1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge (12 page)

Soon enough the tiny dot which was Tory Island became visible on the horizon. As we drew closer, it grew larger and larger until eventually it was near enough to be identified as being really very small indeed. Three miles long and half a mile wide. From the helm Rory steered us in and I stood beside him looking over his shoulder at a map of the island. There was an ‘East Town’ and a West Town’ clearly marked, although there couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards between them. I imagined the signs outside each of them:

EAST TOWN

(Twinned with West Town)

Please walk carefully

WEST TOWN

(Twinned with East Town)

West Town welcomes careful walkers

§

We docked at the end of a deserted pier and I was disappointed to see no royal welcoming party with a beautiful, sexually frustrated princess waiting to be wooed by her knight in shining armour. (Or man with fridge—whichever came first) A couple of scruffy looking islanders eventually emerged from one of the four dwellings in the metropolis which surrounded us, and began speaking in Gaelic with Rory and his crew. One of them gave me a hand lifting the fridge ashore and I took the opportunity to garner some information.

‘I’m looking for Patsy Dan, the King of Tory.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I thought he might be here to welcome me.’

‘Maybe he’s suffering after last night’s boozing.’

‘He likes a drink, does he?’

‘I didn’t say it.’

He smiled and jumped aboard and started passing breeze blocks to his extremely scary looking colleague. I had absolutely no idea if inbreeding took place on this island but if you were going to bring a case that it did, then you would produce this fellow as your most convincing piece of circumstantial evidence. I continued to address the one with whom I had already spoken, assuming that of the two, he was the least likely to have killed a man.

‘What time is Patrick Robinson leaving with the Americans?’

‘Oh, he left an hour ago.’

‘What?’

‘I’d say it was around an hour, anyway.’

‘I thought he wasn’t going until tomorrow morning.’

‘Well, the Americans decided they wanted to go today.’

J looked around at this tiny bleak outpost of civilisation, and saw how the Americans might have arrived at the sudden change of mind. There is obviously a fine line between peaceful and desolate, and small and downright boring, and the Americans had clearly crossed it.

‘So, no one’s going back to the mainland today?’

‘The first boat back will be the mail ferry tomorrow at midday—if it’s running.’

Damn. So either I went straight back with Rory after the bricks had been unloaded, or I stayed over and blew out Antoinette and her colleagues at RTE. I called out to Rory, ‘Rory, how long is it going to take you to unload the bricks?’

‘Oh, around half an hour, I’d say.’

Was that all? After all the trouble I had gone to getting out to Tory Island, was I really only going to stay here for thirty minutes? That would be ridiculous. And then there was the other issue. Princess Brida. Would it really be possible to secure her hand in marriage in that time? I doubted it. I looked at my watch and saw it was one o’clock. Once again I called to Rory who was busy unloading and really didn’t need these distractions.

‘Rory! Patrick Robinson has already gone, so I’d like to come back with you if I may, but if I’m not back here by half past one that means I’m not coming.’

He nodded, doing his best to look like he gave a shit.

§

The inhabitants of this tiny isolated island must have seen a great number of strange things in their time, but had they ever seen anything so odd as the arrival of a man pulling a fridge on a trolley and carrying a bouquet of flowers? The few people who were around the quayside stopped what they were doing and stared, completely unable to deduce what sequence of events could have led to these two particular items being transported in tandem.

I had to find Patsy Dan, and the flowers had to reach their princess. My load and I rumbled to a halt before an old man who was gaping as if weights had been hung from his jaw.

‘Do you know where yer man Patsy Dan is?’ I asked, my use of ‘yer man’ a recent affectation intended as an affectionate nod to the vernacular.

He surveyed me and my belongings and then slowly winched his jaw up to join the rest of his face.

‘Patsy Dan? Oh aye, he won’t be far away.’

This is the one thing you could be sure about saying of anyone who was on the island. It hadn’t helped much.

‘
Will
he be at home?’

‘Oh aye, I imagine he will.’

‘Where does he live?’

