McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (10 page)

Back at the Grade B there’s no sign of paralysis setting in from the poteen, so I order a whiskey from the bar. It isn’t a patch on its illegal cousin. I’m too late for food, so I nip out to the repmobile for the soda bread I forgot to give Dominic, and smuggle it up to my room under a jacket. If you’ve had the right kind of education, it’s amazing how many things you can find to feel guilty about.

I watch a bit of TV while drinking the whiskey and eating the bread. There’s a late-night discussion programme, in Irish, about subsidy in the arts. A trendy-looking young woman in trainers, with a ring through her eyebrow, keeps punctuating her elegant-sounding Irish with ‘like’ and ‘y’know’. It’s kind of, like, interesting? that this sorta, y’know, inarticulacy, like, transcends, languages? The weather in Irish follows, but my lids are drooping and my chin’s nodding on my chest. I climb down off the wardrobe, and go to bed.

Next morning the reception desk is staffed by two pallid, grey, plump young women who’ve had no recent exposure to daylight or unfried food. One of them guides me to a small dining-room with a mock classical archway, but no windows. There are seven tables. Every place-setting is festooned with the boak-inducing debris of previous breakfasts—congealed bacon fat, rigid egg yolk, cold toast, curdled tea, evil Weetabix that’s sucked up all the milk. This stuff should already be landfill. Only forensic examination could determine how long some of it’s been here. The carpet’s sticky grip hints at rare agricultural diseases.

‘D’you want to find yourself a place?’

‘What? Where?’

She gives a giggle.

‘I’ve not had time to clear them all yet.’

You’ve not bloody cleared any of them, you lazy lump, I think, as she gets stuck into the nearest table, using an impressive forearm as bulldozer. I catch a nightmare glimpse of cold black pudding and tea dregs sluicing into a half-eaten bowl of muesli that’s already begun to set, and avert my gaze. She brushes some recalcitrant crumbs to the floor with a hand on which a Band-Aid is well overdue for renewal.

‘Full breakfast, is it?’

I nod, and she goes away. I can’t bring myself to make a fuss after the goodwill I’ve had this week. Suddenly the stereo crashes on, a traditional Irish medley that includes ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’ and ‘Theme from Match of the Day’. Poteen and LSD would be less distressing. The heart-warming ping of a microwave—always a winner, wherever the restaurant indicates reheating is now complete.

‘Careful, the plate’s hot,’ she says, putting it down on my hand. Two rock-hard fried eggs stare up, rigid and unforgiving as tiny silicone breasts. They are turning purple from the heat of the plate, and threaten to explode at any moment. An overtly hostile sausage, and bacon raw as Parma ham, complete the spread. She plonks down a cup and saucer, and one of those stainless-steel teapots that pour tea down the side of the pot, before shooting off to the kitchen to take some more of whatever she’s on.

I pick up the teapot, and pour tea into the cup, and on to the tablecloth. The tea in the cup turns a dark shade of khaki. Hang on, though. I haven’t put any milk in. There must have been something milky in it already. Dear God, no.
She’s given me a cup of someone else’s dregs!

Out at the reception desk I tell her friend I’ve decided to check out.

‘Ah, ya couldn’t have stayed anyway. We’re fully booked. There’s a wedding.’

That’ll be nice for them.

Prices start at £28, which includes breakfast.

There may still be some soda bread in room 7, on top of the wardrobe.

I saw a sign for a hostel yesterday, a couple of miles out of town on the road to Dominic’s, so I’ve reluctantly decided to give it a try. As I drive through the square, wedding guests in tail coats and wing collars stand poised on full alert, waiting for the pubs to open. One elderly man is holding a golden walking-stick.

I suppose I never really got over my first experience of a hostel. We stayed in one on that school trip to Stuttgart. We were all in a dormitory together. On the second night, I was woken from a deep sleep by Mr Chisholm, our criminally insane German teacher, who told me to stop feigning sleep and pretending it hadn’t been me making the silly noises. He laid me across the top bunk and beat my pyjamaed bum with his slipper, in front of all the bigger boys. Two nights later Mengele showed up with the suppositories. Just not my week, I suppose.

Since then I’ve always avoided hostels, telling myself they’d either be full of buck-toothed ramblers with well-polished apples and creases in their socks, or groovy young backpackers swapping addresses, drugs and girlfriends, either of which would be far too depressing. My years as a budget traveller were spent instead on the living-room floors of unfortunate strangers whose addresses had been passed on by indiscreet drunken Australians, if you can imagine such people.

The Dunmanway hostel has only two other guests. One is a pear-shaped Englishman who looks, and I know one really shouldn’t generalise about these things, like a paedophile on the run; the other is a dark-haired German cyclist with an ill-considered toothbrush moustache. I’m shown round by a charming Frenchman called Eric. I admire the magnificent view, and pick my room—a converted gypsy caravan in the grounds, for a tenner a night. I sit in the caravan for a bit, because there isn’t room to do anything else in there, then set off to find Dominic.

After driving to his house and finding him not in, and trying to find Danny’s house and getting lost up a mountain, I have a brainwave, and phone him on his cellphone. I’ve never really come to terms with the wretched things. It seems to me that life is much better if there are times in the day when no one can find you; though, of course, like most people, I’ve often wondered how businessmen used to cope before they were invented. How did they tell their wives they were on the train?

Anyway, Dominic turns out to be about fifty yards away, in the car park of a supermarket in Dunmanway. I’ve had to drive back there to find a phone, on account of not having a mobile. Though a tad hoarse, Dom is in good shape for a man who stayed up till dawn, then slept on some rubble. Merry has stayed on with the other kids at Danny’s for the daytime session, so Dom and I pop in for a pint with the wedding guests by way of a loosener, then set off for Wild Mountain.

