McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (46 page)

Damn. That’s given the game away. Killed the tension. You’ll know I survived now, or I’d never have found the quote. Listen, though. It wasn’t easy.

06.00 Day Two
The rain’s stopped, and first light’s glimmering over a sombre lake. I’m not sure what happens next, but I think it may involve going to church.

In the night shelter I read a newspaper cutting pinned to the wall. ‘Fourteen thousand come each year for one of the toughest pilgrimages in Christendom,’ it says. Next to me a country bachelor stands combing his hair with a steel comb. He leans across conspiratorially. ‘Ah, feck it,’ he says. ‘You can’t pray on an empty stomach, now can ye?’

I’ve decided that at ten p.m. tonight I’m going to be right next to the door when the last service ends, so I can run to the dorm and be wrapped up and asleep before most of the other sleepy buggers have left the church. I’ve also begun fantasising about how nice the rest of my life is going to be once this torture stops.

I find a place on a bench and try to continue Bolger’s book. There’s a description of a music session in a Donegal pub. The musicians have just been brought a plate of sandwiches. I start wondering what kind they were. Beef? Was it rare? With hot mustard? Were they cut in triangles? Had the crusts been removed? Was the butter unsalted? Christ. A complex novel has degenerated into a food fantasy.

Careful. Skinhead the Enforcer’s back. He’s been missing most of the night. Six hours sleep at least, I reckon he’s managed. His shoes are looking well polished and watertight. If there were a spontaneous popular uprising among pilgrims who just couldn’t take it any more, he’d be the first up against the wall. Brawls would break out on the penitential beds as malnourished hallucinating farmers fought over his socks.

‘Can I ask you to go back to the basilica now.’

Time for a bracing six thirty a.m. mass to kick-start the day. Everybody immediately starts to move, unquestioning, but this isn’t good enough for him.

‘Come on! Stand up! Go through!’

As I stand, I find I’m wondering if I’ll be able to get an end-of-row wall seat up in the balcony. So this is what life has come down to—plotting to get the best seat in church. Prison must be like this, finding little targets and rewards to give life structure and meaning.

I make a point of standing on his foot as I go past, but through leather that thick, I shouldn’t think he noticed.

09.08 Day Two
I’ve just popped into the shelter to read a bit more of
Father’s Music
. It’s building to a frightening climax in tiny, remote villages in Donegal, very close to here. Because I’m trapped on the island, I have the distinct feeling that the events he’s describing are actually happening, right now, just over there.

I dozed on and off, uncontrollably, for the duration of the service. My knees went twice, very suddenly, like a scrumpy victim, and I nearly fell while standing. Outside now it’s light, with lots of troubled cloud. It’s wet and cold underfoot, inducing more fantasies, this time of tropical islands, with beds, and restaurants. No doubt about it, if you’re going to go to church in your bare feet, Fiji’s a much better option than this. Fiji. Now there’s a country with a relaxed attitude to time. They make the Irish look like a nation of Bavarian Punctuality Inspectors.

09.20 Day Two
The old boy who sat next to me on the boat just sidled up. This is his fourteenth time, he confided. His feet are all gnarled, like basketwork. We’re in the bathroom in the men’s dorm, where I’ve just splashed some token water on my haggard physog and brushed my teeth in eager anticipation of today’s toast. I’ve never liked communal washrooms, with their noisy bowel movements, and blokes in underwear and shaving foam, and enough warm water and dirt underfoot to start a rice paddy. I’d rather stay dirty. So I do.

Back in the basilica a dozen priests in white robes and comfortable-looking shoes are lined up ready to hear confessions, but I’m afraid this is a bridge too far. Isn’t it enough that our knees are going to need reconstruction by Donegal’s top plastic surgeons, without adding the ordeal of near-public admission of sin? Confession when I was a kid was an altogether cosier affair. I’d go into the box at ten past six—not a moment earlier—on Saturday night, and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it is two weeks since my last confession.’

Father Murphy’s voice would then whisper from the other side of the curtain.

‘Is that you, Peter?’

‘It is, Father.’

‘Would you go out and get me a
Football Pink
?’

