McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (50 page)

Whatever the forces that led me there—and I couldn’t identify them myself, beyond a decision that this would be my destination—I’m glad I went to Lough Derg. Apart from being a bizarre and vivid experience that I’ll remember all my life, it’s changed things in ways I’m still trying to define. When I was up in Donegal, convalescing from the pilgrimage in the bibulous and opaque parallel universe inhabited by musicians and other creatures of the night, I began to feel I was coming to an understanding, however incomplete, of my relationship with this country. So even though I resented the priests and their perfectly polished shoes, the physical and spiritual drubbing over which they presided seems to be leading to a clarity and sense of purpose that wasn’t there before. The fact that I didn’t share most of their beliefs, or those of my fellow pilgrims was of surprisingly little consequence. I’m reminded of a line from
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. I first read it when I was fifteen, and have remembered it ever since.

“It is a curious thing, do you know,” Cranly said dispassionately, “how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.”

I take a walk up the hill behind the church to look down on the village, and discover the remains of a ruined abbey and an ancient graveyard that I never knew existed. I’ve probably been in more cemeteries this year than I have in the rest of my life. Does this indicate a healthy awareness of our own mortality, or am I in the grip of a morbid obsession? I look around the faded headstones and decide that, whatever the answer, this will be the last one. Tonight I’ll stay here in the village; and tomorrow I’ll head back to England.

‘So do you reckon the outward-going side of the Irish character is down to so many people believing in an after-life? You’re relaxed about death, so you can get on with enjoying life.’

‘Well, I think—I’m not sure now, but I think—I think you’re probably talking bollocks.’

I didn’t get the name of the fella I’m talking to, because there’s a guy with keyboards, drum machine, and a V-necked jumper conducting a one-man Jim Reeves revival in the corner, and you have to catch what fragments of conversation you can in between the power surges. I’m staying with my cousin Sean, who now has the farm where my mother grew up. He’s built a new bungalow almost on the spot where the five brothers’ thatched house once stood. I suppose nothing’s ever certain in this life, but he seems reasonably confident the British army won’t turn up and burn this one down.

It’s all a far cry from the kind of farming I remember here as a kid, when eggs were collected each morning, and cows milked by hand, when harvest was a communal activity for friends and neighbours. It may not have been a money-spinner, but there was still an element of self-sufficiency about it, a sense that all these activities were part of a harmonious whole. Today it’s all dairy, says Sean, which relies heavily on the intensive rearing of EC paperwork. He doesn’t think his son will follow him into it. So, instead of farming the same little patch of land the family have tended for 300 years or more, the next generation will probably be surfing the net and conducting virtual commerce in Dublin, or Dubai. Already there are stories of cheap labour being imported from Wales and England to do the jobs the Irish don’t want.

Sean’s son is watching Ireland play a football match on TV, but he’s wearing a David Beckham shirt. I ask him who matters most, Ireland or Manchester United? He grins.

‘United, o’ course.’

My aunt, who was away in Dublin last time I called, is away in London this time. Sean and I walk down into the village to see what else is new. Not a lot, as it turns out. There are no fancy restaurants. No restaurants at all, in fact. No Germans or Dutch have built houses with security fences and great big eagles on the gateposts. McCarthy’s Bar on the main street is still untouched since the last time it was modernised, with Formica. The fire is still burning hand-cut turf. The owner, a middle-distance relative, introduces me to a couple of long-distance relatives. We cross the road to the scruffiest bar in town, which still has no credible rival for the title. I’m told you can see the river through a hole in the floor of the ladies. The gents, mind you, is in a far worse state, and appears to have been destroyed by Semtex, then left for insurance assessors who never turned up.

I’m talking to a silver-haired man who’s nursing a hangover after a four o’clock finish to last night’s Pitch-and-Putt dinner—I’m pretty sure that’s what he said—when it dawns on me that it’s Billy from up the back lane. We used to play together when we were kids. He’s stunned that I remember, and can tell him his name.

‘Me own life’s a complete blank till the age of fourteen.’

The guy sitting at the table next to me turns out to be a second cousin; so does the eighty-year-old drinking whiskey at the bar, who married my mother’s best friend. I’m struggling to decode his accent. I suppose I can understand about sixty per cent of what he’s saying. The old West Cork accent, from the distant days before satellite TV, is a very musical thing, but once you lose the tune it’s hard to pick it up again. I’m doing my best to follow his conversation with Sean.

‘Sure, it’s close by the wall so we could pour over some readymix.’

‘Readymix might not be the right kind of thing, y’know Dan.’

‘We should get the clan together,’ says old Dan. ‘Make a decision. You promised your father, and so did I.’

Sean explains the situation to me, and we agree to go out in the morning and see what’s to be done. As we cross the road for just the one nightcap in the place with the Jim Reeves roadshow, there’s a gardai car parked near the chip van. There’s a rumour a particular officer is overusing the breathalyser in revenge for rumours about his private life, but it isn’t a rumour you’d want getting round.