The travellers started arriving here in the eighties. At first there was an outcry, fuelled by the local press; but since then things have quietened down. As you approach the hillside, a few unusual structures, some thatched, some tarpaulined, and a couple of mobile homes, are visible. An old converted ambulance is parked off-road, looking as though it may once have been used to sell silly hats and tofu at Glastonbury. But there’s no shanty-town squalor, or industrial-sized marijuana plantations guarded by junkies with machetes. If you were a vindictive small-town moralist looking for something to deplore, you’d be struggling; but then the sight of an overgrown and decaying cement farmhouse, its windows falling, or already fallen, out, would give some grounds for optimism.

We park in the lane and walk through the gap where the gate used to be, into a jungle of giant fuchsia and super-nettles. No weed has been cut, no half-hearted paintbrush wielded for twenty years or more. The back of the house, facing south, is in brilliant sunshine. Two ginger cats are asleep among the cans. Sitting in the doorway on a wooden chair, staring at the floor, is a man of about fifty.

He’s wearing a soiled white shirt with a blue and yellow check, under a green cardie buttoned all the way up, under a battered sports jacket. Gumboots, worn over dark grey trousers that might have been another colour when they started out, suggest an authentic bachelor. His face is full and round, and his brown hair, though matted, is thick and luxurious, with a hairline almost down to his eyebrows, like a badly fitted wig. It can’t be though, because he’s too drunk to put one on.

‘Peter, this is Stephen, landlord of the mountain.’

He looks up and smiles. Dominic passes him a can of strong Dutch lager from a carrier bag, and cracks one for himself. I decline, hoping not to appear antisocial, though it doesn’t seem that etiquette will be a problem. Stephen’s thick long hair gives him the look of an older Oscar Wilde, but with dandruff. He’s fuddled but functioning, his engaging wry smile acknowledging that, despite his semi-coherence, he’s fully aware of his semi-coherence.

I sit down next to the cats on the overgrown concrete path.

‘Cats are looking well, Stephen,’ says Dominic.

‘Yerra…mmm…ngg…kittens…blerrh, just yet.’

‘How many kittens?’

‘Ah sure, don’t know, haven’t looked yet. A few, by the sound of it.’

He gestures to a cupboard door under the stairs behind him. I want to go and see what else is in there, behind the blistered wainscoting and rotten doors, or up the shattered staircase, but I fear it will be just too terrible. There’s a powerful stench, as if something’s died in his house, or trousers. He offers me a ‘Major’ brand cigarette, and smiles and says it’s nice to have visitors. I’m moved by his pitiful situation. The family farm has been sacrificed to the bottle.

On the way over Dominic told me how Stephen had owned much of the mountain, and the land around it. Fifteen years ago he started renting plots to the new English arrivals; then, to raise cash, he started selling the land. And so it’s gone on, hand to mouth, to pub, to mouth again, renting and selling to keep himself afloat. Suddenly Stephen starts complaining to us that people haven’t been paying their rent. Dom gently points out that perhaps they have paid, but he hasn’t remembered.

‘Ah sure, I suppose that’s possible.’ The grin again.

He perks up for a few minutes, and becomes quite animated while calling his solicitor a gangster and a cunt. Then he takes me by the arm.

‘I’ll tell ya something now, boy. If it’s true what they say about whiskey, that it’s bad for you, then I’d have been dead years ago.’

We leave him staring out towards the ruined McCarthy castle in the valley, the spectacular view completely obscured by six-foot nettles.

‘Come again, boys, it’s nice to have company.’

Dominic puts an arm round him.

‘Take care now, Stephen. And good luck.’

I suppose I was expecting some sort of commune, but what they’ve built is a village: different families, and couples, and singles, living on their own plots of land, sharing similar aspirations, but living their own lives. And, like a village, everyone knows everyone else’s business.

‘That’s no bad thing. It’s the way village life used to be, back home, but isn’t any more.’

Davie is a broad-shouldered man in his thirties, originally from Devon. We’re sitting on the grass outside his battered mobile home. Next to it is the house he’s building. Below us, lie’s planted an orchard. Ponies are grazing off to our left.

‘It all changed in England some time in the seventies. Everything modernised, and became homogenous. You all had to live the same way, and local differences started to disappear. Townies moved in, and wouldn’t speak to you if you were local. It’s all burglar alarms now, and four-wheel drives to take the kids to school. I hate the way England is now. I could never go back.’

We go inside to make tea. On the wall is a poster of an alien smoking a spliff, captioned ‘Take Me To Your Dealer’. I ask about the gardai.

‘Ah, they know what we’re about. It’s a small place, and news travels. Y’know, if we started a cocaine factory up here or something, that’d be different, but that’s not us and they know that. We look a bit rough, and we like a party, but we have to work hard just to survive, and we love our kids. I think people round here can relate to that.’

Further up the hill is the community centre Dominic helped build. There’s a stone floor they cut from the mountain and laid themselves. There’s a coffee bar, and toys for the creche, and a big Bob Marley quote on the wall: ‘One world, one love, let’s get together, it’ll be all right’.

We pass cabins, roundhouses, a yurt-like affair, and dome. I can’t help wondering about planners, and whether they’re likely to move in with the bulldozers.

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to evict us. They’d have thirty families, more than a hundred people, to rehouse, for a start.’ Laurence is a mild-mannered, dreadlocked father of five. He lives in the most spectacular house I’ve seen—a thatched Hansel and Gretel fantasy. Inside the huge living-room, a tree trunk, still rooted into the ground, serves as a chair among more conventional furniture. He’s recently added a conservatory on the front. Again, the floors are native stone, except for just below the conservatory window, where flowers are growing through bare soil. We’re high up the hill. In England, you couldn’t buy this view for a million.