to sit up?’

Still nothing. So they picked her up and carted her off to First-Aid, followed by her friend, while we carried on queuing for the Bed. I bumped into the friend a couple of hours later and enquired how she was.

‘Ah, she’s grand. She’s lying down.’

‘Are they treating her well?’

‘They are. They said she can do an extra station tomorrow if she doesn’t finish this one today.’

I’d say that’s very reasonable of them. Crueller men would have disqualified her.

When I finally got to do my time on the Beds, I was surprised to find that there was something primal about the rhythm of it, and the feel of the rough, wet, slimy stones underfoot, that was quite pleasing. The designated prayers are the ones so familiar to churchgoers that their meaning is less important than their mantra-like effect; but of course no one actually knows whether you’re praying, or concentrating on your own thoughts, or hating every minute of it, as it’s conducted in silence. I couldn’t match the naked passion of the lip-moving, cross-hugging women on either side of me, though. It’s the knees that’ll be the first to go, I reckon. Kneeling on rock, and rising, kneeling and rising, so that at the end of an hour and a half of this punishment I felt as though I’d been whacked across them by two big lads with a railway sleeper. It felt calm standing down at the water’s edge, gazing out at the silent and empty countryside. There were coins, holy medals, and silver crosses lying in the water. I threw in an English 5p to richen the mix, and also for the craic of seeing the Queen’s face down there.

After that there was evening mass in the eight-sided stone-built basilica. I got a good balcony seat from where I could admire the building. One of the ginger priests sang beautifully, accompanied by an ecclesiastical Celtic ballad ensemble on organ, guitar and flute. A couple of times I caught myself nodding off. Only twenty-six and a half hours till bed.

My feet are freezing, and my knees hurt a lot. I fear they may have rising damp. It’s after nine, but still light. Think I’ll go to the dormitory and put some thermals on, which isn’t something I’ve ever had to do in August before.

00.05 Day Two
When I got to the dorm there were two fat guys getting layered up with fat clothes. They were discussing Chinese food with an intensity that bordered on sexual fantasy. They were clearly mad with hunger. The mention of Kung Po Prawns had one of them bent double, grimacing with lust. The sexiest Chinese and Malaysian food on the planet, they reckoned, is to be found in Tullamore. They’re making elaborate plans to break their fast with a spectacular blow-out of satay chicken, crispy duck, sweet and sour pork, beef in black bean sauce, and chilli crabs, to be delivered to their front doors at midnight on Sunday. Perhaps they should consider skipping toast for the next couple of days, to make sure they’ve got an appetite.

I’m sitting in the night shelter at the back of the basilica, where we can come between sessions of prayer if we don’t fancying wandering outside barefoot in a pitch-black howling deluge. We’re packed together on long benches, some smoking, some chatting, others sipping water. There’s a woman over there reading
Hello!
magazine. I’d have thought that was against the rules. Perhaps there’s some religious content though: exclusive shots of the ex-Bishop of Galway at home with his family, something like that.

Right opposite me there’s a bony woman who looks like she works in a fish shop. She’s wearing leg warmers, which she’s pulled down so that they cover her feet. That can’t be allowed, can it? Surely she’s cheating. It’s not fair. I find myself wanting a priest to come in and confiscate them. This thing is beginning to take on a momentum of its own. Even if you don’t buy into the philosophy, once you’re here you find yourself playing it by their rules. Something inside you takes over, and it becomes a matter of pride. You want to succeed, to score the points, to finish the race, to accumulate the prayers. If they can do it, so can I.

I don’t want to go on about it. I just think they should confiscate her leg warmers, that’s all. I mean, it’s not unreasonable, is it?

It won’t be light for another six hours.

I find myself thinking of something I did a couple of years ago in Australia, when I let an ageing hippy called Graham bury me alive in the outback. The idea was that it was a kind of rebirthing, an initiation ceremony in which you’d break through your own barriers of fear and discomfort and be born anew. You spend all day in a remote place in the New South Wales bush, digging what Graham comfortingly calls ‘your own grave’, then at sunset you get in it, while another hippy, who’s just showed up in a van, plays the didgeridoo. Then Graham fills it in up to your neck, leaving just your head sticking out of the ground, like David Bowie in
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence
, only not so badly made up. Then you’re left to the mercy of the poisonous spiders you’ve been finding all day, the terrifying sounds of the Australian night, and the crushing weight of the soil. After covering my face in insect repellent, Graham made a circle of salt on the ground around my neck. I asked him what it was for.

‘To keep the leeches off your face.’

Up to this point, I hadn’t considered the possibility of leeches on my face, which is what made this the worst moment of all. Anyway, the understanding was that I would stay in the ground as long as I could bear—all night, if possible—but that Graham was my buddy, so that when I asked to be released, he would comply. After a few hours I did ask; and of course he refused, which is when the row began, with me just a ranting head sticking out of the ground, like something from a Sam Beckett play.

But the next day—even though I hated Graham, and never wanted to set eyes on the bastard again—I felt very good, at ease with myself and full of energy, and the feeling persisted for several days. Maybe it was just banging your head on the wall syndrome, and I was glad it had stopped; or maybe the challenge of dealing with something I’d been dreading, and coming out on the other side, had indeed done me some good.