The old man proceeded to give detailed directions, all the time guardedly eyeing my fridge and bouquet of flowers, but not feeling able to broach a questioning of their presence here.

‘How long will it take to get there?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, I’d say about six or seven minutes.’

I assumed he’d taken into account that I would be slowed up a little by the fact that I was pulling a fridge behind me. Six or seven minutes there, and six or seven minutes back. That left under a quarter of an hour to win the hand of a princess and I didn’t hold out much hope. Even if her name had been Princess Slapper I still would have had my work cut out. Then again, I could stay over…

As I pulled the fridge up the hilly dirt track which led to the King’s residence, I decided that unless I fancied the princess something rotten, I was going to take the boat back with Rory McClafferty. The sun was still shining brightly but even so there was a bleakness about the place vfhjch said anything but ‘Come, stay, and enjoy’.

A man in a pair of dungarees, resembling an extra from the Waltons, confirmed that I had followed the old man’s directions correctly.

‘That’s right. He lives right there,’ he said proudly.

If there were any perks for being the King of this island, then superior accommodation wasn’t one of them. I was now looking at a white bungalow which fell some way short of being a palace. I knocked on the door and seconds later there appeared a stocky, rugged looking man with a fair moustache and a peaked cap where his crown ought to have been.

‘Hello, are you Patsy?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Patsy, I’m Tony Hawks.’

‘Ah-failte, failte!’

I took ‘failte’ to be the Gaelic for ‘welcome’ but it could just as easily have meant ‘Get lost!’. If it did, Patsy must have been impressed with my riposte, ‘Thank you.’

I had an answer for everything. Boldly, I went on, ‘I’ve got some flowers for your daughter because she’s a princess, and princesses merit flowers.’

‘Oh dear. She’s not on the island. She left this morning to go to the mainland for a couple of days.’

They say that liming is the secret of good comedy. It can be advantageous in other areas of life too.

‘She would have been here,’ Patsy explained, ‘but she went with Patrick Robinson because the Americans wanted to leave early.’

That decided it, I was going back with Rory.

‘Well, you can have the flowers then, Patsy—or give them to your wife, let the Queen have them.’

‘My goodness, tank you. Tank you very much.’

‘It’s a shame about your daughter not being here, I was hoping to many her and then become a prince.’

‘Oh my goodness, well I don’t know that it would be so easy but you would have to do a lot of talking and a number of meetings and so on. Would you like a cup of tea?’

It felt like this was being offered as the next best thing.

‘I’ve just about got time for a very quick one, but then I’ve got to get down to the pier otherwise the boat will go without me.’

And so tea was taken in the palace’s cramped kitchen and five cordial minutes were spent discussing the life of the islanders and their struggle to remain on Tory during the 1970
s
and 1980
s
when the Irish government was doing its best to get them to leave. Not so very long ago there had been open sewers running down the island’s streets, and hot water and electricity had only been acquisitions of the last twenty years. We talked of how Patsy Dan came to be King, the story being that after the last King had died, his son had turned the job down on the grounds that there was too much responsibility, and Patsy had landed the position pretty much because no one else on the island could be bothered to do it. No protracted and bloody power struggle here, instead a plethora of forged sick notes and new versions of evergreen excuses used to get out of things at school, cleverly modified for the purposes of evading the throne.

‘I’d love to become King but I have a verruca, and also my mother doesn’t aflow me to wear anything metal on my head like a crown, or else I get a migraine.’

On a couple of occasions Patsy leant in towards me to emphasise a point, and a whiff of his breath suggested to me that his predilection was for drink a little stronger than tea. I looked at my watch and was impressed that I could smell this much alcohol on his breath by only twenty past one. Twenty past one! I had to get going. I jumped to my feet and my stomach emitted a loud rumble almost by way of reminding an indolent brain that it would appreciate some food sooner rather than later. Realising there were two more hours at sea immediately ahead of me I scanned the work tops until my eyes alighted on a fruit bowl.

‘I wonder if I could have one of your apples?’ I asked the King. (I apologise for this last sentence sounding like an excerpt from a children’s book, but it’s what happened.)