Later, on the way home, passing the neat row of houses where the blacksmith’s elemental forge once stood, I’m still marvelling at Dan’s use of that word.

Clan.

I was wrong yesterday. There’s one more graveyard to visit. It’s in a spot called Caheragh, three or four miles away off the Skibbereen road. It’s a wild place, not neglected, but remote, and guarded by enormous rooks. The grave is in an unmarked plot close to one wall. Dan was right. It’d be easy to pipe some readymix in, but you really wouldn’t want to. After all, this is where our grandmother lies, mine and Sean’s; she died giving birth to his father. This was back in the 1920s, and for some reason it was never marked. Sean wants to see to it.

‘Nothing too fancy,’ he says.

The 1920s. It seems an impossible age ago. Yet I’d known her husband. It was him laughing at me when I was chased by the pig. I look up at Sean, framed against a clear blue early morning sky. However different our lives, we’re bound together now, across distance and time, by this woman neither of us ever knew. It’s a rare moment, and right that we should be here.

On the way back to the house we stop and go through a rickety gate into a field next to Sean’s land. We elbow our way through some stroppy heifers to a huge stone I’ve seen in the guidebook to Neolithic hot spots that’s been kicking around in the Tank all this time. It’s a boulder burial.

‘Two fellas came from the university. Three thousand years they say it’s been here.’

Under the circumstances, a small stone in Caheragh seems the least we can do.

For now though, it’s time to go. Get back to England. Away from the graves, and the stones, and the ghosts.

‘Lost Your Cat? Try Looking Under My Tyres.’

It’s noon, and the angelus bell is sounding on the radio as I sit reading the sticker in the rear window of the car in front. The traditional call to prayer seems strangely anachronistic in the new Ireland, though I suppose it’s possible that the Dublin traffic has come to a standstill because the drivers still feel a spiritual compulsion to observe the holy moment. So perhaps it’s prayer, not profanity, making that taxi driver’s lips move.

Since reaching the outskirts of the city I’ve been trying to find the Port of Dun Laoghaire by faithfully following road signs showing a big picture of a boat. I now know that the only longer route to the ferry port would have involved a diversion via Derry and the Blasket Islands. For my last night in the country I treat myself to a room with a sea view in one of the nineteenth-century hotels on the waterfront. My boat sails at ten past eleven in the morning to ‘dismal Holyhead’ in ‘dismal Anglesea’, as Thackeray described it. I expect he was thinking of a different Holyhead.

I’d never intended to take the Tank back to England. The plan had always been to get rid of it over here, though there was never much chance of selling it in a nation of actual or newly aspirant BMW drivers. I’d harboured vague notions of donating it to Wild Mountain or trading it in for a meal at the Convent, or perhaps selling it to someone in the car-hire queue at Cork airport for a fiver, but the simple fact is that I’ve become too emotionally attached to abandon it; and though a Volvo isn’t a naturally demonstrative vehicle, I’m pretty sure it feels the same way.

It’s been the only constant in my journey, a steady and supportive travelling companion. It’s even got a sense of humour, as the bird up the exhaust so playfully demonstrated. It rattles, it rumbles, and I can’t open the bonnet, but I just don’t have the heart to ditch it. The landscape of its interior has become as familiar as any in the country, with its giant heated seats, its scattered maps and books, its sleeping bag, sweetie-wrappers, and manure-encrusted floor. I’m resigned to the loss of its wonderful radio phone-ins, and I’ll have to get rid of the pile of yellowing newspapers; but the vehicle itself deserves a dignified retirement. I shall buy it a black-market disabled badge in a pub in Brighton, and park it in a no parking zone on Eastbourne seafront. It can look out to sea and listen to old people in beige clothes saying, ‘Ooh, look at that! They used to be lovely cars. Built like tanks, they were.’

The rest of the day’s my own. I could go into the centre of Dublin for a look round Trinity College, or a stroll on St Stephen’s Green and a pint in James Toner’s, or tea at the Shelbourne Hotel. To be honest, though, I don’t feel terribly motivated to do anything, so I sit with my feet up looking out on the bay. There’s a magazine for businessmen on the bedside locker, and I can’t resist the guilty frisson of looking through it without being a businessman. There’s hardly anything to read, just glossy adverts for conference centres, and club-class airlines, and call girls who’ll show up in your hotel room but not on your credit card statement. But one ad catches my eye. THE IRISH PUB, it says. A MAJOR INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY. ‘In more than a hundred cities worldwide, from Madrid to Moscow, Paris to Prague, Helsinki to Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi to Atlanta, a new generation of Irish pubs continues to prosper, with a new one opening almost every day somewhere around the world…’

There’s a picture of a smiling barman serving a pint, and people playing flutes and bodhrans in front of a roaring log fire in Bangkok. It reminds me of how I began, in Budapest. There’s a phone number, and an address in Dublin 2.