So perhaps being here tonight is like being buried alive in the Australian outback by a hippy. If I can somehow make myself see it through, maybe I’ll reap the benefits of it—even if they’re not the ones the priests might be intending. I did go into a kind of contemplative trance earlier, during some rather beautiful chanting in the basilica, and I came to one unexpected realisation. If I were them I’d order another seafood dish, and cancel the beef in black bean sauce.

Skinhead seems to be the Enforcer round here, the bad priest in the old good-priest/bad-priest routine. He’s just come in and told us time’s up, back to our prayers. How did that old joke about hell go? ‘All right, lads, tea break over, back on your heads.’

01.50 Day Two
Another break after completing one of the stations inside the basilica. It’s done aloud, communally, but you have to walk around as if you were still outside, so there’s hundreds of people milling around, walking up and down aisles and staircases and pews. There are some of those really annoying spiritual clever dicks who jump in early with their responses, before the priest’s finished his bit, then gabble through the prayers dead quick to make sure they get to the end before anyone else does. Someone should give them a slap, but if they’re not even confiscating illegal leg warmers, then I can’t see that happening. It’s a strange, chaotic hubbub of a scene, compounded by the fact that some people are praying in English and some in Irish. I’m feeling more alien here than I have anywhere else in the country.

Hunger doesn’t seem to be a problem, just a faint background ache you soon take for granted. Not that that stops me fantasising about food. At the moment, I’m lingering on the langoustines with whiskey mayonnaise, and the Thai marinated fillet steak they serve at the Convent in West Cork, which right now is about as far away as anywhere could be and still be in the country. Other than that, I’m feeling pretty good. Some of the others are looking rough, mind. Maybe the church-going classes miss being in bed at this time more than I do. My knees are killing me, though. You can see why that priest would sue the council.

I found myself a nice first-floor landing where I could do my pacing around during the prayers, with occasional jaunts up and down the stairs for a bit of variety. I’ve always been a pacer. Pacing around the narrow space reminded me of nights spent pacing up and down dressing-rooms before going on stage. Suddenly I found myself vividly remembering a night I’d all but forgotten. I certainly hadn’t given it a thought for a decade or more.

I was hosting a show in Woolwich, south-east London. The promoter had booked two clowns from the circus, performing up the road in Lewisham to do a routine. They produced a live chicken from under a silver salver, and one of them tried to hypnotise it. But try as he might, the bird would not go under. They departed the stage together in a flurry of boos and feathers. As they passed me in the wings, the clown said to the chicken, ‘You ever do that again, and I’ll wring your fucking neck.’ Then I had to go on and amuse the audience.

It seems somehow appropriate that this memory should pop into my head in such a penitential setting. Life offers few experiences more humiliating than following a failed chicken hypnotist, and it must have been good for my soul. I wonder where the chicken is now? I’d walk barefoot over molten lava for it to be here, deep-fried, with chips.

Earlier on the Enforcer gave us a little talk from the altar, warning of the danger of giving in to ‘the temptation to lie down or stretch out’. On no account must we do this; but nor must we be surprised, he said, if people around us fall asleep standing up. In a carefully calculated piece of psychology, the Enforcer was followed by Kind Priest—warm smile, white robes, guitar—who, after beginning with a bizarre and unsuccessful sermon about
Saving Private Ryan
, got the crowd back on his side by suggesting that the weird green mould and bacteria that were rampant in medieval bread had similar chemical properties to LSD, and would have accounted for the hallucinations experienced by pilgrims in the cave. Present-day pilgrims, he suggested, weren’t attracted by the prospect of psychedelia, but by a spiritual experience that’s increasingly out of synch with the mood of go-ahead economic-boom-time Ireland. There was a strong murmur of agreement, followed by the distinctive sound of a couple of hundred people crashing down on to damaged kneecaps for another seventy-three prayers.

03.10 Day Two
Another station done.

I nearly fell asleep standing up ten minutes ago, so I’ve propped myself up in a corner pew in the balcony. All around me people are sitting and nodding and nudging each other awake. There’s a woman over there in a ‘Lourdes’ T-shirt, and I saw a girl earlier in a ‘Fatima’ baseball cap. I suppose it’s like wearing a Glastonbury T-shirt at the Reading Festival. It lets any lightweights in the crowd know you do this kind of thing a lot.

There’s no rule against reading, but I find I keep reading the same paragraph of
Father’s Music
over and over again, because I can’t remember anything about what I just read. Just now I nodded and dropped the book, twice. Cellphones and computer games are banned, though. So there you have it, if you needed proof: books good, computers bad. It’s official, from the Church.

04.40 Day Two
Through the doorway of the basilica I can see the silhouettes of people walking around outside in the rain and dark, in anoraks. They look like medieval monks in hooded cowls.

I’m hungry, but even more tired. If I was at home now I’d go straight to bed without bothering making something to eat. I don’t think Thackeray could have handled this. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t come. He liked the Irish people, but he makes it clear he didn’t think much of their religion or their priests. What was it he said about them? I must look it up if I make it back to the mainland in one piece. (‘If these reverend gentlemen were worshippers of Moloch or Baal, or any deity whose honour demanded bloodshed, and savage rites, and degradation, and torture, one might fancy them encouraging the people to the disgusting penances the poor things here perform. But it’s too hard to think that in our days, any priests of any religion should be found superintending such a hideous series of self-sacrifices.’)