‘My goodness, oh aye, go ahead.’

I took an apple, which came to feel like the physical embodiment of all that I had achieved here. I made apologies for a ridiculously short sojourn and Patsy countered with his own for not having been at the pier to greet me when I had arrived. We quickly posed for a self-timer photo outside the palace, and goodbyes were postponed when Patsy insisted on coming to see me off, making it his business to pull the fridge for me so that I could, in his words, ‘take a rest from it’. He was filled with admiration for my fridge journey mainly because he was convinced, despite my two attempts to persuade him otherwise, that I was
walking
round Ireland with it As if I’d take on a project as stupid as that.

As the fridge rattled satisfactorily down the hill back to the sea, I felt pleased at the way the audience with the King had gone. It had been considerably more successful than my previous encounter with royalty, and I had an apple to boot By Appointment. My only regret was that the parley with the King had come close to matching for brevity the one I had had with a Prince. At the quayside a huge pile of bricks signalled that the boat’s departure was imminent.

Patsy shook my hand and uttered his most memorable words, ‘You know Tony, I may be the poorest King on Earth, but I am a happy one.’

This had a nice ring to it and a fair measure of profundity. Of course, it might just have been a line that rolled off the tongue for tourists, and the truth might have been altogether different, but as the boat pulled out of the harbour and he stood on the pier smiling and waving, I liked to think that he understood better than some, how to handle life, love and monarchy.

Bandit Country

G
ary didn’t seem to have much time for my desire to have an early night.

‘Ah, don’t be so silly, come and have a couple,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up at nine.’

‘But—’

It was too late, he’d gone, and he was sure to be back.

Gary lived in Dublin and was thin, around thirty years old and a TV sound engineer by trade. He had landed the job of my driver for the following morning as a result of having a good friend in this area and owing somebody
at Live At Three
a favour. Before he had arrived, ostensibly to say ‘Hi’ but in reality to offer to take me up the pub in the evening, Antoinette had phoned and told me that under no circumstances was I to allow Gary take me up the pub in the evening.

‘Yes, she said the same to me,’ said Gary in his strong Dublin accent as he sat down alongside me and popped two pints on one of Hudi-Beag’s sturdy tables.

‘What?’

‘She said that under no circumstances was I to take you up the pub hi the evening.’

‘Oh right. Do you know, if she hadn’t have said that I probably wouldn’t have come. She just made me curious as to what havoc you could wreak.’

‘Antoinette thinks I drink until I can’t stand up, and insist on bringing people down with me.’

‘And do you?’

‘Oh yeah. But don’t worry about that now, that’s hours away.’

I had a feeling ‘Houdini’s’ was going to live up to its name tonight.

§

We were joined by five or six of Gary’s friends, a couple of whom I had met the other night when, over a quiet pint, we had tried to secure the use of a helicopter.

‘Did you get out to Tory?’ one of them said.

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘How was your flight?’

Their faces were pictures of incredulity when they heard that no offer of a helicopter had been forthcoming.

Another voice piped up, ‘Did you have a good time out there?’

‘Yes, I met the King and he gave me an apple.’

‘Good. So it wasn’t a waste of time.’

This last remark was delivered without any hint of sarcasm, the speaker simply not listening to my reply and automatically offering a response of anodyne approval. A few of the others looked a little bemused by the mention of an apple, but chose not to pursue the matter further.

Gary informed me that our destination for the TV interview was going to be by a roadside just south of Armagh in Northern Ireland. Apparently the RTE mobile unit were filming just outside Newry in the morning and so we were going to record an interview for Irish television in a province of the United Kingdom. It was definitely a little odd, and it meant my going back on myself, but I was learning to go with the flow and not question anything too fully. The subject of Northern Ireland being raised, it prompted a short discussion on ‘the Troubles’, with Gary revealing himself to have quite strong views. Although he wasn’t candidly anti-British, I decided I didn’t wish to cross him on the subject after several more pints had been downed.