So I’d go out of the confessional and down to Eyre’s the Newsagents, and get the
Liverpool Echo
sports edition. That’s why I didn’t go to confession till ten past. The papers weren’t delivered till then. Father Murphy was a season-ticket holder at Everton—I think all priests had to be in those days—so I’d go to confession fortnightly, when Everton were playing away, so he could read about the match in the
Pink
. He didn’t go to away matches. Wouldn’t have made it back in time for confessions.

I’ve got two more stations to pound out today if I’m to keep on schedule, so I may as well get cracking. It’s not as crowded as yesterday, on account of most people being inside confessing in front of everybody else, so you don’t need as much vicious elbow work to get you into the holy places. But soon the rain’s driving down again, my feet are slipping on the stones, and my knees are feeling twenty-five years older than the rest of me. I’m trying to elevate my thoughts to a higher plane, but this really is brutal. The landscape seems to be closing in as the rain drives down, and the whole place is taking on a deeply forbidding air. Is this just a waste of three days of my life? There are boats over there, waiting to take the people who had bunks last night back to the mainland. I could just sneak on. No one would know. Except me.

I manage to banish thoughts of escape and hit a steady rhythm, taking a frankly perverse pleasure in the physical discomfort. Wow, that one hurt my foot. Good! Here comes that nasty slippy one with the jaggedy edge. Excellent! As I punish myself, I realise that the big thing today will be deciding when to treat myself to the meal. I need the energy it will give, but I also badly need something to look forward to, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to invite me to a party. I’m allowed to eat when I choose, any time in the next eleven hours, but just the once. Already I’m treating it with all the anticipation of a night out at a major restaurant. This will be purgatory with two Michelin stars.

I’m surprised to find I’m not dying for a pint.

10.40 Day Two
Hour and twenty minutes. Done that station then. Agony, but great sense of achievement. And once you go through your pain threshold, you forget you’ve got no shoes on.

Think I’ll do another.

16.30 Day Two
St Patrick’s Purgatory is a large, bustling, noisy, canteen-style restaurant, in the Conran mode, but with more interesting furniture. To start, I chose Oatcake Lough Derg—a plain oatcake, served on a plate. My partner—or the bloke next to me, as he would probably prefer to be known—opted for
Oatcake Sucré
,
Sauce de L’Eau
—an oatcake dipped in a cup of hot water, then smothered in a generous spoonful of sugar. Both were bursting with flavour. To follow, I tried
Les Toasts Bruns
,
Sans Beurre et Son Garni
—a perfectly conceived and prepared slice of dry brown toast, uncluttered by over-fussy sauces, and once again served in the house style, on a plate. My partner chose from the
Menu Gastronomique: Les Toasts Variés, Rien D’Autre
—brown and white toast, free of unnecessary embellishment. It was all washed down with copious quantities of Barry’s Tea Bag ’99, its distinctive bouquet unsullied by milk, and by a non-vintage Nescafé Noir. At ₤40 for two, inclusive of tip, return boat trip, one night’s accommodation, nine stations, four masses, lacerated feet and shattered kneecaps, it was a bargain. No wonder people come back time after time.

Five stars.

17.30 Day Two
The problem is that once you’ve had your meal for the day, there’s nothing else to look forward to. It’s all downhill from here. Once again I was the only person at our table who hadn’t been here before, and also the only one not from Ireland. I suppose I’d expected the cosmopolitan mixture you’d find in Killarney or Dingle, but from what I’ve seen so far there’s no one here from another country except me, and I don’t really count. My fellow diners were startled when I told them I’d come from England.

‘Well, fair play to ya.’

‘Good man.’

The young fella opposite eyeing up the last oatcake said he’d hated it the first time he came. ‘I found it much too authoritarian.’

So why has he been back four times since?

‘Do you know, I haven’t a clue. I may not be back for a while this time though.’

‘I feel I’m drawing a line under things and wiping the slate clean with God,’ said a big-boned woman from Cavan who was wearing a dry-cleaning bag as a waterproof. ‘It gives me a feeling of personal renewal.’

A man from Belfast with big thick specs was sitting at the end of the table not saying much, so we all quizzed him next.

‘I do a very stressful job, and coming here takes me away from all that.’

So what kind of job would that be then?

‘A very stressful one.’

It seemed like he’d been coached in anti-interrogation techniques, so we decided to leave it there.

Outside there’s the first glimpse of sunshine in two days. There’s a queue of people at the holy water trough filling up mineral water and Body Shop bottles. I’m sitting on a bench looking across the water to the mainland, flexing my pulverised knees and reading
Father’s Music
. Less than fifty pages to go. Tracy’s passed through Killybegs on the way to Glencolumbkille, just the other side of those hills over there, but we know Luke the Dublin Heavy is close behind her. She is torn between her English upbringing and her Irish heritage, and may end up dead in a ditch because of it.

Sometimes you enjoy a book so much that you have to ration the pages to make it last. I make myself stop with twenty-two pages to go, so there’s something to look forward to at bedtime other than forty-seven other men snoring.

20.00 Day Two
We’ve just had sung mass in the basilica, and now I’m starving again. I’m not sure what the medical term is for having two limps at once, but whatever it is, I’ve got it.

There was a visiting deacon from Ghana who got a round of applause for being from Ghana. Kind Priest did some topnotch singing and chanting, which set a very serene mood, and then the Enforcer came on and spoiled it with another list of dos and don’ts, mainly don’ts.

I’ve just come up to the dormitory to admire my bed, fondle it, sit on it, though I MUST NOT STRETCH OUT ON IT BEFORE TEN OCLOCK! I haven’t lived by such rigid rules since I finished my A-levels and escaped from the Brothers. It’s like going back in time. If one of them burst through the door right now and accused me of something I hadn’t done, I’d be powerless to resist. This time tomorrow I’ll have my freedom, but for the moment I can’t think what it was I wanted to do with it. I seem to have everything I need right here, and I’m becoming increasingly confident of who I really am.

I’m 124D, aren’t I?

I think I may be becoming institutionalised.

22.05 Day Two
Our sleepless vigil is over.

It’s an amazing experience to be with scores, hundreds, of people who hurry directly from church straight to bed because a) that’s what they’ve been told to do and b) there’s nothing else to do. The last half-hour has been a rather mystical affair, with strange, harmonious, repetitive chanting—Tai Ze, I think he said it was called—reverberating round the basilica. After the physical battering we’ve inflicted on ourselves, it created a spiritual mood akin to being tucked up in crisp white sheets, with a buxom nurse applying ice-packs. I think I’m getting into this.

No crisp sheets for me tonight, though. I’ve brought a duck-down army sleeping bag to protect me from the rigours of an Irish summer indoors. Each bunk has been provided with two thin blankets, designed to make you almost, but not quite, warm enough. I’ve just given my two to the little fourteenth-visit bachelor who was on the boat with me, who’s just across the room there, taking faded winceyette pyjamas out of his antique suitcase. He’ll never get them on over that mac.

I was in the lead group of thirty or so who were first out of the basilica and scampering up the hostel staircase, raw feet slap-slapping on the cold pre-cast concrete floor. I’m already in bed as some of the guys are still arriving in the door. A tall, beefy sixty-year-old in the bottom bunk, just a couple of feet across from me, has somehow beaten me to it. Has he been cheating? Anyway he’s lying there, motionless, completely silent. I reach under my bed for
Father’s Music
. For a moment I panic, thinking it’s not there, that I’ve left it in church; but then I feel its reassuring spine under my fingers. Now where was I? Page 365.

‘I found my way to the dormitory. It was a spartan room crowded with triple-bunk beds with horsehair mattresses and iron frames.’

This is perfect! What an extraordinary piece of synchronicity. And just enough pages to send me gliding into deep, well-earned sleep. ‘I lay on a low bunk and watched the last light drain from the sky. The dormitories of St Raphael’s would have been bigger—eighty boys asleep in each room, dreaming of cars, revenge, and women…’

Click!

‘Goodnight, Peter,’ murmurs Seamus from the bunk above.

It’s gone dark!

My book thuds to the floor. The bastards have turned the lights off; but there’s no sign of any priests anywhere. There must be a central switch somewhere, operated by some vindictive cleric. He’ll be sitting in that big stone house near the jetty, the lazy sod, lying back in a big leather armchair, with a Cuban cigar and a tumbler of Armagnac, watching reruns of
Baywatch
. The lighting master switch will be down on the skirting board, so he can just stretch out a well-rested leg and plunge us all into darkness with the toe of a hand-tooled Italian brogue. Then he’ll give a bronchial chuckle, stroke the Persian cat on his lap, and dial room service for a club sandwich.